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The Justinianic plague revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Dionysios Stathakopoulos
Dionysios Stathakopoulos*
Affiliation:
University of Vienna
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Extract

In mid July 541 a plague epidemic broke out in the small city of Pelusium at the mouth of the Nile and was subsequently disseminated to the entire Mediterranean basin and even as far as Yemen in the South and Finland in the North. It constitutes the first historically recorded certain appearance of true plague. Contemporary populations witnessed what was to be the beginning of a series of outbreaks that ravaged the Mediterranean world until 750. This cycle of epidemics has been conventionally termed Justinianic Plague. In this study the most important works devoted to this series of events will be critically surveyed with the goal of establishing the status of research on this topic so far, and the possible questions that need to be addressed in the future.

Type
Critical Study
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 24 , 2000 , pp. 256 - 276
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 2000

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References

Works Surveyed

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