Home : Book details : Book description

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

In the middle of the sixth century, the world's smallest organism collided with the world's mightiest empire. Twenty-five million corpses later, the Roman Empire, under her last great emperor, Justinian, was decimated. BeforeYersinia pestis,the bacterium that carries bubonic plague, was through, both the Roman and Persian empires were easy pickings for the armies of Muhammad on their conquering march out of Arabia. In its wake, the plague - history's first pandemic - marked the transition from the age of Mediterranean empires to the age of European nation-states - from antiquity to the medieval world. Justinian's Fleais the story of that collision, a narrative history that weaves together evolutionary microbiology, architecture, military history, geography, rat and flea ecology, jurisprudence, theology, epidemiology, and the economics of the silk trade. The climax ofJustinian's Flea- the summer of 542, when Constantinoplewitnessed the death of 5,000 of its citizens every day - is revealed through the experiences of the remarkable individuals whose lives are a window onto a remarkable age: Justinian himself, of course, but also hisdoppelgnger, the Persian Shah Khusro Anushirvan, whose empire would be so weakened by plague that it essentially vanished his general Belisarius, the greatest soldier between Caesar and Saladin, whose conquests marked the end of imperial rule in Italy and Africa his architect, Anthemius, the mathematician-engineer who built Constantinople's Hagia Sophia (and whose brother, Alexander, was the great physician of the plague years) Tribonian, the jurist who created the Justinianic Code, the source of Europe's tradition of Civil Law and, finally, his empress Theodora, the one-time prostitute who became co-ruler of the empire, the most politically powerful woman in European history until Elizabeth I. Melding contemporary accounts with modern disciplines,Justinian's Fleais a unique account of one of history's great hinge moments.