W. Robert Godfrey

The emperor is a fellow we already probably talked about a little bit at the end of the ancient church course, Emperor Justinian.

Emperor Justinian reigned from 527 to 565.

So he had a relatively long reign, a quite important reign, a reign conducted almost entirely from Byzantium, from Constantinople in the east, and a reign that set the stage for the eastern empire as it would develop and prosper and struggle in the centuries to come.

When people talk about the East and about the movement from the ancient Roman period into what's called the Byzantine period, Justinian is often seen as the transitional period, as the point of change.

But he's also quite important for our understanding of the beginnings of medieval history in the West.

Justinian came to the throne as a Christian and as a relatively militant Christian.

Some historians see him as the first Christian emperor really determined that there would be uniformity in the empire on the matter of orthodoxy.

And particularly in the East, the church had been troubled by a theological controversy known as the Monophysite heresy.

The Monophysite heresy, you go back and listen to the medieval lectures, was the heresy that said Christ had only one nature.

And the Orthodox position as established at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 was that Christ had two natures, a complete divine nature and a complete human nature.

Some Christians in the East thought this made Christ sound sort of schizophrenic.

That's not the word they would have used.

But it made it sound like there were two persons in the one body, and they didn't like that.

They wanted a clearly unified Christ, and they wanted to focus often particularly on His divinity.

And Justinian was determined that this heresy would not dominate in the empire and worked hard

to stamp it out.

He was not entirely successful and indeed created lots of tensions and even some divisions in the church.

But he wanted to see Christianity flourish.

He wanted Christianity more intimately connected to the empire, and part of the way in which he did that was to begin a great building program to build great churches to honor God

and in the process a little bit to honor Justinian as the great Roman emperor, encouraging Christianity.