A single 14th-century rhyming poem, mistakenly believed to be a historical fact, has misled scientists and historians for 700 years about how the Black Death spread across Asia. This discovery now frees researchers to investigate earlier plague outbreaks and rewrite the pandemic’s timeline.
The writings could also help researchers understand how creativity may have served as a way to exercise control and a coping mechanism during this time of widespread death, similar to the way people developed new culinary and artistic skills during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The “maqāma”, an Arabic literary tale about a travelling trickster written by poet Ibn al-Wardi in 1348/9 in Aleppo, has been the sole basis for the widely accepted theory that plague moved over 3,000 miles overland within a few years. Some geneticists still use this narrative to support claims that the pathogen was displaced from Central Asia in the late 1330s, having moved from Kyrgyzstan to the Black and Mediterranean Seas in less than a decade.
“All roads to the factually incorrect description of the spread of the plague lead back to this one text,” said Nahyan Fancy, a historian of Islamic medicine at the University of Exeter. “It’s like it is in the centre of a spider’s web of the myths about how the Black Death moved across the region.”
The plague as a roving trickster
The study, by Muhammed Omar, a PhD candidate in Arab and Islamic Studies, and Fancy, demonstrates how this literary work was accepted as fact by 15th-century Arab historians and subsequent European historians, despite being unsubstantiated by other contemporary chronicles. In his tale, Ibn al-Wardi personifies the plague as a roving trickster who, over the course of 15 years, decimates one region after another, from the unknown areas outside China to Egypt and the Levant.
“The entire trans-Asian movement of plague and its arrival in Egypt prior to Syria has always been and continues to be based upon Ibn al-Wardī’s singular Risāla, which is unsubstantiated by other contemporary chronicles and even maqāmas,” Fancy said. “The text was written just to highlight the fact the plague travelled, and tricked people. It should not be taken literally.”
Debunking the myth frees historians to examine the significance of earlier plague outbreaks, such as the 1258 outbreak in Damascus or the 1232-3 outbreak in Kaifeng, which have been overshadowed by the accepted narrative. Researchers can now investigate how these outbreaks impacted societies and how experiences were recalled by later scholars, potentially rewriting the entire understanding of plague’s movement across continents.
The maqāma form was invented in the late 10th century but gained popularity from the 12th century onwards. Fourteenth-century Mamluk literati particularly prized this form of writing, designing maqāmas to be read aloud in a single session. Ibn al-Wardi’s Risāla was one of at least three maqāmas about plague composed in 1348-9.
