In all this we recognise the work of the great reformer who had already produced the Corpus Juris Civilis, consisting of the Institutes, Digest, Code, and Novellae, which more than anything else he did—­and he did everything—­determined that Europe, which he had secured for ever, should be a Roman thing established upon Roman Law.  But are we also to see in this great man the creator of the exarchate, that citadel of the empire in Italy which was to endure, though almost all else perished, till Charlemagne appeared and the empire itself suddenly re-arose, armed at all points and ready for battle?  It might seem that we are not to attribute that great scheme to Justinian, but rather to a later recognition of the force and reality of the disasters that so few years after his death descended once more upon Italy.

When Narses at the head of the armies of Justinian had in 554 conquered the Goths and possessed Italy, the administrative divisions of the peninsula would seem to have remained almost the same as they had been in the time of Honorius.  Indeed the re-entry of Italy within the empire was accompanied by no important change in the provincial divisions of the peninsular because there was no necessity for it.  Narses, who ruled just eleven years in Ravenna, was never known by the title of exarch.  On the contrary, Procopius and Agathias call him simply the general-in-chief of the Roman army [Greek:  o Romaion strataegos], and pope Pelagius calls him Patricius et Dux in Italia, and others, among them Gregory the Great and Agnellus, simply Patricius.  But it is obvious that there was something new in the official situation and that certain extraordinary powers were conferred upon Narses.  And it is the same with his successor Longinus.  All the texts that mention him, including the Liber Pontificalis, call him Praefectus.  But the transformation from which the exarchate arose was more obscure and far more slow than any official reform of Justinian’s could have been.  It is in part the result of the new condition of the country, which Justinian had had to take into account, but it is much more the result of the progress of the Lombard conquest and the new necessities of defence, which not one of the three great men who had restored Italy to the empire lived to see.

For Belisarius and Justinian both died in 565, and Narses, who was recalled in that year by the foolish and insolent Sophia, the wife of the new emperor Justin II., seems to have died about 572.

It is difficult to determine to which of these three great and heroic figures Italy, and through Italy, Europe, owes most, but since it was Justinian who chose and employed them we must, I think, accord him, here too, the first place in our remembrance.