Winter is coming (^6th-8th century) : the beginning of the end of the world

For the history of the Black Death, the epidemic that affected the entire Mediterranean basin, and beyond, from 541 to 749 is less a precedent than an obligatory comparison, placed opposite historiography. While it occupies a dead branch of the phylogenetic tree of Yersinia pestis, its posterity lies elsewhere: in the methodological challenges it poses to historians confronted with the discrepancy of sources, but also in the political imagination: between the collapsological haunts of the contemporary and the eschatological horizons of the Middle Ages, we attempt to understand how, beyond historiographical conventions, this plague can indeed be said to be "Justinian".

Contents

• "We must go on..." (Samuel Becket, L'Innommable, 1953): recommencements
• La mémoire pathétique des gestes de la peste: quand le corps délivre une mémoire dont nous avons perdu le souvenir (Aby Warburg, Atlas Mnemosyne, 1927-1929)
• Thickening plague time, populating plague worlds: reassuring literate knowledge and narcissistic wounds
• Yersinia pestis and suffering humanity: a disease that wasn't our kind
• Scientific progress and the horizon of knowledge: science poses new questions for history
• Genomics and the discordance of time: a matter of rhythms and scales
• Back to the historian's territory: the heterogeneity of documentary regimes
• Between deep history and global history, a view from mid-slope
• The Justinian plague: history's first epidemic
• A dead branch on the Yersinia pestis phylogenetic tree, but a powerful periodization operator (Yujun Cui, Chang Yu et al., " Historical variations in mutation rate in an epidemic pathogen, Yersinia pestis ", PNAS, 2013)
• Two dead in Bavaria: identification of the first victims of the^6th-century plague in the Altenerding cemetery
• First assessment, new questions: what scale, what dating? (Marcel Keller, Maria A Spyrou et al., "Ancient Yersinia pestis genome from across Western Europe reveal early diversification during the First Pandemic (541-750)", PNAS, 2019)
• This is not a puzzle
• Constantinople, March 542, "At that time there was a pestilence that nearly swept away the entire human race" (Procopius of Caesarea, History of Wars, 2, 22)
• Harvard, 2015: archaeology of mass death (Michael McCormick, "Tracking mass death during the fall of Rome's empire", Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2015)
• Constantinople, 536: "How strange it is, I ask you, to see the sun but without its usual brightness" (Cassiodorus, Variae, 12, 25)
• Belfast, 2008: dendochronological analysis and ice cores (Michaël Baillie, " Proposedre-datingof the European ice core chronology by seven years prior to the 7th century AD", Geophysical research letters, 2008)
• Constantinople, 541: Justinian, the empire's granaries and ships' rats (Michael McCormick, "Boats of life, boats of death. Disease, trade, transport and the economic transition from the Lower Empire to the Middle Ages", in Morfologie sociali e culturali in Europa fra tardo antichità e alto medioevo (Spoleto, 1998)
• Telling history from the animal perspective of rattus rattus ?
• Le " petit âge glaciaire de l'Antiquité tardive " (530-680) : systèmes climatiques et écosystèmes sociaux (Jean-Pierre Devroey, La Nature et le Roi. Environment, power and society in the age of Charlemagne, 2019)
• In Scandinavia, from the "great winter" (Fimbulvetr) to the "twilight of the gods" (Ragnarök) : Winter is coming (Bo Gräslund and Neil Price, "Twilight of the gods? The "dust veil event" of AD 536 in critical perspective", Antiquity, 2012)
• Why the plague of the 6th^century can be called Justinian: epidemic catastrophe and political turnaround
• Combining sources, despite everything: Procopius of Caesarea and John of Ephesus, an "unlikely duo", saw what they saw (Kyle Harper, How the Roman Empire Collapsed. Climate, disease and the fall of Rome, 2019)
• The mortuary silo of the Sykai Towers and the mystical wine press: "grape harvest in the great vat of God's wrath" (John of Ephesus, Chronicle of Zuqnîn)
• An epidemic that advances by leaps and bounds: "Like a field of wheat set on fire, the city was suddenly ablaze with pestilence" (Gregory of Tours, Histories of the Franks, 9, 22)
• Do not dismiss the documentary value of sources on the grounds of their discontinuity (Michael McCormick, "Gregory of Tours on Sixth-Century Plague and Other Epidemics", Speculum, 2021)
• The three periods of the first pandemic: Byzantine plague (542-600),^7th-century lull (600-660), Iberian period (660-749) (Dimitri Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire: A Systematic Survey of Subsistence Crisis and Epidemics, 2004)
• "... the Justinian plague, after having perhaps helped to explain Mahomet, was also able to explain Charlemagne" (Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Noël Biraben, "La Peste du Haut Moyen Âge", Annales, 1969)
• Justinian plague and Black Death: an inevitable historiographical comparison
• The plague and the fall of empires: maximalist readings, deflationist readings (Lee Mordechai and Merle Eisenberg, "Rejecting Catastrophe: The Case of the Justinianic Plague", Past & Present, 2019)
• Kyle Harper and the end of the world, or the fall of Rome without the Romans of decadence
• Collapsological hauntings and eschatological horizons: the Justinian plague and the Middle Ages today