Ancestral Journeys by Jean Manco

Author:Jean Manco
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
Published: 2016-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

Now the disease in Byzantium ran a course of four months, and its greatest virulence lasted about three. And at first the deaths were a little more than the normal, then the mortality rose still higher, and afterwards the tale of dead reached five thousand each day, and again it even came to ten thousand and still more than that … many houses became completely destitute of human inhabitants.24

Raging on from Constantinople, the plague wiped out entire urban populations. It sped around the Mediterranean to Illyria, Greece, Italy, Gaul, Iberia and North Africa. It even reached the British Isles. It remained virulent in all these lands for just over two centuries, coming and going in an unpredictable and terrifying way.25 Plague probably killed about half the population of Constantinople and a third of that of Europe in its first wave, while later waves killed so many more that the Byzantine empire had lost half its population to plague by AD 700.26 The initial and gravest blow to the empire came just as Justinian was intent on restoring it to its former extent. He had recovered Italy from the Ostrogoths and Africa from the Vandals. His advances slowed after the plague. The empire was too weakened by natural disasters and fighting on other fronts to be able to achieve his dream. So the barbarian hold on the West was consolidated.

Those towns and kingdoms trading with the empire were doubtless worse affected by plague than more isolated barbarians initially. In Britain, the Anglo-Saxons pressed westwards once more in the 550s after a long lull in their advance (see p. 222).27 Were they taking advantage of losses among the post-Roman British?

Plague mortality within Illyria from 542 may partly explain the comparative ease with which Slavs came to overwhelm Illyricum by the mid-7th century,28 although the distraction of the Byzantine empire by war with Persia was the key military factor. The Slavs were not simply a governing elite in the Balkans. Slavic languages are spoken today over much of the former Roman province of Illyricum, which suggests that the incomers were not hugely outnumbered by the locals.

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