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syria, palestine and mesopotamia 609
It may be that church building demonstrates continuing prosperity but there
are other possible explanations. One is that the division of the church into
separate Monophysite and Dyophysite communities meant that more
churches were required to accommodate divided congregations. It is also
possible that demographic decline, possibly caused by plague, allowed
churches and monasteries to build up large landholdings.
The position in Jordan seems to have been very different, with evidence
of large numbers of new, or at least newly decorated, churches from the
sixth and seventh century. This prosperity was maintained here in a way in
which it was not in the north, especially in the villages and rural monasteries
which provide us with the evidence. 75 It may well be that increasing
trade with Arabia, notably in wine, oil and grain, was responsible for this,
and that the archaeological record confirms the importance of this trade
reflected in the early Islamic literary tradition. 76 The evidence from the
Negev gives us much less in the way of chronological information, and the
Jordanian tradition of mosaic floors seems to have been entirely absent. It
is by no means clear whether the depopulation of these settlements was a
product or a prelude to the Islamic conquests. The remains of a small
mosque beside the entrance to the south church in Subeita 77 suggests that
the town was still inhabited in the mid seventh century and that the Muslim
settlers were, initially at least, small in number and accepted peacefully.
The causes of change were a combination of natural disasters and
foreign invasion. Of the natural disasters, the plague was the most widespread,
appearing in the area in 542 and reappearing with grim regularity
throughout the late sixth century and, indeed, later. 78 There has been some
tendency in the recent literature to play down the effects of plague on
society, but there seems no reason to doubt that the loss of life was enormous
and that the recurrent outbreaks make it difficult to envisage a sustained
demographic recovery. It is also probable that densely populated
cities and villages would have suffered worse than nomad areas.
The demographic effects of plague were compounded by a period of
violent seismic activity. The most famous earthquakes were those which
destroyed Antioch in 526 (in which Malalas estimated that 250,000 people
died) 79 and Berytus and other cities of the Lebanese littoral in 551. It seems
75 See the fine series of mosaic floors published in Piccirillo (1994); Whittow (1990).
76 See p. 604 above, n. 55. The existence of this or any other trade in late pre-Islamic Arabia has
recently been questioned by Crone (1987), but, while most scholars would accept that the overland
incense trade with South Arabia had long since disappeared, it seems clear that there was still a more
localized trade between the pastoralists of the desert and the agriculturalists of the settled areas in such
mundane goods as wine, wheat and hides; see ch. 22c (Conrad), pp. 686,8 below.
77 Shereshevski (1991) 74.
78 The best account of the plague remains Conrad (1981). See also Conrad (1986). For a sceptical
view of the importance of the plague, Durliat (1989) in Hommes et richesses and the response by J.-N.
Biraben in the same volume, pp. 121–5. The importance of the plague has been reaffirmed in Conrad
(1994). 79 Malalas pp. 419–20 Bonn.
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