Main Body
10
500-1300 C.E.
Mieko Matsumoto and Andrew Reeves
INTRODUCTION
DISCOVERY
“Now the disease in Byzantium ran a course of four months,” wrote Procopius, “and its greatest virulence lasted about three. And at first the deaths were a little more than the normal, then the mortality rose still higher, and afterwards the tale of dead reached five thousand each day, and again it even came to ten thousand, and still more than that” (Fordham University). A 6th century Roman government official working in the court of Emperor Justinian, Procopius had the misfortune to hold a front row seat to the outbreak of a virulent epidemic disease. In great detail he recounted the suffering of the victims, the lack of effective treatments, and the inability of survivors to bury the increasing numbers of dead. Until the early 21st century, historians used the limited surviving written sources from the time period to try to understand the epidemic that struck the Byzantine empire and traveled throughout the Mediterranean. Written sources record the arrival of the disease in Pelusium Egypt (a port town) in 541 CE. By 542 CE authors recorded the arrival of the disease in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. From there it is recorded as “spreading through Syria, Anatolia, Greece, Italy and North Africa. By 543 it had struck both Roman and Persian-held sectors of Armenia, as well as Gaul. It is recorded to have reached as far afield as Ireland by the following year” (Sarris 2022). Recurrent outbreaks of the plague were recorded through the 8th century. Based on descriptions of the illness, scholars are able to hypothesize that the disease was the Bubonic Plague. Because the disease was recorded in the Byzantine Empire during the rule of Justinian, it has often been referred to as the Justinianic Plague or the Plague of Justinian. This naming has also tended to place emphasis on the impact and spread of the plague in this region of the ancient world.
Over recent decades, the ability of scientists to conduct DNA analysis on ancient bones has advanced and scholars are able to verify that the disease that Procopius and others recorded was indeed the Bubonic Plague, caused by the bacteria yersinia pestis. In fact, a 2018 study of DNA derived from 6th century burials in Edix Hill England revealed that a number of the deceased died while carrying yersinia pestis bacteria. This further indicates the far reach of this plague, beyond the Byzantine Empire and the Mediterranean. Significantly, “phylogenetic analysis of the evidence revealed the strain of Y. pestis found at Edix Hill to have been the earliest lineage identified to date of the bacterium involved in the sixth-century pandemic” (Sarris 2022). This indicates that the plague reached England much earlier than anticipated.
Our current analyses of the spread and impacts of the plague during the 6th increasingly rely not only on eyewitness accounts, but also increasingly on “historically focused scientif