Pieter Brughel des Älteren / Wikimedia
It wasn’t quite like that, but that doesn’t make this Arab “maqāma” any less creative. Our ancestors acted in a similar way to how we reacted to Covid-19.
New research has come to an unusual conclusion: for centuries, depictions of the plague spreading rapidly along the Silk Road were based on a misinterpretation of an Arabic poetic taleand not on factual records.
It is a “maqāma” (a form of Arabic narrative that usually features a wandering trickster as the main character), was written by the poet and historian Ibn al-Wardi in 1348/9, in Aleppo.
In the story, over 15 years, a man decimates one region after another, starting from unknown regions outside China, passing through China, India, Central Asia, Persia, and finally reaching the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to wreak havoc in Egypt and the Levant.
But the idea that a lineage of this bacterium has moved more than 4,800 kilometers by land in a few years and became established enough to cause the devastating Black Death in the Middle East and Europe between 1347 and 1350 is seriously called into question in this new published in Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies.
“All the paths that lead to a factually incorrect description of the spread of the plague converge on this text. It is as if he were at the center of a spider’s web full of myths about how the Black Death spread through the region,” researcher Nahyan Fancy told .
“The entire spread of the plague throughout Asia and its arrival in Egypt before Syria was always based, and continues to be based, on the singular Risāla of Ibn al-Wardī, which finds no support in other contemporary chronicles or even in the maqāmas. The text was written only to highlight the fact that the plague spread and deceived people. It should not be interpreted literally”, he states.
“These writings can help us understand how creativity may have been a way of exercising some control at this time of mass deaths, similar to the way people developed new culinary or artistic skills during the Covid-19 pandemic,” he further explains.
“The maqāmas may not give us accurate information about how the Black Death spread, but the texts are phenomenal because they help us understand how people at the time lived with this terrible crisis.”
