Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium Episode 275 climate change in the

sixth century with Robert Bruton. Today we're going to travel back to the time of Justinian

and revisit that most popular of topics, the plague and not only the plague but the whole issue

of climate change in the sixth century and what role it played in the collapse of Roman fortunes.

This is another interview episode and just in case you're in any doubt, these episodes are not

being produced instead of the narrative but simply to fill the silence that would otherwise be

blanketing the feed while I'm off producing an entire season of episodes covering the Latin

occupation of Constantinople. Our guest today is Robert Bruton and American author who fell in love

with the Romans while working in former Byzantine lands for the CIA. Since returning to the states he

has written a master's thesis on the role of climate change in plague in the decline of Roman

fortunes in the sixth century and is now writing a trilogy of historical fiction novels about the

life of everyone's favourite underappreciated general, Belisarius. Book one of the series introduces

Belisarius and follows him to Persia and then onto his successful African campaign while book two

which has just been published Empire in Apocalypse sees the general in Italy just as Yassinia Pestys

rears its head. I'll talk more about this trilogy at the end of the episode. Robert took pity on

me when I was in the midst of moving house with a small child and recorded this episode on his own.

So he's going to take you through what he learnt while writing his thesis, specifically how historians

and scientists can now interrogate the natural archives. Things like tree rings, stalactites and

pollen samples can tell us a lot about what actually happened in the past in a way that people

like Procopius could only hint at. Then Robert will go into the specific events of 536 AD and the

effects on Byzantium and many other peoples from across the world. This of course takes in the plague

which followed as well as global cooling, famine and migration across Eurasia. He links all this

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