Within a few years there was a great change. Earthquakes, rebellions, fires, compelled the rebuilding of a great part of Constantinople, and Justinian the Great, lawyer, theologian and organiser of victory, left monuments as enduring in architecture as in the other spheres of his activity. With the exception of the churches of S. John of the Studium and S. Irene, and the walls of Theodosius, there are to-day no great works of the Christian period, save a very few of the later Emperors, remaining in Constantinople except those which Justinian built. His architects created the Byzantine style which reached its magnificent completion in S. Sophia. The finest of the cisterns which astonish the traveller to-day are the work of his age; and as we walk by the splendid walls that extend from the Marmora to the Golden Horn, it is along his triumphal way that we tread. The first book of the "Aedifices" of Procopius, written to commemorate his achievements in building, is even now a handbook in little to the glories of Constantinople. Leaving to our description of the city the still standing work of the great Emperor, we must here shortly sketch the reign which was for nine centuries the most glorious memory of the Eastern Empire. Born in 482 or 483, Justinian was the son of a Dardanian peasant, and was born at Scupi (Üsküp), "at the crossing-point of great natural routes across the western part of the Illyrian peninsula." When his uncle Justin raised himself to the throne in 518 he was sent for and trained to succeed to, if not already to exercise, supreme power. So long as Justin lived Justinian was his chief adviser. When Vitalian, the orthodox Goth, whose troops in the neighbourhood of the city seemed to threaten the new dynasty, was murdered in the palace, it was Justinian, for whose concern in the crime no valid evidence has been produced, who rose to the highest place in military as well as civil affairs. In 523 he married the beautiful Theodora, whose earlier life has been covered with shame by historians whose veracity is open at least to suspicion. She is described by the bitter Procopius as everything that is vile; it is probably true that her youth was disreputable; but it is certain that she made the noblest atonement for the past by the charity and piety of her later life and by the courage and wisdom which were of profit even to the Empire.[6] Of her beauty there is no doubt. Small, pale as marble, but with brilliant eyes, the bitterest of her enemies describes her; and when he uses the language of compliment he declares of the statue erected in her honour by the baths of Arcadius that "the face is beautiful but falls short of the beauty of the Empress, since it is utterly impossible for any mere human workmen to express her loveliness." Four years after the marriage, which was one of unbroken affection till the Empress died in 548, Justinian was associated with his uncle on the imperial throne.