The dynasty that ruled the eastern Roman empire from 518 to 602, reconquered Africa and Italy, codified Roman law, built Hagia Sophia, and ended in the mutiny that started a century of catastrophe.
The dynasty begins with a peasant. Justin came from Bederiana in the Latin-speaking Balkans, walked to Constantinople as a young man to enlist, and rose through the palace guard over half a century to command it.
When the emperor Anastasius died childless in 518, Justin was about seventy and in the right place, and the throne went to him in circumstances that involved both accident and money.
He brought his nephew Petrus Sabbatius to court, adopted him, and gave him the name by which the century is known. It is one of the more consequential acts of nepotism in European history.
Justinian I ruled from 527 to 565 with an ambition no later emperor matched: to restore the Roman empire in the Mediterranean, in law, in building and in fact.
His generals Belisarius and Narses took Africa from the Vandals in 533–534 and Italy from the Ostrogoths in a war that ran from 535 to 554 — campaigns this archive covers in detail. The Corpus Juris Civilis reorganised a thousand years of Roman law into the form that western Europe rediscovered in the twelfth century. Hagia Sophia was built in five years and remains the dynasty's most visible monument.
The costs were correspondingly enormous, and they were paid by his successors. The plague of 541 killed a large share of the empire's population, the reconquered provinces were devastated and hard to hold, and the treasury Anastasius had filled was empty.
Justin II inherited that bill in 565 and refused to pay the subsidies that had kept the Persians and the Avars quiet. Within a decade the Lombards had taken most of Italy, the Persian war had restarted and Dara had fallen, and he had suffered a mental collapse from which he never fully recovered.
Tiberius II, adopted as Caesar in a lucid interval, ruled four years and was remembered for a generosity the treasury could not afford. Maurice, who married his daughter, was the ablest of them: he ended the Persian war on favourable terms in 591 by restoring Khosrow II to his throne, and fought the Avars and Slavs on the Danube for a decade.
It was the Danube that killed him. In 602 he ordered the army to winter north of the river, and it mutinied, marched on Constantinople and proclaimed a junior officer named Phocas. Maurice was executed after being made to watch the killing of five of his sons.
The murder of Maurice is the hinge. Khosrow II owed his throne to him personally, declared war to avenge him, and the twenty-six-year conflict that followed exhausted both the Roman and the Persian empires so completely that the Arab conquests took Syria, Egypt and all of Iran within a generation of its end.
The dynasty's achievements outlasted its territory. Justinian's law code is the foundation of the civil law tradition across continental Europe and beyond; Hagia Sophia stood as the largest church in Christendom for nine hundred years; and the reconquest, though it did not hold, is the last time a Roman empire ruled both shores of the Mediterranean.
Its structural weakness is visible in the family tree. Four of the five emperors reached the throne through a nephew's adoption, an adoption in illness, or a marriage — never through an undisputed son. A dynasty that improvises its succession four times in eighty years is one mutiny away from ending, and in 602 it met one.