with Kevin Bloomfield, Merle Eisenberg, Marion Holleville, Gunnar Neumann, and Till Stüber, „The First Pandemic in Gaul. Assessing the evidence from an interdisciplinary perspective“, in Human Ecology. An Interdisciplinary Journal. Special issue: The First Plague Pandemic [submitted]. (original) (raw)

This paper examines the evidence for the presence and impact of Yersinia pestis, plague, in Gaul during the First Pandemic (c. 540–750 CE). Early medieval Gaul, roughly coterminous with modern-day France, possesses, to date, the most diverse evidence for plague in the Mediterranean world, including historical texts and remnants of the Yersinia pestis bacterium found in ancient DNA samples. Gaul offers the ideal setting to situate a regional interrogation on the plague before the Black Death (an early paper to discuss the matter is Biraben and Le Goff, 1969). The paper’s aims are threefold. It reassesses plausible chronologies for the introduction and subsequent outbreaks of plague in Gaul, discusses where the different outbreaks occurred and how they evolved, and asks what may be said about the spread or disappearance of the disease. It has long been thought that Yersinia pestis entered Gaul from the Mediterranean via Marseille in the early/middle 540s, spreading northwards along rivers in successive outbreaks (e.g., Bachrach 2006, 2007; McCormick 2021). We complicate this hypothesis by taking into consideration critical readings of the historical texts, model simulations on the spread of plague and fluvial transportation networks (Yue et al. 2016; Foucher et al. 2019; White and Mordechai 2020), and geospatial analyses of contemporary skeletal remains whose DNA analysis has proven the presence of Yersinia pestis (Keller et al. 2019). The focus then shifts to evaluating the impacts that the plague may have had on the society and culture of Merovingian Gaul. The written records documenting plague and its consequences in early medieval Gaul—in any time and place, for that matter—defy easy analysis. The present survey intends to offer a new critical reading of the relevant historical texts and strives to overcome dichotomous interpretation of the plague’s magnitude and significance (see most recently Faure 2021) by reassessing and, wherever necessary, consolidating the evidence in favor of either position. The article concludes with a critical reflection on recent developments in ancient plague studies. We interrogate the heuristic utility of the First Plague Pandemic as a historical periodization. The coherence of the First Plague Pandemic as a valuable tool of historical analysis has generally been asserted more than demonstrated. After a period of major outbreaks, it occasionally reoccurred until the mid-eighth century amidst a backdrop of substantial socio-cultural and economic changes across early medieval Europe. This periodization, however, might be more sensible for ancient genomic reconstructions of Yersinia pestis than for historians. On a broader note, we evaluate the possible limits of the field’s interdisciplinary methodologies that have become prevalent. While the necessity of these collaborative projects is approaching a prerequisite for many avenues of historical inquiry, there remain epistemological difficulties in synthesizing and analysing disparate bodies of evidence.