William Gordon Holmes’s two-volume history examines the reign of the Emperor Justinian I (527–565 AD) — the last great Roman emperor of the East, whose general Belisarius reconquered Italy and North Africa, whose jurists codified Roman law in the Corpus Juris Civilis, and whose empress Theodora, risen from the circus, became one of the most powerful women in late antique history.
This free EPUB of Volume 1 is formatted for e-readers. Drawing on Procopius and other Byzantine sources, Holmes provides a thorough and readable account of the sixth-century Eastern Roman Empire at its most ambitious and most turbulent.