Beginning in 541 during the reign of the emperor Justinian, the first historically recorded pandemic of the bacterium Yersinia pestis (the agent of bubonic plague) struck Constantinople and spread around the Mediterranean. Contemporary writers such as Procopius described enormous mortality in the capital, and the disease recurred in waves for roughly two centuries. It arrived through the grain-trade routes that supplied the great cities. The losses fell heavily on dense urban populations and on the imperial administration.
By draining the manpower and tax base of late-antique cities, it deepened the long contraction of urban life across the early medieval Mediterranean and weakened Justinian's effort to restore the Roman world.
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