![]() ![]() ![]() Another section is devoted to Justinian’s courtship and lifelong love affair with Theodora-of-the-aforementioned-sex-act (actually, her name up until she married him was Theodora-from-the-brothel – seriously), his fascination with the more arcane elements of Christian dogma, his law code and the refinements he made to the fine arts of bureaucracy, and his exhaustive but unsuccessful attempts to reconquer the western empire. Rosen covers the events that caused the Roman empire to split into its eastern and western halves, the barbarian invasions and other events that caused the western empire to fall in 479 C.E., and the rise of Justinian. This is a historian who believes in using a wide-angle lens. To give you a sense of what Rosen is like as a storyteller, with the exception of a few paragraphs in the introduction, the bubonic plague makes its appearance in the book on page 162. in the Mediterranean and surrounding areas – in particular in the area of ending what we think of as the “ancient” way of life and ushering in what is usually called the medieval world. The stated purpose of this book is to explore the effects of the massive outbreak of bubonic plague beginning in 542 C.E. ![]() This is the sort of history book I love – multidisciplinary, oriented around synthesis rather than analysis, and not afraid to go into detail about a sex act that a certain former empress of the Eastern Roman Empire liked to perform with a goose (I’m not telling, but it’s on pp. ![]()
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