On November 14, 565, the Byzantine emperor Justinian died.
Justinian was born in 482, in the village of Tauresium, a village located near Justiniana Prima in the Roman prefecture of Illyria. His peasant family spoke Latin, and Iustinian was the grandson of the future emperor Iustin I, who after 470 had a military career in the army of Emperor Leo I of the Eastern Roman Empire (457-474).
Justinian became emperor in 527. Justinian’s dream was to rebuild the Roman Empire (Christian though) by uniting the two empires, the western and the eastern. He succeeded in part through his general Belisarius who conquered the Italian Peninsula and North Africa. The heavy military and financial attempts to conquer Italy, started by Belisarius and ended by Narses (another general) did not have a long-lasting effect. In 568, the coming of the Longobards there destroyed the work of Justinian.
The most important internal event was the Nika revolt in Constantinople. Justinian’s opponents proclaimed another emperor, Hepatius, the grandson of the former emperor Anastasius I. While Justinian saw the situation as lost, his wife, Empress Theodora, a former circus performer, opposed the withdrawal from the capital. Through negotiations carried out by Narses with the rebels and through the surprise attack of Belisarius with the troops loyal to the emperor in the hippodrome, where the rebels gathered, the rebellion was quelled.
One of Justinian’s greatest achievements is the codification of Roman law begun in 529. Justinian tried to revitalize the Roman society, which was in the last stage of decomposition, through a huge work of systematizing classical and post-classical law, so that it could be applied to the realities of the 6th century in the Roman Empire.
Discover presents the main historical meanings of November 14:
1716 – Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz, German philosopher, mathematician, physicist, passed away (b. July 1, 1646)
1719 – Johann Georg Leopold Mozart, composer, violinist and organist, father of the famous composer WA Mozart, was born (d. May 28, 1787)
1765 – American inventor Robert Fulton, pioneer in the field of steam propulsion, was born (d. February 24, 1815)
1831 – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German philosopher, passed away (b. August 27, 1770)
1840 – The French painter Claude Monet, founder of the impressionist trend in painting, was born (d. 1926).
1889 – Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian politician, militant for India’s independence, was born. He became, in 1947, the first head of state in the history of his country. He campaigned for the modernization of India, and by promoting a policy of non-alignment and peaceful coexistence. (d. 27 May 1964)
1922 – The BBC’s first radio show
1967 – Petre P. Panaitescu, literary historian and philologist, died (b. March 13, 1900)
1991 – The USSR turned into a union formed, in a first stage, of 7 states: Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan.
1991 – The Romanian Parliament, vested by the CPUN (by Decree-Law no. 92 of March 1990, for the election of the Parliament and the President of Romania) with the capacity of Constituent Assembly, concluded the debate on the Constitution.
1991 – The prose writer Constantin Chirita (“Ciresarii”) (b. March 12, 1925) passed away
2008 – The Romanian novelist and publicist Ioan Lacusta (b. September 15, 1948) passed away.