I just finished reading Peter Heather's (PH) Rome Resurgent, which I now have to write a review for. When I first heard about the book, I was both excited and horribly disappointed: excited because I love the topic and have read some of Heather's other work, disappointed because it looked like he had done what I had done. The good news, for me, is that he doesn't quite seem to have done what I had intended: write a detailed study of the impact of Justinian's wars on the fate of the empire. Yes, this is what the book purports to do - and to some degree it does just that, but not quite in the way that I would.
I'm not going to get into all the nitty-gritty here; most of that will have to wait for the review. That being said, there is one issue I want to raise, which PH got to, or at least underlined, at the end: how do you rule for a really long time? As PH makes clear, Justinian (J) did a lot of things while he was emperor, some of which are quite significant, with four items the accomplishments that usually get most of the attention: wars of conquest, legal reforms, building of Hagia Sophia, and the closing of the Academy in Athens. Besides those accomplishments, PH illustrates well J's determination in a number of other capacities, including the religious sphere, for J, like many before and after, strove to bring unity to the Christian church, though with mixed results.
As PH sees J, a great deal of his accomplishments should be ascribed to his attempts to prove his credentials (for rule) and, in the aftermath of the Nika revolt, restore order and his lost prestige (or something to that effect). J didn't have a clear plan with the west. Rather, with real challenges to his rule all around, J needed to find some means of consolidating his power, and military success in far-flung places, as the opportunities arose, seemed the best bet. Yes, there was some strategic thinking on J's and his empire's part, but little of it was long term, and PH argues there's not much in the way of concern for the wellbeing of that empire. Ultimately, then, while J doesn't deserve the blame for the later ills of the empire, which were largely the result of the world war (as PH calls it) of the later sixth century, most of his success would seem to be a combination of opportunism and - as I take PH's underlying message - dumb luck.
Like others, PH sees J as an emperor only out for number one, with little regard for his people and what impact his policies had on them. He was quite happy to plunder and pillage if it got him what he wanted, and that was control of the empire. So, the many thousands who died in Constantinople itself, or the wider parts of the empire at large (Antioch, North Africa, Italy), mattered little. Many have seen J as a particularly harsh ruler, and PH would seem to fall on this side of the spectrum, if not quite at the far end.
This is where I come in. I don't want to make a judgement on J's cruelty here, but I do wonder if the absence of long term strategic planning fits well with what we know about J's reign. Few emperors lived and reigned as long as J. While many of PH's explanations are perfectly reasonable, is it really possible to rule for nearly 40 years on dumb luck, or something a little more sophisticated than that? Augustus' long reign is undoubtedly due to his careful networking, planning, and plotting - and like J, he was a master propagandist. Even if J didn't have any real long term version at the start of his reign, the near disastrous Nika riot would, to my mind, seem to have provided just such an opportunity, after the dust settled, for J to carefully, with Theodora's help, work out how to rule for a long time without the same kinds of crises. Rather importantly, it seems to have worked, despite all the challenges that he later faced, from the death of his wife and the onset of the plague, which might have afflicted J himself, to the Persian invasions of 540 and the 559 Kutrigur attack of Constantinople.
This doesn't necessarily mean that J had a long term plan to conquer the west and rebuild the ancient pan-Mediterranean empire. A good part of J's initiatives on that front truly could have been the result of circumstances, and I don't doubt that J did many of the same things that many if not all pre-modern rules have done to ensure rule, including prove their religious and military mettle. I think the absence of detail - and insufficient evidence - are the cause of some of my dissatisfaction with the explanation PH offers. I guess then too that what I'd also like to know more about is how exactly an emperor like J went about carrying out his foreign policy objectives - and even how he created them in the first place. To what degree were there sets of instructions, or guidelines, left from previous rulers that laid out some of this stuff? Anyway, what the book proves to me, at least for the moment, that my 'great' "impact of war under Justinian" project isn't dead yet, and in fact might be in better shape than I'd feared. Now if only I hadn't just sent in a proposal for a big research project on Ammianus. Oh well, maybe it'll get rejected in April? :)
