Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

dragging on until the 560s, and the Persian conflict for two generations more. Then, amid all this, came the plague. Although its origins cannot be precisely placed, the disease may first have originated in the Tian Shan (which today separates China from Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan), and followed the Silk Road trading superhighway west. So it was by no means an unknown ailment by the sixth century a.d.—outbreaks had occurred in the Roman world as recently as the 520s. Yet plague had seldom been anything more than an intense, local phenomenon, until, somehow, between the 520s and 540s, possibly in southeast Africa, around the ivory markets of what is now Zanzibar, the disease mutated into a super-lethal strain. It then met with environmental conditions ripe for easy infection—the climate crisis of 536 contributed to this by weakening human and rat populations and forcing them into closer-than-usual cohabitation.42 And it spread rapidly along the long-established and booming trade networks around the Mediterranean. In July 541 the population of the small Egyptian delta town of Pelusium (now Tell el-Farama) started dying in droves, their armpits and groins swollen and black, and nightmarish fever visions dancing before their agonized eyes. From this incubator town, the disease raced off in two directions: northeast with the merchant ships and caravan trains that worked the Palestinian coast toward Syria and Asia Minor, and west through the busy ports of north Africa.