History for Night Owls

December 26, 2024

Justinian & The Last Romans #1

<p>In this episode, we look at the story of Emperor Justinian Part 1. Justinian is believed to be the last natively Latin-speaking Roman Emperor of Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. Together with military commander Belisarius, Justinian restored Roman control over territories throughout Europe and North Africa, especially Italy and Tunisia, but placed them under the rule of Constantinople. He also restructured these regions politically in the form of two new provinces called exarchates, one based in Carthage and the other Ravenna, and subsumed Rome under the Exarchate of Ravenna. In the process, Justinian attempted to redirect all Roman ecclesiastical leadership, including the Bishop of Rome (i.e. the office that came to be known as the Roman Catholic Papacy), towards leadership in Ravenna and Constantinople. Justinian was an earlier figure in the rivalry between Christian leadership in Rome and Constantinople that erupted with the schism of 1054, which occurred centuries after the Bishop of Rome established a close partnership with the Lombards and Franks who secured the Bishop of Rome the lands known as the Papal State. The success of Justinian and his successors in restoring Roman order was, in the end, limited by the continued power of the Goths in Spain, the Franks in France and Italy, and the increasingly independent power of Christian Arab tribes like the Banu Ghassan and eventually Muslim Arab tribes like the Banu Umayya of the Umayyad Empire in Damascus. This episode was narrated by Dr. A. H. Akhtar (author of Italy &amp; the Islamic World: From Caesar to Mussolini, Edinburgh University Press 2024).</p>