The Eternal Night
How Plague and Panic Brought Rome to Its Knees
## The Beginning of DarknessThe spring of 541 CE dawned with an ominous silence in Constantinople. The usual bustle of the Mediterranean's greatest city was replaced by an eerie quiet, broken only by the occasional wail of mourning from behind shuttered windows. Justinian I, Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, stood at his palace window overlooking the Bosphorus, watching as another cart piled high with corpses made its way through the streets below. The emperor's own face bore the telltale signs of exhaustion – he too had contracted the mysterious disease ravaging his empire, though unlike countless others, he would survive.The plague arrived first in Pelusium, Egypt, carried by rats aboard merchant ships from distant eastern ports. Within months, it had spread throughout the Mediterranean, striking with such ferocity that contemporary historians would name it the 'Great Plague of Justinian.' The symptoms were horrific: fever, chills, and most distinctively, painful swellings called ...