Medieval Medical Misinformation Persists

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CLong before dubious information about COVID-19 began circulating on social media, another inaccurate narrative about infectious diseases sparked an early spread of misinformation — a myth that persists to this day, in clever prose. A new look at this fable allows us to paint a more precise picture of the deadliest pandemic in recorded history, says a new article.

Between 1348 and 1349, the Syrian poet and historian Ibn al-Wardī told a rhyming story about the spread of the Black Death called Risālat al-nabaʾʿan al-wabāʾ or “An Essay on the Report of the Plague.” In this tale, the plague is depicted as a traveling trickster who left an unidentified “land of darkness” to travel to China and the Mediterranean region in just 15 years. This precise timeline and path has been the subject of much debate.

But 15th-century scholars took al-Wardī’s story literally. This led to a persistent theory that the Black Death that killed so many people in the Middle East and Europe between 1347 and 1350 resulted from a relatively rapid spread of the disease – about a decade – over thousands of miles via traders. In total, the pandemic killed some 50 million people in Europe and the Mediterranean between 1346 and 1353.

Read more: »Why did medieval cats resist the plague»

But al-Wardī never intended to provide a literal historical account, as a recently published article in the Journal of Arab and Islamic Studies. His story is an example of maqāmaor “a literary tale in rhyming prose that often features a traveling trickster.” al-Wardī also cited extracts from this maqāma in his historical research, sowing much confusion about the rate of spread of this scourge.

“All paths leading to a factually incorrect description of the spread of the plague point back to this one text,” Nahyan Fancy, a historian of Islamic medicine at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. “It’s like he’s at the center of a spider’s web of myths about how the Black Death spread through the region.”

According to a more recent analysis of DNA from human remains, the strain of bubonic plague that caused the Black Death may have come from a strain that spread in what is now Kyrgyzstan, adding weight to the theory that the pathogen emerged in Central Asia. Yet the timeline implied by al-Wardī still does not match the assessment of the collective evidence, Fancy and his co-author Muhammed Omar, a Ph.D. candidate in Arabic and Islamic Studies, write: “The idea that a lineage of this bacteria moved more than 3,000 miles overland in a few years and became sufficiently established to cause the devastating Black Death in the Middle East and Europe makes little historical or biological sense. »

Nonetheless, Fancy and Omar note that mythical tales like al-Wardī’s offer valuable insights: they reveal how people engaged in creative activities to cope with the unfolding tragedy of the Black Death, even if some of them may have been a little vague with the facts.

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Main image: Wikimedia Commons

• Molly Glick

  Published on November 5, 2025

  Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.