The Long War for Britannia, 367–664 by Edwin Pace

Author:Edwin Pace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
Published: 2020-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Plague

Sadly, this ‘solar dimming’ produced more than just famine. Scientists opine that the phenomenon made the Nile Valley a perfect breeding ground for the bubonic plague bacteria. Thousands died there. But far worse, Byzantine ships brought infected rats to Constantinople. By 542, almost a third of the city’s population died. The emperor Justinian himself caught the disease, although he managed to survive.14

This was far from the end. Justinian had just launched an ambitious military expedition to reconquer the western Mediterranean. The talented Byzantine general Belisarius managed to retake the Vandal domain in North Africa with relative ease, but the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy proved a far tougher opponent. Although Belisarius’ brilliant handling of his small force time and again staved off the more numerous barbarians, outright victory eluded him. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Italy first starved during the time of the ‘blue sun’, then died in their thousands when the bubonic plague arrived. The latter even thwarted a Frankish invasion of Italy. In the 520s, Rome was a bustling city of tens of thousands; by the 560s, it was a ghost town.

Italy was far from the only victim. Among the storage jars on Byzantine ships lurked plague-infested rats, the most likely culprits behind the Harleian chronicle’s entry for a ‘great death’ in 547. It also reports the Irish bishop Ciarin’s demise only three years later.15 The devastation in the British Isles quickly mirrored Constantinople and Italy. Coastal ports, the most likely landfalls for ships, would be the hardest hit.16

These twin disasters have been seen as the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the Middle Ages.17 This may be an exaggeration, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that they deeply affected the psyches of both Briton and Saxon. Contacts with Byzantium withered away; populations decreased. Ken Dark notes that the real decline in British agriculture (and therefore in its population) occurred not in the fifth century, but in the sixth and seventh.18

Learning certainly did not die, although shipments of papyrus from the eastern Mediterranean ceased. The effect would have been rather like the sudden demise of our internet. We see a marked change in the intellectual climate. Up to this time, well-educated theologians like Gildas and Faustus could debate complex spiritual questions based on knowledge drawn from a wide range of books. We know that Faustus sent a copy of one of his erudite treatises to Britain.19 But with expensive vellum as the only medium, far fewer works could be copied and distributed. The end of the papyrus trade may well mark the beginning of the end of Britain’s first ‘information age’. Intellectuals like Pelagius, Faustus and Gildas became a thing of the past.

Written theological texts soon began to crumble into dust. By necessity, oral accounts became the chief medium for preserving and spreading information. The faith was now propagated through wonder tales of earlier saints. Latin chronicles that mentioned the Burgundian king Gundahari, the Ostrogoth Theodoric and the Proud Tyrant also slowly rotted away. Bards replaced them with oral epics about King Gunther, Dietrich von Bern and Arthur.

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