The world in AD 550

Africa

Procopius wrote that the plague of the 540s started among the Egyptians who lived at Pelusium and spread in two directions, toward Alexandria and the rest of Egypt and into Palestine, before moving over the whole world; in its second year it reached Byzantium in the middle of spring, while he was in the city. The Livius timeline of Justinian’s reign dates the outbreak to 542. Carthage had been Roman again since September 15, 534, when Belisarius entered the city in the year he conquered Africa, and far up the Nile, on the island of Philae, the same timeline records the closing of the pagan sanctuaries in 537.

West Asia

Ten years had passed since Khosrow I (r. 531–579) broke the “unlimited peace” of 532, swept through Syria, captured Antioch and extracted ransom from Dara and other towns. In A. Shapur Shahbazi’s account for the Encyclopaedia Iranica, a truce that cost Byzantium heavily followed, and hostilities went on intermittently for two decades, mostly in Armenia and in Lazica on the Black Sea coast, which the Sasanians had taken. Only in 562 did a treaty of “fifty years of peace” oblige both sides to give back their gains, with Persia guaranteeing freedom of worship to its Christian subjects and Byzantium paying gold each year toward the defense of the Caucasus. On the Levantine coast, the Livius timeline records that an earthquake destroyed the city of Berytus in 551.

Europe

The empress Theodora had died in 548, and in 549 Narses replaced Belisarius as Justinian’s commander in Italy, which he conquered in 552; the Livius timeline puts the publication of Procopius’ History of the Wars in 550 or 551. In the fourth book of his Gothic War, Procopius told how monks who had lived in a land he called Serinda promised the emperor that the Romans need no longer buy silk from the Persians, then went back east and returned to Byzantium with silkworm eggs, which were hatched and fed on mulberry leaves. Shahbazi dates the smuggling to 552, says the silkworms came into Syria, and writes that the empire soon became a major producer of silk. In 551, according to Jona Lendering, Justinian also intervened in Andalusia and took Carthago Nova on the Spanish coast.

• Procopius's Buildings, Hagia Sophia and the dome that fell in 558AD 537
• A ship in a mound, 1939: Basil Brown at Sutton HooAD 625
• Fragment 8 of Priscus: wooden cups at Attila's court, 448 or 449AD 449

East Asia

Gao Yang, whose father Gao Huan had run the Eastern Wei court through puppet emperors until his death in 547, proclaimed himself emperor of Qi in 550 and ruled from Ye, near modern Anyang; historians call his dynasty the Northern Qi to set it apart from the earlier Southern Qi. South of the Yangtze, Hou Jing, a refugee general from the Eastern Wei, had rebelled against the Liang and taken the capital Jiankang, today’s Nanjing, and the dynasty’s founder, Emperor Wu, died during the siege in 549. The emperor in 550 was Xiao Gang, known as Emperor Jianwen, whom Hou Jing had put on the throne, and in Ulrich Theobald’s account the Liang princes fought one another instead of the usurper. On the Korean peninsula Silla’s advance went on after the seizure of the two forts: the annals record that in 551 Jinheung’s commander Geochilbu took 10 commanderies from Goguryeo, and that in 553 Silla took Baekje’s northeastern frontier and set up a new province there, Sinju.

• Two histories of Emperor Yang's canals, and a fivefold gap in 608AD 605

South Asia

Ujjain had been a center of mathematics since around AD 400, and Varahamihira, whom J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson date to 505 to 587 in the MacTutor archive of the University of St Andrews, worked there and raised its standing. His Pancasiddhantika, dated 575, summarized five older astronomical treatises, among them the Romaka-Siddhanta, which rested on the Greek epicycle theory of the motions of the Sun and Moon; where he was born is uncertain. In the Deccan the Chalukya dynasty was building a capital: the Bagalkot district administration credits Pulakeshi I, to whom it gives a reign of 535 to 566, with laying the foundations of Badami, then called Vatapi.

• Sihagiri in the Culavamsa: Kassapa I's rock palace at SigiriyaAD 477
• Act No. 39 of 2010 and the Nalanda that Xuanzang describedAD 629
• Thirty copies of Ajanta and the Crystal Palace fire of 1866AD 470

Central Asia

Anagui, khan of the Rouran since 520, led the steppe federation north of China and raided both the Western and the Eastern Wei, the rival successor states of the Northern Wei. A Türk chieftain named Tumen, later titled Ili Khan, asked him for a marriage alliance; Anagui refused, and in 552 the Türks answered with a punitive expedition. In Ulrich Theobald’s history of the Rouran, the khan Dengshuzi was beaten by the Türks in 555 and went over to the Western Wei, and the Rouran lands became part of the first Türk khanate. Farther west the Hephthalites still ruled their own realm, which, James Howard-Johnston writes in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Khosrow I destroyed in 557 in alliance with the new Turkish khaganate.

• Who actually carried goods along the Silk Road?AD 600

The Americas

In AD 550, writes Linda R. Manzanilla of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the major ritual and administrative buildings along Teotihuacan’s Street of the Dead were set on fire. She finds no trace of a foreign invasion at the site and interprets the fire as a revolt against the ruling elite, perhaps a response to a late attempt by the state to control the intermediate elites who ran the city’s multiethnic neighborhoods. In the phases she uses for the neighborhood center of Teopancazco, south of the Ciudadela, the same year closes the Xolalpan phase (AD 350 to 550) and opens the Metepec phase (AD 550 to 650).

• Joya de Cerén: a Maya farming village sealed by Loma Caldera ashAD 630

Oceania

Guam and the rest of the Mariana Islands were between two archaeological periods. A 2022 ancient-DNA study in Science by Liu and 39 co-authors uses a chronology that ends the Unai period, the islands’ first three periods of occupation, at 1600 years before present, and places the first latte megaliths after 1100 years before present, so AD 550 falls in the gap. The same team dates the oldest human traces in Palau to about 3000 years before present and in Central Micronesia to about 2000, and found that people on Pohnpei, ancient and modern, carried about 27% Papuan ancestry, while the Unai individuals from Guam had little or none. No written record survives from Australia or the Pacific islands for the year.

Sources

• National Institute of Korean History (국사편찬위원회), 사료로 본 한국사: "진흥왕의 영토 확장" (Samguk sagi, Silla annals, Jinheung years 9–23)
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Northern Qi Dynasty 北齊 (550-577)" (2011)
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Liang Dynasty 梁 (502-557)" (2011)
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Rouran 柔然" (2012)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, A. Shapur Shahbazi: "Byzantine-Iranian Relations" (1990, updated 2018)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, James Howard-Johnston: "Ḵosrow II" (2000, updated 2018)
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Justinian" (modified 2020)
• Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook: "Procopius: The Roman Silk Industry, c. 550" (from De Bello Gothico IV.17, modernized by Jerome S. Arkenberg)
• Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook: "Procopius: The Plague, 542" (History of the Wars II.22–23)
• MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews, J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson: "Varahamihira"
• Bagalkot District Administration, Government of Karnataka: "Badami Caves"
• PNAS 112(30) via PubMed Central, Linda R. Manzanilla: "Cooperation and tensions in multiethnic corporate societies using Teotihuacan, Central Mexico, as a case study" (2015)
• Science 377(6601) via PubMed Central, Liu, Hunter-Anderson, Cheronet, Eakin and colleagues: "Ancient DNA reveals five streams of migration into Micronesia and matrilocality in early Pacific seafarers" (2022)