Extract

“An evil destiny of bubo and armpit” (CIG 8628), the plague of Justinian is the name given—unfairly, since the emperor did not cause it, himself contracted it, and was long outlasted by it—to the pandemic of “bubonic plague,” infection by Yersinia pestis, that struck western Eurasia and North Africa towards the middle of the 6th centuryce and that recurred in phases until at least the middle of the 8th century.¹ In geographical extent, demographic and social impact, and chronology, it probably far surpassed the major epidemics of the Roman imperial and late antique period, the 2nd-century Antonine plague and the mid-3rd-centuryplague described by Cyprian of Carthage. Study of the Justinianic pandemic has been transformed in the 21st century not only by ever more sophisticated exploitation of the usual range of historical sources, literary and material, but by the recovery of the DNA and the reconstruction of several of the genomes of the pathogen from the skeletons of some of its victims. And yet almost every aspect of the pandemic remains debated. There is no consensus on its route into the world of Justinian, its subsequent epidemiology, virulence, or macro-historical consequences.