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

Usually collaborated volumes with multiple authors (this volume has a dozen) have little unity other than that imposed by the title and by the valiant editor’s effort in his introduction. This work is a happy exception: it is unified by content and theme, even though authored by talented historians with a variety of specializations. Various aspects are explored on the nature of the sixth-century pandemic and its two-hundred year run in human history but not to the exclusion of social, religious, and economic consequences of the plague.

Unanimously all authors (except for one who says it does not matter) agree that the pandemic was the bubonic plague caused by Yersinia pestis; virtually all modern authorities recognize the preponderance of evidence that the Justinian plague (as the one beginning in the sixth century is called) was caused by a Y. pestis biovar called Antiqua (contrasted with Medievalis, the name given to the Black Plague epidemic of the fourteenth century). New archaeological and bio-molecular evidence is persuasive—we know the genome sequence for these biovars), and, moreover, the biological data are happily compatible with our historical documentary sources. Not all pandemics during this time frame were the bubonic plague, however.

In the first chapter, Lester Little reviews the primary literary and documentary sources and summarizes the modern scholarship. Jo N. Hays enters a contrary viewpoint (“Simple Questions, Complex Answers”) in exploring the political, economic, and social ramifications of the plague, such as effects traced to epidemics. His points about the Justinian plague are partly drawn from analogies with other epidemics in various centuries. Heretically Hays questions the importance of the plague’s medical identification—“why does that matter?” (43)—and observes the social construction of this disease, such as human pressures on the physical environment.

A group of subsequent chapters, organized by regions, visits how the plague affected geographical locations. Michael Morony investigates the plague in West Asia, particularly Syria, where, among his many sources, John of Ephesus’ account in Syriac provides perhaps the best single literary source. Mortality was great (statistics are perilous) in both rural and urban areas and caused manifest societal responses. Hugh Kennedy moderates the literary sources for Syria with archaeological evidence despite the disappointing (to us) lack of mass graves of plague victims. He uses principally monumental evidence of construction activity (“housing starts almost ceased” [95]). Unfortunately, in all the literary sources, there is no medical writer of authority who wrote a plague account; nevertheless, medical information is skillfully gleaned from writings pertinent to the Byzantine Empire in a chapter by Dionysios Stathakopoulos. The Greek sources’ dominating theme is that divine retribution caused the plague; even those who believed that the plague’s etiology was malignant air (miasma) thought God caused the malignancy. People did not blame particular social, ethnic, or religious groups for divine retribution, with a possible exception of homosexuals in Constantinople. Peter Sarris uses nonliterary, Byzantine sources (numismatic, legal, and papyrology) to enter a caution against those revisionist historians who argue that the plague’s consequences are exaggerated.

Alain J. Stoclet, Michael Kulikowski, John Maddicott, and Ann Dooley supply chapters, respectively, on Gaul, the Hispanic Peninsula, England, and Ireland. Flight from the plague internally within Gaul may account for shifts away from centers such as from Lyon and to Paris. The Frankish sources clearly sought moral lessons from the devastation, whereas the lack of medical sources indicates a “health system” under “episcopal control” (147). The plague arrived early in Spain (about 542) and, judging by burial practices and other evidential data, its effects caused or contributed to a general contraction of wealth throughout the peninsula. Kulikowski appended four anonymous sermons that testified to the plague’s impact. The plague, called “blefed,” arrived in Ireland in 544 or 545, according to Dooley, but this disease may not have been the bubonic disease, and some later epidemics may have been smallpox (“the yellow plague”). Most literary sources are ecclesiastical, John Maddicott...