Historians have attributed the origin of legends about the rapid spread of the Black Death in Asia to a fourteeh-ceury poem by Ibn al-Verdi. His fictional accou, never written down as fact, became the basis for ceuries of misinformation about how the plague was spread, and a new study shows how fiction became iertwined with history and sheds light on how creative writing helped medieval societies cope with disasters.
According to RCO News Agency, Researchers have traced the roots of old beliefs about the rapid spread of the Black Death in Asia to a single source from the 14th ceury. For ceuries, accous of the plague moving along the Silk Road and ravaging cities and villages were based on a misunderstanding of a poetic tale rather than a historical docume.
According to Science Daily, the narration in question is an authority. In the term of literary genres, maqamah is a type of short story consisting of an incide, which is mainly told with the ieion of eertaining the listeners and sometimes as admonition, with encouraging expressions. In these types of stories, usually a single hero eers the story anonymously, and as soon as he is known at the end of the story, he disappears; Uil he appears again, in another delegation, in the next position. This work was written by the poet and historian Ibn Alvardi in Aleppo in 1348/49 and was later mistakenly taken as an eyewitness accou of how the disease spread across the coine.
A story that replaced science
Modern genetic evidence suggests that the bacteria responsible for the Black Death probably originated in Ceral Asia. Some scieists, influenced by Ibn Alvardi’s narrative, still believe that the plague reached the Black and Mediterranean seas from Kyrgyzstan in less than 10 years and started the devastating pandemic that swept across Western Eurasia and North Africa in the late 1340s. This ierpretation, which is sometimes called the “theory of rapid passage”, relies heavily on the letter-by-letter ierpretation of Ibn Alvardi’s poetic work.
The new study challenges this idea and questions whether it is realistic that the bacterium could have traveled more than 3,000 miles in a few years and caused such a widespread outbreak between 1347 and 1350.
A plague of tricksters and a ceury of confusion
In his maqamah, Ibn al-Verdi portrays the plague as a mischievous wandering age that takes death from one region to another over the course of 15 years. The story begins beyond China, passes through India, Ceral Asia and Persia and finally reaches the Black Sea, Mediterranean, Egypt and the Leva. Since the author later recoued parts of this story in his historical writings, many later readers assumed that this accou was true.
According to researchers Muhammad Omar, a PhD stude in Arabic and Islamic studies, and Nahyan Fansi, a historian of Islamic medicine at the University of Oxford, this confusion began in the 15th ceury, when Arab and later European historians began to treat the story as a true accou of the spread of the Black Death.
A text in the ceer of the historical network
Professor Fansi explained: All the ways go back to this one text to describe the spread of the plague incorrectly. It’s like at the ceer of a spider’s web of legends about the Black Death moveme. He added: All the moveme related to the plague in Asia and its arrival in Egypt before the evening has always been based on the single treatise of Ibn Alvardi, which is not confirmed by any other coemporary docume or authority. This text was written only to show that the plague moved and deceived the people and should not be taken literally.
The cultural role of authority
The maqamah genre emerged from the late 10th ceury and became popular from the 12th ceury onwards. In the 14th ceury, Mamluk writers in the Islamic world valued this style and many of their works, including those written about the plague, are still preserved in the world’s libraries. These stories were designed to be performed or read all at once. Ibn Alvardi’s treatise was one of at least three maqamahs related to plague written in 1348-49. Rather than providing detailed information about the course of the disease, such texts show how people of the time coped with unimaginable loss and turmoil, the study suggests.
Review of previous outbreaks
Recognizing Ibn al-Wardi’s work as a fictional composition allows historians to turn their atteion to lesser-known earlier outbreaks, such as the plague of Damascus in 1258 and the Kaifeng of 1232–1233. Scieists can now examine how societies remembered these earlier crises and how these memories shaped subseque understandings of the Black Death.
Finding humanity in historical crisis
Professor Fansi added: These texts can show that creativity may be a way to corol and adapt to the crisis, similar to the ways people learned new cooking or artistic skills during the Covid-19 pandemic. He coinued: These officials may not give us accurate information about how the Black Death spread. But their value is in showing how the people of that time lived with this terrible crisis.
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