The Dream of Restoration

When Justinian took the throne in 527, the Western Roman Empire had been gone for half a century — Africa ruled by the Vandals, Italy by the Ostrogoths, Spain and Gaul by other Germanic kings. But in the surviving Eastern empire at Constantinople, the fiction that these were merely lost provinces of a single Roman world remained powerful, and no emperor believed in it more fervently than Justinian. His reign was consumed by the dream of 'renovatio imperii' — the restoration of the empire to its ancient Mediterranean extent.

He prepared the ground methodically. He had the tangled mass of Roman law codified into the monumental Corpus Juris Civilis, a project that would outlive his empire and shape European law forever. He nearly lost everything in 532, when the rival circus factions of the capital united in the Nika Riots and came within a hair of overthrowing him — until his empress Theodora shamed him into standing firm, and his general Belisarius drowned the revolt in blood in the Hippodrome. And he bought peace with Persia in the east, freeing his best soldiers for the great enterprise.

In 533 he was ready. He gave Belisarius a small fleet and just fifteen thousand men and sent them west across the sea to the richest of the lost lands — Vandal Africa. It was a colossal gamble on a tiny army. Most of his advisers thought it madness. Within a year they would be proved spectacularly wrong.