:Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750

Abstract

In 541 plague entered the Roman Empire at Pelusium in Egypt, quickly affecting Alexandria and reaching Constantinople, the greatest city in the Mediterranean world, in 542; it soon spread west across Europe and east into Sassanid Persia and beyond, recurring in different places for the next two centuries until suddenly disappearing after 750. Contemporary observers, such as Procopius and Evagrius Scholasticus in Greek and John of Ephesus in Syriac (whose account only survives through quotation in later writers), described the characteristic swellings in the groin and other symptoms, as well as the high mortality and arrangements for the disposal of corpses. These reports have traditionally served to identify the “Justinianic” plague (named for the current Roman emperor who himself contracted it but survived) as bubonic, a precursor to the Black Death and the pandemic that struck Hong Kong in 1894. This consensus has recently been challenged, in part because of the impossibility of producing firm medical evidence, but more seriously because of the inevitable rhetorical exaggerations in the literary accounts and the difficulty of finding solid independent evidence in the archaeological record or elsewhere. The most sceptical analysis, published by Jean Durliat in the first volume of Hommes et richesses (1989), dissects the different categories of evidence separately, in each case questioning certainties to reduce the assessment of the plague's impact.