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...bubonic plague may have reached England before its first recorded case in the Mediterranean via a currently unknown route, possibly involving the Baltic and Scandinavia...The Justinianic Plague is the first known outbreak of bubonic plague in west Eurasian history and struck the Mediterranean world at a pivotal moment in its historical development, when the Emperor Justinian was trying to restore Roman imperial power.For decades, historians have argued about the lethality of the disease; its social and economic impact; and the routes by which it spread. In 2019-20, several studies, widely publicised in the media, argued that historians had massively exaggerated...

Eyam (AFP) - In the 17th century, residents in the remote English village of Eyam quarantined themselves to prevent the spread of bubonic plague. Most paid with their lives. Now their descendants and locals are outraged that a steady stream of visitors have ignored government warnings to stay at home to tackle the coronavirus outbreak. In 1665, the bubonic plague arrived in the Derbyshire village of Eyam from London, nearly 150 miles (250 kilometres) further south, carried by fleas in fabrics ordered by a tailor. As dozens died, the rector of Eyam church, William Mompesson, with the help of his...

Federico De Romanis, "Comparative Perspectives on the Pepper Trade." ...compares quantitative data and other accounts of the pepper trade in Roman and Early Modern times and finds many broad similarities. Through his reading of both Roman and Early Modern European sources, De Romanis establishes that the Romans must have used both large and small ships carrying a very high proportion of pepper in their cargoes on the voyage from India. On the basis of recent readings of the Muziris papyrus, he argues that the Hermapollon, a large Roman ship, carried about 620 tons of pepper. De Romanis also considers the...

Many have claimed the Justinianic Plague (c. 541-750 CE) killed half of the population of Roman Empire. Now, historical research and mathematical modeling challenge the death rate and severity of this first plague pandemic... White and Mordechai focused their efforts on the city of Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, which had a comparatively well-described outbreak in 542 CE. Some primary sources claim plague killed up to 300,000 people in the city, which had a population of some 500,000 people at the time. Other sources suggest the plague killed half the empire's population. Until recently, many scholars accepted this image...

The life of Belisarius, the greatest military commander of the Roman Empire, came to a close in early March AD 565. Considering how much detail we have of his middle life and military career thanks to his secretary, the historian Procopius of Caesarea, we possess comparatively very little information about his final days. The chronicler John Malalas, writing perhaps 10 years after Belisarius's death, provides some of the only reliable notices of the hero's last acts, beginning with the plot against Justinian which was hatched in AD 562 and in which Belisarius was implicated as a co-conspirator. Malalas offers the...

Teens discover 1500-year-old church that redefines Israeli history The church was discovered near Israel’s Ramat Beit Shemesh neighbourhood. An excavation, largely completed by teens, unearthed the church which dated back to 543 AD during the time of Emperor Justinian. After three years of detailed digging, archaeologists came across mosaics, pillars, still-intact crypts, and frescoes that at one time came together to form a beautiful church. An inscription indicated the building was complete thanks to the financial support of the Emperor. Excavation director Benjamin Storchan, on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, told CBN News: “Numerous written sources attest to imperial...

Nearly 1,500 years ago, a Byzantine merchant ship swung perilously close to the Sicilian coastline, its heavy stone cargo doing little to help keep it on course. The ship's crewmen were probably still clinging to the hope that they could reach a safe harbor such as Syracuse, 25 miles to the north, when a wave lifted the vessel's 100-foot hull and dashed it on a reef, sending as much as 150 tons of stone to the seafloor. The doomed ship was carrying a large assemblage of prefabricated church decorations -- columns, capitals, bases, and even an ornate ambo, or pulpit....

Of all Belisarius’s victories, the defeat of the great Gothic host under King Vittiges which had besieged Rome from February of AD 537 through March of AD 538 must rank as his greatest feat. In this, he was able to defend successfully a gigantic city that had been considered indefensible against a siege while outnumbered at least 20 to 1 – and maybe more. March 12 is the date commonly given for the break-up of the siege, when the remnants of the great Gothic army pulled up stakes and retreated for Ravenna. For the previous few months, they had...

After his stunning re-conquest of Roman north Africa, and destruction of the Vandalic kingdom, Belisarius returned to Constantinople late in AD 534. He left prematurely because a conspiracy had sprung up accusing him of seeking to usurp the imperial power and set himself up as king of Africa. To defuse suspicion, he packed up his household and returned to the capital, his ships laden with the Vandal royalty as captives and the legendary Vandal treasure. Once in Constantinople, Belisarius received a traditional Roman triumph. But while the imperial court celebrated, the situation in Africa deteriorated. Belisarius had left his former...

<p>"Archaeologists in Israel have discovered a massive compound dating back to the Byzantine era, which was used for “industrial-scale” production of wine and olive oil.</p> <p>The site at Ramat Bet Shemesh about 19 miles west of Jerusalem contains an oil press, wine press and colorful mosaics, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority.</p>

A piece of the famous Halley's comet likely slammed into Earth in A.D. 536, blasting so much dust into the atmosphere that the planet cooled considerably, a new study suggests. This dramatic climate shift is linked to drought and famine around the world, which may have made humanity more susceptible to "Justinian's plague" in A.D. 541-542 — the first recorded emergence of the Black Death in Europe. The new results come from an analysis of Greenland ice that was laid down between A.D. 533 and 540. The ice cores record large amounts of atmospheric dust during this seven-year period, not...

Excavations at the Gradishte archaeological site near the village of Taor, continue to unearth findings that shed light on the Early Byzantine fortified settlement and birthplace of Emperor Justinian I. "A number of coins, jewellery, ceramic bowls, weapons, tools and other artefacts have been unearthed at Taor," archaeologist Kire Ristov of the Museum of the City of Skopje who has headed the systematic excavations of the site since 2000 told the Vecher newspaper recently. He added that a part of the wall surrounding the settlement, two buildings and parts of public structures were also defined last year. Another major find...

Multiple comet impacts around 1500 years ago triggered a "dry fog" that plunged half the world into famine. Historical records tell us that from the beginning of March 536 AD, a fog of dust blanketed the atmosphere for 18 months. During this time, "the sun gave no more light than the moon", global temperatures plummeted and crops failed, says Dallas Abbott of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York... Now Abbott and her team have found the first direct evidence that multiple impacts caused the haze. They found tiny balls of condensed rock vapour or "spherules" in debris inside...

It’s a safe bet that most of you reading these words have been to a professional football game. Many of you—particularly those who live in Philadelphia—have probably witnessed the occasional brawls between the home crowd and those foolish enough to wear an opposing team’s colors. A few of you, I dare say, have been involved in such altercations. But how often have you witnessed football fans actually kill opposition partisans? Well, perhaps I should qualify that by saying American football fans. When was the last time you heard of agitated sports nuts rioting in the streets and burning down half...

What happened to the 50 tons of gold, silver and sacred treasures looted from Herod's Temple following the Roman legionnaires' sack of Jerusalem on Tisha b'Av in the year 70 CE? The Arch of Titus in Rome, erected shortly after the death of Titus who reigned as emperor from 79 to 81, clearly depicts Roman soldiers bearing on their shoulders the golden candelabrum, silver trumpets and bejewelled Table of the Divine Presence which the Roman emperor Vespasian and his son Titus carted back to Rome as trophies of war. Between 75 CE and the early 5th century, the treasure...

Highlights Yersinia pestis is discovered in a 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer from Latvia Y. pestis emerged ∼7,000 years ago at the beginning of the Neolithic The infected individual might represent a case of septicemic plague due to zoonosis Summary A 5,000-year-old Yersinia pestis genome (RV 2039) is reconstructed from a hunter-fisher-gatherer (5300–5050 cal BP) buried at Riņņukalns, Latvia. RV 2039 is the first in a series of ancient strains that evolved shortly after the split of Y. pestis from its antecessor Y. pseudotuberculosis ∼7,000 years ago. The genomic and phylogenetic characteristics of RV 2039 are consistent with the hypothesis that this very...

The Black Death, often called the largest pandemic in human history, is conventionally defined as the massive plague outbreak of 1346 to 1353 C.E. that struck the Black Sea and Mediterranean, extended into the Middle East, North Africa, and western Europe, and killed as much as half the total population of those regions. Yet genetic approaches to plague’s history have established that Yersinia pestis, the causative organism of plague, suddenly diverged in Central Asia at some point before the Black Death, splitting into four new branches—a divergence geneticists have called the “Big Bang.” Drawing on a “biological archive” of genetic...

...Prof. Haak will also try to detect more plague DNA in hundreds of skeletons from the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. So far, DNA evidence from a dozen skeletons points to little variability between the strains of Yersinia pestis in such remains, suggesting that the pestilence spread rapidly across the continent. The speed may owe to another human advance at this time -- the domestication of wild horses, which may literally have carried the disease into Europe. "We see the change from wild local horses to domesticated horses, which happened rapidly at the beginning of the Bronze Age," said...

Marcus Aurelius. Photo: © DEA Picture Library/Art Resource, NY. The year was 166 C.E., and the Roman Empire was at the zenith of its power. The triumphant Roman legions, under the command of Emperor Lucius Verrus, returned to Rome victorious after having defeated their Parthian enemies on the eastern border of the Roman Empire. As they marched west toward Rome, they carried with them more than the spoils of plundered Parthian temples; they also carried an epidemic that would ravage the Roman Empire over the course of the next two decades, an event that would inexorably alter the landscape of...

The Plague of Cyprian, named after the man who by AD 248 found himself Bishop of Carthage, struck in a period of history when basic facts are sometimes known barely or not at all. Yet the one fact that virtually all of our sources do agree upon is that a great pestilence defined the age between AD 249 and AD 262. Inscriptions, papyri, archaeological remains, and textual sources collectively insist on the high stakes of the pandemic. In a recent study, I was able to count at least seven eyewitnesses, and a further six independent lines of transmission, whose testimony...