Talk:Plague of Justinian

message: ::Removed the "disputed" tag, added, apparently as a joke, by anon. User:217.225.130.152 a non-entity otherwise unheard from. --Wetman 11:31, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: tag

message: It's not proven, whether this was the bubonic plague or not. see Black Death for this matter. and it is not proven either, if the death toll was as high as it is claimed here. -musschrott
Please see bubonic plague - for information on the disease and historic epidemics/pandemics.  As with most historic events, we can't "prove" anything, but we can evaluate and discuss.  It is true current scientists hold differing opinions (see bubonic plague alternatives as well as the written references).  A general scholarly consensus says the Plague of Justinian was bubonic plague while the Black Death spread more rapidly due to the shifting of the disease from the bubonic to the pneumonic variety, with some septicemic plague as well.  The Third Pandemic is considered to be a combination of the three plague varieties.  Numbers are always an estimate (at best) from a historic source.  I think the original author was quite clear about that and I left the concept in when I did my recent edit.     WBardwin 06:22, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Tell us more about this concensus. Is it a concensus among historians, or epidemiologists?? After all, historians are not scientists. Why not cite this and allow for controversy on this point. Unless there's been a serious study done on the cause of the plague (has there?) which turned up some concrete physical evidence (ie the pressence of plague bacteria found in the bodies of people known to have died in the Plague of Justinian... has there??) then I don't think this is a verifiable fact. Certainly not enough to be stated so concretely in the article. If the concensus is merely based on written records of the symptoms, then this is merely a theory--and a fairly weak one. So I think it's fair to ask for explaination as to just why it is believed to have been plague as opposed to something else. We must be careful when taking an authoritative tone in an article to state theory rather than fact. Also, I'm fairly sure I remember traditional theories regarding the evolution of Bubonic Plague tracing it to Central Asia at a later time period. Thus, if the Plague of Justinian was in fact Bubonic Plague, then wouldn't that contradict conventional theories of the origins of the disease?? It's these kinds of questions that demand further detail on the basis of the claim that it's bubonic plague. Anyone else know more? Links? Thelastemperor 01:07, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: bubonic plague?

message: 10,000 people a day? Really? Wasn't the city's population only about 500,000 at this point? -Dmz5 19:12, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh I missed the note about this later in the article.  I'm going to rearrange it a little bit so it's clearer.--Dmz5 19:13, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  deaths? 

message: I have modified the empire's name in the opening line: "ERE or BE".  This is not related to the controversy about the proper name for Justinian's empire (there is plenty of that at the Byzantine_Empire page).  Rather, this is one of the few articles in which both names have appropriate uses. (a) Justinian's reconquest had the (very temporary) effect of reuniting the Eastern & Western parts of the RE, and a strategic project of this breadth only makes sense from the perspective that the two regions were "supposed" to be united. (b) However, the adjective "Byzantine" is used in several places, and "Eastern Roman" would be a stylistically poor replacement.  (Arguably, "Roman" might be the right replacement, but that gets back to the whole BE naming controversy. ;-) Jmacwiki (talk) 03:09, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  BE *and* ERE, and two questions 

message: 100 million deaths worldwide is a LOT (even now!).  Does anyone know what fraction of the global population this represented?  My guess: At least 20%, which might make it the largest catastrophe in the history of our species. Jmacwiki (talk) 03:09, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fraction of population? 

message: It would be really nice to insert, or at least link to, a map of Justinian's holdings as of 540.  Can anyone find one, and do this?  Or at least the usual map of 565?  (That one is present at Byzantine_Empire.) Jmacwiki (talk) 03:09, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Insert or point to map? 

message: The wording on this point is challenged with a note on "dubious - discuss".  Specifically, the wording is, "could have credibly reformed the Western Roman Empire".  
I believe the intended point of the text is not that conquering all of the former WRE - especially including Britain - was credible; only that conquering western North Africa, Italy, and either Iberia or Gaul (or both) might constitute a reasonable definition of a re-formed WRE (albeit as part of the reunited Roman empire). 
Achieving that much, in the absence of this plague, seems entirely credible to me. (Justinian reconquered western NA and Italy, despite this plague.)  Is there a strong contrary argument?
If not, any thoughts on improving the wording? Jmacwiki (talk) 02:55, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Impact on reconstructing the WRE (renovatio imperii) 

message: The final paragraph of the Origins and spread section implies that the British were separate from the English.  These days the English are a subset of the British.  Are the English in this paragraph the Angles of the Anglo-Saxons?  If so, referring to them as Angles throughout, instead changing the term to English without explanation would make it clearer to the reader.  Or including an explanation of what the term English meant during the period would be another way to make it clearer.  (Obviously I don't know too much about it myself.)--Wikimedes (talk) 00:12, 2 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I didn't notice that, but presumably any distinction being made between Brits and English at this point is talking about Britons (Celtic people)  basically, the Welsh  not the members of the remains of the empire named for a pope's affection for some slaves of the Angles (tribe).  — LlywelynII 22:45, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

text: Yeah, this section is bad. I think I should just delete it. It is not helping anything to talk about British versus English. Not only was "English" not much of a language yet, the "British" speaks of a geography that can't at this point in history be distinguished from "English." There are older names for the people and the location and more descriptive names for the tribes and peoples. This section needs a rewrite. I like to saw logs! (talk) 03:27, 12 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I had exactly the same reaction to reading this section as User talk:LlywelynII. I haven't checked if the content has changed within this five-year period, but I think there is room for improvement, one way or another. However I'm not competent to do that myself.--Nø (talk) 10:24, 27 May 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  British vs. English 

message: The article looks OK to me ... however, other than in half a footnote (a citation of Mark Whittow, one of the foremost active historians of the early Byzantine periods), no hint is given that the Justinianic Plague's intensity, duration and spread have all been questioned can be found in the article.  Only a very few sources from the period even mention it and there's no solid archaeological data ... so ... something might be added about the possibility that it was not nearly as serious as some recent popular histories make out.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.215.149.98 (talk) 15:10, 1 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Whittow's article and other doubters 

message: It should go without saying that this is dubious, especially when given uncited, but just one example  smallpox entered Europe at the beginning of this time frame and broke out repeatedly for the next millennium. If memory serves, some weird leprosy issues were on-going as well. Is there a "new" missing from the sentence? or is this just a matter of defining epidemic up so it no longer applies to repeated massive infections? If so, we should remove the point or clarify that we're using the term in a non-obvious manner. — LlywelynII 22:53, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't understand this either. Dougweller (talk) 09:22, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

text: Well it depends on what is meant by "major epidemic". I think it is true that, until the Black Death, nothing killed anything like as large a proportion of Europe's population as the Justinian plague.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 180.216.105.201 (talk) 08:10, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: No illness in Europe from 750 to 1300

message: I am confused by the sentence at the top of the article that says Genetic studies have pointed to China as the source of the Justinian plague.  I read the footnoted quote at the bottom and that seemed to indicate Egypt as the source, so i read the Times article which is cited and that seemed to be discussing plagues that were at a much later time in history.  Have I missed something, or is this something which should be re-worded to be clearer.  In other words, based on the source cited, I don't see how China can be the source of the Justinian plague.Trucker11 (talk) 12:04, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: It calls the Justinian Plague the first of three waves and says all three originated in China, and quotes another expert who says it is possible. Maybe it needs qualifying, but the article does say China. Dougweller (talk) 14:19, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  China as the primary source 

message: SAN FRANCISCO — The ancients had ample reason to view comets as harbingers of doom, it would appear.
A piece of the famous Halley's comet likely slammed into Earth in A.D. 536, blasting so much dust into the atmosphere that the planet cooled considerably, a new study suggests. This dramatic climate shift is linked to drought and famine around the world, which may have made humanity more susceptible to "Justinian's plague" in A.D. 541-542 — the first recorded emergence of the Black Death in Europe.
The new results come from an analysis of Greenland ice that was laid down between A.D. 533 and 540. The ice cores record large amounts of atmospheric dust during this seven-year period, not all of it originating on Earth. [‪Photos of Halley's Comet Through History]
"I have all this extraterrestrial stuff in my ice core," study leader Dallas Abbott, of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, told LiveScience here last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Certain characteristics, such as high levels of tin, identify a comet as the origin of the alien dust, Abbott said. And the stuff was deposited during the Northern Hemisphere spring, suggesting that it came from the Eta Aquarid meteor shower — material shed by Halley's comet that Earth plows through every April-May.
The Eta Aquarid dust may be responsible for a period of mild cooling in 533, Abbott said, but it alone cannot explain the global dimming event of 536-537, during which the planet may have cooled by as much as 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius). For that, something more dramatic is required.
Ice core data record evidence of a volcanic eruption in 536, but it almost certainly wasn't big enough to change the climate so dramatically, Abbott said.
"There was, I think, a small volcanic effect," she said. "But I think the major thing is that something hit the ocean."
She and her colleagues have found circumstantial evidence of such an impact. The Greenland ice cores contain fossils of tiny tropical marine organisms — specifically, certain species of diatoms and silicoflagellates.
An extraterrestrial impact in the tropical ocean likely blasted these little low-latitude organisms all the way to chilly Greenland, researchers said. And Abbott believes the object responsible was once a piece of Halley's comet.
Halley zooms by Earth once every 76 years or so. It appeared in Earth's skies in A.D. 530 and was astonishingly bright at the time, Abbott said. (In fact, observations of Halley's comet go way back, with research suggesting the ancient Greeks saw the comet streaking across their skies in 466 B.C.)
"Of the two brightest apparitions of Comet Halley, one of them is in 530," Abbott said. "Comets are normally these dirty snowballs, but when they're breaking up or they're shedding lots of debris, then that outer layer of dark stuff goes away, and so the comet looks brighter."
It's unclear where exactly the putative comet chunk hit Earth or how big it was, she added. However, a 2004 study estimated that a comet fragment just 2,000 feet (600 meters) wide could have caused the 536-537 cooling event if it exploded in the atmosphere and its constituent dust were spread evenly around the globe.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.185.130.70 (talk) 22:19, 18 December 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: So what is your suggested edit to this page? Ckruschke (talk) 16:34, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

text: This paper shows significant climate cooling at the time, possibly affecting people in the region. TGCP (talk) 12:05, 8 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Halley's Comet  A.D. 536 

message: The article sites a "high estimate" of 25 Million, but US CDC cites 100 million.http://www.cdc.gov/plague/history/index.html I realize these estimates are wildly uncertain, but shouldn't the latter high estimate be used instead? Or maybe both should be presented.
61.28.160.70 (talk) 04:29, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks but this source is already used. Dudley Miles (talk) 16:29, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Total death toll 

message: Substituted at 03:05, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment

message: Mention of recent interdisciplinary research questioning the geographic, demographic and economic extent of the plague has been added to the introduction, but the body of the text is written as if this research were either non-existent ornot noteworthy. Kdammers (talk) 01:20, 6 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recent research 

message: User:Dudley MilesUser:Martinevans123  See 
 Doug Weller talk 17:11, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Again? A couple of those links don't seem to work. Martinevans123 (talk) 09:46, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: @Martinevans123 they do now, I had to ditch one. Doug Weller talk 10:01, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Your post is somewhat cryptic. But I see that the article currently says: "" I see now that there was some disagreement with an anon IP from North Carolina back in 2021? Martinevans123 (talk) 10:14, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: The article elsewhere contradicts the Gaul... sentence, mentioning the identification of sixth century plague at Edix Hill and citing Sarris at . I suggest amending the Gaul... sentence citing Sarris and . BTW I have already read the review of Roberts' book and added it to my wish list. Dudley Miles (talk) 10:43, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text:  Martinevans123 (talk) 10:53, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Britain again