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Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire
The epic story of the collision between one of nature?s smallest organisms and history?s mightiest empire
During the golden age of the Roman Empire, Emperor Justinian reigned over a territory that stretched from Italy to North Africa. It was the zenith of his achievements and the last of them. In 542 AD, the bubonic plague struck. In weeks, the glorious classical world of Justinian had been plunged into the medieval and modern Europe was born.
At its height, five thousand people died every day in Constantinople. Cities were completely depopulated. It was the first pandemic the world had ever known and it left its indelible mark: when the plague finally ended, more than 25 million people were dead. Weaving together history, microbiology, ecology, jurisprudence, theology, and epidemiology, Justinian?s Flea is a unique and sweeping account of the little known event that changed the course of a continent.
During the golden age of the Roman Empire, Emperor Justinian reigned over a territory that stretched from Italy to North Africa. It was the zenith of his achievements and the last of them. In 542 AD, the bubonic plague struck. In weeks, the glorious classical world of Justinian had been plunged into the medieval and modern Europe was born.
At its height, five thousand people died every day in Constantinople. Cities were completely depopulated. It was the first pandemic the world had ever known and it left its indelible mark: when the plague finally ended, more than 25 million people were dead. Weaving together history, microbiology, ecology, jurisprudence, theology, and epidemiology, Justinian?s Flea is a unique and sweeping account of the little known event that changed the course of a continent.
384 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2007
About the author
William Rosen
9 books72 followersWilliam Rosen was an historian and author who previously was an editor an publisher at Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and the Free Press for nearly twenty-five years. He lived in Princeton, New Jersey.
From recent obituary
William Rosen PRINCETON JUNCTION Author William Rosen, 61, whose works of narrative nonfiction include "Justinian's Flea" and "The Most Powerful Idea in the World: The Story of Steam, Industry and Invention," died at home on April 28, 2016, of gastrointestinal stromal cancer, according to his agent. Born in California, Rosen worked for nearly 25 years as an editor and publisher at Macmillan, Simon and Schuster and the Free Press before becoming an author. With a writing style that used anecdotes to pull together the threads of discovery and innovation, Rosen authored or co-authored books on education, traffic, antibiotics, and climate change. Bill Gates said of Rosen's work, "Rosen argues that only with the ability to measure incremental advances--such as whether a lighter part lowers fuel consumption, or one engine produces more power than another--can you achieve sustained innovation. Rosen's view fits my own view of the power of measurement." Rosen grew up in Los Angeles, CA, attended UCLA and, after a brief stint at John Wiley and Sons, moved east for publishing. He edited books authored by George Will, as well as William Bennett, Bernard Lewis, Maya Lin, and Leon Kass. But he found true fulfillment writing books instead of only publishing them.
From recent obituary
William Rosen PRINCETON JUNCTION Author William Rosen, 61, whose works of narrative nonfiction include "Justinian's Flea" and "The Most Powerful Idea in the World: The Story of Steam, Industry and Invention," died at home on April 28, 2016, of gastrointestinal stromal cancer, according to his agent. Born in California, Rosen worked for nearly 25 years as an editor and publisher at Macmillan, Simon and Schuster and the Free Press before becoming an author. With a writing style that used anecdotes to pull together the threads of discovery and innovation, Rosen authored or co-authored books on education, traffic, antibiotics, and climate change. Bill Gates said of Rosen's work, "Rosen argues that only with the ability to measure incremental advances--such as whether a lighter part lowers fuel consumption, or one engine produces more power than another--can you achieve sustained innovation. Rosen's view fits my own view of the power of measurement." Rosen grew up in Los Angeles, CA, attended UCLA and, after a brief stint at John Wiley and Sons, moved east for publishing. He edited books authored by George Will, as well as William Bennett, Bernard Lewis, Maya Lin, and Leon Kass. But he found true fulfillment writing books instead of only publishing them.
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August 11, 2012
Can you say “bait and switch”?
Justinian’s Flea, as its title, description, and introduction are eager to announce, examines how the bubonic plague epidemic in the sixth century contributed to the demise of the Roman Empire. Already on shaky ground but no means down for the count, the empire was struggling to maintain a hold on its lands in western Europe—including Rome itself—even as the Persians and Huns intermittently harried its eastern borders. The plague ravaged the empire’s labour base, short-circuiting its economy and leaving it weakened. William Rosen is careful to point out that the plague was not the critical component to Rome’s demise—that is to say, it’s doubtful the empire would have lasted even if the plague hadn’t been so severe. But in a careful counterfactual musing in the final chapter, he ponders how the final days of the empire might have been different.
This is all well and good, but after the introduction, the next discussion of the plague doesn’t come until about 200 pages into the book. For the first part, Rosen provides a narrative view of the fourth and fifth centuries of the empire, from Constantine and Constantinople to Justin, whose nephew was probably the power behind the throne and would, upon his ascension to it, become the eponymous Justinian. There are two key components Rosen focuses on: the rising power of Christianity, even in its fractured form; and the increasing hostility of surrounding tribes, such as the Goths and the Huns. These pressures resulted in great changes to the empire and to its fortunes.
I actually found the first part of the book really fascinating. The history of early Christianity interests me, since Christianity shaped so much of the world, including my small corner. Reading about the various internecine disputes between factions, the charges and cries of “heresy!” and “apostate!” being thrown about, adds a perspective that simply reading the Bible and going to church does not. In many cases, matters of theological doctrine were decided for reasons more political, pragmatic, or even personal than spiritual. Many of the beliefs held by some Christians today are the result of the consensus and compromise enforced by Roman emperors from Constantine to Justinian. As with the demise of Rome itself, it’s always fun to wonder how the world would have been different had a different interpretation of Christianity prevailed.
Similarly, Rosen’s accounts of the expansions of the Goths and the sacking of Rome taught me a great deal. I was vaguely familiar with the idea that Rome had been sacked by the Goths; I wasn’t quite sure on the timeline or when the empire had relocated to Constantinople. Rosen clears up some of my confusion. In particular, I appreciate when he notes how a name (such as Visigoths) or a perspective is the product of a later time. It can be difficult to write history, because we are constantly looking to explain what happened by cause and effect—but we are products of our time, conditioned to think and view events in a certain way. The Romans did not have the training of Romantic, Enlightenment, or post-modern philosophers to influence their thinking, so it isn’t a stretch to say that they thought differently from how we do. Hence, when trying to explain why things happened the way they did, not only do we have to deal with insufficient facts and biased sources—we have to keep our own cultural biases from interfering as well!
So the first part of Justinian’s Flea is a fascinating account of the last few centuries of Rome’s rule. Rosen takes up right up to Justinian’s rule, and it seems like we are drawing ever closer to the promised plague. But then he takes a detour to talk about Justinian’s code of laws. All right … I guess demonstrating how well Justinian maintained law and order is good if we’re going to see his empire ravaged by a plague in a few pages. Wait, why are we talking about the building of the Hagia Sophia?
As a mathematician, of course, I didn’t mind reading about conic sections and arches and how Anthemius planned the design of the Hagia Sophia to make it circle-like but not too circle-like (because that would be pagan!). I don’t want to complain about reading something I enjoyed, except that it doesn’t really seem germane to the germs. The entire chapter dedicated to the construction of the Hagia Sophia is a good read but somewhat excessive considering the book’s purported purpose.
Then, when we finally get to the chapters on the plague, Rosen overcompensates. He launches into an expansive, even eloquent narrative of the history of bacteria, from its days as Earth’s only notable life to its current occupation, ruling the planet from our intestinal tracts! If any point can be belaboured along the way, he makes sure to belabour the hell out of it. He describes the evolution of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium identified as the cause of the bubonic plague, from its humble origins as Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, through the language of genetics and evolution. (Rosen is careful to elucidate the evolutionary biologist point that evolution is not progressive and has no “goal” in mind; nevertheless, the language he uses when referring to the evolution of the “demon” Yersinia pestis often gives the impression that it was intentionally seeking out genes to turn it into a bubonic superbug.) Suddenly I find myself in the middle of a science text—again, as with the Hagia Sophia chapter, this is material that appeals to me personal. But it’s an abrupt transition from the material in the previous chapters, even if it is a little more on topic.
Well, at least we’re talking about the plague now, right? Except that Rosen feels the need to spend a few more chapters on the last years of Justinian’s rule. He talks briefly about the parallels between imperial Rome and imperial China, as well as the silk trade that existed between them. And I’m sure, at some point along the way, he gets around to discussing the effects of the plague on the Roman empire. But you know, for the life of me, that’s the one thing about this book that has slipped my mind—the one thing that just isn’t all that memorable.
I enjoyed learning about Emperor Justinian, about his rise to power and his clever and scheming wife and his influence on Christianity (as well as its influence on him). Reading about the exploits of Theodora and Belisarius was a good way to spend the afternoon. The book itself, particularly the first part, is good—it just isn’t exactly what seems to be on offer, and the swift jumps from Roman history to Christian architecture to bacterial evolution and back to history belies the orderly investigation promised in the first chapter. It would have been more accurate—and more honest—to call this book Justinian rather than Justinian’s Flea. Sure, it’s not as catchy, but it better describes the story Rosen tells.
Justinian’s Flea, as its title, description, and introduction are eager to announce, examines how the bubonic plague epidemic in the sixth century contributed to the demise of the Roman Empire. Already on shaky ground but no means down for the count, the empire was struggling to maintain a hold on its lands in western Europe—including Rome itself—even as the Persians and Huns intermittently harried its eastern borders. The plague ravaged the empire’s labour base, short-circuiting its economy and leaving it weakened. William Rosen is careful to point out that the plague was not the critical component to Rome’s demise—that is to say, it’s doubtful the empire would have lasted even if the plague hadn’t been so severe. But in a careful counterfactual musing in the final chapter, he ponders how the final days of the empire might have been different.
This is all well and good, but after the introduction, the next discussion of the plague doesn’t come until about 200 pages into the book. For the first part, Rosen provides a narrative view of the fourth and fifth centuries of the empire, from Constantine and Constantinople to Justin, whose nephew was probably the power behind the throne and would, upon his ascension to it, become the eponymous Justinian. There are two key components Rosen focuses on: the rising power of Christianity, even in its fractured form; and the increasing hostility of surrounding tribes, such as the Goths and the Huns. These pressures resulted in great changes to the empire and to its fortunes.
I actually found the first part of the book really fascinating. The history of early Christianity interests me, since Christianity shaped so much of the world, including my small corner. Reading about the various internecine disputes between factions, the charges and cries of “heresy!” and “apostate!” being thrown about, adds a perspective that simply reading the Bible and going to church does not. In many cases, matters of theological doctrine were decided for reasons more political, pragmatic, or even personal than spiritual. Many of the beliefs held by some Christians today are the result of the consensus and compromise enforced by Roman emperors from Constantine to Justinian. As with the demise of Rome itself, it’s always fun to wonder how the world would have been different had a different interpretation of Christianity prevailed.
Similarly, Rosen’s accounts of the expansions of the Goths and the sacking of Rome taught me a great deal. I was vaguely familiar with the idea that Rome had been sacked by the Goths; I wasn’t quite sure on the timeline or when the empire had relocated to Constantinople. Rosen clears up some of my confusion. In particular, I appreciate when he notes how a name (such as Visigoths) or a perspective is the product of a later time. It can be difficult to write history, because we are constantly looking to explain what happened by cause and effect—but we are products of our time, conditioned to think and view events in a certain way. The Romans did not have the training of Romantic, Enlightenment, or post-modern philosophers to influence their thinking, so it isn’t a stretch to say that they thought differently from how we do. Hence, when trying to explain why things happened the way they did, not only do we have to deal with insufficient facts and biased sources—we have to keep our own cultural biases from interfering as well!
So the first part of Justinian’s Flea is a fascinating account of the last few centuries of Rome’s rule. Rosen takes up right up to Justinian’s rule, and it seems like we are drawing ever closer to the promised plague. But then he takes a detour to talk about Justinian’s code of laws. All right … I guess demonstrating how well Justinian maintained law and order is good if we’re going to see his empire ravaged by a plague in a few pages. Wait, why are we talking about the building of the Hagia Sophia?
As a mathematician, of course, I didn’t mind reading about conic sections and arches and how Anthemius planned the design of the Hagia Sophia to make it circle-like but not too circle-like (because that would be pagan!). I don’t want to complain about reading something I enjoyed, except that it doesn’t really seem germane to the germs. The entire chapter dedicated to the construction of the Hagia Sophia is a good read but somewhat excessive considering the book’s purported purpose.
Then, when we finally get to the chapters on the plague, Rosen overcompensates. He launches into an expansive, even eloquent narrative of the history of bacteria, from its days as Earth’s only notable life to its current occupation, ruling the planet from our intestinal tracts! If any point can be belaboured along the way, he makes sure to belabour the hell out of it. He describes the evolution of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium identified as the cause of the bubonic plague, from its humble origins as Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, through the language of genetics and evolution. (Rosen is careful to elucidate the evolutionary biologist point that evolution is not progressive and has no “goal” in mind; nevertheless, the language he uses when referring to the evolution of the “demon” Yersinia pestis often gives the impression that it was intentionally seeking out genes to turn it into a bubonic superbug.) Suddenly I find myself in the middle of a science text—again, as with the Hagia Sophia chapter, this is material that appeals to me personal. But it’s an abrupt transition from the material in the previous chapters, even if it is a little more on topic.
Well, at least we’re talking about the plague now, right? Except that Rosen feels the need to spend a few more chapters on the last years of Justinian’s rule. He talks briefly about the parallels between imperial Rome and imperial China, as well as the silk trade that existed between them. And I’m sure, at some point along the way, he gets around to discussing the effects of the plague on the Roman empire. But you know, for the life of me, that’s the one thing about this book that has slipped my mind—the one thing that just isn’t all that memorable.
I enjoyed learning about Emperor Justinian, about his rise to power and his clever and scheming wife and his influence on Christianity (as well as its influence on him). Reading about the exploits of Theodora and Belisarius was a good way to spend the afternoon. The book itself, particularly the first part, is good—it just isn’t exactly what seems to be on offer, and the swift jumps from Roman history to Christian architecture to bacterial evolution and back to history belies the orderly investigation promised in the first chapter. It would have been more accurate—and more honest—to call this book Justinian rather than Justinian’s Flea. Sure, it’s not as catchy, but it better describes the story Rosen tells.
April 24, 2020
A historical, biological and epidemiological study of the: social, technical, political and economic effect of the bubonic plague on the end of the Roman Empire and how it spurred development of Medieval Europe and the Middle East.
My ebook version was a moderate 390-pages. It had a 2007 US copyright.
William Rosen was an American historian and author of non-fiction. He wrote more than five (5) books. He passed in 2016. This is the second book I’ve read by the author.
This book is a somewhat disjointed narrative of the effect of the bubonic plague on the three (3) major political entities of the Eurasian landmass of the time. There is a focus on the Roman Empire of late antiquity during the reign of Justinian I. This was during the late 400 to mid-500 years CE. During the end of this period was the first major appearance of the plague in Europe. The story is peculiar because in addition to being an advanced-level history, it also addresses the plague at an advanced biological level. The plague’s disease pathology and even its biochemistry are discussed. The cutting from history, to biological science, and then back to history may be unnerving to some readers.
The book is split into four (4) sections: Emperor, Glory, Bacterium, and Pandemic. All sections are well written, although with a somewhat academic style. The first two (2) sections (Emperor and Glory) are pure history. They describe: the rise of Justinian, the resurgence of the eastern Roman Empire, and the conversion of Europe to Christianity. Having a previous overview of the Roman Empire and its successor states would be very helpful in understanding these sections. The Bacterium section is a very detailed description of Bubonic plague. It addresses the bacterium as an organism and the disease it causes in humans—right down to the molecular level. Having some understanding of disease pathology would be helpful in understanding this section. The final section (Pandemic) is a historical description of the plague epidemic. Its mainly epidemiological. It describes the short and long term effects on the: Roman, Chinese (Tang) and Persian (Sasanian) empires of Europe and Asia. Having a previous overview of early European Medieval history and Middle Eastern Medieval history would be helpful in understanding this section.
I found all of the sections to be interesting. Some were more challenging than others. However, the author did a good job in describing each of the many subjects discussed. There were frequent diversions to give the reader the ‘flavor’ of the times. These provided thumbnail descriptions of significant: people, places and events. For example, late Roman architectural techniques in the construction of the Hagia Sophia, Silk and the Silk trade in late Antiquity, the evolution in arms and armament resulting in “knights in shining armour”, and the rats with their fleas. Some of the sections are better than others. The first and last sections being amongst the best.
The largest proportion of the book concerns how a pandemic along with external effects and endemic weaknesses can unravel empires and change societies. If a man or woman was infected by the plague in antiquity, more than half were dead within a week. The depopulation of the Mediterranean basin by the plague shifted the axis of European power to what is now France and Northern Europe. The similar depopulation of the Persian Empire's Khuzestan and Iraqi core caused it to fall victim to opportunistic Arab Islamic armies. They were coming from a region almost unaffected by the plague. Arabia was protected by the long distances of their desert ‘firewall’. Within a hundred years the great majority of the Roman Empire and several important successor states likewise fell to Islamic armies. The Eastern Roman Christian and Persian Zoroastrian populations of the conquered empires were converted to Islam, which they remain today.
The biological ‘technical’ sections were amongst the most challenging. For example, the genetics and morphology of bacteria were very detailed. These sections will be difficult for most readers.
Most interesting to me were the economic sections. The Mediterranean grain and Silk trades of late antiquity were well laid out. Egypt was the breadbasket of the empire. Infected rats followed the grain, which was their food. In antiquity, Silk had a large historical influence. It was similar to the way “spices” did more than 600-years later in the 1500’s CE. Silk was the commodity that linked the widely separated Roman, Persian and Chinese empire in trade.
However, I did find some fault in the narrative. For example, there was almost no discussion of how folks tried to protect or heal themselves from the plague. I thought a short discussion on the state of ancient medicine and pharmacology would have been helpful. A better discussion of what folks 'thought' was the origin of The Demon would have been appreciated. ("God's wrath." was a bit vague.) The author covered a large number of topics over almost 300-years. At times it was hard to follow the thread of the narrative. In addition, there was only little ancient Chinese and Persian (through Islamic sources) source material cited. The great majority of sources and hence perspective were being Byzantine and Northern European.
This book was an ‘advanced’ work. It assumes a certain amount of context. I happen to have an interest in Byzantine history and the Bubonic plague. I’ve read several books about them. The book tied a wide verity of subjects together using a: bacterium, carried by a flea, carried on rats 1400-years ago in the Mediterranean basin. I found Rosen’s history, science and presentation to be solid. The historical sections were the strongest and most persuasive. The biological sciences sections the most difficult. The sections related to epidemiology were somewhere in between. I learned things I didn’t know from reading this book. However, sometimes it was hard to see how the many topics Rosen introduced were related to each other. I can’t recommend this book to everyone. Its oriented toward those who already have a solid knowledge of late antiquity and some biomedical background. The book would be too hard to appreciate otherwise.
Finally, I read this book while the Coronavirus pandemic has me locked down. There is no comparison between the mortality rate of the first bubonic plague and Corvid-19. However, this book illustrates how a pandemic catalyzed great change in the ancient world. It makes it easy to see how a less virulent infection, like Corvid-19, may cause some change in the modern one.
My ebook version was a moderate 390-pages. It had a 2007 US copyright.
William Rosen was an American historian and author of non-fiction. He wrote more than five (5) books. He passed in 2016. This is the second book I’ve read by the author.
This book is a somewhat disjointed narrative of the effect of the bubonic plague on the three (3) major political entities of the Eurasian landmass of the time. There is a focus on the Roman Empire of late antiquity during the reign of Justinian I. This was during the late 400 to mid-500 years CE. During the end of this period was the first major appearance of the plague in Europe. The story is peculiar because in addition to being an advanced-level history, it also addresses the plague at an advanced biological level. The plague’s disease pathology and even its biochemistry are discussed. The cutting from history, to biological science, and then back to history may be unnerving to some readers.
The book is split into four (4) sections: Emperor, Glory, Bacterium, and Pandemic. All sections are well written, although with a somewhat academic style. The first two (2) sections (Emperor and Glory) are pure history. They describe: the rise of Justinian, the resurgence of the eastern Roman Empire, and the conversion of Europe to Christianity. Having a previous overview of the Roman Empire and its successor states would be very helpful in understanding these sections. The Bacterium section is a very detailed description of Bubonic plague. It addresses the bacterium as an organism and the disease it causes in humans—right down to the molecular level. Having some understanding of disease pathology would be helpful in understanding this section. The final section (Pandemic) is a historical description of the plague epidemic. Its mainly epidemiological. It describes the short and long term effects on the: Roman, Chinese (Tang) and Persian (Sasanian) empires of Europe and Asia. Having a previous overview of early European Medieval history and Middle Eastern Medieval history would be helpful in understanding this section.
I found all of the sections to be interesting. Some were more challenging than others. However, the author did a good job in describing each of the many subjects discussed. There were frequent diversions to give the reader the ‘flavor’ of the times. These provided thumbnail descriptions of significant: people, places and events. For example, late Roman architectural techniques in the construction of the Hagia Sophia, Silk and the Silk trade in late Antiquity, the evolution in arms and armament resulting in “knights in shining armour”, and the rats with their fleas. Some of the sections are better than others. The first and last sections being amongst the best.
The largest proportion of the book concerns how a pandemic along with external effects and endemic weaknesses can unravel empires and change societies. If a man or woman was infected by the plague in antiquity, more than half were dead within a week. The depopulation of the Mediterranean basin by the plague shifted the axis of European power to what is now France and Northern Europe. The similar depopulation of the Persian Empire's Khuzestan and Iraqi core caused it to fall victim to opportunistic Arab Islamic armies. They were coming from a region almost unaffected by the plague. Arabia was protected by the long distances of their desert ‘firewall’. Within a hundred years the great majority of the Roman Empire and several important successor states likewise fell to Islamic armies. The Eastern Roman Christian and Persian Zoroastrian populations of the conquered empires were converted to Islam, which they remain today.
The biological ‘technical’ sections were amongst the most challenging. For example, the genetics and morphology of bacteria were very detailed. These sections will be difficult for most readers.
Most interesting to me were the economic sections. The Mediterranean grain and Silk trades of late antiquity were well laid out. Egypt was the breadbasket of the empire. Infected rats followed the grain, which was their food. In antiquity, Silk had a large historical influence. It was similar to the way “spices” did more than 600-years later in the 1500’s CE. Silk was the commodity that linked the widely separated Roman, Persian and Chinese empire in trade.
However, I did find some fault in the narrative. For example, there was almost no discussion of how folks tried to protect or heal themselves from the plague. I thought a short discussion on the state of ancient medicine and pharmacology would have been helpful. A better discussion of what folks 'thought' was the origin of The Demon would have been appreciated. ("God's wrath." was a bit vague.) The author covered a large number of topics over almost 300-years. At times it was hard to follow the thread of the narrative. In addition, there was only little ancient Chinese and Persian (through Islamic sources) source material cited. The great majority of sources and hence perspective were being Byzantine and Northern European.
This book was an ‘advanced’ work. It assumes a certain amount of context. I happen to have an interest in Byzantine history and the Bubonic plague. I’ve read several books about them. The book tied a wide verity of subjects together using a: bacterium, carried by a flea, carried on rats 1400-years ago in the Mediterranean basin. I found Rosen’s history, science and presentation to be solid. The historical sections were the strongest and most persuasive. The biological sciences sections the most difficult. The sections related to epidemiology were somewhere in between. I learned things I didn’t know from reading this book. However, sometimes it was hard to see how the many topics Rosen introduced were related to each other. I can’t recommend this book to everyone. Its oriented toward those who already have a solid knowledge of late antiquity and some biomedical background. The book would be too hard to appreciate otherwise.
Finally, I read this book while the Coronavirus pandemic has me locked down. There is no comparison between the mortality rate of the first bubonic plague and Corvid-19. However, this book illustrates how a pandemic catalyzed great change in the ancient world. It makes it easy to see how a less virulent infection, like Corvid-19, may cause some change in the modern one.
December 1, 2008
This was a challenging book to read, even though I have a keen interest in the subject matter. William Rosen makes a valiant effort to tie together the collapse of classical civilization with the emergence of the Black Plague in the mid-7th century, but what's lacking is a clear or coherent narrative flow or thesis.
Some of Rosen's prose is quite compelling, especially in the middle section where he describes the mechanics of the plague bacterium itself and how it could have such a devastating impact on human civilizations; unfortunately it's sandwiched by less interesting chapters that dutifully chronicle Justinian's rise to power and the geopolitics of the late classical-era Mediterranean with little more punch than a textbook on the subject would provide.
It's all too apparent that Rosen is not an academic; his writing lacks the kind of signposting and narrative structure that you might see from someone like Jared Diamond. While it's difficult to argue with Rosen's thesis that the plague played a major role in the decline of Byzantine civilization, that point tends to all too often be lost among a wide array of peripheral details that do little to either forward the argument of the book or provide color to the events in question.
Rosen is also hurt by the fact that he relies exclusively on existing translations for his source material, many of which date from the Victorian era and fail to reflect more modern research into classical language and culture. In a couple of places, he even uses Gibbon's 18th-century "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to support his points (while Gibbon's work is certainly a classic in itself, it's generally not used as a reference by modern historians).
In the end, Rosen's book comes across more as a something written by an enthusiast than as a work of historical scholarship, and while some chapters are engaging to read, they're unfortunately too few and far between for me to wholeheartedly recommend this book.
Some of Rosen's prose is quite compelling, especially in the middle section where he describes the mechanics of the plague bacterium itself and how it could have such a devastating impact on human civilizations; unfortunately it's sandwiched by less interesting chapters that dutifully chronicle Justinian's rise to power and the geopolitics of the late classical-era Mediterranean with little more punch than a textbook on the subject would provide.
It's all too apparent that Rosen is not an academic; his writing lacks the kind of signposting and narrative structure that you might see from someone like Jared Diamond. While it's difficult to argue with Rosen's thesis that the plague played a major role in the decline of Byzantine civilization, that point tends to all too often be lost among a wide array of peripheral details that do little to either forward the argument of the book or provide color to the events in question.
Rosen is also hurt by the fact that he relies exclusively on existing translations for his source material, many of which date from the Victorian era and fail to reflect more modern research into classical language and culture. In a couple of places, he even uses Gibbon's 18th-century "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to support his points (while Gibbon's work is certainly a classic in itself, it's generally not used as a reference by modern historians).
In the end, Rosen's book comes across more as a something written by an enthusiast than as a work of historical scholarship, and while some chapters are engaging to read, they're unfortunately too few and far between for me to wholeheartedly recommend this book.
August 31, 2012
I try to only read good books and kinda knew I was taking a leap of faith with this one, but the title hooked into me good. I should have fought the line. This book fails on so many levels. Where to start?
First, the title is blatantly false advertising. This book is only nominally about the plague. The author sets forth a highfalutin thesis and methodology complete with interplanetary analogies and tapestry weaving metaphors that he then completely ignores until the last 5 or so pages of the book. The prologue is intended to create an ooh!ahh!plague! sense of anticipation in the reader, but it just falls flat. Ditto for the silly and unnecessary two-paragraph epilogue.
The structure of the book is incredibly uneven. The first 63 pages provide dense pre-Justinian back story. This section jumps back and forth in time making it tough for the lay person to follow. I actually took notes thinking it would help me better appreciate the rest of the book. Silly me.
Pages 64-162 covers Justinian's rule, but this section delves off frequently into obvious filler material on church architecture, battles, and legal wranglings. Many of these topics are treated in excruciating detail, with nary a word as to how it supposedly "place[s] in context a moment in history by weaving a tapestry out of the threads that connect it to the world that replaced it" (pp 6-7). Note that - by this point - we're halfway through the book and Justinian's flea has yet to make its grand entrance.
Justinian's flea (aka the DEMON) finally enters the picture on page 163 and the reader thinks "Ah, now we're gonna get into the meat of the book". But no - it quickly bogs down into overly worked descriptions of the organs and functions of bacteria. Is this minutia really relevant to understanding the decline of Rome and the rise of Europe? This is losing the forest for the trees at the one-celled level.
After just 60 pages, the author exhausts himself on the topic that is supposedly the premise of his book, so he dives off into extended coverage of the Persian ruler of the time. With just 30 pages to go, you'd think he'd get back to trying to weave all these loose threads into his big picture "tapestry" but no - he devotes another entire chapter to China's silk route. Fascinating stuff, but only marginally related to the topic at hand. Even the final chapter launches into treatment of yet another new topic, the roots of Islam. And then, suddenly, with just 5-10 pages to go, a sudden, manic whoosh! of a rather forced and unconvincing wrap up is slammed on the reader.
I almost get the sense that he had an idea for a book and pitched it, but found once he got into it that he didn't have sufficient material. So he window-dressed 65 pages of material with 260 pages of filler. No one will notice, right?
It reads like topical essays written in separate segments and then just glommed together. Just a lot of filler material. Even the footnotes read like unnecessary filler - like 3x5 notecards he couldn't fit into the body of the text yet couldn't bear to leave out.
I honestly hate to give any book a bad review - I mean it's not like I've published anything. The author clearly put a lot of dedicated research and time into the endeavor. But that doesn't change the fact that this work has no center, no pacing, no focus.
First, the title is blatantly false advertising. This book is only nominally about the plague. The author sets forth a highfalutin thesis and methodology complete with interplanetary analogies and tapestry weaving metaphors that he then completely ignores until the last 5 or so pages of the book. The prologue is intended to create an ooh!ahh!plague! sense of anticipation in the reader, but it just falls flat. Ditto for the silly and unnecessary two-paragraph epilogue.
The structure of the book is incredibly uneven. The first 63 pages provide dense pre-Justinian back story. This section jumps back and forth in time making it tough for the lay person to follow. I actually took notes thinking it would help me better appreciate the rest of the book. Silly me.
Pages 64-162 covers Justinian's rule, but this section delves off frequently into obvious filler material on church architecture, battles, and legal wranglings. Many of these topics are treated in excruciating detail, with nary a word as to how it supposedly "place[s] in context a moment in history by weaving a tapestry out of the threads that connect it to the world that replaced it" (pp 6-7). Note that - by this point - we're halfway through the book and Justinian's flea has yet to make its grand entrance.
Justinian's flea (aka the DEMON) finally enters the picture on page 163 and the reader thinks "Ah, now we're gonna get into the meat of the book". But no - it quickly bogs down into overly worked descriptions of the organs and functions of bacteria. Is this minutia really relevant to understanding the decline of Rome and the rise of Europe? This is losing the forest for the trees at the one-celled level.
After just 60 pages, the author exhausts himself on the topic that is supposedly the premise of his book, so he dives off into extended coverage of the Persian ruler of the time. With just 30 pages to go, you'd think he'd get back to trying to weave all these loose threads into his big picture "tapestry" but no - he devotes another entire chapter to China's silk route. Fascinating stuff, but only marginally related to the topic at hand. Even the final chapter launches into treatment of yet another new topic, the roots of Islam. And then, suddenly, with just 5-10 pages to go, a sudden, manic whoosh! of a rather forced and unconvincing wrap up is slammed on the reader.
I almost get the sense that he had an idea for a book and pitched it, but found once he got into it that he didn't have sufficient material. So he window-dressed 65 pages of material with 260 pages of filler. No one will notice, right?
It reads like topical essays written in separate segments and then just glommed together. Just a lot of filler material. Even the footnotes read like unnecessary filler - like 3x5 notecards he couldn't fit into the body of the text yet couldn't bear to leave out.
I honestly hate to give any book a bad review - I mean it's not like I've published anything. The author clearly put a lot of dedicated research and time into the endeavor. But that doesn't change the fact that this work has no center, no pacing, no focus.
September 13, 2011
Very well written, (almost unbearably) informative; reads like a mystery novel. Bubonic plague during Justinian's sixth-century reign -- much here to interest devotees of the place and period. Wonderful perspective, engagingly written -- self-deprecatory style, tongue-in-cheek erudition.
Drawbacks: eccentric organization of material, abrupt leaps and maddening changes of subject and times. Irritating when the reader is trying to navigate through unfamiliar names and battles.
That said, it's well worth it for those interested in Justinian and Constantinople and the decline of the empire, certainly unique. Outstanding, actually -- it may really deserve a 5 but it drove me too crazy.
Drawbacks: eccentric organization of material, abrupt leaps and maddening changes of subject and times. Irritating when the reader is trying to navigate through unfamiliar names and battles.
That said, it's well worth it for those interested in Justinian and Constantinople and the decline of the empire, certainly unique. Outstanding, actually -- it may really deserve a 5 but it drove me too crazy.
December 16, 2009
As a rule it’s great getting recommendations from friends. An exception may occur if your friend is way more of an expert on the book’s topic than you are. In this case, said friend is a Roman history buff. To him, a book that assumes you already know the cast of characters in late antiquity, who conquered who, and how it all plays out in the end is just fine. That leaves more time for the smaller tiles of the mosaic instead. Unfortunately for me, a book with “Idiot” or “Dummy” in the title would have been more my speed. Too many pages featured some emperor’s son I’d never heard of leading the people of a region I don’t recognize in concert with some celebrated general beyond my ken against some nomadic horde I only know from crossword puzzles in a battle fought at some place that no longer appears on maps, known now as some other place I can’t locate, with gold to the victors measured in some unit no longer used, all resulting in the spread of some new branch of religion that differed from the old in some esoteric way.
Now that I’ve got that off my chest, I’ll concede that certain parts did interest me. For instance, did you know:
- Justinian’s wife, Theodora, an important figure in the Orthodox Church, spent much of her youth as an actress dallying in brothels.
- In battles at that time, catapults and battering rams were much less important than shovels. Tunneling under walls and building trenches to protect flanks were often keys to victory.
- Constantinople (known earlier as Byzantium) was a bigger deal than Rome for a time.
- Political factions were formed in the Byzantine capital, the Blues and the Greens, on the basis of which chariot racers they supported.
- Roman middle men in the silk trade would keep some of the better samples they’d purchased before to sell back to the Chinese, and for a while kept prices lower by pretending they had their own high-quality source.
- As a prime example of The Butterfly Effect, a volcano erupted, its ash lowered temperatures throughout much of Europe, a certain fast-to-adapt microbe carried by fleas infected rats that thrived in areas where grain was traded, the Y. pestis bacilli jumped onto humans in these densely populated areas, the resulting pandemic decimated large populations, Muhammad won a key battle over a plague-ravaged enemy enabling the spread of Islam, and Europe took its current atomized form, the empire having been disintegrated due in no small part to the demon bug.
Tidbits like this were at least partial compensation for the dry and scholarly bits.
Now that I’ve got that off my chest, I’ll concede that certain parts did interest me. For instance, did you know:
- Justinian’s wife, Theodora, an important figure in the Orthodox Church, spent much of her youth as an actress dallying in brothels.
- In battles at that time, catapults and battering rams were much less important than shovels. Tunneling under walls and building trenches to protect flanks were often keys to victory.
- Constantinople (known earlier as Byzantium) was a bigger deal than Rome for a time.
- Political factions were formed in the Byzantine capital, the Blues and the Greens, on the basis of which chariot racers they supported.
- Roman middle men in the silk trade would keep some of the better samples they’d purchased before to sell back to the Chinese, and for a while kept prices lower by pretending they had their own high-quality source.
- As a prime example of The Butterfly Effect, a volcano erupted, its ash lowered temperatures throughout much of Europe, a certain fast-to-adapt microbe carried by fleas infected rats that thrived in areas where grain was traded, the Y. pestis bacilli jumped onto humans in these densely populated areas, the resulting pandemic decimated large populations, Muhammad won a key battle over a plague-ravaged enemy enabling the spread of Islam, and Europe took its current atomized form, the empire having been disintegrated due in no small part to the demon bug.
Tidbits like this were at least partial compensation for the dry and scholarly bits.
February 26, 2016
I was pretty excited about this book because the plague of the 14th century gets so much more attention than Justinian's Plague, but I found Justinian's Flea rambeling and unfocused. The first half is a detailed history of Rome after it's split in two by Diocletian up to the reign of Justinian, and there's a chapter devoted to the scientific aspect of plague, but it's all downhill after that. I learned some interesting random facts about the Byzantine Empire, but not very much about Justinian's Plague, which the book is supposed to be about. Even more annoying than how unfocused the book was is the author's unfortunate tendency to go off on random tangents that start out loosely related to the subject of the Byzantine empire but wind up discussing in some detail WW I or early man's progress from family groups to tribes to kingdoms. If you want to know about Justinian’s Plague, read the scientific chapter and skip around a little after that to see how it affected the empire. When he starts talking about the Sassanids, for god’s sake just put the book down and walk away.
January 31, 2016
If you like (and I do) the Simon Winchester approach to historical events, i.e., lots of tangents and background before the actual kickoff, then you would like Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe. It starts out with Constantine and the transfer of Roman rule to Constantinople, the various migrations and invasions of the Goths, Visigoths, Huns, Vandals, etc. A chapter on the destruction of the Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) cathedral and designing/building the structure we see today (did not really have any connection to the overall story but interesting nevertheless). Military campaigns by Belisarius and others, revision of Roman law into the Codex Justinianus and the evolution of bacteria and life forms. A few other branches are covered before the end.
I like a historian who is willing to look at the broad currents of history and try to make sense of them. Maybe Rosen overreaches but I like the effort:
Does he succeed? No. At the end of the book he says maybe the plague had the impact he theorizes or maybe things would have turned out the same regardless…say what? I thought this was pretty weak, why propose a thesis and then abandon it? That is one reason why I’m only giving this one 3 Stars when he was on track to get more. I have to agree with other reviews that the plague and its impact were not covered to the extent I expected. Although who would want to read extensive accounts of this:
A mostly fascinating look at the 3rd-6th Centuries that fades in the end, still worth the time.
I like a historian who is willing to look at the broad currents of history and try to make sense of them. Maybe Rosen overreaches but I like the effort:
Does he succeed? No. At the end of the book he says maybe the plague had the impact he theorizes or maybe things would have turned out the same regardless…say what? I thought this was pretty weak, why propose a thesis and then abandon it? That is one reason why I’m only giving this one 3 Stars when he was on track to get more. I have to agree with other reviews that the plague and its impact were not covered to the extent I expected. Although who would want to read extensive accounts of this:
A mostly fascinating look at the 3rd-6th Centuries that fades in the end, still worth the time.
March 30, 2019
So, wow, I hadn't realized that I knew pretty much nothing about the Roman empire. I wasn't expecting cavalry, for example.
***
A more appropriate title would have been The Final Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was an interesting stroll through the demise of the Roman empire and the creation of medievalism and European nationalism. Educational and fun, because Rosen shares his digressions and random bits he picked up. There is a really good section on the Persian Empire. But plague, not so much. Some good stuff on the Y. pestis bacterium, and a good survey of contemporary accounts of the symptoms and death toll, but way too much about the rats.
Strongly recommended as a popular history of the 6th century, especially if you like the warfare (as opposed to war which involves regular people, warfare is the genenerals, strategies, and weapons in my mind) and politics. Rather more than I needed about Christian schisms and heresies.
Library copy
***
A more appropriate title would have been The Final Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was an interesting stroll through the demise of the Roman empire and the creation of medievalism and European nationalism. Educational and fun, because Rosen shares his digressions and random bits he picked up. There is a really good section on the Persian Empire. But plague, not so much. Some good stuff on the Y. pestis bacterium, and a good survey of contemporary accounts of the symptoms and death toll, but way too much about the rats.
Strongly recommended as a popular history of the 6th century, especially if you like the warfare (as opposed to war which involves regular people, warfare is the genenerals, strategies, and weapons in my mind) and politics. Rather more than I needed about Christian schisms and heresies.
Library copy
October 5, 2022
The introduction to this wonderful book states that it is divided into four parts, two of which are devoted to the plague of the Justinian era — including a great explanation of the plague’s genesis and its far-reaching effects on the history of those times. My favorite part of this book, however, was chapter 2, “Glory,” devoted to the great accomplishments of Justinian’s reign: the laws that Tribonian codified, the building of Hagia Sofia, and the accomplishments, against monumental odds, of the great general Belisarius. I really enjoyed getting to do a deep dive into Justinian’s times, which is only touched on in the more far reaching overviews of the Byzantine empire that I have previously read. And I loved how the author tied everything together with the first devastating plague, which is not nearly as well known as the one in the Middle Ages. This book definitely earned its five stars.
December 4, 2023
Justinian’s Flea is an odd duck of a book. The first two-thirds and much of the latter third is a straight-up narrative history of Justinian’s reign (527-565 CE) that only occasionally alludes to the effects of the bubonic plague that devastated the eastern Roman Empire from the mid-sixth century onward. And then there’s a handful of chapters that read like another book entirely. A biology text about the evolution of Yersinia pestis from its more benign cousin Y. pseudotuberculosis, its flea-based life cycle, and why it sometimes jumps from fleas to humans with catastrophic consequences.
Both – for me – are of interest but there’s little attempt to integrate them.
That said, I enjoyed the book. William Rosen isn’t a historian and doesn’t do more than report on the most current interpretations of the period but he does so in an engaging and interesting way that’s readily accessible to a general reader (though some of the biology lessons do go deep into the weeds). And I did learn a bit more about how and why the plague acted the way it did.
If you’d like to learn a bit more about the period that incorporates both the traditional sources as well as less traditional ones like epidemiology and climate science, I would recommend this volume.
Both – for me – are of interest but there’s little attempt to integrate them.
That said, I enjoyed the book. William Rosen isn’t a historian and doesn’t do more than report on the most current interpretations of the period but he does so in an engaging and interesting way that’s readily accessible to a general reader (though some of the biology lessons do go deep into the weeds). And I did learn a bit more about how and why the plague acted the way it did.
If you’d like to learn a bit more about the period that incorporates both the traditional sources as well as less traditional ones like epidemiology and climate science, I would recommend this volume.
August 28, 2012
This could have been so much more.
The title of Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire and the Birth of Europe promises so much - the last great Roman Emperor (or first Byzantine Emperor, if you prefer), the Bubonic Plague, how the plague helped create the series of nation-states that have made up Europe for centuries. Throw in the Silk Road and how the Europe was able to get its own silk worms, Justinian's multi-faceted wife Theodora, Belisarius and a discussion of how the Bubonic plague may have paved the way for Islam by weakening a resurgent Roman Empire under Justinian and you should have an amazing book - one that fills a void in most history books - the void left where "ancient" history ends and medieval/Dark Ages history begins.
But, this book will not fill that void except for the most dauntless of readers. Justinian is not dealt with in any organized fashion after the first few chapters - he becomes an office rather than a person. Belisarius is described in one campaign after another but you never get a feel for him. The wordy writing style gets in the way of any chance to have the story told. All historians need to remember that they are telling a story - and telling it in one's best dissertation-speak does not necessarily tell it well and certainly makes it less interesting for most readers.
What Rosen does do well - too well - is...
Read more at: http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2011/...
The title of Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire and the Birth of Europe promises so much - the last great Roman Emperor (or first Byzantine Emperor, if you prefer), the Bubonic Plague, how the plague helped create the series of nation-states that have made up Europe for centuries. Throw in the Silk Road and how the Europe was able to get its own silk worms, Justinian's multi-faceted wife Theodora, Belisarius and a discussion of how the Bubonic plague may have paved the way for Islam by weakening a resurgent Roman Empire under Justinian and you should have an amazing book - one that fills a void in most history books - the void left where "ancient" history ends and medieval/Dark Ages history begins.
But, this book will not fill that void except for the most dauntless of readers. Justinian is not dealt with in any organized fashion after the first few chapters - he becomes an office rather than a person. Belisarius is described in one campaign after another but you never get a feel for him. The wordy writing style gets in the way of any chance to have the story told. All historians need to remember that they are telling a story - and telling it in one's best dissertation-speak does not necessarily tell it well and certainly makes it less interesting for most readers.
What Rosen does do well - too well - is...
Read more at: http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2011/...
January 20, 2012
What a disappointing book. I really had to choke it down and by the fifth chapter without so much as a sentence devoted to the topic of plague I was actually double checking the description on the inside cover flap to make sure I didn't have the wrong book. It would've been better off titled "The Life and Times of Justinian, Rome's Last Great Emperor." While there is some mention of plague, it isn't actually brought up till nearly half way through the book. There is no real direction or point that's being made either which I found annoying. It's a long rambling history of 6th century Eurasian wars, culture, emperors, trade and conflict. I found the description given for this book fairly misleading and would not recommend it if you're looking for a book specifically about plague. However, if you're interested in 6th century history you'll most likely enjoy it.
October 25, 2017
No cohesive argument or narrative thread. The author simply strings together everything he knows about Justinian's reign: from his military campaigns, to the sexual exploits of his wife, to the theological questions of the age to architectural challenges of the day. Yes, some of the information presented is interesting, but without a central argument or unifying theme, it simply does not work.
July 6, 2018
I was very impressed with this book. Focused exclusively on the reign of Justinian the Great, the author provides an in-depth look at the Byzantine empire from the loss of its western provinces to the beginning of the rise of Islam. Even more remarkable was the extensive discussion of the plague that devastated the Mediterranean area for approximately 200 years which began during Justinian’s early reign. The author provides several chapters of bacteria discussion, epedemiology, human migration, and human immun system discussion on how the plaque had such a high mortality rate. This book is a mix of history and medical treatise which is very impressive to me. Additionally the author adds a bonus with a discussion of the other two empires of the time...the Sassanian and Han with the Sassanian wars and the Silk Road from China. Later the author also provides information on the rise of the Franks from the Merovingians. I would recommend anyone reading this book to be familiar with the Silk Road, the overall history of the Byzantine/Roman empires, and the Sassanian empires. A great read!
April 12, 2015
Long fascinated with the staggering speed at which early Islam expanded, I found that this book fills in several empty tiles in the puzzle. While historians, including those sympathetic to Islam, tend to focus on decisive battles like Badr and Yarmuk, it seems strange that a small cadre of converts from a remote desert fastness could by force of arms alone have conquered lands from the Atlantic to the Chinese border, almost as fast a one can walk the distance, against the resistance of Byzantines and Sassanids. Islam's relative tolerance must have attracted the many heretical sects along the way, but this can hardly explain the speed - how could they have known? A key element in understanding how this apparent contradiction came to pass is Justinian's Flea - the vector of what came to be known as the Black Death.
The book compiles details ranging from the identities of the confusion of tribes menacing the late classical world to the biology of the plague organism, Yersinia pestis. Indeed, if I have a complaint it is that the sudden switch from history to evolution is somewhat jarring. Nevertheless, it is compellingly written and uniformly fascinating. The descriptions of plague are a horror. An unusual disease, it is like Ebola a zoonosis, infecting non-human animal hosts in the wild form. Unfortunately for humans, it infects the rat, our constant companion, and at some stage developed the capacity to spread itself around by killing the rats while at the same time driving their fleas insane with hunger. It literally starves the flea by preventing it from swallowing, driving it to bite everything it can find and so spread its payload, the pathogen. An epidemic and population crash among infected rats is followed by an epidemic among humans, and one of uncommon lethality at that. An epidemic in its natural host will burn out by eating away the ground it stands on; a zoonosis knows no such restraints.
Worse, as it is not spread human-to-human, most countermeasures are useless. Monasteries, although isolated, suffered worst of all. The young were disproportionately struck in second and later waves as the old tended to have acquired immunity by surviving earlier epidemics. And for history it is of crucial importance that the Justinian Plague hit the Greeks and Persians just as the Roman Empire had mostly been reunited. Trade spread the plague around the Mediterranean in wave after wave, decimating the military-age population just as the two Empires were fighting each other to exhaustion. They retreated from the Arabian peninsula, and in only a decade a Prophet was born. His religion expanded into the vacuum like an explosion and the Middle Ages commenced, Europe fragmenting into fractious nations and China retrenching behind its Wall.
This is Rosen's model of history, and it seems compelling. It certainly solves an apparent mystery, which may be reason to be cautious. Strikingly, this is the author's first book, despite being a publishing executive. It is a stunning debut.
The book compiles details ranging from the identities of the confusion of tribes menacing the late classical world to the biology of the plague organism, Yersinia pestis. Indeed, if I have a complaint it is that the sudden switch from history to evolution is somewhat jarring. Nevertheless, it is compellingly written and uniformly fascinating. The descriptions of plague are a horror. An unusual disease, it is like Ebola a zoonosis, infecting non-human animal hosts in the wild form. Unfortunately for humans, it infects the rat, our constant companion, and at some stage developed the capacity to spread itself around by killing the rats while at the same time driving their fleas insane with hunger. It literally starves the flea by preventing it from swallowing, driving it to bite everything it can find and so spread its payload, the pathogen. An epidemic and population crash among infected rats is followed by an epidemic among humans, and one of uncommon lethality at that. An epidemic in its natural host will burn out by eating away the ground it stands on; a zoonosis knows no such restraints.
Worse, as it is not spread human-to-human, most countermeasures are useless. Monasteries, although isolated, suffered worst of all. The young were disproportionately struck in second and later waves as the old tended to have acquired immunity by surviving earlier epidemics. And for history it is of crucial importance that the Justinian Plague hit the Greeks and Persians just as the Roman Empire had mostly been reunited. Trade spread the plague around the Mediterranean in wave after wave, decimating the military-age population just as the two Empires were fighting each other to exhaustion. They retreated from the Arabian peninsula, and in only a decade a Prophet was born. His religion expanded into the vacuum like an explosion and the Middle Ages commenced, Europe fragmenting into fractious nations and China retrenching behind its Wall.
This is Rosen's model of history, and it seems compelling. It certainly solves an apparent mystery, which may be reason to be cautious. Strikingly, this is the author's first book, despite being a publishing executive. It is a stunning debut.
October 2, 2008
‘Plague, Empire and the Birth of Europe’
It took me a while to get into the rhythm of Mr Rosen’s writing, but once I did I couldn’t put this book down. I was fascinated by the building of the Hagia Sophia, interested in the presentation of the life, times and achievements of the emperor Justinian during the 6th century and engrossed by the possible impact of the flea on the building of empires.
In this book, Mr Rosen provides a number of interpretations which can (and are) debated. People may argue about the role of Justinian, disagree about the relevance of the detail about the Hagia Sophia and prefer different theories about the birthplace of the bubonic plague. Some theories are contentious, and it is not always clear why certain aspects of the discussion are given a particular focus. However, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and for me the book was well worth reading. Mr Rosen provides plenty of notes for a reader who is seeking more information or who is trying to understand the conclusions Mr Rosen draws.
While it is both true and clever to state that: ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’, I can understand why some readers find this book dissatisfying. The book is ambitious and may, as others have suggested, have benefitted from more ruthless editing. However, that depends on who Mr Rosen saw as his primary audience. This reader enjoyed the perambulations. If you are interested in this period of history, the life of Justinian, the growth and decline of empires and the relationship between man, rats, fleas and bacteria – you may wish to read this book.
It took me a while to get into the rhythm of Mr Rosen’s writing, but once I did I couldn’t put this book down. I was fascinated by the building of the Hagia Sophia, interested in the presentation of the life, times and achievements of the emperor Justinian during the 6th century and engrossed by the possible impact of the flea on the building of empires.
In this book, Mr Rosen provides a number of interpretations which can (and are) debated. People may argue about the role of Justinian, disagree about the relevance of the detail about the Hagia Sophia and prefer different theories about the birthplace of the bubonic plague. Some theories are contentious, and it is not always clear why certain aspects of the discussion are given a particular focus. However, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and for me the book was well worth reading. Mr Rosen provides plenty of notes for a reader who is seeking more information or who is trying to understand the conclusions Mr Rosen draws.
While it is both true and clever to state that: ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’, I can understand why some readers find this book dissatisfying. The book is ambitious and may, as others have suggested, have benefitted from more ruthless editing. However, that depends on who Mr Rosen saw as his primary audience. This reader enjoyed the perambulations. If you are interested in this period of history, the life of Justinian, the growth and decline of empires and the relationship between man, rats, fleas and bacteria – you may wish to read this book.
January 19, 2020
Justinian’s Flea, now that will catch your eye. Then the description, just take a look at it, promised a richly textured tale about the plague. I clicked. Now, nearly twelve hours of listening later, I feel gypped, because that isn’t what I got. Instead of being about the plague, the author delivers a dry history of the fall of the Roman Empire with a detailed description of Plague forced in between battles.
So while I learned a lot, it was such a disjointed, rambling sort presentation that I really didn’t enjoy it. Most of the time, I was trying to guess what possible connection all the pieces had to a narrative about a plague. For example, why do I have to know the biography of Justinian’s general’s wife? How are the engineering techniques used in the Hagia Sophia germane to a plague that happened years later? What does the history of silk manufacture and trade have to do with anything? Oh, and why are we discussing the translation methods of the King James Bible or the Intelligent Design debate, or English Common Law?
It’s also not really ‘woven together’. It’s more globbed together, with the history of each newly introduced character, organism, or empire starting over at the very beginning of its life, history, or supposed evolution. That made it really hard to follow the timeline especially in the first half of the book that discussed the history of numerous battles between dozens of nations and tribes.
The author finds himself trying to understand all the debates surrounding Christian doctrine and practice. So that he might have some baseline, he compares everything to Roman Catholic doctrines. He doesn’t go into as much detail about this as he does other extraneous subjects, and it seems almost as if he is uncomfortable with it. He also repeatedly mentions that such things sound strange to us post-moderns, but that’s the way they were back then. It came across as rather condescending.
There were parts that were for a mature audience, particularly the biographical parts about Theodora and Antonia.
So while I learned a lot, it was such a disjointed, rambling sort presentation that I really didn’t enjoy it. Most of the time, I was trying to guess what possible connection all the pieces had to a narrative about a plague. For example, why do I have to know the biography of Justinian’s general’s wife? How are the engineering techniques used in the Hagia Sophia germane to a plague that happened years later? What does the history of silk manufacture and trade have to do with anything? Oh, and why are we discussing the translation methods of the King James Bible or the Intelligent Design debate, or English Common Law?
It’s also not really ‘woven together’. It’s more globbed together, with the history of each newly introduced character, organism, or empire starting over at the very beginning of its life, history, or supposed evolution. That made it really hard to follow the timeline especially in the first half of the book that discussed the history of numerous battles between dozens of nations and tribes.
The author finds himself trying to understand all the debates surrounding Christian doctrine and practice. So that he might have some baseline, he compares everything to Roman Catholic doctrines. He doesn’t go into as much detail about this as he does other extraneous subjects, and it seems almost as if he is uncomfortable with it. He also repeatedly mentions that such things sound strange to us post-moderns, but that’s the way they were back then. It came across as rather condescending.
There were parts that were for a mature audience, particularly the biographical parts about Theodora and Antonia.
Read
February 16, 2021The story of how a pandemic, driven in part by climate change, destroyed an empire and left Europe an appreciably worse place for centuries. I've had this book for 13 years, but ever since the Event obliged me to work in the room where it sits, it's been glaring at me. I dodged it in 2020 by tacking a different account of late antiquity instead, one which devoted less space to these millions of deaths than it did to the decor in a single church in Ravenna. But as we entered a second year of this shit, I couldn't really leave it any longer, and so here we are. First problem: it's not nearly as much about the plague as the title suggests. It's there in the opening...and then drops out of sight for half the book, in favour of an account of Justinian's reign. Rosen takes the line on Rome which I've always found most congenial, that whatever its undoubted flaws it was better than an awful lot of what followed, and in some respects we're still playing catch-up – though unlike me, he doesn't see the rot setting in as soon as Christianity was adopted. Accordingly, he has a lot of time for Justinian, making much of his being the last Roman emperor known as 'the Great'. And he points out that this was not someone born to the purple; he began as a Balkan peasant, and was married to a former teen courtesan – a level of social and geographical mobility far greater than one would generally expect in world leaders even when this book came out, let alone now. I was also taken with Justinian's pre-Justinian name, Petrus Sabbatius – wouldn't Peter Sabbath be a great name for an occult detective? As well as this big picture stuff, Rosen's also excellent at the snippets of gossip which bring the story alive, like what a dickhead neighbour one of the architects of Hagia Sophia could be, or exactly what sort of thing Empress Theodora was rumoured to get up to in her scandalous younger days (I was particularly taken by the bit about the goose – chastity was never an option). Here too is Galimer, the Vandal king, holed up in his last redoubt, "composing an ode bemoaning his lack of a sponge". And in all those frankly excessive descriptions of Ravenna's ecclesiastical art in that other late antiquity book, I don't remember anything half so eyecatching as the bit here about "the pictorial Jesus – nude, in water up to his waist, but with his procreative equipment quite visible".
While Rosen has more sense than to force cheesy contemporary parallels, he's not afraid of drawing a broader point when one legitimately applies. So, regarding the successes of Justinian's great general Belisarius, we get "Virtually the entire library of tactics, as set down in classics from Sun Tzu to Liddell Hart, consists of ornate descriptions of the best way to apply force - clubs, arrows, or .50 machine-gun bullets - from your front to your enemies' flank." Which, yes, sums it up pretty well. Equally, when he points out that Belisarius' preferred army, armoured men on armoured horses, is the beginning of the knight in European warfare - even if the stirrup was not yet a thing, meaning lances held otherwise, and considerably less useful, than would later be the case. And if that seems like a weird presentiment of the mediaeval in the ancient world, another of the generals, the eunuch Narses, is eight centuries ahead of his time at the battle of Taginae, where he annihilates heavy cavalry with dismounted pikemen supported by missile artillery. Although he had a slight advantage in that his adversary, Totila, told his Ostrogoth cavalry to use only lances, no swords or bows, for reasons which remain unclear but probably involve a heavy dose of macho bullshit. Other, less glorious representatives of the Roman military sound like they'd be more at home in a sitcom version. Chilbudius just for the name, which makes him sounds like an affable stoner from Asterix. John the Sanguinary for the name too, but also for the way he's forever getting distracted from missions by trying to marry people, to the extent that at one point he ends up with his former fiancee as his mother-in-law. And lest it all sound too much like a sausage party, aside from Theodora there's her good friend, Belisarius' wife Antonina - who "disdained the merit of conjugal fidelity" but was recognised as an all-round smart person and good commander in her own right. Again demonstrating the social mobility of the time, she was the daughter of a charioteer and a prostitute, and she gets into a quite spectacularly fruity liaison with her stepson which leads to shenanigans and dismemberment. Granted, Rosen expresses scepticism about whether Procopius can be trusted on this, but surely if recent years have taught us anything, it's that the most batshit accounts of what the ruling classes are up to are exactly the ones to believe.
In other words, this has an awful lot of the stuff I enjoy in a history book, stuff you want to pass on to people. Even the gratifying bit where a pro will admit that yes, sometimes history can be ridiculously confusing, as when Constantine names his three sons Constantine, Constantius and Constans (something which does absolutely nothing to improve my opinion of the emperor whose conversion basically ruined Rome and the civilisations which would follow it). Equally, Rosen can offer a way in to material which can easily alienate, such as the era's interminable theological debates and how seriously they were taken. He offers the illuminating analogy to early twentieth century Bolshevism – and is good in general on how faith really mattered to them, including the tiny niceties which even the other monotheisms aren't fussed about in the same way, abstractions regarding the nature of the divine essence or whatever – which Rosen suggests stems from Christianity's central paradox, "reconciling the suffering death of an omnipotent god". Set against which, despite the purges, the orthodoxy, turning synagogues into churches, even theologians would still invoke Deplhic oracles or Dame Fortune without anyone batting an eyelid, much less building a pyre. Building on that, Rosen can show the ways in which the whole intellectual climate was different: "Justinian was an innovator and reformer who would have been mortally insulted had anyone ever referred to him as such, a man only able to modernise 'by convincing himself and others that he was restorying the past...the idea of innovation, as a sixth-century Christian, was virtually heretical'". Equally, when it comes to the law code which has been one of Justinian's lasting legacies, Rosen explains how the text would frequently quote past jurists still considered authorities - while changing what they said to fit the current requirements. Which is about what you can expect when it's largely the work of Tribonian, a man somehow accused in subsequent centuries of being a pagan despite his personal responsibility for the ruling that Christian oaths must precede all court cases. He was, as you would expect from that, forever changing rulings and generally reckoned to be corrupt as hell. This is not a line Rosen draws himself, alas, though he does note that the Code was the basis for civil, as against common, law, and as such much more vulnerable to subversion by autocrats, which was very much a feature rather than a bug in the mind of Justinian, and of the monarchs who would later rediscover and build on it. It all leaves one wondering how much worse things in the US might have gone over the past few years if they had civil rather than common law as a foundation.
This is what keeps coming through, the way that things from then feed into the world we now inhabit. Sometimes it's micro – I don't think I'd ever twigged that Dietrich is the modern form of Theodoric, and I certainly didn't know that Andalusia was originally Vandalusia, and wouldn't that sound even better in Debaser? Equally, Rosen reminds us when the means by which we think about the past threaten to mislead, as with a certain byword for savagery: "Attila was a patient negotiator, 'temperate in all things', who achieved as much by diplomacy as by his military prowess." Or how the terms 'Ostrogoth' and 'Visigoth' wouldn't have been recognised at the time. Speaking of Goths, I was amused at Belisarius offering the Goths Britain, which was intended as a pisstake, but seems like one of those moments in history where some passing djinn heard and determined that, centuries hence, this would indeed come to pass, only it would involve a lot more hairspray.
You will notice that this is already a lot of review with very little mention of plague. This is representative. In some ways, the title and angle would make more sense if the book were being released now, trying to ride the obvious hook, than it does for something which came out back in the carefree noughties. If Rosen had wanted to write about Justinian, a figure who obviously fascinates him – "Justinian was neither a great orator nor a skilled warrior, nor even a brilliant theologian (the last would probably have been his choice of preofession). He was not physically brave or personally charismatic. He was, however, one of the greatest statesmen who ever lived, combining a grand vision for the empire he ruled with the ability of seeing a dozen moves ahead of his opponents'' – and the publishers had insisted he get the sales up by wedging the plague in. I'm really not sure about those claims, by the way. Purely from Rosen's own account, you can see Justinian repeatedly shooting himself in the foot, not least in his under-resourcing of his generals, his distrust of Belisarius in particular, and the penny wise, pound foolish approach to pacifying territories once conquered. But I digress. Which, again, is representative, because so does Rosen. What makes this both forgivable and frustrating is that he clearly does know his stuff about the plague too. He can do the proper big picture history which easily impressed people think Adam Curtis does, while also giving what at least seems to a non-specialist like a solid account of, for instance, bacterial evolution and its particular promiscuity. He seems as at home with Yops as with the Byzantine (in both sense) details of theology; he even explains the Krebs cycle in a way that I understood it for, ooh, maybe six hours afterwards? Which is at least four times the previous record. Finally, we're on to the promised theme, and the book's revving its engine... And then we're on to another chapter, introducing Justinian's opposite number Khusro, which requires a potted history of the Persian empire as a whole, and once again the suspicion creeps to the fore that this is simply too much material for one book aimed at the general reader. The line editing seems to lapse a little from this point onwards – I definitely noticed more repetition and typos, though whether they were fixed in the final copies, who knows. Which bolsters a sense that maybe the structural editing needed another pass too, because while everything here is something the writer grasps, and gets across well, it's hard to argue that he's properly corralled it all.
Still, when you do follow the thread of the plague through all the other material with which it's tangled here, it's staggering. Bear in mind, this was a proper pandemic – 70% mortality, Rosen estimates, rather than 1.3%; 25 million dead at a time when the population was a fraction what it is now, and life expectancy about half that in the West today, such that the average person who dies of COVID would already have been dead half their lives, as it were. Even if the device of referring to the disease as a demon is slightly overdone, you can see where he's coming from. He's careful to offer the caveat that, with so many moving parts in history, drawing direct consequences is next to impossible – I enjoyed his term for this, 'The Three-Thousand Body Problem'. But equally, some approximations are more useful than others, and I think his comparison is fair: trying to talk about the transition from antiquity to mediaeval Europe without accounting for the plague, as so many historians still do, is like a Saturn mission not taking Jupiter's gravitational perturbation into account. So you get the suggestion that while silkworms being smuggled out of China was definitely a factor in making Arabia less strategically interesting to Rome and Persia, the fact that both empires were far more ravaged by the plague than the Arabs may have been a key factor in enabling the early successes of the Islamic conquests. Rome itself, the former capital, suffers militarily too, but those wars are themselves tilted by the epidemic, and so the plague is a key reason that the city's civilian population is at one point reduced to a feeble 500. It's at this point that the suggestion is made that "the Rome that Belisarius delivered was still the Rome of the Caesars; the Rome that Narses entered sixteen years later was already the Rome of the Popes." This sort of thing is why, unlike some historically minded friends, I do not find the subject much consolation right now. We get an extended comparison between China and Rome – two empires of roughly the same size, which had more contact than one tends to remember, but of which one survived as a recognisable superstate to the present day, while the other fragmented into the patchwork that is Europe. We even get a nod to the birth of the tensions between Islam and China which, Rosen notes, are still an issue among the Uighurs of his present day – and this, lest we forget, in a book published a decade before the world at large started paying (very slight) attention to the atrocities underway in Xinjiang.
At the highest level of all – and this is largely in a footnote, and part of me would have liked much more – there's the following very plausible chain of events. Justinian's plague, like its 14th century successor (and despite Justinian's attempt at a wage freeze), made the poor richer and the rich poorer by reducing the labour supply. This fed into Europe's agricultural revolution*, and thus the felling of forests, and thus a major population increase. These last two, of course, being responsible for the global warming now threatening us. Meaning sixth century global cooling (necessary for a plague pandemic, which are surprisingly fussy about temperature) begets modern global warming, and their depopulation by one pandemic creates our overpopulation that births another. And of course, all these grand cycles are of no interest whatsoever to the plague itself, which even in so far as it can metaphorically be said to 'care' about anything, is only interested in rats; the millions of human deaths are, in Rosen's entirely apt and utterly devastating choice of words, "a sideshow".
*Also, of course, the real reason European slavery ended, in so far as it did though this is a rare tangent Rosen neglects to bring up.
While Rosen has more sense than to force cheesy contemporary parallels, he's not afraid of drawing a broader point when one legitimately applies. So, regarding the successes of Justinian's great general Belisarius, we get "Virtually the entire library of tactics, as set down in classics from Sun Tzu to Liddell Hart, consists of ornate descriptions of the best way to apply force - clubs, arrows, or .50 machine-gun bullets - from your front to your enemies' flank." Which, yes, sums it up pretty well. Equally, when he points out that Belisarius' preferred army, armoured men on armoured horses, is the beginning of the knight in European warfare - even if the stirrup was not yet a thing, meaning lances held otherwise, and considerably less useful, than would later be the case. And if that seems like a weird presentiment of the mediaeval in the ancient world, another of the generals, the eunuch Narses, is eight centuries ahead of his time at the battle of Taginae, where he annihilates heavy cavalry with dismounted pikemen supported by missile artillery. Although he had a slight advantage in that his adversary, Totila, told his Ostrogoth cavalry to use only lances, no swords or bows, for reasons which remain unclear but probably involve a heavy dose of macho bullshit. Other, less glorious representatives of the Roman military sound like they'd be more at home in a sitcom version. Chilbudius just for the name, which makes him sounds like an affable stoner from Asterix. John the Sanguinary for the name too, but also for the way he's forever getting distracted from missions by trying to marry people, to the extent that at one point he ends up with his former fiancee as his mother-in-law. And lest it all sound too much like a sausage party, aside from Theodora there's her good friend, Belisarius' wife Antonina - who "disdained the merit of conjugal fidelity" but was recognised as an all-round smart person and good commander in her own right. Again demonstrating the social mobility of the time, she was the daughter of a charioteer and a prostitute, and she gets into a quite spectacularly fruity liaison with her stepson which leads to shenanigans and dismemberment. Granted, Rosen expresses scepticism about whether Procopius can be trusted on this, but surely if recent years have taught us anything, it's that the most batshit accounts of what the ruling classes are up to are exactly the ones to believe.
In other words, this has an awful lot of the stuff I enjoy in a history book, stuff you want to pass on to people. Even the gratifying bit where a pro will admit that yes, sometimes history can be ridiculously confusing, as when Constantine names his three sons Constantine, Constantius and Constans (something which does absolutely nothing to improve my opinion of the emperor whose conversion basically ruined Rome and the civilisations which would follow it). Equally, Rosen can offer a way in to material which can easily alienate, such as the era's interminable theological debates and how seriously they were taken. He offers the illuminating analogy to early twentieth century Bolshevism – and is good in general on how faith really mattered to them, including the tiny niceties which even the other monotheisms aren't fussed about in the same way, abstractions regarding the nature of the divine essence or whatever – which Rosen suggests stems from Christianity's central paradox, "reconciling the suffering death of an omnipotent god". Set against which, despite the purges, the orthodoxy, turning synagogues into churches, even theologians would still invoke Deplhic oracles or Dame Fortune without anyone batting an eyelid, much less building a pyre. Building on that, Rosen can show the ways in which the whole intellectual climate was different: "Justinian was an innovator and reformer who would have been mortally insulted had anyone ever referred to him as such, a man only able to modernise 'by convincing himself and others that he was restorying the past...the idea of innovation, as a sixth-century Christian, was virtually heretical'". Equally, when it comes to the law code which has been one of Justinian's lasting legacies, Rosen explains how the text would frequently quote past jurists still considered authorities - while changing what they said to fit the current requirements. Which is about what you can expect when it's largely the work of Tribonian, a man somehow accused in subsequent centuries of being a pagan despite his personal responsibility for the ruling that Christian oaths must precede all court cases. He was, as you would expect from that, forever changing rulings and generally reckoned to be corrupt as hell. This is not a line Rosen draws himself, alas, though he does note that the Code was the basis for civil, as against common, law, and as such much more vulnerable to subversion by autocrats, which was very much a feature rather than a bug in the mind of Justinian, and of the monarchs who would later rediscover and build on it. It all leaves one wondering how much worse things in the US might have gone over the past few years if they had civil rather than common law as a foundation.
This is what keeps coming through, the way that things from then feed into the world we now inhabit. Sometimes it's micro – I don't think I'd ever twigged that Dietrich is the modern form of Theodoric, and I certainly didn't know that Andalusia was originally Vandalusia, and wouldn't that sound even better in Debaser? Equally, Rosen reminds us when the means by which we think about the past threaten to mislead, as with a certain byword for savagery: "Attila was a patient negotiator, 'temperate in all things', who achieved as much by diplomacy as by his military prowess." Or how the terms 'Ostrogoth' and 'Visigoth' wouldn't have been recognised at the time. Speaking of Goths, I was amused at Belisarius offering the Goths Britain, which was intended as a pisstake, but seems like one of those moments in history where some passing djinn heard and determined that, centuries hence, this would indeed come to pass, only it would involve a lot more hairspray.
You will notice that this is already a lot of review with very little mention of plague. This is representative. In some ways, the title and angle would make more sense if the book were being released now, trying to ride the obvious hook, than it does for something which came out back in the carefree noughties. If Rosen had wanted to write about Justinian, a figure who obviously fascinates him – "Justinian was neither a great orator nor a skilled warrior, nor even a brilliant theologian (the last would probably have been his choice of preofession). He was not physically brave or personally charismatic. He was, however, one of the greatest statesmen who ever lived, combining a grand vision for the empire he ruled with the ability of seeing a dozen moves ahead of his opponents'' – and the publishers had insisted he get the sales up by wedging the plague in. I'm really not sure about those claims, by the way. Purely from Rosen's own account, you can see Justinian repeatedly shooting himself in the foot, not least in his under-resourcing of his generals, his distrust of Belisarius in particular, and the penny wise, pound foolish approach to pacifying territories once conquered. But I digress. Which, again, is representative, because so does Rosen. What makes this both forgivable and frustrating is that he clearly does know his stuff about the plague too. He can do the proper big picture history which easily impressed people think Adam Curtis does, while also giving what at least seems to a non-specialist like a solid account of, for instance, bacterial evolution and its particular promiscuity. He seems as at home with Yops as with the Byzantine (in both sense) details of theology; he even explains the Krebs cycle in a way that I understood it for, ooh, maybe six hours afterwards? Which is at least four times the previous record. Finally, we're on to the promised theme, and the book's revving its engine... And then we're on to another chapter, introducing Justinian's opposite number Khusro, which requires a potted history of the Persian empire as a whole, and once again the suspicion creeps to the fore that this is simply too much material for one book aimed at the general reader. The line editing seems to lapse a little from this point onwards – I definitely noticed more repetition and typos, though whether they were fixed in the final copies, who knows. Which bolsters a sense that maybe the structural editing needed another pass too, because while everything here is something the writer grasps, and gets across well, it's hard to argue that he's properly corralled it all.
Still, when you do follow the thread of the plague through all the other material with which it's tangled here, it's staggering. Bear in mind, this was a proper pandemic – 70% mortality, Rosen estimates, rather than 1.3%; 25 million dead at a time when the population was a fraction what it is now, and life expectancy about half that in the West today, such that the average person who dies of COVID would already have been dead half their lives, as it were. Even if the device of referring to the disease as a demon is slightly overdone, you can see where he's coming from. He's careful to offer the caveat that, with so many moving parts in history, drawing direct consequences is next to impossible – I enjoyed his term for this, 'The Three-Thousand Body Problem'. But equally, some approximations are more useful than others, and I think his comparison is fair: trying to talk about the transition from antiquity to mediaeval Europe without accounting for the plague, as so many historians still do, is like a Saturn mission not taking Jupiter's gravitational perturbation into account. So you get the suggestion that while silkworms being smuggled out of China was definitely a factor in making Arabia less strategically interesting to Rome and Persia, the fact that both empires were far more ravaged by the plague than the Arabs may have been a key factor in enabling the early successes of the Islamic conquests. Rome itself, the former capital, suffers militarily too, but those wars are themselves tilted by the epidemic, and so the plague is a key reason that the city's civilian population is at one point reduced to a feeble 500. It's at this point that the suggestion is made that "the Rome that Belisarius delivered was still the Rome of the Caesars; the Rome that Narses entered sixteen years later was already the Rome of the Popes." This sort of thing is why, unlike some historically minded friends, I do not find the subject much consolation right now. We get an extended comparison between China and Rome – two empires of roughly the same size, which had more contact than one tends to remember, but of which one survived as a recognisable superstate to the present day, while the other fragmented into the patchwork that is Europe. We even get a nod to the birth of the tensions between Islam and China which, Rosen notes, are still an issue among the Uighurs of his present day – and this, lest we forget, in a book published a decade before the world at large started paying (very slight) attention to the atrocities underway in Xinjiang.
At the highest level of all – and this is largely in a footnote, and part of me would have liked much more – there's the following very plausible chain of events. Justinian's plague, like its 14th century successor (and despite Justinian's attempt at a wage freeze), made the poor richer and the rich poorer by reducing the labour supply. This fed into Europe's agricultural revolution*, and thus the felling of forests, and thus a major population increase. These last two, of course, being responsible for the global warming now threatening us. Meaning sixth century global cooling (necessary for a plague pandemic, which are surprisingly fussy about temperature) begets modern global warming, and their depopulation by one pandemic creates our overpopulation that births another. And of course, all these grand cycles are of no interest whatsoever to the plague itself, which even in so far as it can metaphorically be said to 'care' about anything, is only interested in rats; the millions of human deaths are, in Rosen's entirely apt and utterly devastating choice of words, "a sideshow".
*Also, of course, the real reason European slavery ended, in so far as it did though this is a rare tangent Rosen neglects to bring up.
September 14, 2015
Well. I've learnt some things from this book. More than I bargained for, perhaps. I didn't hate this book. It's just not at all what it was advertised to be.
I will begin by adjusting the title of the book somewhat. Perhaps A History of 5th and 6th Century Rome: Empire and the Birth of Europe with a dash of Plague. I picked this book up several years ago, intrigued by the idea, as set out in the introduction, that an outbreak of Plague could have been the thing that tipped the Roman Empire over the edge. It's macabre, true, but I do enjoy a good pandemic story. This is not a good pandemic story. There are 162 pages of the history of events leading to the reign of Justinian. Battles, intrigue, the building of the Hagia Sophia, the Huns, the Visigoths and the Ostragoths (and the difference between the two), generals of great skill, or less skill, betrayal, jealous wives, doctrinal conflict among the Christians... I finally had to come up for air for a while. Way too much information for the scope of this book. Not to mention, I really just wanted to read about the plague. Finally, at page 165, we arrive. Not exactly at the plague, but to a discussion of the evolutionary history of bacteria. This is dealt with rather exhaustively and repetitively and with no doubt left in the mind of the reader that the author is totally convinced of the accuracy of the current evolutionary theories (already in some doubt just 8 years later). Then, a measly 40 pages or so that actually talk about the plague and suddenly, the author reverts back to political history and the possible meeting of China and Rome and we're reading about the Silk Road. So, lots of interesting stuff, if a bit random and jumpy in its organization at times, but not a book about the Plague.
I will begin by adjusting the title of the book somewhat. Perhaps A History of 5th and 6th Century Rome: Empire and the Birth of Europe with a dash of Plague. I picked this book up several years ago, intrigued by the idea, as set out in the introduction, that an outbreak of Plague could have been the thing that tipped the Roman Empire over the edge. It's macabre, true, but I do enjoy a good pandemic story. This is not a good pandemic story. There are 162 pages of the history of events leading to the reign of Justinian. Battles, intrigue, the building of the Hagia Sophia, the Huns, the Visigoths and the Ostragoths (and the difference between the two), generals of great skill, or less skill, betrayal, jealous wives, doctrinal conflict among the Christians... I finally had to come up for air for a while. Way too much information for the scope of this book. Not to mention, I really just wanted to read about the plague. Finally, at page 165, we arrive. Not exactly at the plague, but to a discussion of the evolutionary history of bacteria. This is dealt with rather exhaustively and repetitively and with no doubt left in the mind of the reader that the author is totally convinced of the accuracy of the current evolutionary theories (already in some doubt just 8 years later). Then, a measly 40 pages or so that actually talk about the plague and suddenly, the author reverts back to political history and the possible meeting of China and Rome and we're reading about the Silk Road. So, lots of interesting stuff, if a bit random and jumpy in its organization at times, but not a book about the Plague.
December 6, 2010
Interesting but ultimately disappointing history of the Roman Empire during Emperor Justinian's reign in the 6th century. I was drawn to this book because I really knew little about the pre medieval political map of the Empire except that it had moved its focus and capitol east to Asia Minor. It did fill in some of the blank areas although I did get lost in the names of all the different non Roman groups, places and cities and the religious schools of thought which were the source of conflict and political unrest in Justinian's domain.
My problem with the book was what I felt was a meandering away from the main premise which was that the outbreaks of plague weakened both the western and eastern empires so much that it enabled the subsequent conquest of the southern Mediterranean, basically today's middle east, by the armies of Islam. The author spends a lot of time arguing and explaining early church doctrinal differences; his own bias clearly in evidence by his overuse of hyperbole in the first half of the book. Similarly he goes into great scientific detail in describing the evolution and genesis of the epidemiology of the plague which was fascinating, even pinpointing the time and place of the initial outbreak but then only painting broad strokes on breakouts and timelines over the next 20+ years.
I could not help but compare his history to Geraldine Brooks' treatment of the same subject almost ten centuries later in "Years of Wonder". Admittedly the latter covers a much smaller geographic space and time. But it seemed to me "Justinian's Flea" spent to much time on prologue and afterward and not enough time on the premise.
My problem with the book was what I felt was a meandering away from the main premise which was that the outbreaks of plague weakened both the western and eastern empires so much that it enabled the subsequent conquest of the southern Mediterranean, basically today's middle east, by the armies of Islam. The author spends a lot of time arguing and explaining early church doctrinal differences; his own bias clearly in evidence by his overuse of hyperbole in the first half of the book. Similarly he goes into great scientific detail in describing the evolution and genesis of the epidemiology of the plague which was fascinating, even pinpointing the time and place of the initial outbreak but then only painting broad strokes on breakouts and timelines over the next 20+ years.
I could not help but compare his history to Geraldine Brooks' treatment of the same subject almost ten centuries later in "Years of Wonder". Admittedly the latter covers a much smaller geographic space and time. But it seemed to me "Justinian's Flea" spent to much time on prologue and afterward and not enough time on the premise.
January 4, 2016
You might think a book titled "Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire" would be about...well, plague. That's why I read it, because I'm interested in microbiology and historical epidemic nonfiction. Sadly, plague doesn't even make an appearance in the book until 160+ pages into the book. The first half of the book is a broad, sweeping account of several hundred years of European history. Which is fine, if the book had been marketed as a European History book, but the cover/title/synopsis all say plague, plague, plague...and it's actually a minor part of the book.
Even when the author does finally get to the topic of disease, he spends tons of time giving a broad, sweeping account (again) of microbiology in general. While I enjoyed this significantly more than the first half of the book, it still wasn't why I was reading the thing in the first place.
Justinian's Flea is severely lacking in focus. It's so...well, broad, and sweeping, and the author tries way too hard to cram more into the book than the 330 pages allow. The result is a skipping, stuttering, and frequently off-topic narrative that is a chore to read. There is a lot of interesting tidbits scattered throughout the book, but overall I was quite disappointed by it.
Even when the author does finally get to the topic of disease, he spends tons of time giving a broad, sweeping account (again) of microbiology in general. While I enjoyed this significantly more than the first half of the book, it still wasn't why I was reading the thing in the first place.
Justinian's Flea is severely lacking in focus. It's so...well, broad, and sweeping, and the author tries way too hard to cram more into the book than the 330 pages allow. The result is a skipping, stuttering, and frequently off-topic narrative that is a chore to read. There is a lot of interesting tidbits scattered throughout the book, but overall I was quite disappointed by it.
July 11, 2010
An excellent read, but if you're expecting a straight narrative regarding the earliest known plague epidemic, look elsewhere. Rosen weaves in history from many different aspects: architecture, mathematics, burgeoning medical science, biographic summaries of many of Justinian's contemporaries, art, philosophy, religion, wars, etc. This is more of a wide-ranging look at the gradual move from antiquity to the medieval period, with the plague casting a shadow over the entirety. Meanders a bit, especially near the end where I feel Rosen got bogged down in his own narrative, but definitely an interesting read as long as one isn't expecting plague and nothing but the plague.
March 31, 2015
One of us, either the book or the reader, was unfocused. Probably me. It didn't help that the audiobook is narrated in a monotone.
October 7, 2018
En esta investigación William Rosen, confiesa que su profesión original era la edición de libros. Después de muchos años decidió que, tal vez, podría investigar y redactar lo investigado, como tantos otros, y este es el resultado, pero yo digo, que todo escritor necesita de un editor y, es obvio que un editor no puede editarse a sí mismo, es por eso que este libro resulta demasiado largo.
No quiero intentar discurrir sobre las primeras 200 páginas, que se refieren al Imperio Romano un poco antes de su división en Oriente y Occidente, ni en la historia de Justiniano y sus obras jurídicas, tales como el Digesto o las Institutas, que muchas personas conocen. Voy a la parte desconocida: la bacteria, su desarrollo y su selección de huésped. En mil setecientos y tantos, un sujeto llamado Anton Van Leeuwenhoek, descubrió con una de las afamadas lentes holandesas, seres microscópicos en una gota de agua. Más tarde, Pasteur, descubrió que esos organismos producían enfermedades; y, el germano Julius Cohn, llamó a estos seres "bacteria", que quiere decir bastón (baktron) en griego.
La bacteria es la forma de vida dominante en la Tierra, y no ha dejado de evolucionar desde su nacimiento. Se cree que su más inmediato ancestro pudo vivir en las aguas del Nilo, o en la Bahía de Bengala. Luego de miles de años, la bacteria Y. Pseudotuberculosis, así llamada por la comunidad científica, ya desarrollada, buscó un vehículo ideal y lo encontró: la pulga. Ésta ha existido desde hace 65 millones de años. Tomó poco tiempo para que la Y. Pseudotuberculosis se convirtiera en su pasajero, y ya estando en las entrañas de la pulga, tuvo que, en el sentido literal de la palabra, reconstruirse, creando un código DNA con la instrucción de producir una proteína YMT para matar las defensas de la pulga. Una nueva reconstrucción del DNA de la bacteria, produjo la proteína HMS, que no es otra cosa que un tipo de pegamento que sella el estómago de la pulga, y causa que ésta muera de hambre. En fin, que al ocurrir esta serie de mutaciones, la Y. Pseudotuberculosis se convierte en Y. Pestis, pudiendo viajar a donde quiera sobre la mejor elección: la Rattus Norvegicus de color café y la R. Rattus, o rata negra del Mediterráneo, proveniente de la India.
Las ratas no son viajeras por gusto, pero si son compañeras de vida del hombre. Comen de todo, como las cabras o los puercos: vegetales, nueces, cera, jabón o papel en caso necesario, entre otras cosas, pero el alimento más importante son los granos.
La aparición de ratas en la Europa del Imperio Romano, está asociada con los caminos pavimentados por donde el grano se transportaba en carretas; su difusión se debe a las conquistas romanas.
Existen varias teorías que intentan demostrar el origen de la peste. Hay algunos que dicen que nació en la Gran Estepa, entre los territorios de Mongolia y Ucrania. Pauline Allen, afirma que tuvo
su origen en la India y viajó por mar hasta Etiopía. Peter Sarris declara que la India está más cerca de China que del Mediterráneo y además, la peste apareció en China 60 años después que en Egipto. En todo caso, son más directas las vías terrestres entre China y la India.
La teoría más persuasiva es la de Evagrius Scholasticus, que señala a Etiopía como su origen, pues de ahí se pudo esparcir más fácilmente, por tierra o por mar, para llegar al Cercano Oriente y Europa.
Para resolver el problema que pregunta por qué repentinamente desaparece o resurge la peste, el autor dice que, la peste se propaga con facilidad cuando el clima es frío y hay grandes precipitaciones, mientras que con calor y sequía, la peste queda encapsulada en algún lugar.
En el 535, aproximadamente, hubo una caída de temperatura, debido a un velo de polvo en la alta atmósfera, este acontecimiento está confirmado por Procopius en los años 536-37. La huella dejada en los hielos de Groenlandia y en la Antártida, confirma su existencia y que su efecto fue mundial. Este efecto climático permitió a la rata, su huésped y la bacteria Y Pestis abrir su camino hacia Pelusium y Alejandría, y de ahí al mundo romano.
El comercio de granos, las ratas y la Y pestis, resurgieron en Europa en los años 542, 558, 590, y 618, debido al cambio climático y las conquistas. Pasados muchos años, un poquito antes de la caída del Imperio Romano de Oriente, en 1347, un puerto del Mar Negro, Kaffa, estuvo bajo sitio. En octubre de ese mismo año llegó un barco al puerto de Messina en Sicilia que participó de aquel sitio. Todos los miembros de la tripulación estaban infectados o muertos, y decorados con bubones. ¡Ay, que miedo con el cambio climático!
Post data: ¿Por qué la Pulga de Justiniano? Él, propiamente dicho, no tuvo nada que ver con la peste, pero se dio en su largo reinado, de ahí el nombre del libro.
No quiero intentar discurrir sobre las primeras 200 páginas, que se refieren al Imperio Romano un poco antes de su división en Oriente y Occidente, ni en la historia de Justiniano y sus obras jurídicas, tales como el Digesto o las Institutas, que muchas personas conocen. Voy a la parte desconocida: la bacteria, su desarrollo y su selección de huésped. En mil setecientos y tantos, un sujeto llamado Anton Van Leeuwenhoek, descubrió con una de las afamadas lentes holandesas, seres microscópicos en una gota de agua. Más tarde, Pasteur, descubrió que esos organismos producían enfermedades; y, el germano Julius Cohn, llamó a estos seres "bacteria", que quiere decir bastón (baktron) en griego.
La bacteria es la forma de vida dominante en la Tierra, y no ha dejado de evolucionar desde su nacimiento. Se cree que su más inmediato ancestro pudo vivir en las aguas del Nilo, o en la Bahía de Bengala. Luego de miles de años, la bacteria Y. Pseudotuberculosis, así llamada por la comunidad científica, ya desarrollada, buscó un vehículo ideal y lo encontró: la pulga. Ésta ha existido desde hace 65 millones de años. Tomó poco tiempo para que la Y. Pseudotuberculosis se convirtiera en su pasajero, y ya estando en las entrañas de la pulga, tuvo que, en el sentido literal de la palabra, reconstruirse, creando un código DNA con la instrucción de producir una proteína YMT para matar las defensas de la pulga. Una nueva reconstrucción del DNA de la bacteria, produjo la proteína HMS, que no es otra cosa que un tipo de pegamento que sella el estómago de la pulga, y causa que ésta muera de hambre. En fin, que al ocurrir esta serie de mutaciones, la Y. Pseudotuberculosis se convierte en Y. Pestis, pudiendo viajar a donde quiera sobre la mejor elección: la Rattus Norvegicus de color café y la R. Rattus, o rata negra del Mediterráneo, proveniente de la India.
Las ratas no son viajeras por gusto, pero si son compañeras de vida del hombre. Comen de todo, como las cabras o los puercos: vegetales, nueces, cera, jabón o papel en caso necesario, entre otras cosas, pero el alimento más importante son los granos.
La aparición de ratas en la Europa del Imperio Romano, está asociada con los caminos pavimentados por donde el grano se transportaba en carretas; su difusión se debe a las conquistas romanas.
Existen varias teorías que intentan demostrar el origen de la peste. Hay algunos que dicen que nació en la Gran Estepa, entre los territorios de Mongolia y Ucrania. Pauline Allen, afirma que tuvo
su origen en la India y viajó por mar hasta Etiopía. Peter Sarris declara que la India está más cerca de China que del Mediterráneo y además, la peste apareció en China 60 años después que en Egipto. En todo caso, son más directas las vías terrestres entre China y la India.
La teoría más persuasiva es la de Evagrius Scholasticus, que señala a Etiopía como su origen, pues de ahí se pudo esparcir más fácilmente, por tierra o por mar, para llegar al Cercano Oriente y Europa.
Para resolver el problema que pregunta por qué repentinamente desaparece o resurge la peste, el autor dice que, la peste se propaga con facilidad cuando el clima es frío y hay grandes precipitaciones, mientras que con calor y sequía, la peste queda encapsulada en algún lugar.
En el 535, aproximadamente, hubo una caída de temperatura, debido a un velo de polvo en la alta atmósfera, este acontecimiento está confirmado por Procopius en los años 536-37. La huella dejada en los hielos de Groenlandia y en la Antártida, confirma su existencia y que su efecto fue mundial. Este efecto climático permitió a la rata, su huésped y la bacteria Y Pestis abrir su camino hacia Pelusium y Alejandría, y de ahí al mundo romano.
El comercio de granos, las ratas y la Y pestis, resurgieron en Europa en los años 542, 558, 590, y 618, debido al cambio climático y las conquistas. Pasados muchos años, un poquito antes de la caída del Imperio Romano de Oriente, en 1347, un puerto del Mar Negro, Kaffa, estuvo bajo sitio. En octubre de ese mismo año llegó un barco al puerto de Messina en Sicilia que participó de aquel sitio. Todos los miembros de la tripulación estaban infectados o muertos, y decorados con bubones. ¡Ay, que miedo con el cambio climático!
Post data: ¿Por qué la Pulga de Justiniano? Él, propiamente dicho, no tuvo nada que ver con la peste, pero se dio en su largo reinado, de ahí el nombre del libro.
May 2, 2024
This was more about Justinian tIthan the actual plague of his time. It was full of good information; I just didn't care about most of it. I wish the whole thing was about the plague rather than just the twenty or so pages discussing eyewitness accounts. Oh well. Fans of ancient history will probably like this, thus 3 stars.
December 18, 2022
This was a pleasing read, a head-first dive into Byzantine history informed with a history-of-science concept: what is the "Black death" and how did it influence history?
I was really expecting the disease to be front and center from the beginning, but instead, the entire first half of the book is an extended exposition on the vicissitudes of the Roman empire from the third century onward, when the Western empire collapsed, and the Eastern empire struggled to maintain a foothold in Europe even as it faced off against a constant barrage of enemies on all sides. We get portraits of the emperors Diocletian, who divided the civil and military administrations and tried to regularize imperial succession, to Constantine, who established Christianity and added so much to the capital that would be named after him. Young Justinian, who like his predecessors had been born a peasant out in the wilds of the Balkans, sought his destiny among the early Church fathers, Platonists who helped forge his vision of a unified empire supported by a balance of Greek, Latin, and Christian thought.
Meanwhile the Goths emerged from murky origins in Northern Europe, and the Huns rode down like an avalanche, one of many waves of warrior horsemen of the European Steppe. The declining empire struggled mightily to manage these external others, at times facing crushing defeats, as at the battle of Adrianople, in which fifty thousand Roman soldiers were killed, along with Emperor Valens: "In Ammianus’s telling, the wounded emperor was taken from the field, and placed in a nearby farmhouse just before it was burned down by its Gothic besiegers, thus 'unwittingly lighting a funeral pyre for the last Arian emperor of Rome.’” Part of Rosen’s talent in these chapters is to introduce the ancient chroniclers and select mots justes to bring us into these highly dramatic scenes. He also goes a bit further than I’ve seen to describe the varying social structures of these ancient societies. The Visigoths, for example, were a roving band, something between an army and a proto-national ‘people’. This brings us to another of Bowen’s talents, which is an occasional sentence of such concrete metaphor as to stick very well in the mind: "It’s all rather as if an expedition intended to revenge Custer’s defeat of Little Big Horn was led by a Sioux general commanding an army of Irishmen, West Indians, and Chinese.” Bravo! Under Alaric, a new Visigothic Kingdom had the recognition of Rome, in exchange for attacking the Vandals. After the charismatic Attila died, the empire tried to co-opt the Huns in the same way, but the situation quickly turned into a complex shambles overseen by a more or less bumbling set of emperors before Justinian. This latter rose to power partly by supporting one of a group of street gangs that dominated the city of Constantinople, and soon after by marrying Theodora, a bearkeeper’s daughter who climbed her way out of the performing world of the Hippodrome, also with assists from street gangs. The new emperor would also prove adept at choosing top-quality delegates, like the general, Belisarius, who quickly lead the Eastern Roman armies to victories over the Persians thanks to his creative strategies.
Protests calling for release of gangsters led to a week of riots and fires in the city, in 532. Justinian survived the storm and immediately ordered rebuilding — we next get a loving description of the reconstructed Hagia Sophia — a must-read for any fans of Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture. Justinian’s extreme-level ambition for international statecraft led him to delegate Tribonian with the development of the Institutes, which contained a civil law code, a leap for rule of law recognized by James Madison. (And there is a seal with a portrait of Tribonian in the House of Representatives, now.) Meanwhile, Belisarius was sent off to the Mediterranean to defeat a Vandal invasion, which he did handily, though not with some odd tactics like running grain mills off river currents — has there ever been an action movie that took medieval siege warfare seriously? Another general, Narses, also has a few battle anecdotes all his own.
Arguably, there is too much background in these two sections. Bowen relies mostly on Procopius, the historian not only of the wars of the era, traveling as he was alongside Belisarius, but author also of a ’secret history’ exposing the evil hedonism of Justinian’s empress, Theodora. I was reminded of the slightly more condensed version of this narrative from Durant’s Age of Faith, and glad to meet the characters again. Then, suddenly, we get to part three, and turn abruptly to observing bacteria along side Anton van Leeuwenhoek, sometime around 1680. And this is merely a segue into the story of prokaryotic life, which Bowen links to civilizations by analogy, both governed by the principles of evolution. "Neither a civilization nor a species,” he says in one example of this, “Can effortlessly change a survival tactic once it is mastered, any more than a drop of water can retrace its path to the point where one river turned into two.” Bacteria have a very special place in the map of evolution — mind-boggling, really: “[F]or nearly two billion years, bacteria were not only the lords of creation; they were creation itself.” One is led to imagine
Yersinia pseudotuberculosis in at least as much finery as Justinian himself! The biological exposition goes on to include references to Richard Dawkins, a quick explanation of the Krebs cycle, and much more discourse on the anatomy of fleas than I have ever seen. Bowen turns from there to dwell on the cross-Mediterranean trade in wheat, which was certainly what brought the rats carrying plague from Egypt up to Asia. Bowen’s passion to get to the origin of every historical identifier in his book is defeated by diversity of theories regarding the origin of plague bacteria, so he simply divides his efforts to consider whether it came from the Himalayas, the steppes, or from Africa.
Y. Pestis has extraordinary genetic features, with deep implications for anyone wondering about the existence of designing order to the universe — the fatal compounds of the bacteria are in fact likely intended help the bacteria fasten into and dominate flea bodies — their effect on humans is entirely accidental. Regardless, with the trade in grain now connecting most of the Mediterranean coast, plague was poised to infect all of Europe and Asia, as 540 turned to 541.
Such are the complexities of global history, though that even as a horrific pandemic began draining the population of one of the world’s centers of civilizations, another heavy-hitter was just emerging to attack using conventional warfare — the Sassanid Persians, under their king, Khusro, who saw himself as the Justinian’s fated nemesis. That Belisarius should wage a defensive war while plague plagued, and win, seems impossible. But Bowen zooms in for a closely-observed exposition on how it was done — siege warfare, again. And the plague did takes its toll. Frankish domination of Europe — which, we have to step back and review, along the lines laid down by Gregory of Tours — was likely set back by plague. But the overriding point here is that plague does not seem to have stopped or slowed the advance of civilization under larger forces of military, religious, and political organization. In the further wars of more Goths, more Lombards, Suevs, Slavs, and on and on, the plague seems almost an omittable factor. Neither China’s growth and reunification in the early middle ages, nor the beginnings of the Arab conquests, seem to have been held back. Questions about the plague’s effect on complex systems involving population, labor, and agricultural technology go no where, in Bowen’s epilogue.
So why read this book? Well, it does have an impressive prose style. The stories are well-told, and dramatic. Rarely have I ever seen a world-historicist account that tries to accommodate the history of science — the history of a bacterium! It was worth the effort, even if, in conclusion, the relations of species to species, and of social units of homo sapiens to each other, are not actually located.
I was really expecting the disease to be front and center from the beginning, but instead, the entire first half of the book is an extended exposition on the vicissitudes of the Roman empire from the third century onward, when the Western empire collapsed, and the Eastern empire struggled to maintain a foothold in Europe even as it faced off against a constant barrage of enemies on all sides. We get portraits of the emperors Diocletian, who divided the civil and military administrations and tried to regularize imperial succession, to Constantine, who established Christianity and added so much to the capital that would be named after him. Young Justinian, who like his predecessors had been born a peasant out in the wilds of the Balkans, sought his destiny among the early Church fathers, Platonists who helped forge his vision of a unified empire supported by a balance of Greek, Latin, and Christian thought.
Meanwhile the Goths emerged from murky origins in Northern Europe, and the Huns rode down like an avalanche, one of many waves of warrior horsemen of the European Steppe. The declining empire struggled mightily to manage these external others, at times facing crushing defeats, as at the battle of Adrianople, in which fifty thousand Roman soldiers were killed, along with Emperor Valens: "In Ammianus’s telling, the wounded emperor was taken from the field, and placed in a nearby farmhouse just before it was burned down by its Gothic besiegers, thus 'unwittingly lighting a funeral pyre for the last Arian emperor of Rome.’” Part of Rosen’s talent in these chapters is to introduce the ancient chroniclers and select mots justes to bring us into these highly dramatic scenes. He also goes a bit further than I’ve seen to describe the varying social structures of these ancient societies. The Visigoths, for example, were a roving band, something between an army and a proto-national ‘people’. This brings us to another of Bowen’s talents, which is an occasional sentence of such concrete metaphor as to stick very well in the mind: "It’s all rather as if an expedition intended to revenge Custer’s defeat of Little Big Horn was led by a Sioux general commanding an army of Irishmen, West Indians, and Chinese.” Bravo! Under Alaric, a new Visigothic Kingdom had the recognition of Rome, in exchange for attacking the Vandals. After the charismatic Attila died, the empire tried to co-opt the Huns in the same way, but the situation quickly turned into a complex shambles overseen by a more or less bumbling set of emperors before Justinian. This latter rose to power partly by supporting one of a group of street gangs that dominated the city of Constantinople, and soon after by marrying Theodora, a bearkeeper’s daughter who climbed her way out of the performing world of the Hippodrome, also with assists from street gangs. The new emperor would also prove adept at choosing top-quality delegates, like the general, Belisarius, who quickly lead the Eastern Roman armies to victories over the Persians thanks to his creative strategies.
Protests calling for release of gangsters led to a week of riots and fires in the city, in 532. Justinian survived the storm and immediately ordered rebuilding — we next get a loving description of the reconstructed Hagia Sophia — a must-read for any fans of Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture. Justinian’s extreme-level ambition for international statecraft led him to delegate Tribonian with the development of the Institutes, which contained a civil law code, a leap for rule of law recognized by James Madison. (And there is a seal with a portrait of Tribonian in the House of Representatives, now.) Meanwhile, Belisarius was sent off to the Mediterranean to defeat a Vandal invasion, which he did handily, though not with some odd tactics like running grain mills off river currents — has there ever been an action movie that took medieval siege warfare seriously? Another general, Narses, also has a few battle anecdotes all his own.
Arguably, there is too much background in these two sections. Bowen relies mostly on Procopius, the historian not only of the wars of the era, traveling as he was alongside Belisarius, but author also of a ’secret history’ exposing the evil hedonism of Justinian’s empress, Theodora. I was reminded of the slightly more condensed version of this narrative from Durant’s Age of Faith, and glad to meet the characters again. Then, suddenly, we get to part three, and turn abruptly to observing bacteria along side Anton van Leeuwenhoek, sometime around 1680. And this is merely a segue into the story of prokaryotic life, which Bowen links to civilizations by analogy, both governed by the principles of evolution. "Neither a civilization nor a species,” he says in one example of this, “Can effortlessly change a survival tactic once it is mastered, any more than a drop of water can retrace its path to the point where one river turned into two.” Bacteria have a very special place in the map of evolution — mind-boggling, really: “[F]or nearly two billion years, bacteria were not only the lords of creation; they were creation itself.” One is led to imagine
Yersinia pseudotuberculosis in at least as much finery as Justinian himself! The biological exposition goes on to include references to Richard Dawkins, a quick explanation of the Krebs cycle, and much more discourse on the anatomy of fleas than I have ever seen. Bowen turns from there to dwell on the cross-Mediterranean trade in wheat, which was certainly what brought the rats carrying plague from Egypt up to Asia. Bowen’s passion to get to the origin of every historical identifier in his book is defeated by diversity of theories regarding the origin of plague bacteria, so he simply divides his efforts to consider whether it came from the Himalayas, the steppes, or from Africa.
Y. Pestis has extraordinary genetic features, with deep implications for anyone wondering about the existence of designing order to the universe — the fatal compounds of the bacteria are in fact likely intended help the bacteria fasten into and dominate flea bodies — their effect on humans is entirely accidental. Regardless, with the trade in grain now connecting most of the Mediterranean coast, plague was poised to infect all of Europe and Asia, as 540 turned to 541.
Such are the complexities of global history, though that even as a horrific pandemic began draining the population of one of the world’s centers of civilizations, another heavy-hitter was just emerging to attack using conventional warfare — the Sassanid Persians, under their king, Khusro, who saw himself as the Justinian’s fated nemesis. That Belisarius should wage a defensive war while plague plagued, and win, seems impossible. But Bowen zooms in for a closely-observed exposition on how it was done — siege warfare, again. And the plague did takes its toll. Frankish domination of Europe — which, we have to step back and review, along the lines laid down by Gregory of Tours — was likely set back by plague. But the overriding point here is that plague does not seem to have stopped or slowed the advance of civilization under larger forces of military, religious, and political organization. In the further wars of more Goths, more Lombards, Suevs, Slavs, and on and on, the plague seems almost an omittable factor. Neither China’s growth and reunification in the early middle ages, nor the beginnings of the Arab conquests, seem to have been held back. Questions about the plague’s effect on complex systems involving population, labor, and agricultural technology go no where, in Bowen’s epilogue.
So why read this book? Well, it does have an impressive prose style. The stories are well-told, and dramatic. Rarely have I ever seen a world-historicist account that tries to accommodate the history of science — the history of a bacterium! It was worth the effort, even if, in conclusion, the relations of species to species, and of social units of homo sapiens to each other, are not actually located.
August 29, 2013
Don't be fooled (or afraid) by the grandiose title, most of the book is not about plague. In fact, it is a concise history of much of world in the 6th Century CE.
I didn't have much trouble with William Rosen's writing this time around. (I reviewed his book on the history of the Industrial Revolution here:The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention My main complaint there was that Rosen had bitten off more than he could chew, with topics ranging from history, property law to thermodynamics and a host of other topics which he could combine only marginally effectively).
In this book, although the digressions range from the theory of evolution, to economics of the Silk Road; Rosen does a decent job with the narration. The first fourth of the book is spent in setting up the stage if you will, with short biographical sketches of Diocletian, Constantine, Attila, Alaric the Goth, and the 2 Emperors immediately preceding Justinian. Rosen's main source appears to be Gibbon (I've read an abridged version of Decline and Fall... only, so I won't complain too much). Justinian, and his wife Theodora; Justinian's famed general Belisarius and his exploits form the next quarter. Here his main source appears to Procopius, a Byzantine historian who was a contemporary of both Justinian and Belisarius, indeed he accompanied Belisarius on his campaigns in Africa and Italy. This first half of the book didn't grip me much, as it doesn't add much to the two historians' work, except adding a little modern touch to it (such as the bit where Rosen proved, to me at least, that Theodora's bad reputation was partly due to Procopius's envy which led him to pen his salacious "Secret History").
The next half of the book deals with the Plague, which Rosen regularly calls the "Demon", which is its contemporaries called it anyway. Apart from the patronizing diversion into the "Cambrian Explosion of Life", this book was easily the best bit, dealing with fleas, Y.pestes (which is the Linnaean name for the plague causing bacterium) and rats.
Rosen convincingly argues that the Demon crippled the Byzantines and the Persian Sassanids in all kinds of ways which left these empires of antiquity unable to combat the rising tide of Islam. Rosen's other grandiose argument that the Demon also led to the creation of "Europe", more precisely the European nation-states that were formed after the Roman Empire fell, I find to be more akin to saying: the laws of physics led to creation of European nation-states. We know it to be true at a very basic level, but to make a very convincing argument, is a different thing.
Overall, top marks for trying. Rosen covers a lot of ground, and for the most part, it is very enjoyable to read. Recommended to anybody who likes history, especially history of late antiquity.
I didn't have much trouble with William Rosen's writing this time around. (I reviewed his book on the history of the Industrial Revolution here:The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention My main complaint there was that Rosen had bitten off more than he could chew, with topics ranging from history, property law to thermodynamics and a host of other topics which he could combine only marginally effectively).
In this book, although the digressions range from the theory of evolution, to economics of the Silk Road; Rosen does a decent job with the narration. The first fourth of the book is spent in setting up the stage if you will, with short biographical sketches of Diocletian, Constantine, Attila, Alaric the Goth, and the 2 Emperors immediately preceding Justinian. Rosen's main source appears to be Gibbon (I've read an abridged version of Decline and Fall... only, so I won't complain too much). Justinian, and his wife Theodora; Justinian's famed general Belisarius and his exploits form the next quarter. Here his main source appears to Procopius, a Byzantine historian who was a contemporary of both Justinian and Belisarius, indeed he accompanied Belisarius on his campaigns in Africa and Italy. This first half of the book didn't grip me much, as it doesn't add much to the two historians' work, except adding a little modern touch to it (such as the bit where Rosen proved, to me at least, that Theodora's bad reputation was partly due to Procopius's envy which led him to pen his salacious "Secret History").
The next half of the book deals with the Plague, which Rosen regularly calls the "Demon", which is its contemporaries called it anyway. Apart from the patronizing diversion into the "Cambrian Explosion of Life", this book was easily the best bit, dealing with fleas, Y.pestes (which is the Linnaean name for the plague causing bacterium) and rats.
Rosen convincingly argues that the Demon crippled the Byzantines and the Persian Sassanids in all kinds of ways which left these empires of antiquity unable to combat the rising tide of Islam. Rosen's other grandiose argument that the Demon also led to the creation of "Europe", more precisely the European nation-states that were formed after the Roman Empire fell, I find to be more akin to saying: the laws of physics led to creation of European nation-states. We know it to be true at a very basic level, but to make a very convincing argument, is a different thing.
Overall, top marks for trying. Rosen covers a lot of ground, and for the most part, it is very enjoyable to read. Recommended to anybody who likes history, especially history of late antiquity.
December 5, 2019
Several chapters in and no plague in sight. While I understand the importance of setting the scene and explaining the state of the empire when the plague appeared, there was too much. And even flipping through it seemed more political and military than social--which is what I was hoping for.
TL;DR: should have read the reviews on here before I started!
TL;DR: should have read the reviews on here before I started!
November 25, 2019
Poorly organized and factually questionable.
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