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Click above for a video excerpt from The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius describing a personal encounter with the dreaded Plague of Justinian. The thought of pandemic troubles many souls these days. It is well to keep in mind that as bad as things may seem with regard to the deaths caused by the COVID-19 virus, we are not even within shouting distance of the type of utter and absolute societal devastation caused by the typical catastrophic historical plague. One of these epic pestilential events was the so-called Plague of Justinian of the mid-to-late 6th century AD. Erupting in AD 542,...

hat caused the fall of the Roman Empire? A devastating plague that struck during the reign of Emperor Justinian in 541 AD, killing a quarter of the population, seems to have landed the final blow, but the identity of the infection was a mystery. Now sequencing of DNA taken from two skeletons buried in Bavaria, Germany, in the 6th century has uncovered the complete genome of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria also blamed for the Black Death that struck Europe in 1348. The find suggests that Y. pestis may have emerged to ravage humanity several times. Hendrik Poinar at McMaster University...

An international team of scientists has discovered that two of the most devastating pandemics in human history -- responsible for killing as much as half the population in Europe at the time -- were caused by strains of the same bacterium. The researchers announced Monday that the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death were caused by distinct strains of the same pathogen, and warned that similar pandemics can strike again. The Plague of Justinian struck in the 6th century and is estimated to have killed between 30 and 50 million people -- virtually half the world’s population as it...

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...

...The bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, has been linked with at least two of the most devastating pandemics in recorded history. One, the Great Plague, which lasted from the 14th to 17th centuries, included the infamous epidemic known as the Black Death, which may have killed nearly two-thirds of Europe in the mid-1300s. Another, the Modern Plague, struck around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries, beginning in China in the mid-1800s and spreading to Africa, the Americas, Australia, Europe and other parts of Asia. Although past studies confirmed this germ was linked with both of these catastrophes,...

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...

Italy: Plague victims discovered after 1500 years Rome, 10 April (AKI) - The remains of hundreds of victims, believed to have been killed in a plague that swept Italy 1500 years ago, have been found south of Rome. The bodies of men, women and children were found in Castro dei Volsci, in the region of Lazio, during excavations carried out by Lazio archaeological office. News of the extraordinary discovery was reported in the magazine, "Archeologia Viva". The victims are believed to have been victims of the Justinian Plague, a pandemic that killed as many as 100 million people around the...

An Empire's Epidemic Scientists Use DNA in Search for Answers to 6th Century Plague By THOMAS H. MAUGH II, Times Staff Writer By the middle of the 6th century, the Emperor Justinian had spread his Byzantine Empire around the rim of the Mediterranean and throughout Europe, laying the groundwork for what he hoped would be a long-lived dynasty. His dreams were shattered when disease-bearing mice from lower Egypt reached the harbor town of Pelusium in AD 540. From there, the devastating disease spread to Alexandria and, by ship, to Constantinople, Justinian's capital, before surging throughout his empire. By the time...

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...

1500 years ago a pungent world plague nearly exterminated the human race! Thomas Short wrote: “from 562 A.D. a plague raged for 52 years the like of which has never been seen before or since!” Conventional wisdom maintains this worldwide plague began in Ethiopia and was carried by ship-born rats to Europe and beyond. With our new knowledge of bacteria and viruses being carried by vectors far above the Earth this theory of deployment has been questioned. Our pertinent scrutiny asks not only what caused this exterminating plague, with its incredible and unmatched virulence, but whether some parallel catastrophic events...

.... snip ... Physical Aspects Of The Dark Ages Let's first look at the onset of "the" Dark Ages in the sixth century AD. The Roman Empire was finished, nothing was happening in the sciences, and worse was happening in nature. The Italian historian Flavius Cassiodorus wrote about conditions that he experienced during the year AD 536 : "The Sun...seems to have lost its wonted light, and appears of a bluish colour. We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon, to feel the mighty vigour of the Sun's heat wasted into feebleness, and the phenomena which accompany...

The Dark Ages : Were They Darker Than We Imagined? By Greg Bryant Published in the September 1999 issue of Universe As we approach the end of the Second Millennium, a review of ancient history is not what you would normally expect to read in the pages of Universe. Indeed, except for reflecting on the AD 837 apparition of Halley's Comet (when it should have been as bright as Venus and would have moved through 60 degrees of sky in one day as it passed just 0.03 AU from Earth - three times closer than Hyakutake in 1996), you may...