The Other Man Who Saw It
Companion essay to the Arcanum World video "The Plague That Tried to End the World."
The video leans on one witness: Procopius, the emperor’s historian, who watched Constantinople empty from inside its walls. He is the source almost everyone quotes. But he was not the only person who wrote down what he saw in 542 — and the other account is, in some ways, the more harrowing of the two, because that man was not safe behind city walls. He was out on the roads, walking straight through it.
His name was John of Ephesus. He was a churchman traveling overland from Syria and Palestine toward Constantinople in the very months the plague was moving along the same routes. Where Procopius gives us the capital, John gives us everything between the cities — and what he describes is a landscape coming apart. Villages standing silent with no one left in them. Crops ripe in the fields with no one to harvest them, simply rotting where they grew. Cattle and sheep wandering loose, untended, “roaming” the hills because their owners were dead. He wrote of walking past places where the living had become too few to bury the dead, so the dead were left where they fell.
And then there is the image that stays with you: ships drifting on the sea with no one aboard alive — crews struck down mid-voyage, the vessels carried by wind and current until they ran aground on empty shores, floating tombs washing up on the coast.
John’s account is, in fact, the longest description of the plague that survives from anyone who lived through it — longer than Procopius’s. He gives numbers too, and they climb even higher: he claims the dead were leaving Constantinople at five, ten, sixteen thousand a day, until the men posted at the city gates to tally the corpses gave up counting altogether. That last detail is quietly devastating. The counting stopped not because the dying stopped, but because the number lost its meaning.
Here is the part the video could not fit, and it matters for the whole argument about what we can and cannot know. We do not have John of Ephesus’s account in his own book. The section of his history that described the plague — Part Two of his Ecclesiastical History — is lost. It survives only because later writers copied it: a Syriac chronicler known as Pseudo-Dionysius of Tell-Mahre quoted him at length, and where even that copy dropped the opening, a twelfth-century patriarch named Michael the Syrian happened to preserve the missing beginning. Our fullest eyewitness to the first pandemic in history reaches us secondhand, stitched together from copies of copies, with a gap that one medieval scribe accidentally filled and another accidentally left out.
Sit with that, because it is the deeper truth beneath the maximalist–minimalist debate in the video. The reason serious historians can argue about whether this plague killed thirty million or a fraction of that is not carelessness. It is that our evidence is genuinely this thin and this fragile — a bacterium’s DNA in a few Bavarian teeth, an emperor’s historian with a talent for drama, and a churchman’s vanished book that survives only because two later monks, centuries apart, chose to copy it.
The plague was real. The witnesses were real. And the record they left us is a handful of fragments we are still, fifteen hundred years later, trying to read in the right order.
Sources
John of Ephesus — Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Ephesus
“John of Ephesus describes the Justinianic plague” — Roger Pearse — https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2017/05/10/john-of-ephesus-describes-the-justinianic-plague/
“Viewpoint: New Approaches to the ‘Plague of Justinian’” — Past & Present (2022) — https://academic.oup.com/past/article/254/1/315/6427314
“Rejecting Catastrophe: The Case of the Justinianic Plague” — Mordechai & Eisenberg, Past & Present (2019) — https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/244/1/3/5532056
Fact-check note: John of Ephesus’s plague account survives not in his own (partly lost) Ecclesiastical History but through later Syriac quotation — chiefly Pseudo-Dionysius of Tell-Mahre (the Chronicle of Zuqnin), with an opening portion preserved via Michael the Syrian. His daily-death figures (5,000–16,000) are his own claims, as contested as Procopius’s “10,000 a day,” and are presented here as testimony, not established fact.