In 2018, Peter Heather published Rome Resurgent, a military evaluation of Justinian's foreign wars mostly in the west (alt-title Making Rome Great Again). Academia.edu has raised Parnell's review of it.
The Greek and Slavic Orient has long hailed Justinian as "the Great" or even as a Saint, like Louis IX for the French. Secular Westerners have also tended to see Justinian positively; more so as his legal code was rediscovered in the High Middle Ages. The primary exception has been the Church, still sore about the kidnapping of Vigilius. Lately, Western scholars have asked if Justinian was right to carry on to a large war over here, rather than concentrating on the Persian front, which - as Procopius already observed at the time - was existential.
Heather splits the difference.
The Vandal kingdom, from its first African beachhead throughout the various Roman and Byzantine efforts to dislodge it, had been lucky. Its army was optimised for fending off Berber raids; its navy was a pirate flotilla. Justinian, more competent than Leo and better supplied than Majorian, tore through it handily. And then Justinian was able to hold it against those Berbers. Heather argues that the expedition paid for itself. (We might, in hindsight, ask if the East Roman Empire needed another potential base for rival Emperors.)
The problem of course was Italy (Heather adds Baetica, the province in Spain). Nobody can argue that the Italian wars were anything but a headache - well, nobody excepting star-struck mediaeval romantics.
I don't know that Heather has added much to our understanding; in 2018, a cursory flip didn't uncover any, and I didn't buy the book. Parnell's main questions concern common army life, which featured in 2010s-decade monographs Heather didn't read; and the plague. That peste is a burning question in scholarship which - I agree - requires an accounting in any study of the post-536 years.
BACKDATE 8/10
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