The Plague of Justinian

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the plague that broke out in Constantinople 541AD, in the reign of Emperor Justinian. According to the historian Procopius, writing in Byzantium at the time, this was a plague by which the whole human race came near to being destroyed, embracing the whole world, and blighting the lives of all mankind. The bacterium behind the Black Death has since been found on human remains from that time, and the symptoms described were the same, and evidence of this plague has since been traced around the Mediterranean and from Syria to Britain and Ireland. The question of how devastating it truly was, though, is yet to be resolved.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• John Haldon No other episodes
  Professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies Emeritus at Princeton University
• Rebecca Flemming No other episodes
  Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge
• Greg Woolf 8 episodes
  Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London

Reading list

• Biology of Man in History
  Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (eds.) (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) Google Books →
• The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire
  Kyle Harper (Princeton University Press, 2017) Google Books →
• A Companion to the Global Early Middle Ages
  Erik Hermans (ed.) (Arc Humanities Press, 2020) Google Books →
• Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750
  Lester K. Little (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian
  Michael Maas (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2005) Google Books →
• Gregory of Tours on Sixth-Century Plague and other epidemics
  Michael McCormick (Speculum, 2021)
• The 'Justinianic Plague': An 'Inconsequential Pandemic'? A Reply
  Mischa Meier (Medizinhistorisches Journal, 2020)
• History of the Wars: Books I and II
  Procopius (trans. H B Dewing) (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013) Google Books →
• Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire and the Birth of Europe
  William Rosen (Jonathan Cape, 2007) Google Books →

Related episodes

• The Black Death
  
  22 May, 2008 940 History of Europe
• Man and Disease
  
  12 Dec, 2002 610 Medicine and health
• Justinian’s Legal Code
  
  17 Nov, 2016 340 Law
• Constantinople Siege and Fall
  
  28 Dec, 2006 940 History of Europe
• The Origins of Infectious Disease
  
  9 Jun, 2011 570 Biology
• Byzantium
  
  19 Jul, 2001 940 History of Europe
• Early Christian Martyrdom
  
  28 Apr, 2022 270 History of Christianity
• Constantine the Great
  
  5 Oct, 2017 930 History of the Ancient World
• The Schism
  
  16 Oct, 2003 270 History of Christianity
• The Thirty Years War
  
  6 Dec, 2018 940 History of Europe

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Programme ID: m000rc43

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000rc43

Auto-category: 940.1 (Europe–History–476-1492)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. In 541 AD, in the reign of Justinian, there was a plague by which the whole human race came near to being destroyed, embracing the whole world and blighting the lives of all mankind.