New Rome: The Empire in the East (History of the Ancient World)

A comprehensive new history of the Eastern Roman Empire based on the science of the human past. As modern empires rise and fall ancient Rome becomes ever more significant. We yearn for Romes power but fear Romes ruinwill we turn out like the Romans we wonder or can we escape their fate? That question has obsessed centuries of historians and leaders who have explored diverse political religious and economic forces to explain Roman decline. Yet the decisive factor remains elusive. In New Rome Paul Stephenson looks beyond traditional texts and well-known artifacts to offer a novel scientifically minded interpretation of antiquitys end. It turns out that the descent of Rome is inscribed not only in parchments but also in ice cores and DNA. From these and other sources we learn that pollution and pandemics influenced the fate of Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire. During its final five centuries the empire in the east survived devastation by natural disasters the degradation of the human environment and pathogens previously unknown to the empires densely populated unsanitary cities. Despite the Plague of Justinian regular barbarian invasions a war with Persia and the rise of Islam the empire endured as a political entity. However Greco-Roman civilization a world of interconnected cities that had shared a common material culture for a millennium did not. Politics war and religious strife drove the transformation of Eastern Rome but they do not tell the whole story. Braiding the political history of the empire together with its urban material environmental and epidemiological history New Rome offers the most comprehensive explanation to date of the Eastern Empires transformation into Byzantium.