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Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire presents the first analytical account in English of the history of subsistence crises and epidemic diseases in Late Antiquity. Based on a catalogue of all such events in the East Roman/Byzantine empire between 284 and 750, it gives an authoritative analysis of the causes, effects and internal mechanisms of these crises and incorporates modern medical and physiological data on epidemics and famines. Its interest is both in the history of medicine and the history of Late Antiquity, especially its social and demographic aspects. Stathakopoulos develops models of crises that apply not only to the society of the late Roman and early Byzantine world, but also to early modern and even contemporary societies in Africa or Asia. This study is therefore both a work of reference for information on particular events (e.g. the 6th-century Justinianic plague) and a comprehensive analysis of subsistence crises and epidemics as agents of historical causation. As such it makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate on Late Antiquity, bringing a fresh perspective to comment on the characteristic features that shaped this period and differentiate it from Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
“A vivid story of Byzantium’s existence over the span of 1,100 years . . . . this work may well become the standard English-language history of Byzantium.” —Library Journal This is the first comprehensive and up-to-date history of Byzantium to appear in almost sixty years, and the first ever to cover both the Byzantine state and Byzantine society. It begins in A.D. 285, when the emperor Diocletian separated what became Byzantium from the western Roman Empire, and ends in 1461, when the last Byzantine outposts fell to the Ottoman Turks. Spanning twelve centuries and three continents, the Byzantine Empire linked the ancient and modern worlds, shaping and transmitting Greek, Roman, and Christian traditions—including the Greek classics, Roman law, and Christian theology—that remain vigorous today, not only in Eastern Europe and the Middle East but throughout Western civilization. Though in its politics Byzantium often resembled a third-world dictatorship, it has never yet been matched in maintaining a single state for so long, over a wide area inhabited by heterogeneous peoples. Drawing on a wealth of original sources and modern works, the author treats political and social developments as a single vivid story, told partly in detailed narrative and partly in essays that clarify long-term changes. He avoids stereotypes and rejects such old and new historical orthodoxies as the persistent weakness of the Byzantine economy and the pervasive importance of holy men in Late Antiquity. Without neglecting underlying social, cultural, and economic trends, the author shows the often-crucial impact of nearly a hundred Byzantine emperors and empresses. What the emperor or empress did, or did not do, could rapidly confront ordinary Byzantines with economic ruin, new religious doctrines, or conquest by a foreign power. Much attention is also paid to the complex life of the court and bureaucracy that has given us the adjective “byzantine.” The major personalities include such famous names as Constantine, Justinian, Theodora, and Heraclius, along with lesser-known figures like Constans II, Irene, Basil II the Bulgar-Slayer, and Michael VIII Palaeologus. Byzantine civilization emerges as durable, creative, and realistic, overcoming repeated setbacks to remain prosperous almost to the end. With 221 illustrations and 18 maps, A History of the Byzantine State and Society should long remain the standard history of Byzantium not just for students and scholars but for all readers. “Fluently written for the general reader.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “Though several others have recently assayed to cover the complex history of the Eastern Roman Empire . . . none has done so as completely and satisfactorily as Treadgold.” —Libraries & Culture
The Second Edition of A History of the Later Roman Empire features extensive revisions and updates to the highly-acclaimed, sweeping historical survey of the Roman Empire from the accession of Diocletian in AD 284 to the death of Heraclius in 641. Features a revised narrative of the political history that shaped the late Roman Empire Includes extensive changes to the chapters on regional history, especially those relating to Asia Minor and Egypt Offers a renewed evaluation of the decline of the empire in the later sixth and seventh centuries Places a larger emphasis on the military deficiencies, collapse of state finances, and role of bubonic plague throughout the Europe in Rome’s decline Includes systematic updates to the bibliography
Recent advances in research show that the distinctive features of high medieval civilization began developing centuries earlier than previously thought. The era once dismissed as a "Dark Age" now turns out to have been the long morning of the medieval millennium: the centuries from AD 500 to 1000 witnessed the dawn of developments that were to shape Europe for centuries to come. In 2004, historians, art historians, archaeologists, and literary specialists from Europe and North America convened at Harvard University for an interdisciplinary conference exploring new directions in the study of that long morning of medieval Europe, the early Middle Ages. Invited to think about what seemed to each the most exciting new ways of investigating the early development of western European civilization, this impressive group of international scholars produced a wide-ranging discussion of innovative types of research that define tomorrow's field today. The contributors, many of whom rarely publish in English, test approaches extending from using ancient DNA to deducing cultural patterns signified by thousands of medieval manuscripts of saints' lives. They examine the archaeology of slave labor, economic systems, disease history, transformations of piety, the experience of power and property, exquisite literary sophistication, and the construction of the meaning of palace spaces or images of the divinity. The book illustrates in an approachable style the vitality of research into the early Middle Ages, and the signal contributions of that era to the future development of western civilization. The chapters cluster around new approaches to five key themes: the early medieval economy; early medieval holiness; representation and reality in early medieval literary art; practices of power in an early medieval empire; and the intellectuality of early medieval art and architecture. Michael McCormick's brief introductions open each part of the volume; synthetic essays by accomplished specialists conclude them. The editors summarize the whole in a synoptic introduction. All Latin terms and citations and other foreign-language quotations are translated, making this work accessible even to undergraduates. The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies presents innovative research across the wide spectrum of study of the early Middle Ages. It exemplifies the promising questions and methodologies at play in the field today, and the directions that beckon tomorrow.
Yaron Ayalon explores the Ottoman Empire's history of natural disasters and its responses on a state, communal, and individual level.
Economic archaeology and ancient economic history have boomed the past decades. The former thanks to greatly enhanced techniques to identify, collect, and interpret material remains as proxies for economic interactions and performance; the latter by embracing the frameworks of new institutional economics. Both disciplines, however, still have great difficulty talking with each other. There is no reliable method to convert ancient proxy-data into the economic indicators used in economic history. In turn, the shared cultural belief-systems underlying institutions and the symbolic ways in which these are reproduced remain invisible in the material record. This book explores ways to bring both disciplines closer together by building a theoretical and methodological framework to evaluate and integrate archaeological proxy-data in economic history research. Rather than the linear interpretations offered by neoclassical or neomalthusian models, we argue that complexity economics, based on system theory, offers a promising way forward.
From the acclaimed author of Miracle Cure and The Third Horseman, the epic story of the collision between one of nature's smallest organisms and history's mightiest empire During the golden age of the Roman Empire, Emperor Justinian reigned over a territory that stretched from Italy to North Africa. It was the zenith of his achievements and the last of them. In 542 AD, the bubonic plague struck. In weeks, the glorious classical world of Justinian had been plunged into the medieval and modern Europe was born. At its height, five thousand people died every day in Constantinople. Cities were completely depopulated. It was the first pandemic the world had ever known and it left its indelible mark: when the plague finally ended, more than 25 million people were dead. Weaving together history, microbiology, ecology, jurisprudence, theology, and epidemiology, Justinian's Flea is a unique and sweeping account of the little known event that changed the course of a continent.
The Byzantine world contained many important cities throughout its empire. Although it was not ‘urban’ in the sense of the word today, its cities played a far more fundamental role than those of its European neighbors. This book, through a collection of twenty-four chapters, discusses aspects of, and different approaches to, Byzantine urbanism from the early to late Byzantine periods. It provides both a chronological and thematic perspective to the study of Byzantine cities, bringing together literary, documentary, and archival sources with archaeological results, material culture, art, and architecture, resulting in a rich synthesis of the variety of regional and sub-regional transformations of Byzantine urban landscapes. Organized into four sections, this book covers: Theory and Historiography, Geography and Economy, Architecture and the Built Environment, and Daily Life and Material Culture. It includes more specialized accounts that address the centripetal role of Constantinople and its broader influence across the empire. Such new perspectives help to challenge the historiographical balance between ‘margins and metropolis,’ and also to include geographical areas often regarded as peripheral, like the coastal urban centers of the Byzantine Mediterranean as well as cities on islands, such as Crete, Cyprus, and Sicily which have more recently yielded well-excavated and stratigraphically sound urban sites. The Routledge Handbook of the Byzantine City provides both an overview and detailed study of the Byzantine city to specialist scholars, students, and enthusiasts alike and, therefore, will appeal to all those interested in Byzantine urbanism and society, as well as those studying medieval society in general.
A new narrative history of the east Roman field armies based on all the available sources.
“Wealth without work Pleasure without conscience Science without humanity Knowledge without character Politics without principle Commerce without morality Worship without sacrifice. https://vidjambov.blogspot.com/2023/01/book-inventory-vladimir-djambov-talmach.html ... I forgot fear. I felt God /// and light embraced me. /// And time stopped for long… /// I came back to myself ... /// The book presents the history of the evolution of mankind over a certain period of time, covering the decline of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. It discusses the events taking place in the Mediterranean, southern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia from the 6th to the 11th century, during the period of plague pandemics. It is shown that it was the plague that became the root cause of the sharp weakening of Byzantium and the Sassanian state, led to the devastation of a significant part of their territories and the complete restructuring of society, affected the demography, economy and even the political system. The book analyzes the reasons for the rise of the Arabs and the success of their campaigns of conquest, proves that the Caliphate as a state could not have emerged and occupied vast territories of its powerful neighbors if they had not been weakened and bled by the plague. The connection of pandemics with the rise and strengthening of the role of the Catholic Church in the West and Islam in the East is considered. It is shown how, with the arrival of the plague in the Caliphate, its gradual decline begins. This allows the author to deviate from the established opinion that the plague played only a secondary role in the fall of Byzantium and the Sassanid states, to conclude that it was the plague that was the real “director” of all events in the period under consideration, and that the Caliphate is the only state that was born "thanks" to the plague and was destroyed by it. The book shows how the search for countering the plague became for the Caliphate in the period from the 8th to the 11th century an impetus to accelerated evolution, comparable to the revolutionary one. This allows the author to deviate from the established opinion that the plague played only a secondary role in the fall of Byzantium and the Sassanid states, to conclude that it was the plague that was the real “director” of all events in the period under consideration, and that the Caliphate is the only state that was born "thanks" to the plague and was destroyed by it. The book shows how the search for countering the plague became for the Caliphate in the period from the 8th to the 11th century an impetus to accelerated evolution, comparable to the revolutionary one. This allows the author to deviate from the established opinion that the plague played only a secondary role in the fall of Byzantium and the Sassanid states, to conclude that it was the plague that was the real “director” of all events in the period under consideration, and that the Caliphate is the only state that was born "thanks" to the plague and was destroyed by it. The book shows how the search for countering the plague became for the Caliphate in the period from the 8th to the 11th century an impetus to accelerated evolution, comparable to the revolutionary one. /// A PANDEMIC is a history of wars against humanity, a struggle where, at the end of the day, human evolution, after initial failures, eventually won out. /// For one and a half thousand years, mankind has not stopped talking, debating and writing about the plague. This is understandable. The plague destroyed empires and forced to change the economic structure of civilizations, under its influence, whether new religions arose and new ethnic groups were formed. /// The book offered to the reader's attention is an attempt to penetrate into the essence of the plague problem, an attempt to comprehend its nature, to dispel the mysteries that envelop it. But my main goal is to raise an issue that goes beyond conventional wisdom. No serious historian denies that the plague has played a role in the history of civilizations. But for them the problem of the epidemic remained in the background for a long time, since all attention was focused on the analysis of the development of states, societies, economies and civilizations. At the same time, epidemics were viewed as some kind of external forces, although capable of causing disorder in the social order, but having nothing to do with the course of world history. The author of these lines is convinced that this is a clear underestimation of pandemics, which occupy the first place in importance in the changes taking place with humanity. /// My book is the history of the evolution of mankind at a certain period of time, the time of the decline of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. It has seven main parts. The first is directly based on Greek, Syrian and Muslim sources about the plague. I will have to consider in detail the events in the time frame from the 6th to the 8th centuries, including the rise and fall of Byzantium, the impact of the epidemic, which led to serious devastation in its territories and a complete restructuring of society, as well as the process of the formation of a completely new civilization, which is now commonly called the civilization of the West. In the same period, from the 6th to the 8th century, the rise and spread of the conquest campaigns of the Muslims, the rise and fall of the Umayyad Caliphate (in the 5th part) took place. From the 6th to the 8th century, we see the flourishing of the scientific upsurge of the Muslim Renaissance under the rule of the Abbasids. It must be said that it is the history of the Caliphate that can serve as a brilliant confirmation of the omnipotence of the plague. This empire, most likely, would not have arisen if Byzantium and the Sassanian state were not covered by pandemics. The Caliphate was born "thanks to" the plague, but it also destroyed him. /// In my book, I propose to look at history precisely through such a prism, using facts about epidemics and assigning them a key role in the historical events that happened to our ancestors. The interaction of disease with a species as a kind of test for survival in the face of mass mortality, the consequences of epidemic-induced genetic selection, manifested in the demographic processes of countries that have survived pandemics - this is what catches the eye in an unbiased analysis.