Plague of Justinian

Just to be clear, like children, all plagues are terrible, but Yersinia Pestis is the two-year-old child of plagues.  In fact, it's so bad, it's the plague they decided to straight-up call "the plague."  This little bug is fun because it can get you in one of three ways; the most common is bubonic, where the bacteria gets in the lymphnodes and swells them up into big, disgusting lumps on the throat, around the crotch and the armpits.  Less common but even deadlier options are pneumonic (infection of the lungs) and septicemic (infection of the blood).  There's one particular pandemic that we all remember it for best, but the Plague of Justinian was like the Black Death before it was cool.  In 541 AD, during the reign of Emperor Justinian, the plague entered Constantinople, the bustling capitol city of Byzantine Empire and just started killing like John Travolta does on the dang dance floor.  Contemporary sources blamed grain ships from Egypt, but modern DNA analysis shows that, at least in part, this is yet another incident we can blame on the Huns, whose expansion across the Eurasian steppe brought Yersinia Pestis westward from its origins in Central Asia.  The death toll is uncertain, estimated anywhere from 25-100 million, and several thousand deaths in Constantinople on a daily basis.  Born in 536 AD, the Syrian Christian scholar Evagrius Scholasticus was just a child during the initial outbreak, caught the bubonic form of plague and survived.  He went on to do pretty well for himself before pulling a total Job as his wife, his kids, his kids' kids, and most of his servants went on to die as, like the 'check engine' light, Betty White, and the floater in your host's guest bathroom toilet, that stupid plague just kept coming back.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Good King Wenceslaus Looked Out on the Feast of Dying At Age 24

Image
In order to have a happy, harmonious family get-together during the holidays, it's a good idea to steer away from topics like religion and politics. Unfortunately for the family of "Good King Wenceslaus," the Přemyslid dynasty that ruled the Duchy of Bohemia in the early 10th century, this was rather difficult given that Wenceslaus's dad, Vratislaus I, was a second generation Christian, his mother, Drahomíra of Stodard, was the pagan daughter of a chief, and everyone in the family was constantly vying for greater political sway over the country. When Wenceslaus was 13, his dad died in battle against the Hungarians, making his grandmother Ludmila (Vratislaus's mother) regent until Wenceslaus could come of age. Drahomíra, doing what any of us would do in similar circumstances, hired assassins to strangle her mother-in-law Ludmila to death with her own scarf. After Christian nobles overthrew Drahomíra to place 18-year-old Wenceslaus on the throne, he...
Read more

The Fall of Ixion

Image
Before you can understand why Zeus is blasting Ixion off of Mount Olympus with a thunderbolt to then be bound to an eternally spinning wheel of fire, you need to understand how Ixion came to be on Mount Olympus in the first place.  Ixion was a classic A-hole.  It all started when Ixion decided to not pay Deioneus for his daughter's hand in marriage, which might seem like a progressive move on Ixion's part, but he was doing it for purely selfish reasons.  Deioneus, now Ixion's father-in-law, decided to take the bride price in the form of a few horses stolen from Ixion's stables, and Ixion decided to push his father-in-law into bed of of smoldering coals, burning him alive.  Even though he was an a-hole, Ixion couldn't help but go mad from the guilt of slaying his own kin.  Zeus, King of the Gods, felt bad for Ixion (maybe because Zeus was something of an a-hole himself) and invited him to hang out on Mount Olympus, home of the gods.  Now, as bad as most of...
Read more

The Plague of Athens

Image
Disclaimer: The publisher wishes to note that he has been warned that this series may be ill-conceived and in bad taste.  If, for whatever sick reason, you still wish to proceed, know that I was warned and advised against this. The Plague of Athens was not the first plague in human history, but it's the earliest one with a surviving reliable historical record.  The year was 430 BC, and those goofy Greeks were at each others throats in a little thing we're going to call the Peloponnesian War.  For a bunch of complicated reasons that basically boil down to Athens becoming the dominant empire in the Mediterranean and Sparta (whose balls were always tingling for a war anyway) deciding that was stupid.  Together with their respective alliances, Spartans and Athenians were having so much fun killing each other that, like the proverbial little sibling, Mother Nature decided she wanted to get in on the fun, at which point the Greeks decided it wasn't fun anymore.  ...
Read more