Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/826

 792 J U S J U S are attributed to the jealousy aud intrigues of the emperor s nephew and successor Justinian. In 522 a war broke out with Persia, in which Belisarius made his first historical appearance ; it continued for some years without any defi nite results. In 522 also Justin ceded to Theodoric, the Gothic king of Italy, the right of naming the consuls, and in 525 he received from that Arian monarch a deputation, of which the pope, John I., was compelled to be the leader, to deprecate an edict issued by Justin in 523 against all heretics. On April 1, 527, Justin, at the request of the senate, assumed Justinian as his colleague, and on the 1st of the following August he died. Justin bestowed much care on the repairing of public buildings throughout his empire, and contributed large sums to repair the damage caused by a destructive earthquake at Antioch. JUSTIN II., the younger, Roman emperor of the East from 565 to 578, was the nephew and successor of Jus tinian 1. He availed himself of his influence as master of the palace, and as husband of Sophia, the niece of the late empress Theodora, to secure a peaceful election. The first few days of his reign when he paid his uncle s debts, administered justice in person, and proclaimed universal religious toleration gave bright promise, realization of which was prevented either by his feebleness or his caprice. The most important event of his reign was the invasion of Italy by the Lombards, who, entering in 568 under Al- boin, in a few years made themselves masters of nearly the entire country. The common story that they were invited by the superseded and insulted exarch Narses, besides being inherently improbable, has but slender historical foundation. Modern historians see in the event only an evidence of the indifference of the Byzantine court to Italy, whence little revenue could be drawn. Justin s arrogance had insulted the embassies from the Persians and Avars, who had come to him in the first year of his reign ; and in 572 war broke out with the former, and in 573 with the latter. Although he formed alliances with the Turks of Central Asia and with the Ethiopians of Arabia in the one case, and with the Austrasian Franks in the other, the emperor s arms were unsuccessful in both wars. The temporary fits of insanity into which he fell warned him to name a colleague. Passing over his own relatives, he raised, on the advice of Sophia, the brave general Tiberius to be Caesar in December 574, and withdrew for his remaining years into retirement. Tiberius was advanced to the dignity of Augustus on September 26, 578, and Justin died on the 5th of the following month. JUSTINIAN I. (483-565). Flavius Anicius Jus- tinianus, surnamed the Great, the most famous of all the emperors of the Eastern Roman empire, was by birth a barbarian, native of a place called Tauresium in the dis trict of Dardania, a region of Illyricum, 1 and was born, most probably, on May 11, 483. His family has been variously conjectured, on the strength of the proper names which its members are stated to have borne, to have been Teutonic or Slavonic. The latter seems the more probable view. His own name was originally Uprauda. Justinianus was a Roman name which he took from his uncle Justin who adopted him, and to whom his advance ment in life was due. 2 Of his early life we know nothing except that he came to Constantinople while still a young man, and received there an excellent education. Doubt less he knew Latin before Greek; it is alleged that he always spoke Greek with a barbarian accent. When Justin 1 It is commonly identified with the modern Giustendil, but Uskiub (the ancient Skupi) has also been suggested. See Tozer, Highlands t&amp;lt;f European Turkey, ii. p. 370. 2 The name &quot; Uprauda&quot; itself is said to be derived from the word &quot; prauda,&quot; which in Old Slavic means &quot;jus,&quot; &quot;justitia,&quot; the prefi: being simply a breathing frequently attached to Slavonic names. ascended the throne in 518 A.D., Justinian became at once a person of the first consequence, guiding, especially in church matters, the policy of his aged, childless, and ignorant uncle, receiving high rank and office at his hands, and soon coming to be regarded as his destined successor. On Justin s death in 527, having been a few months earlier associated with him as co-emperor, he succeeded without opposition to the throne. His reign was filled with great events, both at home and abroad, both in peace and in war. They may be classed under four heads : (1) his legal reforms; (2) his adminis tration of the empire; (3) his ecclesiastical policy; and (4) his wars and foreign policy generally. 1. It is as a legislator and codifier of the law that Justinian s name is most familiar to the modern world ; and it is therefore this department of his action that requires to be most fully dealt with here. He found the law of the Roman empire in a state of great confusion. It consisted of two masses, which were usually distinguished as old law (jus vetus) and new law (Jus novum). The first of these comprised (1) all such of the statutes (leges) passed under the republic and early empire as had not become obsolete ; (2) the decrees of the senate (senatus consulta) passed at the end of the republic and during the first two centuries of the empire ; (3) the writings of the jurists of the later republic and of the empire, and more particularly of those jurists to whom the right of declaring the law with authority (jus respondendi) had been committed by the emperors. As these jurists had in their commentaries upon the leges, senatus consulta,. and edicts of the magistrates practically incorporated all* that was of importance in those documents, the books of the jurists may substantially be taken as including (1) and (2). These writings were of course very numerous, and formed a vast mass of literature. Many of them had become exceedingly scarce, many having of course been alto gether lost. Some were of doubtful authenticity. They were so costly that no person of moderate means could hope to possess any large number ; even the public libraries had nothing approaching to a complete collection. More over, as they proceeded from a large number of independ ent authors, who wrote expressing their own opinions, they contained many discrepancies and contradictions, the dicta of one writer being controverted by another, while yet both writers might enjoy the same formal authority. A remedy had been attempted to be applied to this evil by a law of the emperors Theodosius II. and Valentinian III., which gave special weight to the writings of five eminent jurists (Papinian, Paulus, Ulpian, Modestinus, Gaius) ; but it was very far from removing it. As regards the jus vetus, therefore, the judges and practitioners of Justinian s time had two terrible difficulties to contend with, first, the bulk of the law, which made it impos sible for any one to be sure that he possessed any thing like the whole of the authorities bearing on the point in question, so that he was always liable to find his opponent quoting against him some authority for which he could not be prepared; and, secondl} 7, the uncertainty of the law, there being a great many important points on which differing opinions of equal legal validity might be cited, so that the practising counsel could not advise, nor the judge decide, with any confidence that he was right, or ihat a superior court would uphold his view. The new law (jus novum), which consisted of the ordinances of the emperors promulgated during the middle and later empire (edicta, rescripta, mandata, decreta, usually called by the general name of constitutiones), was in a con dition not much better. These ordinances or constitutions were extremely numerous. No complete collection of them existed, for although two collections (Codex Gregurianus