The Hagia Sophia literally means holy wisdom. You might recognize the word Sophia from philosophy, which literally means friend of wisdom, philosophia. Now, perhaps what Justinian is most famous for is his attempt to better codify a set of laws. The Roman Empire, of course, always had laws, but Justinian got legal experts to go and collect the laws of the land, to make them consistent, to throw out the laws that are inconsistent, to add new laws as necessary, and he did this over his entire reign, and he spread them, and they are often referred to as the Code of Justinian. And they would have an influence on the Byzantine Empire for the next 900 years, and even some influence on some relatively modern schools of law. Now, as I've mentioned before, the reign of Justinian is considered really the high point of the Byzantine Empire, and even as we get into roughly the second half of his reign, things start to slide downward, and over the next 900 years are just in a state of decline. Starting in the 540s, there's a significant plague in the Byzantine Empire.