"The Roman Empire was the biggest state western Eurasia has ever seen and, even though it looks big on the map, it was even bigger ... Turkey and Syria in the east. The Roman Empire was, to ...

The Eastern Roman Empire (shown in yellow on the map above) maintained a guilty neutrality toward its Western counterpart, contributing to its eventual collapse.

Between 541 and 544, there was also the first and most severe documented occurrence of the Justinianic plague in the eastern Roman Empire (also ... of Elusa in the north-western Negev desert ...