Daily Beast by Candida Moss 6/16/2019
A recent discovery in England has some claiming proof for one of the grand theories for the demise of one of history's greatest empires.An international team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has discovered the first direct genetic evidence of the Plague of Justinian in the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxon site of Edix Hill, in southern Cambridgeshire. The Plague of Justinian is believed by many researchers to have been one of the primary causes of the fall of the Roman Empire but until this point it was unknown in the British Isles. As such, these remains may give us new insight into the disease that helped to bring down one of the greatest empires history has ever seen and solve one of history’s greatest mysteries.
In the middle of the second century A.D. the Romans were the preeminent power in the world. The empire spread from northern Britain, in the west, to the Sahara, in the south. Five centuries later much of that empire had been eroded or collapsed. It had become, in the words of Kyle Harper, “a small Byzantine rump-state.†To be sure, Rome had suffered military losses including several devastating ‘sackings’ of Rome, but these alone cannot account for Rome’s demise. How did this transformation—which has sometimes been called the biggest setback in the history of human civilization—happen?
A spate of recently published academic and crossover trade books, most recently Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire, have argued that climate change and environmental agents were the ultimate reason for the Fall of the Roman Empire. Two environmental factors are now cited as the main causes for the fall of Rome. The first is the already mentioned Justinian plague, a pandemic of bubonic plague that reached the Roman Empire around 541 and would sporadically reappear throughout the region for the next two centuries. The plague features prominently in several modern histories of the fall of empire is known to us from sixth century writers such as the Byzantine historian Procopius and the Syriac Church historian John of Ephesus. They describe an illness that caused fevers, swollen buboes, and hallucinations. DNA analysis of sixth century skeletal remains has revealed that the disease was bubonic plague. Harper has estimated that mortality rates during the first pandemic were as high as 50-60 percent of the total population of the Empire. The medievalist Lester Little, editor of Plague and the End of Antiquity, wrote that the plague helped “usher in the Middle Ages.â€
The second is a cluster of environmental changes that includes the so-called Dust Veil event (or perhaps disaster, but it’s mainly known as “the Dust Veil Eventâ€), which took place in 535-36 and was caused by volcanic eruptions, and was followed by the so-called “Late Antique Little Ice Age,†a period of cooling in the sixth and seventh centuries. According to Procopius, “during [535-46 A.D.] a most dread portent took…the sun gave forth its light without brightness ... and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.†Evidence from elsewhere around the globe suggests that something “big†happened in this period. A dense fog was seen in China and Europe. There was a drought in Peru; and snow fell during summer months in China. The Irish Annals also refer to crop failures.
Scientific analysis of tree rings by Mike Baillie, a scientist at the Queen’s University in Belfast, revealed that there was very little growth in Irish oaks in 536 (with a second drop in 542). Independent ice core analysis from Greenland and Antarctica uncovered substantial deposits of sulfates in 534 (give or take two years), which is suggestive of acidic dust in the atmosphere. These eruptions were followed, according to scientist Ulf Büntgen, by LALIA, a period of cooler temperatures across Europe that lasted from 536 to 660.
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/do-these-skeletons-hold-the-secret-to-the-fall-of-the-roman-empire