Jahrhundertelange Fehlinformationen über den Schwarzen Tod begannen mit einem Gedicht. Moderne Darstellungen der Pest, die sich schnell über den Kontinent ausbreitete und dem Lauf der Händler folgte, waren falsch, da eine gereimte literarische Erzählung über Jahrhunderte hinweg falsch interpretiert wurde.

Myths about how the Black Death travelled quickly across Asia, ravaging Silk Route communities, date back to a single fourteenth-century source, experts have found.

Modern portrayals of the plague quickly moving across the continent, following the course of traders, have been incorrect because of centuries of misinterpretation of a rhyming literary tale.

This “maqāma”—an Arabic genre of writing often focusing on a traveling “trickster”—was written by the poet and historian, Ibn al-Wardi in 1348/9 in Aleppo but was later mistaken for a factual description of the plague’s movement.

The pathogen that gave rise to the Black Death most likely had its origins in Central Asia. Some geneticists, drawing on the narrative found in Ibn al-Wardi’s tale, still believe the pathogen was only displaced from there in the late 1330s, moving overland from an origin in Kyrgyzstan to the Black and Mediterranean seas in less than a decade, resulting in the massive pandemic in Western Eurasia and North Africa of the late-1340s. This ‘Quick Transit Theory’ is built primarily upon the literal reading of Ibn al-Wardī’s maqāma.

This notion that a lineage of this bacterium moved over 3,000 miles overland within a few years and established itself sufficiently to cause the devastating Black Death of the Middle East and Europe from 1347 to 1350 is severely called into question in the new study.

In his tale Ibn al-Wardi personifies plague as a roving trickster who, in the course of 15 years, decimates one region after the next starting from unknown regions outside of China, to China, across India, central Asia, Persia and finally entering the Black Sea and Mediterranean to wreak havoc on Egypt and the Levant. But it was taken as the truth because he also quoted selections of this tale in his historical work.

https://journals.uio.no/JAIS/article/view/12790