The Plague in the Early Medieval Near East

The Plague in the Early Medieval Near EastSyriaca.org: The Syriac Reference PortalThe National Endowment for the HumanitiesThe International Balzan Prize FoundationDavid A. Michelsoncbsc_adminRecord added to Zotero bycbsc_adminSyriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portalhttp://syriaca.org/cbss/4NFG7ZU2/tei

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CREATED: This bibl record was autogenerated from a Zotero record.Lawrence IrvinConradThe Plague in the Early Medieval Near Easthttp://syriaca.org/cbss/4NFG7ZU2https://www.zotero.org/groups/a_comprehensive_bibliography_on_syriac_studies/items/4NFG7ZU2https://www.zotero.org/groups/4861694/items/4NFG7ZU21981In recent years there has been a considerable increase in the literature on the Black Death in the Near East, but as yet there has been no commensurate interest in the plague pandemic which ravaged the Near East between 541 A.D. and 131/749. This study is an attempt to fill that gap. The work is in three parts. Part I is introductory in nature and consists of two chapters dealing with the medical and historical background necessary for any detailed evaluation of the pandemic. Part II, in five chapters, reconstructs the pandemic from the available testimony in the Arabic, Greek, and Syriac sources, and concludes that in the sixth to eighth centuries A.D. the plague spread throughout the area, though not to Arabia or Persia, and was particularly serious in Syria and Iraq, where it recurred about every ten years. Part III consists of three chapters evaluating the demographic and social impact of the pandemic in the Near East. It is argued that conditions in settled areas were particularly favorable to the spread and aggravation of plague outbreaks, and that very high levels of mortality occurred in Near Eastern towns and villages. Agriculture was most seriously affected, and large amounts of land fell out of cultivation as population in the agricultural hinterland declined. This, in conjunction with high urban mortality, had a similarly deleterious impact on the larger towns and cities. At the same time, however, the nomadic populations of the Near East remained for the most part unscathed. Thus the pandemic had a marked erosive effect on settled life, but not on the pastoral life of the bedouins. These factors contributed to most of the social, economic, and political changes evident in the early medieval period. Just as the history of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A.D. cannot be understood in isolation from the Black Death, so also the history of the early Byzantine and Arab empires cannot be understood without considering the effects of two centuries of recurrent plague outbreaks in the heartlands of imperial power. Conrad, Lawrence Irvin. “The Plague in the Early Medieval Near East.” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1981. Lawrence Irvin Conrad, The Plague in the Early Medieval Near East (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1981).Arab conquestByzantine SyriaIV-VII CEMesopotamiaVI CEVII CEVII-XVIII CEVIII CEagriculturedemographyeconomicsillnessmedicinenomadsplaguepopulation