Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe William Rosen In the middle of the sixth century, the world's smallest organism collided with the world's mightiest power. Twenty five million corpses later, the Roman Empire, under her last great emperor, Justinian, was decimated. Before Yersinia Pestis, the bacterium that carries bubonic plague, was through, both Rome and Persia were easy targets for the armies of Muhammad on their conquering march out of Arabia. In its wake, the plague history's first pandemic marked the end of a multinational Mediterranean imperium and the birth of European nation-states… the transition from late antiquity to the medieval world. Justinian's Flea is the story of that collision, a narrative history that weaves together evolutionary microbiology, architecture, military history, geography, rat and flea ecology, jurisprudence, theology, epidemiology, and the economics of the silk trade. The climax of Justinian's Flea - the summer of 542, when Constantinople witnessed the death of five thousand of its citizens every day - is revealed through the interactions of the remarkable people whose exploits gave form to a dramatic age: Justinian himself, of course, but also his doppelganger, the Persian Shah Khusro Anushuviran, whose empire would be so weakened by the plague that it essentially vanished; his general Belisarius, the greatest soldier of his time, whose conquests nearly preserved imperial rule in Italy and Africa; his architect, Anthemius, the mathematician engineer who built Constantinople's Hagia Sophia (and whose brother, Alexander, was the greatest physician of the plague years); Tribonian, the jurist who compiled the Justinianic Code, the source of Europe's tradition of civil law; and, finally, his empress, Theodora, the one-time prostitute who became coruler of the empire, the most politically powerful woman in European history until Elizabeth I. […] William Rosen was a senior executive at Macmillan and Simon & Schuster publishing houses for more than twenty-five years. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey. Justinian's Flea is his first book.