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population; settlement; demographic decline? 323
had hit his own family very hard. He himself survived the plague as a child,
but his wife and ‘many’ (pollous) of his relatives had died of it, most recently
a daughter, along with her own child. 14
There is no doubt that this plague was harsh, nor is there any doubting
the degree of personal tragedy that it wrought on many like Evagrius. But
it is harder to be confident about its broad demographic impact. 15 The
problem is that there are two possible models for the impact of such an
epidemic, and both could be applied to the sixth-century plague on the
basis of the limited information available to us. In the absence of fuller evidence,
which model one accepts will depend largely on how far one prefers
to explain demographic change in terms of random ‘acts of God’, or to
play these down in favour of slower changes brought about by human
agency.
Either the sixth-century plagues were a series of demographic hammerblows
comparable to the Black Death of 1348–9 (which probably killed at
least a third of the population of fourteenth-century Europe), or their
impact was more closely comparable to that of the epidemics that hit
Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth century (most famously, London
in 1665). These were devastating locally, and wiped out entire families, but
they did not affect all regions and settlements concurrently. Even within
affected towns and communities, outbreaks hit some parishes and some
families very much harder than others. Despite the death in England from
plague of perhaps three-quarters of a million people between 1470 and
1670, over the same period the population of the country probably
doubled. 16 Perhaps, like Samuel Pepys, Procopius saw plague at its very
worst in the crowded metropolis of Constantinople, where rats and human
beings were densely packed together. And perhaps Evagrius’ family was
one of the very unfortunate ones. Indeed, he himself tells us in some detail
that the impact of individual outbreaks of plague varied a great deal,
between cities, between urban districts, and even between individual households.
Uncertainty over the impact of plague on population levels in the sixthcentury
east is but one aspect of the central and knotty problem of how to
detect population decline. It is generally assumed that the population of the
west, or at least of most of its provinces, declined under the later empire (in
the third and fourth century), and then fell markedly in the immediately post-
Roman centuries (the fifth to seventh). In the Byzantine east, as we have
14 Procop. Wars ii.22–3;Evagr.HE iv.29. It was also witnessed, in the near east, by John of Ephesus,
whose description survives in fragmentary form (it is published only in the original Syriac, but is used
and discussed by Conrad (1986) 144–7). There is a good general discussion of the plague in the east in
Patlagean, Pauvreté 87–91. For the plague in the west: Biraben and Le Goff (1969).
15 As questioned by Durliat (1989). For a general discussion of sixth-century eastern demographic
change: Whitby (1996) 92–103. 16 Black Death: Hatcher (1977). Later plagues: Slack (1990) 53–195.
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