Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe (Audiobook)

from justindtapp

Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of EuropeThis book is primarily about the reign of Justinian (482-565 A.D.) with the bubonic plague ("The Devil") as a key world-changing component in the second half of the book. There is a lot of contextual history provided, which some critics hav...

from NielsenGW

When boats arrived in Constantinople from Egypt in 541 AD, they weren't carrying just exotic foods and trinkets. Rats and fleas from the lower holds scrambled into the new landscape, and with them came the plague. The disease swept through port cities, leaving corpses riddled with black buboes in...

from MiaCulpa

Interesting that I had never heard of Belisaurus, Khosro the great, Narses and the like, even though I'm an eager reader of history. This book is more about history than the plague, which, to be frank, it doesn't spend a lot of time on. Not that this is a bad thing because, after all, who wants t...

from romanccm

This was a really good read- extremely well written and organized. Much of the history was familiar to me from elsewhere, I don't think Rosen breaks new ground here but his synthesis of the cultural, historical, technological and, of course, bacteriologic state of the 6th century Roman empire was...

from Farree

I have been putting off reading this since August 15, 2015 (or so), because I wanted a little more coverage of the Roman Empire (and I don't currently have Gibbon in my library). I got that earlier history from 'The Climax of Rome,' by Michael Grant, which I recently finished and reviewed. Okay. ...