Medieval Nomads and the First Pandemic Theoretical Considerations

Absztrakt

This paper attempts to apply the author’s model for understanding the impact of the Second Pandemic of bubonic plague (the “Black Death” in the mid-14th century and its later waves) on the Golden Horde and Anatolia to the events in the steppe and sedentary regions during the era of the First Pandemic (6th-8th centuries) beginning in the time of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian. The paper tries to analyze selected direct and indirect evidence for political disruption, depopulation, population movements, decline of sedentary populations urban centers, cultural and technological regression, the decline of existing literary languages and the rise of new vernacular-based languages, and an increase in religiosity. It argues that, as in the 14th-15th centuries, there is a close relationship between depopulation in sedentary centers and the in-migration of nomadic populations.