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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Needs more insight, less hobby-horse, March 23, 2009
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.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Loaded with history, but off target, May 9, 2009
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.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heavy, but Good, September 8, 2008
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+
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