The Justinianic Plague: An inconsequential pandemic?
| Autor: | Adam Izdebski, Merle Eisenberg, Timothy P. Newfield, Janet Kay, Lee Mordechai, Hendrik N. Poinar |
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| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: |
History
Yersinia pestis Antique Population Dynamics Social Sciences first plague pandemic Legislation Plague (disease) 03 medical and health sciences Politics Late Antiquity Pandemic Humans 0601 history and archaeology Middle Ages Pandemics Justinianic Plague 030304 developmental biology Plague 0303 health sciences Multidisciplinary 060102 archaeology 06 humanities and the arts History Medieval Ancient DNA PNAS Plus Ethnology Byzantium |
| Zdroj: | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
| ISSN: | 1091-6490 0027-8424 |
| Popis: | Significance The Justinianic Plague (circa 541 to 750 CE) has recently featured prominently in scholarly and popular discussions. Current consensus accepts that it resulted in the deaths of between a quarter and half of the population of the Mediterranean, playing a key role in the fall of the Roman Empire. Our contribution argues that earlier estimates are founded on a small subset of textual evidence and are not supported by many other independent types of evidence (e.g., papyri, coins, inscriptions, and pollen archaeology). We therefore conclude that earlier analyses of the mortality and social effects of the plague are exaggerated, and that the nontextual evidence suggests plague did not play a significant role in the transformation of the Mediterranean world or Europe. Existing mortality estimates assert that the Justinianic Plague (circa 541 to 750 CE) caused tens of millions of deaths throughout the Mediterranean world and Europe, helping to end antiquity and start the Middle Ages. In this article, we argue that this paradigm does not fit the evidence. We examine a series of independent quantitative and qualitative datasets that are directly or indirectly linked to demographic and economic trends during this two-century period: Written sources, legislation, coinage, papyri, inscriptions, pollen, ancient DNA, and mortuary archaeology. Individually or together, they fail to support the maximalist paradigm: None has a clear independent link to plague outbreaks and none supports maximalist reconstructions of late antique plague. Instead of large-scale, disruptive mortality, when contextualized and examined together, the datasets suggest continuity across the plague period. Although demographic, economic, and political changes continued between the 6th and 8th centuries, the evidence does not support the now commonplace claim that the Justinianic Plague was a primary causal factor of them. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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