JUSTINIAN AND RECONQUESTsecond city of the eastern empire, a catastrophe which provoked Procopius
to exclaim:
I shudder when I describe so great a disaster, and pass it on to be Remem-
bered by future generations, and I do not know what God’s will could be
in raising up the affairs of a man or a place, and then casting them down
and wiping them out for no apparent reason.
(Wars II.10.4)We have a telling glimpse of the real situation at Antioch before the Persian
siege when we see the patriarch, local bishops and Byzantine envoys from
Constantinople all in urgent conference about what best to do. Since the Per-
sians demanded payments in silver, the local population did its best to rid
itself of as much silver as possible before they arrived. When the Persians did
start the siege, the population was unwise enough to indulge in taunting the
enemy from the walls, only to be subjected to a massacre when the Persians
entered the city.^31 After this example, Chosroes was naturally able to ask an
even higher price in silver for the safety of other cities such as Apamea, Chal-
cis and Edessa.
The early 540s also saw one of the greatest plagues in history. The disease,
usually thought to be a form of bubonic plague, struck Constantinople and
the eastern provinces in AD 542, having fi rst struck in Egypt the year before,
and is vividly described by Procopius, who was an eyewitness;^32 the emperor
himself fell ill but recovered. Even allowing for exaggeration in the literary
sources (the plague is also described by the Syriac church historian John of
Ephesus), the level of casualties was clearly extremely high, perhaps approach-
ing that of the Black Death. The church historian Evagrius, who was a child
at the time, movingly describes its effects at Antioch, which fell heavily on his
own family. The plague, he says, fell upon the east two years after the sack of
Antioch, thus in 542, and was in some respects, though not all, similar to the
Athenian plague of 430 BC described by Thucydides:
I too, the writer of this history ... was affl icted in the early stages of the
plague with the so-called buboes, while I was still just a schoolboy. In
the various attacks of the plague many of my children died, as well as my
wife and other members of my family, servants and country people, for
the attacks returned up to my own day, as it were in cyclic progression.
I lost my daughter, as well as the earlier ones, and her child, two years
before the time of writing, when I was in my fi fth-eighth year, the plague
having returned four times to Antioch and this being the fourth attack in
the cycle.
(Evagrius, HE IV.29)The sixth-century plague poses considerable problems for historians, in
that despite the detailed accounts in literary sources, it is very hard to