Interpreting the Black Death through Documents and Visuals
Many people in the fourteenth-century world sought to explain the Black Death in light of their own worldviews, influenced by religion and personal experience. As you read these two quotes, consider what effect these words of respected individuals would have on their respective populations.
From Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, a Muslim historian, 1337
Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed. The East, it seems, was similarly visited, though in accordance with and in proportion to [the East’s more affluent] civilization. It was as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion and restriction, and the world responded to its call. God inherits the earth and whomever is upon it.
(Source: Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East, Princeton University Press, 1977, p. 67.)
According to the textbook, Boccaccio, an Italian layman, believing that the plague was a punishment sent by God for humankind’s sins, wrote that the world was ‘sinking and sliding into all kinds of wickedness.’ God’s response had been to send “the “quivering spear of the Almighty”—meaning, the plague.
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