Justinian I

Justinian I was Byzantine emperor from 527 to 565 CE, remembered for an ambitious attempt to restore Roman power in the western Mediterranean and for a codification of Roman law that shaped European legal thought for over a thousand years. He commissioned the jurist Tribonian to compile the Corpus Juris Civilis, a systematic restatement of Roman law that survived the fall of the Western Empire and was rediscovered by medieval European scholars from the eleventh century onward. Through his generals Belisarius and Narses, he reconquered North Africa from the Vandals and much of Italy from the Ostrogoths, though the long Gothic War left Italy devastated and the reconquest largely reversed within a generation of his death. In Constantinople he rebuilt the Hagia Sophia after it burned in the Nika riots of 532, producing what remained the largest cathedral in the world for nearly a thousand years. His reign also saw the first well documented outbreak of bubonic plague to strike the Mediterranean world, a pandemic named for him by modern historians, which killed a substantial part of the empire's population and weakened its capacity to hold the reconquered territories.