Fires from Heaven. Comets and diseases in circum-Mediterranean Disaster Myths (original) (raw)
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Natural calamities form a standard theme in Byzantine apocalypses. This paper discusses their function and meaning by surveying more than a dozen medieval Greek apocalyptic narratives from the sixth to the fifteenth century. It is shown that natural disasters were understood as ambiguous epiphenomena, whose ultimate meaning revolved around human agency and intentionality. Furthermore, it is argued that Byzantine apocalypses offered an intellectual strategy for coping with natural calamities by placing them into an eschatological context. This eschatologization restored epistemological control of the - seemingly uncontrollable - phenomena. Finally, it is suggested that the understanding of natural disasters as anthropogenic events is not only characteristic of medieval Greek apocalypticism but also of modern-day environmental alarmism. The paper closes with a preliminary comparison of these two hermeneutic paradigms.
Records from northern Europe throughout the 9th century AD, especially during its central decades, describe political and environmental turmoil accompanied by frequent sightings of comets and other celestial phenomena. Although the evidence is insufficient for definite conclusions to be drawn, it could be taken to indicate that an encounter between the Earth and debris from a disintegrating giant comet, as in the Clube-Napier scenario, may have occurred at this time. If 9th century archaeological, geological and climatic evidence from around the world is also taken into account, it seems hard to deny the possibility that some major catastrophic mechanism may have been at work, whatever its precise nature.
Rejecting Catastrophe: The Case of the Justinianic Plague
2019
Recent research has increasingly argued that the Justinianic Plague was an unparalleled demographic catastrophe which killed half the population of the Mediterranean world and led to the end of Antiquity. This article re-examines the evidence and reconsiders whether this interpretation is justified. It builds upon an array of interdisciplinary research that includes literary and non-literary primary sources, archaeological excavations, DNA research, disaster studies and resilience frameworks. Each type of primary source material is critically reassessed and contextualized in light of current research. By drawing upon this interdisciplinary foundation, the article demonstrates that the evidence for the catastrophic maximalist interpretation of plague is weak, ambiguous and should be rejected. The article also makes use of the Third Pandemic as a comparative case study, and considers how the metanarratives of plague in contemporary society influence research on the subject. It concludes that the Justinianic Plague had an overall limited effect on late antique society. Although on some occasions the plague might have caused high mortality in specific places, leaving strong impressions on contemporaries, it neither caused widespread demographic decline nor kept Mediterranean populations low. Any direct mid- or long-term effects of plague were minor at most.
The Justinianic Plague and Global Pandemics: The Making of the Plague Concept
The American Historical Review, 2020
This article explores how plague—as an idea—became an ahistorical independent agent of historical change. It focuses on the case of the Justinianic Plague (ca. 541–750 c.e.), the first major recorded plague pandemic in Mediterranean history, which has increasingly been used to explain significant demographic, political, social, economic, and cultural change during late antiquity (ca. 300–800 c.e.). We argue that the Justinianic Plague retains its great historiographic power—namely, its supposed destructive impact over two centuries—because it evokes a terrifying myth of what plague should do rather than because of conclusive evidence of what it did. We define this historiographic power as the plague concept. It includes three key features: extensive chronology (lasting for two centuries), mortality (catastrophic death toll), and geography (global). The plague concept is built on three interdisciplinary types of evidence (here termed truisms): rats, climate, and paleogenetics. Our article traces how scientists constructed the plague concept in the first half of the twentieth century, and how historians entered the discussion in the last third of that century. As historians engaged in Justinianic Plague research, they used the plague concept to frame their arguments without problematizing its presence or contesting features that scientists had constructed decades earlier.