Constantinople, The Byzantine Empire Black, and The Death Plague
by In 542, Roman Emperor Justinian was actively rebuilding the empire from its new headquarters in Constantinople, often referred to as the Byzantine Empire since there was so much Greek influence
there. The old western part with its center in Rome had been taken over by barbarians, vandals, and others. Through a series of military victories, Justinian’s forces had been able to recapture much of Italy and had also been successful on other fronts. It was in the midst of these successes that Constantinople was ravaged by the first case of a Black Death pandemic.
It reached Justinian’s capital from Egypt, probably carried by rats in ships. Historians have estimated that close to half the population of Constantinople died from the plague during its four or five months of active infections. The number of soldiers left for Justinian’s campaigns was completely inadequate so he had to step back from defending or further extending the historic frontiers.
Procopius, a historian living in Constantinople at the time, vividly described the plague and its effects. He pointed out that often, in the first day of infection, nothing very serious was evident but, on the second day, a bubonic swelling developed in the groin, armpits, or on the thighs and mental problems began to appear. Some went into a deep coma while others became delirious. Death came quickly to many while others lived forseveral days. When small black pustules appeared in the skin, the infected individual usually died within a day. Another symptom, vomiting blood, almost always led to death within a few hours. The physicians of that time tried a variety of cures but the results were always the same: again and again the cases that they fully expected to live died and the ones who seemed to the physicians to be hopeless lived on far beyond the period of the pandemic.
In the sixth century there was no significant understanding of bacteria and their role in the spread of diseases, and nothing was yet known anywhere about genes and their critical influence in determining who survived and who did not. These are the reasons for the perplexity experienced by the physicians when they tried their best to save the sick and the results were disappointing. It was the same centuries later when the same Black Death that overtook Constantinople in 542 swept over London in 1665. Many people in London, such as gravediggers, who were constantly exposed to infected bodies, stayed quite healthy while those who had just a single exposure to the infection died within two days. U.S. researchers who investigated this problem in the late 1990s solved the problem: those who had a particular gene, commonly known as Delta 32, did not catch the disease if they inherited this gene from both parents.
If they received the gene from only one parent, they got sick but they recovered. The same gene in HIV patients is now known to be the reason for them escaping the consequences of that particular infection. Procopius went on to describe the disease in Constantinople by showing how it affected pregnant women. Here, as in the general population, death came to both mother and baby but, in a few instances, either a mother died at the time of childbirth while the child survived or else a child died and the mother survived. It seems likely that in these rare cases the Delta 32 gene had been inherited from one parent. One common cause of death that seemed to have escaped the attention of Procopius was inflammation of the lungs, usually followed by spitting blood.
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