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, that is, ‘below the abdomen’, but also in the armpit, beside the ears, on the thighs. There ensued with some a deep coma, with others a violent delirium [wrote Procopius]. Those who were seized with delirium suffered from insomnia and distorted imagination; for they suspected that men were coming to destroy them, and they would become excited and flee, screaming loudly … The bubonic swelling became mortified [as gangrene set in] and the sufferer, no longer able to endure the pain, died. Death came immediately, in others after many days; and with some, the body broke out with black pustules about as large as a lentil [the rash later called Black Death] and those did not survive even one day, but died immediately.

In March 542, Justinian issued laws to prop up the economy, referring to the ‘encircling presence of death’ that had ‘spread to every region’. When he fell sick he had to at least preserve order in this charnel house, but the city was veering out of control: ‘Initially each man attended to the burial of the dead of his own house; but afterwards confusion and disorder everywhere became complete.’

Conspiracy theorists spread panic in a way that sounds very familiar. ‘They love to conjure up causes which are absolutely incomprehensible to man,’ observed Procopius, ‘and to fabricate outlandish theories of natural philosophy. But for this calamity it is quite impossible either to express in words or to conceive in thought any explanation, except indeed to refer it to God.’ That at least let the politicians off the hook: no one expected Justinian or Khusrau to be able to deliver safety as modern leaders are; only God could wreak or end such havoc. ‘A chastening sent by God’s goodness’, wrote Justinian, that should have made workers better people ‘but instead I hear they are turning to avarice’. In Constantinople, Procopius saw how ‘the bodies even of grandees were left unburied’. Finally Justinian ‘deployed soldiers from the palace and distributed money … Tombs were filled with the dead, then they dug graves around the city.’ The ‘evil stink’ was unbearable. When even the mass graves were full, ‘they mounted the towers of the fortifications, and tearing off the roofs threw the bodies there in complete disorder, piling them up until all the towers were filled with corpses and they put the roofs back.’

When news spread that Justinian was infected – ‘for he too had a swelling of the groin’ – the hierarchy was shaken: ‘it wasn’t possible to see a single man clad in the chlamys [cloak of an officeholder]’. A lockdown ruled: ‘in a city which held dominion over the whole Roman empire, everyone dressed befitting private station and remained quietly at home’. Khusrau too was infected. But both emperors recovered. ‘Where the swelling rose to an unusual size,’ wrote Procopius, ‘it discharged pus and they survived.’

After four months, the plague receded, only to rebound again in waves. The pandemic proved a super-propellant, one of those catastrophes that propelled tectonic changes. As many as 25 per cent of Europeans and many Persians died; agriculture suffered; revenues fell. The two empires were weakened.

In 548, Theodora died of cancer at the age of fifty-one. Justinian sobbed as she was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles. He lived for another twenty years, struggling to hold on to Italy and Africa which, as in so many wars, were easier to conquer than to hold. His wars were expensive in an empire desolated and haunted by the plague, ruled obstinately by this pedantic, righteous and geriatric megalomaniac. Berber tribes rebelled in Africa; Rome was repeatedly won and lost as Belisarius and his generals fought a Gothic insurgency before Germanic peoples from the north, the Lombards, moved south to challenge the Romans, turning Justinian’s glorious adventure into an interminable quagmire. Yet Constantinople kept southern Italy for centuries.

In 562 Justinian finally made peace with Khusrau, paying further gold subsidies. The treasury was bare, though taxes were still collected from plague-scourged agricultural heartlands. Justinian’s less eminent successors must share responsibility for the sequel.