The Plague of Justinian Killed Half the Population of the Byzantine Empire and History Barely Covers It

 Most people know about the Black Death. The plague that swept through Europe in the mid 14th century and killed somewhere between a third and half of the European population. It is one of the most covered events in medieval history.

What most people do not know is that a very similar pandemic hit the world eight centuries earlier and may have been just as deadly.

It is called the Plague of Justinian. And it is one of the most significant events in ancient history that almost nobody learns about.

What It Was

The Plague of Justinian was the first recorded pandemic caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the same organism responsible for the Black Death. It began in 541 AD during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, from whom it takes its name.

The plague likely originated in central or east Africa and spread along trade routes through Egypt into the Byzantine Empire and beyond. It reached Constantinople in 541 and spread across the Mediterranean world.

At its peak in Constantinople the plague was reportedly killing 10,000 people per day. Emperor Justinian himself contracted the disease and survived but barely. By some estimates the city lost 40 percent of its population.

The pandemic spread throughout the Byzantine Empire, into Persia, across North Africa, into western Europe. It persisted in recurring waves for roughly two centuries, flaring up every few years until around 750 AD.

Total deaths are estimated at somewhere between 25 and 50 million people. In a world with a much smaller total population than today that represented an enormous fraction of all living humans.

What It Changed

Justinian had been on the verge of reuniting the old Roman Empire. He had already reconquered North Africa from the Vandals and was making significant progress in Italy and Spain. The Plague of Justinian killed the soldiers, the farmers, and the tax payers that made those campaigns possible.

The reconquest of the western Roman Empire was abandoned. The Byzantine Empire contracted. The power vacuum in the west allowed new kingdoms and peoples to establish themselves permanently.

The Arab expansion of the 7th century, which transformed the entire Mediterranean world, happened in part because the Byzantine and Persian empires had both been severely weakened by the plague. Populations that had been devastated were less able to resist conquest.

The Plague of Justinian is not just a historical curiosity. It fundamentally shaped the world that came after it. The reason Europe in the medieval period looked the way it did, the reason the Byzantine Empire was what it was, the reason the Arab expansion succeeded as quickly as it did, all trace back in part to the pandemic of 541 AD.

And it is barely in any history curriculum in the western world.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Forgotten Empire That Was Larger Than Rome and Nobody Taught You About It

 In 1324 the Emperor of Mali set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

His name was Mansa Musa. He traveled with a caravan of approximately 60,000 people. He brought 12,000 personal servants. He brought 500 heralds each carrying a golden staff. He brought 80 to 100 camels each loaded with between 300 and 400 pounds of gold dust.

Along the way he gave away so much gold to people he met, to cities he passed through, to mosques and shrines, that he crashed the gold economies of Egypt and the entire Mediterranean region. The price of gold fell so dramatically that it took more than a decade for the markets to recover.

This is documented history recorded by contemporaries in Egypt and the Arab world who witnessed it firsthand.

Mansa Musa is widely considered the wealthiest individual in human history.

Most American students have never heard his name.

What the Mali Empire Was

The Mali Empire rose to prominence in West Africa in the 13th century and reached its peak in the early 14th century under Mansa Musa's reign from 1312 to 1337.

At its peak the Mali Empire covered roughly 1.26 million square kilometers. It was one of the largest empires in the world at that time. It controlled the most important gold and salt trade routes in West Africa. The gold fields of the Mali Empire supplied a significant portion of the gold in circulation across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

The empire's capital Niani was a major city. Timbuktu, a city in the Mali Empire, was one of the most important centers of Islamic scholarship in the world at the time. The Sankore mosque in Timbuktu functioned as a university with an estimated 25,000 students and a library holding hundreds of thousands of manuscripts.

When Mansa Musa returned from his pilgrimage he brought architects from across the Islamic world who built new mosques and buildings throughout his empire. He commissioned a mosque in every city he passed through.

Why This Is Not Taught

The Mali Empire and Mansa Musa's extraordinary wealth are not part of the standard curriculum in most American schools. African history south of Egypt is largely absent from standard history education.

The reasons for that absence reflect the same biases that shaped most western historical education. The civilizations that got attention were the ones that colonizers encountered and wrote about or the ones that were part of the European and Mediterranean world. African empires that were not part of those stories were treated as though they did not exist or were not significant.

Mansa Musa was one of the most powerful rulers of his era. His empire was larger than most European kingdoms of the time. His wealth was genuinely without historical parallel. And he is still largely unknown to most people in the western world.

That is not a gap in the history. That is a choice about whose history gets taught.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Woman Who Discovered the Structure of DNA Got Almost None of the Credit for It

 In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick published a landmark paper describing the double helix structure of DNA. It is one of the most important scientific discoveries in history. Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize in 1962.

Rosalind Franklin did not win a Nobel Prize. She died of cancer in 1958 at age 37. The Nobel is not awarded posthumously.

But without Rosalind Franklin's work Watson and Crick might not have cracked the structure of DNA when they did. Or possibly at all.

What Franklin Did

Rosalind Franklin was a chemist and X-ray crystallographer working at King's College London in the early 1950s. She was applying X-ray diffraction techniques to study the structure of DNA molecules.

X-ray crystallography works by firing X-rays at a crystallized substance and analyzing the pattern of how the rays scatter. By analyzing those patterns an expert can determine the arrangement of atoms in the molecule.

Franklin was exceptionally skilled at this technique. In May of 1952 she produced an X-ray diffraction image of DNA that has since become one of the most famous photographs in the history of science. It is called Photo 51.

Photo 51 clearly showed the helical structure of DNA. It provided crucial data about the dimensions and structure of the molecule.

What Happened to Photo 51

Without Franklin's knowledge or permission her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed Photo 51 to James Watson in January of 1953.

Watson has described in his own memoir seeing the photo and immediately recognizing its significance. He and Crick used the data from that image, along with data from Franklin's unpublished reports that had also been shared without her knowledge, to build their model of the DNA double helix.

Franklin was not told that her work had been used. She was not consulted or credited in the Watson and Crick paper beyond a footnote acknowledging that her work had stimulated them. The footnote significantly understated her contribution.

Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize. Wilkins shared it with them. Franklin was not eligible because she had died. Whether she would have been included if she had lived is something historians still debate. The Nobel committee's record of crediting women for scientific work was not strong.

Why This Pattern Kept Happening

The story of Rosalind Franklin is not unique. It is one of dozens of cases in the history of science where women did foundational work that men received primary credit for.

Lise Meitner did the theoretical work that explained nuclear fission. Her male collaborator won the Nobel. Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars as a graduate student. Her advisor won the Nobel. Chien-Shiung Wu conducted a groundbreaking physics experiment that disproved a fundamental law. The men who proposed the experiment won the Nobel.

The pattern reflects something about who the scientific establishment recognized and rewarded. The work got done. The recognition went somewhere else.

Franklin's contribution is now widely acknowledged in the history of science. She has a research institute named after her. Photo 51 is famous. But for decades her role was minimized in the standard telling of one of the 20th century's greatest scientific achievements.

Her name belongs in that story. It always did.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.