Plague of Amwas

The epidemic is named after Amwas, the ancient Emmaus Nicopolis, where the Arab army of Syria had its main camp and divided its spoils. It broke out during a nine-month drought and famine that the Arabs called the “Year of the Ashes”. The sources do not describe the symptoms, but historians consider it bubonic plague, one of the recurrences of the pandemic that began in 541. It spread across Syria and reached Iraq and Egypt, killing many of the Christian inhabitants as well as the conquerors; prices rose, and Umar forbade the hoarding of food.

Tradition tells that Umar summoned Abu Ubayda to Medina to save him, but the commander refused to leave his men; at Sargh, on the road to Syria, the caliph consulted his companions and, following the advice of the Qurayshite elders, ordered the army to move to healthier ground. Abu Ubayda died of the plague on the way to the highland camp of Jabiya, and his successors Mu'adh ibn Jabal and Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan soon followed him; Amr ibn al-As led the survivors to Jabiya. Muslim sources put the dead at 20,000–25,000, and of some 24,000 troops in Syria in 637 only 4,000 were left at Jabiya in 639 — though, as the historian Fred Donner notes, it is unclear how many had died and how many had fled.

The loss of the commanders had lasting consequences: Umar appointed Yazid’s brother Mu'awiya, who built his power in Syria on the long-settled Arab tribes, above all the Kalb, and in 661 founded the Umayyad Caliphate. Plague returned to Syria and Iraq about every decade from the 680s to the 740s. The plague of Amwas received more attention in Arabic writing than any other epidemic before the Black Death, and the stories of Umar and Abu Ubayda were cited for centuries in Muslim debates on predestination, on contagion and on whether one might flee a land struck by plague.