December 16, AD 533

Digest (Roman law)

Justinian promulgates the Digest or Pandects

The old jurists' names stayed above their extracts, but Justinian declared every passage to be his own law — and gave the empire fourteen days before it bound anyone.

16 December 533: the constitution Tanta

Justinian issued the constitution Tanta on 16 December 533, addressed to the Senate, the people and the cities of the empire, announcing and confirming the completed Digest, or Pandects.

Tanta presented it as fifty books, in seven parts, of selected and edited extracts from the writings of earlier Roman jurists.

Every included extract, Justinian declared, carried equal authority and was to be treated as an expression of imperial law regardless of which jurist had written it.

Rules for handling the text

He prohibited courts from using the superseded juristic works and restricted commentary on the new compilation.

He also forbade scribal abbreviations, on the ground that they could corrupt the official text.

Fourteen days to get ready

Magistrates and praetorian prefects were ordered to publish the new material, and Tanta decreed that the Digest and the Institutes would acquire legal force on 30 December 533.

Justinian's own accounting in the same document: nearly 2,000 volumes and three million lines examined, reduced to no more than 150,000 lines, in three years rather than the ten first thought necessary.

Those totals are imperial claims made inside the promulgating constitution, not independent measurements.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 8 sources 2 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The totals of almost 2,000 source volumes, three million original lines, and 150,000 resulting lines are Justinian’s own figures in Tanta and should be identified as imperial claims.
Modern works differ in whether they count sixteen commissioners, seventeen including Tribonian, or sixteen associates in addition to him; the discrepancy depends on counting conventions and the names listed in Tanta.