April – July 1348
Gaza, Jerusalem and Damascus, April – July 1348
From Egypt the plague travels along the coast road into Syria, which the Mamluk sultans rule from Cairo. It reaches Gaza in April or May 1348, and from there it spreads to Jerusalem and inland to Damascus and the towns on the road north.
Ibn Battuta, the traveller from Tangier, is on his way home after more than twenty years of travel. At Aleppo in June 1348 he hears that the plague has broken out at Gaza and that more than a thousand people are dying there each day. At Homs about three hundred die on the day he arrives. He reaches Damascus in July, when the plague there is at its worst, with up to 2,400 deaths a day by his account. The governor, Arghun Shah, orders three days of fasting. On the last night the people fill the Umayyad Mosque to pray, and on Friday morning they walk out together to the Mosque of the Footprints south of the city. Ibn Battuta wrote that “the Jews came with their Book of the Law and the Christians with their Gospel, their women and children with them.” Later that year he passes through Gaza and finds most of the town deserted. The judge tells him that only a quarter of its eighty notaries are still alive.
At Aleppo the scholar and poet Ibn al-Wardi writes an essay on the plague while it rages. He traces it from China and India through Persia, the Crimea and Egypt to Gaza, Jerusalem and Damascus. Like the jurists of his time, he calls it a martyrdom for the Muslims who die and a punishment for unbelievers. He dies of it at Aleppo on 18 March 1349. Michael Dols, the historian of the plague in the Middle East, translated the essay into English in 1974.
The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, where the people prayed through the night before the procession of July 1348Wikimedia Commons, Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0
Sources
- Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325–1354, trans. H. A. R. Gibb (1929).
- Ibn al-Wardi, Risalat al-naba’ ‘an al-waba’, trans. Michael W. Dols, in Near Eastern Numismatics, Iconography, Epigraphy and History, ed. Dickran K. Kouymjian (1974), 443–455.
- Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (1977).
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