ISAW Research Associate Gilles Bransbourg Invited to Lecture at the Collège de France

ISAW Research Associate and Director’s Council member, Gilles Bransbourg, has been invited by the Collège de France assembly as a guest lecturer on June 15,2026 speaking on, “The Plague and the End of the Ancient World: Not so Simple. A View from Egypt.” 

The lecture will revisit the so-called Justinian Plague, which reached Roman Egypt in 541 CE. While literary evidence and the identification of Yersinia pestis in burial sites from the period confirm the significance of the outbreak, Bransbourg’s lecture asks whether the plague alone can explain the end of Antiquity.

Drawing on recently published papyri, Bransbourg will examine evidence for a serious but one-off productive crisis in 541 CE. His lecture will consider what this material can tell us about the scale of the outbreak, its likely transmission through the Red Sea and up the Nile, and the limits of comparing Justinian’s Plague with the Black Death of the fourteenth century.

Rather than treating the plague as a direct or mechanical cause of the Eastern Roman Empire’s later contraction in the seventh century, this lecture will place the outbreak within a broader historical context, including climatic change and the emergence of new political actors, particularly Arabs and Slavs.

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