Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The first recorded world-historical pandemic took place (541–750 CE) in the Roman Empire and Sasanian Iran, as well as neighboring areas such as Arabia, 541- 750 CE. It began during the reign of Justinian (r.527 – 565) and continued during the rise of Islam and the fall of the Sasanian Empire in Iran to the Arab Muslim armies. An episode was reported in Medina in a rock inscription late in the Umayyad Empire. Although scientists and historians have long held that that the culprit was the bubonic plague (Yersinia Pestis), until now no solid biological evidence from within the Eastern Mediterranean realms of the Roman Empire has been found. Another puzzle was that archeologists couldn’t with certainty identify mass graves or “plague pits” like those known from the medieval Black Death (the second world-historical plague, in the 1300s and 1400s).
This is a story that has resonances for our generation, who lived through COVID lockdowns and millions of deaths worldwide only a few years ago. I’m also interested because I’ve written two books on the rise of Islam, set during the middle of the plague period — one of them entitled Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires.
The Eastern Roman historian of the 500s CE, Procopius of Caesarea, a Palestinian, described the plague’s advent, saying that “the tale of dead reached five thousand each day, and again it even came to ten thousand and still more than that.” At first people went to the burials of their relatives, but then societal order broke down. People tossed body on top of body in grave pits, or tossed them into the sea, or into boats that they launched into the sea.
Then there weren’t a lot of people around to serve as gravediggers. “For slaves remained destitute of masters, and men who in former times were very prosperous were deprived of the service of their domestics who were either sick or dead, and many houses became completely destitute of human inhabitants.” Even the great and wealthy, when they died of the swelling buboes, might lie dead for days without their bodies being disposed of. They they just had to stop having burial rites. People who hated each other started helping bury their dead.
Then in the 1990s, archeologists did discover a plague pit, in Jerash, in what is now Jordan. And that discovery turned up some teeth that could be analyzed, allowing the identity of the plague microbe to be specified by a scientific team from the University of Southern Florida and Florida Atlantic University, through examination of surviving dental pulp:
Adapa, S.R., et al. “ Genetic Evidence of Yersinia pestis from the First Pandemic.” Genes 2025, 16, 926. https://doi.org/10.3390/genes16080926
The scientists investigated 8 teeth from 5 plague victims who had been buried in a mass grave beneath the hippodrome in Jerash, and found Y. Pestis. Moreover, they found exactly the same strain of Y. Pestis in each, suggesting rapid transmission before the bacterium had a chance to mutate.
Jerash was conquered by the Romans in 106 CE and incorporated into their province of Arabia. People in Jerash, then known as Gerasa, used Greek for formal purposes but spoke Arabic at home. In the late 300s and through the 400s its residents adopted Christianity. It was ruled by the invading Sasanian Iranians around 614-630, briefly recovered by Eastern Rome under Heraklios, but then incorporated into Islamdom in 636.
File photo of Jerash, 2020, by Hisham Zayadneh on Unsplash
Jerash’s Hippodrome was where Roman chariot races were held early in the Roman period. But that practice ceased at some point, and the chambers beneath it became workshops for light industry, especially ceramic production. Rooms appear to have been used to dump ceramic bowls that didn’t turn out very well. Some of these chambers were then pressed into service for mass burials in 555-560 when plague swept in. Extensive Roman structures still survive there, and are visited by over 300,000 people a year.
The authors write that strain of plague found in Jerash resembles some samples earlier recovered in Central Asia, suggesting that the plague of the 500s spread from there west.
The urban dynamism of the Eastern Roman Empire, with extensive trade and circulation of population among substantial urban centers, the authors point out, exposed Roman citizens to pathogens.
They find that the bubonic plague came and went through history, subsiding after 750 but then breaking out again in the 1300s, and then again in the late nineteenth century in China and India, where it killed millions. As a zoonotic disease, it has a base in animal populations. In the period when it wasn’t polishing off millions of people, the plague bacterium hid out in fleas, biding its time until human immunity waned and until some population movement put them in close contact with the rats that carried infected fleas.
It is hard to be sure whether the plague of the 500s and 600s affected world history. Did it help thwart Justinian’s attempt to restore Roman rule to the whole Mediterranean and to keep Iran at bay? In a later time the Black Death killed off 65% of Europeans. Was there a similar toll in Eastern Rome? When you lose so many workers, the value of labor rises significantly and workers have much more bargaining power. How did that impact the social structure of Eastern Rome?
After Heraklios defeated the Sasanians in 628, the Iranian empire appears to have fallen into political instability, with a series of short-lived rulers. We know that at least one died of plague. Did a major plague outbreak help the rising Muslim empire conquer Iran?
Medieval depiction of a burial during the plague of Justinian.
To end on a dark note, here’s some more of Procopius’ description:
- “DURING these times there was a pestilence, by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated . . . It started from the Egyptians who dwell in Pelusium. Then it divided and moved in one direction towards Alexandria and the rest of Egypt, and in the other direction it came to Palestine on the borders of Egypt; and from there it spread over the whole world, always moving forward and travelling at times favorable to it . . . And in the second year it reached Byzantium in the middle of spring, where it happened that I was staying at that time. . .
“And they were taken in the following manner. They had a sudden fever, some when just roused from sleep, others while walking about, and others while otherwise engaged, without any regard to what they were doing. And the body showed no change from its previous color, nor was it hot as might be expected when attacked by a fever, nor indeed did any inflammation set in, but the fever was of such a languid sort from its commencement and up till evening that neither to the sick themselves nor to a physician who touched them would it afford any suspicion of danger. It was natural, therefore, that not one of those who had contracted the disease expected to die from it. But on the same day in some cases, in others on the following day, and in the rest not many days later, a bubonic swelling developed; and this took place not only in the particular part of the body which is called boubon, that is, “below the abdomen,” but also inside the armpit, and in some cases also beside the ears, and at different points on the thighs . . .”
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