When Numbers Don’t Count
<p>The Justinianic Plague, the pandemic that brought waves of plague to western Eurasia between 541 to about 750 CE, has been a feature of narratives about the “decline and fall of the Roman Empire” ever since the eighteenth century, when Edward Gibbon featured<a href="https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/542procopius-plague.asp" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank"> Procopius’s vivid description of plague’s assault on Constantinople in 542</a> during the reign of the Emperor Justinian. For two centuries since Gibbon, the Justinianic Plague (“JP” for short) received a few passing nods in accounts of the period we now call “late antiquity.” But overall, it elicited little attention from historians. Even in my own training as a historian of medicine in the 1970s and ’80s, it was barely a blip on the radar.</p>
<p><a href="https://eidolon.pub/when-numbers-dont-count-56a2b3c3d07"><strong>Click Here</strong></a></p>