Until just now, when digging up a graveyard and doing some testing turned up the plague bacterium on the bodies.
The reporter obviously needed a swoopy angle for the headline, however, and went with the sensational pop science History Channel-esque dubious conclusion
:Which reminds me of Tom Cruise's character in Collateral telling Jamie Foxx's cabdriver that he didn't kill the guy whose bullet-riddled corpse had plummeted five floors to land on the taxi's roof, he "just shot him; the bullets and the fall killed him."
24 comments:
Tam: I have "Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire" (http://goo.gl/yb5Rt)if you'd like to borrow it sometime. Good read. It helped me to understand in part why the Arabs took control of so much territory so quickly; it was depopulated.
Shermlock,
I've read it; it was an interesting book!
Justinian'a Obamaesque spending also weakened the Eastern Roman Empire. But a 30 year war with Persia that enervated the Late Roman state just as the Islamic barbarians boiled up out of Arabia was perhaps a more critical factor. In short order they lost Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Carthage.
Sorry, I had a non-public school education, and checking my toes, a Western Roman Empire that ended in 476 must have been hit by one helluva slow germinating plague bacterium if it, somewhere after 500 A.D. (the Sixth century) had anything to do with toppling an empire that had already been kaput for >24 years.
The fact that the Byzantine half of the Roman Empire survived another 1200 years (until 1453) is evidently lost on that drooling scribbler as well.
So evidentally neither history nor math are required for the @$$clowns posting at HuffPo.
I can only await, with breathless anticipation, the future story that it was the zeppelin Hindenburg which made the Titanic sink, because the flash from the explosion wasso bright it blinded the ship's lookouts 21 years earlier. Or that the Chinese invention of gunpowder in 1040 was directly responsible for JFK getting shot in Dallas a mere 923 years later.
Farking iceholes, all of them.
I kinda think the "Roman" empire was already in a bit of trouble before the plague hit. It was gone in the west, and changed into what was essentially an oriental state two or three leagues beyond Constantinople.
I'm amazed at how much of the Eastern Empire's political organization was borrowed from that of the Persian Empire. Essentially a collection of rather poorly run satrapies, it stayed cohesive primarily by buying off it's enemies, who were, for the most part, second string horse barbarians.
Their army was technologically amazing, but tiny for the job required of it, and capable only of reenforcing selected allies (or putting down riots and butchering opposition parties).
The weaknesses of the Byzantines were matched by the Pasdaran class in Persia, so the endless border wars dragged on inconclusively for centuries, fought by small numbers of professionals and modest numbers of cannon fodder (onagre fodder?).
The weakness left by the plague certainly made it easier for the Arab expansion into what was a political vacuum, but beyond Persia, which at the time couldn't even keep Circassian bandits out of the country, the Arabs mostly conquered people who wanted to be conquered. I.E., they took over Roman North Africa as an economic base.
Most of the urban population was dead or fled, and the endless tens of thousands of miles of irrigation were dry due to the collapse of a central authority to keep the system running. When the Arabs started it up again, everybody was wealthy, and Islam looked like a winner. It wasn't.
When they invaded Europe they met real soldiers in real numbers for the first time, and got their hineys kicked. By the mid 11th century, the Moorish states in southern Spain were buying weapons from their supposed enemies in northern Spain, as well as hiring mercenaries from Galicia and Asturias in the north. Boabdil, the last leader of Moorish Spain, was the product of five centuries of Gallician blondes for mothers, and had to dye his hair and beard black to look the part on his annual procession around the walls of Granada.
The only reason Islam lasted as long as it did on the Iberian peninsula was the infighting between the Christian states in the north, caused in no small part by a deserved mistrust of Castilian hegemony, and the very large financial interest Galicia, Asturias, and Cantabria had in continuing the Moorish states in the south.
The gamechanger was the arrival of the Turks. They took over the Byzantine Empire rather than destroying it, adopted Islam to keep their various tribes united, and kept on rolling west until the Europeans pulled their collective head out of their collective butt long enough to develop coordinated resistance to the onslaught.
Essentially, the Crusades would have been fought even if everybody on both sides had been Moslem, Christian, or Bleeding Unitarian.
Plagues happen, and are devastating at the time, but even the major bubonic plague of the mid-14th century only shifted the Kondratiev wave (economic activity) about 50 years, the time it took to rebuild a population sufficient to keep things moving.
But Yersina Pestis is only endemic among starving people whose resistance has been lowered by malnutrition, something more likely blamed on global cold spells shortening growing seasons.
The world was even more vulnerable than usual in the mis-14th century, as the medieval warm period that ended a few decades before had encouraged a massive population growth, the same as the latter part of the western Roman empire.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the cycle of solar warming and cooling is the primary culprit, with plagues and folkwanderungs being attendant results.
Aesop,
Justinian was well on the way to consolidating a lot of the western Mediterranean littoral back under Byzantine rule when his plans came a-cropper.
Whether that was due to a plague bacillus or the fact that the Gothic wars kicked the corpse of the empire to shreds is open for discussion, but the headline filters serious scholarly issues down to Hollywood History mush.
Also this book, which ties the plague outbreak to a volcanic eruption of the Krakatoa sort.
I don't know how well the author's theory held up though.
He figures the plague into the decline of post-Roman, Celtic Britain and the rise of Anglo-Saxon England.
Chas S: I think he's stretching it a bit. Most plagues come from China, which got it's first sewer in the 1920's, when the Brits put one in Shanghai.
I believe the first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague in Europe was in Kiev, delivered with a bunch of Chinese furs headed to Italy.
Celtic Britain didn't need any plagues to get diddled, it had a bigger problem in being filled with Celts. They were probably the best individual scrappers around, but spent most of their time feuding with each other, rarely capable of united action.
Also, they lived on an island, but didn't have control of the surrounding seas, giving the opposition the option of landing where ever it wanted to and booking if there was to much local pressure. Essentially, if cousin Joe's place got raided three bogs and a hilltop away, it was burned flat by the time the clan had rallied and gotten to it.
Look at a map of England, and notice the geographic variety of place names. Celtic dun, don, and den endings in the hilly west, with Saxon wick, ham, and field in the low fertile east. Especially on or near navigable rivers running in from the sea.
The Saxons were primarily grain farmers and wanted good bottom land. The Celts were mostly herdsman and hunters, so the (then) forested western hills became their stronghold. Light cavalry versus marines, each ending up with what he could best defend.
The Saxons eventually got the Vikings off their backs with a strong navy. They let it wither and ended up with the Normans.
Silly me. I thought that what ended the Roman Empire was Turkish cannon in 1453.
The Celts in England had emptyness.
The Romans invaded Britain and brought will.
The Saxons invaded Britain and brought wishes.
The Norse invaded Britain and brought want.
The Normans invaded and brought desire.
One can do the samething with various works for what goes into a cesspool.
Plague Helped End Roman Empire, Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.
'Nony, both sides had cannon. The Turks had the entire country except for Constantinople, which was kept in existence primarily by the western powers through seabourn resupply. The Turks wisely used their cannon to close the dardanelles to western shipping, and the rest followed.
And, as is often the case, Woodman wins the daily giggle.
"a Western Roman Empire that ended in 476"
Someone must have forgotten to tell Freddie Redbeard that.
@Ed Foster
That book suggested a plague reservoir in East Africa, I believe.
Rather than generalize about quasi-racial characteristics of Celts (who are a language group, not a race anyway), the suggestion was that post-Roman Britain was tied in to the Mediterranean trade networks, whereas the Anglo-Saxons were not so much.
These trade connections exposed the Celtic-speaking population in the south and west to the plague.
Or so the author argues.
@Noah D
"Someone must have forgotten to tell Freddie Redbeard that."
The Holy Roman Empire was three lies for the price of one, being none of the above.
If you can find any supporting evidence that Freddy ruled in the name of "the people and the Senate of Rome" (SPQR) 700 years after Rome was sacked more times than Piers Morgan, their emperor deposed, and they were conquered and ruled over by generaions of foreign kings for seven centuries, feel free to post it.
Otherwise, you're arguing that Sam and John Addams were just wayward MPs from the Boston district, caretaking until the Parliament could reassert the Crown's supremacy.
I'm going with the hypothesis of people like Gibbon and the Durants, that after decades of decline, Rome fell exactly when it fell, finally, in 476AD.
The Tarrantine War (1607-1615) and raids on the southeast coast of New England until the 1630's with fierarms traded from the French also decimated the Native American population, allowing the Plymouth Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony to become established in abandoned former Native American settlements.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Port_St_Louis_Annotated.png
http://books.google.com/books?id=NYH8tU0IO3gC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=tarrantine+war&source=bl&ots=j9rRvW6Jy5&sig=m-RvTKxr1n70tGFnlxirfYXLmZE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=zFCUUbreL4W68wT23YDQCQ&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=tarrantine%20war&f=false
http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~jmh4/nativeamerican/wampanoag/wampanoag.htm
i had a really good post to contribute to this discussion but now i'm drunk, so fukit.
Maybe Critter wins.
Aesop,
"I'm going with the hypothesis of people like Gibbon and the Durants, that after decades of decline, Rome fell exactly when it fell, finally, in 476AD."
It's a nice, round date, and will do for discussing history with the unwashed.
I enjoy the fact that the commentariat on my blog contains many who consider Gibbon and the Durants as a swell jumping-off point; a place to start one's weseawch of the Glowy that was Wome.
Centuwion! Thwow Aesop to the floow! Vewy woughly!
(As an aside, I started reading Grant's The Army of the Caesars yesterday and had to put it aside in the first chapter, simply because so much of what we knew about Roman legionary equipment in '74 turned out to be... Well, it was like reading a book about dinosaurs from 1974; everything all lumbering around and dragging its tail.)
The Arab invasions did not take place for a almost a century after Justinian's time. His generals Belisarius and Narses reconquered Carthage from the Vandals and then Italy from the Goths. Justinian also regained the SE coast of Spain, Ceuta, the Balearics, Sardinia, Sicily, and the eastern coast of the Adriatic. The Spanish holdings were eventually lost to the Visigoths. Italy was invaded by the Lombards who soon controlled areas to the north and south of what would become the Papal States. The actual capital of the Western Empire at the time of the "Fall" was Ravenna, and it remained the capital of the Gothic kingdom and later the Exarchate of Ravenna established by the Byzantines to hold their possessions there. Those were whittled away over time by the Lombards but the Exarchate didn't fall until 751. (IIRC the Senate in Rome continued to meet until about this time.) Pepin the Short defeated the Lombards for the Pope a couple of years later and gave him the lands that had been the Exarchate, which then became the Papal States. The Exarchate of Carthage did not fall until a little before 700. Justinian's "reconquista" was very expensive and stretched the resources of the Romans too thinly. Building projects like the Hagia Sofia were a further drain. The plague killed Justinian's wife Theodora in 548, so they should have had time to repopulate before the Battle of Yarmuk in 636 was lost to the Muslims.
The army of Justinian did rely heavily on mercenaries. The theme system was not established until after the loss of the Egypt, Syria and Palestine. It was a defensive system that worked quite well and shielded Christendom from Islam in the East for centuries.
RE: Fall of Constantinople in 1453, both sides had cannon, but the Turks employed massive bombards produced by a Hungarian engineer to breach the walls.
Dave Willard,
I'm sure you didn't mean to sound patronizing.
No, I didn't. Sorry to have bothered you.
I heard the Romans worked hard at making lots of neat stuff and were all advanced or something. Then they weren't.
Someone should look into it.
Post a Comment