Italian monk Benedict of Nursia, after spending…

Cham leader Rudravarman I is granted investiture by China as the first king of the fourth dynasty of Champa.

Justinian, whose best-known work is as a codifier and legislator, greatly stimulates legal studies: in 528, he had set up a commission to produce a new code of imperial enactments or constitutions, published in 529 as the Codex Constitutionum.

Justinian had ordered the preparation of a collection of Roman law, called the Corpus Juris Civilis (”Body of Civil Law”), the mass of Roman legal material developed over a millennium being generally unavailable to those who needed it, and rife with internal contradictions.

Justinian will appoint three committees, under the general chairmanship of his chief legal advisor, Tribonian, to collect and edit the legal material.

The first committee gathers all the laws that have emanated from the emperors themselves.

These form the “Justinian Code,” published in twelve books in 529 and containing mainly public, administrative, and criminal law.

Damaging raids on Syria by the Lakhmids in 529 also encourage Justinian to strengthen his own Arab allies, helping the new Ghassanid leader al-Harith ibn Jabalah to turn a loose coalition into a coherent kingdom that will be able to gain the upper hand against the Lakhmids over the following decades.

In this capacity, Harith will fight on behalf of the Romans in all their numerous wars against Persia.

Already in 528, he had been one of the commanders sent in a punitive expedition against Mundhir.

In 529, he helps suppress the wide-scale Samaritan revolt, capturing twenty thousand boys and girls, who he sells as slaves.

It is perhaps Harith's successful participation in this conflict that leads Justinian to promote him to supreme phylarch.

Al-Mundhir renews his attacks, in 529 firstly taking all the area of frontiers which was Khabour.

Afterwards, he marches towards Arzona and Nisibis, spoiling and ravaging the cities before continuing to Apamea.

Al-Mundhir is unable to conquer Antioch because Justinian has dispatched a large army to protect it.

Al-Mundhir returns with much booty, among them four hundred nuns, whom he burns in sacrifice to the goddess al-Uzza.

The dynasts of the Christian Arab Ghassanids, though often called kings, are in fact Roman phylarchs (native rulers of subject frontier states).

They have their headquarters well within the Roman empire, a little east of the Sea of Galilee at Jabiyah in the Jawlan (Golan) area; but they control large areas of northwestern Arabia, as far south as Yathrib, serving as a counterpoise to the Sassanian-oriented Lakhmids in the northeast.

From its strategic location in portions of modern Syria, Jordan, and Israel, Ghassan protects the spice trade route from the south of the Arabian Peninsula and acts as a buffer against the desert Bedouin.

Ghassanian influence spans the sixth century CE, and their most prominent member, al-Harith ibn Jabalah, given the title patricius in 529 by the emperor Justinian, supports the Romans against Sassanian Persia.

The Samaritans, under a charismatic messianic figure named Julianus ben Sabar (or ben Sahir) in 529, launch a war, sometimes related as the final Samaritan revolt, to create an independent state.

The Samaritan revolt of ben Sabar is perhaps the most violent of the Samaritan revolts.

Emperor Justinian I, aided by the Ghassanid Arabs, crushes the revolt; tens of thousands of Samaritans die or are enslaved.

According to Procopius of Caesarea, the majority of Samaritan peasants chose to be defiant in this revolt, and "were cut to pieces".

Further, Samaria, the "world's most fertile land, was left with no one to till it."

The Samaritan faith is virtually outlawed hereafter by the Christian Roman Empire; from a population once at least in the hundreds of thousands, the Samaritan community will dwindle to near extinction.

The Academy founded by Plato at Athens in about 387 BCE closes down in 535 by order of Justinian I on charges of un-Christian activity.

Many of the school's professors emigrate to Persia and Syria.

Queen Amalasuntha receives a delegation sent by a council of Gothic nobles urging that she have her son Athalaric, now thirteen, taught an education in the Roman tradition not by elderly schoolmasters, but by men who will teach him to "ride, fence, and to be toughened, not to be turned into a bookworm".

Ahkal Mo' Naab' I, ruler of the Maya city of Palenque, had died in 524, and the city had entered an interregnum which lasted a little over four years before the following king was crowned in Toktán in 529.

K'an Joy Chitam I will govern for thirty-six years.

Justinian selects a second commission on December 15, 530, to collate and excises contradictions from the writings of the foremost Roman legal experts.

Tribonian becomes quaestor sacri palatii and chief editor of the compilation of the old Roman legal writings.

This becomes the Digest (Pandects), a distillation of legal expertise containing more than nine thousand extracts arranged in fifty books.