The Black Death and Iran

The Black Death, the plague pandemic of 1346–1353, killed a large share of the population of Europe, Egypt and Syria. Iran lay between its starting point in Central Asia and the Mediterranean, yet Persian sources of the time say very little about it, and historians still do not know how badly Iran was struck. This page sets out the little that is known and explains why the evidence is so thin.

Where the plague came from

The Black Death was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, carried by rodents and their fleas. Its origin was long debated. In 2022 a team of researchers published ancient DNA from two cemeteries of a Christian community in the Chüy valley near Lake Issyk-Kul, in today’s Kyrgyzstan. Their gravestones, inscribed in Syriac, record a spike of deaths from “pestilence” in 1338–1339, and the plague genomes from the burials were the direct ancestor of the strains that later struck Europe and the Middle East. The disease therefore began in the Tian Shan region of Central Asia, in lands then ruled by the Chagatai Mongols.

The road west

From Central Asia the plague reached the Golden Horde, the Mongol state north of the Caspian and Black Seas. In 1346–1347 it broke out among the army of Khan Jani Beg as it besieged the Genoese port of Kaffa in the Crimea, and ships from the Black Sea carried it to Constantinople and the Mediterranean. Egypt was struck from the autumn of 1347, Syria and Palestine in 1348, Mecca and Mosul in 1349. Baghdad, according to Arabic sources, suffered more than one outbreak.

This route went around Iran to the north and west rather than through it. Whether the plague also moved overland along the caravan roads of Khorasan and Azerbaijan is exactly the question the sources cannot answer.

What the sources say about Iran

The most often quoted text is an essay on the plague by Ibn al-Wardi, a Syrian scholar who wrote in Aleppo in 1348 and died there of the disease in March 1349. He lists the lands the plague had passed through on its way west, China, India, Sind, the lands of the Uzbeks and Transoxiana, and says that “it attacked the Persians” (trans. Michael Dols). But Ibn al-Wardi was repeating reports that had reached Syria; he gives no places, dates or details for Iran.

Persian writing of the 1340s gives almost nothing to set beside it. Egypt and Syria had a tradition of detailed city chronicles, and Mamluk historians recorded daily death counts in Cairo and Damascus. Iran in the same years had no single government and few chroniclers. After the death of Abu Sa’id in 1335, the Ilkhanate had broken into rival states: the Chobanids in Tabriz, the Jalayirids in Baghdad, the Injuids and then the Muzaffarids in Shiraz and Yazd, the Kartids in Herat and the Sarbadars in Sabzevar (see Abu Sa’id and the collapse of the Ilkhanate). The histories written later for these courts and for the Timurids concentrate on wars and successions. Where they mention disease at all, they do so briefly and without numbers.

The standard study of the Black Death in the Middle East, by Michael Dols (1977), is built mainly on Arabic sources from Egypt and Syria, and modern surveys still describe the information for Iran as lacking. No body of Persian evidence has yet been found to change that picture.

The death of Abu Sa’id: an early outbreak?

One episode is sometimes linked to the plague. The Ilkhan Abu Sa’id died suddenly in his camp in Karabakh in November 1335, at the age of thirty. Contemporary rumour blamed poison. Some modern historians have suggested that he may instead have died in an epidemic, possibly plague, in the camp. If so, it would be an outbreak a decade before the Black Death proper. There is no medical description that would allow anyone to decide, and the idea remains a hypothesis.

Lightly hit, or just unrecorded?

Two readings of the silence are possible.

• Iran was hit less hard. The main thrust of the pandemic followed sea routes from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, and much of Iran’s plateau is dry, thinly settled country with long distances between towns, which may have slowed the spread.
• Iran was hit but nobody counted. In a period of civil war with few surviving chronicles, a heavy mortality could pass almost unrecorded, especially in the countryside.

Neither view can yet be proven. Ancient DNA has transformed the study of the Black Death elsewhere, but, as far as published research shows, no 14th-century plague victims from Iran have been identified. Archaeology of Ilkhanid and post-Ilkhanid cemeteries may one day settle the question.

The wider picture

Historians who see a severe impact sometimes connect the plague to the long weakness of Iran’s economy in the 14th century, when many regions had not recovered from the Mongol destruction of the 1220s and the political break-up after 1335. But that weakness has other well-documented causes, so it cannot be used as proof of the plague. Plague did return to the region repeatedly in later centuries, and Iran’s later epidemics, such as the cholera outbreaks of the Qajar period, are much better recorded.

For the Iran of the plague years, see the next era, beginning with the Chobanids and Jalayirids and the Injuids and Muzaffarids of Shiraz, the city where the young Hafez was then writing.