Emperor Justinian becomes a law unto himself and declares his word to be sacred. By making himself equal with the Most High, a fierce judgment is unleashed to coincide with the legal primacy of the papacy in Rome. Both Justinian and his realm are met with punishment when a severe plague devastates Constantinople and its surroundings. Strange weather patterns and anomalies in the sky also mark the judgment.
Show Transcript
Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.
Part 13: Judgment Comes
One momentous year, a startling thing happened in the medieval world. The year was 535. Justinian had previously commissioned the Roman law to be codified, and in so doing, a number of new things were established, not least the legal ecclesiastical leadership of the Roman Papacy over that of all Christian entities. By 535, he set out on a campaign to conquer Italy by vanquishing its current rulers, the Ostrogoths, in what became known as the Gothic War. That same year, the earth was shaken, the climate began to change, and the sun was darkened.
Far east in the Indian Ocean lay two islands, Sumatra and Java. Susan Wise Bauer writes that:
“Between the two islands lay the mountain of Krakatoa: a volcano, slowly building up a head of steam and lava beneath its ice-capped surface. In 535, Krakatoa erupted. The explosion hurled pieces of the mountain through the air to land as far as seven miles away. Tons of ash and vaporized salt water exploded upwards into the air, forming a plume perhaps thirty miles high. The land around the volcano collapsed inward, forming a cauldron of rushing seawater thirty miles across.”
While other dates have been suggested for this volcanic eruption, author David Keys, who published a book in 1999 titled, Catastrophe, presented his extensive review of evidence for a 535-date based on tree-ring data. That said, the effects of the eruption were felt across a wide region. In China, where the sound of the event is recorded in their History of the Southern Dynasties, “yellow dust,” they say, “rained down like snow.” And according to Susan Wise Bauer:
“Procopius reports that in 536, all the way over in the Byzantine domain, ‘the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.’ Michael the Syrian writes, ‘The sun was dark and its darkness lasted for eighteen months; each day it shone for about four hours, and still this light was only a feeble shadow…. [T]he fruits did not ripen and the wine tasted like sour grapes.’ The ash from the explosion was spreading across the sky, blocking the sun’s heat. In Antarctica and Greenland, acid snow began to fall, and continued to blanket the ice for four years.”
In the fall of 538, around three years after the event, a Roman senator serving in Ravenna in the Ostrogothic Italian kingdom, writes a letter to an official describing the aftermath. Taken from The Letters of Cassiodorus, he writes:
“The Sun, first of stars, seems to have lost his wonted light, and appears of a bluish colour. We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon, to feel the mighty vigour of his heat wasted into feebleness, and the phenomena which accompany a transitory eclipse prolonged through a whole year. The Moon too, even when her orb is full, is empty of her natural splendor. Strange has been the course of the year thus far. We have had a winter without storms, a spring without mildness, and a summer without heat. Whence can we look for harvest, since the months which should have been maturing the corn have been chilled?…The seasons seem to be all jumbled up together, and the fruits, which were wont to be formed by gentle showers, cannot be looked for from the parched earth…. [T]he apples harden when they should grow ripe, souring the old age of the grape-cluster.”
And the east was not alone in experiencing this extreme level of crop failure. Susan Wise Bauer adds that:
“Tree-ring data from as far away as modern Chile, California, and Siberia show a ‘drastic drop in summer growth’ from around 535 until about 540: this testifies to cold, dark summers. The darkening of the sun was producing plague, hunger, and famine across the medieval world.”
It has also been discovered that ash from the volcanic eruption was blown across the earth for some five years.
“On the other side of the world, summers grew cold and gray. Drought struck the forests and fields of the Americas, and for thirty years crop-killing dryness alternated with the vicious flooding brought on by unnaturally frequent El Niño events.”
In his book, Catastrophe, David Keys writes that: “The eruption was of truly mammoth proportions. Climatologically, the tree-ring evidence shows that it was the worst worldwide event in the tree-ring record. Looking at the ice cores, we see that it may well have been the largest event to show up in both the northern and southern ice caps for the past two thousand years.” Further expanding on this evidence is author John M. Riddle, who, in his book, A History of the Middle Ages, writes:
“On the basis of tree rings, pollen spores, data from peat bogs, and glacial changes, we know that the world’s climate around Augustus’s time (14 CE) was approximately what it is today. About 450, however, warmer and drier trends are evident. Then, in the 530s, evidence indicates a radical change that lasted about a decade. Speculation centers on a volcanic eruption, possibly Krakatoa in southeast Asia, that sent particles into the upper atmosphere, causing droughts, crop failures, and cooling. There were heavy snowfalls in Mesopotamia and floods in Arabia, while Britain and northern Europe became very cold. The change in climate may have caused the Avars, a Turkic or Mongolic people, to be driven from their native central Asia and created catastrophic disruptions for the pyramid-building empire of Teotihuacán in Mexico, as well as for Japan, China, the Mediterranean region, Europe, and both western and southern Asia.”
But that is not all that the Krakatoa eruption yielded. The past few summers had been cold and dark in the eastern part of the Roman empire, leading to those failed harvests, which meant less food. The scarcity required imports of grain. In 542, a ship docked at the Golden Horn, the harbor at Constantinople, brought just such grain directly from the mouth of the Nile. But the ship had not docked long before a sudden sickness broke out on the waterfront. It wasn’t a new illness; ancient civilizations had experienced it, but it was new to Constantinople. Victims were struck with fever, diarrhea, headaches, vomiting, and delirium. They also experienced fatigue and sleeplessness, though light could not be tolerated. As death approached, lumps would appear in the groin and armpits, as well as other lymphatic areas of the body. And these lumps, called buboes, from the Greek, boubon, meaning “groin,” are what prompted Procopius to call them “bubonic swellings,” hence the name history has given the pestilence: the bubonic plague.
Recent studies have shown that a pathogen in dental remains from sixth century victims of the plague is closely related to the bacillus cause of the Black Death that raged in the fourteenth century. The bacillus, or spore-producing bacterium, is said to spread through fleas, which infest rats. When the rats die out from the disease, the fleas then move directly to humans.
After the volcanic eruption of 535, the summers grew wet and cold in the eastern empire, and the temperature drop created the needed element for the active agent of the plague, the Yersinia pestis bacterium, to spread. Constantinople, suffering from years of bad harvests, relied more and more on imports of grain, and the citizens of Byzantium only grew weaker and hungrier from the severe lack. Their bodies were not fit to fight off even minor illnesses, but a ship was bound to bring death sooner or later. When the day of death finally arrived, the population died off in unprecedented numbers as the plague raged at full force over the course of three long months.
“The tale of dead reached five thousand each day,” Procopius writes, “and then came to ten thousand, and still more than that.”
In his book, Justinian’s Flea, William Rosen writes:
“[T]he existing burial grounds were filled, then every square foot of new ground; gigantic new cemeteries were built across the Golden Horn at Sycae. At the same time, the population that was filling up the graves rapidly overtook the population that could dig them—those who were still healthy, and not spending every waking hour caring for victims. Though burial had always been a family responsibility, Justinian could not ignore the problem, and detailed a minister named Theodorus to find a solution. A Christian city could not contemplate cremation. Instead, Theodorus looked to the walls….
“Every 180 feet, a square tower sixty feet high was built from which Constantinople’s bowmen could defend the city from any barbarian attack. The cemeteries at Sycae were likewise surrounded by such towers, and at Theodorus’s direction, Justinian’s troops removed the tops of dozens of the towers, and filled them with the bodies of the dead. ‘As a result,’ Procopius writes, ‘an evil stench pervaded the city and distressed the inhabitants still more, especially when the wind blew fresh from that quarter.’ ”
Physicians of the day examined the dead by dissecting them. They came across strange abscesses swollen with pus and dead tissue which rested at the center of the mysterious swellings. Some among those infected exhibited black lentil-sized pustules before they died vomiting up blood. Procopius adds:
“There ensued with some a deep coma, with others a violent delirium … who suffered from insomnia and were victims of a distorted imagination, and in those cases where neither coma nor delirium came on, the bubonic swelling became mortified and the sufferer, no longer able to endure the pain, died.”
Other victims were said to have walked out of their homes reasonably healthy only to be struck down with fever mid-travel. They only lay in the road where they fell, helpless, until death came. With grim scenes of this nature, John of Ephesus, a Syrian-speaking bishop of the monastic order who lived through the plague, writes that, “Nobody would go out of doors without a tag upon which his name was written, and which hung on his neck or arm,” the reason being that their bodies, disfigured by disease, could then be identified and claimed by their loved ones.
According to Procopius, Emperor Justinian also suffered from buboes but somehow recovered. During his illness, Empress Theodora practically ran the government, though Byzantium’s infrastructure was devasted. Those of the Persian empire and the Germanic kingdoms in the east were weakened as well. Death seemed to spread its tentacles to every corner, eventually reaching western Asia, northern Africa, and Europe. Estimates say that anywhere from one-third to one-half of the people who inhabited those regions died from the disease at that time. The plague disrupted farming, commercial trade, military, secular, and even religious life. Eight monasteries that were recorded to exist in Constantinople ceased to be. Families were ripped apart, leaving the weak and helpless to fend for themselves. Ships were reported to wash ashore unmanned. And what’s more, another disease broke out congruent with the first, this time killing cattle. It was believed to have started in Syria and is now thought to have been anthrax.
As for the bubonic plague, slowing it seemed impossible. A historian by the name of Evagrius Scholasticus lost his wife, children, and grandchildren to the plague, and he himself developed buboes but survived. According to his own account as a primary source, “Some were desirous of death, on account of the utter loss of their children and friends, and placed themselves as much as possible in contact with the diseased, and yet did not die, as if the pestilence struggled against their purpose.”
That this was a judgment from the Most High was not lost on those who lived through the pestilence. A Syrian historian known as Zachariah of Mytilene said of the plague, “It was a scourge from Satan, who was ordered by [Yah] to destroy men.”
We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]
We now continue with our podcast.
The high level of deaths, and the voracity with which the plague came, though unprecedented, could not be maintained. Yes, the pestilence was very deadly …
“But the deadliness of the plague was also its weakness.”
Writes Susan Wise Bauer.
“By 543, it had killed so many people (as many as two hundred thousand in Constantinople alone) that it could no longer remain at full strength; it had run out of uninfected hosts, and began to decrease.”
Having recovered from his own illness, Justinian resumed control of the empire and was able to stave off its financial insolvency while maintaining public order. Deceased taxpaying landowners saw the transfer of their lands to their living neighbors. Those among the wealthy who had died without heirs, allowed for the redistribution of their income to capable souls who were reassigned their property, which they kept in production. Fallen government officials were replaced, and government services, like water supply, continued. The collection of taxes also resumed.
Of course, this meant that Justinian could once more focus his attention on the war he initiated on the Italian peninsula; a war that would in effect act as a judgment of the Romans who inhabited that unfortunate region of the empire. The Ostrogoths had not yet been vanquished, and in 541, they elected a young, capable Goth from their midst to be king. His name was Totila, and he soon seized Rome, southern Italy, and Sicily from Byzantium rule. Then he formed a navy that he stationed in the Adriatic to prevent the Byzantines from sending reinforcements. Unlike Justinian’s poorly paid mercenaries, who pillaged fiercely to make ends meet, Totila waged war without allowing his Ostrogoth troops to do so, and this caused the Roman populations on the Italian peninsula to welcome him. But Totila would not hold his lands for long.
Justinian’s greatest general, Belisarius had retired, so, as Will Durant writes in his book, The Age of Faith …
“… Justinian gave to his eunuch general Narses ‘an exceedingly large sum of money,’ and ordered him to raise a new army and drive the Goths from Italy.”
Narses rebuilt the army from the ground up, by hiring mainly barbarians: which included Huns, Armenians, Persians, Heruli, and Lombards, among others. He raised around thirty-five thousand men in all. With his new army, in the year 552 …
“Narses accomplished his mission with skill and dispatch; Totila was defeated and was killed in flight; the surviving Goths were permitted to leave Italy safely, and after eighteen years, the ‘Gothic War’ came to an end (553). Those years completed the ruin of Italy. Rome had been five times captured, thrice besieged, starved, looted; its population, once a million, was now reduced to 40,000, of whom nearly half were paupers maintained by papal alms. Milan had been destroyed, and all its inhabitants killed. Hundreds of towns and villages sank into insolvency, under the exactions of rulers and the depredations of troops. Regions once tilled were abandoned, and the food supply fell; in Picenum alone, we are told, 50,000 died of starvation during these eighteen years. The aristocracy was shattered; so many of its members had been slain in battle, pillage, or flight that too few survived to continue the Senate of Rome; after 579 we hear of it no more.”
The Gothic War, which lasted three decades, destroyed the Italian economy and deurbanized the peninsula. Not only did large cities like Rome, Naples, and Milan see their populations shrink to nothing, but great cities along the Mediterranean became nothing more than sleepy provincial towns. The decline in Italy, caused by the catastrophic war initiated by the eastern emperor, stripped the region of its status as a cultural and economic leader in the realm. The famed places that brought it ancient glory were left in ruins.
“The great aqueducts that Theodoric had repaired were broken and neglected …”
Writes Will Durant.
“… and again turned the Campagna into a vast malarial marsh, which remained till our time. The majestic baths, dependent upon the aqueducts, fell into disuse and decay. Hundreds of statues, surviving Alaric and Gaiseric, had been broken or melted down to provide projectiles and machines during siege. Only ruins bore witness to Rome’s ancient grandeur as capital of half the world. The Eastern emperor would now for a brief period rule Italy; but it was a costly and empty victory. Rome would not fully recover from that victory till the Renaissance.”
One of the barbarian tribes hired as mercenaries by the eunuch general Narses to fight against the Ostrogoths in Italy was the Lombards. Thought to have come from frigid northern lands in Scandinavia, the Lombards, according to their oral history, were forced, by lot, to leave their overcrowded homeland. By the time Narses arrived in Italy on orders, the Lombards were there, and he promised them land in Pannonia for their service. When the Ostrogoths were finally vanquished, Byzantium ruled Italy and appointed a general known as an exarch to govern, which meant that he also saw to civil matters. Rome was again in the hands of a Roman emperor, now headquartered in Constantinople. But trouble lay ahead. Following the death of Justinian, his nephew Justin II sat the throne, and a year after he rose to power, plague struck Italy this time.
A historian of the Lombards named Paul the Deacon speaks of the same signature swellings of the groin witnessed in the earlier eastern plague. Fevers again led to the deaths of many, leaving piles of unburied corpses in the streets, further decimating the Italian peninsula. Paul the Deacon described the scene, saying …
“The dwellings were left deserted by their inhabitants, and the dogs only kept house. You might see the world brought back to its ancient silence: no voice [left] in the field; no whistling of shepherds; no lying in wait of wild beasts among the cattle; no harm to domestic fowls. The crops, outliving the time of the harvest, awaited the reaper untouched; the vineyard with its fallen leaves and its shining grapes remained undisturbed while winter came on; a trumpet as of warriors resounded through the hours of the night and day; something like the murmur of an army was heard by many; there were no footsteps of passersby, no murderer was seen, yet the corpses of the dead were more than the eyes could discern; pastoral places had been turned into a sepulchre for men, and human habitations had become places of refuge for wild beasts. And these evils happened to the Romans only and within Italy alone.”
The land of the popes was receiving its own personal judgment. Once this second plague was gone, many empty lands left by the deceased proved tempting to the surviving Lombards, who thrived despite the pestilence. Their numbers actually swelled, making the land of Pannonia they had received as payment too limited to sustain their people. To this end, the Lombards conquered the neighboring Heruls and Gepids. Numbering a quarter of a million, the Lombards needed yet more land. In 568, they stormed Italy and conquered Milan the next year, then headed southward. The Byzantines lost central Italy to them. In fact, all that remained in Byzantine hands following the Lombard conquest was land stretching from Ravenna down the coast, and which cut across to Rome, the city of the pope, who was then Benedict I. The Lombards were besieging Benedict’s city the year that he died, 579, but his successor, Pope Pelagius II, spared Rome by buying them off. Most of Italy was now in the hands of the final horn power to rule over her per Daniel 7, as we have shown in podcast 11.
But the Lombards, who despised both Roman culture and catholic tradition, would not long enjoy their dominance of the future papal territory. In his book, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, Norman F. Cantor writes:
“The Lombards organized themselves into two or three large duchies and a few smaller principalities. Like the early Franks, they condemned Roman culture and government, with the result that the Roman administrative and legal systems disintegrated. The Byzantines had not had enough time to make the Justinian code well known in Italy. Roman law survived in its homeland only as the customary law of the native Italian population and was mixed with the miserable hodgepodge of Lombard folk law. In addition to their political and legal decrepitude, the Lombards remained Arians (for the most part) for a century after their conquest of northern Italy and thus were completely out of touch with the church and the papacy. In fact, even in the eighth century the pope looked upon the Lombard dukes as his bitter enemies. Perhaps no Germanic people had so little to offer to European civilization as did the backward Lombards. They contributed to Italian life only their name and their blood; the former affected the political geography of northern Italy, and the latter made the physical makeup of north Italians different from the Mediterranean physiognomy of the southerners. These were meager boons in exchange for Theodoric’s policy of civilitas. Of course, Justinian had not intended to replace the Ostrogothic with Lombard rule in Italy. But as in his policy in regard to the eastern part of his empire, the risks that he took were so great that failure was bound to result in a worse condition than had existed at the beginning of his reign.”
In the end, Justinian, and indeed Byzantium itself, had failed the western empire in offering adequate leadership and protection from its many enemies. Of this, Norman F. Cantor writes:
“Justinian’s failure demonstrated to the men of the West that, as a result of the barbarian invasions, the Roman Empire could not be effectively reunited. Justinian, the greatest Roman emperor since Constantine, was the nemesis of Byzantine power. In the late sixth and seventh centuries Europe turned away from Constantinople, and the European peoples no longer looked to the hard-pressed Byzantine emperors and the essentially alien Byzantine culture for leadership and guidance. Hence, the most important consequence of Justinian’s work for sixth- and seventh-century Europe was to bring to center stage the West’s own men and institutions. The West was thrown back upon its own resources and had to find leadership in its own ranks: the church, led by the papacy and the monastic orders, and the Frankish monarchy. The short-lived alliance between the papacy and the Byzantine emperor had in the end created only a new disaster for Italy. It remained to be seen whether an alliance between the papacy and the Frankish monarchy could be effected with more fortunate consequences.”
That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.
Keywords: Krakatoa, bubonic plague, buboes, boubon, Yersinia pestis bacterium Cassiodorus, Avars, tree-ring data, Heruls, Gepids, Pelagius II, 535, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers
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