Justinianic Plague

This tooth from the mid-6th century contains DNA from the plague, that same pathogen responsible for the Black Death in 14th- Europe. This version of the bubonic plague is known as the “Justinianic Plague,” named after the Byzantine Emperor who reigned during its outbreak in the capital of Constantinople in 541 CE.

Many historians have considered this “First Pandemic,” as the scientific literature calls it, to be responsible for the collapse of urban society in Western Europe, and for softening the ground for the Muslim invasions of Byzantium and Persia in the 7th century. But a cross-disciplinary paper coming from researchers out of Princeton argue that this pandemic was relatively small, and caused many fewer fatalities than the Black Death.

To give you a sense of the typical “maximalist interpretation” of Justinian’s Plague, casualty estimates have ranged between 15 and 100 million people, between 25-60% of the population of the Late Roman Empire. But evidence is largely drawn from a few written sources, as well as a handful of graves. Other data analyzed tends to have such a wide lens in time-scale that they blur other potential explanations of mid 6th-through 7th- century deaths, like warfare.

There is not enough space to go over the whole argument here, but whether looking at coin circulation, number of laws created, lack of record in administrative papyri, consistency in land use, or low numbers of deaths caused by plague in mass graves, the “minimalist” authors propose that the Justinianic Plague just didn’t have such a large impact. An example I particularly liked was their analysis of the Apion family of Egypt, who were so wealthy they had their own post office and police force, and whose land use didn’t diminish during the plague.

The flagging trade, decrease in written sources, and lack of buildings projects of the seventh century were more likely to have been caused by the horrific warfare that Byzantine, Persian, and later the Islamic forces waged upon one another.