the black death in early ottoman territories - Bilkent University

the disease. 31 During this outbreak, it was also established that the disease was
carried by rats (and as was described above, a number of other rodents). The
Chinese pandemic was the third and until today the last in recorded history and
was the first to reach the American continent. The previous pandemics were
confined to the Asian, European and African continents.
The first pandemic on record was the Justinianic plague of 542, named
after the Byzantine emperor during whose reign the epidemic occurred and who
himself conctracted and survived the disease. 32 The pandemic lingered on with
periodical outbreaks until it vanished from the records in the mid-eighth century. 33
As its appearance coincided with the emergence of Islam, the disease was
frequently mentioned and commented upon by the Prophet and his followers. This
resulted in an Islamic tradition of the writing of plague treatises, which were
studied among others by Dols 34 .
The second plague pandemic, also called the Black Death, ravaged Europe
and the Middle East from 1347 onwards and its effect would be felt in the Ottoman
Empire until the middle of the 19th century. Although this brief enumeration
creates the impression that the disease disappeared completely between the two
first pandemics, it did not. Records exist of outbreaks in Iran, Iraq and the Levant 35
31 Ludwik Gross, "How the plague bacillus and its transmission through fleas were discovered:
Reminiscences from my years at the Pasteur Institute", in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 92: (1995)
7609-7611.
32 For a detailed discussion of the Justinianic plague, see Dionysios Ch. Stathakopoulos. Famine
and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire: A Systematic Survey of Subsistence
Crises and Epidemics. Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs. Vol.9. Burlington:
Ashgate, 2004, 110-154.
33 For Constantinople, Biraben lists epidemics for the years 542-543-544 558, 573-574, 599, 618,
640, 697, 700, 717 and 747. See Jean-Noël Biraben. Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les
pays européens et méditerranéens. Vol. I, Paris, La Haye: éd. Mouton, 1975, 35-36. Dols
enumerates a similar series of outbreaks in the Middle East that also ends in the mid-eighth century.
Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East, 305-314.
34 Arabic plague treatises written after the Black Death often contained a chronology of important
plague outbreaks, as documented by Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East, 373-374. The
plague treatises were a literary tradition that used the Hadith literature as source.
35 Hirst, The Conquest of Plague, 12.
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