Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750

Usually collaborated volumes with multiple authors (this volume has a dozen) have little unity other than that imposed by the title and by the valiant editor's effort in his introduction. This work is a happy exception: it is unified by content and theme, even though authored by talented historians with a variety of specializations. Various aspects are explored on the nature of the sixth-century pandemic and its two-hundred year run in human history but not to the exclusion of social, religious, and economic consequences of the plague. Unanimously all authors (except for one who says it does not matter) agree that the pandemic was the bubonic plague caused by Yersinia pestis; virtually all modern authorities recognize the preponderance of evidence that the Justinian plague (as the one beginning in the sixth century is called) was caused by a Y. pestis biovar called Antiqua (contrasted with Medievalis, the name given to the Black Plague epidemic of the fourteenth century). New archaeological and bio-molecular evidence is persuasive—we know the genome sequence for these biovars), and, moreover, the biological data are happily compatible with our historical documentary sources. Not all pandemics during this time frame were the bubonic plague, however.