I think that Emperor Justinian  is the luckiest motherfucker in history...

Around the time Justinian was born, the Emperor in charge was Anastasias who seemed to have a pretty deep care for his responsibility as the master of millions. The state was out of money and struggling to function. Being a caring man, rather than raise taxes on the struggling peasants he just stopped spending money. His rule was an era of peace and prosperity where there was no war besides fighting off Bulgar and Persian raids. He secured a "100 Year Peace" with Persia. By the time he died of a sudden disease, he had accumulated an absolutely huge treasury. 



Justinian's father was the **VERY** minor noble in charge of the city guard. When the Emperor died, he left no successor, so the Emperor's Vizier gave Justin (father of Justinian) a huge cartoon sack of money and told him to use it to bribe the guard to support the Vizier as new Emperor. Justin accepted the money and used it to convince the guard to support him instead, with his first act as Emperor to execute the Vizier. Then he bullied the Senate into accepting his claim.



Then he died ~10 years later leaving the throne to Justinian. Justinian got to spend the first 15 years of his life as a """"peasant"""" (really a minor noble's son) before inheriting the title of Emperor at 25. He married a prostitute named Theodora which was exactly as scandalous as if Obama married a prostitute named Candi and gave her real power. He then did the stereotypical thing and spent his reign building giant monuments and statues of himself. Out of some cosmic coincidence, Theodora turned out to be an egotist who truly loved having power and was truly good at both using it and maintaining it. She essentially did the job of Emperor for him and kept him from making stupid decisions. She also seemed to actually love him for some reason so while he sat around watching chariot races and other sports she killed his enemies and foiled assassination attempts from senators who really really really really **REALLY** hated that a """"peasant"""" was Emperor.

Meanwhile Persia attacked and broke the "100 Year Peace" that actually lasted around 20 so it was a pretty good peace treaty despite the name all things considered. The war was going very badly. Justinian had spent the money meant for paying soldiers on building the Haggia Sophia, exquisite murals of himself and his wife, and expensive chariot races. Even though general after general kept dying, Justinian sort of just mailed whoever the new general was the helpful advice of "win this time."

So the war raged on.

Justinian was a megalomaniacal man, and when he wasn't commissioning monuments to his glory he was investigating ways to make sure that everyone believed in Jesus the same way as him. Instead of using his power for anything actually useful like his wife, he decided to persecute the last pagans (of which there were still many), actually enforce the laws against homosexuality as a part of this persecution against pagans and having a few prominent homosexuals in the capitol castrated, and generally being the morality police. I said he was lucky, not likable. In fact, that might be a consistent thing here - while this all can be very funny, Justinian was a bad bad man who hurt a lot of people and left his Empire in a horrible place but got to experience none of the consequences.

Justinian was also not a cartoon character, he did more than just lay around talking about how great he was. As the son of someone who had to preside over a lot of court cases both before and after his father Justin became Emperor, Justinian was one of many frustrated with the fragmentary nature of Roman law. One law might be written in Latin. One might be written in Greek. Another might be written in both with scrawled Hebrew in the margins all of them written centuries apart in different but equally scrawled handwriting on a piece of paper near the point of crumbling to dust. The point is that the law was so complicated that it would be reasonably possible to just make something up as your defense and be confident nobody could really check. Justinian commissioned a bunch of scholars to actually read through these law books and compile a single law book written in legible, modern-for-the-time Greek, which would be copied and distributed across the empire.

Justinian was a powerful man, far away from the frontier border with Persia so even though the war was going badly he could sort of just ignore it since Theodora was really good at keeping him from dying. Despite being so powerful, Justinian didn't rule EVERYTHING. His rule only extended to the eastern half of the Roman Empire as the western half lost control of Italy around 10 years before Justinian was born. Being an equally egotistical but much less competent man, Justinian thought that his excellent leadership should be in charge of more things. Rome was too small and needed to be restored to it's former borders. Theodora tried to point out to him just how silly this plan was. The Empire was out of money again, they were already losing a war in Persia, and people hated him so much that they had already narrowly crushed a rebellion which failed to successfully declare a new emperor and kill Justinian.

To Justinian's credit he at least listened to this advice for the moment. He stopped listening to that advice around the time he read the correspondence about the war in Persia. It had completely turned around! In a process of natural selection all of the generals who didn't get it got burnt alive by the Persians, leaving the Byzantine Empire's frontier forces under the command of a raging psychopath and killer of men named Belisarius. To the shock and horror of Theodora, Belisarius had managed to get the Persians to sign another "100 Year Peace Treaty," and her husband was stupid enough to believe it would actually last as long as the previous one.

Since Belisarius had done so well, Justinian decided to send him on a boat to conquer Carthage and the coast of Northern Africa. Theodora managed to have a lot of influence over this plan though. She convinced the Emperor that it was a better plan and less of a risk if Belisarius was sent to Africa with a force that was way to small on boats which weren't good enough with a supply of food that wasn't big enough. This would begin a long rivalry between the general and Empress.

Against all expectations, Belisarius actually won easily in Africa. The Vandals were the tribe of Germanic warriors who had originally taken Africa from Rome, and they still ruled it... terribly. They were actually considerably worse at being well liked than even Justinian. They were so hated that the people of Africa viewed Belisarius as a liberator. The king of the Vandals was also a terrible general which combined with that to create a perfect storm which allowed Belisarius to win.

To Theodora's shock and horror, Justinian immediately sent Belisarius to reconquer ITALY. This led to a long drama between Belisarius and Theodora in which she constantly tries to undermine him, and he constantly tries to prove his loyalty. While Belisarius did turn out to be totally loyal in the end, I really can not stress enough how reasonable it was that Theodora saw Belisarius as an incredibly obvious potential usurper - especially when he managed to win in Italy in what was probably the best day of Justinian's life and the worst day of Theodora's. I could expound with a whole lot more detail about this drama between them, but that isn't the purpose of the article.

After Africa, Italy, and Spain were reconquered, the Empire was left as a bloated heaving mass. Totally out of money, it could never hope to ever defend itself on so many fronts. The entire population seemed to hate the Emperor. The regular citizens had had their friends, family, and neighbors beaten, robbed, and even killed by  Justinian's agents as part of a persecution that really served no purpose. The people of Africa were already tired of their liberators because of the crushing taxes Justinian put on them in order to pay for the wars that had crippled the state even further. In Spain, Roman control extended about five feet outside of the cities as the countryside was controlled by rebels still loyal to the Goths. The people of Italy just wanted it all to end as the war there had raged for over 20 years. The entire empire was crippled. Infrastructure too expensive to ever build again was destroyed. The aquaducts ran dry forever. Cities were left without walls after Belisarius tore them down in a show of force. Everything was awful and its impossible for any Emperor to have successfully managed the resulting crisis.

Then Justinian died before he had to deal with it, making him the luckiest motherfucker in history.