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Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258) – CORRIGENDUM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2023

Nahyan Fancy  and
Monica H. Green
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Abstract

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Keywords

Yersinia pestisHistorical chroniclesIslamic medicineMiasmatic theoryMongol Empirecorrigendum
Type
Corrigendum
Information
Medical History , Volume 66 , Issue 3 , July 2022 , pp. 285
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

The authors wish to correct an error on page 176 in Volume 65, Issue 2 produced due to a misinterpretation of a passage in Ibn Shākir al-Kutubī’s chronicle. The authors missed the fact that, in the translated passage on the plague outbreaks in Samarqand and central Asia cited in footnote 96, Ibn Shākir was not referring to the plague outbreaks of 1349 but rather was quoting from the earlier work of Sibṭ ibn al-Jawzī (d. 1256) regarding the plague outbreak of 1057 CE. The sentence corresponding to footnote 96 and the footnote itself should be amended as follows:

Ibn al-Wardī’s widely influential account (early 1349) of plague afflicting virtually all parts of Asia initiated a narrative of a fast, westward movement of plague from Central Asia to the Black Sea in the fourteenth century that has extended up to the present day.Footnote 96

Footnotes

96 In his aforementioned chronicle, the scrupulous researcher Ibn Shākir does not mention outbreaks in Central Asia while documenting the plague of 1348–1349. However, he does compare the latter to the earlier, devastating plague outbreaks of 1057–1058 by quoting passages from Sibṭ ibn al-Jawzī’s (d. 1256), Mirʾāt al-zamān fī tārīkh al-aʿyān (The Mirror of the Age in the History of the Famous), that record deaths in Central Asia at that time: “No one knows how many died in the Eastern land but it is said that, in Samarqand, from the first of Shawwal [December 6, 1057] till the end of Dhī al-Qaʿda [February 1, 1058] 236,000 funerals were counted leaving its gates. This epidemic disease [wabāʾ] arrived from Turkestan, the land of the infidels, then went from there to Balasaghun, Kashgar, Altanās (?), Ferghana, and these surroundings’; Ibn Shākir al-Kutubī, ʿUyūn al-Tawārīkh, Istanbul, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi, MS Ahmet III 2922, vol. 24, fol. 95a; and Sibṭ ibn al-Jawzī, Mirʾāt al-zamān fī tārīkh al-aʿyān (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2013), vol. 19, 14. We discovered this text after Tarek Sabraa and Stuart Borsch alerted us to a reference to 236,000 deaths in Samarqand in an unpublished manuscript of the chronicle of al-ʿAynī (1360–1451).

References

Fancy, Nahyan and Green, Monica H.. Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258). Medical History. Published by Cambridge University Press, 30 March 2021. https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2021.3.Google Scholar