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In the West, Justinian considered it his duty to regain provinces lost to the empire “through indolence,” and he could not ignore the trials of Catholics living under the rule of Arians (Christian heretics) in Italy and in North Africa.

In the face of considerable opposition from his generals and ministers, Justinian launched his attack on North Africa to aid Hilderich in June 533.

Northern Africa was reorganized as part of the empire and now included Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearic Islands, and Septem (Ceuta).

In Italy, the mother province of the Roman Empire in which the older capital city (Rome) was situated, Justinian found a situation similar to that in North Africa and particularly favourable to his ambitions.

On the northern frontier in the Balkans the Roman provinces faced continual attacks from barbarian raiders. Thrace, Dacia, and Dalmatia were harried by Bulgars and Slavs

The Slavs, and later the Bulgars, eventually succeeded in settling within the Roman provinces. Failure to keep them out is one of the criticisms sometimes made against Justinian.

He greatly stimulated legal studies, and in 528 he set up a commission to produce a new code of imperial enactments or constitutions, the Codex Constitutionum.

A second edition of the Code of Justinian containing Justinian’s own laws up to the date of issue was published in 534

Justinian was genuinely concerned with promoting the well-being of his subjects by rooting out corruption and providing easily accessible justice. This involved adequate control over provincial governors and some administrative reorganization.

the provincial governor was unwilling or not sufficiently strong to enforce good government; and with the disappearance of the larger unit of the vicariate, there was nothing left but an expensive appeal to Constantinople.

The sale of raw material was a government monopoly, and Peter Barsymes, Justinian’s finance minister, extended this to silk fabrics, thus creating another lucrative state monopoly.

It was therefore the duty of Justinian, as it was for later Byzantine emperors, to promote the good government of the church and to uphold orthodox teaching. This explains why so many of his laws deal in detail with religious problems.

Toward the end of his reign, Justinian to some extent withdrew from public affairs and was occupied with theological problems. He even lapsed into heresy when, at the end of 564, he issued an edict stating that the human body of Christ was incorruptible and only seemed to suffer

Located on the European side of the Bosporus (the strait linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean), the site of Byzantium was ideally located to serve as a transit and trade point between Europe and Asia.

In the west, constant attacks from German invaders such as the Visigoths broke the struggling empire down piece by piece until Italy was the only territory left under Roman control. In 476, the barbarian Odoacer overthrew the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, and Rome had fallen.

The eastern half of the Roman Empire proved less vulnerable to external attack, thanks in part to its geographic location.

As a result of these advantages, the Eastern Roman Empire, variously known as the Byzantine Empire or Byzantium, was able to survive for centuries after the fall of Rome.

Even after the Islamic empire absorbed Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem in the seventh century, the Byzantine emperor would remain the spiritual leader of most eastern Christians.

Justinian I, who took power in 527 and would rule until his death in 565, was the first great ruler of the Byzantine Empire

Justinian also reformed and codified Roman law, establishing a Byzantine legal code that would endure for centuries and help shape the modern concept of the state.

By the end of the century, Byzantium would lose Syria, the Holy Land, Egypt and North Africa (among other territories) to Islamic forces.

Known as Iconoclasm—literally “the smashing of images”—the movement waxed and waned under various rulers, but did not end definitively until 843, when a Church council under Emperor Michael III ruled in favor of the display of religious images.

Though it stretched over less territory, Byzantium had more control over trade, more wealth and more international prestige than under Justinian.

Monks administered many institutions (orphanages, schools, hospitals) in everyday life, and Byzantine missionaries won many converts to Christianity

The end of the 11th century saw the beginning of the Crusades, the series of holy wars waged by European Christians against Muslims in the Near East from 1095 to 1291.

During the rule of the Palaiologan emperors, beginning with Michael VIII in 1261, the economy of the once-mighty Byzantine state was crippled, and never regained its former stature.

The fall of Constantinople marked the end of a glorious era for the Byzantine Empire.

In the centuries leading up to the final Ottoman conquest in 1453, the culture of the Byzantine Empire–including literature, art, architecture, law and theology–flourished even as the empire itself faltered.

Long after its end, Byzantine culture and civilization continued to exercise an influence on countries that practiced its Eastern Orthodox religion, including Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece, among others.

Constantine decided it was best to locate his new city at the site of old Byzantium, claiming it to be a New Rome (Nova Roma).

One of Constantine’s early concerns was to provide enough water for the citizenry.  While Old Rome didn’t have the problem, New Rome faced periods of intense drought in the summer and early autumn and torrential rain in the winter

Religion took on new meaning in the empire. Although Constantine openly supported Christianity (his mother was one), historians doubt whether or not he truly ever became a Christian, waiting until his deathbed to convert. 

In 330 CE, Constantine consecrated the Empire’s new capital, a city which would one day bear the emperor’s name. Constantinople would become the economic and cultural hub of the east and the center of both Greek classics and Christian ideals.

Under the leadership of his brilliant general Belisarius, Justinian expanded the empire to include North Africa, Spain and Italy. Sadly, he would be the last of the truly great emperors; the empire would fall into gradual decline after his death until the Ottoman Turks conquered the city in 1453 CE.

One of the darker moments during his reign was the Nika Revolt.  It started as a riot at the hippodrome between two sport factions, the blues and greens. Both were angry at Justinian for some of his recent policy decisions and openly opposed his appearance at the games.

he riot expanded to the streets where looting and fires broke out. The main gate of the imperial palace, the Senate house, public baths, and many residential houses and palaces were all destroyed

Forty days later Justinian began the construction of a new church; a new Hagia Sophia.

Much of the rebuilding, however, was lost during the Fourth Crusade (1202 -1204 CE) when the city was plundered and burned, not by the Muslims, but by the Christians who had initially been called to repel invaders but sacked the city themselves. Crusaders roamed the city, tombs were vandalized, churches desecrated, and Justinian’s sarcophagus was opened and his body flung aside. The city and the empire never recovered from the Crusades leaving them vulnerable for the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE.

Although basically Turkic, the Khazar state bore little resemblance to the other Turkic empires of central Eurasia. It was headed by a secluded supreme ruler of semireligious character called a khagan—who wielded little real power—and by tribal chieftains, each known as a beg.

The state’s military organization also seems to have lacked the forcefulness of those of the greater Turkic-Mongol empires. The Khazars seem to have been more inclined to a sedentary way of life, building towns and fortresses, tilling the soil, and planting gardens and vineyards.

Whatever the case may be, religious tolerance was practiced in the Khazar empire, and paganism continued to flourish among the population.

The prominence and influence of the Khazar state was reflected in its close relations with the Byzantine emperors: Justinian II (704) and Constantine V (732) each had a Khazar wife. The main source of revenue for the empire stemmed from commerce and particularly from Khazar control of the east-west trade route that linked the Far East with Byzantium and the north-south route linking the Arab empire with northern Slavic lands.

Despite the relatively high level of Khazar civilization and the wealth of data about the Khazars that is preserved in Byzantine and Arab sources, not a single line of the Khazar language has survived.

Frank M. Snowden, a Yale historian who studies pandemics, wrote in his book “Epidemics and Society” that definitive accounts of this plague have largely vanished.

History Today, a monthly magazine of historical writing published in London, calls this pandemic “the greatest catastrophe ever.” The number of deaths — 200 million — is just astounding. Put it this way: That would be like wiping out roughly 65 percent of the current U.S. population. (Covid-19 disease modeling predicts U.S. deaths to potentially reach 240,000.)

Like the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death was caused by the bubonic plague.

Explorers arrived to the New World bearing more than just turnips and grapes. They also brought smallpox, measles and other viruses for which New World inhabitants had no immunity.

it is estimated that upwards of 80–95 percent of the Native American population was decimated within the first 100–150 years following 1492

Again, blame the rats with those pesky fleas on their backs: “They were attracted by city streets filled with rubbish and waste, especially in the poorest areas,” according to the National Archives in England. While doctors, lawyers and royalty fled town, the poor were ravaged by the disease

There were no treatments. If you caught it, you had roughly two weeks to live. This caused people to become desperate.

The epidemic that swept London in 1854 spawned the sort of epidemiological investigations that take place in disease outbreaks today. That’s thanks to John Snow, an English physician who almost single-handedly took on the bacteria. While some scientists suspected cholera was transmitted through the air, Snow thought otherwise. “Through carefully mapping the outbreak, he finds that everyone affected has a single connection in common: they have all retrieved water from the local Broad Street pump,”

according to a CDC history. He ordered the pump-handle turned off, and people stopped getting sick.

In 1793, yellow fever swept through Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital, killing roughly 10 percent of the population. President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson high-tailed it out of town, ultimately settling on Washington as the nation’s capital.

It wasn’t until 1900 that U.S. Army researchers “pinpointed mosquitoes as the transmission vector for the disease,” according to a vaccine history project at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

The covid-19 pandemic has inspired lots of comparisons to the 1918 flu, sometimes called the Spanish flu, which got its name not because it originated in Spain but because it was World War I, and Spain was the only country being honest about the toll the pandemic took on the country.

The flu came in two waves, starting in 1918 and ending in 1920. The number of infected is staggering —as many as 500 million, with estimates of 50 million deaths worldwide, according to the CDC.

One man saw it coming: Maurice Hilleman. The doctor later regarded as the godfather of vaccines was working at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 1957 when he read a New York Times article about a nasty flu outbreak in Hong Kong that mentioned glassy-eyed children at a clinic.

Hilleman requested samples of the virus be shipped to U.S. drugmakers right away so they could get a vaccine ready. Though 70,000 people in the United States ultimately died, “some predicted that the U.S. death toll would have reached 1 million without the vaccine that Hilleman called for,” according to the Philadelphia vaccine history project. “Health officials widely credited that vaccine with saving many lives.”

Before covid-19, this was the world’s most recent pandemic, infecting as much as 21 percent of the world’s population. Swine flu was a hodgepodge of several different flu strains that had never been collectively seen together