The Byzantine Empire: Justinian & Theodora — Love, Power and Ambition

Then his wife stands up.

Theodora was born in the Hippodrome, the daughter of a bear keeper — an actress Roman law once forbade a man of her husband's rank from marrying. Justinian was the nephew of an illiterate soldier who'd clawed his way onto the throne. Together they refused to run, crushed a revolt that nearly ended their empire in a week, and rebuilt Rome from the ashes: a legal code still underpinning French, Spanish, and Italian law; the Hagia Sophia rising where the old cathedral burned; armies under Belisarius reclaiming North Africa and Italy after a century of loss.

This book covers all of it — the plague of 541 that killed a quarter of the empire, the scandal-soaked secret history written about Theodora by her own court historian, Justinian's years in mourning black after her death, and the Corpus Juris Civilis that outlived them both by fifteen centuries.

Drawing on Procopius's eyewitness account, John Malalas's court chronicles, and a century of modern scholarship, this is the full story of two outsiders who took an empire on the edge of collapse and made it the richest power on Earth for five hundred years.