In Our Time

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.

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In Our Time: The Plague of Justinian

21/01/2021

The Plague of Justinian

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Plague of Justinian

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the scale and impact of the plague that raged in 541AD.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the outbreak of plague in 541AD in Byzantium that was said, at the time, to have blighted the lives of all mankind.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the plague that broke out in Constantinople 541AD, in the reign of Emperor Justinian.  According to the historian Procopius, writing in Byzantium at the time, this was a plague by which the whole human race came near to being destroyed, embracing the whole world, and blighting the lives of all mankind.   The bacterium behind the Black Death has since been found on human remains from that time, and the symptoms described were the same, and evidence of this plague has since been traced around the Mediterranean and from Syria to Britain and Ireland.  The question of how devastating it truly was, though, is yet to be resolved.

With 

John Haldon
Professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies Emeritus at Princeton University

Rebecca Flemming
Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge

And

Greg Woolf
Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

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