JUSTINIAN THE GREAT 85 his fellow-laborers had made for themselves, by the labors of their own hands, civilized dwellings amid the tangled forest and the dreary morass. At a time when clan-feuds and bloodshed were rife, and princes rose and fell, and all was stormy and changeful, they had covered the islands with monastic schools, where the Scriptures were studied, ancient books collected and read, and native mis- sionaries trained for their own country, and for the remotest parts of the Euro- pean continent. JUSTINIAN THE GREAT (483-565) FLAVIUS ANICIUS JUSTINIANUS, nephew on the mother's side of the Emperor Justin, was born in 482 or 483 A.D., in the village of Tauresium, in Illyria. His original name was Upranda. Although of obscure parentage, and indeed slave-born, he shared the success of his maternal uncle, Justin, being invited at an early age to Constanti- nople, where he received an early educa- tion. When his uncle assumed the purple, in 518, he appointed Justinian commander- in-chief of the army of Asia. His tastes, however, inclining him rather to civic pur- suits, he declined this appointment, and re- mained attached to the court of Constan- tinople. In 521, he was named consul, and during the remaining years of the reign of his uncle he continued to exercise great influence. In 527 the Emperor Jus- tin, by the advice of the senate, proclaimed him his partner in the empire. Justin survived this step but four months, and in the same year Justinian was proclaimed sole emperor, and crowned along with his wife, the famous Theodora, whom, despite her more than dubious anteced- ents as an actress, he had raised to the position as his wife. Justinian on his ac- cession was in his forty-fifth year. His reign, which extends over thirty-eight years, is the most brilliant in the history of the late empire. Although himself without the taste or the capacity for military command, he had the good fortune or the skill to select the ablest generals of the last days of Roman military as- cendency. Under the direction of his generals, and especially of the celebrated Narses and Belisarius, his reign may be said to have restored the Roman Empire.
