A late-antique fleabite, at most

Last week Lee Mordechai and others published “The Justinianic Plague: An inconsequential pandemic?” [h/t Saraceni]. Here they question Procopius and other Byzantine-era historians who claimed that Lady Yersinia killed six trillion Mediterraneans.

(Goak Here. But only by a factor of six…)

Since solar flares, droughts, and earthquakes hit the archaeological record; and since eclipses are predictable – when some liar misdates one of these, we can catch him in the act. Certainly the climate crisis of AD 536, which David Keys related to the later plague, is (well) documented. The failure of rubbish pickup in Elusa likely reflects that, and maybe Saracen attacks. Just not “disease”, at least not any one specific disease.

With plague, we can tell when a raconteur is honest: habeamus corpora, if you will. I understand we habemus many stiffs from the last days of Neolithic Cucuteni Culture, for instance. In an absence of corpses, we cannot test the raconteur so easily.

But we can bring in other proxies. One nice one, which Decker's The Byzantine Dark Age used, is the ratio of farm pollen against invasive weeds – mostly pine. Against Justinian’s Flea, Mordechai et al. argue that we’re not seeing the mass depopulations in the countryside which various studies have claimed of Justinian's reign, lately Kyle Harper’s Fate of Rome. The absence is so glaring as to restore the burden of proof back upon Procopius.

Chroniclers, where ideological, and post-Eusebius many chroniclers were, were ever-tempted to arrange (at least) events to critique some contemporary regime. Andrew Palmer a generation ago noticed this from the Maronite Chronicler concerning the Damascene earthquake of AD 659, which that chronicler misdated. More recently we may read vridar on Thucydides’ account of the 430ish BC plague in Athens, way back in 2014 noting Procopius as similarly compromised. (vridar on topic bolsters Mordechai’s case even where some historian does describe the symptoms, which most don’t.) Whenever you read a Greek - or a Hellenised Syrian - discussing a disaster, you must watch for Sophocles’ ghost standing behind him.

This goes to other comments that Kyle Harper overblew his case.

One complaint I got against Mordechai's crew: The fourteenth century mortalities would cause such a labour shortage, that these disasters even improved the fortunes of the survivors in the lower classes, raising them to the middle. If similar sudden mass mortality truly happened also in the sixth century, then we’d expect similar. Mordechai’s point that the Med economy was not adversely affected is, thereby, otiose. We should agree to exclude artisanal economic production, one direction or another; from evidence for the plague’s effect, one way or another. Land use being the great exception.

Where Mordechai's crew dismiss the drop in Med inscriptions AD 550s as random, perhaps they reflect Berber attacks on an inadequately defended Byzantine Africa; and taxation levied upon postRoman loyalists. Although I agree with Mordechai that this drop is not demonstrably relevant to plague.

As for the onset of the Dark Age: third look at Pirenne?