The Roman Empire was a powerful, ambitious and brutal military machine which held sway over Europe and beyond for centuries. But its descent was swift and there have been many theories propounded by historians on the exact cause for the fall of this mighty empire. Now some researchers have found evidence to suggest that the same strain of killer bacteria that caused the Black Death and spread around the world in the mid 1800s may have helped decimate the Roman Empire.
This theory has been put forward based on DNA analyses of skeletal remains of plague victims from the 6th century AD which have revealed traces of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague which has already been linked with at least two of the most devastating pandemics in recorded history. Researchers strongly believe that this bacterium caused the Justinianic Plague of the sixth to eighth centuries, which killed more than 100 million people and contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire.
The Great Plague lasted from the 14th to 17th centuries, included the infamous epidemic known as the Black Death, which may have killed nearly two-thirds of Europe in the mid-1300s. The Modern Plague spread around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries, beginning in China in the mid-1800s and spreading to Africa, the Americas, Australia, Europe and other parts of Asia. However, until now, researchers had been unsure whether it was also responsible for the Justinianic Plague. At its peak, 5,000 people per day in Constantinople died from it, killing half the population.
Some historians aver that the damage was so enormous to the Persian and Byzantine empires that it made them vulnerable to the Muslim conquests of the next century. The latest study was led by Holger C Scholz and Michaela Harbeck of the Palaeogenetics Group at the Institute of Anthropology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
Although, for a long time scholars from different disciplines had been engaged in intensive discussions about the actual etiological agents of the past pandemics, it was only ancient DNA analyses carried out on skeletal remains of plague victims which concluded the debate.
This international team demonstrated that Y pestis also caused the second pandemic of the 14th-17th centuries including the Black Death. The mystery was solved when scientists analysed ancient DNA from the teeth of 19 different sixth-century skeletons from a medieval graveyard in Bavaria, Germany, of people who apparently succumbed to the Justinianic Plague.
The results confirmed unambiguously that Y pestis was indeed the causing agent of the first pandemic. The researchers announced that these findings confirmed that the Justinianic Plague crossed the Alps, killing people in Bavaria. However, they admit they are still not sure how many strains of the plague were responsible for the deaths.
Although it remains questionable whether at the time of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, only one strain or more was disseminated in Europe, researchers now hope to reconstruct the whole genome sequence of the plague strain in these ancient teeth to learn more about the disease.
The Plague of Justinian (AD 541–542) was a pandemic that afflicted the Eastern Roman Empire, including its capital Constantinople. The plague moved east and west and half a century after it began, 25-100 million in Europe and Asia had died. The plague’s social and cultural impact during this period was compared to that of the Black Death.
