Ancient World Review

Plague Of Justinian May Have Hit England Before It Reached Constantinople

Procopius, the principle historian of sixth-century Byzantium, was a survivor of the plague.

"‘Plague sceptics’ [see note below] are wrong to underestimate the devastating impact that bubonic plague had in the 6th – 8th centuries CE, argues a new study based on ancient texts and recent genetic discoveries." Source: Archaeology News Network.

"The same study suggests that bubonic plague may have reached England before its first recorded case in the Mediterranean via a currently unknown route, possibly involving the Baltic and Scandinavia.

"The Justinianic Plague is the first known outbreak of bubonic plague in west Eurasian history and struck the Mediterranean world at a pivotal moment in its historical development, when the Emperor Justinian was trying to restore Roman imperial power."

Note: There has been a lot of debate recently about how lethal the Plague of Justinian was and how much of an effect it actually had on society:

According to Phys.org (2020), "Many have claimed the Justinianic Plague (c. 541-750 CE) killed half of the population of Roman Empire. Now, historical research and mathematical modeling challenge the death rate and severity of this first plague pandemic." This revisionist argument is based on modern plague research and mathematical modeling (always suspect). The researchers "developed novel mathematical models to re-examine primary sources from the time of the Justinianic Plague outbreak. From the modeling, they found that it was unlikely that any transmission route of the plague would have had both the mortality rate and duration described in the primary sources."

How deadly was the Plague of Justinian? The question is still up in the air, apparently. This latest study, published in the Oxford Past and Present journal, "surveys our current state of historical and scientific understanding with respect to the sixth-century pandemic, responds to the recent attempts to argue that the disease had only a minimal impact on the societies that it struck, and considers how historians should respond to the burgeoning scientific evidence in order to take study of the plague forward."

Another survivor account by the 6th century scholar, Evagrius Scholasticus.

The Secret Of The Black Death (Updated)

The Black Death peaked in Europe in 1348-1350 and by the time it was over, the "Great Mortality" had killed something like 25 million people--one-third of Europe's population at the time. In some places it wiped out so many people that the authorities supposedly had to outlaw the ringing of church bells at funerals because the ringing never stopped. Entire villages disappeared into plague pits and bishops were sometimes forced to consecrate rivers so they could be used to dump the bodies. The exact number of fatalities is still a matter of conjecture, but there's no doubt that the Black Death was one of the worst natural disasters in human history.

Image: detail from The Triumph of Death (1562) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

"According to the Foster scale, a kind of Richter scale of human disaster, the medieval plague is the second greatest catastrophe in the human record. Only World War II produced more death, physical destruction, and emotional suffering, says Canadian geographer Harold D. Foster, the scale's inventor." --"The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time," by John Kelly. P.11.

No one knows where the Black Death came from exactly, but it's generally agreed that it "originated somewhere in inner Asia and spread westward to the Middle East and Europe and eastward to China along the international trade routes." (The Great Mortality, p.7) In other words, the spread of the pestilence was accelerated by a medieval form of globalism which brought Europe into contact with a lot of different cultures -- something to keep in mind these days when air travel and open borders make it possible to spread diseases from one corner of the world to another in a matter of hours.

The Mongols picked up the disease on the steppes of Asia and brought it to Europe through trade and war. In 1346, during their siege of the Crimean city of Caffa [next video], they were said to have catapulted the bodies of their own plague victims into the city -- an early example of biological warfare if it actually happened. Once the Black Death caught hold, Genoese merchant ships -- the notorious "plague ships" -- carried it to ports throughout Europe, their holds full of merchandise, infected sailors and rats crawling with the fleas which carried the plague bacillus: Yersinia pestis, aka Y. pestis. No one understood the connection between fleas, rats and plague at the time, however. They thought the Great Mortality was the result of astrological alignments, foul air, the wrath of God and Jews poisoning their wells.

The pestilence itself apparently consisted of three different types of plague: bubonic plague -- transmitted by flea bites with a two-to-six-day incubation period; pneumonic plague -- a fast-acting and highly contagious form of the disease which attacks the lungs and can be spread like the common cold through the air; and the lethal septicemic plague, which floods the bloodstream with plague bacilli and kills everyone who gets it. According to Kelly, "during one outbreak of septicemic plague in the early 20th century, the average survival time from onset of symptoms to death was 14.5 hours." (The Great Mortality, p.22)

The Black Death spread so quickly -- modern plague is fairly slow -- that some scientists have speculated that it wasn't plague at all, but a form of anthrax or hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola, or some kind of extinct disease unknown to science. The consensus view, however, is that it was a particularly virulent ancestor of the modern bubonic plague. Whatever it was, it raced through Europe in an incredibly short period of time, wiping out millions and creating massive social upheavals.

The effects of this calamity were enormous. Unlike the current COVID 19 "pandemic," people didn't have to be tested to find out if they had the plague. The evidence of the disease was all around them.

Video from 2013. Mass graves of plague victims have been discovered all over Europe.

Before the Black Death, medieval Europe was in a state of decline and stagnation. The feudal system was locked in place, the church corrupt and despotic, medicine and science crippled by religion and superstition. The population was very low by today's standards, but the number of people had grown to the point where it was putting a strain on available resources. The Black Death broke this stalemate by killing off a third of the population, driving up labor costs and forcing social reforms and technical innovations that played a large role in the Reformation.

"In the fifty years after the Black Death, the medieval world's traditional economic winners and losers exchanged places. The new losers, the landed gentry, began to see their wealth shredded by the scissors of low food prices and high labor costs; the new winners, the people at the bottom, saw their one marketable asset--labor--increase dramatically in value, and with it their standard of living rise." The Great Mortality, p. 285.

The depopulation brought about by the Black Death led to technological innovations like the invention of the printing press. The shortage of men for the armies led to new developments in firearms like the musket and cannon. The church's inability to respond to the crisis seriously damaged its prestige, leading to the emergence of new "heretical" movements like the anti-clerical Lollards and a general longing for a more personal religious experience. Medicine started using more scientific methods. Public health systems were created. New colleges were founded. Women began to move into the work force, taking over businesses previously run by their husbands who had died in the outbreak. The disaster played a huge role in the rejuvenation of Europe.

And that's the secret of the Black Death. Demographic collapses like this can be beneficial. "Mortality has its advantages," according to The Plague, a great documentary from the History Channel. For example, if you want to improve wages for the lower class, one of the most direct ways to accomplish this is to kill off a third of them. This will drive up wages for the survivors by creating a major labor shortage and turn the social system on its head. Natural catastrophes are one of the main engines of historical transformation. In the final analysis, the Black Death was a good thing because it helped to destroy a corrupt, dead-end culture dominated by the Catholic Church, facilitating the rebirth of Western Civilization.

Oldest Known Strain Of Bubonic Plague Discovered In 5000-Year-Old Man

"The oldest strain of the bubonic plague, which evolved to wipe out nearly half of Europe, has been discovered in a 5,000-year-old skeleton, scientists say." Source: Study Finds.

"Yersinia pestis, the bacteria behind the disease, was found in a hunter-gatherer whose skeleton was excavated in the late 1800s, according to a new study. The 20- to 30-year-old man, dubbed 'RV 2039,' was one of two skeletons found in Rinnukalns, a region in present day Latvia. Both skeletons disappeared but were then rediscovered in 2011 as part of the German anthropologist Rudolph Virchow’s collection. Two more skeletons were later recovered from the site.

"The discovery casts doubt on popular theories about the origin and spread of the bubonic plague, also referred to as the 'Black Death,' throughout history."

Note: I'm not sure how scientists identify plague bacteria in ancient skeletal remains. In this case, researchers ran "genetic sequencing and tests for viral pathogens and bacteria" on teeth and bone samples taken from four skeletons discovered at the site. When they found evidence of the plague in RV 2039, "the  bacteria’s genome was then sequenced and compared to other ancient strains which had previously been discovered." This makes it sound like they found actual plague bacteria on the skeleton, but let's hope that isn't true. If it is, then it's only a matter of time before some archaeologist accidentally unleashes an ancient strain of this killer disease on an unsuspecting world.

Image: The skull of RV 2039. Dominik Göldner, BGAEU, Berlin.

1500-Year-Old Infant Cemetery Discovered At Walls Of Thessaloniki

Beautiful night views of the walls of Thessaloniki. The infant burials discovered recently were found "east of the Roman-Byzantine eastern walls," according to the Archaeology News Network.

"Dozens of infants and children, possibly victims of the great plague of the 5th century, have been unearthed in an excavation at the walls of Thessaloniki." Source: Archaeology News Network.

"More than 200 burials, 90% of them jar burials, packed in a dense arrangement, were revealed by archaeologists on Kastrona Street, where they were digging for the redevelopment and promotion of the outer rampart in almost the heart of the city. Apparently this was part of the Christian cemetery of the Eastern Cemetery, which was dedicated exclusively to infants and children in early Christian times (late 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries)."

Note: These infants apparently died during the Plague of Justinian (541 - 549 AD).  At the time, Thessaloniki was the second largest city in the Byzantine Empire.

Plague And The Bronze Age Collapse

Video from Feb. 2021.

"Europe changed dramatically during the Bronze Age, with huge population shifts generally ascribed to the rise of new metal technologies, trading and climate change. But scientists believe that there may have been another reason for this social upheaval—the plague, possibly transported by, or on the back of, newly domesticated horses." Source: Phys.org (2019).

"Plague is forever linked to the Black Death, a pestilence that wiped out a significant portion of humanity in Europe in the Middle Ages. It likely originated in the plains of Central Asia. But plague was not a new arrival. Bronze Age remains, dating from 3000 BC, have in recent years been discovered to contain DNA from the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis."

Note: "The Late Bronze Age collapse was a transition period in the Near East, Anatolia, the Aegean region, North Africa, the Caucasus, the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean which took place from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age. It was a transition which historians believe was violent, sudden, and culturally disruptive, and involved societal collapse for some civilizations. The palace economy of the Aegean region and Anatolia that characterized the Late Bronze Age disintegrated, transforming into the small isolated village cultures of the Greek Dark Ages." (Wikipedia)

The widespread and relatively sudden collapse of Bronze Age civilizations that occurred during the 13th and 12th centuries BC has been described as ""the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the Western Roman Empire." It's still unclear what happened, but the possible causes include earthquakes, drought, famine, class war, foreign invasions and political instability; and it's possible that all of these factors came into play in a perfect storm of disasters.

In the top video, Professor Eric H. Cline, author of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, suggests that plague may have been involved in the collapse as well. I'm not sure where the evidence stands right now -- in the interview Cline says there is no evidence, but this seems to contradict other findings that the plague was present in Europe before the collapse -- but it's a logical conclusion that the disease must have played a role. Epidemics always seem to go along with war and disaster.

Video from 2020.

Plague Of Justinian Not As Lethal As Previously Believed?

"Many have claimed the Justinianic Plague (c. 541-750 CE) killed half of the population of Roman Empire. Now, historical research and mathematical modeling challenge the death rate and severity of this first plague pandemic." Source: Phys.org (May, 2020).

Note: This conclusion is based on mathematical modeling and modern plague research. The researchers "developed novel mathematical models to re-examine primary sources from the time of the Justinianic Plague outbreak. From the modeling, they found that it was unlikely that any transmission route of the plague would have had both the mortality rate and duration described in the primary sources."

Mathematical models are always suspect. Look at the flawed climate models used to support the global warming scam, for instance, or the discredited models created by Professor Neil Ferguson which were used to justify the absurd COVID lockdowns in the UK and to a certain extent in the United States. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if these plague researchers are correct when they say that the impact of the Plague of Justinian was exaggerated in the primary sources. Ancient and medieval writers aren't known for their reliability when it comes to things like the size of armies, casualty figures, and so on.

Byzantine historians like the great Procopius had no way of knowing how many people had died in the plague -- it's not like anybody was compiling accurate statistics back then -- but I'm not sure it really matters. The Plague of Justinian has been called one of the deadliest pandemics in history, killing something like 15-100 million people, but if this new research is accurate the outbreak was more like the Third Plague Pandemic which started in 1855 and only killed around 12 million people in India and China. There's a big difference between 100 million deaths and 12 million deaths, of course, but we're still talking about a major disaster.

The Dancing Plague Of The 14th - 17th Centuries

This is an entertaining video if you can overlook the pitch for a male pattern baldness cure that occurs around the 3-minute mark.

"Dancing mania (also known as dancing plague, choreomania, St. John's Dance and St. Vitus' Dance) was a social phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. It involved groups of people dancing erratically, sometimes thousands at a time. The mania affected men, women, and children who danced until they collapsed from exhaustion. One of the first major outbreaks was in Aachen, in the Holy Roman Empire (in modern-day Germany), in 1374, and it quickly spread throughout Europe; one particularly notable outbreak occurred in Strasbourg in 1518 in Alsace, also in the Holy Roman Empire (now France)." Source: Wikipedia.

The dancing plague died out in the 17th century. Nobody knows what it was or what caused it:

"Numerous hypotheses have been proposed for the causes of dancing mania, and it remains unclear whether it was a real illness or a social phenomenon. One of the most prominent theories is that victims suffered from ergot poisoning, which was known as St. Anthony's fire in the Middle Ages..." (Wikipedia)

Video from 2013.

"Other theories suggest that the symptoms were similar to encephalitis, epilepsy, and typhus, but as with ergotism, those conditions cannot account for all symptoms." Note: a disorder called Sydenham's chorea is sometimes referred to as St. Vitus' Dance, but it's a completely different thing.

Various other causes have been proposed. For instance, these cases of group mania (if that's what they were) "may have simply been the result of stress and tension caused by natural disasters around the time, such as plagues and floods. Hetherington and Munro describe dancing mania as a result of 'shared stress'; people may have danced to relieve themselves of the stress and poverty of the day, and in so doing, attempted to become ecstatic and see visions."

It's also possible that these outbreaks were staged rituals of some kind:

^"Religious cults may have been acting out well-organised dances, in accordance with ancient Greek and Roman rituals. Despite being banned at the time, these rituals could be performed under the guise of uncontrollable dancing mania. Justus Hecker, a 19th-century medical writer, described it as a kind of festival, where a practice known as 'the kindling of the Nodfyr' was carried out. This involved jumping through fire and smoke, in an attempt to ward off disease. Bartholomew notes how participants in this ritual would often continue to jump and leap long after the flames had gone."

Nobody can explain what caused the dancing plague because we still don't know whether it was some kind of group insanity, disease outbreak, festival or public dance-o-thon. Personally, I like the ergot-poisoning scenario, but maybe St. Vitus' Dance was just the medieval equivalent of our modern flash mob.

An outbreak of dancing plague in the Netherlands (2011?)

Medieval Black Death Started Earlier Than 14th Century?

"The Mongols, whose empire emerged in 1206, unwittingly moved plague through Central Eurasia in the thirteenth, not the fourteenth, century. Grain shipments that the Mongols brought with them to several sieges, including the siege of Baghdad, were the most likely mechanism of transmission. The fourteenth century plague outbreaks represent local spillover events out of the new plague reservoirs seeded by the military campaigns of the thirteenth century." Source: The Four Black Deaths, Monica H. Green, The American Historical Review (Dec. 2020).

Note: The Black Death devastated Afro-Eurasia from 1346 to 1353 with sporadic outbreaks afterwards. If this new research is correct, the plague actually started in the previous century. According to Green, "...genetic approaches to plague’s history have established that Yersinia pestis, the causative organism of plague, suddenly diverged in Central Asia at some point before the Black Death, splitting into four new branches—a divergence geneticists have called the 'Big Bang'" and "The fourteenth century plague outbreaks represent local spillover events out of the new plague reservoirs seeded by the military campaigns of the thirteenth century."

Also see: Did the Black Death Rampage Across the World a Century Earlier Than Previously Thought?

Plague Doctors: Fact And Fiction

These weird plague doctor outfits aren't medieval. They were invented in the 1600s.

"You’ve seen them before: mysterious figures, clad from head to toe in oiled leather, wearing goggles and beaked masks. The plague doctor costume looks like a cross between a steampunk crow and the Grim Reaper, and has come to represent both the terrors of the Black Death and the foreignness of medieval medicine." Source: Live Science.

"However, the beak mask costume first appeared much later than the middle ages, some three centuries after the Black Death first struck in the 1340s. There may have been a few doctors in the 17th and 18th centuries who wore the outfit, including the iconic beak mask, but most medieval and early modern physicians who studied and treated plague patients did not."

Note: "Medical historians have attributed the invention of the 'beak doctor' costume to Charles de Lorme, who adopted in 1619 the idea of a full head-to-toe protective garment, modeled after a soldier's armor. This consisted of a bird-like mask with spectacles, and a long leather (Moroccan or Levantine) or waxed-canvas gown which went from the neck to the ankle. The over-clothing garment, as well as leggings, gloves, boots, and a hat, were made of waxed leather. The garment was impregnated with similar fragrant items as the beak mask." (Wikipedia)

The long beaks attached to the mask contained scented materials which included "juniper berry, ambergris, roses (Rosa), mint (Mentha spicata L.) leaves, camphor, cloves, laudanum, myrrh, and storax. Due to the primitive understanding of disease at the time, it was believed this suit would sufficiently protect the doctor from miasma while tending to patients." (Wikipedia)

Nostradamus, the famous astrologer, physician and supposed prophet, was, at one time, a plague doctor.

The Discovery & Examination Of A Black Death Mass Grave At Thornton Abbey

Video from 2016.

"The discovery of mass burial sites is rare in Europe, particularly in rural areas. Recent excavations at Thornton Abbey in Lincolnshire have revealed a previously unknown catastrophic mass grave containing the remains of at least 48 men, women and children, with radiocarbon dating placing the event in the fourteenth century AD. The positive identification of Yersinia pestis in sampled skeletal remains suggests that the burial population died from the Black Death. This site represents the first Black Death mass grave found in Britain in a non-urban context, and provides unique evidence for the devastating impact of this epidemic on a small rural community." Source: Antiquity (2020).

Thornton Abbey "was founded as a priory in 1139 by William le Gros, the Earl of Yorkshire, and raised to the status of abbey in 1148. It was a house for Augustinian or black canons, who lived a communal life under the Rule of St Augustine but also undertook pastoral duties outside of the Abbey. Officers within the abbey included a cellarer, bursar, chamberlain, sacrist, kitchener and an infirmer." (Wikipedia)

"The abbey was closed in 1539 by Henry VIII as part of the Dissolution of the Monasteries" but kept operating for the next eight years by turning itself into a school.

Note: These deaths apparently occurred during the second great plague pandemic in England (1348-1349 AD) when something like one-third to half the population died in less than two years, according to Antiquity. This new (Feb. 2020) article goes into considerable detail about the history of the discovery of the mass grave and what is currently known about the site.

The population of medieval England was never very large. According to Wikipedia, there may have been around 5 million people living in the country when the Black Death reached Europe in 1348. By the year 1400, that number had dropped to around two million, a decline of at least 50 percent.

Related: The History of the Plague: Every Major Epidemic (short animated video).

Comment: As bad as the current coronavirus pandemic is, it's nothing compared to the Black Death. If it's true that one-third to one half of the population in England died during the 14th century, an equivalent outbreak here in the States could cause something like 150 million deaths. As of April 12, we've had around 20,000 deaths from COVID-19, but it's hard to know how accurate these numbers are because the current policy is that if someone died with the virus then they died of the virus.

The coronavirus has been mild so far compared to the medieval plague or even the modern flu and other causes of death. To put this into perspective, something like 60,000 people died from the regular flu during the 2017-2018 season in the US and 37,00+ died from traffic accidents in 2016 alone. Assuming that the COVID-19 mortality statistics are correct, it's hard to understand why controlling the current outbreak is so critical that it justifies destroying the US economy.

Peter Schiff, one of the best financial commentators in the country.