Key finding: A University of Exeter study shows that a 14th‑century maqāma by Ibn al‑Wardi was later misread as literal history and helped popularize the “Quick Transit” idea that the Black Death rapidly moved from China to the Black Sea. Recent palaeogenetic evidence points to a more complex origin near central Asia. The authors urge historians to revisit other regional outbreaks (Damascus 1258; Kaifeng 1232–33) and to treat literary texts as cultural testimony rather than straightforward chronicles.
How a 14th‑Century Maqāma Warped the History of the Black Death
Key finding: A University of Exeter study shows that a 14th‑century maqāma by Ibn al‑Wardi was later misread as literal history and helped popularize the “Quick Transit” idea that the Black Death rapidly moved from China to the Black Sea. Recent palaeogenetic evidence points to a more complex origin near central Asia. The authors urge historians to revisit other regional outbreaks (Damascus 1258; Kaifeng 1232–33) and to treat literary texts as cultural testimony rather than straightforward chronicles.
02:30, 06.11.2025Culture
How a 14th‑Century Tale Skewed Our View of the Black Death
A new study by historians at the University of Exeter, published in the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, argues that a single 14th‑century literary text helped create a persistent — but misleading — narrative about how the Black Death spread across Eurasia.
From literary form to historical fact
The text at the center of this misconception is Risālat al‑nabaʾ ʿan al‑wabāʾ (“An Essay on the Report of the Pestilence”), a maqāma composed around 1348 CE by the poet‑historian Ibn al‑Wardi in Aleppo. The maqāma is a hybrid prose‑poetry genre built around the comic and often moralizing exploits of a wandering trickster. Ibn al‑Wardi’s tale follows a meddlesome itinerant on a 15‑year journey that begins beyond China, moves through China, India, central Asia and Persia, and ends at the Black Sea and Mediterranean.
How fiction became a historical shortcut
By the 15th century, later Arabic and European chroniclers began treating Ibn al‑Wardi’s fictional narrative as literal reportage. The Exeter study’s authors argue that this single maqāma was read as evidence that the pandemic swept westward from China to the Black Sea within a decade — the so‑called “Quick Transit Theory.” In reality, that reading is not supported by contemporaneous accounts or by genetic data.
Nahyan Fancy, a University of Exeter historian and a co‑author of the study, notes: “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 center of a spider’s web of the myths about how the Black Death moved across the region.”
Reassessing origins and routes
Recent palaeogenetic research has shifted the pandemic’s likely origin closer to central Asia, rather than exclusively within China, and suggests more complex, slower patterns of spread than the Quick Transit model implies. The Exeter team recommends that historians revisit other documented regional outbreaks — for example, the epidemic in Damascus (1258 CE) and the Kaifeng outbreak in China (1232–33) — as part of a more nuanced reconstruction of plague dynamics.
Why the maqāma still matters
The study does not dismiss the literary or cultural value of Ibn al‑Wardi’s maqāma. On the contrary, these texts illuminate how contemporaries interpreted and coped with catastrophic mortality. As Fancy observes, creative expression — whether storytelling, cooking, or art — can serve as a way to exert control and process grief during mass death, a pattern echoed in responses to the COVID‑19 pandemic.
Takeaway: Literary genres can shape historical narratives, sometimes misleading scholars when fiction is read as fact. Reexamining primary sources in their literary and cultural contexts helps build a more accurate picture of past pandemics.