New Science and Old Sources: Why the Ottoman Experience of Plague Matters

Reconstructing the Ottoman plague experience is vital to understanding the larger Afro-Eurasian disease zone during the Second Pandemic. This essay deals with two different aspects of this experience. On the one hand, it discusses the historical and historiographical problems that rendered this epidemiological experience mostly invisible to previous scholars of plague. On the other, it reconstructs the empire’s plague ecologies, with particular attention to plague’s persistence, focalization, and transmission. Further, it uses this epidemiological experience to offer new insights and complicate some commonly held assumptions about plague history and its relationship to plague science

TMG 1 (2014): Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, ed. Monica Green

The plague organism (Yersinia pestis) killed an estimated 40% to 60% of all people when it spread rapidly through the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe in the fourteenth century: an event known as the Black Death. Previous research has shown, especially for Western Europe, how population losses then led to structural economic, political, and social changes. But why and how did the pandemic happen in the first place? When and where did it begin? How was it sustained? What was its full geographic extent? And when did it really end? Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World is the first book to synthesize the new evidence and research methods that are providing fresh answers to these crucial questions. It was only in 2011, thanks to ancient DNA recovered from remains unearthed in London’s East Smithfield cemetery, that the full genome of the plague pathogen was identified. This single-celled organism probably originated 3000-4000 years ago and has caused three pandemics in recorded history: the Justinianic (or First) Plague Pandemic, around 541-750; the Black Death (Second Plague Pandemic), conventionally dated to the 1340s; and the Third Plague Pandemic, usually dated from around 1894 to the 1930s. This ground-breaking book brings together scholars from the humanities and social and physical sci­ences to address the question of how recent work in genetics, zoology, and epi­de­miology can enable a rethinking of the Black Death\u27s global reach and its larger historical significance. It forms the inaugural double issue of The Medieval Globe, a new journal sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This issue of The Medieval Globe is published with the support of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/1000/thumbnail.jp

Plagued by a cryptic clock: insight and issues from the global phylogeny of Yersinia pestis

The emergence of the plague pathogen throughout history is investigated using molecular clock modelling and phylogenetic analyses

Coping with Institutional and Financial Crises in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Ensuring the Survival of Ottoman Royal Waqfs

The Ottoman Empire had inherited the waqf (charitable foundation) as an institutionalized form of charity from the Near Eastern Islamic states, which had preceded it. Over time, new forms of charitable foundations emerged, while with the expansion of the Empire, waqfs grew in number and spread geographically. Donors created over fifty thousand charitable foundations, making them into the most widespread institution in Ottoman history. Some waqfs, the largest ones in particular, survived for many centuries. However, sometimes continued functioning was under severe threat, due to wars, epidemics, natural disasters, and rebellions. To overcome financial straits, the waqfs resorted to a variety of measures. Occasionally, a royal waqf in difficulty received assistance from other foundations established by sultans and/or their relatives. Administrators reduced current expenditures, sometimes even suspending salaries and charitable services. Moreover, through long-term lease contracts involving substantial down payments by the lessees, waqf administrators often raised the money needed to restore damaged properties. In the present paper, we study Ottoman royal waqfs when exposed to adversities and financial hardships. As administrators reacted with considerable flexibility, the claim that the waqfs were rigid institutions is in obvious need of revision