Burial During Justinian's Plague, Part 1

Sometimes a disaster strikes a civilization that kills so many so fast that the systems for providing support and burial cannot keep up. Such was the case when the Bubonic Plague came to town. One of the earliest recorded cases of the plague sweeping through civilization came during the time of Emperor Justinian I of Constantinople.

Procopius, who recorded much of the history of this era, wrote of the advance of the plague and how it affected its victims. He also tells us of the impact it had on society:

Now the disease in Byzantium ran a course of four months, and its greatest virulence lasted about three. And at first the deaths were a little more than the normal, then the mortality rose still higher, and afterwards the tale of dead reached five thousand each day, and again it even came to ten thousand and still more than that. Now in the beginning each man attended to the burial of the dead of his own house, and these they threw even into the tombs of others, either escaping detection or using violence; but afterwards confusion and disorder everywhere became complete. For slaves remained destitute of masters, and men who in former times were very prosperous were deprived of the service of their domestics who were either sick or dead, and many houses became completely destitute of human inhabitants. For this reason, it came about that some of the notable men of the city because of the universal destitution remained unburied for many days.

Modern scholars doubt that the number reached 10,000 per day, but generally agree that 5,000 per day was in fact a reasonable number. These dead were so numerous that burial in the ground was no longer possible. An unusually creative method for containing the corpses was employed:

And when it came about that all the tombs which had existed previously were filled with the dead, then they dug up all the places about the city one after the other, laid the dead there, each one as he could, and departed; but later on those who were making these trenches, no longer able to keep up with the number of the dying, mounted the towers of the fortifications in Sycae, and tearing off the roofs threw the bodies there in complete disorder; and they piled them up just as each one happened to fall, and filled practically all the towers with corpses, and then covered them again with their roofs. As a result of this an evil stench pervaded the city and distressed the inhabitants still more, and especially whenever the wind blew fresh from that quarter.

Sycae was a suburb of Constantinople. Climbing outside a tower and dropping corpses into it to fill it up a a truly horrific and gruesome solution to a problem.

A proper funeral had certain actions to be performed. Were these actions completely ignored in the haste to dispose of the diseased bodies? Not necessarily. Tomorrow we'll look at how to have a "proper" funeral when your goal is to eliminate too many bodies. (The illustration is a picture of bones from a mass grave of plague victims during the Justinian Plague.)