Kyle Harper

But even the fact that it's killing 50% of the people in cities, in provinces, in countries is just beyond the damage that other plagues do.

Yeah, I mean, that's a great comparison, right?

And not just sort of like decline and fall of dynasties, but also like geographic changes in the configuration that parts get added and parts get...

get cleaved off, but you still kind of think of it as fundamental continuity in the core, like that to me is a very, very plausible counterfactual.

Like Justinian, the emperor in the 540s, he reigns from the 520s to the 560s.

He's on a path of success.

He's retaken Africa.

He's mostly retaken Italy when the plague hits.

Like to me, a very plausible counterfactual is that a more or less Mediterranean core –

of the Roman Empire could have survived east and west, so it does sort of survive in the east, but even including really all of Italy, Africa, and probably Spain, that would have been, to me, a very, very reasonable outcome of the sixth century if you hadn't had this kind of random shock.

That there would be this, you know, the Roman Empire would keep going.

And remember, it does.

And it calls itself the Roman Empire until the 15th century.

But we would think of it as maybe more sort of like really the Roman Empire if it still included the Western Mediterranean and was this...

major, powerful, urbanized polity that resists invasion from the southeast, as happens in the 7th century.

So, yes, the answer is, like, I think that the Roman Empire absolutely could have had another turn, sort of as the thing that we kind of mean when we say the Roman Empire, this pan-Mediterranean, powerful, urbanized empire.

Clearly, people have to try and explain within the elements of a worldview that they have how something like this can happen.

And they don't have –

They don't have modern science.

They don't have germ theory.