Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/71

Rh therefore no doubt that the plague has been known for more than two thousand years.

The next authentic account of the plague is that of the epidemic of the sixth century. The disease at this time was first recognized in Lower Egypt, from which country it extended into Europe by two routes. It was brought from the north coast of Africa, and it also extended through Palestine and Syria, and by this way into Europe. This disease became pandemic and spread, according to the chroniclers of the time, to the "ends of the habitable world." It prevailed in an active form for about sixty years, showing great virulence in certain localities. According to Warnefrid, "it depopulated towns, turned the country into a desert, and made the habitations of men to become the haunts of wild beasts." Hirsch says: "It is impossible to decide whether this outbreak of plague in the second half of the sixth century was the first general diffusion of the disease on European soil, or whether it had been epidemic there before, and if so, to what extent. What is certain is that this outbreak gave it firm hold in Europe, and that it kept its dominion there for more than a thousand years."

It is an interesting fact that this pandemic occurred during the reign of Justinian the Great, the most illustrious emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire. This man, who did so great a service to the world in the codification of the Roman laws, seems to have been both wise and unwise. He is said to have been so filled with Christian ardor that he forcibly baptized more than seventy thousand pagans in Asia Minor alone; and yet he was a pagan by birth, and there is reason for believing that he died a pagan. He is known as the great legislator, and yet he oppressed the people to the verge of starvation by the imposition of unjust taxation, and by granting monopolistic privileges to a few. On one side he instituted just reforms and on the other he fell into reckless and extravagant expenditures. He built the great cathedral of St. Sophia, now a Turkish mosque and one of the architectural wonders of the world, with a treasury filled with the sighs and tears of his overtaxed subjects. I mention these facts in order to show that the spread of the plague occurred at a time when the masses of the people were oppressed by wrong and broken by burdens too heavy to carry.

From the time of Justinian on, for more than ten centuries, as has been stated, the plague raged, sometimes with more, sometimes with less, severity, in Europe. The historians of the time generally content themselves with a statement of its most violent outbursts and an enumeration of its victims. The numbers given must, in many instances at least, be gross exaggerations. It is possible, also, that other diseases, especially smallpox, were