DIONYSIOS STATHAKOPOULOS

INVISIBLE PROTAGONISTS: THE JUSTINIANIC PLAGUE FROM A ZOOCENTRIC POINT OF VIEW

The animals I am going to refer to are neither domestic, nor wild. They are those rodents that take refuge in human dwellings during their life-cycle, while their survival depends on food destined for human consumption, the

The rats that live among us in contemporary urban centres are numerous, despite the fact that we seldom see them, because they are nocturnal animals. The persisting urban myth that there is one rat per inhabitant notwithstanding,

been done on this subject, the safest estimate about the number of rats in modern cities ranges between 1:15/36 (rat per inhabitant)1. The rats we would likely come across today are brown or norway rats (Rattus norvegicus), a species that has successfully colonized Europe from the 18th century onwards2. In the Byzantine period, however, the dominant species was that of the black rat (Rattus rattus) to which I will be referring in this paper.

According to studies of its genetic code, the black rat originates from southeast Asia and possibly Malaysia. The caryotype of paleozoologically examined rat remains from the Mediterranean (with 38 chromosomes, as

1. D. E. DAVIS – W. T. FALES, The rat population in Baltimore, 1949, American Journal of Hygiene 52 (1950), 143-146; D. E. DAVIS, The rat population in New York, 1949, American Journal of Hygiene 52 (1950), 147-152. On the urban legend of rat numbers see R. SULLIVAN, Rats: A Year with New York’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants, London 2005, 18-20.

2. R. POLLITZER, Plague Studies 6. Hosts of the infection, Bulletin of the World Health Organization 6 (1952), 412; K. DOBNEY – J. HARWOOD, Here to stay? Archaeological evidence for the introduction of commensal and economically important mammals to the North of England, in N. BENECKE (ed.), The Holocene history of the European vertebrate fauna. Modern aspects of research, Rahden 1999, 373-387.

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opposed to 42 in the Malaysian species) is linked to southwestern India, from where it probably reached the Mediterranean through the spice route and Red Sea ports3

rats: the Modern Greek word for rat ( ) was initially an adjective of the generic word for mouce ( ) and designated a country mouse4. In the late Byzantine period such adjectives had already become nouns.

The existence of these rodents in Byzantium is corroborated by certain mentions in written sources: as they caused damage to agriculture and

and epistolography) contain occasional references to them5. But there are other ways to explore the presence of these animals in the Byzantine world and furthermore to discuss the important role they played in of the greatest natural calamities of Late Antiquity, the Justinianic Plague. To do so, we have to set aside the Byzantine views on the environment and the position of animals therein and to read our data with the help of the new reality of the microbiological laboratory.

rats in the dissemination of plague in 18986. This theory was subsequently

Black Death of the 14th century and the earlier Justinianic Plague. In this paper I will present an alternative, as much as possible non-anthropocentric overview of the Justinianic Plague. The main topics I will focus on are the role of rats in the dissemination of the pandemic including the discussion of their

3. F. AUDOIN-ROUZEAU – J.-D. VIGNE, La colonisation de l’Europe par le rat noir (Rattus rattus), Revue de Paléobiologie 13 (1994), 125-145; M. MCCORMICK, Rats, Communications, and Plague: Toward an Ecological History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34 (2003), 1-25, esp. 7-9.

4. MCCORMICK, Rats, 4; the earliest use of the adjective is found in Aesop (transl. L. GIBBS,

).5. See, for example, M. GRÜNBART, Store in a cool and dry place: perishable goods and their

preservation in Byzantium, in L. BRUBAKER – K. LINARDOU (eds.), Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Luke 12:19)

– Food and Wine in Byzantium [Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, Publications 13], Aldershot 2007, 42-43.

6. L. WALLØE, Medieval and Modern Bubonic Plague: Some Clinical Continuities, in V. NUTTON

(ed.), Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague [Medical History, Supplement 27], London 2008, 59.

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time in 541 and why it disappeared from Europe and the Mediterranean after two centuries in 7507.

The plague is an acute infectious disease. Its causative agent, the bacillus Yersinia pestis, was discovered and isolated in 1894 in the course of an epidemic in Hong Kong8. The plague pathogen is a non-motile, gram-negative bacillus that belongs to the family of the Enterobacteriaceae, ancient microorganisms that emerged between 42 to 187 million years ago and, as a rule are symbiotic, to humans. To be more precise, Yersinia pestis is, from a genetic point of view, almost 90% identical to Yersinia pseudotuberculosis (a pathogen that causes fever and abdominal pains) from which it mutated relatively recently (compared to the antiquity of the genus) some 20.000 years ago9.

The plague is a zoonose of rodents: in the colonies of wild rodents the infection abounds in endemic foci in which an interaction between the rodents

10. There are over 200 species of wild rodents that act as reservoirs of plague. Most of these wild rodents are,

such rodents are brought into contact with commensal rodents, an exchange of ectoparasites takes place and the latter are infected. As these live in close proximity to humans, the infection is thus, in a way incidentally, introduced to human populations. The main vector of the disease in its demic form is the

Xenopsylla cheopisfeeding on infected rats; once these succumb to the epizootic (as they are

7. On the Justinianic Plague see D. CH. STATHAKOPOULOS, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire [Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs 9], Aldershot 2004, esp. chapter 6; P. HORDEN, Mediterranean Plague in the Age of Justinian, in M. MAAS (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, Cambridge 2005, 134–160; L. K. LITTLE (ed.), Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541 – 750, Cambridge 2007.

8. H. KUPFERSCHMIDT, Die Epidemiologie der Pest. Der Konzeptwandel in der Erfor schung der Infektionsketten seit der Entdeckung des Pesterregers 1894 (Gesnerus Supplement 43), Aarau–

9. E. CARNIEL, Plague Today, in Pestilential Complexities (as n. 6), 119-120; R. SALLARES, Ecology, Evolution, and Epidemiology of Plague, in Plague and the End of Antiquity (as n. 7), 231-248.

N. GRATZ

World Health Organization, Plague Manual: Epidemiology, Distribution, Surveillance and Control, Geneva 1999, 63-96.

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mechanism that is called proventriculus-obstruction, as a result of which the

an increased frequency, biting their hosts and sucking their blood repeatedly. As they cannot ingest the blood, however, at each bite an extremely large number of virulent bacilli enters the blood of the hosts, where they will multiply within a very short period of time11.

which in most cases is not identical to the one in which the Justinianic Plague was active for the simple reason that the plague had long disappeared from such regions. Many modern researchers, both from the Humanities as well as the Life Sciences have cast doubts as to whether all the parameters of the above model were present during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages and therefore as to whether these pandemics were in facts outbreaks of plague12.

when, as consensus had it, they were passively transported from the East as a result of the Crusades13.

It is a fact that textual records of mice and rats in Byzantine sources are rare. However, data brought to light in the last two decades by archaeozoology has moderated, if not rejected the utterly negative position of the plague revisionists. The presence of the black rat in the Mediterranean is uncontested since the Neolithic14

excavated from the Roman period until the 8th century – mostly from 15. The fact that samples from former regions of

of detailed excavations and the reluctance to check for small mammal bones in them, a time-consuming and costly enterprise16.

11. . KUPFERSCHMIDT, Epidemiologie, 82-83.12. See the overview in . See the overview in SALLARES, Ecology (as n. 9), 268 .13. . F. AUDOIN-ROUZEAU, Le rat noir (Rattus rattus) et la peste dans l’Occident antique et

médiéval, 92 (1999), 422–26 and now F. AUDOIN-ROUZEAU, Les chemins de la peste : le rat, la puce et l’homme, Rennes 2003, 115-124 where this theory is ultimately challenged ; see also MCCORMICK, Rats (as n. 3).

14. . G. HAAS Israel Exploration Journal 2 (1952), 38.15. . MCCORMICK, Rats (as n. 3), 9-10; AUDOIN-ROUZEAU – VIGNE, Colonisation (as n. 3), passim.16. . MCCORMICK, Rats, 9 ; This is now beginning to change: see the recent reports on

excavations in Nicopolis, which provide one of the earliest evidence for the black rat in the

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Those who deny the existence of the plague in the Middle Ages further-more invoke the fact that medieval texts do not record groups of obviously diseased or dead rats prior to the outbreak of an epidemic of the disease. Such phenomena were recorded in the course of the third pandemic in the late 19th century in Hong Kong17. Perhaps they expect a description similar to the one in Albert Camus’ The Plague, in which doctor Rieux encounters hundreds of dead rats in the streets of Oran in the course of a couple of days18. It is important to note, however, that rats come out in the daylight only in very rare cases, as a rule only when there is a convergence of a rising population and a decline

daylight19. Evidently, a large number of rats that would have succumbed to

Byzantine written record preserves the only testimony of diseased rats in the context of the plague. John of Ephesus, the sixth-century Monophysite bishop

plague, writes the following: “Also we saw that that this great plague showed

wild, and even on the reptiles of the earth. One could see cattle, dogs and other animals, even rats, with swollen tumours, struck down and dying”20.

As the revisionist arguments on the scarcity of rats have been overturned

symptoms that completely agree with the clinical picture of the disease21,

series of outbreaks of plague. A number of questions, however, remain yet to be debated: why did the pandemic break out at the particular moment that it

Balkans in the 2nd century CE: M. BEECH, The Environmental Archaeology Research Programme at Nicopolis: Methodology and Results, in A. G. POULTER (ed.), The Transition to Late Antiquity, on the Danube and Beyond [Proceedings of the British Academy 141], Oxford 2007, 219-248, esp. 232-33.

17. . C. A. BENEDICT, Bubonic plague in nineteenth-century China, Stanford 1996, 8-14, 22-24 and passim.

18. . A. CAMUS, The Plague, translated by S. GILBERT, New York 1948, 3-5 .19. . SULLIVAN, Rats (as n. 1), 20.20. . PSEUDO-DIONYSIOS OF TEL-MAHRE, Chronicle, Part III, trans. with notes and introduction by

W. WITAKOWSKI [Translated Texts for Historians 22], Liverpool 1996, 87.21. See . See STATHAKOPOULOS, Famine and Pestilence (as n. 7), 135-146.

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did in 541 and why did it disappear two centuries later? The answers to both questions are only peripherally linked to humans.

Current scholarship on the plague agrees that the pandemic dimension of the infection is connected to the existence of the Roman communication network, both by sea and land as well as the presence of a political entity that supported the movement of commodities and people within its realm22.

but was valid for almost the entire Common Era after the onset of the Pax

Augusta. An occurrence that corroborates this is the so called Antonine Plague, a pandemic of smallpox that broke out in Mesopotamia around 165/66 CE and was disseminated into Persia, Asia Minor, Italy, Gaul, Dacia and Egypt, raging until 189/9023. Although bubonic plague had seemingly existed in the Mediterranean prior to the sixth century, as there were some sporadic, local outbreaks24, some factors must have come together to enable the disease to

an unusual event that took place in 536. Procopius, an eye witness, describes it as follows:

“And it came about during this year that a most dread portent took place.

whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed. And from the time when this thing happened men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death”25.

This phenomenon, which has been termed “dust-veil event” lasted for approximately 18 months and according to contemporary accounts it had quite a negative impact on agriculture26. The dust-veil event has been attributed

22. . STATHAKOPOULOS, Famine and Pestilence, 173.23. . D. GOUREVITCH, The Galenic Plague: a Breakdown of the Imperial Pathocoenosis, History

and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 27 (2005), 57-69; D. STATHAKOPOULOS, Plagues of the Roman Empire, in J. BYRNE (ed.), Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics and Plagues,

24. . SALLARES, Ecology (as n. 9), 251.25. . PROCOPIUS, History of the Wars, eds. J. HAURY – G. WIRTH, vol I, Leipzig 1962, II 14, 5–6;

Translation: H. B. DEWING, Loeb Classical Library, PROCOPIUS vol II, London-New York 1916, 329. 26. I will not discuss the growing body of literature on this subject, but point the reader . I will not discuss the growing body of literature on this subject, but point the reader

to some works of synthesis on it: STATHAKOPOULOS, Famine and Pestilence (as n. 7), 265-268; D. STATHAKOPOULOS, Reconstructing the Climate of the Byzantine Empire: State of the Problem and

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to a volcanic eruption in the Southern hemisphere (a fact which does not seem to be corroborated by the deposits of volcanic activity as preserved in the ice cores of Greenland) or the impact of an asteroid or gigantic comet. Dendrochronological data seem to suggest that 536 and its immediately following years were among the coldest and wettest on record. Despite the

only at a local or regional level27. The above remarks refer to human po-pulations. If, however, we move our gaze towards animals, we can make a

have disrupted the migration patterns of wild rodents and causing them to migrate beyond their usual radius in the endemic foci of plague in Central and East Africa. The contact between such wild rodents with their commensal counterparts in the littoral zones of modern Tanzania, where ivory trade with

disease that until then only had a local focus could be disseminated to such an extent and reach the proportions of a pandemic28. This happened when the black rats were introduced into the Roman communication network as unwelcome passengers in the holds of grain transporting ships and caravan coaches29. Another, alternative model is equally possible: the cold spell of the 530s may have enlarged the area in which the plague survives in its wild form among the wild rodents. The greater perimeter of the disease’s carriers could easily have brought the wild rodents into contact with commensal rats in the shores of Tanzania with the results I have described above30. These

the Justinianic Plague in 541.

Case Studies, in J. LASZLOVSZKY – P. SZABÓ (eds.), People and Nature in Historical Perspective [Central European University, Medievalia 5], Budapest 2003, 251-55; I. TELELIS,

A. ARJAVA, The Mystery Cloud of 536 CE in the Mediterranean Sources, DOP 59 (2005), 73-94.

27. . ARJAVA, Mystery cloud (as n. 26).28. I am following here the argument of . I am following here the argument of D. KEYS, Catastrophe: an Investigation into the Origins

of the Modern World, London 1999, 17-23, although I strongly disagree with the conclusions he has drawn from it.

29. . SALLARES, Ecology (as n. 9), 284-85.30. . HORDEN, Mediterranean Plague (as n. 7), 153.

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The disease disappeared from Europe and the Mediterranean after 18 waves in 750, a fact that has puzzled scholars since research on the plague began31. Perhaps the drastic population decline as a result of plague-induced

32. According to another

which to develop an endemic activity33. Recent stochastic simulation models, however, that are not anthropocentric but focus on the metapopulation dynamics of rat populations, refute such views34. According to this research every rat population is divided into subpopulations. If within such a

disease exists, then the plague can survive within the subpopulation regardless of what happens to the rest of the subpopulations within, for example, the same city and without causing important (that is epidemic) outbreaks in the

rats of about 50,000, which would be usual for a mid-sized town35, this would mean that the plague could survive for up to century without the need of re-introduction from external carriers or vectors. Approximately every ten years, when climatic conditions happened to be particularly favourable both

would surpass this margin and the greater mortality of rats would cause the outbreak of a human epidemic36. This model explains in a satisfactory way the presence of frequent epidemic outbreaks with short interepidemic

the Justinianic Plague and is even more valid for the great cities of the Islamic 37.

31. . J.-N. BIRABEN, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditeranéens, 2 vols [Civilisations et Sociétés 35], Paris–The Hague 1975, I 45; SALLARES, Ecology, 288-89; M.

MCCORMICK, Toward a molecular history of the Justinian Pandemic, in Plague and the End of Antiquity (as n. 7), 311-312.

32. . BIRABEN, Les hommes, ibidem. 33. . W. MCNEIL, Plagues and Peoples, Harmondsworth 1976, 150. 34. . M. J. KEELING – C. A. GILLIGAN, Metapopulation Dynamics of Bubonic Plague, Nature 407

(2000), 903-906; EIDEM The Royal Society: Proceedings, Biological Sciences 267 (2000), 2219-2230.

35. . MCCORMICK, Rats (as n. 3), 24.36. . MC CORMICK, Rats, ibidem; SALLARES, Ecology (as n. 9), 283.37. In my book, . In my book, Famine and Pestilence (as n. 7), 123-124, I had falsely interpreted the short

interepidemic intervals in Syria as a possible trend of endemization of the plague.

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The discovery of Yersinia pestis’ genome sequence in 2001 and the research

that followed have brought to light new evidence that can help us understand

some possible reasons for the plague’s disappearance38

research seems to suggest that individuals infected with bacilli of the

Enterobacteriaceae family (Yersinia enterocolitica or Yersinia pseudotuberculosis)

that abound in populations with low levels of hygiene and produce, as a rule,

quite harmless clinical manifestations, acquire immunity from the plague39

.

Perhaps it will soon be proved that the bacilli from the same genus as the

plague managed to antagonize the bacillus that had mutated from the same

family some thousands of years before and had become dangerous for its

carriers.

Even more interesting is the exploration of the dynamics of synergy

and antagonism between the plague and other infectious diseases. It seems,

for example, that the antagonism between plague and malaria was positive

for the diseased – provided they did not succumb to the former within

few hours: the symptoms of malaria prevailed over those of plague. This

in many Mediterranean regions in Antiquity and the Byzantine Middle Ages

– especially Italy and Greece40

. Perhaps malaria gradually stripped the plague

from a potential number of victims, thus depriving the bacillus of a more

permanent and stable ecological focus.

By looking at the past in a non-anthropocentric way we gain important

the natural world including animals. However, the danger of a neo-determi-

nistic reading of history looms large and I would like to categorically distance

myself from such an interpretation. Instead, by looking at the Justinianic

Plague as a dynamic relationship between climate and the environment on

the one hand, and animals (including the ancient microorganisms) on the

other, we enhance our outlook by introducing parameters that our sources

themselves ignored.

well.

38. . J. PARKHILL et al., Genome sequence of Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague,

Nature 413 (2001), 523-527.

39. . MCCORMICK, Molecular (as n. 31), 311-312.

40. . R. SALLARES, Pathocoenoses Ancient and Modern, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences

27 (2005), 214.