W. Robert Godfrey

He saw to the codification of the Roman law, which had become kind of complicated, and here a law, there a law, hard to find the precedence in law, and led to the preparation of Justinian's Code, which became the foundation of much legal theory in the whole medieval period and beyond.

He was engaged

frequently in war, first in the east against the Persians, then in the south in North Africa, and finally in Italy.

And it was particularly in his Italian campaigns.

He didn't go himself.

He sent others.

But he took the glory for any success.

He took glory even when there wasn't much success.

If you're emperor, you get to help write the history, and things can turn out better than they actually did.

And one of the things he was determined to do was to restore Roman authority in Italy.

Much of it had fallen into barbarian hands.

I say barbarian because those barbarians actually had largely come into Italy and become Christianized and Romanized, so they weren't radical barbarians.

But

It aided Justinian's propaganda to label them barbarians and to say that he as the noble Roman emperor had to recapture Italy for the Roman Empire from the hands of these barbarians.

It's very interesting that it was a historian, Marcellinus, in Justinian's court who in his chronicle first declared that the Western Roman Empire had ended in 476.

He's the only ancient historian or early medieval historian who ever said that.

But that observation made in Justinian's court has stayed with us down until today.

The Roman Empire in the West ended in 476.

Well, Justinian wanted that to be true so he could justify his invasion of Italy and his efforts to conquer Italy.

Most historians today think it was more a battle of Roman against Roman.