. So too is his noblest title to immortality, the
composition by his orders of that magnificent legal trilogy, the Code,
the Digest, and the Institutes, which summed up whatever was most worthy
of preservation in the labours of Roman lawyers for nine centuries in
the past, and sent it forward for at least thirteen centuries into the
future to ascertain the rights and to mould the institutions of men
dwelling in lands of the very existence of which no Roman, from the
first Julius to the last Constantine, ever dreamed. Justinian as
legislator is as much out of our present focus as Justinian the
antagonist of Persia.

But what we have here briefly to concern ourselves with is that
marvellous display of renewed energy by which the Empire, under
Justinian, made its presence felt in Western Europe and Africa. During
the thirty-eight years of his reign the great world-kingdom, which for
five generations had been losing province after province to the
Barbarians, and which, when she had once lost a game had seemed never to
have the heart to try her fortune again on the same battle-field, now
sent out her fleets and her armies, apparently with the same confidence
of success which had once animated her Scipios and her Sullas, again
planted her victorious standards on the citadel of Carthage, made the
New Carthage in Spain, Malaga, and distant Cadiz her own, and--what
concerns our present subject more nearly--once more asserted the
unrestricted dominion of the Roman Augustus over Italy "from the Alps to
the Sea". Let us beware of thinking of all these great changes as
strange and precarious extensions of "the Byzantine Empire". To do so
is to import the language of much later ages into the politics of the
sixth century. However clearly we may now see that the relations thus
established between Constantinople and the western shores of the
Mediterranean were artificial, and destined not to endure, to Justinian
and his contemporaries these were not "conquests by Constantinople", but
"the recovery of Africa, Italy, and part of Spain for the Roman
Republic".

The first of the Teutonic states to fall was the kingdom of the Vandals.
Its ruin was certainly hastened by the estrangement between its royal
house and that of the Ostrogoths. We left Theodoric's sister, the
stately and somewhat domineering Amalafrida in prison at Carthage. Soon
after her brother's death she was executed or murdered, by order of her
cousin the Catholic reformer,