Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World Read Free Page B

detail the scale of the catastrophe. “When this scourge weighed heavy upon this city, first it eagerly began [to assault] the class of the poor, who lay in the streets.
    “It happened that 5,000 and 7,000, or even 12,000 and as many as 16,000 of them departed [this world] in a single day. Since thus far it was [only] the beginning, men [i.e., government officials] were standing by the harbours, at the cross-roads and at the [city] gates counting the dead.
    “Thus the [people of Constantinople] reached the point of disappearing, only a few remaining, whereas [of] those only who had died on the streets—if anybody wants us to name their number, for in fact they were counted—over 300,000 were taken off the streets. Those [officials] who counted having reached [the number of] 230,000 and seeing that [the dead] were innumerable, gave up [reckoning] and from then on [the corpses] were brought out without being counted.”
    The authorities quickly ran out of burial places. “The city stank with corpses as there were neither litters nor diggers, and corpses were heaped up in the streets.” Some victims would take days to die. Others became ill and died within minutes.
    “In some cases, as people were looking on each other and talking, they [began to] totter and fell either in the streets or at home. It might happen that a person was sitting at work on his craft, holding his tools in his hands and working and he would totter to the side and his soul would escape.
    “It might happen that [a person] went out to market to buy necessities and while he was standing and talking or counting his change, suddenly the end would overcome the buyer here and the seller there, the merchandise remaining in the middle with the payment for it, without there being either buyer or seller to pick it up.
    “And in all ways, everything was brought to nought, was destroyed and turned into sorrow alone and funeral lamentations. The entire city then came to a standstill as if it had perished, so that its food supply stopped.”
    At first, when burial space ran out, the dead were buried at sea. Vast numbers of corpses were taken to the seashore. “There, boats were filled with them and during each sailing, they were thrown overboard and the ships returned to take other [corpses].
    “Standing on the seashore one could see litters colliding with each other and coming back to carry and to throw upon the earth two or three [corpses] to go back again and to bring [further corpses]. Others carried [the corpses] on boards and carrying-poles, bringing and piling [them] up one upon another. For other corpses, since they had rotted and putrefied, matting was sewn together. People bore them on carrying-poles and coming [to the shore] threw them [down] with pus running out of them.”
    Thousands of corpses “piled up on the entire seashore, like flotsam on great rivers, and the pus flowed, discharging itself down into the sea.” Even with the ships busy dumping their macabre cargoes at sea, it was proving impossible to clear the backlog of dead bodies.
    The emperor, Justinian, therefore decided on a new corpse-disposal strategy—the creation of giant mass graves, each capable of accommodating seventy thousand individuals. The high official who was given the gruesome task of organizing the scheme was one of the emperor’s
referendarii
(top civil servants), a man by the name of Theodore. The emperor “gave him instructions to take and spend as much gold as should be necessary.”
    Theodore arranged for the mass graves to be dug on a hill, immediately north of the city, on the other side of the Golden Horn waterway. “He took along many people, [and] gave them much gold” to dig the pits and start burying the dead. “He placed there [some] men who brought down and turned over [the corpses], piled them up and pressed the layers one upon another as a man might heap up hay in a stack.
    “Also [Theodore] placed by the pits men holding gold and encouraging