Today’s Pestilent Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The plague of Justininian may have been the most terrible that has ever harrowed the world. It started in A.D. 540 at Pelusium in Lower Egypt, spreading throughout Egypt to Alexandria and to Palestine. Palestine seems to have been the focus of spread to the rest of the known world. It reached Byzantium in the spring of 542. The mortality was not at first great but rapidly rose until some 10,000 died each day. So many were the deaths that graves could not be dug sufficiently quickly. Roofs were taken off the towers of forts, the towers filled with corpses and the roofs replaced. (Isn’t that a bit like sweeping the corpses under the rug? – DeSpair) Ships were loaded with the dead, rowed out to sea and abandoned.
Now, THIS is art! Love that strategically placed rat.
This sickness was undoubtedly bubonic plague. Victims were seized with sudden fever; on the first or second day buboes, swollen glands, appeared in the groin or armpit. Many patients became deeply comatose, other developed a violent delirium in which they saw phantoms or heard voices prophesying death; sometimes the buboes broke down into gangrenous sores and the sufferer died in terrible pain. Death usually occurred on the fifth day, but could be very quick or delayed for a week or two. Physicians were unable to tell which cases were light and which severe; as there was no known remedy, they were quite useless.
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The plague returned again and again, lasting until about the year 590. It spared no town or village, but ravaged even the most remote settlements; if a region seemed to have escaped, the plague would surely appear in due time. As in the plague of Cyprian, there was a seasonal occurrence and an outbreak might fade for a few years only to recur in the same place with equal ferocity. All ages were at risk but more men died than women. Many cities and villages were wiped out or abandoned, agriculture largely ceased, panic threw the whole empire into confusion. Entire countries never regained their precious density of population.
Culled from: Disease and History