Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire

I shall turn and become Jew better to be a pagan than a Blue, God knows…”14 The most telling part of the entire dialogue, however, is that it was” The Green spokesman accuses the emperor of suppressing the truth, of countenancing murder, and when he has had enough, he ends with “Goodbye Justice! You are no longer in fashion. Justinian tells his interlocutor, “I would have you baptized in the name of one God” only to receive the response, “I am baptized in One God,” evidently an attempt to contrast his Monophysite sympathies with the emperor’s orthodoxy. He addresses Justinian respectfully-as “Justinianus Augustus”-but registers his complaint precisely as if he were doing so before a small claims court, informing the most powerful man in the world that “my oppressor can be found in the shoemaker’s quarter.” For his part, Justinian, though clearly aware that he holds what might be called a preemptive advantage (“Verily, if you refuse to keep silent, I shall have you beheaded”), still debates both the truth of the Green claims and the theological position that he suggests informs those claims. First, the Green “debater” addresses the emperor, the viceroy of Christ on earth, practically as an equal. The dialogue is startling on a number of grounds. The Chronicle of the courtier Theophanes faithfully records a debate-perhaps disputation is the better word-between Justinian (through his herald, or mandatus) and the chosen representative of the Green faction. Weaving together evolutionary microbiology, economics, military strategy, ecology, and ancient and modern medicine, Rosen offers a sweeping narrative of one of the great hinge moments in history, one that will appeal to readers of John Kelly's The Great Mortality, John Barry's The Great Influenza, and Jared Diamond's Collapse.“And not merely slogan-shouting, but debate.

The ensuing outbreak of bubonic plague killed five thousand people a day in Constantinople and nearly killed Justinian himself.In Justinian's Flea, William Rosen tells the story of history's first pandemic-a plague seven centuries before the Black Death that killed tens of millions, devastated the empires of Persia and Rome, left a path of victims from Ireland to Iraq, and opened the way for the armies of Islam. Then, in the summer of 542, he encountered a flea.

In his capital at Constantinople he built the world's most beautiful building, married its most powerful empress, and wrote its most enduring legal code, seemingly restoring Rome's fortunes for the next five hundred years. A richly told story of the collision between nature's smallest organism and history's mightiest empireThe Emperor Justinian reunified Rome's fractured empire by defeating the Goths and Vandals who had separated Italy, Spain, and North Africa from imperial rule.

Justinian's Flea by William Rosen