As, perhaps, had always been inevitable. The Copts were simply too numerous, too distant and too Monophysite to be brought to heel. Nor were these the only considerations weighing on Justinian’s mind. It was no coincidence, surely, that the squalid episode of Paul’s tenure in Alexandria coincided with a far more crowd-pleasing initiative: the closure, in an isolated Libyan oasis, of the very last functioning temple of Amun. This step, although clearly taken in accordance with the wishes of the heavens, was not wholly devoid of earthly calculation: for Justinian was keen to remind the Copts that he and they, despite their disagreements, were all of them lovers of Christ. Urgent though it clearly was to secure the unity of the Church, it was no less urgent to ensure the continued loyalty of Egypt—and thereby to secure for the vast population of Constantinople, and the soldiers of the eastern front, the incomparable harvests sprung from the flood-plains of the Nile. Every year, gliding downriver to Alexandria, great fleets of barges would bring hundreds upon thousands of tons of grain; and every year, giant ships would then transport the precious cargo onwards to the capital. Alexandria might have been a marble-clad cosmopolis of lecture halls and churches; but she was no less an entrepôt of warehouses, docks and silos. Had she not been, the New Rome would long since have found the flesh shrinking off her bones: “For Constantinople and all the region around it are fed, in the main, by Alexandria.”29
Yet, in the summer of 541, as the ghostly fleet of bronze ships appeared along the Mediterranean coast, it was becoming terrifyingly clear that death too, as well as life, might be had from Egypt. In July, reports had reached Alexandria of an epidemic in the port of Pelusium, on the far eastern side of the Nile Delta, that had left the city a charnel house. Panic at this news, however, was unlikely to have been immediate: for sudden flare-ups of disease were common, and usually, “by the grace of God which protects us, do not last long.”30 The outbreak in Pelusium, however, had not abated. Instead, from coastal town to coastal town, it had begun to spread with lethal speed. Every time a bronze ship was spotted out on the night-time waters, people on the shore would abruptly find themselves struck down by a fever, and then, touching their groins, or their armpits, or behind their ears, discover painful black swellings—boubones, as they were called in Greek—until finally, it might be, staggering out into the streets, they would fall, and “become a terrible and shocking spectacle for those who saw them, as their bellies were swollen and their mouths wide open, throwing up pus like torrents, their eyes inflamed and their hands stretched out upward, and over the corpses that lay rotting on corners, and in the porches of courtyards, and in churches, and everywhere, with no one to bury them.”31 And so the pestilence raged; and as it raged, it drew ever closer to Alexandria.
By September, the first headaches, the first buboes, the first rattling expectorations of blood, were being reported in the docks. Within days, the plague was general over the city, and far beyond. Alexandria, ever the intellectual powerhouse, boasted the most prestigious medical schools in the world; but even the city’s famous teaching specialists found themselves helpless before the spread of the mysterious pestilence, unable to diagnose it, still less prescribe any cure. The death rate rose inexorably, until “many houses became completely destitute of human inhabitants.”32 So putrid were the streets with piles of the dead, so thick with flies, so slippery underfoot with blood and melted flesh, that it was impossible to clear them. Those who dared to venture out into the fetid heat—whether to loot or simply to scavenge food—wore tags, so that their families could be alerted to come and bury them should they too be overwhelmed by the plague while abroad. Unless, of course, as was entirely probable, their families had themselves been struck down in the meanwhile. Nor, the observant noted, was it only humans who were perishing of the epidemic. Animals too were succumbing. “Why, even rats, swollen with buboes, were to be seen, infected and dying.”33
Week after week, the pestilence continued its scything progress. Then finally it began to subside; until at last, four months after its first appearance on the streets of Alexandria, the dying was largely done. Yet the plague, “always moving forward and travelling at times favourable to it,”34 was still far from spent. Traders from Egypt might sail as far afield as Britain—and those who had survived the pestilence still needed to make a living. In the spring of 542, as the storms of winter died down, the ships of Alexandria started to put out to sea, bearing with them their freights of merchandise: papyrus and linen, spices and medicines, glassware and exotic sweets. Pet birds too, and even camels, were sometimes transported; and then, of course, travelling as stow-aways, there were always rats. On the rats were fleas; and in the fleas was Yersinia pestis, the deadly pathogen that, unknown to anyone, was spreading the plague.35 The science of bacteriology, it went without saying, lay immeasurably beyond the orbit of the scholarship of the age. Even the most brilliant of Alexandria’s doctors did not think to associate the spread of a pandemic so lethal and unprecedented with anything so commonplace as a flea bite. The result was, as ships fanned out across the Mediterranean, that the pestilence too, invisible and unsuspected, continued on its deadly way. Sometimes it happened, in the midst of a voyage, that a vessel would be attacked so suddenly “by the wrath of God,”36 and to such devastating effect, that it would be left to drift aimlessly on the currents, manned by nothing but corpses, until it sank or ran aground. More commonly, a ship would dock in some distant port and then, a day or two later, the first buboes would start to appear on the groins and armpits of the locals. “And always, after beginning on the coast, the disease would then head on inland.”37
In Constantinople, rumours of doom had been sweeping the city for months. Back in the autumn of 541, as Alexandria had been twisting upon the rack, a woman had fallen into a rapture and cried out to the Byzantines that death was arriving from the sea to swallow up the world. The following spring, with the first grain ships of the year looming off the Golden Horn, and granaries along the harbour front busily being filled, so mysterious apparitions began to be glimpsed. Whoever was touched by one of these phantoms would immediately fall sick. Within days, across the whole of Constantinople, thousands upon thousands were dying. At first, only the poor perished; but soon even the most exclusive quarters of the city were succumbing. Such was the lethal effect of the plague’s spread that entire palaces might be transformed into sepulchres, their mosaic floors littered with corpses, senators and servants alike left as pus-streaked food for worms. Even in the imperial palace, in the bedchamber of the emperor himself, the burning mark of the plague was felt; for Justinian too fell ill. That he went on to recover was proof that the pestilence, though virulent, was not necessarily fataclass="underline" for there were some, a small minority, who did survive infection. Whether this was necessarily a blessing, however, was debatable: for what pleasure could there be in life if spouse and children, friends and kin, were all of them dead? Certainly, to those who lived through that summer in Constantinople, the entire city appeared condemned. The streets were empty of the living; no business of any kind was undertaken, save for the burying of corpses; the butchers’ shops stood empty, the markets deserted, the bakers’ kilns unlit. “So it was, in a city prodigiously full of good things to eat, that starvation ran riot.”38 The pestilence, adding to all the manifold sufferings that it had already dealt, now trailed famine in its wake.