The emperor Justinian, who came to the throne in 527, was kindled by a great dream — to recreate the Roman Empire in all its fullness and forever. He won back the West from the barbarians — North Africa, Italy, part of Spain; he ordered all Roman law gathered into a single Code (the Corpus Juris Civilis), which would nourish the laws of Europe for a thousand years; he raised in the capital the church of Hagia Sophia, completed in 537 — showpiece and symbol of a renewed Christian realm. It seemed that a little more, and the world would once again become a single Rome under one sovereign. The price was the very construction of the realm: communications stretched from Spain to the Euphrates, a treasury and a people drained for the reconquest — an empire left without a reserve of strength.
But at the height of triumph came a calamity no army could turn back. In 541-542 an epidemic of plague fell upon the empire, entering history as the "Justinianic" plague — it came from outside and was no one's fault. By the testimony of the court historian Procopius, it mowed down a vast portion of the population — about a fifth of the inhabitants of the capital alone; the emperor himself fell ill, but survived. The treasury was emptied, the army was bled white: a realm stretched beyond its strength had nothing left to meet the blow — and the great dream broke in the very hour of its fulfillment. Flowering and fragility, it turned out, walk side by side.
There began a long captivity of exhaustion. Overstrained by wars and plague, the realm could not hold what it had won back: in 568, a bare generation after Justinian, the Lombards entered a drained Italy almost without resistance. The East was worn out, the realm's strength sapped from within — what had taken decades to win slipped away almost without a fight.
And yet what was born of this breaking was not defeat but rebirth. What died was precisely the ancient Romanitas — Justinian's Latin, Mediterranean dream; in its place grew another realm: a Greek-speaking, Christ-centered Byzantium that would live for nearly nine centuries more. The most durable fruits of his reign also outlived the catastrophe — Roman law and the Church. So the law of history was fulfilled: the idol of an eternal empire fell, but the spirit found itself a new form. And the inner logic of this plague — a flowering broken by pestilence — would return, more terribly still, in the "Black Death" of the fourteenth century.