Read Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World Online

Authors: David Keys

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Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (44 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTES
 
 
CHAPTER 1
 
  1. From the account written by the sixth-century cleric Evagrius, translated from the original Greek by the Oxford University scholar Peter Sarris, but unpublished. However, a new translation, by Michael Whitby, is being published in the year 2000.
  2. The “at least 50 percent” estimate was made by Cyril Mango on page 51 of his
    Le Développement Urbain de Constantinople (IV–VII Siècles),
    Paris, 1985.
  3. From the account of the plague in Constantinople by John of Ephesus, as preserved in the
    Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre,
    part III, edited and translated by W. Wittakowski, Liverpool University Press, 1996, pages 74–98. Subsequent quotations from John of Ephesus are also from this source, unless otherwise stated.
  4. Particularly such scholars as P. Allen and Lawrence Conrad.
  5. This agricultural abandonment has already been referred to briefly on page 10–11. There I quoted an eyewitness of the epidemic catastrophe, John of Ephesus, as describing how he saw grain fields that had nobody to reap them, “cattle abandoned” and “flocks of sheep,” etc., who had “forgotten [life in] a cultivated land.” No doubt each major outbreak of the plague wrought similar havoc. Yet there are relatively few extant eyewitness historical accounts describing the rural wilderness that must so often have resulted from plague devastation. There is, however, a second type of evidence—but only for the most severe episodes of abandonment. It is provided by those ancient chroniclers and historians who included major outbreaks of locust infestation in their works. One of the worst periods of the plague pandemic (especially in terms of geographical spread) was in the late sixth century—in the 570s and 580s—and it is from precisely that period that we get the only known locust invasions of the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East prior to the 670s. According to
    Invasions des Acridiens Sauterelles en Algerie
    (2 volumes, by J. Kunckel d’Herculais, Alger-Mustapha, 1893–1905), locust swarms attacked Syria and Iraq (Mesopotamia) in
    A
    .
    D
    . 576. And in exactly the same period, Gregory of Tours (in book VI, 33, of
    The History of the Franks
    ) says that locust swarms arrived (in 578) in Spain and devastated the area around the capital, Toledo. “Not a single tree remained, not a vine, not a patch of woodland,” he wrote. “There was no fruit of the earth, no green thing which these insects had not destroyed.” (From page 364 of
    The History of the Franks
    by Gregory of Tours, translated by L. Thorpe, Penguin, London, 1974.) The devastation was almost certainly wider than that, but information was obviously easier to obtain from the capital than from more remote areas. Gregory (book VI, 44) says that the locust swarms ravaged the Toledo region for five years and then spread out along the line of a major road and “invaded” another province. He tells us that the swarm was 100 miles in length and 50 miles across. I believe that locust infestation in areas not normally affected seriously by them should be regarded as a marker for agricultural abandonment. This is because locust swarms are particularly attracted to large tracts of abandoned agricultural land. For the attraction to work, all the land has to have been abandoned at roughly the same time, as would occur during and after a severe epidemic. The locusts prefer land with an abnormally wide variety of plant species—and abandoned agricultural land provides exactly that phenomenon. Under cultivation, the number of species is obviously kept deliberately very low—and under normal long-term wild conditions, interspecies competitive pressures ensure that the level of diversity is also relatively low. However, after agricultural land has been abandoned, a huge variety of different wild plant species flourishes for around five years until the natural competitive pressures start to substantially decrease that number. That gives a massive window of opportunity to locusts. What’s more, if vast areas of land were in this recently abandoned (fallow) condition simultaneously, then overall locust numbers would increase dramatically because the additional nourishment would boost reproduction, thus making movement into new areas even more likely. Two other factors would also boost reproduction. First, locust egg pods survive better in fallow than in cultivated terrain, because plowing exposes the pods to sunlight, which kills them. Second, previously uninfested terrain is relatively free of those parasites that attach themselves to, and finally kill, locust eggs. A locust swarm such as that covering 5,000 square miles in Spain would have consisted of around 770 billion insects and would have devoured some 1.5 million tons of plant and tree cover per day.
  6. During the plague pandemic of the sixth and seventh centuries, large numbers of towns and villages must have become partially or fully depopulated. Even at the beginning of the pandemic, John of Ephesus wrote of “desolate” villages, and later in the sixth century, Evagrius wrote that some cities were “rendered empty of almost all their inhabitants.” Today, however, it is difficult for archaeology to determine exactly which towns and villages—or which parts of them—were abandoned specifically as a result of plague rather than war or general economic decline. However, by working out when particular cities or other settlements experienced particularly steep declines, it is possible to suggest which archaeological sites were abandoned or substantially abandoned as a result of the plague. Prime candidates for substantial abandonment include Anamur, Anavarza, Canbazli, Corycus, Dag Pazari, and Kamlidivane (all in southern Turkey); El Bara, Sinhar, Deir Sim’an, Sergilla, and Kfer (all in northern Syria); and Dion at the foot of Mount Olympus in Greece. Candidates for partial (and in some cases perhaps final) abandonment as a result of plague include a clutch of sites in Tunisia: Dougga, Sbeitla, Thuburbo Majus, and the northern part of Carthage itself. Depopulation evidence has also come from rural areas. Surveys carried out in the Tunisian countryside have revealed that population densities fell by 50 percent between 550 and 650 around Carthage and by 70 percent between 550 and c. 600 around Dougga.

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