The English and the Celts - no genocide?

[ambrosius]

... If the germanic speaking areas are to get the plague, they have to either trade with the Mediterranean world directly, or trade with those infected British areas. The lack of plague, mediterranean imports or other british goods in the germanic speaking areas suggests neither.

I had thought that the North did have noticeable Roman imports - the deposits in Illerup Adal showing Roman manufactures, as well as other bog sites. So the lands the germanic invaders came from would have possibly been exposed to plagues (do we know that this disease really was bubonic plague?). Were the Angles and Saxons really isolated from their Continental brethren?

Yes, Roman items from the Western Empire still seem to get to the
German/Danish areas, in a South-North trade network from Italy, which
goes across land. But at the same time (mid-5th to mid-6th c.) there is
a separate network of trade going East-West from the Eastern Empire
to Britain, Spain & Western Gaul by sea. Hence we get imports of
Byzantine pottery & coins in Western Britain all the way from Bantham
in Devon and Tintagel in Cornwall up the coast of Wales to Lancashire
and even Whithorn in Dumfries & Galloway in Scotland. This is the
likely result of Eastern Emperors like Justinian trying to retain/resume
trade/political contacts with the provinces in the West, as part of his
reconquest of the lost parts of the Empire. Hence the term 'Justinian
Plague' for this epidemic. :wink:

It seems that the Byzantines had become the real inheritors of the
Empire, by this point, whereas Rome itself had been sacked so many
times and supplanted by Ravenna, etc, that it was no longer in any
fit state to conduct either a resurgence of Romanitas or a reconquest
of the territories already lost. Interestingly, the types of pottery which
we find at Tintagel etc are exactly the same kind of amphorae which
the Byzantine Emperors are using to supply the Eastern frontier fort
garrisons with their 'Annona'. So it looks like Justinian was politically
supporting the survival of Romanitas in the British West. 8)


Ambrosius/ Mike