Dear MAGA: 20190311 Open Topic

There’s a couple of steps I left out, like the Last Great War of Antiquity — the last war between the Romans and the Persians before the coming of Islam.
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Throughout the duration of the Roman Empire the population kept falling. (They had an effective oral contraceptive, sylphium, made from a powerful form of North African fennel.)
By the time Emperor Constantine the Great made the Empire officially Christian, and moved its capital to Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople, after himself, the total population of the Mediterranean Basin and Western Europe was only a fraction of what it had been during the Julius Caesar’s day, at the end of the Roman Republic.
Whole provinces were abandoned because the Empire simply didn’t have enough people to defend that much area — Dacia (Romania), Britain, and Morocco.
There seems to have been some bounce back in population all around the Empire during the Christian Era, after Constantine’s reforms, but prior to the Plague. There also seems to have been some development of new technologies, and a kind of pre-Renaissance rebirth in art, with new techniques and styles pioneered. This was following centuries of technological loss under the heavy-handed economic regulations, monetary inflation, and population loss of the pre-Christian emperors.
The Romans and Persians cooperated to defend themselves from powerful new tribes invading from the east, but sometimes fought each other in wars in which they invaded whole provinces of the other empire. This was not always done to seize the land, but often to seize the people, and to bring them back in chains, to work the land of the invading empire.
Whole ethnic groups living near the border, who came under suspicion of plotting rebellion, were seized and moved deeper within their respective empire, where it was easier to force them to be loyal.
These wars and movements of people seem to be where the Medieval idea of serfs being bonded to the land first started.
Overall, many ideas and customs that we associate with Dark Age and/or Medieval Europe originated in these wars, or in Persia at this time, or were old Persian traditions that were borrowed into the Roman Empire at this time:
Kings wearing crowns — an old Persian custom.
Kings sharing power with powerful hereditary barons, uniting their respective military forces in time of war — based on the Persian Shahanshah (“King of Kings”) sharing power with his individuals hereditary Shahs, each the ruler of his own individual fiefdom.
Knights in armor riding around on giant armored horses — the first breed of horse big enough to carry an adult on its back was developed after the Bronze Age, which had been known for its chariot cavalry. This breeding was accomplished in Persia.
Centuries later, the first breed of horse large enough for heavy cavalry, with an armored man riding an armored horse, was developed, also in Persia.
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After 2 centuries of Christian rule that had started with Constantine, Emperor Justinian came to the throne. He was to be the last powerful Roman emperor of a more-or-less united Empire.
He was known for making himself popular in the capital with bread and circuses for the urban masses.
He also built the Hagia Sophia, the largest and most beautiful church in the world, now a museum and ex-mosque, possibly scheduled to be reconsecrated as a mosque again. He also built many other beautiful churches and religious and government buildings throughout the Empire.
Also, he built major military fortifications throughout the Empire, especially near the Persian border.
He asked a large number of attorneys to convene and standardize the legal framework, which led to the famous Justiniac Code. This is the basis of the Roman Catholic Church’s and the Orthodox Churchs’ Canon Law today, as well as the Code Civil used in France and in many European countries. By way of the French Code Civil, it is the basis for Louisiana’s state legal code.
He fought a major, very damaging and hard-fought war against the Germanic Vandal kingdom, finally kicking the Vandals out of North Africa, and restoring North Africa to the Empire, including Carthage, which had been the wealthiest western province. Then he launched two major wars, extremely damaging, against the Germanic Ostrogoth tribe in Italy, restoring Italy to the Empire, also.
And he started a major war in the East, the second-to-last against the pre-Islamic Persian Empire.
Well, needless to say, all these bread and circuses, religious, civilian, and military construction projects, legal reforms, and, especially, wars, were extremely costly.
Worse, North Africa and Italy, formerly the wealthiest areas of the Western Empire, before being invaded by Germans in the previous century, were temporarily wrecked by the wars to recapture them. So they contributed nothing to the tax base during Justinian’s reign. And there is a hypothesis that in 2 of the 3 wealthiest and most populous parts of the Eastern Empire, Egypt and Syria, (the 3rd being the capital city itself,) the corruption was so bad that is was difficult to get tax revenue to flow onward to Constantinople.
So Justinian financed all this spending by borrowing and by debasing the currency. So much borrowing and debasing, in fact, that he invited financial catastrophe.
In the last few years of Justinian’s reign, just as the monetary chickens were coming home to roost, and inflation and credit collapse were about to destroy the economy totally, ships trading from Egypt around the Horn of Africa inadvertently carried rats, afflicted with African fleas, into the Empire. These fleas in turn were infected with the bacteria Yersinia pestis, which had come from the original Yersinia pestis reservoir in East Africa.
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The Black Death was a pandemic that killed from 30% to 60% of Europe’s population in the 14th century, as well as millions in Asia and Africa. The deaths were concentrated in coastal areas vs. inland, in river valleys vs. uplands or dry areas, in urban vs. rural communities, and among active working adults vs. children or the elderly.
It was believed by previous generations of historians, biologists, and medical researchers that the tremendous human cost of the Black Death in Medieval Europe was due to it being a “virgin soil” epidemic. In other words, that it killed so many because neither anyone there at the time, nor their ancestors, had been exposed to the disease before. Therefore, they had developed no biological immunity to it, neither acquired immunity nor inherited immunity.
Research carried out in our day at an ancient mass grave outside Marseille, France, and confirmed in similar ancient mass graves in Germany and elsewhere, has shown that this view is, alas, incorrect. Archeologists discovered there human remains from various times, but a large number of disordered remains from one particular time span. This time proved to be consistent with Late Antiquity i.e. the Christian Era of Antiquity. This discovery indicated that many bodies had been disposed of hastily in the gravesite within a short time span, as in a severe epidemic.
Modern DNA testing of bacterial traces found in the bone marrow of the human skeletons resulted in the unexpected finding that the organism that had afflicted these people was in fact Yersinia pestis, the Black Death killer, but hundreds of years before the Black Death itself. The true Yersinia pestis virgin soil pandemic was finally identified, and it was none other than Justinian’s Plague.
The Black Death of the 14th century had struck a European population that consisted of descendants of survivors of the same bug who had lived in the 6th century. So, theoretically, they had inherited some resistance from those survivors.
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The catastrophic pandemic caused by these East African germs nearly destroyed the Empire.
And the terrific effort to recover from the disaster during the generation that followed Justinian was accompanied by a struggle for political leadership of the Empire.
This in turn led to fresh conflict with Persia, then undergoing its own internal struggles, though today only poorly documented.
And from the final war between these two badly damaged empires, was born the Saracenic crisis that, during the crucial century after Justinian, brought about the basic shape of the Mediterranean world that has lasted until today, so utterly different from the Mare Nostrum (lit. “our sea”) known to the Romans in Antiquity.
But those accounts must wait for future chapters…