Centuries-Old Tale Rewrites History of the Black Death‘s Spread
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A new study reveals that long-held beliefs about the rapid transmission of the Black Death across Asia stem from a misinterpretation of a 14th-century Arabic story, not historical fact. For centuries, the narrative of the plague swiftly racing along the Silk Road has dominated understanding of one of history’s deadliest pandemics.
the Power of a Poetic account
The source of this enduring myth is a literary work known as a “maqāma“-an Arabic storytelling form characterized by a wandering “trickster”- penned by the poet and historian Ibn al-Wardi in Aleppo in 1348/9.Initially, the piece was mistakenly considered an eyewitness account detailing the disease’s continental journey. Modern genetic evidence, however, suggests a different picture.
Unlike a factual record, the maqāma personifies the plague as a mischievous traveler embarking on a 15-year journey of death. The tale traces a path from beyond China, through India, Central Asia, and Persia, ultimately reaching the black Sea, the Mediterranean, Egypt, and the Levant. As the author later incorporated excerpts from this story into his historical writings, subsequent readers mistakenly assumed its veracity.
Researchers Muhammed Omar,a PhD candidate in Arab and Islamic Studies,and Nahyan Fancy,a historian of Islamic medicine at the University of Exeter,pinpoint the beginning of this confusion to the 15th century. It was than that Arab chroniclers-and later, European historians-began treating the story as a literal account of the Black Death’s spread.
the Center of a Historical “Spider’s Web”
“all roads to the factually incorrect description of the spread of the plague lead back to this one text,” explained Professor Fancy. “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.” He further emphasized that the entire narrative of the plague’s trans-Asian movement and arrival in Egypt before Syria is based solely on Ibn al-Wardī’s Risāla, a text unsupported by contemporary chronicles or other maqāmas. “The text was written just to highlight the fact the plague travelled, and tricked people. It should not be taken literally.”
The Cultural Significance of the Maqāma
The maqāma genre emerged in the late 10th century, gaining meaningful popularity from the 12th century onward. During the 14th century, writers within the Mamluk world notably valued this style, and numerous works-including those concerning the plague-survive today in libraries globally. These stories were designed to be performed or read aloud in a single sitting.
ibn al-Wardi’s Risāla was one of at least three plague-themed maqāmas created between 1348 and 1349.The study underscores that these texts offer insight not into the disease’s route, but into how people at the time coped with unimaginable loss and upheaval.
Shifting Focus to Earlier Epidemics
Recognizing Ibn al-Wardi’s work as a fictional composition allows historians to redirect their attention to earlier, less-documented epidemics, such as those that struck Damascus in 1258 and Kaifeng in 1232-33.Scholars can now investigate how communities remembered these earlier crises and how those memories shaped their understanding of the Black Death.
Professor Fancy added,”These writings can help us understand how creativity may have been a way to exercise some control and served as a coping mechanism at this time of widespread death,similar to the way people developed new culinary skills or artistic skills during the Covid-19 pandemic.” He concluded, “These maqāmas may not give us accurate information about how the Black Death spread. But the texts are phenomenal because they help us see how people at the time were living with this awful crisis.”
