Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

and divine sanction for his rule. So, within six months of his reign beginning, Justinian ordered the reform and recodification of the entire body of Roman law.14 The commission Justinian appointed to carry out this gargantuan task was assembled under the leadership of a young, energetic Greek lawyer called Tribonian. With him worked some of the most acute legal minds in Constantinople, and together they reviewed millions of lines of imperial constitutions—statements of the law made by emperors all the way back to Augustus. Just twenty months into Justinian’s reign, these lawyers had digested, edited, and compiled these statements into a single, definitive account of Roman law known as the Justinianic Code (codex iustinianus). The codex was issued on April 7, 529, and sent to every province in the empire, where it automatically superseded every other legal code. It was not perfect: in December a.d. 534 a second edition was required to clean up inconsistencies. Nor did it set in stone a single Roman law, perfectly formed and unchangeable for eternity; law by its nature is constantly evolving, and Justinian by his nature was addicted to issuing new legal commands, which were collected by scholars as the Novels (Novellae constitutiones). But the code was a phenomenal achievement nonetheless. It ran to twelve books, covering civil, ecclesiastical, criminal, and public law. It was an exercise in clarification and bureaucratic streamlining that set a gold standard for constituti...