Historians have uncovered how a fictional 14th-century Arabic poem by Ibn al-Wardi shaped centuries of myths about the Black Death's rapid spread across Asia. Mistaken for a factual account, the work influenced even modern scientific theories on the plague's path. A new study reveals its literary origins and cultural significance.
In 1348 or 1349, poet and historian Ibn al-Wardi wrote a maqāma—a rhyming Arabic literary form featuring a trickster figure—in Aleppo. This imaginative piece personified the plague as a mischievous wanderer embarking on a 15-year journey, starting beyond China, through India, Central Asia, and Persia, before reaching the Black Sea, Mediterranean, Egypt, and the Levant. Intended as creative fiction, it was later quoted in Ibn al-Wardi's historical writings, leading readers to treat it as an eyewitness record of the Black Death's transmission.
The confusion arose in the 15th century, as Arab chroniclers and subsequent European historians interpreted the maqāma literally. This narrative fueled the 'Quick Transit Theory,' suggesting the plague bacterium traveled over 3,000 miles from Kyrgyzstan to the Black and Mediterranean seas in less than a decade, sparking the pandemic that ravaged Western Eurasia and North Africa from 1347 to 1350. However, modern genetic evidence points to a Central Asian origin, and the new study by researchers Muhammed Omar and Nahyan Fancy questions the feasibility of such swift spread.
Professor Fancy, a historian of Islamic medicine at the University of Exeter, stated: "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." He added that Ibn al-Wardi's Risāla remains unsubstantiated by other contemporary chronicles and should not be taken literally.
The maqāma genre, emerging in the late 10th century and popular among 14th-century Mamluk writers, served as a performative coping mechanism for catastrophe. Ibn al-Wardi's work was one of at least three plague-themed maqāmas from 1348-49. Recognizing its fictional nature shifts focus to earlier outbreaks, like those in Damascus in 1258 and Kaifeng in 1232-33.
Fancy noted: "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." While not providing accurate epidemiological details, such texts illuminate medieval responses to crisis.