Justinian

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Two hours on the most famous eastern emperor, scored the way this show scores everyone. The reconquest, the law code, the plague and Theodora all get weighed, and the verdict at the end is a number you can argue with.

Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes

Part of The Rest Is History

The last of three: the reconquest of Italy, the plague that arrived in 541, and the ledger afterwards. Fifty-three minutes.

Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes

Part of Lost Roman Heroes · Matteo and Matthew Storm, 101 episodes

Part of The Fall of Rome Podcast

Patrick Wyman as guest on whether taking Italy back destroyed it. Forty-six minutes on a reconquest that left the peninsula emptier than the Goths did.

Part of Tides of History

Peter Sarris on his own biography of Justinian, with Patrick Wyman pressing on the balance sheet: the reconquest, the Code, Hagia Sophia, and the plague that arrived in the middle of all three. Forty-six minutes.

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of The Rest Is History

Part two, thirty-nine minutes on the Nika riots of 532, which burned the city centre and came close to ending the reign in its fifth year.

Part of The History of Byzantium

With Peter Sarris

Peter Sarris on his biography, arguing the reconquest was less reckless than it reads with hindsight. Thirty-seven minutes with a historian defending an unfashionable position.

Part of The History of Byzantium

Thirty-three minutes weighing what was left in 565: Italy ruined by twenty years of war, the treasury empty, and a law code that outlived every province he took.

Part of The History of Byzantium

Twenty-eight minutes on the peasant's nephew who inherited an empire and spent it trying to win back the west. The reconquest and the plague arrive in the same decade.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-five minutes on the case against: the wars, the taxes and the Nika riot in which thirty thousand died in a hippodrome.

Part of Echoes of Empires

The question put directly, with the law code and Hagia Sophia on one side and a bankrupt, plague-thinned empire on the other. Twenty-three minutes.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Procopius wrote the official history and then a private pamphlet calling the empress a whore and the emperor a demon. Twenty-three minutes on what to do with a source that contradicts itself on purpose.

Part of Echoes of Empires

The uncle who rose from the peasantry to the purple and the nephew he educated for it. Twenty-three minutes on a succession planned from the bottom up.