The Plague of Justinian

At the Hay Festival, Misha Glenny and guests discuss the impact of the Norman invasion on the people and land of Wales and across the modern border with England in what became known as The Welsh Marches, march being a term for a militarized borderland. Hay was one of the first Ma ...  Show more

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the group which came to be known as the Levellers and emerged during what would become arguably one of the bloodiest and most turbulent periods of English history. After the First English Civil War, the Levellers started calling for reforms to achi ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the plague that broke out in Constantinople 541AD, in the reign of Emperor Justinian. According to the historian Procopius, writing in Byzantium at the time, this was a plague by which the whole human race came near to being destroyed, embracing th ...  Show more

In the summer of 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman Empire. Known as the Justinianic Plague, it would be just as bad as the Black Death that 800 years later devastated Medieval Europe. Find out what happened here!Support the showFor a free ebook, maps and blogs check out my web ...  Show more

From a plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 430 BCE, to another in 540 that wiped out half the population of the Roman empire, down through the Black Death in the Middle Ages and on through the 1918 flu epidemic (which killed between 50 and 100 million people) and ...

In October 1347, a ghostly fleet of trading ships docks at a port in Sicily. The crew members – dead already, or well on their way – bear bubonic plague. The ‘Great Pestilence’ will ravage the populations of three continents over the next decade. What changes to society will resu ...  Show more