I just finished Kyle Harper’s The Fate Of Rome, and in it he argues for the Justiniatic Plauge’s widespread reach and crippling mortality. After finishing his work I read some reviews from academic journals which seemed to agree with the book’s thesis, though they thought he was prone to some exaggeration. Today however I came across an article by Lee Mordechi and Merle Eisenberg called “Rejecting Catastrophe: The Case of the Justinianic Plague”. This article cites Harper, several other historians and “recent scholarship” in its account of how historians have drastically over emphasized the devastation of the justiniatic plague. The article goes on to claim that “Any direct mid-or long- term effects of plague were minor at most.” Where is the status of current scholarship on this issue? Do they accept the “maximalist” position of over 33% cumulative mortality, the “minimalist” position of no or almost no impact, or somewhere in between?
Sorry for format issues I had to write this on mobile
As you know, the scholarly opinion on the possible demographic impact on the plague of Justinian is divided now.
The fundamental problem is that we don't have any firmly established and (corrected:) widely accepted way to estimate early medieval demography, so almost all of the article on the mortality inevitably involve with highly hypothetical elements (since we don't have an established figure on the total population in the 6th century, how can we estimate the mortality of the plague per se?)
We should also keep in mind that Mordechai have indeed involved with a few academic reviews of Harper's book like Haldon, J, Elton, H, Huebner, SR, Izdebski, A, Mordechai, L, Newfield, TP. Plagues, climate change, and the end of an empire: A response to Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome (3): Disease, agency, and collapse. History Compass. 2018; 16:e12507. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12507, so these reviews cannot be used to validate / refute the criticism against Harper's estimated figures from a third party position (I don't mean to criticize or refute Mordechai here at all).
As for provinces of former Western Roman Empire and the possible demographic impact of successive outbreaks of after the plague of Justinian, the collection of essay by Little also largely proposes the devastating figures as that of the Eastern Empire found in Harper's book. On the other hand, the review of Bresson takes more neutral stance on the figures at least than those reviews Mordechai writes or involves in some ways, if I remember correctly (Cf. Bresson 2020).
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(Edited): corrects typos.