Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

they disagreed with each other, he preserved them by cleansing them of the mass of their verbal trickery,” wrote Procopius.15 From a chronicler whose stock-in-trade was verbal trickery, this was high praise indeed. The code was, however, just one of the legal reforms of Justinian’s early reign. The year after it was issued, Tribonian was given another mammoth task. Having dealt with the minutiae of specific Roman laws, he now impaneled experts to make sense of jurisprudence, as it was contained in the collective writings of the great classical jurists. Most of the great jurists of the imperial era—men such as Gaius, Papinian, Ulpian, and Paulus—had lived and written during pre-Christian times. So their pronouncements were not only frequently contradictory but also flirted with irreligion. As they were pagans, their opinions were naturally devoid of Christian sentiment. And impieties did not please Justinian. So Tribonian was tasked with creating a single statement of Roman jurisprudence, in which the great works of the ancients were rationalized and improved by references to Almighty God. This project appeared in two stages: first the so-called Fifty Questions (quinquaginta decisiones) and then the Digest or Pandects of December 533. And here again, Tribonian succeeded, providing the emperor with an elegant solution to a bureaucratic mess. For generations, Romans had complained of the archaic complexity, slowness, and corruption of the law. Now it had all been whipped into...