TIL that at its peak the Justinian Plague was reported to be killing 10,000 people in Constantinople daily.

[u/fizzbitch7534]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian

[u/Demderdemden]

The link says 5,000.... but even that is a huge "maybe, possibly, we hypothesize, we pulled this number out of our arse."

We have no idea how many people were dying every day, no one kept track when it happened.

[u/fizzbitch7534 → u/Demderdemden]

"Procopius,[18] in a passage closely modeled on Thucydides, recorded that at its peak the plague was killing 10,000 people in Constantinople daily, but the accuracy of the figure is in question, and the true number will probably never be known."

This is the line I got the title from, hence why I said "reported to be".

[u/Demderdemden → u/fizzbitch7534]

Ah fair enough, didn't see Procopius' note in the text. Though he jumps from 5 to 10 himself, and reading through Procopius you'll note his love for very large numbers (usually ten and twenty thousand) it's a complete and total guess.

"Now the disease in Byzantium ran a course of four months, and its greatest virulence lasted about three. And at first the deaths were a little more than the normal, then the mortality rose still higher, and after- wards the tale of dead reached five thousand each day, and again it even came to ten thousand and still more than that./ Now in the beginning each man attended to the burial of the dead of his own house, and these they threw even into the tombs of others, either escaping detection or using violence ; but afterwards confusion and disorder everywhere became complete."

I'm having a hard time finding the original Greek to see if this is translator laziness, or how he stated it though. If it's how he stated things then again, the number really can't be trusted.

[u/HeroHelck → u/fizzbitch7534]

Considering it's Procopius, who is unreliable at the best of times. Yeah, take it with a grain of salt.

[u/[deleted] → u/fizzbitch7534]

Translation = a lot of people died.

[u/[deleted]]

I read "Justinian Plague" as "Justice League" which made the post much more intriguing at first.

[u/fizzbitch7534 → u/[deleted]]

So that's why it's Istanbul now. I guess Lex Luthor blew up Constantinople and they had to rebuild.

[u/MoreGull]

Imagine how terrifying it would have been to live during this plague - death all around you and you have no idea why.

[u/herbw]

This interestingly occurred during a cold phase in that period, which might be related to a volcanic eruption near Java at about that time.

Interesting in that the plague continued till about the time of 800 AD, when it was not reported again. At that time the earth had gone into a very much warmer period, called the late Medieval Warming, also coinciding with the New World decline of the Maya from droughts and likely overpopulation & deforestation in Central America.

By about 1350, cooling had once more occurred, and the plague recurred at about that time, in Eurasia, widely. that marked the onset of the global Little Ice Age, which lasted until about 1800-1850. At that time, the plague also abated about 1700.

The occurrences & subsidences of the plague associated with these climatic changes is very, very curious.

[u/inthearena]

One of the more interesting debates I recently read was a group of historians that argued that the Justinian plague was directly responsible for the failure to put the roman empire back together, as well as the rise of Islam, given that the plague also hit Persia and the rest of the empire.

Rome's technology (roads) made it impossible to contain a disease, and was ultimately responsible for it's eventual failure.

[u/Johannes_P]

While the true number will be still unknown, we can only guess any mass gathering of population where sanitary infrastructure is weak can only make outbreaks worse.