San Vitale

Procopius, historian and biographer of Justinian, presents in his On Building the following summary of the Emperor's accomplishments:

Justinian, who reigned as emperor between 527 and 565, clearly saw himself as an inheritor of the tradition of Roman Imperial authority. This is well manifested in the priorities and contributions of his reign. We owe to Justinian the codification of the tradition of Roman civil law in his Corpus juris civilis. His building campaigns, especially in Constantinople, link him to the great Roman Imperial builders like Augustus, Trajan, and Hadrian. Like his Roman predecessors, Justinian paid attention to both utilitarian structures like the defensive walls of Constantinople and formal ceremonial buildings like the church of Hagia Sophia. In these campaigns, Justinian characterized himself as a renovator rather than innovator thus reflecting the essentially conservative nature of the imperial tradition. Religious piety had long been a priority of Roman authority. For the Emperors of the early empire, their "pietas", exemplified by their construction of temples and altars, linked them with their ancestral traditions. With the conversion of the Empire to Christianity in the fourth century, the Emperors saw themselves as defenders of the orthodox faith. This latter priority was a major motivating factor for the initiating of a series of military campaigns by Justinian with the aim of restoring the old territories of Roman authority. The campaign to supplant Ostrogothic rule in Italy was less motivated by the barbarian ancestry of the Ostrogoths than by the fact that they had been converted to Arian Christianity, considered a heretical form of the faith by Orthodox Christianity. Central to Justinian's conception of the political and religious order was that he as Emperor was anointed by God as the chosen leader of the Empire. Von Simson in Sacred Fortress writes: "Imperial policy conceived political and religious issues as inextricably entwined. Orthodox doctrine spearheaded the moves of political, as well as of military, strategy; and nowhere is this fact more apparent than in the great campaign to wrest the western parts of the Empire from their Arian conquerors (p. 3)." The conception of the Emperor's authority is identified as Caesaropapism, in that the Emperor is understood to combine the functions of the Caesar of the Roman imperial tradition and of the Pope of the Roman Church. Justinian saw himself as the defender of both political order and religious Orthodoxy. Justinian's ambition was thus to restore the old Empire under a central political and religious authority.