WITHDecades before questionable information about COVID-19 began spreading across social media, another inaccurate report about the infectious disease sparked an early spread disinformation– a myth that lives on today in smart prose. A new look at the fable helps paint a more accurate picture of the deadliest pandemic in recorded history, a new paper argues.
Between 1348 and 1349, the Syrian poet and historian Ibn al-Wardi composed a rhyming story about the spread of the Black Death called Risalat an-nabaan al-wabaʾ or “Essay on the Plague Report.” This tale portrays the plague as a traveling trickster who, in just 15 years, rushed from an unidentified “land of darkness” to China and the Mediterranean region. This timeline and exact path have been the subject of much controversy.
But 15th-century scholars took al-Wardi’s story quite literally. This has led to the persistent theory that the Black Death, which killed so many people in the Middle East and Europe between 1347 and 1350, resulted from the disease spreading relatively quickly (about a decade) over thousands of miles through traders. Overall, the pandemic killed about 50 million people in Europe and the Mediterranean between 1346 and 1353.
Read more: “Why medieval cats approved of the plague»
But al-Wardi never intended to give a literal historical account, as stated in paper recently published in Journal of Arab and Islamic Studies. His story is an example maqamaor “a literary story in rhymed prose, often featuring a traveling trickster.” al-Wardi also quoted passages from this maqama in his historical research, causing much confusion regarding the rate of spread of this plague.
“All paths to a factually incorrect account of the spread of the plague lead to this one text,” said In a statement, Nahyan Fancy, a historian of Islamic medicine at the University of Exeter in the UK. “It appears to be at the center of a web of myths about how the Black Death spread across the region.”
According to later analysis DNA from human remainsThe strain of bubonic plague that caused the Black Death may have originated from a strain that spread to what is now Kyrgyzstan, adding weight to the theory that the pathogen originated in Central Asia. However, the timeline implied by al-Wardi still doesn't add up when assessing the collective evidence, say Fancy and co-author Muhammad Omar, Ph.D. PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies, write: “The idea that a lineage of this bacterium moved over 3,000 miles overland in a few years and became sufficiently established to cause the devastating Black Death in the Middle East and Europe does not make much historical or biological sense.”
However, Fancy and Omar note that mythical stories like al-Wardi's provide valuable insight—they reveal how people engaged in creative exploration to cope with the unfolding tragedy of the Black Death—even if some of them may have been a little careless with the facts.
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Main image: Wikimedia Commons.
