Ancient Arabic Tale May Have Sparked Centuries of Black Death Myths

For more than six centuries, historians have repeated a chilling story of the Black Death racing across Asia along the Silk Route. But according to new research from the University of Exeter, that story may trace back to a single misunderstood poem, not to historical evidence.

In a study published in the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, researchers show that a fourteenth-century Arabic literary tale, or maqama, written by Ibn al-Wardi in Aleppo during the 1348–1349 plague, was later mistaken for a factual account of how the disease spread from China to Europe. The poem’s central character, a personified Plague acting as a roving trickster, has been read literally for centuries, fueling what the authors call the “Quick Transit Theory” of plague transmission across Eurasia.

The Tale That Traveled Too Far

The new study, by PhD candidate Muhammed Omar and historian of Islamic medicine Nahyan Fancy, argues that this single work sits “in the center of a spider’s web” of later misconceptions. Written in rhymed prose, Ibn al-Wardi’s tale describes the Plague as a wandering destroyer that sweeps through China, India, Central Asia, and Persia before reaching the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Later readers, unaware that this was a common fictional trope, treated it as a chronicle.

“All roads to the factually incorrect description of the spread of the plague lead back to this one text,” said Professor Fancy. “It should not be taken literally.”

By the fifteenth century, both Arab and European historians had adopted this allegorical story as evidence of a real east-to-west contagion. Even some modern geneticists, the authors note, have drawn upon the same source to justify compressed timelines for the movement of Yersinia pestis from Central Asia to the Mediterranean in under a decade.

Yet Omar and Fancy found that Ibn al-Wardi’s Risala was one of at least three plague-themed maqamas written around the same time in the Mamluk world, including one by the Damascene writer al-Safadi. All depict the plague as a cunning visitor who deceives humanity—a device meant to convey moral and spiritual reflection, not medical reportage.

Art As Coping During Catastrophe

The researchers argue that recognizing these texts as literary rather than historical allows scholars to ask different questions about the lived experience of plague. What did people turn to when confronted with mass mortality? How did art and narrative become tools of survival?

“These writings can help us understand how creativity may have been a way to exercise some control and served as a coping mechanism,” Professor Fancy said. “They may not tell us how the plague spread, but they tell us how people lived with this awful crisis.”

The maqama form itself—a stylized genre often performed aloud in one sitting, flourished in medieval Islamic culture as a medium for satire, moral instruction, and resilience. By reframing Ibn al-Wardi’s tale in this context, the Exeter team not only corrects a centuries-old misreading but also highlights how literature shaped historical memory of one of humanity’s darkest pandemics.

The study ultimately frees historians to reexamine earlier, region-specific plague outbreaks such as those in Damascus (1258) and Kaifeng (1232–1233), rather than treating the fourteenth-century pandemic as an overnight Eurasian explosion.

Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies: 10.5617/jais.12790