Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(18)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

Great men have changed the world. And so have microbes. And changes fifteen hundred years ago, among ancient societies that are irretrievably lost except to scholars, created contingencies that have made our world what it is, with no way possible to conceive all the "what ifs" that have thereby fallen out to give our current political, religious, and social situation. If you are like me, the history of the sixth century Mediterranean, especially Constantinople, is one vague gray area, but it doesn't have to stay that way. _Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe_ (Viking) is a strange book in many ways. It is not written by an academic with long publishing credentials behind him. William Rosen has publishing credentials, but they are in the business of publishing, where he has been a senior executive. This is his first book as author, and it shows all the enthusiasm of a hobbyist eager to let others know just how interesting is the subject of his particular fascination. It is crammed with religious, military, and political history, along with large doses of epidemiology and bacteriology (to help explain how bubonic plague works) as well as an addendum of entomology (to help explain the equally history-making silkworm). Not every hobbyist could make his obsession interesting, but Rosen's book swarms with so many facts that it is always surprising and never dull.

The backbone of the book is a biography of the Emperor Justinian himself. He was born in a Balkan hill town in 482 CE, but an uncle, a general in the imperial guard, adopted him, took him to Constantinople, and got him an education. Justinian was a hard worker, productive to the point of robbing himself of sleep. He did not pay much attention to his appearance, and he tended to asceticism. He stuck around Constantinople to work, and had little interest in visiting his military conquests. He had a considerable ego, revealed in his own writings, and little respect for his predecessors or especially for anyone whom he considered an enemy of the church. Justinian was shrewd in his choice of advisors, and never chose better than his chief general Belisarius, who conquered Vandals in Africa and Ostrogoths in Italy, as well as a late glory in defending Constantinople against the Huns. For all his accomplishments, Justinian could not overcome the devastation caused by the rat, the flea, and the bacterium _Yersinia pseudotuberculosis_. Rosen explains how the bacterium was a relatively harmless type, perhaps causing a mild flu, but then it harnessed the flea as a means of transportation, and while evolving to turn off the defenses of the flea, it became deadly to humans. It was recorded in 540 in the Nile delta, and because this was the grain source for Constantinople, the germs in the fleas on the rats in the ships soon were causing a plague within the city. At least 25 million people were killed in the empire. Justinian himself was infected, but was one of the lucky ones whose immune system somehow fought off the illness; other residents of Constantinople were dying off at the rate of maybe 5,000 a day during the same time, overfilling the hospitals and then the cemeteries. The plague affected tax revenues, and handed new opportunities to the enemies of the Empire. It possibly prevented Justinian's armies from reforming the old Roman Empire entirely, and it enabled a subsequent Arabic expansion and the growth of Islam.

It is safe to say that our world would be quite different if the Plague of Justinian had never happened. Rosen knows that looking at the complicated sixth century through the lens of one particular bacteriological eruption is an oversimplification, and that the plague cannot be the single cause of Rome's decline, the birth of European states, or the rise of Islam. The effects, however, were vast and often surprising; the plague had disproportionate effects, for instance, on those in monasteries due to the close living quarters, and also especially afflicted those upon ships so that there was a direct effect on naval campaigns. Looked at another way, the pandemic caused a labor shortage, which sparked an agricultural revolution, which caused increased population and power for European states. Rosen's book is valuable for the account of the history and epidemiology of a distant time, but also for contemplation of contingency on a world-wide scale.

A combination of biography, sweeping historical drama, vivid eyewitness accounts, geopolitical intrigue, and epidemiological detective story, "Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe" argues that Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for bubonic plague, was the major force that led to the decline of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire of late antiquity and the subsequent rise of medieval Europe.

Tracing the origins of "Justinian's plague" to the fairly benign bacterium Yersinia pseudotuberculosis in East Africa, William Rosen describes how the bacterium, in adapting to a new host, the flea, became far more virulent and mobile. The Mediterranean black rat carried the flea and the plague from Africa aboard ships to port cities all along the eastern Mediterranean and eventually to Constantinople, the capital of the empire, where it killed more than a third of the population.

"Justinian's Flea" also tells of the historical figures whose lives were changed by the plague, including and especially the Emperor Justinian, who hoped to rebuild the former glory of the Roman Empire but could not foresee that his greatest obstacle would be a flea. He was born in a small village in the Balkans and rose to power through family connections and sheer talent, promoting others with merit and even marrying a professional courtesan who went on to become his confidante and a powerful woman in her own right.

Rosen makes excellent use of contemporary accounts to describe not only the immediate effects of the plague, but the far-reaching ones as well, ranging across the empire and beyond, to China and Arabia. But rather than simply describe events, Rosen explains them within the context of our current knowledge of medicine, science, and technology, and with the awareness of the eventual political and social outcomes we know today.

"Justinian's Flea" shows with extensive learning and research, disguised as a compelling narrative, how one of the great turning points in history was decided not by man but by a flea.

William Rosen's "Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire" is better titled "The Life and Times of Justinian the Great". Although Rosen's work is loaded with endless interesting details

of Justinian's rise to power, love life, geopolitical accomplishments, architectural triumphs and his complex personal relationships, it has a proportionally miniscule amount of information about the plague itself. And while I find the aforementioned information worthwhile, it is not why I purchased the book in the first place.

For example, more actual pages in the book are dedicated to the Hagia Sophia than to the details of the plague. In fact, there is no discussion of the plague until well into the second half of the book (page 170 something)...that's a long way to go before you're introduced to the antagonist. In contrast, by page 98 we are in the midst of a mini-series on the birth, destruction and re-construction of the Hagia Sophia. It indeed is one of the the great churches found on earth and we learn a vast array of details regarding its eccentric designers, the history of the arch, the source of the materials, the craftsmen and artisans involved, the socio-political and religious implications of its creation, the specific details of the piers and buttresses, practical liturgical considerations and so on and so on. This one tangent alone carries more pages in the book than the entire discussion of the title's topic.

Additionally, while there is no doubt regarding the impact of the plague on western civilization, Rosen leaves a huge hole in his proposed conclusion relative to the crushing effects of the Islamic imperialism of the following century. Although depopulation and destabilization contributed to the ease of the Muslim conquests,the net result, plaque or not, would have been likely the same.

The book would receive a significantly higher rating if it had centered on a different central theme, but it misses the mark of the title.

I won't repeat the history that many reviewers cover so well. And I would recommend the book with some reservations. You're not educated without more understanding of this time period. My husand and I both read and discussed it at legth, so it did provoke thinking and conversation.

Now for the downside. The author is a pedant who needed an aggressive editor. To be fair, he's trying to lay the groundwork to cover a lot of disparate pieces that come together eventually. It might have been more successful had he summarized the story upfront to give the reader a roadmap through the book.

He also gets bogged down in minutae. While his premise about the arrival of the plague requires some detail to appreciate the subleties, he goes overboard with information that will be of interest to few readers.

This gave me the impression the author wants the reader to see his erudition more than the story. Too bad. It's a good piece of history. Seems to be well researched. He uncovered a lot of sources I was not familiar with. It fills a gap - a missing link in this part of history. And it does have a lot of interesting pieces of information. But I kept thinking there must be better works on this.

5 stars for excellent research; 3 for organization; 2 for continuity.

Horrific events, while memorable to those who live through them, don't always have significant consequences. I wouldn't have wanted to be on the Titanic when it sank but it would be foolish to maintain that its consequences were world-historic. One set of horrific events which is often over-interpreted in this way is the Bubonic Plague which struck Constantinople in 542 AD.

William Rosen will not accept that this Plague was inconsequential in its effects. He has written this large book to a thesis: namely that the Plague, which he coyly calls `Justinian's Flea' or `The Demon', had a significant weakening effect on the Byzantine Empire and led ultimately to its dismemberment and collapse.

One of the difficulties of mounting an argument of this type is that, well, very little has come down to us from ancient authors concerning the effects of the Plague. Beyond the initial, horrific, die-off there is very little or nothing in ancient sources about the knock-on effects of the disease. When it comes to the actual devastation that the Plague wrought on Constantinople Rosen's account becomes curiously attenuated and he brings the narrative of the disease's course swiftly to a close. This is because of the dearth of documentary material but, to make up for that, Rosen has filled his book with learning of every type: the construction of Hagia Sophia, the writing of Justinian's Code, The life of King Chosroes of Persia and the unending and completely irrelevant wars between Byzantine and Goth armies for the Italian peninsula. As a result the central thesis of the book is lost to the reader's view for fifty or a hundred pages at a stretch. Rosen is a polymath and he does not wear his learning lightly; one of his more impressive set pieces is a minute biological examination of the precise mechanics of the disease. This covers everything from the living habits of the rat to the exact proteins manufactured by the disease organism and their effects on the body. All this scholarship seems relevant to the thesis but, really, it isn't. Nothing about the biochemistry of the plague bacillus has much relevance to the central thesis of Byzantine collapse. All this material is filler; of some slight interest but its true role is to disguise the extent to which material is lacking to document Rosen's claims.

To be sure Rosen tries to paper over the huge documentary gaps with pseudo-quantitative statements. We are told, for example, that the Plague depressed Byzantine birth rates. How Rosen, or anyone, could know such a thing is far from obvious. For example, when Rosen says `birth rates' does he mean actual birth numbers declined or does he mean that the rate of change of population growth slowed? Does he mean that the number of live births per 1000 Byzantine females was lower? (And if he did mean this then how does he relate that to the bacillus?) Did the Plague target women of child-bearing age or did it skip them completely or was morbidity in that demographic class the same as for others? Did this `decline' last for many years, refreshed by periodic reoccurrences of the Plague (as he asserts unconvincingly)? Or did it last only for a short period? Was this decline characteristic of the Empire as a whole or did it only affect the populated corridors into the Black Sea? It really doesn't matter because there simply are no reliable numbers that would allow any of these questions to be answered. Perhaps Rosen is right about `birth rates'. If so, he has simply asserted it, not shown it. This is the precise definition of the phrase `begging the question'.

It is not until the very final pages of the book that we come face to face with Rosen's actual concern. How, he asks, were the armies of Arabia able to dismember the Byzantine Empire (specifically, Syria) in the seventh century? The sudden irruption of Arab armies successfully battling it out with the remains of the Byzantine and Persian empires is a subject worthy of careful historical examination. How were the Arabs able to succeed so quickly and overwhelmingly? Rosen's answer, of course, is that it was the flea that allowed the Arabs to have the overwhelming success that they did. The Byzantine Empire was weakened and so the Arabs were able to take advantage of it. The specific example that Rosen provides is the battle that lost Syria to the Arabs, Yarmak, in 638 AD.

This is nonsense.

The flea struck Constantinople in 542, 96 years before the battle of Yarmak. Before I expand on this point I remark parenthetically that Rosen seems to suffer from the amateur historian's characteristic of supposing that all these long-ago events happened nearly simultaneously. What, to this way of thinking, is a mere 96 years? The flea so weakened Byzantium that its effects were still felt nearly a century later! What could be more obvious? But it's not obvious at all. I'm writing this review in 2009. 96 years ago it was 1913; in 1913 WWI hadn't started yet. No epidemic, not even one as horrific as Bubonic Plague would have knock-on effects 96 years later. In 1917 and the immediately succeeding years there was in fact, such a plague. A world-wide outbreak of influenza killed approximately 25 million people (more, perhaps, than WWI itself). This particular flu killed many thousands of U.S. soldiers. Would we blame the defeat of the United States in Viet Nam on the weakening effects of the 1917 flu? By Rosen's reasoning we would. But if William Westmoreland had tried such an excuse he would have simply been laughed at.

For all his learning (and this is the problem with riding hobby-horses) Rosen has missed what is the central explanation for the successful Islamic expansion. The people of the Byzantine Empire were ruled by Greeks but were mostly not Greek themselves. They were subjected and had been subjected through the entire life of the Empire to a brutal and remorseless exploitation as well as to an experiment in forced cultural assimilation. Egypt had suffered particularly severely from Roman and Byzantine rule. Egypt under the Romans and Greeks makes the slavery-plantation system of the American Old South look like the Elysian Fields. One people that tried to resist Hellenization were the Jews. Jewish history during the period from the Seleucids to the Revolt of Bar Kochba in 135 AD is a textbook of resistance to Hellenization as well as Greek and Roman exploitation. Most of the subjects of the Byzantine Empire were desperate to change rulers and when they learned, in the middle of the seventh century that liberating Arab armies were coming they would typically march out in great parades from their cities in the direction of the invading armies, cheering them on and congratulating themselves on their liberation from Byzantine rule. Rosen makes the elementary mistake of taking labels seriously. For example, the Arab `Conquest' was a series of revolutions as much as actual military conquest. The plain truth is that you can't keep an Empire together when your subjects don't speak your language, are culturally unrelated to you and, for good measure, loathe and fear you. That's the ugly truth about how the Byzantine empire collapsed. The flea was horrific but, ultimately, of no significance. If Rosen doesn't believe this then I recommend that he read the Gnomon of the Idiologus; it can be found in the Loeb Classical Library. Before Rosen idealizes the rule of the Greeks and the Romans he should meditate very carefully on this ancient tax document.

There are a few typos which Rosen might like to correct. The correct term is 'iatrosophist', not 'iastrophist' (roughly, `medical teacher', L&S, sv.). The dome of the Arian baptistery in Ravenna is covered with mosaics, not frescoes as Rosen surely knows. These are tiny flaws in what is a rattling good read. Recommended for intelligent teen-agers. This is not a put-down; I was an intelligent teen-ager once myself and I would have liked to have been given such a broad-ranging and challenging (and gory) book.

This is a useful, interesting book. It's a good read if you like all sorts of digressions--I loved them, but some reviewers did not. It might make you want to read Gibbon's Decline and Fall (or reread it, if you've read it), which would be great, because Gibbon is still about the most satisfyingly enjoyable read in history (bad pun intended).

The ostensible conclusion--that the Plague of Justinian changed the course of history--is not supported, and cannot be, because the evidence is thin and there is no "control case." A world without the plague must remain as purely theoretical as Pascal's wonderful question: "What if Cleopatra's nose had been an inch longer?" The plague must have made some difference, but I suppose it merely accelerated changes that were happening anyway.

Rosen makes some historical errors, including relying a bit much on Ammianus Marcellinus and his war propaganda against the Huns, but I will pick up on some biological errors. None is serious, but taken together they make one question Rosen's scholarship enough to make one doubt the wider case. He has the rat flea as "_Xenopsylla cheopsis_" instead of "cheopis." He thinks wine is made by bacteria (p. 181; yeasts aren't bacteria). He seems to think the rat is the basic host for plague, and he barely mentions the real definitive hosts, ground squirrels (including susliks and marmots); they don't die of it as easily as rats and people do, and thus it becomes endemic among them. He has the plague coming from Africa, and dismisses the classic theory of Central Asian origin (based partly on the fact that ground squirrels are most common and diverse there). He wonders why bacteria produce toxins (p. 208) without mentioning the fact that most toxins are great for getting the bacteria around--gut bacteria cause diarrhea, for instance. And so on. A couple of items are more questionable: are Norway rats really commoner than black rats (p. 185)? Not anywhere I've been (including my garage!), but then I've spent a lot of my life in seaports and other good black-rat habitat. And did the plague really reach China only around 600 AD (p. 194)? I know Chinese medical history pretty well, and am unaware of any really identifiable account of plague or any other contagious bacterial disease in early or medieval China. They just didn't do good descriptions. The plague may have been in China forever; we'd never know. (In historic times, it was endemic rather than epidemic, because the rat and ground squirrel fauna was local, complex, and adapted, rather than alien and irruptive like the black rat in Europe. See Carol Benedict's great work, "The Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China.")

So, this book is a fine and entertaining bit of popular history, and I enjoyed it, but it has some limits.

After the positive review in the Washington Post, I had expected considerably more. I enjoyed the book, but it certainly did not live up to expectations, nor even the promise of the title. This discursive work contains many facts and some interesting historical anecdotes, but separately and together they failed to elucidate the purported theme of the birth of medieval Europe. In fairness, some of the brief descriptions of the various groups/tribes/nations that were the blocks of which Europe was to be constructed were interesting enough to make me want to know more about them -- and the many footnotes will help should I decide to do so.

Another disappointment -- and also an irritant -- were the many run-on sentences trying to deal with multiple concepts. They required this reader to pause and back up to capture the sense and, in the process, lose whatever thread might have been developing. Perhaps because he is an editor the author did not think his work needed editing; it would have benefitted from a good editorial scrubbing.

Avoid this book like the plague. I am an avid reader of history and found this book one of the most poorly written history books that I have had the misfortune ever to read. The writer redefines the term pedantic. Historical premises are often followed by a minimum of three pages of material unrelated to the central point. By the time the reader comes back to anything remotely resembling the author's thesis the central point is nearly forgotten.Discussion of the book's central theme does not even occur until page 183. The author rambles on throughout and an editor is sorely needed. There is absolutely no linear flow and the author gaps from one historical period to another so frequently it is almost impossible to determine its relevancy to Byzantium. Beware deeply discounted Amazon book offers...there is a reason

I wasn't planning on reading this book at all. Merely saw it on a friend's table yesterday, got curious, and asked if I could read it before she did. Now I feel as if I've eaten a 10-course meal in the space of 20 minutes.

This era of history is not usually my thing. I was an International Studies major in college, so I of course covered it in my history classes, and I taught it to my world history students, but it's not an era I would seek out books upon. However, I was fascinated by _Pox Americana_ (I've read it twice as research for my WIP), and the title of this book sounded like it was similar. It wasn't really. But in this case, that isn't a bad thing, because Rosen provided a buffet of information so well presented that you don't need a background in history to take it in.

His bottom line is this: (from the back cover blurb)

"It was the golden age of Emperor Justinian, who, from his glorious capital of Constantinople, united and reigned over an empire stretching from Italy to North Africa. It was the zenith of his achievements--and the last of them.

In A.D. 542, the bubonic plague struck. In weeks, the glorious classical world of Justinian was plunged into chaos, and the beginings of a medieval Europe were born."

However, the plague itself only occupies perhaps a quarter of the book. The rest of it is background, side-plots, and connections to other ideas and future events. Rosen follows a common thread, loops off on a connected idea, but always manages to bring the reader back the main thread before they get too lost.

In the course of the book, Rosen covers "history, microbiology, ecology, jurisprudence, theology, and epidemiology," not to mention tidbits of architecture, art, trade, politics, medicine, and numerous other subjects. Whether he was discussing the changing tactics of warfare or the warring theologies of the early Christian Church (Arian vs. Monophysite vs. orthodoxy/Catholic), his writing went down so smoothly that I almost wasn't aware of how much I was taking in at times. The only sections that I found hard to chew was when he went into great detail about the evolution and biology of Yersinia pestis, that is, bubonic plague.

_Justinian's Flea_ is heavy reading, but not overwhelmingly so. It appeals both to serious students of history as well as to the curiosity of the "layman."

Grade: A/A+

About the year 540 AD, history seemed to be on the verge of rewinding itself. Emperor Justinian was making Constantinople the wonder of the world, with such wonders as the Hagia Sophia, the imperial armies under General Belisarius were reconquering Italy, and everything seemed to point towards a rebirth of the glories of Rome. But history didn't rewind itself, and Europe traveled off on a new course, one not set from Constantinople. What happened?

In this book, author William Rosen examines Emperor Justinian and the world of the early 500s, showing what was happening and why. Then, he begins an examination of The Great Plague of Justinian, and shows how it unraveled the world that existed before it, and laid the groundwork for the world that was to come.

Overall, I found this to be a very interesting book. The author did a great job of examining a part of history that I must admit that I have studied very little. He presents the Emperor and the Byzantine Empire in a very interesting and informative manner. If you want to know about the very end of the Classical World, then this is a great book to get. I highly recommend this book!