" After a fashion he recovered, and his capital city eventually returned to some semblance of normality; on March 23, 543, the emperor declared “God’s Education” over. But this was the same wishful thinking that has traditionally accompanied any political statement about pandemic disease delivered with certain authority. Bubonic plague in fact continued to sweep and swirl around the Mediterranean world for the rest of the decade, resurfacing time and again all over the world until 749. "

― Dan Jones , Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages