Abstract
The Justinianic Plague, the first part of the earliest of the three plague pandemics, has minimal historical documentation. Based on the limited primary sources, historians have argued both for and against the "maximalist narrative" of plague, i.e. that the Justinianic Plague had universally devastating effects throughout the Mediterranean region during the sixth century CE. Using primary sources of one of the pandemic’s best documented outbreaks that took place in Constantinople during 542 CE, as well as modern findings on plague etiology and epidemiology, we developed a series of dynamic, compartmental models of disease to explore which, if any, transmission routes of plague are feasible. Using expected parameter values, we find that the bubonic and bubonic-pneumonic transmission routes exceed maximalist mortality estimates and are of shorter detectable duration than described by the primary sources. When accounting for parameter uncertainty, several of the bubonic plague model configurations yielded interquartile estimates consistent with the upper end of maximalist estimates of mortality; however, these models had shorter detectable outbreaks than suggested by the primary sources. The pneumonic transmission routes suggest that by itself, pneumonic plague would not cause significant mortality in the city. However, our global sensitivity analysis shows that predicted disease dynamics vary widely for all hypothesized transmission routes, suggesting that regardless of its effects in Constantinople, the Justinianic Plague would have likely had differential effects across urban areas around the Mediterranean. Our work highlights the uncertainty surrounding the details in the primary sources on the Justinianic Plague and calls into question the likelihood that the Justinianic Plague affected all localities in the same way.
Highlights
Since the beginning of the 21st century, scholars have paid increasing attention to the series of epidemics that began with the Justinianic Plague, the first part of the earliest plague pandemic (c. 541–750 CE)
Since the primary sources provide almost no concrete supporting evidence about the transmission mode of the Justinianic Plague, we developed a series of dynamic, ordinary differential equation (ODE) models that represent hypothesized transmission routes based on the modern understanding of plague etiology and transmission
We sought to answer three key questions: (1) given our modern understanding of plague epidemiology, could a plague outbreak in Constantinople have the impact described by the historical primary sources, as argued by the maximalist narrative?; (2) which, if any, hypothesized transmission routes would enable an impact of this magnitude?; and (3) within the context of our sensitivity analysis, to what extent are the results from Constantinople generalizable to other first pandemic outbreaks around the Mediterranean? we focus our analysis on the case study of Constantinople in 542 and evaluate the results of our models the uncertainty of the model parameters can serve as a proxy for the variety of Mediterranean ecosystems affected by the Justinianic Plague
Summary
Since the beginning of the 21st century, scholars have paid increasing attention to the series of epidemics that began with the Justinianic Plague, the first part of the earliest plague pandemic (c. 541–750 CE). Since the beginning of the 21st century, scholars have paid increasing attention to the series of epidemics that began with the Justinianic Plague, the first part of the earliest plague pandemic Maximalists believe that the Justinianic Plague resulted in catastrophic mortality, killing between a quarter and half of the population of the Eastern Roman Empire, or 15–100 million people, over a few years [3,5,8]. This narrative often associates plague with the fall of Rome, the end of Antiquity, and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Recent work has pointed to a series of proxy measures— ranging from contemporary inscriptions to pollen in lakebed sediments—that show no evidence for a major demographic change in the period [13]
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