Paul Freedman, teaching Yale's HIST 210, The Early Middle Ages, 284-1000, examines the sixth century reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian through the historian Procopius. Freedman explains why Procopius's three very different works, the military history The Wars, the flattering Buildings, and the scathing Secret History, remain the best sources on the period, alongside Gregory of Tours's history of the Merovingian kings. He covers Justinian and Theodora's reconquest of North Africa and Italy from the Vandals and Ostrogoths, the Nika riots tied to the chariot-racing factions of the Blues and Greens, the financial strain of constant warfare and heavy taxation, and Justinian's two lasting monuments, the Hagia Sophia and the legal compilation known as the Corpus Iuris Civilis. The lecture runs through Justinian's building projects and legal reforms as the culmination of late Roman imperial ambition in the eastern Mediterranean.