REFUGEES OF THE BLACK DEATH: QUANTIFYING RURAL MIGRATION FOR PLAGUE AND OTHER ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTERS

The awful dimensions of the Black Death's mortality in europe has long been examined and estimates of its death toll there have risen in the last two decades of scholarship. While there is much left to discover, the mortality of the Black Death in other areas of the world (the Near East, the Far East, South Asia, and Africa) remains, in relative terms, almost unexamined. While a number of scholars have made exemplary contributions to our understanding of the mortality of the second plague pandemic in the Middle East (1347-1844 CE), the untimely death of the pioneering Michael Dols (1977) was in many ways both the first and the last word on the subject of Black Death mortality in the Middle East. This study hopes to get the ball rolling again by approaching the question of mortality with some new tools. Starting with the basis of applying the fascinating Keeling and Gilligan (2000) plague model to the recorded death tolls, which we tested for 1400s Cairo, our main hope for advancing the field rests upon a new method we introduce here, one that uses the quintessentially Islamic character of Middle Eastern civic institutions (institutions that counted plague deaths) to quantify a phenomenon wholly untouched by scholars (mathematically at least): the flight of desperate rural refugees – i.e. Those countless many – the rural majority - who fled the plague, Black Death especially, only to die of it, almost always penniless, anonymous, and utterly alone, in Middle Eastern cities that most of them had never seen before. If this first attempt shows promise, the hope is that we may be better equipped to understand the seemingly inexplicable – the astronomically high urban death tolls that have made quantification of plague mortality for the Middle East so difficult. Deux décennies de travaux sur la Peste noire en Europe et sur la mortalité effrayante qu'elle a causée ont conduit à une ré-évaluation très notable du nombre de victimes. S'il y reste encore beaucoup à découvrir, la mortalité due à la peste noire dans d'autres régions du monde (Proche-Orient, Extrême-Orient, Asie du Sud et Afrique) est, elle, relativement peu étudiée. Bien que nombre de chercheurs aient apporté des contributions significatives à notre compréhension de la mortalité au cours de la seconde pandémie de peste au Moyen-Orient (1347-1844 BC), la mort prématurée de Michael Dols (1977) a fait de ses travaux, à la fois les pionniers et les derniers sur la mortalité durant la Peste noire au Moyen-O