Studenda Mira

The Economist has a mixed review of William Rosen's Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe . Some highlights: Mr Rosen argues his position methodically and thoughtfully. He has a lot of ground to cover and he will not be rushed. So there are chapters not only on Justinian and the plague but also on the migration of the Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Huns; on Byzantine architecture; on Roman law; on China and the silkworm; and on the emergence of Islam... At this point, thumbing the remaining 200 or so pages to come, one begins to wonder whether the whole thing might be somewhat overlong and overdone. There is no sense of its having been padded—just a slightly crushing abundance of riches, of multiple lines of inquiry, to every one of which Mr Rosen gives his close attention...“Justinian's Flea” reads like several books in one and the glut is, by the end, a little hard to digest.

By the final years of Justinian's reign, the heady era of Belisarius's western reconquests was only a memory. In 542, a devastating plague—very likely an earlier strain of Y. pestis , the bacterium behind the medieval Black Death—swept through the East and killed a third or more of the population. It took the economic and military stuffing out of the Empire, forcing it to buy an expensive peace from the Sassanid king Khosro I in 545 and leaving it unable to check the ravages of the nascent Slavs and Bulgars in the Balkans. Constantinople was on the defensive. The emperor himself hadn't been the same since his wife Theodora had died, probably from ovarian cancer, in 548. Without the counsel and support of the woman who had convinced him not to abandon his throne during the Nika riots in 532, Justinian showed little interest in governing his shrinking, increasingly destitute empire. He instead preoccupied himself with the theological disputes for which Byzantium would be...