To many of those who survived its passage, the plague appeared a calamity “by which the whole of humanity came close to annihilation.”39 An exaggeration? Perhaps—but then again, accurate figures were hard to come by. The imperial statisticians had tried to keep track of the death rate in the capital, but had fast been overwhelmed. In due course, confronted by the mounds of corpses in the streets, Justinian gave orders for them to be dumped at sea, and then, as the water turned into a soup of decomposing flesh, for vast pits to be dug on the far side of the Golden Horn. Within these, rows of bodies were laid and then “trodden upon by feet and trampled like spoiled grapes,”40 so that further corpses, when they were hurled down from the rim of the pit, would sometimes vanish into the mulch. To those haunted by such a hellish vision the entire world seemed to have become a winepress, in which countless multitudes were being crushed by the wrath of God. Even though the plague, by August 542, had finally spent itself in Constantinople, reports of its onward sweep across the rest of the empire, and beyond, did not diminish in horror. Asia Minor too, it was reported, had been visited by the pestilence, and Jerusalem, and the rubble-strewn shanty town that was Antioch. By December, it was endemic in Sicily, and by 543 across much of Italy, Spain and Gaul. That the West could boast no cities on the scale of those to be found in the East did not serve to spare it. In the most remote village, no less than in the darkest urban slum, the pestilence stalked down the living. “The world seemed returned to its primordial silence, for no voices rose in the fields, no whistling was heard of shepherds.” So it was reported of the Italian countryside. “Places where men once lived had become lairs for savage beasts.”41
Meanwhile, along the eastern frontier of Justinian’s empire, where Khusrow had frantically constructed a cordon sanitaire, the plague was briefly halted in its tracks. One outbreak of buboes, in the ranks of the Shahanshah’s own army, had been effectively quarantined, and another in Media. But the pestilence could not be kept at bay for ever. By 545, it had breached the bulwarks of Iranshahr and was sweeping eastwards with a violence even more terrible, if anything, than it had displayed on its westward course. Across Mesopotamia, in particular, it raged for longer than it had ever done in Alexandria or Constantinople, so that all was “famine, madness and fury.”42 Nothing was proof against it. Time would see it spread as far afield as China. Never before in history had so much of humanity been united by a common experience of suffering. If some communities were wiped out utterly by the plague, and some were mysteriously spared, then most, if reports are collated, and the evidence carefully sifted, appear to have suffered a mortality rate of something around a third.43 Not annihilation, then, by any means; but a culling, nevertheless, on a wholly shattering scale.
Always, however, after every visitation, the time would come when even “the evil stench”44 of the rotting corpses would lift, and people, rubbing their eyes, would emerge on to weed-covered streets or fields. Many of them—artisans, tradesmen, peasants—found the world they were returning to ripe with unanticipated opportunity. The ready supplies of labour that the wealthy had hitherto always taken for granted were suddenly at a premium. Demands that previously, before the coming of the plague, the poor would never have dared to push were now increasingly theirs to make. Inflation, as a result, began to gallop. By 545, just three years after the departure of the plague from Constantinople, Justinian was appalled to discover that wages in the capital had more than doubled. The emperor’s response to this unsettling state of affairs was his habitual one: he passed a law. By its terms, it was declared illegal for any labourer to be paid more than he would have received prior to the plague. The effect of this legislation, to Justinian’s bafflement and indignation, was minimal. Wages continued to spiral upwards. The world, it seemed, was not to be restored to its former condition simply on the say-so of an edict.
And in truth there was barely a sinew, barely a muscle of the great machine of imperial administration that had not been left enfeebled by the pestilence. Physicians noted with interest that those who had contracted the plague and survived would invariably bear the stamp of their brush with death. Some were left bald; others with a lisp; others with a staggering, lurching gait. Almost all suffered a terrible lassitude, often for years. To this rule, it was true, Justinian himself stood as a notable exception; but he knew, none better, that what might be true of individuals was true as well of his entire dominion. Infinitely more than the feckless tribes of the barbarians, more even than the kingdom of Khusrow, the empire of the Roman people had always depended on a sizeable population for its healthy functioning. Civilian state that it essentially was, it could not hope to prosper without a hefty tax base. Now, in the wake of the plague, that tax base had suffered perhaps irreparable damage. Nor was that the limit of the danger. In provinces that only a few years previously had provided ready supplies of recruits for the imperial armies, whole villages, whole regions now stood denuded. This, at the best of times, would have posed a formidable challenge. At a moment when Roman forces were engaged in a number of debilitating conflicts, from Italy to Syria, it threatened catastrophe.
As for Justinian himself, so devastating and unexpected had been the blow to all his ambitions that he might well have been expected to buckle under it. But he did not. Instead, grimly, doggedly, heroically, he set to shoring up his battered empire against utter ruin. From the summer of 548 onwards, he would be forced to do so without the woman who for over twenty years had been the companion both of his bed and of his councils: for in June that year, Theodora died. Justinian, who for the rest of his life would never cease to light candles before the mausoleum which he had built to serve the pair of them as their final resting place, could not endure to take another wife: henceforward, he would be married to his work. Day and night—“for he had little need of sleep”45—he devoted himself to the thankless task of compensating for the most precipitous drop in revenue that any emperor had ever faced. Ruthless austerity measures were imposed: courier services slashed, road maintenance abandoned, the civil service streamlined. Tax-collection was overtly professionalised, so as to throttle any prospect of evasion. Even the manufacture of silk was nationalised. Such measures won for Justinian, against all the odds, funding sufficient to bring his many wars to a seemingly satisfactory close. By the time of his death in 565, he had stabilised the eastern frontier by signing yet another “Eternal Peace” with Khusrow, and decisively defeated the Ostrogoths in the West. He had even acquired a whole new province in southern Spain. Only fitting, then, it might have been thought, that the body of the great emperor, as it lay in state, had been covered by a pall on which he was shown trampling down a barbarian king, of the kind that it had always been the traditional prerogative of the Roman people to crush. Happy days, so the image proclaimed, were come again.
But the pall told only part of the story. Its portrait of the emperor as the youthful and Christ-favoured visionary who, in the joyous year of 534, had sat in triumph over the Vandals, veiled the withered corpse of an eighty-three-year-old man. Between the image of an empire restored to its ancient supremacy over most of the Mediterranean and the grim reality there stretched a similarly yawning chasm. In the opinion of Justinian’s critics—of whom, behind closed doors, there were many—the emperor’s cure had proved quite as deadly as the disease. In Italy, for instance, no matter how shrilly his propagandists might seek to deny it, “victory” had left the peninsula immeasurably less Roman than it had ever been under Theoderic. Over the course of two decades, the bloody and wearisome slog to overthrow the Ostrogoths had witnessed the abolition of the consulship, the flight to Constantinople of almost every senator, and even, during the winter months of 550, the most shocking of all the breaks with the past: the complete, albeit temporary, depopulation of Rome itself. Not since the time of Romulus had the Eternal City stood so empty, so abandoned to grass and swamps. Victory of such an order seemed scarcely different from defeat. Why, then, had Justinian waded through a whole mire of destruction to secure it? “Because he was bloodthirsty and murderous by nature,”46 some thought to whisper. That his reign had seen “the entire world drenched with human blood”47 was due, not to his desperate struggle against evil circumstance, but to the startling fact that he had literally been an agent of hell. Even his tireless burning of the midnight oil might be interpreted as evidence, not of his devotion to the Roman people, but of his diabolic nature. One servant had reported seeing Justinian late at night without his head; another that the emperor’s face had suddenly metamorphosed into a hideous and shapeless lump of flesh. “How, then, could this man have been anything other than a demon?”48