Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]
Author: | Language: English | ISBN: B000R51QZQ | Format: PDF, EPUB
Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe
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Books with free ebook downloads available Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe
Posts about Download The Book Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
The emperor Justinian reunified Rome's fractured empire by defeating the Goths and Vandals who had separated Italy, Spain, and North Africa from imperial rule. At his capital in Constantinople, he built the world's most beautiful building, married the most powerful empress, and wrote the empire's most enduring legal code, seemingly restoring Rome's fortunes for the next five hundred years. Then, in the summer of 542, he encountered a flea. The ensuing outbreak of bubonic plague killed 5,000 people a day in Constantinople and nearly killed Justinian himself.
In Justinian's Flea, William Rosen tells the story of history's first pandemic - a plague seven centuries before the Black Death that killed tens of millions, devastated the empires of Persia and Rome, left a path of victims from Ireland to Iraq, and opened the way for the armies of Islam. Weaving together evolutionary microbiology, economics, military strategy, ecology, and ancient and modern medicine, Rosen offers a sweeping narrative of one of the great hinge moments in history, one that will appeal to readers of John Kelly's The Great Mortality, John Barry's The Great Influenza, and Jared Diamond's Collapse.
Books with free ebook downloads available Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 11 hours and 51 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Tantor Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: May 22, 2007
- Language: English
- ASIN: B000R51QZQ
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.
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.
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