This 14th century story fooled the world about the Black Death

For centuries, depictions of the plague racing along the Silk Route, devastating cities and towns in its path, have been based on a misunderstanding of a rhyming story rather than a historical record.

The work in question is a "maqāma" -- an Arabic literary form that often features a wandering "trickster." Written by the poet and historian Ibn al-Wardi in Aleppo in 1348/9, the piece was later mistaken for an eyewitness account of how the disease traveled across the continent.

A Story Mistaken for Science

Modern genetic evidence suggests that the bacteria responsible for the Black Death most likely originated in Central Asia. Some scientists, influenced by Ibn al-Wardi's narrative, still argue that the plague spread from Kyrgyzstan to the Black and Mediterranean seas in less than ten years, setting off the catastrophic pandemic that swept Western Eurasia and North Africa in the late 1340s. This interpretation, sometimes referred to as the "Quick Transit Theory," rests heavily on taking Ibn al-Wardi's poetic work literally.

The new study challenges this idea, questioning whether it is realistic that the bacterium could have traveled more than 3,000 miles in just a few years and caused such a widespread outbreak between 1347 and 1350.

A Trickster Plague and a Century of Confusion

In his maqāma, Ibn al-Wardi personifies the plague as a mischievous wanderer who brings death to one region after another over a 15-year journey. The tale begins beyond China, moves through India, Central Asia, and Persia, and finally reaches the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, Egypt, and the Levant. Because the author later quoted sections of this story in his historical writing, many later readers assumed it was factual.

According to researchers Muhammed Omar, a PhD candidate in Arab and Islamic Studies, and Nahyan Fancy, a historian of Islamic medicine at the University of Exeter, the confusion began in the fifteenth century when Arab chroniclers -- and later European historians -- started to treat the story as a literal account of the Black Death's spread.

The Text at the Center of a Historical Web

Professor Fancy explained: "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 centre 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-Wardī's singular Risāla, which is unsubstantiated by other contemporary chronicles and even maqāmas. The text was written just to highlight the fact the plague travelled, and tricked people. It should not be taken literally."

The Cultural Role of the Maqāma

The maqāma genre emerged in the late tenth century and became especially popular from the twelfth century onward. During the fourteenth century, Mamluk writers in the Islamic world particularly valued the style, and many of their works -- including those about the plague -- survive today in libraries around the world. These stories were intended to be performed or read aloud in a single sitting.

Ibn al-Wardi's Risāla was one of at least three plague-themed maqāmas written in 1348-49. The study highlights how such texts offer insight not into the disease's route, but into how people of the time coped with unimaginable loss and upheaval.

Revisiting Earlier Outbreaks

Recognizing Ibn al-Wardi's work as a fictional composition allows historians to shift focus toward earlier, lesser-known epidemics, such as those that struck Damascus in 1258 and Kaifeng in 1232-33. Scholars can now explore how communities remembered these earlier crises and how such memories influenced later understandings of the Black Death.

Finding Humanity in Historical Crisis

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.

"These maqāmas may not give us accurate information about the 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."