The evidentiary uncertainty in the scholarship on this most fundamental question underscores how little we know about the Black Death and second-pandemic plague in North Africa. 14 Problematically, none of these claims is well supported-the disagreement is not evidence-based, and both maximalist and minimalist claims were probably intended as throwaway speculation. 13 On the other hand, Jean Vitaux contends that the Maghreb was “particularly affected” by the Black Death and Jean-Noël Biraben claims that North Africa faced “economic misery and political instability” as a result of the pandemic. The minimalist interpretation is articulated by Kmar Ben Néfissa and Anne Marie Moulin, who hypothesize that, in a lightly touched Maghreb, elites, especially scholars, may have been more susceptible to plague. Some propose the region should be treated separately because it suffered less from the Black Death than Europe did, whereas others argue the reverse, believing the region to have been more gravely impacted yet. 12Ī handful of scholars argue for a distinction between the Maghreb and the rest of the Mediterranean world, but they disagree over why it is necessary. Dols, for instance, argues the “far-reaching significance of the Black Death in Muslim lands,” and Melhaoui asserts that the plague “manifested with brutality across the entire region,” creating destruction “without precedent,” yet their argumentation is based solely upon data from Cairo and Granada which they have extended to the Maghreb. Both approaches result in a maximalist interpretation of the epidemic, for we know that the Black Death devastated at least some of the areas which these scholars use as heuristics.

Some authors unthinkingly group these regions together, 11 but others consciously conflate the experiences and mortality figures of Egypt and Al-Andalus with those of the Maghreb, as better demographic data is available for these regions. Most works do not differentiate between the Black Death in Europe, the Middle East, Islamic Spain, and the Maghreb, and thus imply that the pandemic was equally severe in each location. We do not have an evidence-based answer to the question of the Black Death’s impact on the Maghreb, for instance. Our understanding of the fundamentals of 14 th-century North African plague is therefore woefully incomplete. There has also been no attempt to incorporate plague ecology or genetics into the study of the Maghrebi Black Death, although this has become standard practice in the study of late medieval plague outbreaks in other regions. 9 But there has been little to no scholarship on more recent historiographical concerns, such as plague’s gender history or the influence of climate on plague outbreaks. 8 This is not to say that there has been no innovation in the field since the 1970s Justin Stearns redefined our understanding of 14 th-century Maghrebi conceptions of contagion within the last decade. 5 They cover the Black Death’s transmission to and from the Maghreb, 6 the outbreak’s theological and philosophical effects, 7 and its political consequences. Dols and those who draw from him demonstrate a linguistic and textual focus traditional to Islamic Studies. But it is also over 40 years old, and its historiographical focuses and methodology reflect its age.

4 Dols’ work is a landmark study for a reason it is wide-ranging, well written, and impeccably researched. 3 When scholars do touch on medieval plague in the Maghreb, they draw overwhelmingly from Michael Dols’ 1977 The Black Death in the Middle East. 2 North African plague has no place at all in The Cambridge History of Islam, for instance, even though the work covers Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali’s attempt to unify the Maghreb under his control, which seems to have been impacted by a plague outbreak at a pivotal battle near Kairouan. 1 Histories of the Maghreb often omit the Black Death altogether or merely refer to it in passing. Despite its vastness, prominent place in late medieval interregional trade networks, and central location in the well-studied Mediterranean, only two full-length books are devoted to the Maghrebi Black Death, and both fail to differentiate between the plague’s impact in the Maghreb and Al-Andalus.

Black death medieval manuscripts