The Rest Is History - 217. Plague and the decline of the Roman Empire

Episode Date: August 4, 2022

Tom and Dominic are joined by friend of the show Kyle Harper to discuss how pandemics and disease played a far greater role in the decline of the Roman Empire than previously understood. On the show Kyle, Dominic, and Tom discuss life expectancy, how the Roman Empire was ‘bad for people’s health', the Antonine Plague, and more. Listen to our previous episodes with Kyle: 146. Disease vs. the rise of civilisation 147. Disease, the New World and modern pandemics Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. Hello. In the 6th century AD, the Eastern Roman historian Procopius described the advent of a plague by which, he said, the whole human race came near to being annihilated. He first heard

of it in Egypt, but then it spread and soon it reached the imperial capital in Constantinople. There, he wrote, people were seized by the disease before they knew what was coming. They came down with a fever, developed painful swellings and fell into delirium or even a coma. Before long, hundreds of people were dying every day, then thousands and then 10,000. The empire itself seemed shaken to its foundations. And for this calamity, wrote Procopius, it is quite impossible to write or think of any explanation except to refer it to God. Tom Holland, you're always very keen to refer explanations to God in this podcast. Do you think this was an act of God or do you think there's more to it than that? I think there may be more to it. Yeah. And I'm delighted to say

that we are joined by someone who also thinks that there was more to it than that? I think there may be more to it. Yeah. And I'm delighted to say that we are joined by someone who also thinks that there was more to it than that, friend of the show, Professor Kyle Harper from the University of Oklahoma. And if you haven't listened already, we did, I thought, a kind of absolutely, for me, eye-opening two-part episode with Kyle on the history of disease. And I'm more thrilled than I can say that we've got him back once again to talk more specifically about the book that he wrote before his book on disease, The Fate of Rome, Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. And I read actually on a holiday in Greece, so surrounded by all the evidence for the glories of classical civilization about three or four years ago. And honestly, I've been wanting to have Carl back on as I really enjoyed the previous episode that we did,

kind of so eye-opening. And it's wonderful to have you back. And today we thought we'd look at the argument that you advance in The Fate of Rome that... Well, you wrote the book. Give us a quick summary of your argument. Well, thank you so much for all that. I'm really honored and thrilled to be here.

And in 2017, I published this book about the importance of the environment and this chapter of the human history. That's the area that I specialize in studying history of the environment. And by the environment, I mean both the physical climate, so patterns of precipitation, patterns of temperature, as well as the biological environment. So that's just a domain of sort of the past that I think doesn't always get the attention that it deserves. It's an area of the past where also we're learning so much about the experience of ancient civilizations that we just didn't know 10 or 20 years ago. And that's true both on the climate side, where the concerns that we have about human-driven climate change have inspired just this sort of incalculable scientific effort to understand the earth and to understand human impact. You have to understand sort of incalculable scientific effort to understand the earth and to understand human

impact. You have to understand sort of the natural background and the natural background of the climate isn't one of perfect stability. The climate's always changing for natural reasons and human impacts, which are massive, sort of overlay those natural dynamics. But the need to understand those natural dynamics of the earth system have really unintentionally created a new archive for people like me who are historians. It wasn't created to sort of study Roman history, but it does tell us things that we just didn't know 10 or 20 years ago. And so we're always learning new things about the Romans. But this is this is like a sort of a whole new wing of the library that we just didn't have the ability to walk into before. And now we do. So as a historian, to me, that's really exciting. And it can also be challenging because it's not necessarily how we're trained.

And and it's not easy to to integrate natural forces with with human factors but but i think it's fun to try and i think we're still at the beginning of a really exciting period so in a kind of nutshell the argument of the fate of rome is that um the climate and disease played a much greater part in what happens to the roman world you know in uh i don't don't know, the 5th, 6th centuries and so on, than we previously, you know, the old kind of Edward Gibbon decline and fall sort of model, where it's the behavior of emperors, but and also the movements of kind of barbarians and so on, that there's much more to it than that, basically, that and disease in particular, you think plays a really big part in that story.

That's right. And I think you still need all the human factors. You need barbarians. You need class tensions between the rich and the poor. You need political dynamics. You need senators and equestrians and Italians and provincials. So you need all of those tensions, internal and external. But I think you can actually understand the story in a more accurate and richer way by realizing that all of those human factors play out in a world that is sort of always fragile, always on the edge. have in modern times. So life expectancy in pre-industrial times, under the best of circumstances, is, you know, around 30. And in the Roman Empire, we think it was probably more like in the mid-20s. So even in times when there's not some devastating pandemic, just the material reality of life is that it's very hard. And as you say, to me, disease is the even more powerful force. These societies are just living on the biological edge. Mortality is always ubiquitous. It's unpredictable in a society where most people, most of the time, die of infectious disease. But these pandemics that the Romans experience, and there's really a series of them in the second, third, and then most importantly, in the sixth century, when the bubonic plague appears. So Carly, you said just then that the average kind of life expectancy in antiquity is 30 years.

And then you said under the Roman Empire, it's probably closer to 25, implying that the Roman Empire is actually bad for people's health. And that would, I think, seem kind of counterintuitive to a lot of listeners who would think of the Roman Empire is actually bad for people's health. And that would, I think, seem kind of counterintuitive to a lot of listeners who would think of the Roman Empire, let's say, in its heyday, the Antonine Age, the Golden Age, the age that Edward Gibbon said was the age that most people would say was the happiest in human history, that actually, this golden age of temples and roads and functioning sewerage systems is actually terrible for people's health. The Roman Empire, I argue, is paradoxically bad for people's health. And this is something

actually that, first of all, there's a strong comparative basis for this claim that in late pre-industrial times, we know that living in cities, whether it's London or Amsterdam, is very risky for your health. And in the Roman period, there's a similar plausibility to say, look, when you have hundreds of thousands, upwards of a million people with no biomedicine, with limited waste disposal, living in extreme proximity, including with their animals, it just creates the ecology where it's so much easier for infectious diseases. They're kind of sinks, little ones, big ones of disease. There's sinks of disease. There's sinks of human life. A city like Rome would have been a demographic sink that simply

required constant replenishment from migrants. I mean, Rome in its imperial heyday is kind of a million, maybe over a million people. There's never been a city as large. So in terms of the impact on health, humanity as a species is kind of pushing at limits with the urban fabric of Rome. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's a kind of step forward in the ability of society to provision such a city. And it required both state provision as well as a very highly functioning market to feed that many people. But this is also a common pattern. The ability to create that density wasn't matched by the ability of public health responses to maintain a sanitary and healthy environment. And that doesn't mean that the Romans didn't have any concept of public health or desire

for public health. I just think they were simply overwhelmed by the density of a city that was bigger than any that had existed and bigger than any that really would exist in Europe until probably the 18th century. Am I right in thinking that Romans actually got shorter? So literally they're shrinking as the empire is expanding and the population is physically shrinking. People get shorter. And so then you have to ask why. There are different factors that go into achieved stature, partly it's genetics, but partly it's environment. The environmental part is affected by nutrition. So a lot of it has to do with how much food in particular, how much protein you're getting during your sort of youth. But a major, major factor is also the infectious disease environment. And so when children are constantly fighting off diarrheal diseases, malaria, it imposes such a heavy burden on the developing body that the body has to, it faces trade-offs.

And it can't grow because it's funding the immune system's battle against infectious diseases. And so I think the best explanation is that you have a dense urban civilization and a very interconnected civilization, too. It's not just the cities. It's the fact that they're connected together. And again, we know this from really, really good data from the 18th and 19th century. Like in America, there's a lot of study of very good study of bone links in 18th, 19th century colonial and early United States. And like the people who live in railroad towns are shorter than the people who live in towns of the same size,

20 miles off the line. And it's because the germs are coming through. Yeah. And it's the transportation networks that creates the transmission network for infectious disease. The weird thing then is that when we, you know, people,

people who are not super familiar with Roman history, we look at maps, let's say of the Roman empire. we look at maps, let's say, of the Roman Empire and we see the development classically of roads, roads being the great symbol of kind of civilization. Shipping lanes. Yeah, all those things. And we say, gosh, look at the Romans.

Isn't that amazing? They have villas and they have roads and all these things. And they have, as you say, this kind of urban density. But actually, if you're living in that society with those things, what that means is you are subjecting yourself in a way to a kind of experiment are you unprecedented in human history where you're the sort of epicenter of this swirling massive i don't my metaphor has got completely out of control of this sort of massive you know germs coming in from goodness knows where

as traders and merchants and emissaries and envoys and so on. Is that pretty much the situation? Exactly. And I think it would have been both really sort of low level, sort of not notorious respiratory and gastroenteric diseases. So like we shouldn't forget that collectively the burden on human health of a lot of these colds and, you know, respiratory syncytial virus, or all the, the sort of like low level coughs, colds, flus that, that today, you know, we, we just sort of muscle through them. We don't like it, but remember in the ancient world, those would have been more dangerous. There weren't antibiotics. So a lot of the diarrheal diseases, this really blew my mind. I was young then, and I asked a medically informed historian what would have killed most people in the Roman Empire. And it really did. It just blew

my mind at the time when he said diarrhea. Even today in much of the world, that's one of the leading causes of early death. We're looking at the golden age of the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana, the Antonine Peace, and you've established that we have these great cities, in the case of Rome, on an unprecedented scale, but the other great cities of the empire is Alexandria, Antioch, and so on. These are vast too. They're linked by roads, by shipping lanes, and that this is terribly detrimental for people's health. There's one further factor, which is, of course, that the trade links that are feeding these great cities extend beyond the limits of the empire. And famously, they head southwards into Africa, because that's where the animals that feature in the arenas are coming from. And their trade

links are starting to be established along what will become the Silk Roads, you know, in the age of the Antonines, as far as China. And you point out in your book that Central Africa and Central Eurasia are absolute kind of breeding grounds for incredibly lethal diseases. Yeah, I mean, it's just like COVID-19. It's really, you know, mutatus mutandus travels quickly around the world on the jet airplane. They didn't have jets, but they had sailing networks and they had horses. And when you connect different populations, it's just basic ecology of infectious disease. Those populations then have the opportunity to expose each other to the disease pools that they have. So the Romans are probably giving away diseases. They're probably taking their diseases elsewhere, and they're certainly increasingly exposed to the diseases of other populations. But the Roman Empire is kind of unique as the intersection point between these two incredibly dangerous breeding grounds of disease, kind of Central Asia with its various kind of rodents. And then in Africa with all its caves

full of bats and chimpanzees with Ebola and so on. Yeah. I mean, infectious diseases, every disease comes from somewhere. They come from wild animals that the pathogen then adapts to humans either directly, sometimes through the domestic animal. And there are certainly different environmental factors that can create kind of hotspots. One is simply biodiversity in general. There's more animals, there's more diseases, there's more opportunity. But there are some in particular, the presence of primates that are closely related to us. So all of the malarial diseases come from old world primates, from apes in particular, that have bodies and immune systems like ours. And so they're more likely to be the source of new infectious diseases. And as you said, bats, bats and rodents play a really important role, just because there's so many small mammals out there that are that are swapping around their viruses, and creating evolutionary chances to cross to humans. That's certainly what happened with COVID-19. Let's let's go through some of these major sort of crises. So Tom mentioned the Antonines, you know, Gibbon, most of our listeners, well, many of them will know that

because we've referred to it before that Gibbon famously said this was a great golden age you know when you would have chosen to have lived but before i mean within 100 years or so the empire has plunged into you know it's a tremendous crisis you got the crisis of the third century endless emperors and what you might say is one of the triggers for that is you have one of the first of this succession of plays don't you the antonine plague so do you think that's one of the things that basically pushes the empire of course as it were yeah i mean the antonine plague is a major disease event that starts in the 160s and i think it's it's worth sort of even saying very basically it is a pandemic it meets all the the criteria for being an epidemic that is widespread, which is all that a pandemic

is. So it's a sudden increase in mortality over a mass spatial area, including all three continents that the Roman Empire touches. If there had been a pandemic, I would say we would know it. I would go so far as to say there wasn't a pandemic for centuries that we can detect. Now, of course, there have been epidemics, and we know that at the city level, regional level, there's always volatility in the death rate. What you have in the 160s is this truly pandemic widespread disease event that is everywhere basically at once.

You say probably the single most lethal mortality event in human history up to that time. Yeah, I mean... Seven million people killed. There would have been big epidemics before. There are certainly periods in the Bronze and Iron Age where we don't have the same historical record, but also population levels are lower. So that limits the scope. So I think in the height of the Roman Empire, you have this pandemic event that probably

was the biggest, deadliest disease event that maybe ever happened. The first true pandemic, Kyle? Is that too strong? It's the first very well-attested pandemic. Right. And that we can follow its growth because it originates, doesn't it, in Parthia, so in Mesopotamia. Part of the problem with the Antonine Plague is we don't know the the pathogen that cost it which is kind of a an important detail that's out there and we could figure out the the pathogen of the antonine plague in theory but nobody's been able to to find it um but the roman sources say that the troops um started this whole thing when they were inside the the parthian empire and they sacked

a temple of apollo and it let loose. Bad idea. Always a bad idea. Don't piss off Apollo. Of all the gods. And I think that's kind of a just so story that I think that the troops probably play some role because it breaks out right at that time. But there's an inscription that says that there's a plague the year before that already in Asia Minor. So I think the disease was already there. Well, that's quite COVID, isn't it? an inscription that says the that there's a plague the year before that already in asia minor so i think the disease was already there well that's quite covid isn't it that's what like you know

like people discovering covid in the paris sewers in you know the october before the shoe leather epidemiology and there's there's this really interesting arabian inscription uh in sebaic in the the 150s that says there was a plague that killed everybody in Arabia, like a decade before the Antonine Plague. Of course, we don't know. Was that the same thing? Maybe, maybe not. And then there's these really interesting disease outbreaks in China too. And we need more work that can really cross these very, very different cultural and language boundaries. Because I would love to know if the Chinese pandemics of the mid and late second century are really, really related to the Antonine Plague. I think we'll make progress on that.

But right now it's just sort of out there and we need a lot of work to figure that out. But we don't really know exactly where it came from. Okay, with the Antonine Plague, we've got our first pandemic to hit the Roman Empire. There are more to come. And I think that we should take a break now. And then when we come back, plagues, we've got them.

I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club.

If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking the very jolly subject of plagues, disease and the fate of Rome with Professor Kyle kyle harper so the antonine plague has broken out we think that the troops in mesopotamia and parthia have sacked the temple

of apollo by mistake are key in spreading it probably um and what basically happens kyle it sort of travels back west uh presumably comes to these big urbanized centers, and then basically lets rip. Is that basically the story? Yeah, we know that when it gets into the cities, it's very, very deadly and devastating. We really still have a pretty wide bounds about how many people it killed. People have estimated the whole spectrum. People said it killed 2% of the population, which in most years, probably about 3% of the Roman empire would have died. So the crude mortality rate would have been

about 3% a year. So just in a normal, healthy year, about 3% of the population died. So the people who've argued that only 2% of the population died in the Antonine plague, I think just don't know anything about historical technology. People have also said, you know, this was like the bubonic plagues. It could have been 25, 30% of the population. And I just, I honestly, I don't think that's true over the whole empire. It may have in the cities. That's sort of consistent with the description we have of some of the urban mortality experience. But I think what's really important is it clearly shocked people. I mean, it was different in virulence and scale than anything within their horizon of experience. I said, Carl, this is NVIDIA's question. And I'm sure it's one that doesn't really have an answer,

but the plague hits. And from that point on, essentially, the stability of the empire starts to crumble, and you start to get rival emperors, incredibly a quickening succession rate of emperors. You get wars, civil wars, all kinds of problems. Do you think that the plague is a contributory factor to what's called the crisis of the third century? Or is it just kind of background noise? Yeah, I mean, that is a great question. I'd start by saying that I really separate out the Antonine Plague of the 160s that kind of reverberates a couple of times. It's interesting that whatever it is,

it seems to relapse two or three times, and then it kind of seems to go away. And so I actually think there's a there's this moment where there is a short term crisis and it does fundamentally change the direction of Roman history because up to that point, the population is growing. And as best we can tell, the economy is still growing. So I don't see this as a kind of endogenous crisis that was inevitable, that it really, to explain it, you have to have the pathogen coming and causing a shock to the system. So I kind of separate the second century crisis, as important as it is, to say that what emerges on the other side is still pretty recognizable as the kind of Roman Empire of Augustus. The third century crisis is really different.

What comes out on the other side of this generation that goes from about 250 to 275 is a very different, very structurally different empire. And I think the plague that happens in that generation, which is called the Plague of Cyprian, is a contributory factor, not just a background factor. So this plague is much, it's not as well known as the Antonine Plague. It's much more visible kind of in the sources. And yet, and I've never really computed it until I read your account of it. It sounds horrendous.

So you say that it might have been a filovirus whose most notorious representative is the Ebola virus. Yeah, I mean, that's terrifying. Ebola is, I i mean it's kind of so lethal that it burns itself out so if if you've got kind of ebola spreading equivalent of ebola spreading through carthage and roman i mean i say carthage because that's where cyprian the bishop of carthage was right i mean that's terrifying right it lasts decades yeah it's, whatever it is, it's clearly deadly and terrifying. And it is, this is a plague that's interesting because it's sort of, people had forgotten about it. I mean, and the major syntheses about the third century crisis that were written in the early 20th century, early 21st century, don't even mention it. I mean, it falls out of the discussion completely. And I think that's obviously unsupportable. But the 250s to 270s, those are a dark period of Roman history. So

unlike the earlier empire, where you always kind of have a solid thread of narratives, there are places in the 250s and 260s where we're not really sure what's happening. Right. And that's what we also get with coming on later to the Justinianic plague, is you do get the sense that sources drop off a cliff. And so maybe that's a kind of measure of how bad a pandemic is, that there just aren't people around to sit and write histories anymore. Yeah. I mean, it's crude and hard to know. I really feel that's a big explanation for what happens in parts of the sixth century, like where Italy other sources that should be mentioning it. It's just that there's so little written evidence for that particular moment that may actually, of course, be a reflection of the fact that so many people died. But we don't know if that's the cause. And certainly in the middle of the 250s, 260s, it's a multifaceted crisis. The monetary system

falls apart. I mean, the silver, for all intents and purposes, disappears from the coinage. The imperial center sort of is overtaken by centrifugal forces and nobody knows who the rightful emperor is. There are rivals in the East and in Gaul. There's such a constant succession of emperors that there's, on average, about one a year for a generation. So there's political turmoil within the empire. And then there's clearly a new level of threat beyond. So this is when the Persian, Achaemenid dynasty, Neo-Persian dynasty comes into power. And they're far more expansionist than the Parthian dynasty that they succeeded, that creates a greater challenge on the eastern

frontier, which had always been Rome's probably most challenging frontier. And then on the northern frontier, at the same time, you have larger and larger confederations of northern, probably mostly Germanic people groups that are more formidable and start to cross into the empire. This had really started with Marcus Aurelius, but in the 250s, the Goths come in. Is it coincidence that all these crises are reaching the boil at the same time as this terrible plague is sweeping the Mediterranean? Or is there a degree of cause and effect there? Yeah. One of the really interesting questions is, is there cause and effect, but also which way is the cause and effect? Because human health is fragile. And if you start to see a breakdown of systems of food

provisioning, for instance, so you have this very complex society that is dependent on, you know, what we would call just-in-time delivery. There's not, you know, two, three years of food stored up that you can eat. And so if you do have a, all of a sudden you have invasion and imperial civil war, that means that the harvest don't come in and the food shipments can't make it. Then you have people that are hungry and when people are really, that are already poor, move into starvation level hunger. I mean, we know this for instance, from the 1840s in the Irish potato famine. You have a poor society where the potato harvest fails dismally. And most people don't actually die of starvation. They die of infectious disease. They

have typhus, typhoid, relapsing fever, and so on. So it may be that the pandemic of infectious disease in the third century could be an effect rather than a cause of the crisis, that it just sinks human nutrition and health. But it could be the other way around too. It could be that you have a system where there's already some kind of political tension and it just can't handle it. So it could be, again, a new pathogen that is introduced into a system that's already got some kind of fragility and that that is what tips it beyond a point where it can really still function as a system. So you have the crisis of the third century, but I mean, Rome is still reasonably resilient, right? Because I mean, the empire

doesn't completely fall apart at that point, but it's different. So the system that emerges after this crisis, I mean, you were talking about being recognizable as the Rome of Augustus. This is clearly not the Rome of Augustus, right? By the time you've got to the fourth century or so. Yeah. I mean, I think the Roman empire really could have fallen in the 260s and 270s. And maybe we should frame it instead as sort of saying, how the heck did it not just come apart? Because this is what happens. Empires fall apart, they change, they fragment. Then eventually, hundreds of years later, somebody puts it back together again. But that's not what happens. Actually, what happens in 268, this is really the revolutionary year. You have a Danubian

cavalry officer named Claudius who takes over the empire and starts paying donatives to his military officers in gold. That's it. The next 300 years of Roman history is Danubian military officers running the show and paying their officer class a lot of gold. And that is not the Augustan system. The Augustan system is rich senators from the Mediterranean who are mostly civilian, who are kind of gentlemen officers that command these massive armies with sort of experienced officers by their side. You have a coup in the 260s and 270s, and the empire from that point forward is ruled almost entirely, there's an important exception or two like the Theodosian dynasty, but is almost entirely, there's an important exception or two, like the Theodosian dynasty, but is almost entirely ruled by experienced military commanders and their offspring, who come from a tiny, tiny part of the empire that is very much not the posh Italian Senate.

So these are the kind of guys who would cheerfully introduce a vaccine passport, or something like that. You are getting a kind of apparatus of military control that had not existed previously. And through the fourth century, this enables the Roman Empire to, it has a very, very heavy tread. Then in the fifth century, it all starts to crumble in the West. And the figure who is associated with that collapse is Attila, the king of the Huns. And you describe the Huns, intriguingly, as armed climate refugees on horseback, which is not how they are traditionally thought of. So what's going on there that makes you say that?

Did I say that? Oh, my gosh. You did. It's a good line. Don't be ashamed of it. There's endless um debate that will never end and hopefully never ends because it keeps us employed um and also causes a lot of a lot of fun jolly uh academic argument about whether the the movements both of germanic peoples but also of central asian peoples like the huns Huns in the fourth and fifth century really are movements of people or whether what we're seeing are sort of changing cultural organizations and terms and names that really we shouldn't imagine as sort of a massive migration of people. I would still stick by the basic importance of understanding environmental stress as a motivator for human movement and actual human mobility is a major factor. that they carry disease and obviously sometimes mass migration does bring disease did the goths so on the huns whatever did they bring disease from central asia into the roman world yeah it's

a great question and there was a there was an article that was published um just this last year a couple months ago by um sabina hoytner on the plague of cyprian that suggests that i don't know that i totally agree, but I like putting this idea into the discussion that actually the plague of Cyprian may have come from either Eastern Europe or somewhere beyond as the Goths moved into the empire. And there certainly is a correlation that makes that a plausible story. One thing we don't actually have like really directly in the fourth and fifth century is any very strong evidence for disease moving with people from Central Asia. And actually, this is kind of a problem because maybe we'll come back to this when we talk more about the

Justinianic plague. One of the really big questions right now is how does it get from Central Asia to the Mediterranean? And actually, the easiest answer would be across the steppe. That's how the Black Death seems to move from Central Asia to the West in the 14th century or even 13th century. But we don't actually have very good evidence for this. And so I tend to sort of think that the written record is good enough that if the plague was coming with the migrants in the 4th and 5th century, we would know it. But we have to say that's an open question. So Kyle, the 6th century, 541, this terrible plague is reported in Pelusium and then spreading to Alexandria in Egypt and then to Constantinople and then basically across the Mediterranean world.

And we know now that it was definitely plague, right? Yes. So this is a huge, huge deal. We know it's Yersinia pestis. And you say when Yersinia pestis reached the Roman empire, it found an urbanized, interconnected society teeming with rats. Not good news. Not good news. I mean, where to even start? So the plague, bubonic plague, the bacterial disease caused by Yersinia pestis, is the most explosive disease in human history. There's just nothing like it.

Because we're kind of collateral damage, aren't we? I mean, basically it's a disease of rodents. And that's why it's so deadly. Because it doesn't care. It doesn't have to worry about it. Its evolution doesn't depend on us at all. It's a rodent disease from start to finish. It lives permanently in colonies of burrowing rodents here in America, in prairie dog populations, most ancestrally in Central Asia, in gerbils and marmots and gerboas and similar kinds of social rodents.

And when it reaches the Roman Empire, it reaches a world with cities, with armies, with a lot of movement of grain on ships and overland. And wherever you have that, you have black rats, ratus ratus, which is very susceptible to the plague. And there's still a lot we don't totally know, but I think that this is the best version of the story is that the big plague pandemics are really fundamentally dependent on that network of black rats. So you have to think of the humans as sort of this, as you call it, collateral damage, this top level. What's really going on is this panzootic, this major mass scale animal plague that ultimately engulfs us. When the black rats die, their fleas are

carrying the bacterium. And this is one of the things that makes plague, plague biologically speaking, it's evolutionary history. It is very, very good at using the flea vector. It builds a biofilm in the digestive tract of the fleas that allows the bacteria to just sort of stack up in the front of the digestive tract and makes the flea simultaneously feel like it's starving. So they're constantly biting and just ejecting bacteria into the next victim. So they're very, very well adapted to the flea vector. And so when the black rats die, these fleas that are infected with the bacteria jump to humans and infect humans with bubonic plague. And how far does it spread? Does it spread to Britain, to Scandinavia,

you know, to the sort of Germanic areas of Europe and so on? This is one of the really exciting questions where we're learning. We know things that we didn't know in 2017 or 2016 when I was really writing, that the literary sources only go so far. And the literary sources we have all speak with one voice that this was apocalyptic. You read Procopius. And sometimes, of course, we, you know, you have to know what to make of that, what's motivating them, what's their, you know, what do they really

know? And, you know, how does Procopius know how many people a day are dying? What does a number mean to Procopius? All of those good questions we can ask of literary sources. But even so, you can only ask questions of literary sources where you have them. And I said there's only one in Italy. There's very little written evidence for Gaul in the 540s. And so what do you make of it when you have one source that is a chronicle that is one line and says there was a magna mortalitas in Italy. What do you make of it? You have to know, did it really reach Italy? Did it really just hit Rome?

Did it get into the other towns? Did it get into the countryside? And this is where the DNA evidence is really starting to help us because it can fill in those blank gaps. If we can find sixth century skeletons that may have died in this pandemic, then it's possible to try and extract the DNA of the pathogen. And so the DNA evidence tells us lots of things, but one of the things that can help us understand is the reach of the pandemic. And so there's a lot we still don't know,

but we know that the pandemic reached Bavaria, reached tiny little villages, sort of near what's now Munich. We know that it reached, that it reached Britain. And this is the importance of the, the discovery of the DNA at Edix Hill in Cambridgeshire. This is, this is not, you know, the crossroads of civilization, you know, with due respect to. Wow. You're not coming back on this. If it made it to this Hamlet of a hundred, 150 people off the main busy roads, then we really have to ask, you know, where did it not, where could it not have gotten to? I mean,

and we'll learn more with more data, but that's already very, very suggestive that this thing got a lot of places. There is a kind of ongoing debate right now, isn't there, about how serious it was. And there does seem to be a kind of reluctance on the part of many historians to admit that, you know, apocalyptic events can really have an impact on history. My old tutor is a contributor to this debate, Tom. Peter Sarris. Peter Sarris, yes. He's just written a really excellent, I thought,

kind of breakdown of where things stand. And he's very much on the, it was horrible side of the argument. Yeah, no, no. And Peter, of course, is totally right. But no, his intervention was useful and helpful. And he was onto this very early on. I mean, he knew the plague was a big deal when knowing the plague was a big deal wasn't cool 20 years ago.

And he's a participant in these conversations. And there's a huge range of opinion. To me, there's still so much we don't know, and there is room for debate. I don't think that, that it's particularly fruitful to, to sort of just be so skeptical that, um, that you deny the significance of the plague. I think there's a lot we don't know, but the really interesting and incredible range of opinion is sort of like, was this really bad? Meaning it really did hit the cities in the East and sort of may have trickled over and hit some places in the West, but it wasn't black death-like and the population could kind of rebound from this, but still was a major widespread disease event

to this was black death-like and it eliminated some serious part of the population, not just in the towns, but in the countryside, not just in the east, but in the west. Well, Kyle, can I just ask? So a massive, you know, the Dark Age in Britain, when the Romans leave, and then the emergence of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. And there is this kind of 200-year period where we basically have no idea really what's going on. And somehow in that period, an entirely new language comes to be spoken, new social structures and everything. Do you think, I mean, is it possible that the plague is a contributor to that very mysterious process, do you think? I absolutely think so. I mean, I think it is a factor. Of course, it's not the only factor, but it's actually hard to explain such a dramatic structural change without a major demographic right

shock being a part of it and i i'll say this too i don't think it's just the plague of justinian in the the first wave of the 540s just as the black death its significance is not just one huge wave of disease it's that the plague then sticks around and the first wave after wave after wave. Yeah, it's it's there for 200 years. And we still have a lot genuinely to learn about the patterns of its recurrence. But in the late Middle Ages, what's so significant is the plague. Boom, it hits. And then a little over 10 years later, it hits again.

10 years later, it hits again. 10 years later, it hits again. And it's that repeated, it's that change to the whole environment of disease that in the long run is so devastating. You said at the beginning about the seismic effect of the Justinianic plague. So, I mean, politically, the regime in Constantinople is still the same regime. But how long does it take for the kind of political consequences to play out?

Because obviously a generation after Justinian, I guess you'd say, the Eastern Roman Empire starts to go through these colossal sort of shocks, doesn't it? I mean, even before Justinian's dead, the Downing Frontier is starting to give way, isn't it? I mean, he's just done his kind of reconquista, hasn't he? His attempted reconquista. And then there's a great loss of momentum.

And then later on, you have sort of coups and enormous sort of ructions within the empire. So do you think this is politically a massive watershed? And is the plague part of that in creating a sort of, I don't know, in destroying the tax base or creating a sense of apocalyptic fear or what? Yeah, I mean, all of that. But I do think that the plague is a huge part of it. And it's sometimes easy for us with hindsight to say, well, Justinian's campaigns of reconquest were this crazy, completely unrealistic and unattainable dream that caused overstretch. And certainly, it would have stressed the fiscal and military resources of the empire. But I mean, for one

thing, it doesn't completely fail. I mean, they hold on to North Africa for several generations. Yeah, and Rome. But it does ultimately, I think, have very serious geopolitical consequences, as you mentioned, on the Danube frontier or Italy, where they're in the process of taking back Italy. And there's no reason why they shouldn't have been able to seize all of Italy. They are very successful in getting rid of the Goths. But look at what happens to Italy. It's not Justinian isn't able to hold on to Italy, but it's not like the Goths sort of fight back. It's that ultimately Italy is taken by a completely new people. The Lombards who come in in the five sixties were told very directly by a very well-informed contemporary source

that the plague struck again in five 65 and was so desolating and so powerful and depopulating that by the time the Lombards arrived, there was almost no resistance. call it Byzantine control under Justinian of Italy to the arrival of the Lombards and the complete reconfiguration of power so that the Eastern Roman Empire can only control Rome and Ravenna and sort of the immediate hinterlands of those areas. So how do we explain that? I think you need plague to be a part of the story. And looking even further ahead, of course, Calamity also hits the Roman Empire in the east with Arab invasions and the emergence of what will become an Islamic order. The Quran is a text that seems shot through with apocalyptic anxieties. Do you think that it's

possible to see the emergence of Islam against this background of plague as well? Was that pushing it too far? I do. And I think in a couple of ways, this really fits with the story of Islam as part of late antiquity that has been so richly developed by people, by scholars who are not interested in the plague, but it really helped us see that one, Islam is a late antique religion. So it doesn't come from sort of outside the cultural worlds that we think of when we think of late antiquity, that this, that the, that Arabia, the Red Sea world really is deeply economically and culturally and politically connected to the world of the Eastern Romans and the Persians. And so this is, first of all, plausible

because this is all one big interconnected cultural orbit. And two, the sort of apocalyptic strain of culture in the 6th century and 7th century really transcends any one cultural system. So Christianity, of course, is a religion that has a lot of apocalyptic resources. But there are centuries where Christianity or Christian apocalypticism is fairly muted. You know, if you look in the fourth century, where we have more Christian texts than any other period in antiquity, those authors aren't sort of talking about the imminent judgment and the signs of it

that are all around them. It's just not what Augustine or Chrysostom or those guys talk about. They think there is going to be a judgment and that we need to prepare for it, but they're not sort of like saying, oh my gosh, here it comes. This is obviously all around us. God is telling us. Whereas the year 500 symbolically does seem to start to stir some apocalyptic belief, so it doesn't come out of nowhere with the plague. But this is how people who live through the plague largely understand it in divine terms and cosmic terms as the sign of the judgment of God. And so it's in the air. part of the Christian and Jewish and ultimately Islamic sort of set of ideas, the stew of ideas that late antique religions are made of, really has these apocalyptic strains in the 6th and 7th century in a way that they didn't in the 4th and 5th century. Well, I think that's really

absolute tool to force and as kind of as a showcase for how the study of disease can shed light on as titanic a process as the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. So if you've enjoyed this, please do make sure that you go back and listen to the two episodes we released in February where we cover the entire sweep. Thanks so much for this episode and for giving us such an incredible in-depth look at the role of disease over the course of human history. Thank you all so much. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

Thanks for listening to The Rest is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works.

We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.