History Extra June 2026

On an autumn day in 1347, a ship docked in the ancient Egyptian harbour of Alexandria, gateway to the remarkable Islamic realm that today we know as the Mamluk Sultanate. It had set sail, probably from the Black Sea, carrying 32 merchants, a large crew and hundreds of slaves destined for sale in Egypt. But at some point during that voyage, a strange and merciless disease swept through the vessel. Some on board were tortured by grotesque swellings and tumours, while others coughed up torrents of blood. By the time the ship made landfall, only four merchants, one slave and perhaps 30 sailors remained alive – and they all died in the port within a matter of days.

The ship’s arrival in Alexandria marked the outbreak there of the lethal plague now known to history as the Black Death. We tend to think of this 14th-century pandemic as a European phenomenon, but the disease also spread far beyond the boundaries of Catholic Christendom, travelling along the well-established Mediterranean trade routes that linked east and west.

Indeed, the Black Death arrived in Egypt at about the same time it landed in Sicily, and was arguably at its most destructive in the Muslim world of north Africa and the Near and Middle East. Here, the seemingly invincible Mamluk Sultanate – the force that had turned back the Mongol horde and crushed the crusaders – was crippled by plague and eventually overrun by the Ottomans.

Punishment or reward

The disease’s devastating impact within the Mamluk state can in part be explained by orthodox Islamic theology, derived from earlier experience of seventh-century plague outbreaks. Muslims believed that plague was a gift from God, because it was thought that this was the view espoused by the Prophet Muhammad. When noted Syrian poet and scholar Ibn al-Wardi described how the Black Death struck his home city of Aleppo in June 1348, he explained that this lethal malady was inflicted as a dreadful “punishment and a rebuke” for non-Muslims, but ought to be seen as “a martyrdom and a reward” by the faithful.

According to the Islamic tenets repeated by Ibn al-Wardi, plague was not actually contagious. Rather, those afflicted were selected by Allah, and fleeing pestilential outbreaks or travelling into areas affected by the disease was strictly prohibited. Despite witnessing first-hand how plague “frightened and killed” his city’s populace, likening its attacks to those of a sudden deadly arrow or a ravenous lion, the poet held firm to these religious beliefs. But though he survived nine dreadful months of the pandemic, the disease ultimately claimed his life on 18 March 1349.

According to Islamic tenets, plague was not contagious: those afflicted were selected by Allah

Islamic dogma regarding plague stood in stark contrast to attitudes demonstrated in much of medieval Europe and beyond, where many fled outbreaks – and it had profound consequences for the progress of the Black Death throughout the Muslim world.

In European cities such as London, Florence and Paris, it is thought that around 50 per cent of the population perished during the pandemic. In Damascus and Cairo, the Mamluk Sultanate’s largest population centres, that figure may well have been closer to 80 per cent. In the former, home to a population of perhaps 80,000 before the Black Death, we are told that, when fatalities peaked in the autumn and early winter of 1348–49, “the plague sat like a king on a throne… killing daily 1,000 or more and decimating the population”. According to one Muslim chronicler, the Damascenes were “terrified by the multitude of corpses”. As a result, “people stopped asking the administration for permission to bury their dead, and bodies were abandoned in gardens and on the roads.”

The same calamitous disaster also played out in Egypt – though in the Mamluk capital of Cairo, home to some 500,000 people, the situation was even ghastlier. During that terrible winter of 1348–49, vast numbers of Cairenes succumbed to the Black Death. As one contemporary noted: “The pestilence increased to the point where it was impossible to count the dead,” with whole households perishing “in one night or two… each individual [believing] that he was going to die in this same way.”

At the height of the pandemic, in December 1348 and January 1349, perhaps 20,000 people died each day in that city alone. “Cairo [became] an abandoned desert [with] no one… walking along the streets,” we are told. Such was the despair that “you could not pass any house without being sickened by the howling”. In all, probably well in excess of 250,000 lives were lost there, though the exact figure cannot be determined.

As one Muslim observer conceded: “This epidemic crossed the bounds of understanding, and it is impossible to draw up a statistic.” Another remarked simply that “the plague destroyed mankind in Cairo”.

Collapse of normality

The unprecedented mass mortality witnessed during the Black Death left many medieval communities struggling to bury their dead. In Venice, for example, four islands were designated as emergency burial grounds, while in London two large new cemeteries were created just outside the city walls.

We know from modern excavations of these European sites that, in spite of the crisis, the bodies interred there were, for the most part, treated with considerable care. Rather than thrown in, they were lowered into their graves, presumably with ropes, and orientated east to west, as was the Christian custom. In Cairo, by contrast, the sheer number of corpses seems to have overwhelmed the Mamluk regime, prompting the wholesale collapse of normative burial customs.

Muslim chroniclers recorded that the city’s mosques were soon filled with the bodies of the dead and the dying. By the winter of 1348–49, makeshift benches for washing the dead, as Islamic tradition demanded, had to be fashioned out of any available material. Bodies were routinely carried on “[wooden] planks, ladders or doors” rather than funeral biers (even though the city apparently had 1,400 of these on hand), sometimes with “two or three bodies on a single stretcher or a single plank”. The surge in mortality drove up charges for burials to exorbitant levels, with porters demanding six silver dirhams for carrying a body, and grave diggers charging 50 dirhams – though we are told that “most of these people then died without ever having taken any profit from their gains”.

In early January 1349, bodies reportedly began “accumulating in the road and in the markets”, and “teams were appointed to carry out burials, [while] pious persons installed themselves permanently in various places of prayer in Cairo… to recite funeral orations”. With “cadavers piling up in heaps on the public highway”, and the city’s main cemeteries already filled to capacity, authorities had no choice but to break Islamic burial customs and begin using mass graves. As one chronicler grimly observed: “We dug pits into which we threw 30, 40 corpses, or even more.”

Although Islam’s staunch rejection of the concept of contagion and its prohibition on flight may have exacerbated the death toll, these strictures did mean that the Muslim world seemingly avoided the horrifying social fragmentation witnessed in Christian Europe. In that region, many contemporaries recorded that plague victims were often abandoned by physicians, friends, neighbours, even family members, because fear of infection was so rife.

One chronicler grimly observed: “We dug pits into which we threw 30, 40 corpses, or even more”

“No doctor will visit the sick, not even if he were to be given everything the sick man owns,” noted one eyewitness in the city of Avignon in April 1348. “Nor will the father visit the son, the mother the daughter, the brother the brother, the son the father, the friend the friend, the acquaintance the acquaintance, nor anyone a blood relation – unless, that is, they wished to die suddenly along with them, or to follow them at once.”

No similar phenomenon was reported in the Mamluk realms. Before his demise, Ibn al-Wardi did chide his fellow Aleppan citizens: “If you see many [funeral] biers and their carriers, and hear in every quarter of Aleppo the announcements of death and cries, you run from them and refuse to stay with them.” But there is no evidence to suggest that Muslims struck down by the Black Death were routinely neglected.

Violent persecution

The Islamic world also appears to have avoided succumbing to the violent persecution of religious minorities. In Catholic Europe, tens of thousands of Jews were executed during the pandemic on the entirely spurious grounds that they had somehow caused the mass mortality by poisoning water sources. In contrast, Christians and Jews living under Muslim rule in the Levant appear to have experienced no maltreatment during the crisis. Indeed, when plague first hit Damascus, its populace came together in an extraordinary act of collective multifaith worship.

Having purged their bodies with a three-day fast, Damascenes – young and old, male and female – crowded into the great Umayyad Mosque on the night of Thursday 24 July. According to an eyewitness, Muslims gathered alongside “Jews with their Book of Law and Christians with their gospel” to spend an entire night engaged in prayer. At dawn, they all processed, barefoot and weeping, some 2 miles south to the Mosque of the Footprints. There, before the impressions supposedly left by the feet of Moses and Muhammad, they sought through “supplication and invocation” to invoke “the favour of God through his Books and His Prophets”.

Annihilation and dissolution

Although the Muslim world seems to have escaped some of the Black Death’s worst immediate effects in terms of social cohesion, it struggled to adapt to the plague’s longerterm consequences.

Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), the pre-eminent Muslim historian of the Middle Ages, was just a teenage boy when the Black Death ravaged his home in Tunis, killing both of his parents. He went on to become a revered intellectual in later life, developing a new theoretical framework for the study of human history that highlighted the essential role of lethal plagues in the rise and fall of civilisations. According to Ibn Khaldun, mankind “approached the point of annihilation and dissolution” during the pandemic, and those who survived found the “entire inhabited world changed”.

The shattering impact of the scourge was only accentuated when it began to recur. It struck much of the medieval world again in the early 1360s, then reemerged cyclically every 10 to 15 years for centuries to come in what scholars now term the Second Plague Pandemic. England was hit at least another 16 times before the end of the 15th century and, by the year of its collapse in 1517, the Mamluk Sultanate had endured 43 outbreaks. These successive epidemics were generally shorter-lived and less virulent than the Black Death, but they nonetheless made the disease a lethal and destabilising fact of life, helping to ensure that the overall population continued to dwindle for the next five generations.

The Christian west struggled through a slow, often painful period of adaptation to this new age of plague, reshaping systems of settlement, social organisation and agricultural exploitation. More importantly still, western society gradually learned how to manage outbreaks. Avoiding unnecessarily close contact with the afflicted came to be widely recommended, and governing administrations also began to develop more effective strategies for tackling the disease.

Global catastrophe Listen to Thomas Asbridge discuss the terrible events of the mid-14th century on our new Black Death Sunday Series:

In July 1377, the Republic of Ragusa, on the Dalmatian coast of what’s now southern Croatia, imposed the first recorded regulations designed to curtail the disease’s ability to spread via trade routes. These forced all merchants arriving from plague-affected regions to undergo a 30-day period of isolation, together with their goods and ships, before entering the city. Venice soon followed suit, and by 1385 the city had extended the official isolation period to 40 days. It is from the Italian for this timespan – quaranta giorni – that the word quarantine was derived.

The palliative effect of these new approaches was neither immediate nor universal, and fresh outbreaks still brought spells of shocking mass mortality in Europe. However, the frequency and lethality of these recurrences did begin to decline at the end of the 15th century, with even the worst episodes killing only between 10 and 15 per cent of the population. From that time on, overall population levels slowly started to recover.

Failure to adapt

Sadly, no similar process of adjustment was set in train in the Muslim world. Instead, theologians held firm to the orthodox Islamic tenets regarding plague. In the 1440s, the eminent Egyptian writer Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani published an influential treatise entitled Merits of the Plague, again refuting the notion of contagion and forbidding flight – despite himself losing three daughters to the disease. As a result, Muslim polities such as the Mamluk Sultanate continued to be assailed by what one eyewitness described as “the horror of the plague”.

In all, the disease ravaged that realm in 60 out of 170 years, with 19 severe waves hammering Egypt. The most devastating outbreak, from autumn 1429 to spring 1430, came to be known as “the Great Extinction” and is thought to have killed around 45 per cent of Cairo’s population. A further 80,000 perished in the plague of 1460.

These repeated episodes of mass mortality crushed any prospect of population recovery, and compromised the Mamluks’ ability to wage war. Worse still, they eroded the regime’s ability to manage and maintain the exceptionally advanced but also fragile irrigation system that had for centuries been used to harness the Nile’s annual flood. When this complex system broke down, the empire’s ability to farm the Nile Delta, its agricultural heartland, faltered and a critical source of Mamluk wealth began to dry up.

During the Black Death, mankind “approached the point of annihilation and dissolution”

By the end of the 15th century, the oncemighty Mamluk Sultanate had entered a terminal spiral of decay. It soon fell prey to another expansionist Muslim power – the Ottoman Turks, whose nomadic lifestyle seems to have afforded them some protection during the initial emergence and spread of the Black Death.

The Ottomans proved better able to protect their military forces, moving troops out of plague-affected regions during some of the worst outbreaks of the 15th century. And in 1516, Ottoman forces invaded Mamluk Syria, going on to conquer Egypt the following year. The fearsome Islamic polity that had dominated the eastern Mediterranean for more than 250 years had come to an end – brought to its knees, at least in part, by the ravages of the Black Death and the Second Plague Pandemic.

Thomas Asbridge is a reader in medieval history at Queen Mary University of London. His new book is The Black Death: A Global History (Allen Lane, 2026)