The Plague Of Justinian
Okay so this one probably wasn’t planned nor did it involve the Chinese or their puppet-vassals in western states like Victoria or Bill Gates, but it was significant and deadly and altered human history in a seismic way. From the following link at the Greek Reporter:
Crucially, the disease arrived on the heels of the so-called Late Antique Little Ice Age, a run of severe volcanic-forced cooling after 536 that brought harvest failures and scarcity, sharpening the city’s vulnerability as the pathogen found hungry hosts in crowded cities.
Justinian the First was the poor bastard on deck at the top of the leadership poll when it came about, and in the ensuing chaos of death he somehow survived the plague himself, this was a few years after having survived the violent revolts known as the Nika Riots. That’s him whom I’ve depicted.
Its one thing to live through an actual proper plague that kills a large percentage of the population of your known world, its quite another thing to have one named after you, and through no fault of your own other than that you happened to be the person in charge when it arrived. Justinian is unique in human history for carrying that distinction.
This article carries alot of the critical info but there' was also a good history-channel(?) doco on it years back and there’s also Robin Pearson’s excellent History Of Byzantium podcast (also available on spotify) where he does a deep dive.
The weakened Byzantine Empire was in no shape afterward to reclaim the lost Western Roman territories or withstand the rise of the Islamic armies, but they hung on as a state until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. More from the article above:
The historian Procopius painted a city where funerals halted, burial grounds overflowed, and civic life crumbled under a relentless toll of unexpected death. His near-Thucydidean remarks are joined by the Syriac bishop John of Ephesus, whose stark arithmetic conveys the speed of loss: “5,000 and 7,000, or even 12,000 and as many as 16,000 of them departed in a single day.”
Even allowing for rhetorical inflation rather than scientific precision, these voices capture a Byzantine Empire overwhelmed by plague, as officials dug pits, crammed towers with quicklime-covered corpses, and pushed burning hulks out to sea to clear the dead.
….
The Byzantine state wrestled with questions strikingly familiar to those faced during the early 2020s global pandemic—keeping food moving when supply chains seized, ensuring the dead were buried with dignity when systems failed, legislating amid fear without corroding social trust, and sustaining campaigns abroad despite faltering recruitment at home.
Some now argue that humans themselves—carrying fleas and lice—may have been the main vectors. Others stress the role of climate-driven scarcity in priming societies for contagion. In both views, the Byzantine Empire was not brought to its knees by microbes alone but by a complex interplay of environmental, social, and political forces.
In the end, the Byzantine Empire survived but changed profoundly, with far-reaching implications. The eastern empire refocused on more defensible territories, the western reconquests weakened, and this shift effectively paved the way for more efficient Hellenization of the Eastern Roman Empire and for the eventual rift between the Orthodox East and Catholic West.
The Emperor Justinian losing his shit as the empire grapples with plague all around him. The pathogen involved was Yersinia Pestes, the same that caused the Black Death of 14th Century Europe. The death toll is hard to estimate but was massive and stretched over subsequent waves over the next two centuries. Justinian himself caught the plague but survived.