New Rome
The Empire in the East
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- $35.99
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
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 Rome’s power but fear Rome’s ruin—will 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 antiquity’s 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 empire’s 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 Empire’s transformation into Byzantium.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Stephenson (Constantine) delivers a sweeping survey of the disintegration of the western Roman empire and the emergence of Byzantium, the Christian empire centered in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). Covering the period from the division of the Roman empire between eastern and western rulers in 395 CE to the Muslim conquests of the seventh century, Stephenson draws on the "new science of Roman history" to reveal how climate change, pandemics, invading tribes, and near-constant warfare led to the decline of ancient cities whose culture and tax revenues underpinned the imperial system. For example, radionuclide and cave mineral deposits reveal that the empire experienced a long period of declining sunlight and less rain beginning in the middle of the fourth century, which contributed to a loss in cultivable land and the disruption of trade networks. Stephenson also delves into doctrinal disputes within Christianity, details rulers' efforts to ban "public spectacles and entertainments" that often led to riots, explains how the "existential" war between Rome and Persia weakened both empires' abilities to withstand Arab invasions, and notes the rise in apocalyptic literature as the western Roman empire broke apart. Skillfully interweaving economic, environmental, and social history, this impressive chronicle offers an eye-opening perspective on a period of dramatic change.
