Bubonic plague that toppled Roman Empire ‘exaggerated’

AN OUTBREAK of bubonic plague thought to have wiped out up to half of the world’s population and helped topple the Roman Empire was exaggerated by scholars, a study has found.

The Plague of Justinian, which preceded the Black Death by more than 800 years, was thought to have killed around 50 million people across the Roman and Byzantine empires between 541 and 750AD.

The plague, spread in part by rats along trade routes, was believed to have left the Roman Empire vulnerable after the population loss hit its trade and military might across the Mediterranean, Africa and the East.

An international team of scholars led by researchers from the University of Maryland have now called into question the scale of the plague, as the available evidence paints a different picture.

Lee Mordechai, the lead author of Princeton’s Climate Change and History Research Initiative, said: “If this plague was a key moment in human history that killed between a third and half the population of the Mediterranean world in just a few years, we should have evidence for it, but our survey of data sets found none.”

The researchers analysed ancient texts alongside pollen samples, plague genomes and the archaeology around graves to debunk the previous consensus on the scale of the outbreak.

However, the researchers found that scholars had earlier focused on evocative written accounts, ignoring hun- dreds of contemporary texts that did not mention the outbreak.

“We found no reason to argue that the plague killed tens of millions of people, as many have claimed,” said coauthor Timothy Newfield. “Plague is an easy explanation, too easy. It’s essential to establish a causal connection.”