> What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.
It did. Justinians gains in italy were lost not long after the plague to the lombards, who saw a power vacuum. The empire had just spent quite a bit on wars and capital expenses, and the tax base never recovered. It hobbled the economy and manpower of the empire and left it susceptible to attacks from enemies virtually on all sides, and territory shrunk by the century until Constantinople was merely a city state, mostly abandoned within its rotting walls which it no longer had the manpower to fully defend, with a few Grecian possessions and vassal states by the time it succumbed to the Turks.
I had the same reaction. Constantinople fell in 1453. That's 917 years later. Justinian maybe represented the high water mark, but the empire continued to contract and expand in the centuries to follow.
So few human institutions have lasted 917 years, it's hard to compare this claim to anything. It's a little bit like arguing that the sack of Rome in 390 BC was a mere precursor to the one that took place in 410 later, or like arguing Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance helped hasten along the Italian Renaissance.
Hastening its collapse several centuries later?