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- [01:12]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter bcinartime. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello. In 541 AD, in the reign of Justinian, there was a plague by which the whole human race came near to being destroyed, embracing the whole world and blighting the lives of all mankind. That was the claim of the historian Procopius, writing in Byzantium at the time. And evidence of this plague has since been traced around the Mediterranean from Syria to Britain. Yes, Procopius exaggerated, but the bacterium behind the Black death in the 14th century has since been found on human remains from this time, and the symptoms were the same. And the question of how devastating it truly was is yet to be resolved. With me to discuss the Plague of Justinian are John Halden, professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies Emeritus at Princeton University, Rebecca Fleming, Senior Lecturer in Classics and Fellow of Jesus College at the University of Cambridge, and Greg Wulf, Director of the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London. Greg Wulf, who was Justinian and how did he get associated with this plague?
- [02:27]
John Halden
Justinian was probably the most successful emperor of the 6th century, Roman Emperor of the 6th century AD. He's one of those who reigned for a long period, reigned for 40 years almost. He's born in a fairly humble Background, but he's born actually after the last emperor of the Western Empire has been deposed by barbarians. So he's born into a Roman world which is centered on the city of Constantinople, Istanbul, as it is now. He's a Christian in a world with very few pagans left. So this is a very successful Roman emperor, living in a Greek speaking Roman world, with barbarians to the west, Persians to the east. He's the builder of Hagia Sophia. He's a spectacular military conqueror. His armies went out to reconquer, with some success, parts of the West. And unfortunately for him, he is also the emperor who is in power at the time where this disease spreads rapidly through the Mediterranean world.
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Unnamed Host of In Our Time
And when you say he, you mean he is leading them, He's a good general?
- [03:35]
John Halden
Well, no, he sits in Constantinople and he sends his people out. I mean, he's the sort of opposite of Hadrian. So Hadrian travels around the empire manically, visiting places again and again. And Justinian rules the world, but he sits on the Golden Horn in the great palace. And in his time, Constantinople comes to look more spectacular than ever before, partly because huge amounts were destroyed in fires, in riots, relatively early in his reign. There's a big set of riots in 532. This gives him the opportunity, when he's put them down, to rebuild. That's where Hagia Sophia comes from, but also to rebuild the palace, great courtyards. And so, and he sits here and the rest of the world comes to him. Even Ravenna, where there's those spectacular mosaics, never went there.
- [04:26]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Rebecca fleming in the 540s, people started to fall ill in large numbers.
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Rebecca Fleming
What were the symptoms, the main symptoms that are described or particularly picked out and noted by contemporary authors, such as Procopius, who you mentioned earlier, but also, for example, Evagrius Scholasticus, who witnesses the plague in Antioch. The key features are that these people are struck down by a severe and sudden fever and also affected by buboes. So swellings of the groin, in the armpits and other areas of the body. And after that there's just an enormous kind of variety of symptoms. So some sufferers become comatose, some become delirious, some stay sound in mind, some are very demented, some are affected in the head and the throat, others in the stomach. There's vomiting, there's flux of the intestines, some die immediately or after a couple of days or after a long time. Some survive. But across all this variety, there is this one or this unifying features of fever and buboes.
- [05:37]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Well, the reaction to that would obviously be fear and panic. Can you describe what sort of fear and what sort of panic?
- [05:44]
Rebecca Fleming
There's another contemporary eyewitness, John of Ephesus, who sees a range of different communities in the Eastern Mediterranean and talks about going to bed at night worrying about whether or not he'll wake up alive the next morning.
- [05:59]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
In terms of numbers, I understand at Byzantium that Constantinople had a population of about half a million, and it's reported that between 10 and sometimes up to 15,000 people a day were being attacked by this plague. Is that right? And if so, it's devastating.
- [06:14]
Rebecca Fleming
Procopius talks about these very large figures. So he says that the initial outbreak lasted about four months, and at the beginning the death toll was just a little bit higher than it was usually, and then it ramped up and they were dying. 5,000 a day, 10,000 a day, eventually even more. John of Ephesus provides higher figures, 12,000, and talks about 230 or 300,000 people dying, which would be pretty much half the population. But on the other hand, these are obviously nice round numbers. So these are, if you like, a way of putting a number on just vastness.
- [06:57]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
It's not unlike, we get the Black Death in the middle of the 14th century, and now people looking at DNA from this Justinian plague and comparing it with that, see a connection between the two. Do you go into that?
- [07:14]
Rebecca Fleming
We do now have evidence from DNA that has been recovered from crisis burials that come from the 540s and onwards across Western Europe, where we have found Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that produces what we would think of as modern plague, bubonic plague. And since we do now have a kind of clearer handle on the disease, and this is a disease which is one of the most lethal known to modern science, with mortality of around 50%. And in some of the cases, it gets even higher than that.
- [07:50]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Thank you, John Halden. We mentioned Procopius. He was more or less contemporaneous with all this. What do we know about him? He's the one who make the great claims this is going to wipe out the whole world. There's been nothing like it before. Can you tell us a bit about him and how reliable do you think his sources are? Not about wiping out the whole world, but such as he said about that area.
- [08:10]
Unnamed Historian
Yes. Well, Procopius comes to Constantinople as a young man and he eventually becomes the personal secretary to the General Belisarius, who was the key general who led some of Justinian's Reconquest armies in the 530s and 540s. And Procopius himself seems to have been in Constantinople during this outbreak in 542. So there's no doubt that he was an eyewitness to some of the events he's describing. And there's no reason to doubt either that the immensity of the outbreak struck him very powerfully. And he wrote about it in two different contexts. One in a passage in his eight volume history of the wars of Justinian, where he recounts the different campaigns led by Belisarius, most of which he actually witnessed himself. And then in another context, slightly less detailed in the so called Anecdota or Secret history, which he wrote probably in the 550s when he was no longer working with Belisarius and when he had retired, as it were, to private life. But that's a very vituperative account of the reign of Justinian, an extremely hostile blackening of Justinian, the emperor and of his consort, the Empress Theodora. And so there's a strong ideological element to his later account in the Secret History, his earlier account, which is much more detailed and as Rebecca said earlier, it gives a lot of information about the symptoms and the course of the disease that seems entirely plausible and has generally been accepted by historians to be more or less accurate. The problem with Procopius's account are the numbers he ascribes to the mortality.
- [10:05]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
He looks back to athens in the 4th century BC about 8, 900 years earlier, and Thucydides description of that. Does he, what does he draw from that?
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Unnamed Historian
Well, the first thing to say is that that's an entirely normal thing to do for a highly literate, well educated person at this period. They're very keen to demonstrate their classical credential, so to speak. And so using and quoting from ancient sources is entirely normal. And so one would expect Procopius to do precisely that. But you're quite right that he does indeed take the passage written by Thucydides about a plague outbreak in Athens, which almost certainly wasn't bubonic plague, although we don't know either way. And he elaborates on that and uses that as the basis for his account of the terrifying impact of this outbreak in Constantinople in 542.
- [11:00]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Now we're talking about this as a. It's a Christian empire and Procopius explains it as an act of God, God's wrath, the Christian God's wrath. What did you say God was wrathful about?
- [11:12]
Unnamed Historian
Well, again, we're living in a pre scientific age. And as in many societies, it's entirely normal to ascribe major catastrophes and calamities to the gods or to some natural disaster which has been brought down upon the heads of human beings because of their sins or because of some other problems that they've themselves engendered. In the case of the Christian Roman Empire, the Byzantines or Christian Romans saw themselves as legitimate successors, inheritors of the role of God's chosen people, on the logic that the Jews had failed to recognize the Messiah, Jesus Christ, the Christians had, and therefore that the Romans had inherited the mantle from the Jews of the chosen people. When the chosen people sin in whatever way, either through heresy or a heretical leader or whatever, then of course they can expect to be punished by God from straying from the path of righteousness. And so most of the accounts we have which ascribe any sort of causal background to the plague or to other disasters usually related to either heretical leaders or heretical members of the population.
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Unnamed Host of In Our Time
How did it relate to the Antonine plague? Who wants to pick that up?
- [12:30]
Rebecca Fleming
The Antonine plague is the plague that breaks out in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. So it's a second century AD plague and we have again, we don't have quite such rich descriptions as from the Justinianic plague. So most of the historians are quite terse in their descriptions. We have some accounts from the great physician Galen, but they are of cases that he cured rather than sort of systematic surveys. But also the although the spread is very wide, comes back from Lucius Ferras's campaigns in the east and then is said to spread right across the empire and destroy the army and so on. The symptoms are very different and seems to be is fever, but it's also there's pustules. So there's no suggestion that it could be bubonic plague.
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Unnamed Historian
I think some people suggested that it was smallpox, but I'm not sure if that's still part of the picture.
- [13:33]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Thank you, Greg Gregor. So the plague leapt into life and how did it spread geographically? Can you give us some idea? There are in Constantinople, this massive thing happens quite quickly. People are dying left, right and center. Then where does it go and how does it move?
- [13:50]
John Halden
It's a difficult story to piece together. As John said, Procopius is there in Constantinople during the four months of the first big outbreak. So we sort of see a view from the empire center. And what Procopius says is it first appears at a place in Egypt called Pelusium. Which is actually not very far from Port Said. So would be the head of the Suez Canal now. So that's where he thinks it comes from. And then he says, well, some immediately contagion spreads. It spreads in two directions eastwards. It goes through Gaza, Palestine and heading towards Jerusalem within the same year 541. And then another set of contagion springs off to Alexandria, a bit further to the west on the delta. So there's an Egyptian starting point for Procopius. But when we begin to look at others, we realize that that's really just a matter of where it comes onto the radar in the Mediterranean. So it's also said to come up from Africa, from Abyssinia, or from northern Sudan or perhaps even further south, or from what's now Yemen. And then others have it coming from the land of Kush, which is the North Sudan. Just recently, a body which seems to have traces of Yersinopestis on it has been found from Kyrgyzstan in the third century, 300 years before. So what we're looking at is perhaps a plague that maybe starts somewhere in. Or first we have first spotted it in Central Asia and then is maybe milling round the Indian Ocean routes or the various routes that connect up across Eurasia and then comes into Egypt. At this point it's from Egypt, it then sort of hops around and by, by Spring of 542. So relatively quickly it's got to Constantinople and then we can sort of trace it quite rapidly as it zips around sort of through Anatolia, up through Syria, out to the west and eventually gets to Britain, probably Ireland, maybe Scandinavia, certainly sort of Africa, Gaul, southern Italy, Rome. So the view we see of its origin is entirely dependent on where our sources are writing from. And probably event we will eventually have a much more detailed picture because ancient DNA is beginning to pick out this and places which suffered without writing about it will suddenly come into the story.
- [16:17]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
But to be crudely generalist, at this point it's milling around, as you've said, and then it seems to gather itself together and hit. Is there any reason as to where this gathering together and sudden explosive impact happened and why?
- [16:36]
John Halden
I don't think there is. I mean, Rebecca or others might think differently, but if you look at epidemics more generally, often they're really difficult to detect. The earlier stages, the very early stage ever, the very early stage of HIV aids, that there's simply not very much information and then where you pick them up is when they hit a big visible population. So Egypt is one of the most densely populated Parts of the Roman Empire at this time, Constantinople, the biggest city. And the fact that they're connected, that Constantinople lives off grain brought from Alexandria, that there are still frequent connections to the old major cities of the west, like Carthage and Rome, even if they're under barbarian rule, that once it slips into the set of trade networks, then it can go quite fast.
- [17:25]
Unnamed Historian
We can say a little bit more about how Yersinia pestis develops and spreads, because we know that it's primarily, of course, a disease of animals rather than people. And it tends to spread when an animal population that carries Yestinia pestis expands and then collapses. And there is a vector which can allow the fleas which live on the animals to jump from the animals onto human beings. And that's a sort of primary vector for infecting human populations. And when we look at the context in which those rodents live both geographically and climatically, and then relate that historically to resident human populations, we can make quite a few well informed guesses about how it moves around and how the different strains infected human populations.
- [18:14]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
This is the Oriental rat flea you're talking about.
- [18:16]
Unnamed Historian
There are issues with exactly how it moves. But the black rat and the black rat flea, yes, are thought to be one key vector, but they're not necessarily the major vector of transmission once the disease is up and running, as it were.
- [18:31]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Rebecca, what did doctors of the time understand of the disease and how did they treat it in general?
- [18:37]
Rebecca Fleming
This concept of plague thought of very generally in the ancient world, so this would be plague. Loymos in Greek, pestis in Latin is simply conceived of as a kind of very lethal, large scale epidemic event. So any disease that affects a large number of people all in the same place at the same time and kills a lot of them will be described as plague. They don't particularly have a set of symptoms or particular disease in mind. And this also causes some particular. I mean, it obviously is a practical challenge in terms of the large scale of it. But because ancient medicine is considered in quite a individual way, and it's about the disruption of individual constitutional balances and so on, doctors struggle with the whole notion of plague. So we see in Procopius, who does talk about doctors, for example, and very eminent doctors, that although they try, we are told, some of the very traditional therapeutic methods. So he mentions things like baths, where you'd adjust lifestyle and you'd have people have more baths or fewer baths, or change their diet or whatever. He says that this didn't really work, that it worked for some people, not for others. And the doctors were struggling with this notion of how the individual and the large scale interacted. And they were not just practical overwhelmed, but conceptually overwhelmed.
- [20:10]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
A lot of people who were rich, well off, well protected, like Justinian himself, who got the plague, were not protected. They fell. A lot of people who you thought, oh, they'll get the plague over there in that quarter. They don't get the plague. So there's no pinning it down. There's no, as I understand it, please correct me, there's no pinning it down. It's raging and rampaging all over the place. Once it gets this grip in Constantinople and then moves from Procopius, we just.
- [20:35]
Rebecca Fleming
Get this sense of everybody that it being unpredictable, that it affected all the sectors of the population, and then it didn't kind of follow the patterns that doctors would expect. Although every so often he has a kind of turn to more traditional notions of kind of medical thinking. So he says that some of those who survived, although in general they were very bad at predicting who would survive and who wouldn't. Some of those who survived, if your bubo kind of really swelled up and then separated and lots of pus came out, then that was a good sign and you'd probably survive, which is very much a kind of the body evacuating the bad pestilential material, the excess, and restoring its balance in some sort of way. So you get these moments of kind of ancient medical understanding amidst this sort of panic and difficulty with the kind of conceptual mix that they're facing.
- [21:36]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
John Holland, we were talking about how it spreads. Can you add to what you were saying about agents of transfer at this time?
- [21:44]
Unnamed Historian
Yeah, it's a really interesting question, and it's very hard to. To tie down, as is becoming apparent as we talk about the way this disease worked. I think the first thing is that the general assumption has been that like the later pandemics we know about, such as the third great pandemic in the 1890s, which particularly affected India and South Asia, but also, like the Black Death, it was spread by fleas from the black rat. But in fact, we were now thinking much more carefully about whether that really applies to anything other than the third great pandemic, where it definitely is rats and rat fleas. And the statistics collected by British authorities from Bombay, for example, make that very clear. But for the earlier plagues, that's becoming less necessarily the answer. So, for example, for the. The great plague of London in 1665, 66, it's pretty clear now that while the initial infection may have been from rat fleas. It was spread primarily by human lice and human fleas. And it's possible that that was also one of the vectors for the Black Death, because, again, archaeologically speaking, and also in terms of literary sources, rather, rats really don't play a role at all in any of these accounts. And our problem is that for the Justinian plague of the 6th century, and of course, we need to bear in mind that it recurred on and off right through into the 8th century, we really don't have any decent evidence for a large rat infestation or rat fleas being the major vector. So it's difficult to know exactly where to look next.
- [23:28]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Greg Gregory, what was Justinian doing about the plague and how did it affect him?
- [23:33]
John Halden
Well, he caught it, he had an attack, had buboes and so on. But he dealt with it the way he dealt with lots of things, which is he delegated. I mean, he's an old, by ancient standards, an old man when it happens. He's 60, so he's well established, and he has someone who looks after this for him. He gets one of his functories, Theodorus, whose normal job is to introduce people.
- [23:58]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
How does he look after him?
- [24:00]
John Halden
Oh, no, he doesn't look after him. He simply gives Theodorus money and soldiers and tells him to get on and sort it. So Justinian stays in the great palace and Theodorus is given the job of looking after the city. And the way it's presented by Procopius is that the problem is expressed almost in terms of how do you deal with the dead? Because they know you can get it from the dead, you can get it from living people. They're not really looking for vectors or anything, because that's not part of their science. So Theodorus sets about managing mass burials, and to begin with, he goes across the Golden Horn, which is the strip of water just north of Istanbul, Constantinople, and starts pouring bodies into the towers of the old fortifications on the other side. And so the job is get the corpses out and distribute money. And when it dies down, and after all, it dies down in four months, which is a lot quicker than our pandemic, isn't it? And when it dies down, Justinian says, well, you know, that's over. God's education is finished now, back to normal. And there's not very much sign that I'm aware of that he does very much to deal with it in other cities. It's still very much controlled in the capital. And then Procopius says, and it went on to infect the Persians and all the barbarians.
- [25:22]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Just briefly, Roka, can you give us any idea how many people died in the plague and what proportion of the population it was?
- [25:29]
Rebecca Fleming
The kind of ancients aren't very good at precise figures or collecting this sort of data that we would like. I'm not sure that they're really even meant to be reliable. It's just about putting a number on, being overwhelmed. And in a way, it's just a kind of quantitative way or numerical way of saying the same thing that somebody like Avagria says when he talks about the plague overrunning the world and that everybody had some experience of it and that that experience would include some deaths. Those might be relatively light in a particular community in one outbreak, or they might be incredibly heavy in a particular community, might be sort of destroyed, devastated in an outbreak. And for example, Evagrius talks about the fact that he lost members of his family, his wife, children, at least one grandchild, other relatives, other members of the household. And in a way, these are numbers that are doing the same kind of work as that.
- [26:33]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Yes, John. John Holden, do we have anything to add to that? Are we or are we, as far as we can get with numbers, we.
- [26:39]
Unnamed Historian
Can go a little bit further, I think, because we can look at different sorts of evidence. We've got the textual evidence, as Rebecca said, and the vast numbers given really just mean big. So you put 400,000 on it, and that just means a very large number. But we can go elsewhere for information as well. So, for example, where we have data from archaeology and particularly paleo environmental studies for landscape use and changes in landscape use, we don't really see in the countryside any significant evidence to suggest that there's a reduction in the output of agricultural produce, such as cereal crops and viticulture and so forth at this period. Not until the early part and middle part of the seventh century, in other words, 50, 60, 70 years later, do we see that sort of impact. So it sounds. It seems to be the case that the disease probably impacted high density populations worst, and it may have impacted rural communities as well, but not nearly to the same degree.
- [27:44]
John Halden
One other thing we haven't mentioned is that this disease doesn't burn out. The outbreaks are short. But Evagrius, who's just a boy when he first gets it, by the time he's writing, it's come back to Antioch three more times and it goes back to Constantinople before Justinian's death. So it's sort of circling and it becomes a kind of fact of life and there are outbreaks of this well into the 8th century. So it's not possible that it devastated the population because, you know, there are still these populations waiting to catch it again. It's normalized really, quite suddenly.
- [28:21]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Are you coming in, Rebecca?
- [28:22]
Rebecca Fleming
The archaeological evidence where people have picked up Yersinia pestis in various parts of Western Europe, including England, do actually show that it did reach a quite wide range of rural settings as well as urban centres. Doesn't necessarily help you with producing numbers, but I think the reach was extensive.
- [28:42]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Do you have any sense, Rebecca, that people were aware that they were going through something quite exceptional?
- [28:49]
Rebecca Fleming
I think so. To go back to Greg's point about Evagrius and it's taking over his lifetime, he talks about the fact that it's been going on for 52 years and that this is the longest ever and that there's been a previous 15 year plague cycle or series of cycles. And everybody thought that was amazing. And now we've outdone that. And he's got a whole sense of plague time, if you like, that the plague has in some sense interweaved with other temporal cycles and temporal rhythms. So the tax cycles, for example, and various other governmental and administrative patterns.
- [29:31]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
You mean this happened before the plague, this happened in the middle of the plague, this happened when the plague, that sort of thing?
- [29:35]
Rebecca Fleming
Yeah, this was the first outbreak and then it came back. You locate them in your lifetime or locate them in time through reference to plague.
- [29:45]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
John, how is our understanding of this plague colored by what we know of later plagues?
- [29:52]
Unnamed Historian
I think quite a lot. The scholarship has focused really on looking at more recent events to try and understand the past where we have or have had limited evidence and data. And as I mentioned a little bit earlier, the Black Death, for example, has been the victim, in a sense, of the. The third great pandemic in the 1890s. And the third great pandemic was used as a model against which to measure the data we had about the Black Death in Western and Central Europe. And then the Black Death was, as it were, reconstructed on the basis of what happened in the 1890s. And historians have really done rather the same with the Justinianic plague. And recent work is beginning to suggest that that's really a fundamentally flawed approach and that we need to rethink not only the. The textual data, the evidence of the historians and commentators of the time and later, but also look more carefully at the context, and particularly the ecological context in which this disease spread and impacted the human populations, that it's when you.
- [31:02]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Look, what are you hoping to find.
- [31:03]
Unnamed Historian
In terms of the Justinian plague? What we need to do is to compare the sorts of data I mentioned about land use against the evidence we have from archaeological cemetery sites and graves and so forth that Rebecca has just mentioned. We need to look at what we know of coverage. So I totally agree with Rebecca. There's no doubt that it spread very extensively. We don't go into quite how far, but it was almost certainly also very patchy because Evagoras himself says that it struck different communities to different degrees and some not at all. And so there's a whole range of situational and contextual information that we still need to bear in mind when we think about both its impact in terms of extent and. And its impact in terms of numbers.
- [31:49]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Greg. Greg Wulf, if you look at what happened to Byzantium in the following decades after 541, where would you put the plague in terms of its impact? With other things that were going on, wars and buildings and this, that and the other.
- [32:03]
John Halden
And this is quite a controversial topic at the moment. And part of it is because this is one of those areas of ancient medieval history where the science is changing things very rapidly. We know much more about climate change now, have all this DNA evidence.
- [32:17]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
How does that affect it?
- [32:19]
John Halden
Well, there's a group, there is one view, which is that the plague is a huge sort of. It's the beginning of a period of sort of weakness, of disaster. It takes the Byzantine world and its surrounding territories a long time to get over it. And this connects it to. We know there are some big climate changes around this time. There's a couple of enormous volcanoes exploding around the time of the plague, which, which probably reduce global temperature significantly for a few decades anyway. But I think my take on it would be that there are so many different things going on that trying to make the plague the one thing that changes everything is the wrong tactic. We need to think about all the other things that's going on. And I mean, certainly from the point of view of nuts and bolts, what does Justinian do after the plague's gone? He just gets on with doing what he was doing before this. More attempts to build the city, improve and repair Hagia Sophia. There's more conquests in the west, there's more wars and treaties with Persia, something we haven't mentioned, which is probably much bigger on Justinian's mind than any of this. It's the desperate attempt to get all the Christians to be the right kind of Christian to defend an orthodox view against an emerging counter view in the East. So my guess is that the plague is like really bad weather and probably in the long run it's not that influential. And certainly if we look further on in the next century or so, what are the big things that change? Well, the conquest in the west fails, the wars in Persia get stalemated, and then in the seventh century, you get the beginning of Arab invasions of Turkish, the Roman and Persian empires, the destruction of the Persian Empire, the Arabs, the conquest of all of Roman North Africa, including the bit Belisaris are caught back right up the strait to Gibraltar, the invasion of Spain by Arab armies. And compared to all of that, I think the plague sort of pales in insignificance. It's very dramatic at the time, but I don't actually think in the long run it has huge sort of structural consequences.
- [34:36]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Do you agree with that, Rebecca?
- [34:38]
Rebecca Fleming
I think I do. I think that the plague is a kind of experience, it's a kind of devastating experience. But that there are trying to pin it as the cause of any really specific change or development, as opposed to being part of a much broader complex of shifts and impacts, is really very tricky. And some people have tried to think about changes in religiosity, for example, increase in Marian devotion in Constantinople. But again, how you get from plague to that in particular is quite problematic. I would also say that one thing that it doesn't have much of an impact on is that people still continue to write medical treatises that don't really have much time for plague in them. They just stick to the old traditional individualistic model of medicine. But it clearly is a really important experience to the people who live through it.
- [35:38]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
So all that happens is that lots of people get dead. John? What? John, what new evidence might we look for now to throw more light? I mean, that's a pretty comprehensive. Well, that's a comprehensive summary by Greg saying a lot else is going on. This fades into the background, Justinian gets on with building a city, with battles and so on and so forth, and the plague fades into memory. Except that soon a great number of people are dead. But what new evidence are we looking for now to throw more light on the plague and its impact? Or have you got enough to judge what its impact was?
- [36:18]
Unnamed Historian
Not really. Not enough yet. We need more archaeology. At the moment we've only got 45, plus or minus a couple of as yet uncertain ancient DNA samples of Yersinia pestis from graves all in Western Europe. There's nothing from the Balkans or from the Mediterranean at All that's partly a factor of the nature of archaeology and the politics of archaeology, but that's a problem. The so called mass graves. The definition of a mass grave in archaeology is five or more so, and some of these are only 30 or 40. And of those 30 or 40, only three or four have got clear identifications of YP DNA in them. So it doesn't mean to say that, as Rebecca pointed out earlier, that the disease didn't reach a long way nor that it didn't have a significant impact. But we can't really judge how big the impact was. So we need more cemetery archaeology, we need more ancient DNA work. We now know, for example, that the Sydney Pestis strain that caused the Justinianic plague and that from the Black Death were slightly separate strains of a similar yet distinct Yersinia pestis. Probably from wild animal reservoirs, almost certainly. But what's interesting is that the Justinianic Yersinia pestis strain remains or appears to remain endemic in Europe, but doesn't affect and contact any of the later outbreaks of bubonic plague as far as we can tell. So we need more ancient DNA work and we also can use ancient DNA and the lineages that geneticists can generate from the material. They've got to look at the way in which the bacterium develops, because it seems clear from there's a little bit of evidence now to suggest that the strain of this particular version of Yersinia pestis in the course of the late 6th and 7th centuries was losing some of its virulence. And that may also explain why in the 750s, its last identifiable outbreak, thereafter it sort of disappears and fades away.
- [38:31]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
So the rather breezy idea that. Sorry, just a second. The rather breezy idea that it was swirling around and it popped up again and again and it was sort of the same thing, same sort of thing lurking for an opportunity to strike. That's not on, is it?
- [38:49]
Unnamed Historian
In a very general sense, that still makes sense. But it's the particular ecological contexts for each of those outbreaks that's important and the particular conditions that influence those ecological contexts, such as changes in local climate, changes in animal populations and so forth, that makes the difference. So for each outbreak one needs to locate very specific drivers, I think, rather than assuming some very general sort of catastrophist theory of plague outbreak. After all, bubonic plague still endemic in northern Turkey, in the western United States, in India, China and Central Asia today. But you don't get major outbreaks because the conditions aren't right. And also of course, because of modern antibiotics.
- [39:37]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
You wanted to come in, Rebecca.
- [39:39]
Rebecca Fleming
There is still. Yersinia pestis is still endemic in parts of the world and you can have the presence of the bacterium without the outbreaks, and that all of the indications are that there was Yersinia pestis in the Mediterranean world before the outbreak of Justinian. And there's both DNA evidence, but also there's some description by. There's a medical author called Rufus of Ephesus who's writing in the first century ad, who talks about pestilential buboes being present as a disease in Egypt and Libya, but not in a kind of epidemic way. So you have these possibilities and then something shifts in terms of interactions between humans and animals and the environment, and that this is always kind of a possibility, that. And that outbreaks, epidemic outbreaks of disease are just part of the human experience, as we, as we know. But I was also going to say.
- [40:46]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Sorry, right back up here, I interrupt you.
- [40:48]
Rebecca Fleming
Yes, yeah, I was also going to say that I don't think that the. Although people have become quite. This is to pick up on a previous point of John's, that although people have become. We've become much better at looking at some of the virulence relevant parts of the genome. Exactly how changes affect actual virulence is much less clear. And I think it would be disputed whether or not something. There is certainly something going on in the virulence part of the genome in both the Yersinia pestis strains for Justinianic plague and indeed for the Black Death. And indeed they seem to be similar developments. But whether or not they actually impact virulence is more questionable I think, at the moment. And indeed, this is kind of an area where it would be good to get more work in terms of how she shifts in pathogen DNA, impacts, symptoms and virulence.
- [41:45]
John Halden
Finally, Greg, what we need most now is more archaeology, more ancient science, that this is an area where just in the last 10 years, but also in the last 30, everything we thought we knew about it has changed. And it's an interesting illustration of how, particularly looking at ancient DNA, you can return to things you thought you understood quite well on the basis of. Of eyewitness accounts from the time, and discover that there's actually quite a lot more to it than that.
- [42:14]
Unnamed Historian
The historians we've talked about all make a big thing of the plague, and there's no doubt that it did have the sort of impact they're describing. Whether or not the numbers are believable is a different matter, but it's also interesting that quite a lot of writers of the time who write accounts of political and other events in the period make no mention of the plague at all. They pass over it, and sometimes where it is mentioned, it's merely one of a list of other things that have gone wrong. So we need to think very carefully, I think, as well, about the context in which the plague actually appears in any of our sources.
- [42:52]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Well, thank you very much, John Halden, Rebecca Fleming and Greg Wulf. Next week we'll be discussing Saint Cuthbert from the 7th century, patron saint of Northumbria, monk, hermit and kingmaker. Thanks for listening. Thank you.
- [43:05]
Alex von Tunzelman
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [43:12]
John Halden
The whole question of how plagues enter history in general, I think, is really interesting. And as John was saying, a lot of it's about what people want to write about. And if you're a classicising historian, you want to write about a plague destroying a sit in. If you're a religious writer, you want to talk about the wrath of God and this particular period, there's a lot of bishops and some classicizing historians doing that. But, I mean, there must be lots of plays that were never mentioned, outbreaks never mentioned that, because they happened in the wrong time or nobody observed them. And we know, we know a few, we know sort of plays in the third, second century, but there must have been lots of. Lots of outbreaks that just never made it into anybody's narrative, I think, were the plague.
- [43:59]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Were the specific prayers against plague, did they come into prominence at this time?
- [44:05]
Unnamed Historian
There is, I think, Gregory of Tours mentions the rogations, doesn't he, which were introduced as special processions to ward off the plague.
- [44:15]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Is there any comparison to be made from the number of people who are lost in war compared to the number of people lost in plague over this time?
- [44:24]
Unnamed Historian
Certainly the general assumption is that far more people die from diseases of all sorts, including plagues, than die in battle or even from wounds. And the number who die from wounds is usually larger than the number who get killed in the actual combat and certainly on military campaigns. The number of soldiers and camp followers and so forth who die of disease or illness is usually higher than the number who die in combat.
- [44:50]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
So plagues don't figure there. What happened to those who believed it was divine and did they think that prayer could mitigate it or see it off? Do we have any evidence, any accounts of that?
- [45:03]
Unnamed Historian
The only thing I can think of that's direct is that reference that Gregory of Tours makes to the bishop who institutes the rogations, the rogationes, which are processed processional events or prayers through the town, asking for God's mercy in times of. Of. Of stress and disease. But we don't know. It's assumed that it was the plague, but it could have been something else. Of course, I think Gregory assumes it's the plague, but there aren't any. So, for example, from Egypt we have papyri fragments from the 7th century with prayers on them, asking them, asking God to spare them from the ravages of the Muslims, or the. In fact, the Hagarenes, they're referred to as. But there's no reference, at least there's no evidence of prayers for protection against plague that I'm aware of.
- [45:58]
John Halden
There's a bit from the Antonine age, isn't there? But this is, but this is a pagan empire, so it's directed to sanctuaries of Apollo and so on. And I mean, there's certainly a tradition that in the pagan world, pre Roman as well as Roman, that plague is a way that gods communicate with humans, and that you then have to go to an oracle or you have to do what God's prophet tells you if you're pharaoh in Egypt. And so plague is a way in which the divine registers its dissatisfaction with what's going on in the present, and you then have to listen to what they're saying and make reparation up to you.
- [46:36]
Unnamed Historian
I was just going to jump in, Melvin. There's another plague as well in the third century called the Plague of Cyprian, which appears to spread from North Africa, and that also is supposedly devastating, but we have hardly any information about it other than a couple of textual references. There's been some attempt to relate some archaeology to it, but not very successfully.
- [46:58]
Rebecca Fleming
One of the things that the Plague of Cyprian, or it might actually be a continuation of the Antonine plague, does indicate is that there is a kind of. One of the sort of challenges of this, and why there may or may not be prayers and so on, is that the appropriate action of Christians in the face of plague is what you're meant to do. How much you're meant to ask for mercy or take your punishment, how much you're meant to flee or not, is kind of up for grabs at that point. Cyprian has to tell his congregation that they shouldn't be so cross, that the plague is taking Christians and non Christians alike, and that they have certain sorts of ways that they should behave. There are things that you have to think about in terms of what exactly you ask God for.
- [47:45]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Are there any medical things that are learned from this plague which are carried forward to succeeding centuries?
- [47:52]
Rebecca Fleming
In terms of what the impact on the literary tradition, it's very hard to see. And we don't get particular treatises on the plague, which you get eventually in later medical traditions. Procopius says that the doctors cut open the buboes to have a sort of look, but it didn't really tell them very much, so it doesn't seem to have. Because I think the intellectual model, the conceptual model of classical medicine is so strong and plague fits into it so poorly that it doesn't sort of impact on what moves forward.
- [48:27]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Sorry, after you.
- [48:29]
Unnamed Historian
Now, I'm just going to say, if we look at a different tradition, the Arabic tradition from the 12th century on, they have a much more, if you like, scientific approach to plague, and they're a little bit more, shall we say, anatomical about how to deal with it. But otherwise, no, I don't think there's really anything until we get to post Black Death.
- [48:49]
Unnamed Host of In Our Time
Well, thank you very much in Our.
- [48:51]
Alex von Tunzelman
Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.
- [48:54]
Rebecca Fleming
Hello.
- [48:54]
Melvin Bragg
I hope you've enjoyed the podcast you've just heard. There's another podcast available as well. It's called the Infinite Monkey Cage with me, Robin Ince and me, Brian Cox.
- [49:01]
Unnamed Co-host
And it's gonna be, I think, more educational than whatever it is that you just listened to, because we're gonna consider subjects such as the nature of reality, which encompasses whatever it is that you just listened to.
- [49:12]
Melvin Bragg
So, yeah, Jan11, Eric Idle, Frank Wilczek, Sarah Pascoe, Ross Noble, Chris Jackson, Alan Davis, David Dill. There's a huge number of people talking about many big ideas. There won't be that many equations. There might be one equation, won't there, Brian?
- [49:22]
Unnamed Co-host
There will. And also Erica McAllister, lady of the Flies. Very 2021.
- [49:26]
Melvin Bragg
And you can hear the infinite monkey cage on BBC Sounds.
- [49:29]
Unnamed Co-host
Yeah, there's hundreds of them, actually.
- [49:30]
Melvin Bragg
Hundreds, loads of them. Who would have thought you could do over 100 episodes about everything that's in the universe? There's a lot more than I first imagined.
- [49:37]
Unnamed Historian
Why?
- [49:37]
Unnamed Co-host
You're a comedian, not a scientist.
- [49:41]
Alex von Tunzelman
This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.
- [49:54]
Unnamed Surgeon
You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us. When I'm done with you.
- [50:00]
Alex von Tunzelman
Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcast.