Existing mortality estimates assert that the Justinianic Plague (circa 541 to 750 CE) caused tens of millions of deaths throughout the Mediterranean world and Europe, helping to end antiquity and start the Middle Ages. In this article, we argue that this paradigm does not fit the evidence. We examine a series of independent quantitative and qualitative datasets that are directly or indirectly linked to demographic and economic trends during this two-century period: Written sources, legislation, coinage, papyri, inscriptions, pollen, ancient DNA, and mortuary archaeology. Individually or together, they fail to support the maximalist paradigm: None has a clear independent link to plague outbreaks and none supports maximalist reconstructions of late antique plague. Instead of large-scale, disruptive mortality, when contextualized and examined together, the datasets suggest continuity across the plague period. Although demographic, economic, and political changes continued between the 6th and 8th centuries, the evidence does not support the now commonplace claim that the Justinianic Plague was a primary causal factor of them.

Recent research has increasingly argued that the Justinianic Plague was an unparallelled demographic catastrophe which killed half the population of the Mediterranean world and led to the end of Antiquity. This article re-examines the evidence and reconsiders whether this interpretation is justified. It builds upon an array of interdisciplinary research that includes literary and non-literary primary sources, archaeological excavations, DNA research, disaster studies and resilience frameworks. Each type of primary source material is critically reassessed and contextualized in light of current research. By drawing upon this interdisciplinary foundation, the article demonstrates that the evidence for the catastrophic maximalist interpretation of plague is weak, ambiguous and should be rejected. The article also makes use of the Third Pandemic as a comparative case study, and considers how the metanarratives of plague in contemporary society influence research on the subject. It concludes that the Justinianic Plague had an overall limited effect on late antique society. Although on some occasions the plague might have caused high mortality in specific places, leaving strong impressions on contemporaries, it neither caused widespread demographic decline nor kept Mediterranean populations low. Any direct mid- or long-term effects of plague were minor at most.

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This article is a detailed critical review of all the major scholarly publications in the rapidly expanding field of the Justinianic Plague published from 2000 through 2018. It updates the article in this journal by Dionysios Stathakopoulos from 2000, while also providing a detailed appraisal of the state of the field across all disciplines, including: literary studies, archaeology, DNA evidence, climatology, and epidemiology. We also identify the current paradigm for the Justinianic Plague as well as survey possible avenues forward for the field in the future.1

This article explores how plague—as an idea—became an ahistorical independent agent of historical change. It focuses on the case of the Justinianic Plague (ca. 541–750 c.e.), the first major recorded plague pandemic in Mediterranean history, which has increasingly been used to explain significant demographic, political, social, economic, and cultural change during late antiquity (ca. 300–800 c.e.). We argue that the Justinianic Plague retains its great historiographic power—namely, its supposed destructive impact over two centuries—because it evokes a terrifying myth of what plague should do rather than because of conclusive evidence of what it did. We define this historiographic power as the plague concept. It includes three key features: extensive chronology (lasting for two centuries), mortality (catastrophic death toll), and geography (global). The plague concept is built on three interdisciplinary types of evidence (here termed truisms): rats, climate, and paleogenetics. Our article traces how scientists constructed the plague concept in the first half of the twentieth century, and how historians entered the discussion in the last third of that century. As historians engaged in Justinianic Plague research, they used the plague concept to frame their arguments without problematizing its presence or contesting features that scientists had constructed decades earlier.