The resulting shortage of manpower affected several aspects of a state and society that perceptibly were losing their Roman character and assuming their Byzantine. The construction of new churches, so noteworthy a feature of the earlier years, ceased as men did little more than rebuild or add to existing structures. An increasing need for taxes, together with a decreasing number of taxpayers, evoked stringent laws that forced members of a village tax group to assume collective responsibility for vacant or unproductive lands. That, contemporary sources avow, was a burden difficult to assume, in view of the shortage of agricultural workers after the plague. Finally, the armies that won the victories described above in east and west were largely victorious only because Justinian manned them as never before with barbarians: Goths, Armenians, Heruli, Gepids, Saracens, and Persians—to name only the most prominent. It was far from easy to maintain discipline among so motley an army; yet, once the unruly barbarian accepted the quieter life of the garrison soldier, he tended to lose his fighting capacity and prove, once the test came, of little value against the still warlike barbarian facing him beyond the frontier. The army, in short, was a creation of war and kept its quality only by participating in battlefield action, but further expansive warfare could hardly be undertaken by a society chronically short of men and money.
In summary, the East Roman (or better, the Byzantine) state of the late 6th century seemed to confront many of the same threats that had destroyed the Western Empire in the 5th century. Barbarians pressed upon it from beyond the Balkan frontier, and peoples of barbarian origin manned the armies defending it. Wealth accumulated during the 5th century had been expended, and, to satisfy the basic economic and military needs of state and society, there were too few native Romans. If the Byzantine Empire avoided the fate of West Rome, it did so only because it was to combine valour and good luck with certain advantages of institutions, emotions, and attitudes that the older empire had failed to enjoy. One advantage already described, diplomatic skill, blends institutional and attitudinal change, for diplomacy would never have succeeded had not the Byzantine statesmen been far more curious and knowing than Justinian’s 5th-century predecessor about the habits, customs, and movements of the barbarian peoples. The Byzantine’s attitude had changed in yet another way. He was willing to accept the barbarian within his society provided that the latter, in his turn, accept Chalcedonian Christianity and the emperor’s authority. Christianity was often, to be sure, a veneer that cracked in moments of crisis, permitting a very old paganism to emerge, while loyalty to the emperor could be forsworn and often was. Despite those shortcomings, the Christian faith and the ecclesiastical institutions defined in the 6th century proved better instruments by far to unite people and stimulate their morale than the pagan literary culture of the Greco-Roman world. Christian culture of the Byzantine Empire
Justinian’s legislation dealt with almost every aspect of the Christian life: entrance into it by conversion and baptism, administration of the sacraments that marked its several stages, proper conduct of the laity to avoid the wrath that God would surely visit upon a sinful people, and the standards to be followed by those who lived the particularly holy life of the secular or monastic clergy. Pagans were ordered to attend church and accept baptism, while a purge thinned their ranks in Constantinople, and masses of them were converted by missionaries in Asia Minor. Only the Christian wife might enjoy the privileges of her dowry; Jews and Samaritans were denied, in addition to other civil disabilities, the privilege of testamentary inheritance unless they converted. A woman who worked as an actress might better serve God were she to forswear any oath she had taken, even though before God, to remain in that immoral profession. Blasphemy and sacrilege were forbidden, lest famine, earthquake, and pestilence punish the Christian society. Surely God would take vengeance upon Constantinople, as he had upon Sodom and Gomorrah, should the homosexual persist in his “unnatural” ways.
Istanbuclass="underline" Hagia SophiaInterior of the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul.Dennis Jarvis (CC-BY-2.0) (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Justinian regulated the size of churches and monasteries, forbade them to profit from the sale of property, and complained of those priests and bishops who were unlearned in the forms of the liturgy. His efforts to improve the quality of the secular clergy, or those who conducted the affairs of the church in the world, were most opportune. The best-possible men were needed, for, in most East Roman cities during the 6th century, imperial and civic officials gradually resigned many of their functions to the bishop, or patriarch. The latter collected taxes, dispensed justice, provided charity, organized commerce, negotiated with barbarians, and even mustered the soldiers. By the early 7th century, the typical Byzantine city, viewed from without, actually or potentially resembled a fortress; viewed from within, it was essentially a religious community under ecclesiastical leadership. Nor did Justinian neglect the monastic clergy, those who had removed themselves from the world. Drawing upon the regulations to be found in the writings of the 4th-century Church Father St. Basil of Caesarea as well as the acts of 4th- and 5th-century church councils, he ordered the cenobitic (or collective) form of monastic life in a fashion so minute that later codes, including the rule of St. Theodore the Studite in the 9th century, only develop the Justinianic foundation.
Probably the least successful of Justinian’s ecclesiastical policies were those adopted in an attempt to reconcile non-Chalcedonian and Chalcedonian Christians. After the success of negotiations that had done so much to conciliate the West during the reign of Justin I, Justinian attempted to win over the moderate non-Chalcedonians, separating them from the extremists. Of the complicated series of events that ensued, only the results need be noted. In developing a creed acceptable to the moderate non-Chalcedonians of the East, Justinian alienated the Chalcedonians of the West and thus sacrificed his earlier gains in that quarter. The extreme non-Chalcedonians refused to yield. Reacting against Justinian’s persecutions, they strengthened their own ecclesiastical organization, with the result that many of the fortress cities noted above, especially those of Egypt and Syria, owed allegiance to non-Chalcedonian ecclesiastical leadership. To his successors, then, Justinian bequeathed the same religious problem he had inherited from Anastasius.
If, in contrast, his regulation of the Christian life proved successful, it was largely because his subjects themselves were ready to accept it. Traditional Greco-Roman culture was, to be sure, surprisingly tenacious and even productive during the 6th century and was always to remain the treasured possession of an intellectual elite in Byzantium, but the same century witnessed the growth of a Christian culture to rival it. Magnificent hymns written by St. Romanos Melodos mark the striking development of the liturgy during Justinian’s reign, a development that was not without its social implications. Whereas traditional pagan culture was literary and its pursuit or enjoyment thereby limited to the leisured and wealthy, the Christian liturgical celebration and its musical component were available to all, regardless of place or position. Biography too became both markedly Christian and markedly popular. Throughout the countryside and the city, holy men appeared in legend or in fact, exorcising demons, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and warding off the invader. Following the pattern used in the 4th century by Athanasius to write the life of St. Anthony, hagiographers recorded the deeds of those extraordinary men, creating in the saint’s life a form of literature that began to flower in the 6th and 7th centuries.