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Centuries before questionable COVID-19 information began rippling through social media, another inaccurate account of infectious disease sparked an early spread of misinformation—a myth that still lingers, in clever prose, today. A new look at this fable helps to paint a more accurate picture of the deadliest pandemic in written history, a new paper claims.
Between 1348 and 1349, Syrian poet and historian Ibn al-Wardī spun a rhyming yarn concerning the spread of the Black Death called Risālat al-nabaʾʿan al-wabāʾ or “An Essay on the Report of the Pestilence.” In this tale, the plague is portrayed as a traveling trickster that zipped from an unidentified “land of darkness” to China to the Mediterranean region in merely 15 years. This timeline and precise path have been subject to much debate.
But 15th-century scholars took al-Wardī’s story quite literally. This led to a persisting theory that the Black Death that killed so many people in the Middle East and Europe between 1347 and 1350 resulted from relatively rapid disease spread—roughly a decade—over thousands of miles via traders. All in all, the pandemic killed some 50 million people in Europe and the Mediterranean between 1346 and 1353.
Read more: “Why Medieval Cats Approved of the Plague”
But al-Wardī never intended to provide a literal historical account, as argued in a paper recently published in the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies. His story is an example of a maqāma, or “a literary tale in rhymed prose that often features an itinerant trickster.” al-Wardīalso quoted snippets of this maqāma in his historical research, sowing plenty of confusion about the pace of this plague’s spread.
“All roads to the factually incorrect description of the spread of the plague lead back to this one text,” said Nahyan Fancy, a historian of Islamic medicine from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, in a statement. “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.”
According to more recent analysis of DNA from human remains, the strain of bubonic plague behind Black Death might have emerged from one that spread in what’s now Kyrgyzstan—adding weight to the theory that the pathogen emerged in Central Asia. Still, the timeline implied by al-Wardī’s still doesn’t add up when weighing the collective evidence, Fancy and his co-author Muhammed Omar, a Ph.D. candidate in Arab and Islamic Studies, write: “The 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 makes little historical or biological sense.”
Still, Fancy and Omar note that mythical tales like al-Wardī’s offer valuable insights—they divulge how people took up creative pursuits to cope with the unfolding tragedy of the Black Death—even if some of them may have been a little loose with the facts. 
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Lead image: Wikimedia Commons
