"The Last Days" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westerfeld Scott)
PART II AUDITIONS
The Plague of Justinian was the first time the Black Death appeared.
Fifteen hundred years ago, the emperor Justinian had just embarked on his greatest work: the rebuilding of the Roman Empire. He wanted to reunite its two halves and place the known world under Roman rule once more.
But as his vast war began, the Black Death came. It swept across the eastern Mediterranean, leaving millions dead in its wake. Thousands died daily in the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, and Justinian was forced to watch his dreams crumble.
Oddly, historians aren’t certain what the Black Death was. Bubonic plague? Typhus? Something else? A few historians suggest that it was a random assortment of diseases brought on by one overriding factor: an explosion of the rat population fostered by the Roman army’s vast stores of grain.
That’s close, but not quite.
Whatever caused it, the Black Death’s effects were clear. The Roman Empire slipped into history at last. Much of the mathematics, literature, and science of the ancients was lost. A dark age descended on Europe.
Or, as we said back then, “Humanity lost that round.”