Inside over the first door I saw one of these, which shows Constantine offering the city to the Virgin Mary and Justinian offering the temple.

Justinian saw Theudebert as an ideal ally: Austrasian lands flanked the Ostrogoths in northern Italy.

Justinian ’ s reign saw the continued slow and ongoing process of transformation of the Byzantine Empire, as the traditions inherited from the ancient Latin Roman state were gradually being eroded.

This is most clearly seen in the coinage of Justinian ’ s reign, which saw the reintroduction of the Loros, the traditional consular costume that had not been seen on Imperial coinage for a century, while the office itself had not been celebrated for nearly half a century.

The reign of Justinian saw the construction of over 100 legionary fortresses to supplement the defense.

Some of the senators saw this as an opportunity to overthrow Justinian, as they were opposed to his new taxes and his lack of support for the nobility.

The reign of Justinian ( 482 – 565 ) saw the Empire recapture Rome and much of Italy from the barbarians, but these successes left the empire's eastern flank exposed.

Justinian and the Quinisext Council excluded from their pentarchical arrangement churches outside the Empire, such as the then-flourishing Church of the East in Sassanid Persia, which they saw as heretical.

Again, Justinian moved toward compromise in the religious edict of 15 March 533, and congratulated himself that Pope John II admitted the orthodoxy of the imperial confession.

When Justinian, towards the close of his life, tried to raise the sect of the Aphthartodocetae to the rank of orthodoxy, and determined to expel Eutychius for his opposition, the able lawyer-ecclesiastic of Antioch, who had already distinguished himself by his great edition of the canons, was chosen to carry out the imperial will.

Procopius was the author of a history in eight books of the wars fought by Justinian I, a panegyric on Justinian's public works throughout the empire, and a book known as the Secret History ( Greek: Anekdota ) that claims to report the scandals that Procopius could not include in his published history.

After the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire, the Justinian Code remained in effect in the Eastern empire, known in the modern era as the Byzantine Empire ( 331 – 1453 ).

The Emperor Justinian, renewer of the greatness of Rome's empire and patron of the world's greatest religious building, the Hagia Sophia, contracts the disease but recovers.

With the ascent of Justinian, Procopius says that the Heruli within the empire converted to Christianity and " adopted a gentler manner of life.

It was this flaw that cost him throne and life and thwarted most of his efforts to prevent the disintegration of the great empire of Justinian I.

* Narses ( 478 – 573 ): general of Byzantine emperor Justinian I, responsible for destroying the Ostrogoths in 552 at the Battle of Taginae in Italy and saving Rome for the empire.

He was among the pagan philosophers persecuted by Justinian in the early 6th century, and was forced for a time to seek refuge in the Persian court, before being allowed back into the empire.

Yet " Justinian I succeeded in imposing his ecclesiastical policies on the papacy and Pope Gregory the Great maintained an attitude of political loyalty to the empire ."< ref > T.

Neither empire was able to get an advantage of the other, causing Emperor Justinian and King Khosrau to agree on a peace treaty in 531.

He was one of the pagan philosophers persecuted by Justinian in the early 6th century, and was forced for a time to seek refuge in the Persian court, before being allowed back into the empire.

When the proposed government of universal Christendom by five patriarchal sees ( Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, known as the pentarchy ), under the auspices of a single universal empire, was formulated in the legislation of Emperor Justinian I ( 527-565 ), especially in his Novella 131, and received formal ecclesiastical sanction at the Council in Trullo ( 692 ), the name " patriarch " became the official one for the Bishops of these sees, and the title " Exarch " remained the proper style of the metropolitans who ruled over the three remaining ( political ) dioceses of Diocletian's division of the Eastern Prefecture, namely the Exarchs of Asia ( at Ephesus ), of Cappadocia and Pontus ( at Caesarea ), and of Thrace ( at Heraclea Sintica ).

* 533 – Justinian I begins to restore the empire in the west ; Belisarius defeats the Vandals at the Battle of Ad Decimum and the Battle of Tricamarum

In Constantinople he seems to have early won the notice of Justinian I, one of the main objects of whose policy was the consolidation of Eastern Christianity as a bulwark against the Zoroastrian power of Persia, through persecution of all the remaining pagans of the empire.

Like Riose, Belisarius served a strong emperor, Justinian the Great, in an empire that it had declined from its peak ( Belisarius was one of the people, along with Justinian, known as " the last of the Romans ", i. e., imperials ); helped it to recapture much of its lost territory ; and was called back on baseless suspicion that he was angling for the Imperial throne.

Justinian I, who assumed the throne of the Byzantine Empire in 527, oversaw a period of Byzantine expansion into former Roman territories, and re-absorbed the area of Kosovo into the empire.

Discovered in the affluent suburb of Daphne and the nearby port city of Seleucia Pieria, the mosaics date from the days of the emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century A. D. to the Christian empire of Justinian in the 6th century, bridging the Classical world and the early Middle Ages.

The army of Justinian I was the result of fifth-century reorganizations to meet growing threats to the empire, the most serious from the expanding Persian empire.

In the Roman empire, a number of codifications were developed, such as the Twelve Tables of Roman law ( first compiled in 450 BC ) and the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian, also known as the Justinian Code ( 429-534 AD ).

Justinian himself stands in the middle, with soldiers on his right and clergy on his left, emphasizing that Justinian is the leader of both church and state of his empire.

Erected on the site of pagan temples and three previous St. Sophias, the first of which was begun by Constantine, this fourth church was started by Justinian in 532 and completed twenty years later.

Actually an underground cistern, its roof supported by rows and rows of pillars, it was built by Justinian in the Sixth Century to supply the palace with water.

Anthemius of Tralles ( c. 474 – before 558 ; ) was a Greek professor of Geometry in Constantinople ( present-day Istanbul in Turkey ) and architect, who collaborated with Isidore of Miletus to build the church of Hagia Sophia by the order of Justinian I. Anthemius came from an educated family, one of five sons of Stephanus of Tralles, a physician.

* 529 – First draft of the Corpus Juris Civilis ( a fundamental work in jurisprudence ) is issued by Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I.

The city was sacked by the Samaritans in 529, but rebuilt by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. Bethlehem was conquered by the Arab Caliphate of ' Umar ibn al-Khattāb in 637, who guaranteed safety for the city's religious shrines.

One of the first and throughout its history one of the most significant treatises of the common law, Bracton ’ s De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae ( On the Laws and Customs of England ), was heavily influenced by the division of the law in Justinian ’ s Institutes.

The region was then ruled by the Ostrogoths up to 535, when Justinian I added the territory to the Byzantine Empire.

Justinian also had Anthemius and Isidore demolish and replace the original Church of the Holy Apostles built by Constantine with a new church under the same dedication.

However, the social fabric of Constantinople was also damaged by the onset of Plague of Justinian between 541 – 542 AD.

* Constantinople under Justinian is the scene of the book A Flame in Byzantium ( ISBN 0312930267 ) by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, released in 1987.

In its preparation, centuries of material was examined, scrutinized for authenticity by leading experts, and harmonized as much as possible with opposing canons and even other codes, from the Codex of Justinian to the Napoleonic Code.

Emperor Justinian I ensured that his new structure would not be burned down, like its predecessors, by commissioning architects that would build the church mainly out of stone, rather than wood, “ He compacted it of baked brick and mortar, and in many places bound it together with iron, but made no use of wood, so that the church should no longer prove combustible .”

Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles originally planned on a main hall of the Hagia Sophia that measured 230 feet by 250 feet, making it the largest church in Constantinople, but the original dome was nearly 20 feet lower than it was constructed, “ Justinian suppressed these riots and took the opportunity of marking his victory by erecting in 532-7 the new Hagia Sophia, one of the largest, most lavish, and most expensive buildings of all time .” Although Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles were not formally educated in architecture, they were scientists that could organize the logistics of drawing thousands of laborers and unprecedented loads of rare raw materials from around the Roman Empire to create the Hagia Sophia for Emperor Justinian I.

Justinian is considered a saint amongst Orthodox Christians, and is also commemorated by some Lutheran Churches.

Justinian was struck by the plague in the early 540s but recovered.

Theodora died in 548, perhaps of cancer, at a relatively young age ; Justinian outlived her by almost twenty years.

They forced him to dismiss Tribonian and two of his other ministers, and then attempted to overthrow Justinian himself and replace him by the senator Hypatius, who was a nephew of the late emperor Anastasius.

King Hilderic, who had maintained good relations with Justinian and the North African Catholic clergy, had been overthrown by his cousin Gelimer in 530.