The Justinianic Plague

All pandemics are horrible, but no two are alike. Certainly this is true for those who have suffered from the bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia Pestis.

These poor victims pictures here died of the pandemic that raged across western Eurasia during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and after (from 541- the following two centuries). As the contemporary Procopius records, the plague at first settled on people gradually: “the initial fever was so feeble from its beginning . . . That it gave no cause for worry . . . . In fact, no one who fell ill in this way believed he would die from it”. Eventually, however, the mortality rates grew so heiniously that at the capital city of Constantinople it was reported that 10,000 people were dying each day.

Although some historians have speculated that the Justinianic Plague killed between 25-60% of the population across Western Eurasia and North Africa, more recent evidence suggests otherwise. In a paper from 2019, authors Lee Mordechai, Merle Eisenberg et al. bring together a wide variety of evidence that argues for a much lower death rate. They notice the way that coinage, land use, and archaeology show more continuity than change. Perhaps not as many people died in this round of the plague because the disease was spreading only from animal to human, not human-to-human as happened in the Black Death. As evidence, Procopius writes that “no doctor or layman contracted this misfortune by touching any of the sick or the dead . . .”

In contrast, during the Black Death of the mid 14th-century, the disease appeared not only with swelling buboes, but also in a pneumonic and septicemic/blood form.