535, and its explosion was heard all the way to Beijing. The eruption occurred in late February or early March of A.D. Then, about ten years ago, other researchers did some serious scholarship on those disastrous events and tried to determine the cause of what turned out to be a worldwide famine and, after considering a number of different scenarios from meteor collisions to a mini-ice age-which indeed occurred-at last identified the probable source of the trouble as an eruption of that all-time bad-boy volcano, Krakatoa this eruption was more overwhelming than many of its others, for, according to records in Indonesia, this eruption broke Sumatra off from Java-Krakatoa is at the hinge position of those two islands-and opened the Sundra Strait to a deep-water sea passage instead of only the shallowest-draft boats, which it had been for centuries.
535-36, which was characterized by catastrophic drops in temperature, crop failures, and famine throughout Asia and Europe, with disruption of trade and movements of populations resulting from these losses-just the sort of event to set the speculative juices, flowing, but not the object of my research, nor the period with which I was dealing, promising though it appeared. “AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION: More than twenty-five years ago while researching the fourth Saint-Germain book, Path of the Eclipse, I ran across references to the Year of the Yellow Snow, sometimes called the Year of the Dark Sun, in Western reckoning A.D. The attempt to maintain a society of laws was giving way to one of political and commercial influence, and all the while the gulf between rich and poor was widening, and the legal rights of women and slaves were diminishing steadily.”
“his novel is set in the period of Roman history called the Decadence, which began about 160 AD, a distinction it richly deserved: social distinctions had become lax the bureaucracy was increasingly corrupt, due in large part to the privatizing of most of the civil service the nobility were competing in luxury and excess, and were rarely held accountable for their overindulgence, either legally or politically the Emperors were more often than not puppets for powerful families and influential plutocrats maintenance of Roman roads, the most successful communication routes in the ancient world, was reduced or abandoned even as the Romans strength, now filled their ranks with client-nation soldiers and gave high rank positions to mercenaries the standards of education and language-use had declined and the quality of linguistic communication and literary expression were eroding public entertainments, from the arena to the stage, were violent, sensationalistic, and debauched.
0 kommentar(er)
