HEALTH
The Justinianic Plague
541 CE
History · Middle Ages · Holocene · Meghalayan
The Justinianic plague, the first documented plague pandemic, reached the Roman world in 541 through the ports of Egypt and returned in waves for two centuries.
The Justinianic plague, so named after the emperor then reigning, whom the sources report to have contracted the disease, is the first documented plague pandemic. It reaches the Roman world in 541 through the ports of Egypt and recurs in waves over two centuries. Its cause remained conjectural for about 1,400 years, until the identification of Yersinia pestis in DNA extracted from the teeth of sixth-century victims. The choice of support is not incidental: the dental pulp is enclosed in enamel, an almost sealed medium, where the blood deposited the circulating bacteria of the last days of life, protected from the soil micro-organisms that colonise the rest of the skeleton. Genomes collected from Bavaria to Britain have since documented a bacterium in the course of diversification, belonging to a lineage distinct from that of the Black Death, and a mass grave in Jordan has yielded it close to the region where the epidemic was first reported.
Why it matters
The case constitutes one of the principal results of pathogen palaeogenomics, a cause that had remained undetermined for fourteen centuries having been established by direct sequencing. The Justinianic plague and the Black Death appear as two independent emergences from rodent reservoirs, separated by eight centuries. The magnitude of the demographic and political consequences of the former remains debated.
Dating & uncertainty
The beginning of the epidemic in 541 is documented by written sources; the pandemic recurs in waves until about 750. Ancient DNA established the cause and the independence of the lineage. The total number of deaths remains the object of divergent estimates.
Our species’ history as one day
23:53:126 min 47 s before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day