Introduction

The new religion of Islam emerged during the course of the First Plague Pandemic. Also referred to as the Justinianic Plague after the Byzantine Emperor Justinian (r. 527–65), in whose reign the plague pandemic is traditionally assumed to have begun (541), the origins of this significant disease episode are being studied anew. Historians, chief amongst them Lawrence Conrad, have examined the impact of this first pandemic on the burgeoning Islamic polity in Western Asia and North Africa, as well as on Islamic religious thought over the subsequent centuries. Although plague was discussed often in literary works throughout the Abbasid period (750–1258), scholars have generally concurred with Conrad’s judgement that the end of the First Pandemic coincided with the Abbasid dynasty’s rise in 750.

Historians also have generally believed that the Second Pandemic, whose first wave is known as the Black Death, began in the 1330s in Central Asia, arrived in Eastern Mediterranean societies in the late 1340s and lasted until the eighteenth century in Western Europe (and the nineteenth century in Islamic Mediterranean societies). However, as Monica Green has argued, recent genomic studies of the plague bacillus Yersinia pestis using archaeological DNA samples (primarily from Europe, but also Kyrgyzstan and Russia) have allowed historians to revisit historical literary sources and to expand both the geography and chronology of past plague pandemics.

This chapter builds upon Green’s invitation to revisit our historical sources in light of the new genomic evidence, much as Ann Carmichael and Robert Hymes have done for Italian and Chinese sources, respectively. I focus here on Arabic medical works from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, particularly the medical commentary corpus. Sustained, at times detailed, discussions of plague in the commentaries and other medical works suggest the distinct possibility that Islamic societies in Western Eurasia continued to witness plague outbreaks well into the tenth century. Yet their derivative writing suggests that physicians from Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran did not have much direct experience with the disease. Medical commentaries composed after the 1240s, however, demonstrate significant changes in how plague was characterised, suggesting that by this era some Islamic physicians working in these regions were encountering or learning about plague outbreaks during their lifetimes.