During the reign of the Emperor Justinian I (527-565 AD), a mysterious plague spread out of the Nile Valley to Constantinople and finished off the Roman Empire. Appearing first in China and North India, the “Black Death” (Yersinia pestis) radiated throughout the Mediterranean and into Northern Europe. It may well have killed close to half the world’s population, some 50 million people.
COVID-19 is not the Black Death, but its impact may be civilizational, weakening the mighty, raising up the modest, and rearranging axes of power across the globe.
The Middle East is a case in point. Since the end of World War II, the wealth of the Persian Gulf monarchies — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait and Qatar — has overturned the traditional centers of power that dominated the region for millennia:
