JUSTINIAN and BYZANTIUM IN 100 FACTS: the Emperor, Empress, Empire That Outlasted Rome Itself: 33

JUSTINIAN AND BYZANTIUM IN 100 FACTS The Emperor, the Empress, and the Empire That Outlasted Rome Itself Our single richest source for Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora wrote three completely different accounts of the same reign - and all three came from the same pen. Procopius of Caesarea praised Justinian's generals in his official History of the Wars. He praised Justinian's architecture in near-worshipful terms in his Buildings. And in a third book - hidden for over a thousand years until its 1623 rediscovery deep in the Vatican Library - he called Justinian a literal demon in human form, capable of removing his own head at will. This book exists to walk through exactly that contradiction, fact by fact, rather than picking whichever portrait makes the better story. Justinian rose from a peasant family in the Balkans to rule the entire Eastern Roman world. He married Theodora, a former actress and courtesan whose path to the throne required Roman law itself to be rewritten. Together they survived a week-long riot that killed tens of thousands and nearly cost them everything - then rebuilt Constantinople's skyline, commissioned the greatest legal code in history, and raised Hagia Sophia in under six years. >The story continues far beyond Justinian's own reign - through an empress who restored a controversial religious practice by blinding her own son, through the catastrophe of 1204, when a crusade meant for Jerusalem sacked the greatest Christian city on earth instead, and finally to a single devastating morning in 1453, when the last Roman emperor tore off his imperial regalia and died fighting in the street like an ordinary soldier. Organized across eight parts - Justinian's rise, his reconquest of the lost West, his legal revolution, Hagia Sophia, the plague and Procopius himself, theological schism, the later empire, and the long road to 1453 - this book gives you Byzantium the way the evidence actually demands it: sourced, corrected where correction is overdue, and honest about what remains genuinely uncertain. A companion to this author's volumes on Roman law, the twelve Caesars, the Roman army, the fall of Rome, and Latin's afterlife - same rigor, same method, following Rome's other half for another thousand years. >Dr. Cornelis van Houte