Bubonic plague in fact continued to sweep and swirl around the Mediterranean world for the rest of the decade, resurfacing time and again all over the world until 749. How many people it killed in total during these pestilent years is today a matter of live historical debate—most of it largely speculative, with a range of opinions running from hardly anyone to one hundred million people. But the economic disruption was real: wildly fluctuating wheat prices, rapid wage inflation as ready laborers vanished, an overwhelmed inheritance system, and a near-total crash in construction.
