Plague of Justinian - Origins and Spread

Origins and Spread

The outbreak in Constantinople was thought to have been carried to the city by infected rats on the grain boats arriving from Egypt. To feed its citizens, the city and outlying communities imported massive amounts of grain—mostly from Egypt. Grain ships may have been the original source of contagion, as the rat (and flea) population in Egypt thrived on feeding from the large granaries maintained by the government. The Byzantine historian Procopius first reported the epidemic in 541 AD from the port of Pelusium, near Suez in Egypt. Two other first-hand reports of the plague's ravages were by the Syriac church historian John of Ephesus and Evagrius Scholasticus, who was a child in Antioch at the time and later also became a church historian. Evagrius was afflicted with the buboes associated with the disease, but survived. During the disease's four returns in his lifetime, he lost his wife, a daughter and her child and other children, most of his servants and people from his country estate.

Procopius in a passage closely modeled on Thucydides, recorded that, at its peak, the plague was killing 10,000 people in Constantinople daily, but the accuracy of this figure is in question and the true number will probably never be known. He noted that because there was no room to bury the dead, bodies were left stacked in the open. In his Secret History, he records the devastation in the countryside and reports a ruthless response of the hard-pressed Justinian:

When pestilence swept through the whole known world and notably the Roman Empire, wiping out most of the farming community and of necessity leaving a trail of desolation in its wake, Justinian showed no mercy towards the ruined freeholders. Even then, he did not refrain from demanding the annual tax, not only the amount at which he assessed each individual, but also the amount for which his deceased neighbors were liable.

As a result of plague in the countryside, farmers could not take care of crops and the price of grain rose at Constantinople. Byzantine Emperor Justinian I had expended huge amounts of money for wars against the Vandals in the Carthage region and the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy. He had dedicated significant funds to the construction of great churches, such as Hagia Sophia. As the empire tried to fund these projects, the plague caused tax revenues to decline possibly because of the many deaths and disruption of agriculture and trades. Justinian swiftly enacted new legislation to deal more efficiently with the glut of inheritance suits being brought as a result of victims dying intestate.

As the disease spread to port cities around the Mediterranean, the struggling Goths gained an edge in their conflict with Constantinople. The plague weakened the Byzantine Empire at a critical point, when Justinian's armies had nearly wholly retaken Italy and the western Mediterranean coast; this evolving conquest could have credibly reformed the Western Roman Empire and united it with the Eastern under a single emperor for the first time since the year 395. The plague may also have contributed to the success of the Arabs a few generations later in the Byzantine-Arab Wars.

The long-term effects on European and Christian history may have been enormous. Justinian's imperial gambit was ultimately unsuccessful. The troops, overextended, could not hold on. When the plague subsided, his troops regained Italy, but could not move further north. The eastern empire held Italy for the remainder of Justinian's life, but the empire quickly lost all territory except the southern part after he died. Italy was ravaged by war and fragmented for centuries as the Lombard tribes invaded the north.

Some scholars have suggested that the plague facilitated the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain, since its aftermath coincided with the renewed Saxon offensives in the 550s, after a period during which the Saxons were contained. British sources from this period report plague, but Saxon ones are silent (as there are no sixth century English documents). The Romano-British may have been disproportionately affected because of trade contacts with Gaul and other factors, such as British settlement patterns being more dispersive than English ones, which "could have served to facilitate plague transmission by the rat". The differential effects may have been exaggerated. In this era, British sources are more likely to report natural disasters than Saxon ones. In addition, "the evidence for artifact trade between the British and the English" implies significant interaction and "just minimal interaction would surely have involved a high risk of plague transmission".