![]() ![]() Rosen recognizes that linking cause and effect in the chaos of history is hazardous and often unprovable. 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. The chaos left by imperial decline turned out to be an incubator for nation-states such as France and Spain. Hagia Sophia, Justinian's great Constantinople church, is one of the wonders of the world. Justinian's consolidation and rationalization of Roman law underpins the civil code across the continent. Consolidation of the empire stalled and then reversed, perhaps accelerated by the fact that Justinian had no sons.Įven so, Justinian and the flea that carried the bacillus, Rosen argues, created conditions for the formation of modern Europe. The resulting labor shortage drove up wages and costs for both agricultural production and military service. ![]() Perhaps a quarter of the citizens had died. Justinian survived an infection, but his empire was never the same. It killed millions of imperial citizens and barbarians alike, an appropriate overture to the Dark Ages. It probably came from Egypt, whence Constantinople imported much of its wheat. ![]() But it was the first bubonic-plague pandemic on record. Justinian's plague, which came to Constantinople in the early 540s, was not the first invasion by Yersinia pestis. A bacterium that had lived semi-harmlessly in mammalian stomachs for thousands of years mutated into a killer. ![]()
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