Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe

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Description

The Emperor Justinian reunified Romes fractured empire by defeating the Goths and Vandals who had separated Italy, Spain, and North Africa from imperial rule. In his capital at Constantinople he built the arena’s most beautiful building, married its most powerful empress, and wrote its most enduring legal code, seemingly restoring Rome’s fortunes for the following five hundred years. Then, in the summertime of 542, he encountered a flea. The following 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 tale of history’s first pandemic plague seven centuries before the Black Death that killed tens of millions, devastated the empires of Persia and Rome, left a path of sufferers from Ireland to Iraq, and opened the best way for the armies of Islam. Weaving together evolutionary microbiology, economics, military strategy, ecology, and ancient and up to date medicine, Rosen offers a sweeping narrative of one of the most great hinge moments in history, one as a way to appeal to readers of John Kelly’s The Great Mortality , John Barry’s The Great Influenza , and Jared Diamond’s Collapse .

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