Rejecting Catastrophe: The Case of The Justinianic Plague

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REJECTING CATASTROPHE: THE CASE
OF THE JUSTINIANIC PLAGUE*
I
INTRODUCTION
In the past couple of decades, scholarship has increasingly
identified the Justinianic Plague as a major agent of historical
change in Late Antiquity. A recent study described it as ‘a
significant caesura in the transition from Late Antiquity to the
Byzantine Middle Ages’, while an innovative synthesis on the
end of the Roman Empire declared it to be one of the two ‘most
severe biological catastrophes in history’.1 The plague’s wide
spatial and chronological extent directly correlates with its
estimated mortality and these recent publications, among
others, argue for unparallelled demographic and institutional
catastrophe alongside cultural changes. The world before the
plague differed quantitatively and qualitatively from the world
after it. In short, plague has become a central driver of the
transformations of the sixth century — the ‘Age of Justinian’.2
Intensified focus on the plague’s alleged devastating effects
corresponds with two broader scholarly trends. The first is the
development of environmental history, which is unlocking new
sources and methodologies. The growing inclusion of natural
scientific data in historical analyses is a positive development, but
since historians are less knowledgeable about how to read and
* We would like to thank John Haldon, Adam Izdebski and Tim Newfield for
commenting on earlier versions of this article. Princeton’s Climate Change and
History Research Initiative provided an instrumental platform for the development
and refinement of the ideas behind this article.
1 Mischa Meier, ‘The ‘‘Justinianic Plague’’: The Economic Consequences of the
Pandemic in the Eastern Roman Empire and Its Cultural and Religious Effects’, Early
Medieval Europe, xxiv, 3 (2016), 270; Kyle Harper, Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and
the End of an Empire (Princeton, 2017), 244.
2 For this title, see Michael Maas (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of
Justinian (Cambridge, 2005). See also on this period Mischa Meier, Das andere
Zeitalter Justinians: Kontingenzerfahrung und Kontingenzbewältigung im 6. Jahrhundert
n. Chr (Göttingen, 2003); Peter Heather, Rome Resurgent: War and Empire in the Age of
Justinian (New York, 2018).
Past and Present, no. 0 (Aug. 2019) ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2019
doi:10.1093/pastj/gtz009
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2 of 48 PAST AND PRESENT
apply these tools, they sometimes overestimate historical effects.

Scientists, who are rarely aware of historical nuances, further
exacerbate this simplification and frequently argue for large-scale
social and political changes. These simple causal models
proliferate in studies that examine pre-modern environments.3
The second trend is ‘collapsology’. From Edward Gibbon
onward, narratives of collapse, decline and fall have become
increasingly prevalent. The growth of ‘collapsology’ over the
past few decades is remarkable. In parallel, popular culture has
brought the environment into broader public consciousness
through various media ranging from disaster films to post-
apocalyptic video games.4 These popular trends encourage the
publication of works on societal collapse. Recently, however,
some have noted that popular scholarship uses societal collapse
to interpret historical developments.5 This approach risks using
historically ambiguous cases to build major narratives upon
flimsy evidence. As a general rule, scholars tend to argue for
more extreme, more catastrophic, and longer-lasting outcomes
in cases where little evidence exists, for example, the collapse of
Minoan civilization, or Easter Island.6
Coupling environmental history with societal disaster has
proved easiest in the history of infectious diseases. After all, the
maximum demographic effect of an epidemic is greater than any
other natural disaster.7 Nükhet Varlık has pointed out the
association between ‘great plagues’ and ‘great empires’ in world
3 For example, Ulf Büntgen et al., ‘Cooling and Societal Change during the Late
Antique Little Ice Age from 536 to around 660 AD’, Nature Geoscience, ix, 3 (2016); for
the opposite, more balanced approach, see John Haldon et al., ‘History Meets
Palaeoscience: Consilience and Collaboration in Studying Past Societal Responses
to Environmental Change’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
States of America, cxv, 13 (2018).
4 Respectively, Outbreak, directed by Wolfgang Petersen (Burbank, Calif., 1995);
and Ndemic Creations, ‘Plague Inc.’ (2018),5https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/

22-plague-inc4(accessed 1 Mar. 2019).
5 Guy D. Middleton, Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths
(New York, 2017) pointing towards, for example, Jared M. Diamond, Collapse: How
Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York, 2006).
6 Haldon et al., ‘History Meets Palaeoscience’.
7 J. R. McNeill, ‘Can History Help with Global Warming?’, in Kurt M. Campbell
(ed.), Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of
Climate Change (Washington, DC, 2008), 28.
REJECTING CATASTROPHE 3 of 48
history. It is tempting to link the emergence of the former with
the demise of the latter.8
The Justinianic Plague in context

The Justinianic Plague (c.541–c.750) is the first of the three
recognized plague pandemics. It was followed by the Black
Death (1346–mid nineteenth century), and an unnamed Third
Pandemic that ravaged south and east Asia and spread worldwide
(c.1894–c.1950).9 Compared to the two later pandemics, very
little evidence survives for the demographic, economic and
cultural effects of the Justinianic Plague. Recent scholarship on
the Justinianic Plague focuses on the plague’s biology and
epidemiology, complete with lively debates about its
geographical origins, method of transmission and identity.
These approaches use the natural sciences — specifically
remnants of Yersinia pestis DNA isolated from late antique
skeletal remains, and genomic studies on them — to answer
questions about the pandemic that literary evidence cannot.
Drawing heavily on the catastrophic Black Death model
established by recent scholarship, estimates for the mortality of
the Justinianic Plague range between 33 and 60 per cent of the
Mediterranean population.10 Scholars estimate catastrophic
death tolls such as fifteen, twenty-five, or even one hundred
8 Nükhet Varlık, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The
Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (New York, 2015), 5. For examples of such

identifications, see William Rosen, Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of
Europe (London, 2007); Harper, Fate of Rome.
9 This paradigm, however, obfuscates several methodological problems regarding
the boundaries of each of these intervals: see Peregrine Horden, ‘Mediterranean

Plague in the Age of Justinian’, in Maas (ed.), Cambridge Companion to the Age of
Justinian, 146–8; Ole. J. Benedictow, ‘Review: The Justinianic Plague Pandemic:
Progress and Problems’, Early Science and Medicine, xiv, 4 (2009), 547–8. For
examples, see also Lars Walløe, ‘Medieval and Modern Bubonic Plague: Some
Clinical Continuities’, in Vivian Nutton (ed.), Pestilential Complexities:
Understanding Medieval Plague, suppl. xxvii to Medical History, lii (2008), 60–3;
Michael G. Morony, ‘ ‘‘For Whom Does the Writer Write?’’: The First Bubonic
Plague Pandemic According to Syriac Sources’, in Lester K. Little (ed.), Plague and
the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750 (Cambridge, 2007), 67–9. For clarity, we
will retain the traditional classifications.
10 For mortality of a third, see P. Allen, ‘The ‘‘Justinianic’’ Plague’, Byzantion, xlix
(1979), 11–12; for mortality of half or more, see references in Meier, ‘ ‘‘Justinianic
Plague’’ ’, 271. Kyle Harper, ‘Invisible Environmental History: Infectious Disease in
Late Antiquity’, Late Antique Archaeology, xii (2018) argues for mortality of 50–60 per
cent of the total population.
million people.11 We refer to this paradigm as the ‘maximalist

interpretation’.12
The complex recent discussions of pathogens, hosts, vectors
and the methodologies employed for extracting plague DNA
from Justinianic Plague-era skeletons have two additional
outcomes. First, their technical jargon establishes plague as a
specialized topic. This dissuades most scholars from wading into
plague studies and analysing the raw data themselves. Second,
practically all the relevant scientific publications, despite their
contribution to our understanding of the Justinianic Plague,
uncritically assume the maximalist interpretation and cement it
as fact in scholarly discourse.
Although the number of publications related to the Justinianic
Plague over the past several decades has grown exponentially, few
contributions reject the maximalist view. Plague dissenters, or
those representing a minimalist or moderate view, do not
discuss their criticisms in detail, but rather suggest other drivers
of change.13 There is only one notable exception: Jean Durliat,
who drew attention to the insufficient non-literary and literary
evidence for the maximalist position in a brief paper three
decades ago.14 Durliat’s doubts, however, were largely dispelled
at the turn of the millennium.15 Some have even argued that
11 Respectively, Harper, Fate of Rome, 244–5 covering the 542 outbreak; Rosen,
Justinian’s Flea, 309 covering the plague outbreaks of the sixth century; David M.
Wagner et al., ‘Yersinia Pestis and the Plague of Justinian 541–543 AD: A Genomic
Analysis’, The Lancet: Infectious Diseases, xiv, 4 (2014), 319 as a general statement.
12 For a recent survey of the literature, see Timothy P. Newfield and Inga Labuhn,
‘Realizing Consilience in Studies of Pre-Instrumental Climate and Pre-Laboratory

Disease’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xlviii, 2 (2017), 218–19.
13 For examples, Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the
Mediterranean 400–800 (Oxford, 2005), 548–9; Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

(New Haven, 2016), 43–4; Mark Whittow, The Making of Byzantium, 600–1025
(Berkeley, 1996), 66–8; Heather, Rome Resurgent, 306–7. Dissenters for the
Antonine Plague have been more vocal: see for instance James Greenberg, ‘Plagued
by Doubt: Reconsidering the Impact of a Mortality Crisis in the 2nd c. AD’, Journal of
Roman Archaeology, xvi (2003).
14 Jean Durliat, ‘La peste du VIe siècle: pour un nouvel examen des sources
byzantines’, in Hommes et richesses dans l’Empire byzantine, 2 vols., i, Tome 1, IV e–

e
VII siècle, ed. Catherine Abadie-Reynal, Cécile Morrisson and Jacques Lefort
(Paris, 1989); the cautious treatment of Harrison has been largely overlooked: see
Dick Harrison, ‘Plague, Settlement and Structural Change at the Dawn of the Middle
Ages’, Scandia, lix, 1 (1993).
15 Peter Sarris, ‘Bubonic Plague in Byzantium: The Evidence of Non-Literary
Sources’, in Little (ed.), Plague and the End of Antiquity; Meier, ‘ ‘‘Justinianic
Plague’’ ’, 281.
Durliat did not really reject the maximalist interpretation, but
wanted it to be supported with material evidence.16
In contrast, this article suggests that we need to rethink the
existing plague paradigm by reconsidering all the available
evidence to understand whether plague was a central feature of
the end of the Roman Mediterranean world. The direct evidence
is almost entirely literary, is frequently exaggerated, and is quoted
uncritically. The indirect evidence is only connected to plague
through correlation in time, and can be explained instead as
part of the ongoing transformation of the sixth-century
Mediterranean to adapt to the fractured political realities of the
fifth century.
This article espouses a minimalist perspective on the
consequences of the Justinianic Plague. It accepts that the
plague was geographically vast and caused high mortality in
some cases. On a number of occasions, it had a devastating
short-term effect. However, we argue that the effects of the
plague were neither uniform, nor so catastrophic as to cause
substantial mortality at the societal level, not to mention the
collapse of states or empires. Without disregarding the suffering
of the many victims of plague, the available evidence suggests that
any direct mid- or long-term impacts of plague on the societies or
the population of the Mediterranean world were minor. This
article builds upon an interdisciplinary array of sources and
methodologies. The relative paucity of written and
archaeological evidence for widespread depopulation during
the Justinianic Plague forces scholars to use ambiguous and
limited material, and to accept the catastrophic epidemiological
model of the Black Death according to which half the population
of Europe died. Although the interpretations that result from this
analysis might be attractive, they are often overly simplistic.
Wherever possible, we attempt to reassess critically the primary
source evidence. Our argument begins by re-examining key
literary and non-literary sources for the Justinianic Plague
and their inherent limitations. We then reanalyse archaeological
and recent DNA reports, before moving on to investigate
the Justinianic Plague through the frameworks of modern
disaster research, socio-environmental interaction and
16 Dionysios Stathakopoulos, ‘The Justinianic Plague Revisited’, Byzantine and
Modern Greek Studies, xxiv (2000), 270.

resilience, all of which recognize the agency of humans in

mitigating the effects of environmental stressors such as
epidemics.17 We draw upon a comparative case study of early
twentieth-century India to suggest an alternative mortality
model before discussing the metanarratives of plague in
historical discourse.
II
THE PRIMARY SOURCES FOR THE JUSTINIANIC PLAGUE:
A WEAK FOUNDATION
Evidence for the Justinianic Plague is predominantly literary.
Although a few dozen sources are assumed to refer to the
plague, many provide only a terse sentence or two that simply
acknowledge an outbreak with no additional details. Scholars
argue these cases were all plague based on their temporal
proximity to cases that refer to the most frequently cited
symptom — buboes on infected individuals. They disregard the
brevity of most plague descriptions and instead scour the few
sources that report on the plague in detail. Epidemics are
interpreted as the plague if they seem to fit the chronology of a
‘plague wave’ or ‘amplification’. In other words, if a plague
epidemic was taking place in one location, and there is some
evidence for an epidemic (of any kind) happening elsewhere at
the same time, the latter is assumed to be plague. The popularity
of this model is based on the graphic representation of J.-N.
Biraben and Jacques Le Goff, who mapped fifteen such waves.18
Yet in almost all of the literary primary sources, plague does not
feature prominently, and the amount of attention allocated to it is
miniscule in the overall work. Although the authors considered
17 See for example Steve Matthewman, Disasters, Risks and Revelation: Making Sense
of Our Times (Basingstoke, 2015); Kathleen Tierney, The Social Roots of Risk: Producing
Disasters, Promoting Resilience (Stanford, 2014). For an accessible introductory
summary see Keith Smith, Environmental Hazards: Assessing Risk and Reducing
Disaster, 6th edn (New York, 2013). For using disaster studies to answer historical
questions see, for example, Lee Mordechai, ‘Antioch in the Sixth Century: Resilience
or Vulnerability?’, Late Antique Archaeology, xii (2018); Lee Mordechai and Jordan
Pickett, ‘Earthquakes as the Quintessential SCE: Methodology and Societal
Resilience’, Human Ecology, xlvi, 3 (2018).
18 J.-N. Biraben and Jacques Le Goff, ‘The Plague in the Early Middle Ages’, in
Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (eds.), Biology of Man in History: Selections from the
Annales, économies, sociétiés, civilisations (Baltimore, 1975).
plague outbreaks notable events, they were not cataclysmic. It
would be reasonable to expect that if the plague were of
apocalyptic proportions or a sign of divine punishment,
contemporaries would pay closer attention.19
Case studies
In order to contextualize primary source discussions of the
plague, we have analysed four of the key primary source
accounts of the first few outbreaks from both the East and
West.20 Prokopios wrote the best-known depiction of the
Justinianic Plague.21 He referred to the plague in his Wars and
his more private Secret History. The former is more moderate,
while the latter is a more extreme version.22 In his Wars,
Prokopios used Thucydides’ account of the epidemic in Athens
a thousand years earlier as his model.23 Although some doubt that
his symptomological and epidemiological details are sufficient for
a plague diagnosis, he clearly describes the outbreak of plague in
the Byzantine Empire, its geographical movement and its
symptoms. His account in the Wars provides the backbone of
modern scholarly interpretation.24 The social effects of plague
in his description, however, are partial and restricted to the
19 More general studies have found that large mortality events tend to result in more
documentation rather than unexplainable lacunae: for instance, Greenberg, ‘Plagued

by Doubt’, 416, 422.
20 We discuss Prokopios of Caesarea (writing in Greek), Gregory of Tours (Latin),
John of Ephesus (Syriac) and Ioannes Malalas (Greek). The first three were
contemporaries of the outbreaks they described, who left detailed accounts and,
therefore, feature prominently in plague scholarship. The fourth is a key
contemporary source for the sixth-century Roman Empire. Almost all the
remaining literary sources discussing the plague in all four main languages (Arabic,
Greek, Latin, Syriac) are brief, not contemporary to the events they describe, or
rhetorical in nature.
21 Prokopios was probably an eye-witness: Prokopios, History of the Wars, 2.22.9–
10, in Procopius, 7 vols., trans. H. B. Dewing, i, History of the Wars, Books I and II
(Loeb Classical Library, xlviii, Cambridge, Mass., 1914), 454. Averil Cameron,
Procopius and the Sixth Century (Berkeley, 1985), 7, seems sure he was present, but
pp. 163–4 are somewhat less certain.
22 Compare Prokopios, History of the Wars, 2.23.20, in Procopius, trans. Dewing, i,
472; to Prokopios, Secret History, 4.1ff., in Procopius, 7 vols., trans. H. B. Dewing, vi,
The Anecdota or Secret History (Loeb Classical Library, ccxc, Cambridge, Mass.,
1935), 42ff. Justinian merely falls ill in the former, but the latter asserts that his
generals thought him dead and began planning the succession.
23 Cameron, Procopius and the Sixth Century, 39ff.; Anthony Kaldellis, Procopius of
Caesarea: Tyranny, History, and Philosophy at the End of Antiquity (Philadelphia, 2004),
26–7.
24 Cameron believes he offers an oversimplified ‘less than adequate’ narrative that
avoids discussion, while Kaldellis asserts that his stance is ‘fully scientific’: see
(cont. on p. 8)
capital.25 While Prokopios probably experienced a plague

outbreak, its large-scale effects remain unclear. His narrative is
compelling, but ultimately inconclusive to determine widespread
mortality across the Mediterranean.
Scholars often cite Prokopios’ estimated mortality of half the
population.26 Yet a closer examination reveals that this reading
ignores the context of the statement. A little earlier Prokopios
states ‘that [the emperor] was no man but rather some kind of
anthropomorphic demon. . .’, and continues to narrate a long list
of calamities resulting from Justinian’s demonic influence.27
After a lengthy discussion of human destruction, which
includes an estimate of a trillion deaths, Prokopios continues to
discuss nature’s wrath, beginning with floods and continuing
through earthquakes. In both cases, he provides specific cases.
After all this, he adds a single pithy sentence that plague ‘carried
away half of the survivors [of all the aforementioned events]’
before concluding the chapter in the next sentence,
conveniently ignoring that the demonic emperor himself
contracted the disease he supposedly caused and almost died.28
The plague references in the Secret History are, therefore, minor
(n. 24 cont.)
Cameron, Procopius and the Sixth Century, 168–9; Kaldellis, Procopius of Caesarea,
212–13.
25 Prokopios focuses on the breakdown in burial customs (Prokopios, History of the
Wars, 2.23.3–13, in Procopius, trans. Dewing, i, 464–8), discusses how people

changed their personalities (Prokopios, History of the Wars, 2.23.13–16, in
Procopius, trans. Dewing, i, 468–70), and how people did not leave their homes,
causing society to break down (Prokopios, History of the Wars, 2.23.17–20, in
Procopius, trans. Dewing, i, 470–2). Prokopios does not mention any effects
outside Constantinople other than the epidemic spreading and killing people
(History of the Wars, 2.22.6–9, in Procopius, trans. Dewing, i, 452–4).
26 Prokopios, Secret History, 18.44, in Procopius, trans. Dewing, vi, 226; and History
of the Wars, 2.23.2–3, in Procopius, trans. Dewing, i, 464, estimates a mortality of more
than ten thousand people a day during the worst part of the first outbreak in
Constantinople.
2 ti d"; o2k 4uqrwpo”, 2ll1 da0mwu ti”, 7sper e4rhtai, 2uqrwp0morfo” 9u’,
27 ‘O
Propkopios, Secret History, 18.1, in Procopius, trans. Dewing, vi, 210.

28 For the human destruction see Prokopios, Secret History, 18.3–36, in Procopius,
trans. Dewing, vi, 212–22, the estimate (ten thousand times ten thousand times ten
thousand; ‘muri0da” muri0dwu mur0a”’) is at 18.4, (Procopius, trans. Dewing, vi, 212,
but see also the latest translation, Prokopios, The Secret History: With Related Texts, ed.
and trans. Anthony Kaldellis (Indianapolis, 2010), 81). See Prokopios, Secret History,
18.37–43, in Procopius, trans. Dewing, vi, 222–4, for a list of events; the quote is from
Secret History, 18.44 (t1u 3m0seiau m0lista t8u perigiuom0uwu 2uqr0pwu 2p0uegke
mo8rau), in Procopius, trans. Dewing, vi, 226; for Justinian contracting the disease,
see Prokopios, History of the Wars, 2.23.20, in Procopius, trans. Dewing, i, 472.
and coloured by Prokopios’ condemnation of Justinian’s reign. It
is misleading to treat these references as facts.
Prokopios’ contemporary Ioannes Malalas pays far less
attention to the plague. He refers to three ‘waves’ of plague in
five references in his chronicle: c.542, c.557 and c.559. Malalas
provides few details and his accounts are extremely brief: the
longest covers only five sentences; three others are only
one sentence long and are reported between other events.29 No
mortality estimates are given and only one case refers to buboes.
There is nothing to suggest Malalas experienced these epidemics,
which he describes with different Greek terms, as connected in
any way.30 More importantly, these cases must be contextualized
within the larger narrative Malalas was attempting to convey to
his readers — namely to argue that despite the many different
manifestations of the divine will in the world, they were not
living through the End Times.31 Accordingly, his chronicle is
full of other disasters to which he pays far more attention — for
example, the long detailed description of the 526 CE earthquake in
Antioch.32 Malalas often reports the numbers of deaths in these
other disasters, and even with his exaggerations they range in the
thousands to hundreds of thousands, far below the mortality
modern scholars estimate for the plague. If plague was so
catastrophic, Malalas would have paid more attention to it.
John of Ephesus’s Ecclesiastical History contains the second key
plague account from the mid sixth century, including a detailed
first-hand account of Constantinople in 542 CE that affirms that it
29 See Ioannes Malalas, Ioannis Malalae Chronographia, ed. Ioannes Thurn (Corpus
Fontium Historiae Byzantinae — Series Berolinensis, xxxv, 2000), 18.92 (The

Chronicle of John Malalas, trans. Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys and Roger Scott
(Byzantina Australiensia, iv, 1986) 286–7), for the longest account; for the one-line
references see Malalas, Ioannis Malalae Chronographia, 18.90, 18.120, 18.131
(Chronicle of John Malalas, trans. Jeffreys, Jeffreys and Scott, 286, 295, 299). The
remaining reference, 18.127 (296–7), is three sentences long.
30 qu8si” (lit. ‘mortality’, often used to describe epidemics) is used in Malalas,
Ioannis Malalae Chronographia, 18.90, 18.92 and 18.120 (Chronicle of John Malalas,
trans. Jeffreys, Jeffreys and Scott, 286–7, 295); qu8si” 2p1 boub0uwu (‘mortality from
buboes’) in 18.127 (296–7); qauatik1u (‘death’) in 18.131 (299).
31 On natural disasters and their literary function in Malalas in general, see Mischa
Meier, ‘Natural Disasters in the Chronographia of John Malalas: Reflections on Their

Function — An Initial Sketch’, Medieval History Journal, x (2006); Elizabeth Jeffreys,
‘Malalas’ World View’, in Elizabeth Jeffreys, Brian Croke, and Roger Scott (eds.),
Studies in John Malalas (Leiden and Boston, 2017), 66.
32 Malalas, 17.16 (Chronicle of John Malalas, trans. Jeffreys, Jeffreys and Scott,
238–41).
had a significant short-term demographic effect in the capital.33

John’s descriptions of plague outside Constantinople, however,
are different and consist largely of imprecise lists of geographical
locations and effects.34 Unlike his description of Constantinople,
he only offers general statements about an increase in bodies and
abandoned villages in the eastern Mediterranean. His account of
the plague’s effects in these other regions is a literary description
intended to demonstrate how the plague struck every living
person and caused the remaining people to neglect fields and
livestock. The contrast between his detailed description of the
capital and other regions is stark.35 It is likely that there were
plague deaths elsewhere, but we should not appropriate his
account from Constantinople as reflective of experiences in
these locations, nor should we equate these deaths as similar
types of waves or even necessarily of the same epidemic.
John only provided details of the plague’s impact in two
unnamed cities other than Constantinople, in Egypt and
Palestine. John is explicit that in both cases he was ‘told about’
the events rather than witnessing them first hand.36 Almost all the
33 For the detailed description of Constantinople see John of Ephesus ¼ Pseudo-
Dionysius of Tel- Mahre, Incerti auctoris Chronicon Pseudo-Dionysianum vulgo dictum, 2

vols. (1927–33), ed. J-B. Chabot, ii (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium,
civ, SS ser. 3, t. 2 [¼ 53], Paris 1933), 94–109; translated in Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-
Mahre, Chronicle: Part III, trans. Witold Witakowski (Liverpool, 1996), 86–98. The
transmission of John’s History is complex, since the plague section only survives in later
chronicles. For a brief overview, see Witold Witakowski, The Syriac Chronicle of Pseudo-
Dionysius of Tel-MaArē: A Study in the History of Historiography (1987), 34–7, 132–5.
More broadly on John as an author: Jan van Ginkel, ‘John of Ephesus: A Monophysite
Historian in Sixth-Century Byzantium’ (Univ. of Groningen Ph.D. thesis, 1995); his
description of the plague in Constantinople has been exhaustively discussed: Meier,
Das andere Zeitalter Justinians, 321–36; Morony, ‘ ‘‘For Whom Does the Writer
Write?’’ ’; Harper, Fate of Rome, 220ff. Our thanks to Walter Beers for his help with
John of Ephesus.
34 John discussed the spread of plague in two short lists: first noting that it hit Gaza,
Ashkelon and Palestine, then parallelling his own travels in the eastern Mediterranean.
John of Ephesus ¼ Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Incerti auctoris Chronicon Pseudo-
Dionysianum vulgo dictum, ed. Chabot, 83 and 86–7; Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre,
Chronicle: Part III, trans. Witakowski, 77 and 80.
35 John of Ephesus ¼ Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Incerti auctoris Chronicon
Pseudo-Dionysianum vulgo dictum, ed. Chabot, 80–1 and 87–8; Pseudo-Dionysius of

Tel-Mahre, Chronicle: Part III, trans. Witakowski, 74–5 and 80–1. The first list
comes before the discussion of where the plague struck. The neglect of fields and
livestock could have been the result of internal migration, rather than plague deaths
(see below). For a combination of these accounts into a problematic synthetic
narrative: Harper, Fate of Rome, 220–35.
36 For the first story, see John of Ephesus ¼ Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Incerti
auctoris Chronicon Pseudo-Dionysianum vulgo dictum, ed. Chabot, 83–4; Pseudo-

(cont. on p. 11)
inhabitants of the Egyptian city died, with the few survivors
looting the now-abandoned houses before fleeing the city. As
they left, divine punishment struck them down for their avarice.
This circumstantial account is, therefore, about John’s
condemnation of greed, a critique that also appears in John’s
account of plague in Constantinople.37 In the city in Palestine,
the inhabitants worshipped an idol they believed would protect
them from the plague, but instead caused divine punishment
which killed them all. This second story serves as John’s
warning to apostates in the context of his role as a missionary to
convert pagans throughout the East.38 Beyond his description of
Constantinople, John used the plague to offer his audience a
series of moral religious commentaries on sinful actions.
The major literary source for plague in western Europe is the
Merovingian Bishop Gregory of Tours (538–94), who recorded
two instances of plague outbreak in significant detail and several
endemic outbreaks in Marseille and the surrounding region.39
(n. 36 cont.)
Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Chronicle: Part III, trans. Witakowski, 77–9. It is impossible to
determine if the stories refer to actual events or are literary constructs, although the
latter seems likely based on John’s writing style throughout his works.
37 For the point on greed, see John of Ephesus ¼ Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre,
Incerti auctoris Chronicon Pseudo-Dionysianum vulgo dictum, ed. Chabot, 100–5; Pseudo-
Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Chronicle: Part III, trans. Witakowski, 91–5, esp. 105 where he
writes ‘that angel who was ordered to fight people with this scourge until they should
spurn all matters of this world . . . so that everybody who might incite his mind to revolt,
and still covet things of this world, was by him quickly deprived of life’; also: Anthony
Kaldellis, ‘The Literature of Plague and the Anxieties of Piety in Sixth-Century
Byzantium’, in Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester (eds.), Piety and Plague:
From Byzantium to the Baroque (Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, lxxviii,
Kirksville, Mo., 2007), 8–10.
38 John of Ephesus ¼ Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Incerti auctoris Chronicon
Pseudo-Dionysianum vulgo dictum, ed. Chabot, 85–6; Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre,

Chronicle: Part III, trans. Witakowski, 79–80. For John and paganism more generally,
see Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the
Lives of the Eastern Saints (Berkeley, 1990); van Ginkel, ‘John of Ephesus’, 130–3;
Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, Missionary Stories and the Formation of the Syriac
Churches (Oakland, 2015), 72–8.
39 A list of disease outbreaks of any type mentioned by Gregory of Tours is: Gregorii
Episcopi Turonensis Libri historiarum X, 2.18, 4.5, 4.31, 5.17, 5.34, 5.41, 6.14, 6.33,
8.39, 9.21, 9.22, 10.1, 10.23, 10.25 and 10.30, ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm
Levison (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, i/
1, Hanover, 1951), 65, 138–9, 163–6, 214–16, 238–41, 248, 283–4, 304, 405–6, 441–
2, 442, 477–81, 514–15, 517–19 and 525 respectively; Gregory of Tours, Liber in
Gloria Martyrum, c. 50, in Gregorii Turonensis Opera, ed. Wilhelm Arndt and Bruno
Krusch (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, i/2,
Hanover, 1885), 523–4; Gregory of Tours, Liber de Virtutibus S. Iuliani, c. 46a, in
(cont. on p. 12)
He first covered the 543 outbreak in Gaul, listing places the

plague struck, but provided more information only about
Clermont’s preparations to stop the plague to justify how the
Rogation Day ceremony was transferred from its origin
(Vienne) to Clermont. As he framed the story, the local bishop
‘instituted the Rogations’ that protected the city and no one died
in Clermont, unlike other places.40 Gregory recorded a second
serious outbreak in 571 that devastated Clermont and again, the
extent of the outbreak and its mortality are just as unclear.41 In
both cases, plague was a literary device that justified Gregory’s
ideological stance, namely to exhort his listeners to reorient
themselves to his Christian social imagination.42
Gregory’s account suggests that plague was probably endemic
or enzootic in certain regions, since it kept striking the same
places. Additionally, he reported outbreaks of other diseases in
Gaul. Plague scholarship often ignores these other non-plague
outbreaks, although Gregory discussed them in as much detail
(n. 39 cont.)
Gregorii Turonensis Opera, ed. Arndt and Krusch, 582; Gregory of Tours, Liber de
Virtutibus S. Martini, 3.18, in Gregorii Turonensis Opera, ed. Arndt and Krusch, 637;
Gregory of Tours, Liber Vitae Patrum, 6.6 and 17.4, in Gregorii Turonensis Opera, ed.
Arndt and Krusch, 684 and 731; Gregory of Tours, Liber in Gloria Confessorum, c. 78,
in Gregorii Turonensis Opera, ed. Arndt and Krusch, 795–6. Some of these are unnamed
diseases, which will be discussed below.
40 ‘Rogationes illas instituit . . . Cum autem regiones illas, ut diximus, lues illa
consumeret, ad civitatem Arvernam, sancti Galli intercedente oratione, non attigit’.

Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis Libri historiarum X, 4.5, ed. Krusch and Levison, 138; with
the same more detailed story at Gregory of Tours, Liber Vitae Patrum, 6.6, in Gregorii
Turonensis Opera, ed. Arndt and Krusch, 684; and Gregory of Tours, Liber in Gloria
Martyrum, c. 50, in Gregorii Turonensis Opera, ed. Arndt and Krusch, 523–4.
41 ‘Iam vero adveniente ipsa clade, tanta strages de populo per totam regionem illam
facta est, ut nec numerare possit, quantae ibidem ceciderunt legiones . . . Tunc et
Lugdunum, Bitorex, Cabillonum atque Divione ab hac infirmitate valde depopulatae
sunt’ (‘When the plague now began [in Clermont], so many people were killed
throughout the whole region that it was not possible to count how many died there
. . . Lyons, Bourges, Chalon-sur-Saône and Dijon were greatly devastated by this
sickness’). Gregory provides no further details on these other cities. Gregorii Episcopi
Turonensis Libri historiarum X, 4.31, ed. Krusch and Levison, 165; see also Marius of
Avenches 571 AD, in Justin Favrod (ed.), La Chronique de Marius d’Avenches (455–581)
(Lausanne, 1991), 82. This outbreak was similar to the one that killed Pelagius II in
590, with a massive flood followed by disease. For the problems with this construction
see below.
42 On Gregory’s goals, see Martin Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours: History and
Society in the Sixth Century, trans. Christopher Carroll (Cambridge, 2001); Helmut
Reimitz, History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550–850
(Cambridge, 2015).
as the plague.43 They are not identified as related to wider plague
outbreaks, and possibly had a greater effect. Gregory was keen,
for example, to note that Marseille was frequently struck by what
appeared to be plague, which stopped only through Bishop
Theodore’s prayers. When it spread outside Marseille, King
Guntram’s institution of the Rogations, along with fasting and
alms, again prevented its spread northward.44 Gregory also lists
many other times at which unnamed epidemics devastated a
city or region before and after the first occurrence of Gallic
plague in 543 without suggesting plague was necessarily the
most devastating. Finally, Gregory often included outbreaks in
lists with famine, floods, comets, blood rains, locusts and
other natural disasters as only one of many portents and
signs of the End Times. In 582, for example, there were
torrential downpours, followed by a comet, various other
night-time astronomical phenomena, blood rain in Paris, and
two epidemics — one of boils and tumours and the second of
plague in Narbonne. Gregory devoted more space to each one
of these disasters than he did to plague, which was added at the
end.45 Plague did not lead the list in 582 and rarely leads his other
43 For plague-like language before the 540s, see ‘Magna tunc lues populum
devastavit’, Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis Libri historiarum X, 2.18, ed. Krusch and
Levison, p. 65. For one epidemic sketched out in detail that might be dysentery:
‘Sed haec prodigia gravissima lues est subsecuta. Nam et discordantibus reges et
iterum bellum civile parantibus, desentericus morbus paene Gallias totas
praeoccupavit’. Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis Libri historiarum X, 5.34, ed. Krusch
and Levison, 238–9. This seems to have been equally devastating. For other
accounts that are unclear, see Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis Libri historiarum X, 5.17,
5.41, 8.39 and 10.30, ed. Krusch and Levison, 214–16, 248, 405–6 and 525
respectively.
44 ‘Iussit omnem populum ad eclesiam convenire et rogationes summa cum
devotione celebrare’ (‘He ordered all the people to assemble in the church and to
celebrate the Rogation Days with the greatest devotion’), Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis
Libri historiarum X, 9.21, ed. Krusch and Levison, 441; and see on Marseille: 9.22 and
10.25, ed. Krusch and Levison, 442 and 517–19 respectively. On Marseille, see Simon
T. Loseby, ‘Marseille and the Pirenne Thesis, I: Gregory of Tours, the Merovingian
Kings and ‘‘Un Grand Port’’ ’, in Richard Hodges and William Bowden (eds.), The
Sixth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand (Leiden, 1998), esp. 220–2.
45 ‘Mense Ianuario pluviae, coruscationes atque tonitrua gravia fuerunt. Stilla,
quem comitem superius nominavi, apparuit . . . In Parisiaco vero terminum verus

sanguis ex nube defluxit . . . Magna tamen eo anno lues in populo fuit; valitudinis
variae, milinae cum pusulis et vissicis, quae multum populum adficerunt mortem . . .
Audivimus enim eo anno in Narbonensem urbem inguinarium morbum graviter
desevire’ (‘In the month of January there were heavy showers, flashes of lightening
and heavy thunder . . . The star, which I have called a comet earlier appeared . . . In the
Paris region, real blood rained from a cloud . . . In that year, there was a great epidemic
(cont. on p. 14)
lists of catastrophes. How much we can read into such cases as

plague outbreaks is debatable, but they were certainly neither
waves of death nor the most devastating disasters to strike Gaul.
Other literary sources

The literary sources include few if any references to long-term
effects. After late antique authors cover the plague in their
narratives, they tend to ‘forget about it’. At the same time,
contemporaries chose to remember other calamities for
centuries. Malalas counted the most powerful earthquakes that
several cities experienced throughout his chronicle.46 The
inhabitants of Constantinople annually celebrated the memory
of the volcanic ashes that reached their city from Vesuvius in
472.47 There are few or no cases, however, in which sources
explicitly ascribe to plague, beyond its immediate context,
effects such as depopulation, new protective ceremonies,
administrative changes, decreased land prices or increased
labour costs.
The modern urge to arrange the surviving evidence in
catalogues, lists and datasets organized by outbreak or
amplification exacerbates this problem by stripping the sources
from their context.48 Many authors, similar to Gregory, report
epidemics as part of a series of disasters with plague not even
(n. 45 cont.)
among the people; many people died from a variety of illness, with boils and tumours
. . . We heard that the disease of the groin struck the city of Narbonne in that year’). For
further discussion, see Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis Libri historiarum X, 6.14, ed.
Krusch and Levison, 283–4. Gregory does suggest people were more likely to die
from plague once infected, but it does not seem to have been more widespread; for
a non-exhaustive sampling of other outbreaks of disease, some of which were bubonic
plague, but some of which are perhaps other diseases, see Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis
Libri historiarum X, 5.41, 6.33, 10.23 and 10.30, ed. Krusch and Levison, 248, 304,
514–15 and 525 respectively; also Giselle de Nie, ‘Roses in January: A Neglected
Dimension in Gregory of Tour’s Historiae’, Journal of Medieval History, v, 4 (1979).
46 For example, Malalas, Ioannis Malalae Chronographia (numbers in parentheses
refer to Chronicle of John Malalas, trans. Jeffreys, Jeffreys and Scott), 10.53 (141),
17.15 (237) for Anazarbos; 10.18 (129), 11.8 (145), 14.36 (202), 17.16 (238),
18.27 (256) for Antioch.
47 [Marcellinus Comes], The Chronicle of Marcellinus: A Translation and
Commentary, ed. and trans. Brian Croke (Byzantina Australiensia, vii, Sydney,
1995), AD 472 (trans. 25).
48 Biraben and Le Goff, ‘Plague in the Early Middle Ages’; Dionysios Ch.
Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire:
A Systematic Survey of Subsistence Crises and Epidemics (Aldershot, 2004), 177–386;
Harper, Fate of Rome, 304–15.
ranked first on the list — as we would expect if it caused
devastating mortality. It is unclear what conclusions one could
reach from a source that mentions an anonymous epidemic only
once in a single sentence alongside drought and famine.49 While
plague catalogues can be useful as references for raw data, they are
often uncritically interpreted to demonstrate massive mortality.
Moreover, important contemporary sources remain eerily
silent. The seventh-century Constantinopolitan Chronicon
Paschale, for example, does not mention the plague until its end
in 630, even though there were five or six reported outbreaks in
Constantinople during its time period.50 Theophylact Simocatta,
who wrote eight books of history covering the period 582–602,
failed to mention the two outbreaks in contemporary
Constantinople.51 Although it is full of disasters, the Liber
Pontificalis does not single out plague until the late seventh
century when it is described as a ‘very great mortality [that]
ensued from the East’.52 The single other reference to epidemic
disease is vague.53 It is reasonable to expect these histories and
chronicles to feature a major biological catastrophe more
prominently. Their silence further suggests that the Justinianic
Plague was not as destructive as is commonly assumed.
49 Chronicle of 1234, Anonymi auctoris Chronicon ad annum Christi 1234 pertinens,
ed. J.-B. Chabot (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, v, 81–2, SS 3,

t.14–15, Paris 1916–20), 2 vols. in 1, i, 314 (trans. in ii, 245). The authors are
leading a digital humanities project that will result in an open-access web
application for the sources of plague.
50 Original outbreak and #1, #5, #7, #14, possibly also #17 in Harper, Fate of Rome,
304–15. It does refer to a vague ‘Great Death’ in 529, more than a decade before the
first outbreak of the Justinianic Plague.
51 #7, #14 in Harper, Fate of Rome, 304–15.
52 ‘Maxima mors a parte Orientis subsecuta est’; quotation from Liber Pontificalis
Pars 1, 80.3, ed. Theodore Mommsen (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, i, Gesta

pontificum Romanorum, Berlin, 1898), 192; translated by Raymond Davis as The Book
of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis): The Ancient Biographies of the First Ninety Roman Bishops
to AD 715 (Liverpool, 1989), 72; the problem was noted in Durliat, ‘La peste du VIe
siècle’, 113. See also the reference in Liber Pontificalis Pars 1, 81.16 (ed. Mommsen,
193; trans. Davis, 72; a great mortality, ‘mortalitas maior’), which is accepted as
evidence tentatively in Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and
Early Byzantine Empire, 359 (#192); and securely by Harper, Fate of Rome, 311 (#24).
An earlier appearance of the same noun in Liber Pontificalis Pars 1, 64.1 (ed.
Mommsen, 159; trans. Davis, 59; ‘Roma periclitaretur fame et mortalitate’, ‘Rome
was endangered by famine and mortality’) is not considered as evidence for plague in
either catalogue.
53 Liber Pontificalis Pars 1, 69.1: ‘In these times there was a very serious famine,
plagues, and floods’ (ed. Mommsen, 165; trans. Davis, 61; ‘huius temporibus famis,
pestilentiae et inundationes’) while Boniface IV (608–15 CE) was pope.
Plague mortality in the literary sources

Mortality counts for the Justinianic Plague are rare and most of
them concern only Constantinople, whose population before the
first plague outbreak was likely to have been in the mid hundreds
of thousands. While numbers in pre-modern sources are
notoriously unreliable, the reported mortality in the sources
actually increases over time from 300,000 deaths in 542 to
3,180,000 deaths c.599.54 While these inflated numbers say
little about actual mortality, they offer some evidence against
significant visible depopulation in Constantinople over half a
century and five major outbreaks.55
In addition to the large numbers of plague victims some sources
report, scholars focus on a few well-known individual examples
such as the family of Evagrios, who lost several members of his
household over four bouts of plague in sixth-century Antioch.
They rarely mention, however, that it is one of the only two
concrete cases of plague-affected families.56 Even the pagan
acquaintance of Evagrios, whose family was not affected,
54 John of Ephesus notes more than 300,000 deaths in 542 (in a discussion of plague
in John of Ephesus ¼ Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Incerti auctoris Chronicon

Pseudo-Dionysianum vulgo dictum, ed. Chabot, 94–5; Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre,
Chronicle: Part III, trans. Witakowski, 86–7). Michael the Syrian estimates three
thousand deaths per day in 573–4 (in a brief reference coming after a discussion of
a major earthquake, Chronique de Michel le Syrien: patriarche jacobite d’Antioche (1166–
1199), ed. J.-B. Chabot, 4 vols., ii (Paris 1901), 309–10); Agapios claims that 400,000
people died in 585–6, reporting it in a single line after introducing Emperor Maurice:
Agapius, Kitāb al-6Unwān (Histoire universelle): Seconde partie, ii, ed. and trans.
Alexandre Vasiliev (Patrologia Orientalis, viii, fasc. 3, Paris [1912], 439; while
Michael the Syrian asserts that no less than 3,180,000 people died around 599
(after reporting an eclipse and an earthquake): Chronique de Michel le Syrien, ed.
Chabot, ii, 373–4. The Chronicle of 1234, 82, lists ‘only’ 380,000 for the same
event in a single sentence preceding an earthquake report: Chronique de Michel le
Syrien, ed. Chabot, i, 218; ii, 171.
55 A study of grain supplied to the capital — and hence one of the few indicators of
population — has suggested the population loss in Constantinople was substantial

(perhaps one-third) in 542, but the population rebounded to its original size within a
few years. See Constantin Zuckerman, Du village à l’empire: autour du registre fiscal
d’Aphroditô (525/526) (Paris, 2004), 212.
56 The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius, with the scholia, 4.29, ed. J. Bidez and L.
Parmentier (London 1898), 177–9; translated in The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius

Scholasticus, ed. and trans. Michael Whitby (Translated Texts for Historians, xxxiii,
Liverpool, 2000), 229–32; see also Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis Libri historiarum X,
9.22, ed. Krusch and Levison, 442. Aside from the discussion of his family,
Evagrios offers no detailed information on mortality in specific places, but only
general unconfirmable and unprovable statements.
remains little discussed.57 There is no way of knowing whether
the family of Evagrios was the exception or the rule.
Aside from these famous examples, named plague victims are
virtually non-existent. The ratio between named plague victims
and the total number of historical figures known from the period
is extremely low, as is the ratio between named plague victims and
the number of historical figures whose cause of death is reported.
Our investigation of prosopographical data found eight
individuals out of several thousand who can be said to have
perhaps died of plague. Tracing these individuals back to the
original sources reveals that plague actually seems to have killed
only two, and potentially another three, people.58 Regardless,
none of these eight people died during the first outbreak, which
was supposedly the deadliest.59
Another of the rare named plague casualties was Pope Pelagius
II, who died in 590, an event that led to the election of Gregory the
Great. Few sources survive on the pontificate of Pelagius II and
his death is not linked to the plague in the Liber Pontificalis.60
57 Life of St. Symeon Stylite the Younger, in Paul van den Ven (ed.), La vie ancienne
de S. Syméon stylite le jeune (521–592) (Subsidia Hagiographica, xxxii, Brussels, 1962),

210–11; Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius, 6.23, ed. Bidez and Parmentier, 239; ed. and
trans. Whitby, 315–16.
58 Our analysis is based on both parts of volume 3 of the Prosopography of the Later
Roman Empire (Cambridge 1992) which contain almost 1,500 pages. We searched for
the terms ‘plague’, ‘Justinianic Plague’, ‘pestilence’, ‘epidemic’, ‘outbreak’, ‘bubonic’
and ‘bubo’. Likely died of plague: Felix 5, d. 582 (p. 481–2) and Stephanus 21, d. 590
(p. 1188). Plague death based on later evidence: Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah, d. 639 (p.
7), Mu’adh ibn Jabal, d. 639 (p. 896–7), Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan, d. 639 (p. 1408–9).
Ruled out: Austregildis, d. 581 (p. 157), Chlodobertus, d. 580 (p. 297), Dagobertus 1,
d. 580 (p. 383). All page references are to John Robert Martindale, The Prosopography
of the Later Roman Empire Vol. 3: AD 527–641, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1992). The three
Muslims all died during the Plague of ’Amwas and are discussed in Lawrence I.
Conrad, ‘The Plague in the Early Medieval Near East’ (Princeton Univ. Ph.D.
thesis, 1981), 167–246.
59 The discrepancy might have been the result of the biases of our sources, but the
sources could also have emphasized the devastation of plague by discussing elites who
died. Prokopios, who often names people who died in other ways (for example, History
of the Wars, 5.10.38–9, 5.29.39–44, 6.2.30–3, in Procopius, trans. Dewing, iii, History
of the Wars, Books V and VI (Loeb Classical Library, cvii, Cambridge, Mass., 1919),
102, 282–4, 304–6; Secret History, 1.21–9, in Procopius, trans. Dewing, vi, 12–14),
does not mention anyone who died of plague by name and only mentions Justinian’s
infection (History of the Wars, 2.23.20, in Procopius, trans. Dewing, i, 472).
60 Liber Pontificalis Pars 1, 65.3 (ed. Mommsen, i, 160; trans. Davis, 59). For the best
biography with all the primary sources on his life, see Henry Wace and William C.
Piercy (eds.), A Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature to the End of the Sixth
Century AD, with an Account of the Principal Sects and Heresies (Peabody, Mass., 1911),
828. Pelagius II does not appear in the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire.
Only Gregory of Tours associated his death with the outbreak of

the plague in Rome in 590. The episode — as with Gregory’s
other discussions of plague — served his own literary purposes.
In this case, Gregory of Tours sought to heighten the power and
prestige of the new pope, Gregory the Great, and amplify
the centrality of the recently instituted Roman Greater Litany.
The plague in this episode was one of a series of unfavourable
conditions before Gregory’s time (floods, plague and the death
of Pelagius II), which were resolved through divine action
that favoured Gregory. As with the earlier 589 flood in
Rome, the plague was not necessarily a catastrophic event, but
a portent that served as the pivot to a divinely favoured
period that consolidated Gregory the Great’s position in Rome.61
Non-literary sources
Although scholars have scoured legislation, numismatics, papyri
and archaeology, these non-literary sources reveal only indirect
connections to plague outbreaks.62 Almost all of them are
circumstantial and coincide with the ongoing transformation in
Eastern Roman governance that characterized the mid sixth
century.63 With a couple of exceptions, the ambiguous evidence
is impossible to prove or disprove. Although absence of evidence
does not imply evidence of absence, it is difficult to argue that
the lack of corroborating non-literary evidence around the
Mediterranean over two centuries does not weaken the
maximalist interpretation.
61 See Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis Libri historiarum X, 10.1, ed. Krusch and Levison,
esp. 477–9; all the sources with their relationships to each other are summarized in
Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire,
320–1 (#151). For a similar conclusion about the flood of 589 that preceded the
plague, see Paolo Squatriti, ‘The Floods of 589 and Climate Change at the
Beginning of the Middle Ages: An Italian Microhistory’, Speculum, lxxxv, 4 (2010),
819–26, which also discusses how Gregory the Great’s Dialogues and its discussion of
plague were part of a similar process. On the Roman Greater Litany, see Nathan J.
Ristuccia, Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe: A Ritual
Interpretation (Oxford, 2018), 127–9.
62 Durliat, ‘La peste du VIe siècle’; Stephen Mitchell, A History of the Later Roman
Empire, AD 284–641 (Malden, Mass., 2015), 480.

63 Meier, Das andere Zeitalter Justinians, divides Justinian’s reign between pre- and
post-540 disaster periods with plague playing a key transformative role between the
two. Yet, structural changes began far earlier as noted in Christopher Kelly, Ruling the
Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2004); P. N. Bell, Social Conflict
in the Age of Justinian: Its Nature, Management, and Mediation (Oxford, 2013); Peter
Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian (Cambridge, 2006).
Consider the case of Justinian’s legislation. It has been argued
that after the first plague outbreak in Constantinople, Justinian’s
earlier legal reforms ceased. As evidence, scholars have noted
that Justinian issued 142 known laws between 533 and 542,
but only thirty-one between 543 and 565, after the first
outbreak of plague. Although we were unable to reconstruct
exact numbers because of unclear dating, the two sets of data
we compiled agree with this trend.64 However, in both cases
grouping the entire 533–542 period together was unjustified:
almost all laws were issued between 535 and 539 (between
thirteen and thirty-two laws for each year). Two years before
the plague (540) the spike in legislative activity subsided and
only one or two new laws were issued. Numbers increased
subsequently, but did not return to their pre-540 levels. Nine
laws were issued in 541, four or six in 542, two in 543, and six or
seven in 544. In other words, once the data are adjusted for an
annual resolution, the connection between the plague and
legislative trends disappears, since the significant reduction in
legislation took place before, rather than after, plague
appeared. The fluctuations in legislation were the result of
ongoing changes within the Eastern Roman state, not plague.65
Most scholars believe the Justinianic Plague initially struck the
Byzantine capital in March 542. A closer examination of the laws
issued during the plague outbreak in Constantinople, dated to
April–August 542, precisely when Prokopios has thousands
dying daily, reveals little stress on the state. The four laws
issued from April onward are not concerned with plague.66
64 Harper, Fate of Rome, 235. We used Fred H. Blume, ‘Annotated Justinian Code’,
(2018), 5http://www.uwyo.edu/lawlib/blume-justinian/ajc-edition-2/novels/index.
html4 (accessed 8 March 2019); Pierre Noailles, Les Collections de Novelles de
l’empereur Justinien (Paris, 1912); for the original edition see Rudolf Schoell and
Wilhelm Kroll (eds.), Corpus iuris civilis: Volumen tertium. Novellae (Berlin, 1912).
65 On the novels we were unable to consult the new edition of David Miller and Peter
Sarris, The Novels of Justinian: A Complete Annotated English Translation, 2 vols.

(Cambridge and New York, 2018); for the end result of this process, John F.
Haldon, The Empire That Would Not Die: The Paradox of Eastern Roman Survival,
640–740 (Cambridge, Mass., 2016); for a discussion of legal culture in Byzantium
see David Wagschal, Law and Legality in the Greek East: The Byzantine Canonical
Tradition, 381–883 (Oxford, 2015), 1–19.
66 Edict 7, from 1 March 542, before plague reached the capital, concerns assisting
bankers and refers to ‘the danger of death everywhere’ (764); Novel 116 (549–51),
Novel 157 (733–4), Appendix 3 (797), Novel 117 (551–66). Numbers in parentheses
refer to Schoell and Kroll (eds.), Corpus iuris civilis: Volumen tertium; for translations,
see Blume, ‘Annotated Justinian Code’.
None of these, or the two laws from 543, refer even vaguely to the
epidemic that supposedly killed half the capital’s population.67
The only law that refers obliquely to the plague is Novel 122,
which condemned an increase in the price of labour and
services in the capital after ‘the chastisement, which God, in his
clemency, visited upon men’.68 It is hardly evidence for anything
resembling a major societal effect. Furthermore, it refers to the
capital rather than the rest of the empire, implying that any
broader effects were limited.69 The undated Novel 77, which
punishes homosexuality and blasphemy, similarly does not
support the maximalist interpretation. It refers to ‘epidemics’,
but they appear last in a list of disasters after the more serious
threats of famine and earthquakes.70
Numismatic evidence is likewise cited as indicative of the
impact of plague on local communities. For example, the
interpretation of the gold/copper exchange rate allegedly
demonstrates an increase in the price of labour due to the
plague. Based on very limited data, the number of copper folles
per gold solidus declined from 210 between 538–542 to 180
between 542–550. This ignores the broader context of this ratio.
The ratio of copper to gold was 360 between 512–538, hence a
much larger drop came before the plague.71 Even if the 210 to 180
decrease was a result of the plague — a conjecture that is
impossible to prove or reject — it quickly reversed. The ratio
rose to 216 between 550–565 and reached as high as 525 in 565
67 Novels 118 (567–72) and 125 (630–1) in Blume, ‘Annotated Justinian Code’.
68 Novel 77, preface (Schoell and Kroll (eds.), Corpus iuris civilis: Volumen tertium,
381; Blume, ‘Annotated Justinian Code’): ‘met1 t1u pa0deusiu t1u kat1 filauqrwp0au
toA desp0tou qeoA geuom0uhu’.
69 Kaldellis, Procopius of Caesarea, 223 is somewhat doubtful about both the reason
and the effect. While it could also imply that Justinian was not concerned about other
cities or the countryside, his other laws from 542–3 suggest that he paid close attention
to governing those areas: Novel 116 (549–51) concerns soldiers, including in the
provinces; Novel 157 (733–4) discusses intermarriage between unfree people in
Mesopotamia; Appendix 3 covers the privileges of the Council of Byzacium in
Africa. Numbers in parentheses refer to Schoell and Kroll (eds.), Corpus iuris civilis:
Volumen tertium; for translations see Blume, ‘Annotated Justinian Code’.
70 ‘ka1 limo1 ka1 seismo1 ka1 loimo1’. Meier, Das andere Zeitalter Justinians, 591–9 dated
the law to 545/6 partially based on the supposed plague reference.

71 For the argument, see Sarris, ‘Bubonic Plague in Byzantium’, 131. For the
original data, see Jairus Banaji, ‘Rural Communities in the Late Empire, AD 300–
700 — Monetary and Economic Aspects’ (Univ. of Oxford Ph.D. thesis, 1992),
table 5; recent version at Jairus Banaji, Exploring the Economy of Late Antiquity:
Selected Essays (Cambridge, 2016), 107.
and 720 in 570. Other numismatic phenomena are equally
unconvincing. Peter Sarris points to the reduction in weight of
the copper follis, which was reformed in 538. There is no attempt
to explain how plague caused this change other than a vague
correlation to ‘the frailty of state finances’.72 Yet, this ignores
the simultaneous military campaigns Justinian carried out, the
sixth-century extension of the Byzantine Empire and the major
building projects across the empire. The data shows that the
falling weight of the follis accounted for only a 10 per cent
reduction in weight from one of the heaviest coins in Roman
and Byzantine history. Moreover, the original study examined
only one of ten copper denominations from only four of about
fifteen operational mints.73
The appearance of the lightweight solidus is also sometimes
cited as evidence for the plague. In this correlation, the state
supposedly tried to increase its revenue after the plague
devastated its tax base, by taxing the remaining population in
full solidi while paying for its services with lighter solidi.74
There are multiple holes in this argument: the lighter solidi did
not replace the regular solidi since regular ones were
simultaneously minted, the lighter solidi were marked
differently so people would recognize them and they began to
be minted before the plague, perhaps as early as 538 or 539.75
Moreover, a substantial number of these coins appear near the
empire’s frontiers, leading some to argue they were used for
foreign purposes rather than domestic exchange.76
The reduction in legislative frequency began before plague,
while the numismatic changes fluctuated independently from
72 Sarris, ‘Bubonic Plague in Byzantium’, 128–9.

73 D. M. Metcalf, ‘The Metrology of Justinian’s Follis’, The Numismatic Chronicle
and Journal of the Royal Numismatic Society, xx (1960), 218–19; Wolfgang Hahn,
Moneta Imperii Byzantini: Rekonstruktion des Prägeaufbaues auf synoptisch-
tabellarischer Grundlage, 1. Teil, Von Anastasius I bis Justinianus I (491–565):
einschliesslich der Ostgotischen und Vandalischen Pragungen (Vienna, 1973), Tafelteil
14–35.
74 Sarris, ‘Bubonic Plague in Byzantium’, 128–9.
75 Michael F. Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy c.300–1450
(Cambridge, 1985), 492–3; Michael F. Hendy, ‘Light Weight Solidi, Tetartera, and
the Book of the Prefect’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, lxv, 1 (1972), 79 seems unconvinced
by plague explanations.
76 Howard L. Adelson, Light Weight Solidi and Byzantine Trade during the Sixth and
Seventh Centuries (New York, 1957).

plague.77 Both types of evidence, therefore, do not support the

catastrophist narrative or any long-term plague effects.
Epigraphic evidence
Inscription evidence from across the Mediterranean has been
associated with the plague as well. Among thousands of
inscriptions across the Mediterranean over two centuries, only
two (a building dedication and a tombstone) explicitly refer to
the plague as a cause of death. A few others refer to vague diseases
and epidemics.78
The maximalist position has a contradictory view of plague
inscriptions, sometimes using opposite arguments to support
plague interpretations. Sarris, for instance, argued that we
should not expect more funerary inscriptions because of plague,
since social norms regarding burial customs broke down. The only
evidence for this claim is Prokopios’ report from Constantinople at
the peak of plague in 542.79 Yet, it is difficult to generalize
this evidence to an imagined breakdown of social norms over
two centuries in all settlements around the Mediterranean.
Moreover, other studies have used funerary inscriptions to argue
for the presence of plague. Nancy Benovitz, for example, showed
that the outbreak of 541 coincided with an increase in the number
of surviving funerary inscriptions in Byzantine Palestine and
Arabia.80 Scholarship, it seems, assumes the breakdown of social
norms regarding burial everywhere except for those places for
which we have inscription evidence.
Moreover, ambiguous epigraphic evidence is interpreted to
support the presence of the plague throughout whole regions,
often when it coincides with a plague ‘wave’. Consider the
evidence for plague in Sicily during the first outbreak: a single
funerary inscription that records the death of three boys in the
77 Banaji, ‘Rural Communities in the Late Empire’.
78 One inscription refers to ‘an evil destiny of bubo and armpit;’ the second
mentions death from the plague of the groin (‘ab inguinali plaga’). For references
and discussions: Michael McCormick, ‘Tracking Mass Death during the Fall of
Rome’s Empire (I)’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, xxviii (2015), 326–8; Meier,
‘ ‘‘Justinianic Plague’’ ’, 267–9.
79 Sarris, ‘Bubonic Plague in Byzantium’, 126; Michael McCormick, ‘Toward a
Molecular History of the Justinianic Pandemic’, in Little (ed.), Plague and the End of
Antiquity, 296.
80 Nancy Benovitz, ‘The Justinianic Plague: Evidence from the Dated Greek
Epitaphs of Byzantine Palestine and Arabia’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, xxvii

(2014).
sixth indiction. Even if we limit the inscription to the sixth century as
per its epigraphic features, there are still six possible years of death.81
Both the connection to 542 or afterward and the assumption that the
children died of plague are unfounded and circular: scholars use the
inscription to prove the plague’s presence, which is then used to date
the inscription. This single inscription is insufficient to establish that
the plague ravaged Sicily.82
Similarly, the only evidence for plague in North Africa during the
first outbreak (541–3) is a combination of a vague reference from a
minor chronicle (‘the whole earth was ravaged by an epidemic’) and
four funerary inscriptions from a town in Algeria. The four
inscriptions refer to children who all died within a month,
although the cause of their death is not mentioned.83 Even if both
sources refer to the presence of bubonic plague (which is dubious),
it would be a stretch to use this evidence to claim plague devastated
North Africa. Circular reasoning frequently features in these
discussions as well. For example, in the case of Nessana, epitaphs
dated around the period of an outbreak of plague were linked to the
plague. Subsequent epigraphic work on the nearby city of Gaza
accepted the Nessana epitaphs as proof for plague and its effects
in the broader region. If the Nessana evidence remains uncertain,
subsequent epitaphs cannot interpret it as proof for plague as well.84
Altogether, the literary and non-literary sources do not support
the case of an empire-wide mass mortality event. Most existing
references in the literary sources are general and vague. In all
accounts, plague quickly disappears and multiple sources gloss
over it. Non-literary sources are almost always ambiguous and
could be connected to other sixth-century trends. We did not find
any substantial evidence for significant effects at the societal level
that would lead to mortality estimates of around half of the
population. The primary sources cast serious doubts on the
81 The indiction was a recurring cycle of fifteen years, so the boys could have died in
512, 527, 542, 557, 572, or 587 — not to mention 497 and 602.
82 Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine
Empire, 290–1 (#115).

83 Ibid., 290–3 (#114, #117).
84 H. Dunscombe Colt, Excavations at Nessana (London, 1962), 168 (#80), 179–
81 (#112–14); Carol A. M. Glucker, The City of Gaza in the Roman and Byzantine
Periods (British Archaeological Reports: International Series, cccxxv, 1987), 124–7
(#9–11).
III
EXAMINATION OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL DATA
New scientific tools in archaeological evidence are opening new
avenues to understand pre-modern societies, complementing
the existing literary paradigms to construct a more complete
image of Late Antiquity.85 However, the archaeological data
claimed as evidence for the Justinianic Plague is rarely nuanced.
Scholars often interpret ambiguous evidence as proof while
overlooking the significantly greater number of cases that do
not fit the maximalist interpretation of plague.
Some general studies of large plague-affected regions such as
Syria suggest massive devastation and depopulation.86 This
interpretation, however, does not fit a growing corpus of
evidence. Jairus Banaji drew on archaeological excavations and
surveys to argue for a long-term ‘remarkable rural expansion’ that
only ended in the seventh century. The areas around Bostra
attained ‘astonishing prosperity’, while the Hauran flourished
after the plague.87 Archaeological work in Palestine reveals
similar findings: Gideon Avni describes flourishing settlements
and urban growth, while Jodi Magness argues for ‘tremendous
growth of the population as well as of maritime trade’ between the
mid sixth and mid seventh centuries.88 These overarching trends
suggest that even if plague did cause depopulation over the short
term, it is all but invisible in the archaeological record, implying
that Syria and Palestine quickly recovered.
Most recent attention in plague research has focused on scientific
discoveries. These studies, however, exacerbate the existing
problem by reinforcing a reading of limited ambiguous evidence
85 See, for example, Janet Kay, ‘Moving from Wales and the West in the Fifth
Century: Isotope Evidence for Eastward Migration in Britain’, in Patricia Skinner

(ed.), The Welsh and the Medieval World: Travel, Migration and Exile (Cardiff, 2018).
86 Hugh Kennedy, ‘From Polis to Madina: Urban Change in Late Antique and
Early Islamic Syria’, Past and Present, no. 106 (Feb. 1985); Hugh N. Kennedy,
‘Justinianic Plague in Syria and the Archaeological Evidence’, in Little (ed.), Plague
and the End of Antiquity.
87 Jairus Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity: Gold, Labour, and Aristocratic
Dominance (New York and Oxford, 2007), 16–22, quote at 22; contra Kennedy,
‘Justinianic Plague in Syria and the Archaeological Evidence’ who argues for
general urban decline in Syria without much evidence or proof that plague was
involved.
88 Gideon Avni, The Byzantine-Islamic Transition in Palestine: An Archaeological
Approach (Oxford, 2014), 328–9; Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of the Early Islamic
Settlement in Palestine (Winona Lake, Indiana, 2003), 195–214, esp. 214.
as identifying the sixth-century epidemic as a massive demographic
disaster. To date, Y. pestis DNA has been identified in human
remains in five archaeological sites in western Europe: two in
Bavaria (Aschheim and Altenerding) and three in France (Vienne,
Sens and Poitiers).89 No equivalent sites are known for the eastern
Mediterranean where the plague supposedly had a more significant
impact. This small and non-representative sample is extrapolated to
construct the maximalist interpretation. We examine below the
evidence for each site, in order to underscore the problematic
foundations of this structure.
Aschheim and Altenerding

The cemetery at Aschheim lies just outside Munich and contains
approximately 438 recoverable graves. Most of the graves are
single burials, but around 34 are multiple burials (of which 28
are datable). The site was occupied from c.480/490–c.680,
which archaeologists have divided into five or six phases. The
remains at Aschheim feature expected sex and age ratios,
skeletal heights, and standard life expectancy. Scholars have
suggested Aschheim contained plague victims based on the
number of multiple burials and the ‘collapse’ of the population
after c.555.90 If every person in each multiple burial at Aschheim
89 We have been unable to access the original archaeological reports from Sens or
Poitiers. The first discovery of plague DNA was in Michel Drancourt et al., ‘Detection
of 400-Year-Old Yersinia Pestis DNA in Human Dental Pulp: An Approach to the
Diagnosis of Ancient Septicemia’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America, xcv, 21 (13 Oct. 1998). The same researchers discovered
similar DNA at Sens, Michel Drancourt et al., ‘Genotyping, Orientalis-like Yersinia
Pestis, and Plague Pandemics’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, x, 9 (Sept. 2004). This
evidence and the techniques were challenged in M. Thomas P. Gilbert et al., ‘Absence
of Yersinia Pestis-Specific DNA in Human Teeth from Five European Excavations of
Putative Plague Victims’, Microbiology, cl, 2 (Feb. 2004). A more recent study found
some evidence of plague from Sens teeth: Nada Malou et al., ‘Immuno-PCR — A New
Tool for Paleomicrobiology: The Plague Paradigm’, PLOS ONE, vii (Feb. 2012); the
debate over data remains: M. Drancourt and D. Raoult, ‘Molecular History of
Plague’, Clinical Microbiology and Infection, xxii, 11 (Nov. 2016). For Poitiers, see
Dominique Castex and Sacha Kacki, ‘Demographic Patterns Distinctive of
Epidemic Cemeteries in Archaeological Samples’, Microbiology Spectrum, iv, 4 (Aug.
2016). Johannes Krause has mentioned in a lecture that more DNA has been found in
Valencia, but has not published his finds. See the presentation at Science of the Human
Past, SoHP: Johannes Krause, 16 Feb. 2017, 49:30, 5https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v¼ywlXj46SeUg4(accessed 9 Mar. 2019).
90 Summarized in Anja Staskiewicz, ‘The Early Medieval Cemetery at Aschheim-
Bajuwarenring — a Merovingian Population under the Influence of Pestilence?’, in

Gisela Grupe and Joris Peters (eds.), Skeletal Series and Their Socio-Economic Context
(Rahden, Westf., 2007), 35. For a complete inventory of all the graves, see Doris
(cont. on p. 26)
was a plague victim, plague mortality could have reached at least

35–53 per cent.91 There is, however, no reason to assume all the
multiple burials were dug following the plague and we lack DNA
evidence to support this hypothesis. Many, including the graves
that tested positive for plague DNA, had high-status grave goods
and were not buried hastily.92
The first DNA study at Aschheim tested evidence from the
dental pulp of skeletons A166 and A167, which were interned
in a high-status double-burial grave. The first test returned
positive results for A166 and inconsistent ones for A167. Based
on this analysis, the authors of this article were careful to note that
even a positive DNA test did not necessarily mean plague caused
massive mortality.93
Although this first study was groundbreaking in its scientific
methodology, it did not employ anti-contamination protocols
now considered vital and it only examined two remains. A
subsequent more rigorous study tested 19 skeletons and
documented eight positive results using a broad standard of
comparison to known plague DNA, including individual A166
again. Only a single skeleton (A120), however, was found to have
plague DNA in larger extracts.94 The study, which was aimed at
determining the etiological agent of the first plague pandemic,
concluded that certainly ‘some humans buried in the 6th century
Ascheim (sic) cemetery were infected with Y. pestis’.95 A third test
subsequently confirmed the single positive result for A120 and for
(n. 90 cont.)
Gutsmiedl-Schümann, Das frühmittelalterliche Gräberfeld Aschheim-Bajuwarenring
(Kallmunz, Bavaria, 2010), 121–344, with a summary at pp. 422–30. The totals
differ due to the surviving composition of some graves. Gutsmiedl-Schümann
divides the cemetery into five phases with those before 525 in a single phase. For
the supposed demographic ‘collapse’ see below.
91 McCormick, ‘Tracking Mass Death during the Fall of Rome’s Empire (I)’, 345–
6, and esp. 355.

92 D. Reimann, K. Düwel and A. Bartel, ‘Vereint in den Tod — Doppelgrab 166/
167 aus Aschheim’, in Das Archäologische Jahr in Bayern (1999); Staskiewicz, ‘Early
Medieval Cemetery at Aschheim-Bajuwarenring’, 51–4. For the problems with
demography at Aschheim see below.
93 Ingrid Wiechmann and Gisela Grupe, ‘Detection of Yersinia Pestis DNA in Two
Early Medieval Skeletal Finds from Aschheim (Upper Bavaria, 6th Century AD)’,
American Journal of Physical Anthropology, cxxvi, 1 (Jan. 2005).
94 Michaela Harbeck et al., ‘Yersinia Pestis DNA from Skeletal Remains from the
6th Century AD Reveals Insights into Justinianic Plague’, PLOS Pathogens, ix (May
2013).
95 Ibid.
another victim (A76). Better genomic coverage was found for
A120. The authors noted that the Aschheim DNA evidence
diverged significantly from the DNA of Black Death victims.96
Despite these inherent problems and the very low frequency of
plague in the remains at Aschheim, scholars grew more confident
of its devastating impact. The third study, for example, claimed
the plague killed ‘an estimated 100 million people . . .
contributing to the end of the Roman Empire, and marking the
transition from the classical to the medieval world’.97 Ignoring the
small dataset, historians absorbed this evidence and its analysis,
extrapolating from it to suggest that if the plague hit this small
community in rural Bavaria, then it must have struck many other
places.98 Current disputes about Aschheim’s results concern the
origin of the plague and its strain, while the maximal societal
effect of plague is automatically assumed.99
The second Bavarian site, Altenerding (about twenty miles
from Aschheim), is a cemetery of at least 1,521 graves
excavated between 1966 and 1973 with skeletons dating from
the late fifth century to the seventh century. Burial practices
generally remained constant and the graves are evenly spread
throughout the cemetery. The average age at death, in the mid
30s, is standard. All the burials are individual, except for 17
double burials which are spread relatively equally throughout
the four phases.100
By the first occurrence of the Justinianic Plague (the 540s), the
cemetery was divided between several grave sections based on
similar, often valuable, grave goods. The differing artefacts
found in the regions of the cemetery hint that connected groups
of people continued to bury their dead in the same places over
time. This suggests continuity in population and possibly related
96 Wagner et al., ‘Yersinia Pestis and the Plague of Justinian’; see below for more
detail.
97 Ibid., 319.
98 Harper, The Fate of Rome, 230; Harper, ‘Invisible Environmental History’.
99 On current disputes, see Monica H. Green et al., ‘Yersinia Pestis and the Three
Plague Pandemics’, The Lancet: Infectious Diseases, xiv, 10 (2014); George D.

Sussman, ‘Scientists Doing History: Central Africa and the Origins of the First
Plague Pandemic’, Journal of World History, xxvi, 2 (2015). This follows the earlier
debate about diagnosis, for example, Horden, ‘Mediterranean Plague in the Age of
Justinian’, 151.
100 Hans Losert and Andrej Pleterski, Altenerding in Oberbayern: Struktur des
Frühmittelalterlichen Gräberfeldes und ‘Ethnogenese’ der Bajuwaren (Berlin, 2003).

burials based on the different groupings of grave goods.101 The

cemetery and its layout point to substantial continuity rather than
demographic collapse over its period of use. There is no
archaeological evidence for a virulent epidemic disease.
The research team conducting the DNA study of Altenerding
selected twenty skeletons from ten double graves for analysis,
presumably due to the higher possibility of plague victims in
multiple graves. They did not study the seven undated multiple
burials or reburials. This research team isolated plague DNA
from two skeletons in one double burial (AE 1175 female and
AE 1176 male), but only the DNA extracted from AE 1175 was
robustly positive for plague.102 The individuals chosen for the
DNA study suggest careful burial, since they were ‘buried with
rather expensive clothes and jewels . . . Burial rites, which
probably also included washing and public laying out of the
body seem to have been conducted’.103 This practice hardly
suggests an apocalyptic pandemic.104 Rather, it seems as if AE
1175’s burial was part of the standard rituals at Altenerding. Even
if these were plague-related deaths, they did not disrupt normal
patterns of life.105
While the Y. pestis DNA from both sites seems to be the same,
Altenerding’s findings demonstrated significant problems with the
original Aschheim data collection. The authors of the Altenerding
study concluded that the DNA evidence from the Aschheim site
had a high percentage of heterozygous genetic material, with
internal differences of up to 48.05 per cent in the genome,
making the Aschheim data an outlier compared to other ancient
DNA studies. They suggested this is ‘unlikely’ and that tainted
samples or incorrect data might have played a role, although they
101 Susanne Hakenbeck, Local, Regional and Ethnic Identities in Early Medieval
Cemeteries in Bavaria (Florence, 2011), 107–20, esp. 118–20 for a summary of

findings.
102 Michal Feldman et al., ‘A High-Coverage Yersinia Pestis Genome from a Sixth-
Century Justinianic Plague Victim’, Molecular Biology and Evolution, xxxiii, 11 (Nov.
2016).
103 Feldman et al., ‘A High-Coverage Yersinia Pestis Genome from a Sixth-Century
Justinianic Plague Victim’, suppl. 69.

104 On this see Henri Duday, ‘Archaeological Proof of an Abrupt Mortality Crisis:
Simultaneous Deposit of Cadavers, Simultaneous Deaths?’, in Didier Raoult and

Michel Drancourt (eds.), Paleomicrobiology: Past Human Infections (Berlin and
Heidelberg, 2008).
105 See also McCormick, ‘Tracking Mass Death during the Fall of Rome’s Empire
(I)’, 337.
never doubt the presence of Y. pestis at Aschheim.106 Although
false negatives are a real possibility, it is important to note that
among the pre-selected burials at Aschheim and Altenerding only
eleven confirmed isolations of Y. pestis DNA were found in total.
The lack of comparable archaeological and DNA evidence from
all other excavations is ignored.107
Vienne, Sens and Poitiers108
The other three Y. pestis finds come from France. The site at Vienne
has been well documented and contains eleven skeletons, buried in
five hastily dug layers. As with many burials, the dating is insecure
with a single fifth-century nummus coin in the graves and two C14
dates providing ranges of 610–880 CE and 760–1040 CE.109 While
the recent archaeologists suggest the site is evidence of plague, they
remain wary of necessarily attributing it to Y. pestis.110 Four
skeletons from the Vienne site yielded positive results for Y. pestis,
which was linked to the Justinianic Plague. In attempting to
genotype these pathogenic remains, however, the team located
Justinianic Plague-era Y. pestis on what is now known to be the
106 Feldman et al., ‘A High-Coverage Yersinia Pestis Genome from a Sixth-Century
Justinianic Plague Victim’, 2915–18. Although Y. pestis is a haploid organism (i.e. with
one set of chromosomes rather than two), Feldman and her team found more than one
allele (as would be expected in a haploid organism) in a high number of SNP locations
in the Aschheim data reported by Wagner et al., ‘Yersinia Pestis and the Plague of
Justinian’.
107 Although more DNA evidence of Y. pestis will likely be found, on its own it will
not confirm or reject a maximalist interpretation. This new evidence must be

considered against the many cases in which plague was not identified across the vast
number of burials in Late Antiquity. A few additional cases of plague cannot confirm a
demographic, social and cultural collapse across the Mediterranean. A recent pre-
print (pre-peer review) paper that came out too late to be used here has expanded the
number of known plague cases. Our overall point, however, remains. For the new
paper see M. Keller et al. (2018), ‘Ancient Yersinia pestis genomes from across
Western Europe reveal early diversification during the First Pandemic (541–750)’,
bioRxiv, 481226. Pre-print, posted 4 December, 2018.
108 See n. 89, above, for our reasoning to exclude Sens and Poitiers.
109 Michel Drancourt et al., ‘Yersinia Pestis Orientalis in Remains of Ancient Plague
Patients’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, xiii, 2 (Feb. 2007). Moreover, the article ignores
dating issues by asserting a seventh–ninth-century date for the burial using a
composite of the two C14 estimates and a fifth-century coin; the coin provides a
terminus post quem, see Michel Signoli et al., ‘Une sépulture de pestiférés du Haut
Moyen Âge à Vienne (Isère)’, Archéologie du Midi médiéval, xxvii (2009).
110 Signoli et al., ‘Une sépulture de pestiférés du Haut Moyen Âge à Vienne (Isère)’.
The grave suggests a mass mortality event, but the dating is potentially later than the
Justinianic Plague (541–750 CE).
wrong branch of plague’s phylogenetic tree, which almost certainly

meant the genetic test was contaminated.111
Plague and its transmission

There is also the problem of how the plague was transmitted.
Infected commensal black rats (Rattus rattus), which are hosts
to plague-infected fleas (Xenopsylla cheopis), are strongly
correlated with bubonic plague deaths in humans based on
Third Pandemic data.112 The rarity of rat bones in the
Mediterranean outside of western Europe, however, is
a warning sign. The Byzantine Empire has evidence for only a
handful of rats before the Justinianic reconquest, with only a few
others in the reconquered territories.113 Although rodent bones
have not always been a high priority for archaeologists, the
paucity of finds is still notable, especially since archaeological
research into rat remnants began in the 1970s if not earlier.114
The near absence of evidence for rats in the Roman Empire
should be compared to the 500,000 rats killed every year in
twentieth-century Bombay after the British instituted rat-killing
campaigns in the city. Only 14,000 of them (less than 3 per cent)
were infected with plague.115 Based on the few finds so far, the
low numbers of rats and fleas in medieval Europe would be
insufficient to maintain a major pandemic even during the
111 Harbeck et al., ‘Yersinia Pestis DNA from Skeletal Remains from the 6th
Century AD Reveals Insights into Justinianic Plague’. Most scholars do not accept
the French results as evidence for plague.
112 While other mammals such as cats, goats and cattle can serve as hosts to the
plague-infected fleas, rodents and the black rat are particularly important in
maintaining the disease over time. See Varlık, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern
Mediterranean World, 19–28.
113 Ten rats in total are known from three locations in Egypt dating from 663 BCE to
600 CE; twenty-eight rats in Apamea (modern Syria) dated between 500 and 800; and
an unknown number of fifth-century rat bones in Stobi (modern Macedonia). Roman/
Byzantine Carthage has some evidence for rats and they were slightly more common in
Italy. All details are from Michael McCormick, Guoping Huang and Kelly Gibson
(eds.), ‘The Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations’, (Cambridge, Mass.,
2007), 5http://darmc.harvard.edu/home4. As of 2013, no rat bones were found in
Roman contexts from excavations in Rome, see Michael MacKinnon, ‘Pack Animals,
Pets, Pests, and Other Non-Human Beings’, in Paul Erdkamp (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 2013), 120–1.
114 Michael McCormick, ‘Rats, Communications, and Plague: Toward an
Ecological History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxiv, 1 (2003), 6.

Comprehensive inventories exist from 1994.
115 John Andrew Turner, Sanitation in India (Bombay, 1914), 557–8.
Black Death, when there is slightly more evidence for rats.116
While the dissemination of plague to and through late antique
Mediterranean cities and countryside did not necessarily hinge
on the rat and flea model, several maximalist interpretations of
the Justinianic Plague rely exclusively on it.117 The minimal
evidence for rats in the late antique world therefore casts
further doubt on the standard maximalist interpretation of the
Justinianic Plague.118
An alternative model for the First Pandemic is pneumonic
plague, which spreads through direct human-to-human contact.
This is an attractive model since it progresses rapidly (death in one
to three days of the first symptoms) and its mortality rate is close to
100 per cent of those infected by it. Yet, the only known cases of
large-scale pneumonic outbreak happened in early twentieth
century Manchuria in which a specific cultural, social and
geographic context provided the optimal setting for its spread.
Pneumonic plague generally, however, kills its victims so quickly
that it does not spread beyond its immediate context and,
therefore, cannot provide a viable alternative model to explain
the maximalist interpretation.119
116 For example, Anne Karin Hufthammer and Lars Walløe, ‘Rats Cannot Have
Been Intermediate Hosts for Yersinia Pestis during Medieval Plague Epidemics in
Northern Europe’, Journal of Archaeological Science, xl (2013), 1752–9; references in
Walløe, ‘Medieval and Modern Bubonic Plague’, 69. For a recent high-profile
publication using mathematical models see Katharine R. Dean et al., ‘Human
Ectoparasites and the Spread of Plague in Europe during the Second Pandemic’,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, cxv, 6
(2018).
117 Scholars have long superimposed the Bombay rat/rat–flea model onto the earlier
plague pandemics with little evidence. See I. J. Catanach, ‘The ‘‘Globalization’’ of

Disease? India and the Plague’, Journal of World History, xii, 1 (2001); Katherine
Royer, ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant: Imperial Medicine, Medieval Historians
and the Role of Rats in the Historiography of Plague’, in Poonam Bala (ed.), Medicine
and Colonialism: Historical Perspectives in India and South Africa (London, 2014).
118 Contra McCormick, ‘Rats, Communications, and Plague’; Harper, Fate of
Rome. Some have argued that the Black Death spread through human fleas and lice;
the authors are unaware, however, of any late antique evidence for head or body lice.
For recent contributions to this debate, see Katharine R. Dean, ‘Modeling Plague
Transmission in Medieval European Cities’ (Univ. of Oslo MA thesis, 2015); Dean et
al., ‘Human Ectoparasites and the Spread of Plague in Europe during the Second
Pandemic’. Moreover, more than two hundred species of animals can serve as hosts for
the disease, as in Royer, ‘Blind Men and the Elephant’. We are not aware of similar
arguments for the Justinianic Plague.
119 Jacob L. Kool, ‘Risk of Person-to-Person Transmission of Pneumonic Plague’,
Clinical Infectious Diseases: An Official Publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of

America, xl, 8 (2005); Elizabeth M. Begier et al., ‘Pneumonic Plague Cluster,
(cont. on p. 32)
Archaeological and scientific research can offer valuable insights

about the Justinianic Plague. However, a critical examination of
the existing evidence provides an underwhelming case for the
plague’s mortality. It appears that scholars have extrapolated
from scanty and problematic data to construct broad
hypotheses, confirming their pre-formulated theories. Although
additional DNA and archaeological research of potential plague
victims could uncover valuable insights, this type of evidence must
be considered critically. We would caution against extrapolation to
create grand narratives of catastrophe and instead acknowledge
that local socio-environmental conditions determined the effects
of ecologically complex diseases such as Y. pestis.
IV
EPIDEMIOLOGY AND SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL INTERACTION
Recent developments in disaster studies have moved away from
identifying environmental stresses (for example, earthquakes) as
disasters that affect human societies. Rather, scholars
differentiate between hazards, the natural aspects of an event
(such as the earth shaking), and disasters, which are social
effects that are determined by constant interaction between the
environment and society. This implies that human societies can
mitigate or aggravate these social effects.120
These developments, however, are not acknowledged in plague
studies. Models of the effects of the Justinianic Plague describe a
swift and significant depopulation without acknowledging
mitigation attempts or possible population recovery.121 The
most popular and simple countermeasure was migration. There
is evidence for late antique contemporaries moving, rather than
dying in massive numbers. Emperor Constantine V left
Constantinople for a suburb during an outbreak in the 740s.122
(n. 119 cont.)

Uganda, 2004’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, xii, 3 (2006); Dean et al., ‘Human
Ectoparasites and the Spread of Plague in Europe during the Second Pandemic’
used mathematical models to reject this transmission method for the Black Death.
120 For an introductory survey on this see Smith, Environmental Hazards, 3–22.
121 For an example of the former, see Harper, Fate of Rome, 245; and Harper,
‘Invisible Environmental History’.

122 Nikephoros, Antirhetikos III, in Jacques-Paul Migne (ed.), Patrologia Graeca 100,
496B–497A; for context Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 6238, ed. C. de Boor, 2

vols. (Leipzig, 1883–5), 422–4; trans. in Cyril Mango and Roger Scott (eds.), The
(cont. on p. 33)
In 542, the population of Myra’s hinterland refused to enter the
city, fearing the plague.123 Gregory of Tours likewise discusses
the migration of people away from plague-struck cities.124 Paul
the Deacon mentioned the outbreak of disease in the year 680 that
struck both Rome and Pavia, which in the latter was so severe ‘that
all [the] citizens fled to the mountain ranges and to other
places’.125 Even the empty villages John of Ephesus describes
might have been willingly (and sensibly!) vacated by locals, who
would temporarily move off the main road to remote places until
the outbreak subsided.126 Such risk mitigation strategies would
reduce plague mortality, especially in subsequent outbreaks when
people knew what to expect.
Analyses of the plague also ignore other epidemics. As in the
Third Pandemic in India discussed in section V below, plague was
only one of an array of co-existent diseases, and could become
endemic.127 In all but a few cases, any differentiation between
these epidemics in the sources is impossible. Scholars rarely
acknowledge that a reference to any disease in the sources might
have been the result of combined mortality from two epidemics.128
Similarly, few discussions note that two simultaneous outbreaks of
the same disease in different regions might not be related.
Although plague could actively spread between regions, it could
(n. 122 cont.)

Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History. AD 284–813,
585–6.
123 Ihor Ševčenko and Nancy Patterson Ševčenko, The Life of Saint Nicholas of Sion
(Brookline, Mass., 1984), 52.

124 Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis Libri historiarum X, 9.22, ed. Krusch and Levison,
442.
125 ‘Cunctis civibus per iuga montium seu per diversa loca fugientibus’. Paul the
Deacon, Pauli Historia langobardorum, 6.5, ed. Georg Waitz (Monumenta Germaniae
Historica, Scriptores rerum germanicarum, xlviii, Hanover, 1878), 214.
126 John of Ephesus ¼ Ps. Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Incerti auctoris Chronicon Pseudo-
Dionysianum vulgo dictum, ed. Chabot, 87–8; Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Chronicle:

Part III, trans. Witakowski, 80–1.
127 For other late antique diseases see Timothy P. Newfield, ‘Malaria and Malaria-
like Disease in the Early Middle Ages’, Early Medieval Europe, xxv, 3 (2017); Timothy
P. Newfield, ‘Mysterious and Mortiferous Clouds: The Climate Cooling and Disease
Burden of Late Antiquity’, Late Antique Archaeology, xii, 1 (2018); Harper, ‘Invisible
Environmental History’.
128 A rare exception in the context of the Black Death: see Ann G. Carmichael,
‘Universal and Particular: The Language of Plague, 1348–1500’, in Nutton (ed.),

Pestilential Complexities, suppl. xxvii to Medical History, lii (2008), 51; Samuel K.
Cohn Jr, ‘The Black Death: End of a Paradigm’, The American Historical Review,
cvii, 3 (2002), 713.
also remain endemic in cities or enzootic in populations of wild or

sylvatic rodents.129
Demographic Decline?
Despite these analyses, scholars use plague as part of the model to
explain the depopulation of the Roman Empire.130 The first
outbreak is seen as a catastrophic event that began c.541 and
caused up to 50–60 per cent mortality in a few years.131
Subsequent plague waves continued to strike as a longer-term
factor that reduced Mediterranean populations significantly by
750.132 This model identifies plague as the causative agent of
demographic depopulation and draws upon the common
interpretation of the Black Death, which is said to have reduced
Europe’s population by a third or more in only a few years and
struck repeatedly thereafter, further depressing the population.
This depopulation model, however, has little supporting
epidemiological evidence, as Y. pestis was not new to Europe or
the Mediterranean in 541. Recent genetic evidence has revealed
that earlier forms of plague, ancestral Y. pestis strains, were found
across large stretches of western Eurasia for more than
three thousand years before the Justinianic Plague. These
earlier forms may have been able to cause pneumonic and
septicemic plague and, therefore, might have been more isolated
in their outbreaks.133 Moreover, pre-Justinianic Plague medical
authorities refer to a disease resembling bubonic plague. Around
100 CE the physician Rufus of Ephesus, drawing in part on earlier
writings, mentioned that it was known in Egypt, Libya and
129 For example Varlık, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World,
8, 48–9.
130 In reality only parts of the empire: compare Wickham, Framing the Early Middle
Ages, 508.
131 Harper, Fate of Rome, 244–5; Harper, ‘Invisible Environmental History’.
132 Mitchell, History of the Later Roman Empire, 412–13; Biraben and Le Goff,
‘Plague in the Early Middle Ages’, 62 refer to a ‘catastrophic demographic slump’;

Morony, ‘ ‘‘For Whom Does the Writer Write?’’ ’, 73 seems to suggest mortality of a
third overall; Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications
and Commerce, AD 300–900 (Cambridge, 2001), 30–41 does not use plague to explain
the depopulation. Some scholars use only part of this model.
133 Simon Rasmussen et al., ‘Early Divergent Strains of Yersinia Pestis in Eurasia
5,000 Years Ago’, Cell, clxiii, 3 (2015); Aida Andrades Valtueña et al., ‘The Stone Age
Plague and Its Persistence in Eurasia’, Current Biology, xxvii, 23 (2017). These papers
place the plague in Armenia and Croatia a millennium or more before the Justinianic
Plague. Also see the recent Peter de Barros Damgaard et al., ‘137 Ancient Human
Genomes from across the Eurasian Steppes’, Nature, dlvii (May 2018) for an example
of the plague across the Eurasian steppe.
Syria.134 Likewise, Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite mentioned the
outbreak of a bubonic-type disease which killed countless people
half a century before the first outbreak of the Justinianic Plague.135
This contradicts the hypothesis that plague (or at least a similar
type of disease) never visited the Mediterranean before the
Justinianic Plague.
Moreover, evidence suggests that socio-environmental systems
show surprising resilience to environmental stress. High mortality
events are followed by growth spurts, as the case of twentieth-
century India demonstrates. Similar effects have been noted for
native Americans in the early modern period, where population
decline was neither uniform nor persistent. Population simulations
demonstrate that after a 40 per cent reduction of population in an
epidemic, post-disaster population growth of only 2 per cent or 3
per cent a year would result in full demographic recovery after
about a decade.136
Although none of these findings are discussed in the context of
the Justinianic Plague, the evidence from Aschheim supports
demographic recovery. The population of Aschheim has been
calculated to average sixty-six people at any given time, but this
includes the entire 170 years of settlement, notwithstanding that
the first thirty and the last fifty to sixty years only had an estimated
population of thirty-four and thirty-five people respectively.
Modelling suggests that in phase two (530–555), during the
height of the plague, the population was approximately 126
people while in phase three (555–580) after the most
devastating supposed ‘wave’ of plague, the population
decreased to 105 people — a 16.7 per cent drop. Yet, the local
population soon recovered to 155 people in phase four (580–
600), already above its phase two levels, and then in phase five
134 In Oribasius, Collectionum medicarum reliquiae, ed. Ioannes Raeder (Corpus
medicorum graecorum, vi, 1–2, Leipzig, 1928–33), 44.14, ‘o3 d"; loim0dei”
kalo0meuoi boub8ue” qauatwd0statoi ka1 2x0tatoi, o7 m0lista per1 ib0hu ka1 A4guptou
ka1 ur0au 3r8utai giu0meuoi’ (the so-called pestilential buboes are most deadly and
most severe, and are seen mostly in Libya, Egypt and Syria); the mid first-century AD
physician Aretaeus also refers to buboes: The Extant Works of Aretaeus, the
Cappadocian, 2.3, Acute Diseases, ed. Francis Adams (Boston, 1972).
135 Pseudo-Joshua, Chronicle, 28, also 44 for another unclear epidemic, The
Chronicle of Pseudo–Joshua the Stylite, ed. and trans. Frank R. Trombley and John W.
Watt (Liverpool, 2000), 26, 46; see p. 26 #127 for a brief discussion.
136 Russell Thornton, Tim Miller, and Jonathan Warren, ‘American Indian
Population Recovery Following Smallpox Epidemics’, American Anthropologist, xciii

(1991).
(600–620) increased again to 231 people. Only in phase six (620–

670/680) did the population decrease to approximately thirty-five
people, but this was likely due to changing burial locations.137
From this evidence, we find no indication of mass population
collapse at Aschheim, which negates its application as a model
elsewhere. This is not to say that plague did not strike Aschheim
or that it did not devastate families, causing untold grief.
However, the archaeological evidence does not lend itself to
catastrophic population collapse in Bavaria and should not be
extrapolated to other places.138
The lack of nuance regarding the Justinianic Plague is also
apparent when considering the influence of the mid-sixth-
century cooling climate.139 Not only is the causal pathway
between cooling and plague unclear, but modern research has
shown that plague prevalence is sometimes positively correlated
with higher temperatures.140 More nuanced interpretations that
consider the different regional, sub-regional, and micro-regional
environments around the Mediterranean are almost non-existent.
Although the lack of hard data forces scholars to generalize,
variances within the late antique world must be analysed when
discussing environmental phenomena. Consider the seven sub-
regional climate zones in Asia Minor, and the additional
variability within them.141 Any large-scale environmental
change would necessarily have different local manifestations in
each, creating conditions that would be less or more amenable
137 All numbers from Staskiewicz, ‘Early Medieval Cemetery at Aschheim-
Bajuwarenring’, 49, table 5, and see table 4 for burial specifics; Gutsmiedl-
Schümann, Das frühmittelalterliche Gräberfeld Aschheim-Bajuwarenring, 112–13 has
different phase calculations. While demographic modelling makes several
unverifiable assumptions, we have used it with this caveat in mind (as others have).
138 Contra McCormick, ‘Tracking Mass Death during the Fall of Rome’s Empire
(I)’, 355.
139 Büntgen et al., ‘Cooling and Societal Change during the Late Antique Little Ice
Age’.
140 Nils Chr Stenseth et al., ‘Plague Dynamics Are Driven by Climate Variation’,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, ciii, 35
(2006); Boris V. Schmid et al., ‘Climate-Driven Introduction of the Black Death and
Successive Plague Reintroductions into Europe’, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the United States of America, cxii, 10 (2015).
141 Yurdanur Unal, Tayfun Kindap, and Mehmet Karaca, ‘Redefining the Climate
Zones of Turkey Using Cluster Analysis’, International Journal of Climatology, xxiii, 9

(2003); John Haldon et al., ‘The Climate and Environment of Byzantine Anatolia:
Integrating Science, History, and Archaeology’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xlv,
2 (2014), 143; Adam Izdebski, A Rural Economy in Transition: Asia Minor from Late
Antiquity into the Early Middle Ages (Warsaw, 2013).
to different parts of the complex plague cycle.142 Evidence from
the Third Pandemic demonstrates such non-linear effects.143
Scholarship assumes the Justinianic Plague was an unmitigated
natural disaster. Recent disaster studies literature casts doubts
on this model, even without expecting late antique populations
to have carried out effective quarantines or cordons sanitaires.
Contemporaries had several available moderating strategies and,
even if afflicted, they would quickly recover demographically.
Current scholarship casts past climate in a similar rudimentary
role, emphasizing uniform effects throughout large territories
without acknowledging the complex interaction between local
climates, biospheres and human activities.
V
A COMPARATIVE CONTEXT: THE THIRD PANDEMIC
Most studies of the Justinianic Plague assume it was comparable
to the Black Death, while the Third Pandemic remains missing
from most discussions. However, given the vast differences
between the Second and Third Pandemics, accepting the Black
Death as the only epidemiological model for the Justinianic
Plague assumes equivalences that might not exist.144 We,
therefore, introduce comparative data from the Third Pandemic
as a counterbalance to suggest an alternative way to synthesize the
First Pandemic outbreak. Although we recognize problems with
both comparisons, the Third Pandemic offers more detailed data
and offers a glimpse into how a complex society dealt with the
plague.
The plague pathogen of all three pandemics, Y. pestis, and the
scholarly understanding of it, has evolved over time. Until
142 Tamara Ben-Ari et al., ‘Plague and Climate: Scales Matter’, PLoS Pathogens, vii
(2011).
143 See below and L. Xu et al., ‘Wet Climate and Transportation Routes Accelerate
Spread of Human Plague’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, cclxxxi
(2014). Also, Lei Xu et al., ‘Nonlinear Effect of Climate on Plague during the Third
Pandemic in China’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States
of America, cviii, 25 (2011); Ira Klein, ‘Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British
India’, Modern Asian Studies, xxii, 4 (1988).
144 Compare Allen, ‘ ‘‘Justinianic’’ Plague’, 11–14. For an exception considering
the Third Pandemic, see Samuel K. Cohn Jr, ‘Epidemiology of the Black Death and
Successive Waves of Plague’, in Nutton (ed.), Pestilential Complexities, suppl. xxvii to
Medical History, lii (2008). On other comparisons, see Harper, Fate of Rome.
recently, scientists thought the predecessor of plague evolved into

three biovars (groups sharing similar phenotypes) which
correspond to the three pandemics: antiqua, medievalis, and
orientalis. Research now shows that many additional genotypes
of plague exist.145 Current DNA studies demonstrate that the
pathogen underwent mutations in the Common Era, both
during and between the pandemics, but suggest the Y. pestis of
the Justinianic Plague, the Black Death or the Third Pandemic
were potentially similarly virulent.146
Despite the common genetic composition of their pathogens,
there are some caveats to a comparison between the Justinianic
Plague and the Third Pandemic. They occurred in different
climates, environments and cultural contexts. Modern scientific
research could have alleviated some of the effects of the Third
Pandemic, and together with sanitary measures, reduced the
number of deaths. Nonetheless, this comparison can illuminate
our understanding of the Justinianic Plague, especially by ruling
out unfeasible interpretations.
Although many of the outbreaks of the Third Pandemic were
controlled, the case of India is an outlier. Plague had existed in
limited areas in nineteenth-century India, but reached epidemic
proportions in 1896.147 It remained endemic for decades and,
after a lull, broke out as late as 1994.148 The British, who
governed India when the plague struck worst, amply
documented the disease’s epidemiology and effects. Although
the British made efforts to improve public health in India, a
contemporary report noted that ‘over fifty years of sanitary
work in India’ had resulted in ‘almost complete failure’. In fact,
145 Older views are in R. Devignat, ‘Variétés de l’espèce Pasteurella Pestis’, Bulletin
of the World Health Organization, iv, 2 (1951); more recent references in Harbeck et al.,
‘Yersinia Pestis DNA from Skeletal Remains from the 6th Century AD Reveals Insights
into Justinianic Plague’; also Horden, ‘Mediterranean Plague in the Age of Justinian’,
147–8.
146 Kirsten I. Bos et al., ‘A Draft Genome of Yersinia Pestis from Victims of the Black
Death’, Nature, cdlxxviii (12 Oct. 2011); Yujun Cui et al., ‘Historical Variations in
Mutation Rate in an Epidemic Pathogen, Yersinia Pestis’, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, cx, 2 (8 Jan. 2013); Harbeck et al.,
‘Yersinia Pestis DNA from Skeletal Remains from the 6th Century AD Reveals Insights
into Justinianic Plague’. The equivalence in virulence is assumed, but never proven.
See Horden, ‘Mediterranean Plague in the Age of Justinian’; Science of the Human
Past, SoHP: Johannes Krause 16 Feb. 2017, 1:12:00, 5https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v¼ywlXj46SeUg4.
147 Klein, ‘Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British India’, 735–7.
148 Whether the last outbreak was plague is still debated (see below).
many of the British infrastructural developments facilitated the
spread of disease, so that between 1881 and 1921 life
expectancy in India dropped from 25 to 20.1 years.149
The colonial reports on India reveal that despite the high
mortality, plague was never the main cause of concern for the
British beyond the short term.150 The first census describing
the plague in 1901 noted its arrival, but emphasized famine’s
higher mortality.151 The next census, in 1911, reported plague
mortality, but only that it had slowed population growth.152
Likewise, the following census in 1921 was more concerned
with the influenza pandemic, which killed more Indians in a few
months than plague had killed over twenty years.153 Late antique
sources similarly often report other disasters coinciding with the
Justinianic Plague, sometimes discussing them in greater length,
hinting that their effects were more significant.
Plague was never the leading cause of mortality in India. Fever
— a general term that included falciparum malaria — was far
deadlier than all but the worst plague outbreaks. Cholera
sometimes also caused higher mortality. Plague drew British
attention because it was unexpected, not because it was
qualitatively worse than other diseases. In an examination of
mortality in eight provinces over ten years, plague was shown to
have had a minimal effect in six provinces (less than 1 per cent
mortality per year, often much less). In only one province, in one
year, did mortality reach as high as 3 per cent of the total
population.154 Between 1911 and 1921, plague caused more
than 10 per cent of all deaths in only three years.155 These
findings reveal a mortality that is at least an order of magnitude
less than that assumed for the Justinianic Plague and offers an
alternative model for the First Pandemic.
149 Ira Klein, ‘Death in India, 1871–1921’, The Journal of Asian Studies, xxxii,
4 (1973), 639–42, quote cited at 657.

150 Klein, ‘Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British India’, 724 argues for at
least twelve million plague deaths.

151 For instance, H. H. Risley and E. A. Gait, Census of India, 1901: Vol. I. India,
3 pts, pt 1, Report (Calcutta, 1903), 30–1; E. A. Gait, Census of India, 1911: Vol. I. India,
2 pts, pt 1, Report (Calcutta, 1913), 57–8.
152 Gait, Census of India, 1911: Vol. I. India, pt 1, Report, 57.
153 J. T. Marten, Census of India, 1921: Vol. I. India, 2 pts, pt 1, Report (Calcutta,
1924), 14.
154 Punjab in 1907; Gait, Census of India, 1911: Vol. I. India, pt 1, Report, 58–9.
155 L. J. Sedgwick, Census of India, 1921: Vol. VIII. Bombay Presidency, pt 1, General
Report (Bombay, 1922), 18–19.

The best information about the plague survives from Bombay

(present-day Mumbai), the location of its first serious outbreak.
The city was crowded — the 1901 census found an average of
twenty-six people living in the same house, compared to
between four and six in other cities of the twenty-five million-
person province.156 Throughout India, sanitation infrastructure
more closely resembled pre-modern infrastructure during the
First and Second Pandemic than that of today, so more
stringent measures did not mitigate the impact of plague.157
These difficult sanitary conditions must have increased plague
mortality compared to more salubrious environments. The
infrastructural problem was also exacerbated by British colonial
indifference to local systems of knowledge, response and
organization.158 Despite these detrimental factors, Bombay lost
less than a tenth of its population to the plague over five years.159
In the following decade, despite endemic plague, the population
of Bombay increased by 26 per cent.160
The epidemiology, closely investigated for the 1906–12 period,
is clear. Annual mortality decreased over time for humans and
rats, although it would flare up in the 1910s. The death toll
among humans is strongly correlated to the number of infected
rats a few weeks earlier. The ratio between infected and non-
infected rats was highest between February and May. Between
June and November, infected rats comprised less than 5 per cent
of all rats. Human deaths began increasing in February, peaked
in March and April, and decreased to background levels in
May.161 Although this evidence suggests the environment
156 R. E. Enthoven, Census of India, 1901: Vol. IXA. Bombay, 3 pts, pt 1, Report
(Bombay, 1902), 19; Klein, ‘Death in India, 1871–1921’, 652–3.

157 Turner, Sanitation in India, 554; Klein, ‘Death in India, 1871–1921’, 653–4.
158 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in
Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley, 1993); Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Recasting

Disease and Its Environment: Indigenous Medical Practitioners, the Plague, and
Politics in Colonial India (1898–1910)’, in Christina Folke Ax et al. (eds.),
Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies (Ohio
University Research in International Studies, Global and Comparative Studies
series, xii, Athens, Ohio, 2011).
159 Between the first outbreak of 1896 and the census of 1901, there were 64,792
plague-related deaths. The city’s overall population was reported as 821,764 in 1891
and 776,006 in 1901. See Enthoven, Census of India, 1901: Vol. IXA. Bombay, pt 1,
Report, 18, 44; Marten, Census of India, 1921: Vol. I. India, pt 1, Report, 74.
160 Gait, Census of India, 1911: Vol. I. India, pt 1, Report, 44.
161 These deaths all happened in the second half of the dry season (October to May),
which is characterized by similar temperatures (30–33 degrees centigrade) and almost

(cont. on p. 41)
determined the plague’s course, its interactions with
temperature and precipitation are unclear and non-linear. In
fact, scholars have used every type of possible climate and
weather change — cooler temperatures, warmer temperatures,
increased precipitation and droughts — to argue for greater
incidence of plague.162
The plague in India likewise contradicts the ideas of plague
‘waves’ and extreme mortality that are often asserted for the
Justinianic Plague. Rather, it demonstrated high chronological
and spatial variability. It battered some areas for years, but never
established itself in others.163 The census of India for 1901
noted in the description of another city that ‘plague has been
present more or less, for some years past, but . . . has never yet
assumed the frightful proportions familiar to the inhabitants of
Bombay, and it does not appear to have had so much influence,
hitherto, in keeping down the [local] population’.164 These
findings suggest that regional variability and microclimates
must have determined the local epidemiology and mortality
patterns of the Justinianic Plague as well.
The British reports from India indicate that plague never
seriously disrupted institutions nor was it a driver to transform
administrative, cultural or social factors. Local difficulties were
quickly resolved. In one census, for example, three hundred
Indian enumerators refused to enter plague-infected houses to
(n. 161 cont.)

no rainfall. Human deaths between June and January fluctuated around 0.1 per cent of
the total population. See Turner, Sanitation in India, 542–3 for plague data; NOAA,
‘5no Title4 (Climate Data for Mumbai)’, (n.d.) for climate: 5ftp://ftp.atdd.noaa.
gov/pub/GCOS/WMO-Normals/TABLES/REG_II/IN/43057.TXT4 (accessed 19
Mar. 2019).
162 Büntgen et al., ‘Cooling and Societal Change during the Late Antique Little Ice
Age’; Harper, Fate of Rome, for cold; Stenseth et al., ‘Plague Dynamics Are Driven by
Climate Variation’, for warmer springs and wetter summers; Schmid et al., ‘Climate-
Driven Introduction of the Black Death and Successive Plague Reintroductions into
Europe’, for cooling after a warm period. For feedback loops between increased
precipitation and drought: R. R. Parmenter et al., ‘Incidence of Plague Associated
with Increased Winter-Spring Precipitation in New Mexico’, The American Journal of
Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, lxi, 5 (1999); McCormick, ‘Rats, Communications,
and Plague’, 20. For a comprehensive analysis of climate and weather as non-linear
and micro-regions as determinate: Xu et al., ‘Wet Climate and Transportation Routes
Accelerate Spread of Human Plague’.
163 See for example Sedgwick, Census of India, 1921: Vol. VIII. Bombay Presidency,
pt 1, General Report, 19.

164 Risley and Gait, Census of India, 1901: Vol. I. India, pt 1, Report, 30.
count the city’s population on the appointed day. The British

officials simply hired other people. Three enumerators died of
plague, presumably because of their exposure.165
Findings from India could also illuminate potential answers
to questions that have long troubled discussions of the
Justinianic Plague. For instance, they demonstrate the effect of
internal migration on perceived depopulation, which could be
extreme.166 In 1994, news of a supposed plague outbreak in the
city of Surat caused panic. Although only several hundred
infections and about fifty deaths were documented, seven
hundred thousand people fled.167 These population movements
suggest that although similar migrations in Late Antiquity are
rarely acknowledged, they would have a larger impact than
mortality.
The evidence from the Third Pandemic casts more doubt on
fundamental assumptions of the Justinianic Plague by offering a
different model to understand it. The divergent mortality, the
paths and speed in which plague spread, its differential effect
on society and its overall socio-environmental context all
suggest viable alternatives to the traditional interpretation of
plague in Late Antiquity.
VI
THE PLAGUE AND ITS METANARRATIVES IN DISCOURSE
The modern search for plague’s origins is also tied to
contemporary discourses about epidemics and the need to
prevent their spread today. The globalization of the
contemporary world and the spread of diseases (such as SARS,
Zika, or Ebola) are routinely compared to past epidemics. Several
scholars have already pointed out the connection between the
emergence of AIDS in the 1980s and the increased attention to
165 Enthoven, Census of India, 1901: Vol. IXA. Bombay, 3 pts, pt 1, Report, 3.
166 For the early twentieth century see Gait, Census of India, 1911: Vol. I. India, pt 1,
Report, 40–1; also Marten, Census of India, 1921: Vol. I. India, pt 1, Report, 74.
167 About a quarter of the population; Ashok K. Dutt, Rais Akhtar, and Melinda
McVeigh, ‘Review: Surat Plague of 1994 Re-Examined’, Southeast Asian Journal of

Tropical Medicine and Public Health, xxxvii, 4 (2006); for an early twentieth-century
comparison, see Klein, ‘Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British India’, 743. We
recognize that modes of communication differed and could lead to greater panics.
historical plagues, to which AIDS was metaphorically linked.168
Furthermore, the use of biological weapons in the hands of non-
state actors since the 2001 anthrax envelope attacks serves as
further impetus for studies on past epidemics. Contemporary
publications refer to plague as a potential bioterrorist threat.169
While DNA studies on First Pandemic victims can publish their
results without external influence, national security agencies have
a direct interest in funding them, since they can be used to guide
state policy.170
The plague similarly provides an attractive explanation for the
fall of the Roman Empire if the model of the Black Death, rather
than the Third Pandemic, is used. The plague of the 540s neatly
coincides with Justinian’s pyrrhic reconquest of the West, making
it an easy explanation for the Eastern Roman Empire’s ‘failure’ to
reunify the Mediterranean.171 Yet, Justinian’s reconquest was a
far more complex process, which had immediate positive
outcomes for the empire (that is, increased tax revenues from
recently conquered lands in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and
Spain). The initial reconquest was largely successful, even if the
conquests may have stretched the empire’s resources in the long
term. Later difficulties were unrelated to plague. Plague did not
cause, for example, the Lombard invasion of Italy, which would
have equally devastated both Lombards and Romans in any case.
A connection between plague in the 540s and the Arab conquests
almost one hundred years later minimizes any structural changes
to the eastern Mediterranean in the intervening years and
removes the agency of the many individuals who sought to
168 David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, ed. Samuel K.
Cohn Jr (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 17–20ff.; also Samuel K. Cohn Jr, ‘Introduction’,
in Herlihy, Black Death and the Transformation of the West, ed. Cohn Jr, 4–6;
Stathakopoulos, ‘The Justinianic Plague Revisited’, 269.
169 On anthrax, see Thomas H. Maugh, ‘An Empire’s Epidemic: Scientists Use
DNA in Search for Answers to 6th Century Plague’, Los Angeles Times, 6 May 2002.
For these connections, Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and
Early Byzantine Empire, 3; McCormick, ‘Toward a Molecular History of the
Justinianic Pandemic’, 291; Robert Sallares, ‘Ecology, Evolution and Epidemiology
of Plague’, in Little (ed.), Plague and the End of Antiquity, 238; Harper, Fate of Rome,
207.
170 For examples of state funding, see Harbeck et al., ‘Yersinia Pestis DNA from
Skeletal Remains from the 6th Century AD Reveals Insights into Justinianic Plague’;
Wagner et al., ‘Yersinia Pestis and the Plague of Justinian’. As educational funding
opportunities become scarcer, justifying research by emphasizing the effects of
plague is more attractive than ever.
171 Harper, Fate of Rome.
sustain the empire.172 Moreover, as has long been demonstrated,

rather than a period of decline and fall, Late Antiquity was a
transitional period in culture, religion and politics that began
centuries before plague.173
There is also the problematic underlying assumption that the
plague caused significant difficulties only in the Eastern Roman
Empire and the western successor states. The demographic
decline, and the accompanying loss of military manpower and
financial resources, supposedly allowed Islamic armies to
conquer the eastern provinces.174 Comparative evidence again
suggests otherwise: the Black Death had little immediate effect
on military recruitment and manpower, did not cause the collapse
of political systems or change the balance of power between
states.175 Moreover, if the plague was as widespread as
suggested, it should have devastated Persia and other non-
Roman locations.
The First Pandemic certainly caused local demographic
problems in the short term, but it did not put the nail in Rome’s
coffin. As the discussions above demonstrate, epidemics could be
followed by an increase in population. Any such recovery would
further weaken the association between depopulation and plague
over the decadal and centennial scales. Numerous other causes
which could have decreased regional or local population levels
over Late Antiquity, such as changes to settlement patterns, are
often left unmentioned.176 Plague may have contributed to
172 For the reconquest, see Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes
and Imperial Pretenders (London, 2013), 176–204; and in more detail see the recent
Heather, Rome Resurgent, 303–31.
173 On the late antique transformation, see Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity:
From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (London, 1971) among his many other
publications.
174 Rosen, Justinian’s Flea reached this view from a Byzantine perspective;
Lawrence I. Conrad, ‘Epidemic Disease in Central Syria in the Late Sixth Century:
Some New Insights from the Verse of H assān ibn Thābit’, Byzantine and Modern Greek
_
Studies, xviii (1994) connected the depopulation of Syria to the conquests from Arabic
sources.
175 Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years’ War, 4 vols., ii, Trial by Fire (London,
1999), 6–10; William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (London, 2001),
295–301. A full comparison with the Black Death is beyond the scope of this article,
but even its high mortality did not change the balance of power or the political systems
in medieval Europe, despite social and cultural turmoil.
176 John F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a
Culture, revised edn (Cambridge, 1997), 111, 459; and for a detailed example: Jean
Guyon and Marc Heijmans (eds.), D’un monde à l’autre: naissance d’une chrétienté en
e e
Provence IV -VI siècle (Arles, 2002) on late antique Arles.
depopulation in certain areas, but there is little evidence it
caused it.
Finally, plague is often considered the catalyst for major
intellectual, cultural, social and administrative changes within
the Eastern Roman Empire. Not only did plague cause the
‘end’ of the Roman Empire, but also the ‘beginning’ of
Byzantium. Mischa Meier, for example, has connected the late
antique cultural shift, including processes such as the increased
worship of the Virgin Mary or the emergence of iconolatry, to the
presence of plague.177
While Meier makes clear he does not believe that plague was
the key determining element, he links major cultural
transformations to its influence.178 For lack of space, we will
address the argument in favour of increased Marian devotion as
representative of some of this model’s problems. The cult of Mary
certainly grew during sixth- and seventh-century crises.179
A more holistic examination, however, reveals that Marian
devotion had a prominent role in liturgies, church councils and
church construction already a century earlier.180 The plague does
not neatly separate ancient and medieval Marian devotion.
However, it may have played a similar role for Marian devotion
as it did in many of Justinian’s pre- and post- plague policies: a
catalyst that led to synthesis and codification of ongoing
transformations (for example, in law, religion and
administration, among others). The changes during the
tumultuous Age of Justinian were part of a series of ongoing
reorganizations of the Mediterranean World following the
177 Meier, ‘ ‘‘Justinianic Plague’’ ’; and in more detail Meier, Das andere Zeitalter
Justinians. See also Mischa Meier, ‘Prokop, Agathias, die Pest und das ,Ende‘ der
antiken Historiographie: Naturkatastrophen und Geschichtsschreibung in der
ausgehenden Spätantike’, Historische Zeitschrift, cclxxviii, 2 (2004); Mischa Meier,
‘Von Prokop zu Gregor von Tours: Kultur- und mentalitätengeschichtlich relevante
Folgen der ‘‘Pest’’ im 6. Jahrhundert’, in Florian Steger and Kay Peter Jankrift (eds.),
Gesundheit –Krankheit: Kulturtransfer medizinischen Wissens von der Spätantike bis in die
Frühe Neuzeit (Beihefte zum Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, lv, Cologne, 2004). For a
similar discussion of western changes linked to plague: Karl Ubl, Inzestverbot und
Gesetzgebung: die Konstruktion eines Verbrechens (300–1100) (Berlin, 2008), 163–4.
178 Meier, ‘ ‘‘Justinianic Plague’’ ’, 269–70.
179 Ibid., 285.
180 Stephen J. Shoemaker, Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion (New Haven,
2016), 205–28; and for a differing view of the early Marian worship that supports her
centrality before the plague: Richard M. Price, ‘The Theotokos and the Council of
Ephesus’, in Chris Maunder (ed.), Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York,
2008), 100.
political fragmentation of the fifth century. Plague might

have been one of the many factors that accelerated this
process at specific times and places, but it did not modify the
overall trajectory.
The Justinianic Plague is studied in the context of modern
concerns about epidemics and bioterrorism, since
investigations of the past are believed to be helpful for
contemporary societies for addressing similar issues in the
present. This approach encourages catastrophism, linking
the Justinianic Plague to the narratives of the fall of Rome and
the end of Antiquity. The evidence for these connections is
circumstantial at best and assumes rather than explains the
VII
CONCLUSION
The maximalist view of the Justinianic Plague, as conveyed
through several scholarly disciplines, attributes millions of late
antique deaths and major societal disruption to the pandemic,
asserting that it ended Antiquity and brought down the Roman
Empire. Few dissent from this view — with one partial exception
three decades ago — or attempt to counter the specific arguments
maximalists have offered. This article aims to open a discussion
by offering a counter-narrative to the maximalist perspective. We
argue that plague likely caused high mortality at certain places
and times during Late Antiquity, leaving strong impressions on
particular contemporaries. The effects of plague, however,
remained limited beyond the local and short term.
The literary and non-literary sources, when considered
together, are a weak foundation for the maximalist
interpretation. Few direct pieces of evidence exist for the
supposed catastrophe outside a handful of famous literary
accounts. Most references in the literary sources are brief,
formulaic, and serve a particular contextual purpose with
specific details few and far between. The almost complete
silence of non-literary sources from epigraphy to legislation,
especially in the context of the substantial amount of work done
in these fields, is similarly glaring.
Considering the unusual paucity of evidence for plague during
a period which is otherwise well covered, we should ask what kind
of evidence (or lack thereof) would be required to reject the
maximalist plague hypothesis. Having examined both
the primary sources and the current state of scholarship in the
other relevant disciplines, we believe the time to reject
the maximalist interpretation has long passed. The Age of
Justinian and the substantial transformations of the sixth-
century world do not require plague as an important historical
agent. Moreover, as this article has demonstrated, incorporating
plague uncritically can easily muddle historical interpretation
rather than clarify it.
We suggest five possible avenues to expand the debate. First,
research into the Justinianic Plague should engage with
additional academic disciplines and theoretical backgrounds.
While recent scholarship has incorporated more evidence for
plague (that is, aDNA and rat bones), we believe that it should
also draw upon broader conceptual frameworks such as disaster
studies or resilience studies. These offer a methodological
approach to move beyond the current boundaries of research
and ask new questions.
Second, discussions of the Justinianic Plague require more
nuance. As the variety of conclusions connecting climate and
plague have demonstrated, Mediterranean-wide conclusions
might be tempting, but are gross oversimplifications.
Examining evidence of narrower spatial and chronological
scope might instead uncover evidence that has been overlooked.
Similarly, the presence of Y. pestis in a region before the sixth
century must be accounted for when interpreting ancient DNA
evidence that might belong to the Justinianic Plague.
Third, we call for increased awareness of the contemporary
cultural biases involved in research of the Justinianic Plague,
especially catastrophism and environmental determinism. It is all
too easy to use the lack of evidence in an uncritical fashion and
argue for inflated mortality numbers without conclusive evidence.
Fourth, more work can be done with the late antique non-
literary primary sources. While significant qualitative work has
been done, developments in neighbouring fields have made
openly accessible datasets of epigraphy, numismatics and
papyrology available for research. Further digital and
quantitative research methodologies could provide further

evidence to understand changes during the sixth century.
Fifth, a critical comparison between the three plague
pandemics — led by historians — is necessary. As discussed
above, there appear to be more discrepancies than similarities
among the pandemics, despite the common terminology
scholars use to describe them. This only demonstrates the
inherent dangers in arbitrarily extrapolating from a specific
pandemic to another while ignoring the third one. A
comparison between the Justinianic Plague, Black Death and
Third Pandemic could rule out certain explanations while
nuancing others.
Most of these recommendations require broader skill-sets than
a single historian has, and as technology continues to develop, the
required skill-set will only increase. Further collaboration with
colleagues in history and in other fields must play an ever more
central role. Although this is standard practice among scientists
studying plague, historical plague research remains largely single-
authored. Such an approach risks misinterpreting the data and
contributes to the relative insularity of Justinianic Plague studies.
This article has aimed to stimulate the scholarly discussion of
the Justinianic Plague. Building upon primary studies and recent
research, it rejects the current scholarly consensus of the
maximalist interpretation of plague. Despite the many
challenges involved, the potential to understand the Justinianic
Plague is greater today than ever before. It is only through joint
effort and a critical approach that we could hope to answer the
pressing questions involved in this subject.
University of Notre Dame Lee Mordechai

Princeton University Merle Eisenberg

Rejecting Catastrophe: The Case of The Justinianic Plague

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Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/past/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.

1093/pastj/gtz009/5532056 by Promedica Health System user on 18 July 2019

apply these tools, they sometimes overestimate historical effects.

and Ndemic Creations, ‘Plague Inc.’ (2018),5https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/

The Justinianic Plague in context

Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (New York, 2015), 5. For examples of such

the boundaries of each of these intervals: see Peregrine Horden, ‘Mediterranean

million people.11 We refer to this paradigm as the ‘maximalist

‘Realizing Consilience in Studies of Pre-Instrumental Climate and Pre-Laboratory

Mediterranean 400–800 (Oxford, 2005), 548–9; Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

byzantines’, in Hommes et richesses dans l’Empire byzantine, 2 vols., i, Tome 1, IV e–

Modern Greek Studies, xxiv (2000), 270.

resilience, all of which recognize the agency of humans in

documentation rather than unexplainable lacunae: for instance, Greenberg, ‘Plagued

capital.25 While Prokopios probably experienced a plague

Wars, 2.23.3–13, in Procopius, trans. Dewing, i, 464–8), discusses how people

Propkopios, Secret History, 18.1, in Procopius, trans. Dewing, vi, 210.

Fontium Historiae Byzantinae — Series Berolinensis, xxxv, 2000), 18.92 (The

Meier, ‘Natural Disasters in the Chronographia of John Malalas: Reflections on Their

had a significant short-term demographic effect in the capital.33

Dionysius of Tel- Mahre, Incerti auctoris Chronicon Pseudo-Dionysianum vulgo dictum, 2

Pseudo-Dionysianum vulgo dictum, ed. Chabot, 80–1 and 87–8; Pseudo-Dionysius of

auctoris Chronicon Pseudo-Dionysianum vulgo dictum, ed. Chabot, 83–4; Pseudo-

Pseudo-Dionysianum vulgo dictum, ed. Chabot, 85–6; Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre,

He first covered the 543 outbreak in Gaul, listing places the

consumeret, ad civitatem Arvernam, sancti Galli intercedente oratione, non attigit’.

quem comitem superius nominavi, apparuit . . . In Parisiaco vero terminum verus

lists of catastrophes. How much we can read into such cases as

Other literary sources

ed. J.-B. Chabot (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, v, 81–2, SS 3,

Pars 1, 80.3, ed. Theodore Mommsen (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, i, Gesta

Plague mortality in the literary sources

in John of Ephesus ¼ Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Incerti auctoris Chronicon

population — has suggested the population loss in Constantinople was substantial

Parmentier (London 1898), 177–9; translated in The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius

de S. Syméon stylite le jeune (521–592) (Subsidia Hagiographica, xxxii, Brussels, 1962),

Only Gregory of Tours associated his death with the outbreak of

Empire, AD 284–641 (Malden, Mass., 2015), 480.

Sarris, The Novels of Justinian: A Complete Annotated English Translation, 2 vols.

the law to 545/6 partially based on the supposed plague reference.

72 Sarris, ‘Bubonic Plague in Byzantium’, 128–9.

Seventh Centuries (New York, 1957).

plague.77 Both types of evidence, therefore, do not support the

Epitaphs of Byzantine Palestine and Arabia’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, xxvii

Empire, 290–1 (#115).

Century: Isotope Evidence for Eastward Migration in Britain’, in Patricia Skinner

Aschheim and Altenerding

Bajuwarenring — a Merovingian Population under the Influence of Pestilence?’, in

was a plague victim, plague mortality could have reached at least

6, and esp. 355.

Plague Pandemics’, The Lancet: Infectious Diseases, xiv, 10 (2014); George D.

Frühmittelalterlichen Gräberfeldes und ‘Ethnogenese’ der Bajuwaren (Berlin, 2003).

burials based on the different groupings of grave goods.101 The

Cemeteries in Bavaria (Florence, 2011), 107–20, esp. 118–20 for a summary of

Justinianic Plague Victim’, suppl. 69.

Simultaneous Deposit of Cadavers, Simultaneous Deaths?’, in Didier Raoult and

106 Feldman et al., ‘A High-Coverage Yersinia Pestis Genome from a Sixth-Century

not confirm or reject a maximalist interpretation. This new evidence must be

wrong branch of plague’s phylogenetic tree, which almost certainly

Plague and its transmission

Ecological History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxiv, 1 (2003), 6.

plague pandemics with little evidence. See I. J. Catanach, ‘The ‘‘Globalization’’ of

Clinical Infectious Diseases: An Official Publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of