With the rise of HIV and other “emerging diseases” having global reach over the past twenty years, interest in historic plague has flourished. The Justinianic plague in and around the Roman empire from a.d. 541 to 750, however, has received far less attention that the Black Death of 1348 and its recurrent strikes in Europe to the eighteenth century. This difference results in part from the comparative paucity of sources for the former and its greater linguistic demands, which require a knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern as well as Western languages. Because of these demands, Lester Little argues persuasively that a multiple-authored work by authorities in different parts of Europe is now needed before a single-authored synthesis can be adequately written.

From Ireland to Anatolia, these essays concentrate predominantly on two questions: what were the demographic consequences of the plague, and what was the disease? On the first, the various authors have departed from the position of Jean Durliat (1989) that the literary sources grossly exaggerated the plague's toll and enduring demographic effects on European and Middle Eastern populations. In the shortest essay in this volume, and one of the best crafted, Hugh Kennedy synthesizes recent archaeological findings, arguing that after 541 public building ceased “almost completely”; the total number of inscriptions also declined sharply, and the plague brought “to an abrupt end” rural and urban expansion in Syria (pp. 92–95). This might be construed as a sign of generalized population decline.

For the second question these scholars show far fewer doubts than historians and scientists have shown for the Black Death since Graeme Twigg's pioneering study of 1984. Only Michael McCormick casts even the slightest doubt on the identity of the disease that spread from Egypt to Ireland and circulated through the Mediterranean in less than five years. Unquestionably, it had to have been the same rodent subtropical disease, Yersinia pestis, that slowly crept through the Yunnan peninsula, taking more than fifty years to reach Hong Kong in 1894, and by steamship reached ports around the world, killing, however, only in the hundreds, not the expected millions, in temperate zones. Except for one essay, these authors base their conclusions on symptoms alone, taken mainly from six literary sources. These describe not only buboes in the three principal lymph nodes, as would be normal for Yersinia pestis, but also buboes forming in other parts of the body and pustules that almost wholly covered the afflicted. One essay does consider the epidemiology evidence, but not from large numbers of quantitative sources, which are hard to come by from before the Black Death and the early modern period. It asserts that the distribution of the Justinianic plague (as well as that of the Black Death) was “patchy,” and thus resembled the behavior of Yersinia pestis simply because some towns and regions appear to have been spared during particular plague waves (258). For the plague of 1348, such an assertion flies in the face of the work of epidemiologists George Christakos and his équipe (2005), who show that the Black Death spread over space and in time at one order of magnitude greater than any known wave of Yersinia pestis. As for the Justinianic plague, the assertion is based on scraps of anecdotal evidence, and worse, the absence of evidence. Given the absence of any connection of Justinianic plague to rats or other rodents, this essay asks us to believe that this “failure” in observation redounds simply to people before the nineteenth century being incapable of seeing millions of rats that must have strewn their streets, and of drawing connections between them and the disease (270). Yet in subtropical zones such as India and China, where Yersinia pestis struck before Yersin cultured the agent, natives had no difficulty seeing rats drop from their rafters, realizing that the plague season had begun, and that it was time to abandon their huts.

More positively, this collection will stimulate new research on the plagues from 541 to 750, not only on questions of the disease and demography, but also on the plagues’ social and cultural consequences, a matter of interest to everyone concerned with pandemics.