This book explores the professional and social lives of the soldiers who served in the army of the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century. More than just a fighting force, this army was the setting in which hundreds of thousands of men forged relationships and manoeuvred for promotion. The officers of this force, from famous generals like Belisarius and Narses to lesser-known men like Buzes and Artabanes, not only fought battles but also crafted social networks and cultivated their relationships with their emperor, fellow officers, families, and subordinate soldiers. Looming in the background were differences in identity, particularly between Romans and those they identified as barbarians. Drawing on numerical evidence and stories from sixth-century authors who understood the military, Justinian’s Men highlights a sixth-century Byzantine army that was vibrant, lively, and full of individuals working with and against each other.

The reign of Justinian (527--65) was a key phase in the transition from the Roman empire of classical times to the Byzantine empire of the Middle Ages. Justinian himself, born of peasant stock in a provincial backwater, was one of the greatest rulers yet, despite prodigious achievements, he remained an outsider in the sophisticated society of Constantinople. Here, John Moorhead reinterprets Justinian as man and monarch, together with his formidable empress, the ex-actress Theodora, and assesses the evidence from their time for the evolution of a distinctively medieval world.

Examines how Emperor Justinian (482-565 A.D.) and his wife, Empress Theodora, both infamous, he for corruption and she for sexual depravity, fought revolts, riots, intrigues, and plots in an attempt to restore the Roman Empire to its former glory and to its former boundaries.

Byzantine Empresses provides a series of biographical portraits of the most significant Byzantine women who ruled or shared the throne between 527 and 1204. It presents and analyses the available historical data in order to outline what these empresses did, what the sources thought they did, and what they wanted to do.

The Corpus Iuris Civilis, a distillation of the entire body of Roman law, was directed by the Emperor Justinian and published in a.d. 533. The Institutes, the briefest of the four works that make up the Corpus, is considered to be the cradle of Roman law and remains the best and clearest introduction to the subject. A Companion to Justinian's "Institutes" will assist the modern-day reader of the Institutes, and is specifically intended to accompany the translation by Peter Birks and Grant McLeod, published by Cornell in 1987. The book offers an intelligent and lucid guide to the legal concepts in the Institutes. The essays follow its structure and take up its principal subjects--for example, slavery, marriage, property, and capital and noncapital crimes--and give a thorough account of the law relating to each of them. Throughout, the authors explain technical Latin vocabulary and legal terms.