Hello and welcome to Life of the Week where leading historians delve into the lives of some of history's most intriguing and significant figures.

From ancient Egyptian pharaohs and medieval warriors, to daring 20th century spies.

He was a ruler of insolubrious beginnings, maligned as a peasant, who was nearly lynched by a mob of angry sports fans and even had a play named after him.

Yet, as Peter Saris tells Kev Lachin, Justinian was in fact one of the greatest

Byzantine emperors. A man who remade the Eastern Roman Empire and whose influence stretched well into the medieval era.

Welcome to this Life of the Week episode on Byzantine Emperor Justinian I.

I'm delighted to be joined today by Peter Saris. Peter is professor of late

antique medieval and Byzantine studies and a fellow of Trinity College Cambridge.

He's also the author of Justinian Emperor Soldier Saint. So all around an excellent guest to talk about Justinian.

And Peter, thank you so much for joining us today.

It's a great pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

You're most welcome. I wonder as a place that starts

could you introduce this to who this man is and why he's such a big figure in this period of

history? Yeah Justinian is a figure who really in many ways bestrides the transition from the ancient world

to the medieval and at a crucial moment in time tries to reunite the worlds of the eastern and western Mediterranean,

which in the century before his reign in the fifth century had been fragmenting and drifting apart. So he comes to power in the

Eastern Roman Empire from Constantinople in the early sixth century and will his reign

will herald a major attempt to revive the East Roman state, to conquer territories in the West which had been lost to the Roman Empire over the course of the 5th century.

His reign will witness a concerted attempt to fully Christianize

Roman society and through his efforts at Imperial Reform, at Imperial Revival, and at Christianization he will help to lay the foundations for both the world of medieval Byzantium,

but also in many ways will lay the foundations for the world of medieval Christendom as it would take shape to the west

in the centuries ahead. So he was a key figure as a key moment of transition in European and in many ways

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