As the Black Death approached the eastern Mediterranean in 1348, a Syrian poet composed a short story about a wandering trickster who brought death from one location to another. The story was intended as entertainment inspired by the crisis, not as a factual report. However, over time, this tale influenced how later scholars understood and described the plague's spread across Asia.
Modern genetic research suggests the Black Death started in Central Asia and likely spread through rodents in the highlands. Historians still debate how the disease moved west: one common idea, called the Quick Transit Theory, says the plague traveled from Kyrgyzstan to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean in less than 10 years.
The recent study argues that the rapid spread of disease in this theory is based more on a misunderstanding of literary sources than on actual scientific or historical evidence.
At the center of this confusion is Ibn al-Wardi's Risāla, a short narrative poem also known as a maqāma. In medieval Islamic tradition, maqāmas were a well-known genre of rhymed prose that typically followed a clever traveler or trickster moving from city to city.
In his plague-themed story, Ibn al-Wardi describes the disease as a mischievous traveler moving through multiple regions over a 15-year journey. The story starts in a region beyond China, then moves through India, Central Asia, and Persia before arriving at the Black Sea and spreading into the Mediterranean. Ibn al-Wardi intended this sequence as an allegory, not a literal record of the plague's spread.
Muhammed Omar, a PhD researcher at the University of Exeter, and his co-author Nahyan Fancy, a historian of Islamic medicine, traced how this fictional journey evolved into "evidence" over several generations.
The researchers believe that this confusion began when Ibn al-Wardi later used lines from his own maqāma in a different historical text. Other writers later mistook the poem for a factual account because the same information appeared multiple times in other documents. By the fifteenth century, Arab historians treated the maqāma's list of places as the real path of the plague. European scholars later accepted this idea, believing the list was based on real testimony rather than one literary source.
Over time, this idea became a widely accepted model for how the plague spread across Asia. Omar and Fancy point out that records, burial lists, and eyewitness accounts from the period do not represent such a rapid spread of disease.
"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," Professor Fancy explained.
The authors argue that the Quick Transit Theory depends too much on a single, misinterpreted source. Recognizing the maqāma as a work of fiction shifts the historical context. Rather than a rapid spread across the continent, the available evidence suggests a slower progression of the plague, with outbreaks emerging in different regions at different times, often along trade routes.
Reframing the context of this story also lets historians examine earlier epidemics before the infamous Black Death. Omar and Fancy cite outbreaks in Damascus in 1258 and in Kaifeng between 1232 and 1233 as examples of events that are frequently overlooked but may help explain how communities remembered disease and incorporated those memories into later stories.
The researchers stress that clarifying the historical record does not diminish Ibn al-Wardi's writing. Instead, it shows how important these stories were to people facing disaster. The trickster in Risāla reflects a society grappling with uncertainty, loss, and fear.
"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," stated Professor Fancy.
"These maqāmas may not give us accurate information about how the Black Death spread," Fancy added. "But the texts are phenomenal because they help us see how people at the time were living with this awful crisis."