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INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE JUSTINIANIC PLAGUE.

POST CONFERENCE REPORT

Justinianic Plague Conference Held at the American Academy in Rome

The first conference ever held on the Justinianic Plague, a pandemic of bubonic plague that was present all around the Mediterranean basin, Europe, and the Middle East for two and a quarter centuries, 541-767 AD, took place at the American Academy in Rome December 13-15, 2001.

(L.to R.) Dionysios Stathakopoulos, Michael McCormick, Alain Stoclet, Michael Kulikowski Jo N. Hays

Historians, archaeologists, and molecular biologists gathered to discuss this vast natural catastrophe, which up to the present has attracted very little attention from scholars. They came from Austria, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States expressly to give it the scholarly attention they think it merits. They discussed and compared all the relevant texts known to them. These are written in Arabic, Greek, Latin, and Syriac. They also discussed the known archaeological evidence from the sixth to eighth centuries for the presence of rats (the principal vectors), for mass burials, which could contain remains of plague victims, and for the depopulation of cities, monasteries, and rural areas.

Prof. Michael McCormick, a historian at Harvard, posed a series of historians' questions for molecular biologists, and there were two molecular biologists present to supply answers. One was Prof. Michel Drancourt from the medical faculty at the University of La Méditerranée in Marseilles. He and his colleagues at Marseilles made the first positive identification of bubonic plague by DNA analysis of Black Death victims. In 1998 they published results of research on remains from cemeteries that can be reliably dated in 1722 and 1590. In 2000 they pushed such results back to the beginnings of the Black Death in 1348. This is particularly significant right now because there is so much serious doubt being expressed about whether the disease known as the Black Death was really plague.

The other molecular biologist present was Dr. Robert Sallares from the University of Manchester. Dr. Sallares and his colleagues made a similar identification in 2001 when they found malaria in bones from a cemetery dating from about 450 AD some seventy kilometres north of Rome. Thus a major question for conference participants was where and how to find remains of Justinianic Plague victims that can be subjected to the same type of laboratory analysis.

(L. to R.) Barbara Rosenwein, Hugh Kennedy, Michael Morony, David Whitehouse, Peter Sarris, John Maddicott

Other questions focussed on the influence of massive mortality on late-Roman culture, on both Greek and Latin Christian spiritual life, and on the newly emerged religion of Islam, which came to regard death from the plague as a form of martyrdom. Still others dealt with the origins of the cult of St. Sebastian as a plague saint, or with the marked rise in the value of labor because of the deaths of so many workers. The papers delivered at this meeting are to be published next year by the American Academy in Rome.

This pandemic takes its name from the Byzantine Emperor Justinian who was reigning in 541 AD when the deadly infectious disease arrived on the Mediterranean shores in Egypt and began to spread rapidly. It eventually sputtered out in the 760s, not to reappear until its return almost six centuries later in the more familiar guise of the Black Death.

Although bubonic plague was known about earlier, for example by the Greek physician and writer Hippocrates in the fifth century BC, the so-called Justinianic Plague was the first historically documented pandemic of plague. There have been just two other pandemics. The second originated in China in the 1320s and, thanks to the Eurasian reach of Mongol power, arrived in the Crimea in 1341. From there it sailed for Italy in 1347 with Genoese merchants; their ships wandered into the Straits of Messina, with everyone aboard either dead or dying, and thus introduced the Black Death into Europe. It did not disappear entirely from Europe until 1772.

Robert Sallares, Hugh Kennedy, Michel Drancourt

The third pandemic started in China during the middle of the nineteenth century. Once it hit Hong Kong in 1894, it spread to the rest of southeast and south Asia. By 1899 the steamship brought it to Honolulu and to San Francisco, and today one of the largest reserves of the disease is found among the wild rodent population of the southwestern United States.

Once fatal to slightly over half the people who contracted it, plague in recent decades has become routinely curable, if timely diagnosis and medical supplies permit, by antibiotics, in particular streptomycin or gentamicen. Modern medicine notwithstanding, this third pandemic shows no sign of going away. Each year the world over a few hundred people die of plague; in the United States, twenty or so cases of plague are reported annually and one or two persons die of it. The continuing importance of the disease in the world today is emphasized by the report published in 1997 by a team of French doctors working in Madagascar about the first known case of resistance to antibiotics in a plague victim.

Carmela Franklin, Lester K. Little, Michael McCormick

In addition to Michael McCormick, Michel Drancourt, and Robert Sallares, conference participants also included:
Lawrence Conrad of the University of Hamburg; Jo N. Hays of Loyola University, Chicago; Hugh Kennedy of St. Andrews University; Michael Kulikowski of the University of Tennessee; Lester K. Little, Director of the American Academy in Rome and Professor at Smith College, John Maddicott of Exeter College, Oxford; Michael Morony of UCLA, Los Angeles; Peter Sarris of Trinity College, Cambridge and All Souls College; Oxford, Dionysios Stathakopoulos of the University of Vienna; Alain Stoclet of the University of Lyons II, and David B. Whitehouse, Director of the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York.

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