Image of famine in 15th-century manuscript (BL Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts).
YOU CAN LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE OR ON YOUR USUAL PODCAST APP
Sources:
Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī. A Physician on the Nile: A Description of Egypt and Journal of the Famine Years. NYU Press, 2021.
Lev, Yaacov. Administration of Justice in Medieval Egypt: From the 7th to the 12th Century. Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
Lewicka, Paulina B. Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes: Aspects of Life in an Islamic Metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean. Brill, 2011.
Traveling Through Egypt: From 450 B.C. to the Twentieth Century, edited by Deborah Manley & Sahar Abdel-Hakim. American University in Cairo Press, 2008.
Script:
The signs of trouble were there to be seen in two ways.
First, there was the Nile itself. Anything less than a 16 cubit increase in its levels was insufficient, but in the year 596 on the Islamic calendar, the rise amounted to only 12 cubits and 21 finger breadths. It was said that there had only been once it had measured so low since the time of Muhammad.
There were ways of anticipating such misfortune. There were those who claimed they could do so with a particular type of mud that they would weigh and then “expose … to the influence of the stars on a particular night” before weighing it in the morning, the difference in carob seeds indicating the Nile’s rise in cubits. Others would assess based on the date crop or the honey harvest. For Abd al-Latif, green colouration was something to look for. He recorded all of this, all of his observations, in hopes of future readers being able to add their own observations to his and have “warning of foreseeable events.”
In that year 596, the river began to rise as normal in June, but it never reached its full volume before decreasing. It became green, like “the juice of beet leaves when left some days and allowed to rot.” People began to avoid it, choosing well water instead, and Abd al-Latif found, in boiling it to try to make it drinkable, that even the clearer water below the surface would “only become more disagreeably foul” in taste and odour.
Later that summer, an envoy from Ethiopia arrived with word that the archbishop there had died and a replacement was needed. He brought word that the rainfall in his land had been meager that year.
Then there was what was to be read in the skies.
Abd al-Latif here quotes an earlier commentator, saying:
“Shooting stars are an indication that the water vapours will dry up. If the shooting stars appear in one quarter, they are a sign that winds will blow from that quarter. But if they are present in all quarters, they are a sign that the water will be insufficient, the air disturbed, and armies at odds.”
Then, from that same commentator:
“I remember well how, in the year 290 [by the Islamic calendar], meteors showered over Egypt, filling the whole of the sky. The people were terrified, and yet the meteors went on falling ever more numerously. Then, after only a little more of the year had passed, the population was afflicted by drought: the Egyptian Nile reached only thirteen cubits, and the resulting public disturbances led to the end of Tūlūnid rule in the land. In the year 300, also, meteors showered from all quarters of the sky. Once more, the Nile failed to rise sufficiently, and there were riots and disturbances in the kingdom.”
Abd al-Latif then concludes in his own words:
“Upon my life, these phenomena are potent indicators indeed … [T]his very same set of events has also taken place in this present year: stars scattering all over at the start of the year, water levels falling at the end of it, and the ruler of Egypt being replaced during it by his uncle, al-Malik al-’Ādil, following a war between the two of them.”
Today, we’ll talk about what happened next.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, a history podcast that zooms in on that medieval world through the eyes of those who travelled it, and a history podcast with a Patreon, where I recently posted the newest bonus mini-episode all about consuming mummies as medicine, and where you can listen to all episodes ad-free for as little as a dollar a month. Today, my thanks especially go out to Liam S, the newest member of that Patreon community. Thank you very much!
And now back to the story, the story of Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi in Egypt. Last time, we talked about his observations on buildings and monuments, how those achievements of the past had, in his own time, been mistreated. That was quite a while ago now that I did that last episode, even by the somewhat irregular standards of this podcast, but today, after a substantial and unpleasant Covid-caused delay, it’s time for the first of two episodes on the events of years 597 and 598 on the Islamic calendar, and I should mention as we get going here that the material is going to make for pretty grim listening in parts.
The build-up to this section of the book is, as you just heard, ominous, very clearly taking you to a bit of a dark place. The Nile had been low, the stars cautionary, and rule unstable as two of Salah ad-Din’s sons and their supporters struggled for supremacy before one of them died and their uncle al-Adil arrived to assume power. “And then,” begins the section itself, “came the year ‘seven—that monstrous year, that predator date, “seven,” the severer of lives.” “Seven,” here referring to 597 on the Hijri or Islamic calendar, 1200 rolling into 1201 on the Gregorian.
And you might think that maybe Abd al-Latif is being overdramatic, that this calamitous year can only have been so bad, but then he continues.
“People had already abandoned hope of the Nile rising. Prices went up, and the land was stricken with drought. The populace sensed the coming calamity, and fear of famine made them riotous. The villagers and country folk took refuge in the main towns. Many emigrated to the Levant, the Maghrib, the Hijaz, and Yemen … and were torn apart and scattered in every direction. A vast throng of these creatures also made their way into Cairo and Old Fustat; but their hunger only grew more severe, and they began to die off.”
Then, writes Abd al-Latif, “when the sun entered Aries, the air became pestilential, and diseases and deadly contagions struck.” It was going to be every bit as bad as he had made it out to be.
The very poorest of course felt this disaster first and worst. Those without property or profession, he has first eating rotten carrion, and then animal dung, and then human flesh. There were children, roast or stewed. There was a man found in Fustat, flesh stripped from bones. There would be many more. One does want to be cautious here, to wonder if Abd al-Latif’s report wasn’t just rumour or hysteria, but he says that he himself “saw [with his own eyes] a basket containing a roasted child.” The times were very hard.
He says that the paupers plunged into a habit of cannibalism, a flesh-lust that they made a, quote, “way of life, a source of enjoyment, and a means of sustenance.” The people talked and gossiped about all of this, their reported mixture of shock, curiosity, and excitement sounding very much like the modern spectator to disaster. And again, you might wonder if he is falling too readily for that gossip himself.
Then those spectators ceased to gossip, excitedly or otherwise. They ceased to be spectators in the same way. To, quote, “tell or listen to stories about [what was happening] was now deemed to be in the worst taste.” To speak of such things became vulgar. It was no longer deserving of notice, for it was too commonplace, too widespread.
Abd al-Latif, for example, writes of seeing a dead woman dragged through the marketplace, no one around him reacting to what was happening before them. He was amazed by this but wrote that, quote, “their indifference was due to nothing but the effect upon their sense perception of the frequent repetition of such scenes, which had entered the category of the familiar, and as such were not worthy of provoking amazement.” Apparently the woman had been caught eating a child, something Abd al-Latif did not himself witness, but he saw what had happened to her, and he saw the apathy of the crowd.
He didn’t always see what he wrote of with his own eyes. He heard of an infant boy snatched away from the woman who was looking after him. He heard similar stories several times, heard from a woman who’d been forced to cover her child with her own body until a horseman had ridden up and driven off their assailant. But he saw an adolescent boy who had been cooked and partially eaten, and heard that two men had already confessed. Saw that roasted child in the basket, the parents condemned to death by burning. Heard of a corpse that had been found, limbs tied like a sheep for cooking and flesh stripped away, and he thought with perhaps a bit of grim humour, how Galen and countless other anatomists barred from dissection in their own times would have delighted in exactly such an example for their work.
He talked of how the alleys were full of hunted orphans and otherwise unprotected children. Said that it was mostly women who were caught in such crimes, if anyone was. Said that the reason for this was because women were naturally less wily though I rather suspect there were other explanations.
There are a few days in Fustat when 30 women were put to death for cannibalism, the executed invariably found by the next day to have since been eaten themselves. Soon, this turn to cannibalism spread beyond the impoverished, some more well-off individuals taking it up by new necessity, some, our guide tells us, “for the sake of a novel culinary experience.”
Abd al-Latif heard from a man who had been invited to a friend’s for dinner, the friend being a man of some wealth and standing. He arrived to find that friend seated among men dressed in rag-like garments round a large meat stew and, highly unusually, no bread to go with it. Making an excuse, he left that room, and in one of the others found human bones alongside freshly butchered meat. He quickly fled.
A physician who Abd al-Latif knew well told him of how he had been asked to make a house-call, how he had been guided to the patient by a man who, as they approached their destination, started distributing charity to those they passed, telling people that, quote, “Today a reward will be gained, and a manifold recompense be earned. For the like of this, let the doers perform their deeds.” The physician was feeling worse and worse about all of this, but he didn’t leave. He wanted to, but he also wanted the money that he had been promised. He didn’t leave when they entered a large rundown house, didn’t leave as they climbed the stairs inside, didn’t leave until someone opened a door at the top of those stairs and said to man one who was guiding him, “You’ve taken your time. Have you caught us a bit of game that’s worth the wait?”
Now, the physician did leave, hurling himself out through a nearby window and down into the stable below. At first he would not speak to the stable owner who confronted him, but then he didn’t need to. “Don’t tell me,” the man said. “It’s that lot in this house here, luring people to the slaughter.”
There were all kinds of stories of this sort, some from close acquaintances of Abd al-Latif’s, like this physician, some that more generally circulated, some that he heard directly from those he considered trusted authorities, a prefect for example. There was a gang of cannibals hiding out in huts on Rhoda Island, on the Nile, huts that were later reported, by a man he thought honest, to hold 400 human skulls. There was a midwife who had in thanks been served a stew that was “beautifully cooked and flavoured with all the appropriate spices.” It was also, she realized, “particularly rich in meat,” and suspecting something amiss she privately questioned a small girl of the family who told her, “Oh, Mrs So-and-so, the fat lady, came to visit us, and Daddy cut her throat. There she is, hanging up in bits.” The “Daddy” in question was later said to have paid a substantial bribe to avoid punishment.
Many when caught in an act of cannibalism would claim, perhaps truly, that the body was that of a family member, a child, spouse, or parent. It was better that they ate it, they’d say, rather than some stranger to the deceased. Many bodies that had made it below the earth untouched, were then dug up and eaten.
Concluding this particular catalogue of horrors, Abd al-Latif writes that, quote:
“If we were to set out to recount in detail everything we caught sight of and heard tell, we would surely be suspected of exaggeration, or would babble on too long. And yet all the scenes we personally witnessed and describe [here] result from experiences that we neither sought out, nor went looking for in likely places; we came across them purely by accident. Indeed, I often fled from such sights, so gruesome were they to behold.”
“But enough of these accounts of cannibalism,” he wrote, “even if I believe, though I have gone on at length, that I still have not told all that should be told.”
There was more to tell of that dreadful year than just the eating of the dead, and after this quick break, we will tell it.
…
As I mentioned, cannibalism was not the beginning or the end of issues faced in 597. That people were murdering and eating others was really more symptom than sickness, and the same could be said of the heightened violent crime of other sorts, the boatmen and brigands who would kill and rob travellers’ on their routes without necessarily going so far as eating them.
That first half of this episode might have left you with the impression that nobody was really going hungry once cannibalism had been hit on as a solution, that they were all consuming rich meaty stews, but of course that was not the case. No matter how shockingly widespread Abd al-Latif found the practice to be, it was not sustaining the broader population. People, as you might have guessed from those driven to eat others in the first place, were starving.
In this context, it’s worth looking at what Medieval Egyptians were usually, or at least ideally, eating. We can look at the recommendations of the 11th-century Egyptian physician Ali ibn Ridwān and at other authors who give us a broad range of produce. I’m drawing here from Paulina B. Lewicka’s Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes which gives us “lettuce, lupine, and grass pea, orache, spinach, purslane, endive, … at least three varieties of cucumber, pumpkin, gourd, … chard, asparagus, carrots, turnip, celery, onion, leek, rue, radish, taro, lentils, and broad bean,” along with “olives, eggplants, and cowpeas, … cabbage, and [also] cauliflower,” the leaves of which were, in better times, cut off and disposed of, eaten by those most in need. Not even mentioned here are the abundant grain, the fruit, or the meat. Egypt was a highly productive region. In times past it had been what is referred to as “the breadbasket of Rome,” and it had not ceased to be fertile with the passing of the Roman Empire in the west. But for all of that abundancy, water was required, and the consequences of its absence were appalling.
One indication of just how appalling is apparent in documents found in the Cairo Geniza, one study of which has estimated that more than half of Old Cairo’s Jewish population died during this period, and in a letter written near the beginning of 597 from a man in Alexandria we see something of the then still-young disaster put into words. Quote:
“Alexandria is in great trouble … People eat up one another. This catastrophe came upon the population quite suddenly, may God grant relief in his mercy. [I] was able to purchase only three [measures of wheat] and most of it has already been consumed. May I ask you to get the wheat under all circumstances. Your servant is [like one] of your family. May I never miss you.”
Unfortunately for that man, unfortunately for all those who lived in that time and place, things from that point would only worsen.
Abd al-Latif himself found it difficult to put into numbers the depth of the disaster, said the total death toll could be known only to God, but he tried to communicate just how bad things were. Within Old Fustat, Cairo, and the surrounding areas, anyone on foot would, quote, “at all times find himself treading or gazing on some person who was either dead or in the throes of death, or on a large mass of people in this condition.” In Cairo, he writes that between 100 and 500 bodies were brought in every day, and in Old Fustat, he writes that it was worse, the scale beyond anything that survivors, often weakened, could possibly deal with. “Corpses were simply left where they were, in the markets, or between the houses and shops, or inside them.” Out on the rural exterior and in the villages, he heard that it was worse.
From more than one person he heard scenes of devastation and abandonment, towns emptied entirely of life, their houses open, belongings untouched, for there was no one to take them, those who had lived there often still arrayed about the house in various states of decay.
“We went into one city,” a man told him, “and found not a single living creature, either on the ground or in the air. So we went into the houses, and came upon their inhabitants just as God, mighty and glorious is He, says in the Qur’an, ‘We made of them a harvest of the dead.’”
In the next town, one known for its weaving workshops, it was the same. “There would be the weaver in the pit of his loom,” the man continued, “dead, with his family dead around him.”
“Then we moved on to yet another town, and found it like the previous one: not a soul there to welcome us, and crammed with the bodies of its inhabitants. We needed to spend some time in the place, to deal with the cultivation there. So we hired some people to remove the corpses from around our accommodation and take them to the Nile, at the rate of one dirham for every ten corpses. But the land had been transformed into a land of wolves and hyenas, feasting on the flesh of its people.”
In poetry, those two animals would often appear together, the second as the bane of the dead, the first of the living.
Abd al-Latif saw corpses floating down the Nile, saw about ten going past in the course of an hour, and by boat on other waterways saw the same, heard from a fisherman of how 400 dead had drifted past him during one day, carried off by the Nile to the sea.
As for the picture by land, it was no less grim. From the roads to the Levant, stories flowed in of how the region had, quote, “become a field sown with human beings—or, rather, a reaping ground, and one that turned into a banquet of human flesh for bird and beast,” how dogs, abandoned and alone, consumed their humans’ remains.
There were reports of entire areas emptied, as the people sought better lives elsewhere. One group is described here as “scattered along the entire way [toward the Levant] … like a swarm of locusts killed off by the cold.” Others survived to make it to Mosul, to Baghdad, or to Khurasan, going to Anatolia, the Maghrib, or to Yemen. They were, quote, “torn asunder and scattered in every direction through the lands.” They were torn from their homes, from all that they knew, and from family members who died or became separated on the journey. They were horribly wrenched from the familiar, and they left behind an emptiness.
Behind them, society was breaking down. You certainly get that impression from the accounts of cannibalism, but the cheap sale of freeborn people became a common practice. Abd al-Latif was offered two girls for one dinar, saw two with someone calling out the price of 11 dirhams, was offered one by her own mother for five dirhams. He insisted to the mother that this was unlawful, to which she only replied “Then take her as a gift.” She surely hoped the girl might then at least be fed, and that perhaps with one fewer mouth, the rest of her family might also. Like those who made the journey freely, in the limited sense that they were “free” under those circumstances, the newly enslaved became scattered, “dispersed,” Abd al-Latif writes, “to Iraq, deepest Khurasan, and elsewhere.”
Among of all this death, all this disruption of the world around him, he says that he was astonished most of all that people, quote, “remained unrepentantly devoted to the idols of their lust, wallowing in the sea of their errors, as if they themselves were exempt from the rule of divine law,” happily taking advantage of the newly enslaved now available as sex workers for next to nothing, the writer here using a word that could either mean small coin or scraps of bread. For him, that was the most glaring sign of how horribly wrong everything had gone, that people would do this despite all of the portents, all of the indications to be read in the stars, in the water, and on land, that society had gone astray and needed correction.
He also expresses “particular wonder” at how, in this year of all years, there were some people, people who “prosperity had previously always eluded,” who now found wealth and success, whether in trade, in inherited property, or for no apparent reason at all. “Blessed,” he simply said, “be He by Whose hand all gifts are withheld or bestowed, and to Whose every creature comes the share of His provision it is owed.”
I don’t know that anyone now would express much wonder that a person might become rich or richer during such broadly terrible times.
And this was, if that was not already totally clear, a terrible time. So much of this place was now deserted: villages, with shops and homes gone empty, whole quarters of the city, even busy neighbourhoods that had just recently seemed like cities in themselves now went abandoned. Even in the heart of Cairo, in places that had just recently been highly sought after and never left empty, sometimes hardly anyone remained. As for those who did, they found themselves without fuel for ovens or for the bakeries, nothing left to burn save for wood torn from roofs, doors, or animal pens. So it went, as one disaster piled itself atop another.
And the indications weren’t good that there was to be any immediate relief. As ever, people looked to the Nile. They had done so back in 1023 when the water levels suddenly receded causing public supplicatory prayers and panic in the grain markets. They did so now, and the signs were obvious.
For one thing, there was the structure built to measure the Nile’s flooding. It may have been the same nilometer that al-Maqdisi had written of two centuries earlier, may have been the one you can still visit today, in person or online, a marble column, marked like an enormous ruler, within a handsomely housed step-well. It would be checked daily and the results reported only to the ruler unless they were high enough to promise successful irrigation and a good year. This year, that structure was left dry.
For another, an island appeared out of the middle of the river, along with buildings that had long been submerged. The water took on a foul taste and smell which only worsened as time went on, developing that same green colour as it had the previous year, when it had gestured toward imminent catastrophe. The people despaired of it ever properly rising.
They followed its every movement that summer of 597, or at least Abd al-Latif did and surely he was not alone in his concerns. They saw it come up only feebly, then saw it fail to rise at all for three consecutive days. “At this, people,” quote, “ realized that disaster was inevitable, and resigned themselves to destruction,” but then they were encouraged by a more substantial increase, made to think that maybe, maybe it was going to be okay, only to have it reach its peak and then fall on the very same day in September, “sinking in sudden defeat. The water had touched some of the farmlands,” Abd al-Latif wrote, “but a token touch at most, like some dream-visit from the river’s ghost.” It was a much more pleasant image than the stark reality which it reflected, the grim tidings it brought of life soon to come.
It was only the lowest-lying agricultural lands that experienced that “dream-visit,” only those limited areas that were irrigated. But even there, whole villages which had provided hands to work them had been displaced so that, as Abd al-Latif quotes the Qur’an, “they became such that nothing could be seen but their empty dwellings.” It was only the wealthier landowners who could afford to bring back the necessary labourers. Even for those, the availability of even the scrawniest working animal or the required seeds remained challenges, and so, despite the soldiers dispatched by the Ayyubid sultan, did a shortage of people to properly manage the irrigation, to operate the dykes and floodgates so as to retain and distribute the water.
What was planted despite these problems fell victim all too often to pests. What escaped the pests all too often shrivelled and died. Wheat and barley shot upward in price.
“From God alone, may He be glorified,” wrote Abd al-Latif, “is relief to be hoped for.” That year, there seemed to be no relief in sight.
It can be easy, in reading a text like Abd al-Latif’s, to lose sight of the fact that these were, assuming the accuracy of his reports, real human beings that were squeezed in a vise of climate and human action, many of whom could have no hope that there would be any help for them. It can be easy, despite the shocking nature of some of the material here, to read such texts from a very comfortable distance, with a touch of the unreal or unaffecting about it all. But the most important thing to remember about the people of the medieval period was that they were, in fact, people, that they, much like us, were neither uncaring nor immune in the face of such incredible devastation that whole communities were uprooted, that a parent would turn to consume their child, that neighbour would devour neighbour, or else die.
597 had been an especially hard year. 598 was just starting to loom over the horizon, and next episode, we’ll get there, and we’ll wrap up this Abd al-Latif series. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you then.