Justinian's Flea
Plague, Empire and the Birth of Europe
By William Rosen
Viking Adult / 384 pages / $27.95
Don't charge William Rosen with lack of ambition. Instead of biography or the thin slice of the past that has become popular with history publishers, he presents us with no less than the foundations of the modern world, as built by a man and an insect.
The result is largely successful and engaging. While the reader occasionally loses his bearings in an account that spans 10,000 miles, a dozen peoples, biology, architecture and the law, he is also amazed that Rosen packs it all into only 384 pages.
Justinian led Byzantium, the eastern half of the Roman Empire that survived as a political institution far longer than its counterpart, from A.D. 527 until 565. His capital was Constantinople, modern Istanbul, on the seam between Europe and Asia.
A peasant by birth, he gained the throne in sixth-century Constantinople as the Dark Ages descended. If anyone could have repelled the gloom, it was Justinian. He towered in intellect above his peers, possessed so much energy that his staff suspected he never slept, superbly hired and delegated to lieutenants and married a woman who was his equal in smarts and ambition.
He failed, and the failure and its aftermath is the theme of this book.
Rosen does not blame the emperor, who in his words was "one of the greatest statesmen who ever lived, combining a grand vision for the empire he ruled with the ability of seeing a dozen moves ahead of his opponents." Rather, only a god, not a man, could have defeated the forces facing Justinian. To wit:
The Prophet Muhammad, who would found a civilization that would drive Justinian's heirs from Africa, the Levant and ultimately Constantinople itself, was born five years after Justinian died.
European "barbarians" were only stayed, not vanquished. Ostrogoths, Goths, Visigoths and Vandals had swept from the east and taken over much of the western empire. Justinian pushed back, reconquering lost territories with generals Belisarius, one of the greatest who ever lived, and Narses, a eunuch who took the field when he was in his 70s. But the conquests recovered only part of the former empire, and even they were temporary.
A bacterium that had lived semi-harmlessly in mammalian stomachs for thousands of years mutated into a killer. Justinian's plague, which came to Constantinople in the early 540s, was not the first invasion by Yersinia pestis. But it was the first bubonic-plague pandemic on record.
It probably came from Egypt, whence Constantinople imported much of its wheat. It killed millions of imperial citizens and barbarians alike, an appropriate overture to the Dark Ages. Justinian survived an infection, but his empire was never the same.
Perhaps a quarter of the citizens had died. The resulting labor shortage drove up wages and costs for both agricultural production and military service. Consolidation of the empire stalled and then reversed, perhaps accelerated by the fact that Justinian had no sons.
Even so, Justinian and the flea that carried the bacillus, Rosen argues, created conditions for the formation of modern Europe.
Justinian's consolidation and rationalization of Roman law underpins the civil code across the continent. Hagia Sophia, Justinian's great Constantinople church, is one of the wonders of the world. The chaos left by imperial decline turned out to be an incubator for nation-states such as France and Spain. The plague-caused labor shortage spurred technology improvements that boosted agricultural productivity and put Europe on the path to becoming the world's first rich continent.
Rosen recognizes that linking cause and effect in the chaos of history is hazardous and often unprovable. But in this widest of wide-ranging books, he leaves no cause unconsidered and eloquently connects a flea's bite 1,465 years ago with the world as it is today.