History.
A Blog about "The Late Antique Little Ice Age."
We rightly fear climate change in the form of global warming, but in the later Roman Empire, the greater danger was sudden sharp cooling. While the Western half of the empire fell, the Eastern, Greek half of the empire,

Now centered on New Rome, a.k.a. Constantinople, thrived.
In fact, during the reign of Justinian (who ruled from 527 to 65), the Roman Empire found new glory. In the first part of his reign, Justinian codified all of Roman law,

Went on the grandest building spree in Christian history (including erecting the Hagia Sophia), and took back Roman Africa and Italy.
But then came perhaps the worst environmental catastrophe yet:
To be continued....

-The dual blow of a little ice age and yet another pandemic. In the 530s and 540s, volcanic eruptions rocked the globe. We have long known that in the year 536 there was no summer; for about 15 months, the sun seemed to shine only dimly, unnerving people worldwide. -

-First, in AD 536, there was a massive eruption in the Northern Hemisphere. Second, in AD 539/40, a tropical volcano erupted. The result was not just a year of darkness but truly staggering global cooling: The decade 536 to 545 was the coldest decade of the last 2000 years,

-with average summer temperatures in Europe falling by up to 2.5 degrees Celsius. And this was no passing phenomenon. For a century and a half, colder temperatures prevailed across large parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Just as the climate started to turn colder,-

-the plague appeared on the Southern shores of the Mediterranean — in AD 541. This was true bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the agent of the more famous medieval Black Death. The plague is at root a disease of rodents, -

-and had been endemic among social burrowing rodents in central Asia. It probably traveled to Rome across the trading networks that carried silks from China to the Mediterranean. The plague first spread from one rodent species to another, carried by fleas -

-ultimately infecting black rats, which live in close quarters with humans. Once the bacterium reached the rats of the Roman Empire, it was mayhem.
TBC-

This precursor to the more famous European “Black Death” of the middle ages may have carried off half of the entire population of the Roman Empire. The immediate (and insuperable) problem was disposing of the corpses; -

-the longer-range problem was managing an empire with a severely weakened tax base and a serious manpower shortage — including in the army.
What’s more, the first pandemic inspired a wave of apocalyptic fervor. The pandemic not only wrecked Justinian’s dream of restoring glory.-

-it triggered a spiral of dissolution and state failure that stretched over the next century. One insidious aspect of plague is that it does not vanish after its initial work. It became permanently established in rodent colonies inside the Roman Empire and broke out repeatedly,-

-every 10 to 20 years, unleashing new destruction each time. This helped push the Romans past the breaking point. By the middle of the seventh century, very little remained of the “eternal empire.”

END.