HMN 2025: How a misread Arabic tale misled generations of historians about the Black Death’s rapid spread

Myths about how the Black Death traveled quickly across Asia, ravaging Silk Route communities, date back to a single fourteenth-century source, experts have found.

Modern portrayals of the plague quickly moving across the continent, following the course of traders, have been incorrect because of centuries of misinterpretation of a rhyming literary tale.

This “maq?ma”—an Arabic genre of writing often focusing on a traveling “trickster”—was written by the poet and historian Ibn al-Wardi in 1348–9 in Aleppo but was later mistaken for a factual description of the plague’s movement.

The pathogen that gave rise to the Black Death most likely had its origins in Central Asia. Some geneticists, drawing on the narrative found in Ibn al-Wardi’s tale, still believe the pathogen was only displaced from there in the late 1330s, moving overland from an origin in Kyrgyzstan to the Black and Mediterranean seas in less than a decade, resulting in the massive pandemic in Western Eurasia and North Africa of the late-1340s. This “quick transit theory” is built primarily upon the literal reading of Ibn al-Ward?’s maq?ma.

This notion that a lineage of this bacterium moved over 3,000 miles overland within a few years and established itself sufficiently to cause the devastating Black Death of the Middle East and Europe from 1347 to 1350 is called severely into question in the research, which appears in the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies.

In his tale, Ibn al-Wardi personifies plague as a roving trickster, who—over the course of 15 years—decimates one region after the next, starting from unknown regions outside of China, to China, across India, central Asia, Persia and finally entering the Black Sea and Mediterranean to wreak havoc on Egypt and the Levant. But it was taken as the truth because he also quoted selections of this tale in his historical work.

The study, by Muhammed Omar, a Ph.D. candidate in Arab and Islamic Studies, and Nahyan Fancy, a historian of Islamic medicine from the University of Exeter, shows how this story began to be taken as fact by 15th-century Arab historians and subsequent European historians.

Professor Fancy said, “All roads to the factually incorrect description of the spread of the plague lead back to this one text. It’s like it is in the center of a spider’s web of the myths about how the Black Death moved across the region.

“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-Ward?’s singular Ris?la, which is unsubstantiated by other contemporary chronicles and even maq?mas. The text was written just to highlight the fact the plague traveled and tricked people. It should not be taken literally.”

The maq?ma form was invented in the late tenth century, but really took off from the twelfth century onwards. Fourteenth-century Mamluk literati particularly prized this form of writing, and several of their maq?mas, including on plague, are to be found in manuscripts in libraries across the world. Maq?mas were designed to be read aloud completely in one session.

Ibn al-Ward?’s Ris?la was one of at least three maq?mas about plague composed in 1348–9. The study shows how this writing has huge potential to show how communities at the time coped with catastrophic events.

This frees historians up to examine the significance of earlier plague outbreaks (such as the 1258 outbreak in Damascus, or the 1232–3 outbreak in Kaifeng), their impact on those societies, and how experiences in those outbreaks and their memories were recalled and revisited by later scholars.

Professor Fancy said, “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.

“These maq?mas 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.”

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