ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
The Justinianic Plague: An inconsequential pandemic?
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed.
- Drivers of Viral Spillover: An Examination of How Pathogens Spread.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Temporal shifts in polygenic traits track major epidemics in Western Eurasia.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Spatial prediction of animal plague risk in Qinghai Province, China using MaxEnt modeling: implications for targeted control.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Article
- Antiviral Inactivated Vaccines: Looking to the Past to Face the Future-A Narrative Review.Vaccines · 2025Review
- Plagued by the Past, Pressed by the Present: A One Health Perspective onBiomedicines · 2025Review
- More continuity than change following the Black Death epidemic in medieval Cambridge.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Managing and mitigating future public health risks: Planetary boundaries, global catastrophic risk, and inclusive wealth.Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis · 2025Article
- Pandemic Events Caused by Bacteria Throughout Human History and the Risks of Antimicrobial Resistance Today.Microorganisms · 2025Review
- Towards a Comprehensive Definition of Pandemics and Strategies for Prevention: A Historical Review and Future Perspectives.Microorganisms · 2024Review
- The Natural and Clinical History of Plague: From the Ancient Pandemics to Modern Insights.Microorganisms · 2024Review
- Mid-to-late Holocene climate variability in coastal East Asia and its impact on ancient Korean societies.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Overview ofBiology · 2023Review
- Characterization of an aspartate aminotransferase encoded by YPO0623 with frequent nonsense mutations inFrontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2023Article
- Review
- Aerosol transmission of human pathogens: From miasmata to modern viral pandemics and their preservation potential in the Anthropocene record.Geoscience frontiers · 2022Article
- Applications of polymerase chain reaction-based methods for the diagnosis of plague (Review).Experimental and therapeutic medicine · 2022Review
- Learnings from COVID-19 for managing humanitarian supply chains: systematic literature review and future research directions.Annals of operations research · 2022Article
- Four New Horsemen of an Apocalypse? Solar Flares, Super-volcanoes, Pandemics, and Artificial Intelligence.Economics of disasters and climate change · 2022Review
- Settlement, environment, and climate change in SW Anatolia: Dynamics of regional variation and the end of Antiquity.PloS one · 2022Article
- Microorganisms as Shapers of Human Civilization, from Pandemics to Even Our Genomes: Villains or Friends? A Historical Approach.Microorganisms · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Existing mortality estimates assert that the Justinianic Plague (circa 541 to 750 CE) caused tens of millions of deaths throughout the Mediterranean world and Europe, helping to end antiquity and start the Middle Ages. In this article, we argue that this paradigm does not fit the evidence. We examine a series of independent quantitative and qualitative datasets that are directly or indirectly linked to demographic and economic trends during this two-century period: Written sources, legislation, coinage, papyri, inscriptions, pollen, ancient DNA, and mortuary archaeology. Individually or together, they fail to support the maximalist paradigm: None has a clear independent link to plague outbreaks and none supports maximalist reconstructions of late antique plague. Instead of large-scale, disruptive mortality, when contextualized and examined together, the datasets suggest continuity across the plague period. Although demographic, economic, and political changes continued between the 6th and 8th centuries, the evidence does not support the now commonplace claim that the Justinianic Plague was a primary causal factor of them.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.