![]() ![]() ![]() The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian Nevertheless, when the Age of Justinian came to a close on the eve of the Islamic conquests, the Roman Empire was still the strongest, best organized, and most resilient political community in Europe or the 3 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Throughout Justinian’s era, recently called “the last of the Roman centuries,”2 the monarchy begun by Augustus Caesar half a millennium earlier remained a going concern – even though it was now ruled from Constantinople, the “New Rome,” even though most of its inhabitants spoke Greek rather than Latin, even though the old gods who had guided the empire to world rule were now pushed aside by the worshipers of Christ, and despite the uncomfortable fact that much of its territory in western Europe had been lost. He Age of Justinian stands at a historical milestone, marking a transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages in the Mediterranean world.1 The period lasted for roughly a century, from the time that the young Justinian came down to Constantinople from his Balkan village around the year 500 to the regime of Phocas that began in 602, when the empire that Justinian had done so much to shape and that had been sustained with great effort by his successors plunged into a period of political instability. ![]() – Procopius of Caesarea, Buildings 2.6.6, trans. S Then appeared the emperor Justinian, entrusted by God with this commission, to watch over the whole Roman Empire and, so far as was possible, to remake it. 1: Roman Questions, Byzantine Answers contours of the age of justinian ![]()
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