The Pandemic in the Eastern Mediterranean

In the eastern part of Mediterranean, life carries on pretty well. The big story comes in the six twenties and six thirties with the rise of Islam after the Prophet Muhammad. And for the next two or 300 years, you haven't sort of standoff between this great Arab empire and the great surviving Christian empire of the eastern Mediterranean. You've got iconoclasm where you don't show images of human beings and so on; images and statues and artworks smashed by the Christian world. By about the eight hundred and fifties, about 900, the Roman world is back in the ascendancy and starts to push eastwards to reclaim territories that are being captured by the Arabs. So at