Abstract
Boerner and Severgnini study the spread of plagues from a comparative perspective. They investigate the determinants of the speed of the spread of the Black Death and the Justinianic Plague. In addition, they compare the speed of infection during both periods of time. The investigation finds that the Justinianic Plague follows a similar pattern as the Black Death. In particular, the study detects that the speed of transmission between two destinations along a trade route is determined by the trade technology and trade geography, which is the physical time to travel between two destinations following the ORBIS data set. This supports claims made by other scholarly work that argues that both diseases were spread by human interaction, particularly through trade activities.
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Notes
- 1.
Lopez, The Commercial Revolution.
- 2.
Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution; Epstein, Freedom and Growth; Greif, Institutions.
- 3.
Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire; Burdick, The Principles of Roman Law and Their Relation to Modern Law; Aldrete and Aldrete, The Long Shadow of Antiquity; Temin, The Roman Market Economy; Michaels and Rauch, “Resetting the Urban Network”.
- 4.
The fall of the Roman Empire has been widely discussed, for instance, by Gibbon, Decline and Fall; Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantins des Großen; Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire; Mazzarino, La fine; Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome; Goldsworthy, The Fall of the West, and many others. However, some scholars understand this period rather as a smoother process of relative decline than a total disintegration. For instance, see Pirenne, Medieval Cities; Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity; McCormick, Origins of the European Economy.
- 5.
Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution; Epstein, Freedom and Growth; Greif, Institutions. A different perspective is provided by McCormick, Origins of the European Economy. He argues that the rise of Charlemagne in the eighth and ninth centuries (before the Commercial Revolution) can be considered as “The Origin of Europe”.
- 6.
Lo Cascio and Malanima, “Ancient and Pre-Modern Economies” GDP.
- 7.
Scheidel, “Demography”; Scheidel, “Real Wages in Early Economies”.
- 8.
Boerner and Severgnini, “Epidemic Trade”.
- 9.
ORBIS. The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, orbis.stanford.edu.
- 10.
Cipolla, “The Plague”; McCormick, Origins of the European Economy; Sallares, “Ecology”, among others.
- 11.
Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity; McCormick, Origins of the European Economy.
- 12.
Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire; Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome; Goldsworthy, The Fall of the West.
- 13.
Lopez, The Commercial Revolution.
- 14.
The list of historians who contributed to the identification of the place and time of the diffusion of the plague is long and reaches back to the late nineteenth century. A recent and comprehensive description of the spread can be found in Benedictow, The Black Death.
- 15.
For a recent DNA recovery from victims of the Black Death and identification of the bacterium Yersinia pestis, see Bos et al., “A Draft Genome of Yersinia Pestis from Victims of the Black Death”; or Callaway, “Plague Genome”.
- 16.
Boerner and Severgnini, “Epidemic Trade”.
- 17.
We tested this argument in the empirical exercise we describe in the next section.
- 18.
Domar, “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom”.
- 19.
Since the 1970s, the causal link between the dispersion of the Black Death and trade has been confirmed by several studies in economic history (Cipolla, “The Plague and the Pre-Malthus Malthusians”), medieval history (Herlihy and Cohn, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West; Bridbury, “Before the Black Death”.), demography (Livi-Bacci, “The Nutrition-Mortality Link in Past Times”; Livi Bacci, Concise History of World Population.), and medicine (Pollitzer, Plague), and most recently by Benedictow, The Black Death. There exist a small number of contributions, most recently represented by Cohn, “The Black Death: End of a Paradigm”, that claim that there is no such relationship (they neither confirm the existence of bacillus in form of the Bubonic Plague nor the transmitter in the form of rats, so they ultimately reject the link between social diffusion and the spread along commercial trade routes). However, neither Cohn nor any other scholar offers any clear alternative explanation.
- 20.
Benedictow, The Black Death.
- 21.
Cipolla, “The Plague”; Slack, “The Disappearance of Plague”.
- 22.
As outlined, this section is based on our past work and summarizes Boerner and Severgnini, “Epidemic Trade”.
- 23.
Armington and other scholars: Armington, “A Theory of Demand for Products Distinguished by Place of Production”.
- 24.
We follow here the empirical trade literature, which mainly follows an empirical gravity model approach; see Anderson and van Wincoop, “Gravity with Gravitas”.
- 25.
Please note that we measure relative trade intensity by comparing the speed between different city pairs. In addition, the speed of transmission is measured in one direction only. Thus, we measure commercial flow from the outbreak in the corner of the Eastern Mediterranean to the rest of the Mediterranean basin and Europe.
- 26.
Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War.
- 27.
Controlling for temperature did not have any significant effect on the speed of transmission of the Black Death.
- 28.
Population size has been established as a proxy variable for economic growth in the literature on pre-modern growth; cf. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, “The Rise of Europe”.
- 29.
A research programme is urgently needed that could discover more locations and reveal information about the dates of the outbreak of the Justinianic Plague, as proposed by McCormick, “Toward a Molecular History of the Justinian Pandemic”.
- 30.
Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire; Horden, “Mediterranean Plague in The Age of Justinian”.
- 31.
Stathakopoulos, Ibid.
- 32.
The port of Clysma, located at the Red Sea, has been identified as a possible gateway for the plague. (Tsiamis, Poulakou-Rebelakou, and Petridou, “The Red Sea and the Port of Clysma.”) Such a path is likely because Pelusium was infected before Alexandria. This indicates that the disease did not travel along the Nile but came via the Red Sea and likely from Asia. For a broader discussion on the origin with a different perspective (and a likely origin from Africa), see Sarris, “Integration and Disintegration in the Late Roman Economy”.
- 33.
Alternatively, Myra was directly infected via the ship route from Alexandria to Constantinopolis; cf. Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire.
- 34.
To locate the lost city of Sykia, we follow recent findings by Barchard, “Sykeon Rediscovered”.
- 35.
Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire states that major sources about the Southern Italian city of Naples do not reveal any infection by spring 543. Thus, the disease likely spread to Southern Italy by summer 543. Thus, we can take Naples as a proxy variable for an infection.
- 36.
The plague must have arrived along the most important sea trade routes on the French and Spanish coast. We have no information identifying at which port the disease first broke out. To estimate the speed of the spread, we take two of the most important harbours at the time, Massalia and Tarraco, as proxies.
- 37.
Since it is not entirely clear from the source material whether the disease arrived in Spain in 542 or 543, Kulikowski tends to estimate the outbreak of the plague already for the end of 542 due to strong commercial ties between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean (Kulikowski, “Plague in Spanish Late Antiquity”). However, given that the spread only seems to have arrived in Sicily by the end of December and Tunisia by January 543, it seems reasonable to assume the disease arrived not before spring 543 (similar to Southern Italy) on the Western European Mediterranean coast.
- 38.
According to Dooley, “The Plague and Its Consequences in Ireland”, the plague spread from Southern France via Narbonne along the river Garonne to Bordeaux to Ireland. The ORBIS data set does not report any direct connection from Bordeaux to Ireland. We assume that the traders followed the coastline up to the Bretagne and then crossed the Atlantic to Ireland.
- 39.
Maddicott, “Plague in Seventh-Century England”.
- 40.
Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire.
- 41.
Horden, “Mediterranean Plague in The Age of Justinian”; Sallares, “Ecology”.
- 42.
Harbeck et al., “Yersinia Pestis DNA from Skeletal Remains from the 6th Century AD”.
- 43.
McCormick, “Rats, Communications, and Plague”; Rosen, Justinian’s Flea, 185–86.
- 44.
Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire, 136; Orent, Plague; Horden, “Mediterranean Plague in The Age of Justinian”; Rosen, Justinian’s Flea, 185–86.
- 45.
Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire, 136.
- 46.
Boss, Justinian’s Wars.
- 47.
Jacobsen, The Gothic War.
- 48.
Rosen, Justinian’s Flea, 211–12.
- 49.
Rosen, 216–217; Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire, 146–54; Stathakopoulos, “Crime and Punishment”.
- 50.
Horden, “Mediterranean Plague in The Age of Justinian”.
- 51.
Due to the few observations we have, we bundle the land and the river trade routes together. The river routes in the Black Death data set are slightly faster than the land trade routes but much slower than the sea trade routes.
- 52.
The coefficient is 0.33 and is significant at a 5 per cent confidence level. This is an acceptable result, given the rough data and the small number of observations.
- 53.
These results are based on a conservative estimate that the plague only arrived in the middle of 543 in Spain and France. If we replace these numbers with an arrival already by the end of 542 or the beginning of 543, we might expect an even faster transmission in this politically unstable area.
- 54.
For instance Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire.
- 55.
Kingsley and Decker, “New Rome”, 3–4.
- 56.
However, we cannot exclude that the Yersinia pestis mutated or evolved during this period of time in such a way that it had an (so far unobserved) impact on the speed or form of spread of the infection. For a recent discussion of the evolution of the bacterium, see Demeure et al., “Yersinia Pestis and Plague”.
- 57.
A final comparative remark concerning the climate should be made: We previously noticed that temperature did not have an impact on the speed of transmission in the study of the Black Death. However, we must mention that the spread of the Justinian Plague falls into the coldest decade measured during the last 2000 years (for instance see the data collection by Luterbacher et al. “Review of 2000 Years of Paleoclimatic Evidence). Consequently, we might need to take this into account. Unfortunately, we are unable to quantify and compare this in a meaningful way given the few observations we have for the Justinian Plague.
- 58.
Since we identified different geographical starting points of the spread of the disease the reader might ask if this had any effect on the routes infected and estimated determinants of the speed of the spread, that is, due to the path-dependent order of the infection. Studying the spread of the Black Death we could not identify such effects: Neither could we find any specific effects in the estimates or residuals of the regression analysis nor based on an empirical network investigation we just started in a new project. Furthermore, there is no evidence that specific trade routes were infected and others not. The starting point only had an impact on the timing of the infection not the selection.
- 59.
If we replace Pelusium with Alexandria as the major hub in the South Eastern Mediterranean, the infection would still last six months.
- 60.
Lopez, The Commercial Revolution; Freedman, Out of the East; Abulafia, The Mediterranean in History.
- 61.
Finley, The Ancient Economy.
- 62.
Kehoe, “The Early Roman Empire: Production”, finds such regional specialization of production (for instance, ceramics, linen, and wool) already during the early Roman Empire.
- 63.
Bowman and Wilson, The Roman Agricultural Economy.
- 64.
Temin, The Roman Market Economy.
- 65.
Kingsley and Decker, Economy and Exchange; Decker, “Food”; Ward-Perkins, “Specialisation”; Mundell Mango, “Beyond the Amphora: Non-Ceramic Evidence for Late Antique Industry and Trade”; McCormick, Origins of the European Economy.
- 66.
Scheidel, “Demography”, 80.
- 67.
Wilson, “City Sizes”.
- 68.
Lo Cascio and Malanima, “Ancient and Pre-Modern Economies” GDP”.
- 69.
Scheidel, “Demography”, 55–56; Scheidel, “Roman Real Wages”.
- 70.
The list of theories for such demographic and sectorial shifts is long. In particular, institutional failures that led to a decline of the state have been prominently discussed. For instance, see Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire. Exogenous shocks due to ongoing migration flows and war activities (Goldsworthy, The Fall of the West) or permanent arrivals of diseases since the Antonine Plague starting in AD 165 have also been discussed. (McNeill, Plagues and Peoples; Erdkamp, “Urbanism”, sees the de-urbanisation as more related to a social and political shift away from the city to the countryside than to economic factors.)
- 71.
Rosen, Justinian’s Flea, 119–20.
- 72.
Evans, The Age of Justinian, 236; Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy, 398–99.
- 73.
Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire, 356–57.
- 74.
Baker, Justinian, 320–21.
- 75.
Evans, The Age of Justinian, 226–27, 236; Stantchev, Spiritual Rationality, 24.
- 76.
Lane, Venice; Epstein, Genoa & the Genoese.
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Börner, L., Severgnini, B. (2021). Measuring and Comparing Economic Interaction Based on the Paths and Speed of Infections: The Case Study of the Spread of the Justinianic Plague and Black Death. In: Verboven, K. (eds) Complexity Economics. Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47898-8_10
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