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Middle East and Egypt (14th – mid-15th c.)Nature and disasters

Black Death in Cairo and Damascus

In the autumn of 1347 a ship from Constantinople brought the plague to Alexandria. In 1348 it spread through Egypt and on to Gaza, Damascus and Aleppo, and in Cairo, then the largest city of the Mediterranean world, it raged through the autumn and winter of 1348–1349; by modern estimates a third or more of the city’s inhabitants died.

Date
1347–1349year known · duration: ≈ 2 years
Place
Cairotoday: Cairo, Egypt · Middle East and Egypt
Participants
Mamluk Sultanate, Ibn Battuta
Threads
Middle East and Egypt (14th – mid-15th c.)
Also known as
Black Death in the Middle East; Black Death in Egypt; Plague of 1348; Чума в Каире; Чума в Дамаске; Великий мор 1348 года

The epidemic was part of the Black Death that had reached the Black Sea from Central Asia. From Alexandria it spread over northern Egypt in the spring of 1348, reached Gaza by April–May, Damascus by July and Aleppo by the autumn, and pilgrims carried it to Mecca. Ibn Battuta, travelling home from India and China, crossed Syria and Egypt in the middle of the epidemic: in late July 1348 he saw the people of Damascus, after fasting for three days, walk out of the city — the Jews with the Torah and the Christians with the Gospel among them — to pray at the Mosque of the Footprints. His figures, partly hearsay, differ from one passage of his book to another: up to 2,400 deaths a day in Damascus, and in Cairo, by hearsay, 21,000 or 24,000 a day. Modern estimates put the death toll in Cairo at about 200,000, a third of its population.

The plague returned again and again over the following century and a half. The depopulated countryside could not maintain the canals and dykes, harvests fell and so did the revenues of the Mamluk state; at the same time the property of many who died without heirs passed to the treasury, and the historian Howayda al-Harithy links this windfall to the building of the great mosque-madrasa of Sultan Hasan in the 1350s. In the Maghrib the same pestilence carried off the parents of the young Ibn Khaldun in Tunis.

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Connections

Causes and preconditions

Part of

  • The Black Death1346–1353 · Western and Central EuropeThe same pandemic reached Alexandria in the autumn of 1347 and devastated Egypt and Syria in 1348–1349

Related events

  • The travels of Ibn Battuta14 June 1325 – between January and February 1354 · AfricaIn 1348 Ibn Battuta witnessed the plague in Syria and Egypt and the procession of prayer in Damascus
  • Building of the Mosque-Madrasa of Sultan Hasan1356–1363 · Middle East and EgyptAccording to the historian Howayda al-Harithy, the building was financed largely from the property of plague victims who had left no heirs
  • Ibn Khaldun writes the Muqaddimah1377 · AfricaThe plague that struck Cairo and Damascus also killed Ibn Khaldun’s parents in Tunis; in the Muqaddimah he describes how it devastated the East and the West. From the end of 1382 he lived in Egypt

Same participants

Same place

Adjacent events in the thread

Meanwhile in the world

Other regions, within a year of this event

Western and Central Europe

Eastern Europe

Balkans and Anatolia

Africa

Central and Northern Asia

South Asia

East Asia

Southeast Asia and Oceania

North America

Latin America

The same period

134714th century

Sources

  1. Wikipedia (English): Black Death in the Middle East
  2. Wikipedia (English): Black Death
  3. Wikipedia (Russian): Чёрная смерть
  4. Ibn Battuta. Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325–1354 / Transl. H. A. R. Gibb. — London: Routledge, 1929. — P. 68–69, 304–305
  5. Dols M. W. The Black Death in the Middle East. — Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
  6. Wikidata: Q92159855