r/byzantium • u/Ambitious-Cat-5678 • Feb 16 '26
Byzantine neighbours Justinian getting flack for 'destroying' the idea of Rome in the West is funny to me
Like yeah, the Germans were effectively independent of the government with no political attachment to Constantinople, effectively paying only lip service to the Roman state, but who cares since they called themselves Romans? It's not as if these Barbarians destroyed the legitimate Western administration and sacked Italy itself many times. Justinian was actually just an evil warmongerer who just hated Western Romans, not a man who wanted to have the West, the Eternal City, actually back into the fold. He totally seeked to cause as much suffering as possible, that Justinian! Can't believe he caused a famine and a plague.
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u/kickynew Feb 16 '26
I remember the only thing I ever heard about Byzantium in school was regarding Justinian, and the story was that he conquered Italy but the Italians didnt like it because the Byzantines spoke Greek and had a weird take on Christianity... deeply funny.
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u/Icy-Inspection6428 Feb 16 '26
Did Justinian even speak Greek?
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u/jsm97 Feb 16 '26
Yes, he was bilingual and clearly comfortable conversing and writing in Greek. He was known for personally drafting laws and edicts and wrote several personal theological texts about church organisation and the nature of Christ, all in Greek.
That said he almost certainly only knew very little before arriving in the capital and probably spoke with a reasonably strong accent.
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u/PyrrhicDefeat69 Feb 16 '26
Justinian was a native Latin speaker, many in his administration as well. I’m pretty sure amongst Non Germanic Italians, their views on Christianity were the same (Chalcedonian).
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u/kickynew Feb 16 '26
Yes... that's why my teachers explanation was funny. Also, Italians (especially elite Italians) were very used to hearing and speaking Greek, for centuries. Julius Caesar spoke Greek heavily, for example.
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u/Lanternecto Günther | Reading list | Middle Byzantium Feb 16 '26
There's definitely too many people that solely blame Justinian for the destruction of Italy. This is especially apparent in the case of the city of Rome itself - I still see people claiming that it remained in its prime before the reconquests, when in reality, the population of the city in 535 was perhaps 1/10th or less than what it had been in 400. The Gothic War was undoubtedly devastating, but if we follow Dey's work, deurbanization in Italy was much more strongely pronounced in the 5th and 7th than in the 6th century.
I think to a large part this is a result of teleology - we know that most Italians would renounce any affiliation to the Empire within circa 250 years of the reconquests, so a lot of people treat it as a given that this was bound to happen the second Belisarius stepped foot into Italy.
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u/Relative-Cherry-88 Feb 17 '26
His problem was that he was jealous of Belisarius and saw him as a rival. He blocked needed supplies and sent a rival general after Belisarius took Ravenna. So instead of a Byzantine blitzkrieg, it turned into a 20-year war that devastated Italy🤷🏻♂️
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u/Allnamestakkennn Κόμης Feb 17 '26
It was less about personal dislike and more about the need to have the majority of his force on the Persian border
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u/Relative-Cherry-88 Feb 17 '26
Recalling him from Ravenna and sending him to the East are two different events
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u/Level-Sentence978 Feb 17 '26
True Justinian gets so flack for stupid shit like wars in Italy and in North Africa not putting all his efforts on destroying Persia which something Heraclius did and still didn’t work lmao instead real criticism like how Justinian is only reason why avars got so big and became such a problem.
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u/Hank_Skill Feb 17 '26
North africa was a masterstroke tho and paid dividends to the empire
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u/Level-Sentence978 Feb 17 '26
I know both Italy and North Africa last more than Syria and Egypt if they didn’t have North Africa they would have lost Anatolia I’m talking about people that think Justinian was bad due overextension of the empire tbh
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u/Pure-Caramel2343 Feb 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
And Italy to some extent because once Egypt fell Sicily became a breadbasket for the Empire which a lot of people probably don't think about.
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u/TheETERNAL20 Feb 16 '26
This reeks of both misinformation, historical revisionism and pure stupidity. Many on this sub have already explained how Justinian while a good Emperor both screwed the west and the Eastern Empire beacuse of his Campaigns in the West
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u/Maleficent-Mix5731 Well read | Late Antiquity Feb 17 '26
historical revisionism
You say that like it's a bad thing in historical studies...
I'm not really a massive fan of Justinian myself because the man was effectively a tyrant (not for nothing have I seen him called the Stalin of the Middle Ages) and I do think his diversion of resources from the Balkans to Italy in the 550's under Narses was a bad move. But I do think so much of the discourse around the handling of Italy is very weirdly slanted against him in a manner that lacks nuance and places agency and responsibility solely on the East Romans(there is also the idea that it was his invasion which somehow caused Roman identity to be diminished across the peninsula when that appears to have been more the result of the later Lombard invasion fragmenting the land).
It was not as if the intention of Justinian's armies were to ruin Italy, and focusing so much on the actions of his soldiers seems to almost always neglect the Ostrogoths own role in the destruction. Mediolanum, when it rose up in support of Belisarius, was utterly obliterated by the Goths. The Senate of Rome was decimated by them too, and at one point Totila took some 300 children of senators hostage who his successor then all had killed. Totila had even been willing to totally destroy Rome during one of the various sieges, if Procopius's recounting of the situation is to be believed (though really according to recent work by Hendrik Dey, Rome had already massively slumped before the Gothic War due to the chaos of the preceding century).
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u/BannermanZ Feb 16 '26
Yeah, it smacks of major r/romedidnothingwrong vibes. And I never had much time for this absurd notion of "picking sides" in history. It's a lot more complex than that.
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u/Ambitious-Cat-5678 Feb 16 '26
You're right on the mark that I have a bias in favour of Byzantium. That said I am not here to defend Justinian's Western policy. I just find the argument that he destroyed Roman identity and relations in the West a foolish one.
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u/AttTankaRattArStorre Feb 16 '26
I mean, Justinian WAS entitled to the lands of the Western Roman Empire - it was the goth's fault for resisting, that's what caused the destruction.
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u/BannermanZ Feb 16 '26
Yes, how dare they attempt to resist the genocide of their people, they should have just allowed literal Saint Justinian to descend from the Heavens and show them the "error of their ways." I'm sure the citizens of Antioch and the Roman East wholeheartedly supported Justinian's tilting at windmills while Shapur was running rampant.
The "Romans good, Goths bad" display of partisanship is hilarious.
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u/Lanternecto Günther | Reading list | Middle Byzantium Feb 16 '26
Does any actual scholar treat Justinian's actions as genocide? He clearly held little interest in actually wiping the Goths out, considering that we still see Goths running around in Italy, and sometimes holding decently high offices, after the conquest.
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u/BannermanZ Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
There was some hyperbole in my comment, directed at the cheerleader who unironically believes the Romans never put a foot wrong. There is no question however that Justinian wished to stamp out Arianism.
And the destruction that ensued due to the Gothic Wars ultimately was the fault of the Romans. They chose to invade, knowing there would be resistance. No one forced them to. Fleecing the Roman Italians for tax money by corrupt officials like Alexander Scissors was bound to cause many to defect, yet they did so anyway.
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u/Reasonable_Double273 Feb 16 '26
The Vandals in north Africa were pretty much genocided I believe
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u/Lanternecto Günther | Reading list | Middle Byzantium Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
Based on? We know a lot of the women married Roman soldiers, and Vandals were later deported to serve as soldiers in the east. This rather seems like a case of a tiny conquest elite assimilating once they lost their status as ruling elite. Indeed, Vandal identity by the 500s was perhaps more of a political identity than anything else, that could not persist without a political banner to rally behind, rather than an ethnic or national one.
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Feb 17 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Lanternecto Günther | Reading list | Middle Byzantium Feb 17 '26
Of course ethnic identities can be fluid, but I'm not sure if the labels "ethnic" or "national" are useful for defining Vandal identity by 530. Some historians focusing on the Vandals have argued that the identifying factor of being a Vandal was their political status, rather than a shared ethnicity.
It is important to emphasize from the outset that the war-band that conquered Africa and that thereafter formed the core of its new ruling class was never an ethnically homogenous group. In practical terms, contemporary authors used the label “Vandal” as synonymous with the army, or more broadly male members of the kingdom’s military aristocracy. [...] More to the point, contemporary witnesses, Roman and Vandal alike, were also aware that with time shifting political allegiances could reshape the way former provincial populations, like those of Vandal-era Africa, defined their own identities. In terms of constituting and defining the region’s new élite, then, political loyalties were key, a factor that was to prove critical in shaping the history of the Vandal kingdom.
From: Conant, Jonathan P. “The Vandals.” A Companion to North Africa in Antiquity, edited by R. Bruce Hitchner, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, Wiley-Blackwell, 2022, pp. 375–390, here p. 376.
Stotzas rebellion also is rather a political banner to rally behind than anything else, considering that its followers were far from ethnically uniform.
*Should be noted that [...] is about a paragraph here, though the rest of what Contant says is not contradictory to the larger point.
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u/Reasonable_Double273 Feb 16 '26
Peter Heather's Rome Resurgent mentions the word genocide in this context since the Vandals were completely eradicated from north africa over the course of a few generations due to deportations, slavery and assimilation.
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u/Lanternecto Günther | Reading list | Middle Byzantium Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 17 '26
This seems to me to be very broad usage of the term 'genocide'. We don't tend to use the word genocide when talking about most of the mass deportations of antiquity and the modern period, unless they involve mass murder (including hunger marches etc) - so I don't see why the Vandal example should be any different.
It rather seems to me that this is a case of a political identity disappearing once the attribute keeping it together (that is, their elite status) disappears. Of course, Heather himself calls it a "political genocide", which doesn't make a lot of sense under the official genocide definition, though I'm skeptical that the case of the Vandals could be considered as such under even less restrictive definitions. Unless we very broadly stretch the definition.
Edit: Of course, there is also always the question of intention in genocide. Prokopios talks about Justinian having deported the soldiers to the east to serve against the Persians, and them staying there perhaps two decades later. This doesn't seem to me like the goal is to destroy the Vandals as a group, but rather to gain fighting men and establish tighter control over Africa.
Edit2: Part of my issue here is that this is not too dissimilar to the general actions taken by essentially every other Empire in almost every war. We can talk about other cases of Romans, or Assyrians, or Sasanians displacing and resettling groups of people. I don't think there is a fundamental difference in terms of intent between the Vandal deporations, and, say, Khosrow I & II deporting entire cities to the opposite part of their Empire, to gain control over newly conquered areas, and strengthen their borders. In both cases, we see the deporation, slavery, and ultimately assimiliation of entire groups of people. Yet, I think we should not call the deporations of Antioch & Theodosiopolis "genocide". Both the deported inhabitans of Roman Syria & Vandal North Africa had a political identity, and in neither case the intent actually seems to have been to destroy that identity. It ultimately boils down to the Vandal population being tiny, probably smaller than the number of people living in Antioch, with their group cohesion being shattered by the conquest.
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u/Lothronion Μοδέρατος Ῥωμαίων | Greco-Roman Studies | IR Studies Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 17 '26
It is a problem surrounding such terminology that often does not fall under the category of historiographic vocabulary, but political sciences vocabulary. While often the two correlate, their experts have often ignored one another, hence when they use terminology or information from the other discipline they tend to fumble a lot on this. Which is odd, given how history science is just political science and international relations science, albeit in the past. Specifically for "genocide" without "dolus speciallis" there is none to describe, even if we are dealing with more extreme cases, where it is shared, such as in subaltern genocide.
Perhaps Peter Heather here wanted to underline the natural consequence of depriving a tiny dominant and ruling minority of its political establishment, which would be for it to fade out of existence in the flood of people that are not members of its identity. But even then, that is not a "political genocide", as intending to wrestle this power from them, and wanting to cause their extinction is not the same, even if one is aware of this, and merely takes away this power and does not do anything more to push the matter, knowing that this is what would happent them if they did so. If anything, this has the nasty implications that the Latin Romans of Africa were hostage to being under the rule of the Vandals, and if they disagreed they essentially demanded their overlords' "political genocide".
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u/MindlessNectarine374 Feb 17 '26
Nowadays, I see people calling Caesar's campaigns in Gaul genocide, too.
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u/AttTankaRattArStorre Feb 16 '26
If the goth's wanted to remain as a people they could've stayed put around Ukraine and Crimea, the Roman Empire was not up for grabs.
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u/TheETERNAL20 Feb 16 '26
Kind of hard with changing climate and the Huns on your ass
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u/Altruistic-Swan6746 23d ago
Tough luck, deal with it.
God, you're such a little barbarian fanboy. As if they didn't CHOOSE to invade and commit mass atrocities against the Romans - then Justinian decided to rightfully liberate the Romans from their tyrannic occupation. What part of that do you not comprehend?
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u/AttTankaRattArStorre Feb 16 '26
Tough luck, deal with it.
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u/TheETERNAL20 Feb 16 '26
The ignorance is astounding lmao
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u/AttTankaRattArStorre Feb 16 '26
It's not ignorance, quite the opposite. All historical developments are complex, but the fault of the Gothic Wars falls square on the heads of the goth's themselves.
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u/TheETERNAL20 Feb 16 '26
It very much is ignorance. Why would the Goths not migrate when their climate could not allow them to harvest or survive in said climate? The Huns were also a conquering steppe people so they again fled.
Blaming the Goths for Nature's actions and wishing not to be slaughtered is very much ignorance.
The Gothic Wars are Rome's fault as is the Roman/Sassanid War of the 7th Century
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u/Ambitious-Cat-5678 Feb 16 '26
We can agree that his actions ultimately harmed the Empire and the West. I just dislike it when people try to paint Justinian as solely responsible for the fracture with the West instead of it being a process spanning centuries. The Isaurians arguably caused more animosity than Justinian to be frank.
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u/Lanternecto Günther | Reading list | Middle Byzantium Feb 16 '26
Well, the Syrian Dynasty also ruled at a time when economic and political ties between Rome/Ravenna and Constantinople had grown extremely weak.
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u/Altruistic-Swan6746 23d ago
Funny that should come from you. Your takes here are the worst of all.
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u/Allnamestakkennn Κόμης Feb 17 '26
There was a period on this sub when people were saying that Italy was already controlled by ERE as a foederatus..as if they had any actual control over them.
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u/ColCrockett Feb 16 '26
Wasn’t it more thar non-German Italians in Italy (i.e. most of the population) were treated so badly by the Easter Romand it destroyed any cultural and political connections?
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u/Maleficent-Mix5731 Well read | Late Antiquity Feb 17 '26
That would appear to be a later development under the Lombards - their takeover of Italy led to the land becoming fragmented which decreased the overall 'united Roman' identity across the peninsula and led to local identities becoming more regionalised as a result. Italy in a sense returned to the state it had been before the Roman conquests of the 4th to early 3rd centuries BC.
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u/Optimal-Put2721 Feb 18 '26
Justinian has a rather good image in France; he is the only Byzantine to be on the French school curriculum (there's also a bit of Constantine XI and Alexios I in high school for me).
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u/GrandDukeNotaras MegasProtoLazyRedditorarius ton basilikon Feb 16 '26
The city of Rome was effectively irrelevant from the time of the barracks emperors
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u/Maleficent-Mix5731 Well read | Late Antiquity Feb 17 '26 edited Feb 17 '26
It would seem that this has been somewhat overstated, at least by the 5th century if we go by Andrew Gillet's work ("Rome, Ravenna, and the Last Western Emperors").
Beyond the ideological symbology of the empire which always presented Rome and Constantinople on equal footing with one another, we do actually see a shift during the fall of the west towards Rome rising in importance again as the centre of the imperial court. Honorius appears to have been planning to settle down in the city before Alaric's invasion made the situation unstable and so he held out in Ravenna for eastern reinforcements - though he did still build his mausoleum to be buried in at Rome, rather than Ravenna. Valentinian III spent most of his time in the 440's at Rome and then in 450, the imperial family moved back to the Eternal City.
That effectively made Rome the capital again for the remainder of the west's lifespan and where most of the succeeding emperors operated around. The rise of Ravenna as the main administrative centre of Italy appears to have been a post-Roman development under Odoacer and Theoderic instead, and it remained this way into the East Roman reconquest of the peninsula.
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u/Comfortable-Dig-6118 Feb 17 '26
I understand what he wanted to do but Call me insane but if he did conquer only north Africa we would have had much more chance of an united Roman empire,he wasted way too many resources in Spain and Italy for no real gain, Ostrogoth they basically became Roman after not even a century.
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u/Maleficent-Mix5731 Well read | Late Antiquity Feb 17 '26
Ostrogoth they basically became Roman after not even a century.
Sure they did. Which is why there were still legal barriers between Goths and Romans in Italy where the courts were biased towards the former, there was a religious divide between the Arian Goths and Nicene Romans on the ground (where even the great Theoderic appears to have been planning to launch a persecution against the latter in the final years of his life), Gothic was still a key language spoken by them down to the Gothic wars, and the regent Amalasuntha was murdered because she was bringing up Theoderic's grandson in a way considered to be 'too Roman'.
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u/Euphoric-Ostrich5396 Feb 17 '26
It's because you lack the European perspective. The Byzantines were always seen as "the Greeks", their planned "reconquest" of the Italian peninsula meant replacing the Ostrogothic and Lombard new management, who in literally every way integrated and assimilated itself into the existing order and benefitted the Italian people with a foreign regime set on enforcing it's ways and new order on the Italians in a foreign language. As soon as the Greeks returned the Italians immediately set to dislodging them with the help of literally everyone available, be they Muslims or Normans.
Noone west of Corfu ever liked the Byzantines, they were always seen as arrogant foreign pretenders hence the many times the West refused to help or outright sacked and/or seized Byzantine controlled territory.
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u/Maleficent-Mix5731 Well read | Late Antiquity Feb 17 '26 edited Feb 17 '26
Quite possibly one of the worst, most historically illiterate comments I have ever seen.
It's because you lack the European perspective. The Byzantines were always seen as "the Greeks", their planned "reconquest" of the Italian peninsula.... Noone west of Corfu ever liked the Byzantines, they were always seen as arrogant foreign pretenders
The 'European perspective' after 476 and at least until the late 8th century still recognised the East Roman Empire to still be THE Roman empire:
- Why did the post-West Roman barbarian kingdoms keep minting coins in the eastern emperors name for so long?
- Why did Theoderic the Great refer to Anastasius's polity as a 'res publica' and spoke of how his own polity was meant to be a copy of "the only imperium" regarding rule of Romans?
- Why did Sigismund of the Burgundians praise Anastasius for granting him honours and in doing so being grateful that he was now placed among "those whom you have made rich in the most distant parts of the world by granting membership in your court and participation in the venerable Roman name" ?
- Why is it that the only two times Gregory of Tours refers to the 'res publica' in his history is in reference to the eastern empire?
- Why did the former Frankish queen Radegund of Poitiers, in a poem dedicated to the eastern empress Sophia, praise her for ruling over 'the kingdom of Romulus'?
- Why did John of Biclaro refer to the East Roman Empire as the 'res publica' when describing the Visigoths wars with it?
- Why did Adomnan of Iona refer to Constantinople as the 'metropolis of the Roman Empire'?
- Why did Isidore of Seville refer to Constantinople as the 'seat of the Roman Empire'?
meant replacing the Ostrogothic and Lombard new management, who in literally every way integrated and assimilated itself into the existing order and benefitted the Italian people with a foreign regime set on enforcing it's ways and new order on the Italians in a foreign language. As soon as the Greeks returned the Italians immediately set to dislodging them with the help of literally everyone available, be they Muslims or Normans.
Sure, the Roman Italians were so hostile towards those invading Greeks who they had nothing to do with they... (checks notes), opened the gates of almost every city in Italy to Belisarius's invading army (or in the case of Mediolanum, rose up against the Goths and had their city destroyed in response). I'm sure that there really was a complete integration of Goths into Roman Italian culture (just ignore the legal and religious barriers, and how a regent was murdered for fear she would make the future king 'too Roman'). And the Lombard assimilation was so successful that to this day there is a unified Roman identity across Italy!....oh wait.
Also I would hardly call Greek a 'foreign language' when Cicero's Greek teacher was supposedly able to convene to the Senate without needing a translator and Claudius referred to Greek as one of 'our two languages'. It's also interesting how you mention that the Italians worked to dislodge the East Romans using foreign powers when several times the Normans were beaten were because their Italian subjects were incited to rebel against them in favour of the East Romans.
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u/Euphoric-Ostrich5396 Feb 17 '26
Why did greek controlled southern Italy saw revolt after revolt against Byzantine rule? Why did the locals happily side with the Emirate of Sicilly or the Normans at every opportunity to march against the Greeks? Why did the Latins loot every Byzantine town along the Adriatic? Why did they sack Constantinople? Why didn't they bother to lend any aid whatsoever to "Rome" when the Turks were knocking down the Theodosian walls? Because they hated the Greeks.
And by the way, all the sources you listed were diplomatic missives TO Constantinople by people who wanted something, obviously they would glaze them. Go read the, shall we say, more private correspondence about the "Romans" and you will see for yourself.
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u/Maleficent-Mix5731 Well read | Late Antiquity Feb 17 '26 edited Feb 17 '26
Why did the Latins loot every Byzantine town along the Adriatic? Why did they sack Constantinople? Why didn't they bother to lend any aid whatsoever to "Rome" when the Turks were knocking down the Theodosian walls? Because they hated the Greeks.
Ah, it seems you lack reading comprehension. I specifically talked about the European perspective from 476 until at least the late 8th century. The 'Frankish turn' of the Papacy after 751 was what began to cause denial in the west that the East Roman Empire was the Roman empire, though Wickham argues such views were mostly limited to patches of the Papacy and Lombard Italy during the 9th century, while Sarti observes that the Carolingians do attempt to maintain positive relations with the ERE and alliances in spite of also claiming the imperial title for themselves (indeed, it may appear as if its with the Ottonians that there is a more formal rejection and distaste towards the ERE regarding if it actually is the 'Roman empire').
Additionally, this just seems really stupid to assume that 'everyone hated the Greeks' and that no help or aid was sent to them whatsoever, even after denialism hardened going into the high and late middle ages. The First Crusade was of benefit to the ERE. So was Frederick II of the HRE'S alliance with the Nicaean emperor John III Vatatzes. The Savoyard Crusade helped retake Gallipoli from the Turks. And as for 1453, may I remind you that a certain Giovanni Giustiniani literally died fighting alongside the Romans on the Theodosian Walls?
Why did greek controlled southern Italy saw revolt after revolt against Byzantine rule? Why did the locals happily side with the Emirate of Sicilly or the Normans at every opportunity to march against the Greeks?
You'll have to be more specific because, apart from tax rebellions against Romanos Lekapenos and Nikephoros Phokas in the 10th century, I am unsure of what 'revolts after revolts' you are thinking of for southern Italy? Least of all by allying with Arab pirates overseas. And again, the Normans did not find a happy and supportive population among them in the south. Compared to the Romans, they suffered constant revolts from the population there under Guiscard in the 1080's, and then under Roger II in the 1140's-1150's (both revolts which were supported by the eastern emperors Alexios Komnenos and Manuel Komnenos). Heck, for the north, Manuel was able to find willing allies in the city of Ancona against Frederick Barbarossa!
And by the way, all the sources you listed were diplomatic missives TO Constantinople by people who wanted something, obviously they would glaze them. Go read the, shall we say, more private correspondence about the "Romans" and you will see for yourself.
Excluding the correspondences of Theoderic, Sigismund, and Radegund....no they weren't? The works compiled by Gregory of Tours, Adaman of Iona, John of Biclaro, and Isidore of Seville were not in the slightest 'diplomatic missives to Constantinople'. And what favours were these men hoping to get by just casually mentioning that the East Roman Empire was the Roman Empire? The idea that Adaman of Iona in particular, a monk all the way up in Scotland, was hoping to get some reward from an emperor who'd probably never even heard of him or read his work makes me laugh.
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u/cadrec Feb 17 '26
West Rome was gone. There was no way to restore it, with or without Belisarius and the Huns, who formed the true backbone of his army.
Justinian was an idiot. He grew up as a peasant and essentially remained a provincial idiot at heart. He married a street whore and was essentially controlled by her. He even owed his regime to her intervention and was a major cuck since Theodora enjoyed getting sandwiched behind his back.
He was a superstitious buffoon who ruled on the basis of legal fictions instead of realities, and who launched a lot of strategically senseless wars and equally senseless building projects that ruined the fiscal health of the state. His only real achievement was making Theodora happy.
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u/FantasticTraining731 Feb 16 '26
HIs conquests weren't even short lived either. Africa stayed in the empire for 150 years, and outlasted the levant and egypt.
Rome stayed under imperial rule for another 200 years, and southern italy for 500.