Justinian I

Life and ideas

Justinian ruled the Eastern Roman Empire from Constantinople from 527 to 565. Soon after taking power he appointed a commission under his minister Tribonian to bring order to a thousand years of Roman law, which lay scattered in statutes, imperial rulings and the opinions of the jurists. The commission produced the Code, a collection of imperial constitutions; the Digest, extracts from the jurists arranged by subject; and the Institutes, a short textbook for students. Justinian later added the Novels, which were new laws. Together they are known as the Corpus Juris Civilis. The collection was largely lost in the West but was studied again from the eleventh century in Bologna, and it became the common foundation of the legal systems of continental Europe and of the countries they influenced.