Abstract
This article examines how plague depopulation had a direct effect on the environment of the Egyptian province of al-Buḥayra in the late medieval period. Egypt witnessed a period of robust expansion and irrigation infrastructure development in late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. This irrigation infrastructure was the key to the region’s agricultural wealth and the Mamluk sultanate expended a great deal of energy in developing, improving, and expanding this system in the province of al-Buḥayra. It is estimated that overall agricultural output increased by as much as 50 % between 1250 and 1315. Al-Buḥayra was at the center of this expansion, where the Mamluk sultanate may have increased its cultivated area by some 60,000 hectares through excavation projects on the Nāṣir, Ṭayriyya, and Alexandria Canals. It seems clear that plague depopulation, starting in 1347, brought a halt to all of this growth and started Egypt on a path of severe economic decline. The irrigation system suffered heavily during this period, which extended from the mid fourteenth century well into the early modern period. This article focuses on how damage to the irrigation system profoundly altered the environment of this province. Irrigation decay led to desiccation in many areas, depriving rich farmland of its water supply, altered the saline balance of the soil, had a profound effect on the usage of viable flood basin acreage, and shifted the land’s ecology from arable to pasture, thereby shifting the balance of power from the peasants to the Bedouins. The province of al-Buḥayra provides a microcosm of what was happening in other parts of Egypt, and it offers us a window into some of the devastating changes that plague mortality was having on the Islamic world in the late medieval period.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Stuart J. Borsch , The Black Death in Egypt and England : A Comparative Study (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 54.
- 2.
Borsch, Black Death, 113–117.
- 3.
For recent work on this subject, see Sevket Pamuk, “The Black Death and the Origins of the ‘Great Divergence’ Across Europe, 1300–1600,” European Review of Economic History 11, no. 3 (2007): 289–317.
- 4.
Stuart J. Borsch, “Environment and Population: The Collapse of Large Irrigation Systems Reconsidered,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, no. 3 (2004): 451–468.
- 5.
Nicolas Michel, “Villages Désertés, Terres en Friche et Reconstruction Rurale en Égypte au Début de L’époque Ottomane,” Annales Islamologiques, (2012): 197–251; Clément Flaux, et al., “Environmental Changes in the Maryut Lagoon (Northwestern Nile Delta) During the Last ~2000 Years,” Journal of Archaeological Science 39, no. 12 (2012): 3493–3504; Stuart J. Borsch , “Nile Floods and the Irrigation System,” Mamluk Studies Review 4 (2000): 131–145.
- 6.
Only part of the 1528 Ottoman survey survives: one section on al-Buḥayra and another on the sub-province of Jazīra Banī Naṣr. See Michel, “Villages Désertés,” 198–201.
- 7.
Sulṭānī means components of the system, dikes and canals, that served multiple villages and whose maintenance was the responsibility of the regime, whether that meant the provincial government or the central government in Cairo. Baladī, by contrast, indicated those parts of the system that were part of the individual village, and were supposed to be maintained by that village. See Borsch, Black Death , 36–37.
- 8.
Given the numbers and scale of these projects, and all the subsidiary information we have, a 50 % increase in cultivated land seems very realistic and helps account for the robust figures in the 1315 cadastral survey. See Sato Tsugitaka, “Irrigation in Rural Egypt from the 12th to the 14th Centuries,” Orient: Report of the Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan 8 (1972): 81–92; Sato Tsugitaka, State and Rural Society in Medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 220–233; Borsch, Black Death , 38–39.
- 9.
The Abū al-Munajja Canal was developed for the purpose of extending the irrigation network in the eastern province of al-Sharqīya. This canal extended northeast from the Nile to the metropolis of Bilbays because the Sardūs Canal did not provide enough water. See Taqī al-Dīn al-Maqrīzī, Kitāb al-mawāʿiẓ wa al-iʿtibār bi-dhikr al-khiṭaṭ wa al-athār (Cairo, 1853–1854), 1:72. See also ʿĀmr Nagīb Mūsā Nāṣir, al-Ḥayyāt al-iqtiṣādīya fī Miṣr (Ramallah: Dār al-Shurūq, 2003), 175. For the dike from Būlāq to Minyat al-Shayraj, see al-Maqrīzī, Kitāb al-sulūk li-maʿrifat duwal al-mulūk, ed. Saʿīd ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ ʿĀshūr (Cairo: Lajnat al-taʾlīf wa al-tarjama wa al-nashr, 1957–1973), 2:251. These projects are presented in chronological order in Sato, State and Rural Society in Medieval Islam, 228.
- 10.
Al-Maqrīzī , al-Khiṭaṭ, 1:171.
- 11.
See Aḥmad Ibn ʿAlī al-Qalqashandī, Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā fī sināʿat al-inshāʾ (Dār al-fikr, 1913–1919), 3:334, where this is discussed. See also ʿAmr Negīb Mūsā Nāṣir’s discussion of the relocation and timing of these repairs in al-Ḥayyāt, 175. For details on the construction work, see al-Maqrīzī , al-Khiṭaṭ, 1:171–172; al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk, 2:111.
- 12.
See Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 244, for a discussion of this complicated nomenclature. The canal was also commonly referred to as the ‘Ashrafīya’ Canal, as reconstructed by the Sultan al-Ashraf Barsbāy in 826 AH/1423 CE, a task that employed a much lower number of rural laborers, over a period of several months in the late spring of 1423 CE. However, it very soon filled with sand again, marking the end of one of the few late Mamlūk canal renovations. See al-Maqrīzī , al-Khiṭaṭ, 1:172.
- 13.
This is a realistic estimate of the labor actually employed in this work compared to estimates for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century canal work in Mikhail, Nature and Empire, 258, where 36,000 peasants were said to have worked on a canal in Manfalūṭ in 1808. These numbers were then dwarfed by subsequent modernisation efforts by Muhammad ʿAlī, in which 100,000 peasants were initially recruited, and by 1819, approximately 315,000 had been made to work on the new Alexandria /Ashrafīya canal (al-Maḥmūdīya), resulting in a horrific loss of life. See Mikhail, Nature and Empire, 258, 280–281.
- 14.
100,000 faddān, or some 67,000 hectares, would be a reasonable sum for a restoration of the Alexandria Canal area. The western half of this canal, from Qābil out to Qabr al-Wāʿilī, supplied water to some 27 villages and accounted for approximately 50,000 faddāns. For the latter number, see Heinz Halm, Ägypten nach den Mamlukischen Lehensregistern, vol. 2, Das Delta, Beihefte zum Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients 38 (Wiesbaden: Reichert [in Komm.], 1982), 390–464. Al-Maqrīzī was probably on target if he was envisioning the entire area fed by the Alexandria Canal: he had a good head for quantitative estimates, as is seen elsewhere. See my discussion of his use of numbers in Black Death , 42–44.
- 15.
For the qaṣaba, see Helen Rivlin, The Agricultural Policy of Muhammad ʿAlī in Egypt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 125. Al-Maqrīzī, Khiṭaṭ, 1:171.
- 16.
For the analysis yielding a decline of 55–58 %, see Borsch, Black Death , 81–87.
- 17.
Michel, “Villages Désertés,” 229–232.
- 18.
Ibid., 241, 247.
- 19.
Ibid., 217.
- 20.
Ibid., 202–204.
- 21.
Ibn al-Jīʿān, Kitāb al-tuḥfa al-sanīya, ed. Bernhard Mortiz (Cairo: Maktab kulliyat al-Azhar, 1898), 133; Halm, Ägypten, 2:428; Michel, “Villages Désertés,” 241.
- 22.
The simple calculation of theoretical carrying capacity here divides some million liters (twice the revenue) by 350 liters per person per year. The result is close to 3,000.
- 23.
Ibn al-Jīʿān, Tuḥfa, 133; Halm, Ägypten, 2:428.
- 24.
Michel, “Villages Désertés,“ 241, 247; for ‘būr’, see 215.
- 25.
Ibid., 203, 243.
- 26.
Michel, “Villages Désertés,” 229. Michel’s estimate is for population and he posits a shift to more extensive farming practices, which means his estimate of the decline in production might be somewhat less than his estimate for depopulation . The figure of 60 % is obviously quite close to the economic retraction estimated in Borsch, Black Death , 87.
- 27.
A 58 % decline was extrapolated for 1517 in Black Death, 83.
- 28.
Flaux, “Environmental Changes,” 1–12.
- 29.
Ibid., 2–6.
- 30.
The annual volume of inflowing fresh water from canals was probably some 10 billion liters, at the very least; this makes the al-Buḥayra flood basin a formidable defence against evaporation and Mediterranean salt water. The sum of 10 billion liters is based on a reconstruction of the drainage basin of al-Buḥayra and the likely drainage volume of the Alexandria Canal, the Baḥr Damanhūr, the Baḥr Ramsīs, and the Ṭayrīya Canal, all of which emptied into Lake Maryūṭ at the tail end of the flood season. Sources for this reconstruction include the late twelfth-century al-Makhzūmī, who is quoted in al-Maqr īzī, al-Khiṭaṭ, 1:169–171. Ibn Mammātī, Kitāb al-qawānīn al-dawānīn, ed. A. S. Atiya (Cairo: Maktab Madbūli, 1943), 221–233; Umar Tusun, Prince, Memoires sur histoire du Nil (Le Caire: Impr. de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1925), 1:213–228. The text of Ibn al-Jīʿān, Tuḥfa, 116–136, and Halm, Ägypten, 2:390–464 were used map out arable acreage.
- 31.
Flaux, “Environmental Changes,” 6.
- 32.
Ibid., 8–11.
- 33.
Ibid., 10.
- 34.
Ibid., 8.
- 35.
Ibid., 10–11. Flooding from the Mediterranean Sea occurred sporadically in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Due to one of these flooding cycles (specifically one caused by the British in 1801) the lake expanded to the south-east.
- 36.
The subject was first explored in Borsch, “Nile Floods,” 131–145.
- 37.
The maximum height of the Nile in the flood season was faithfully recorded at the Cairo Nilometer in an almost uninterrupted tradition from the seventh century to the modern era. This record, as compiled and analyzed by Umar Tusun (1925) and William Popper (1951), has provided subsequent historians, archaeologists, and mathematicians with a beautiful set of tools for understanding and quantitatively modeling climatic and environmental changes. See Umar Tusun, Memoires, vol. 2 and William Popper, The Cairo Nilometer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952).
- 38.
Records from 1350 to 1500 show that the Nile maxima went up by nearly a meter in the early fifteenth century, an increase that cannot be attributed to the natural build-up of alluvial sediment. See Popper, Nilometer, 221–223.
- 39.
Regarding floods of short duration, Ibn Iyās dramatically relates the concern that the rise of the Nile is ‘too short’, that it reaches an adequate level and then plunges rapidly, disrupting the delicate timing of the irrigation system, and depriving the administrators and laborers of adequate time to fill the basins to the required level. (It generally took anywhere between 20 and 40 days to fill the basins, and they were filled to an average level of 1−1.5 meters. Julien Barois, Irrigation in Egypt , trans. Major Alexander M. Miller, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1889), 25; S. W. Willcocks and J. I. Craig, Egyptian Irrigation, vol. 1, 3rd ed. (London : E. & FN Spon, 1913), 304–307. There was a noticeable concern that the Nile was receding too early. See, for example, al-Maqrīzī , Sulūk, 2:709–710; Borsch, “Nile Floods,” 133. For example, for the years 1425, 1426, 1427, 1429, 1430, 1434, and 1435, we are told that the Nile ‘receded too quickly’. See al-Maqrīzī, Sulūk, 4:678, 709–710, 750–752, 806, 834, 903–904, 931, and 950. Regarding floods of early inception, Ibn Iyās notes that the flood crest was occurring earlier and earlier in the Coptic month of Misrā (7 August–6 September). See Ibn Iyas, Nuzhat al-umam fi al-ʿajāʾib wa al-ḥikam, ed. Muḥammad Zaynham Muḥammad ʿAzab, (Cairo: Maktab Madbulī, 1995), 89. Other events such as the highly unusual crest in 1479, arriving at the exceptionally early date of the 29th of the Coptic month Abīb (the 6th of August), added to the general level of anxiety, see C. F. Petry, Protectors or Praetorians? The Last Mamlūk Sultans and Egypt ’s Waning as a Great Power (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 123. Moreover, it seems that during the fifteenth century, the flood not only receded too soon, but it also crested earlier and at a greater height. See Ibn Iyās, Nuzhat, 88–89.
- 40.
Al-Qalqashandī repeatedly reports that higher flood levels, up to 20 cubits, were leaving much of the cultivable land dry. See al-Qalqashandī, Ṣubḥ, 3:516. This observation is echoed by al-Maqr īzī, Ibn Iyās, and others. See al-Maqrīzī, Sulūk, 2:753, 769; al-Qalqashandī, Ṣubḥ, 3:516; Ibn Iyās, Nuzhat, 88–89; Al-Maqrīzī, Khiṭaṭ, 1:60. Like al-Qalqashandī, they attribute this change to the decay of the irrigation system. Al-Qalqashandī also gives us an account of the problems facing the irrigation system. He tells us that repairs to the sulṭānī system were limited to simple, easy tasks only. He also speaks of a significant failure to maintain and repair (ʿimāra) the baladī system. See al-Qalqashandī, Ṣubḥ, 3:516.
- 41.
Al-Qalqashandī, Ṣubḥ, 3:516.
- 42.
For the Bedouins in Upper Egypt , see, Sarah Büssow-Schmitz, “Rules of Communication and Politics Between Bedouin and Mamluk Elites in Egypt: The Case of the al-Aḥdab Revolt,” Eurasian Studies 9, no. 1–2 (2011): 67–104; J. C. Garcin, “The Regime of the Circassian Mamluks,” in The Cambridge History of Egypt, ed. C. Petry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1:290–317; J. C. Garcin, Un centre musulman de la Haute-Égypte médiévale: Qûs (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1976), 468–507; Muḥammad Ibn Khalīl al-Asadī, Kitāb al-taysīr wa al-iʿtibār, ed. Aḥmad Tulaymat (Cairo: Dār al-fikr al-ʿarabī, 1968), 5:21; Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ al-ghumr bi-anbāʾ al-ʿumr, ed. Hassan Habashī (Cairo: al-Majlis al-ʿAlī, 1969–1972), 8:338, 8:343; Khalīl Ibn Shāhīn al-Ẓāhirī (d. 872 AH/1468 CE), Kitāb zubdat kashf al-mamālīk wa bayān al-ṭuruq wa al-masālik, ed. Paul Ravaisse (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1894), 34–41; Saʿīd ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ ʿĀshūr, al-Mujtamaʿ al-miṣrī fī ʿaṣr salāṭīn al-mamālīk (Cairo: Dār al-nahḍa al-ʿarabīya, 1993), 59–63.
- 43.
For Bedouin cutting dikes, see al-Maqr īzī, al-Sulūk, 2:832–833 and 2:896; Petry, Protectors, 124–125. As was the case in so many other places where agriculture bordered desert, scrub, and steppe, once in place, pastoralism dug in with force, and the area could only be re-sown after the Bedouin were removed and the land reworked. Thus the Bedouin spread, particularly in Upper Egypt , because these rural areas, which had become a wasteland for farmers, had developed into prime real estate for the pastoral nomad. For an analysis of this sort of environmental resistance to plague , see Lawrence Conrad, “The Plague in the Early Medieval Middle East” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1981).
- 44.
See here Barois, Irrigation in Egypt , 25; Willcocks, Egyptian Irrigation, 61–65. The basins in Upper Egypt were drained over a period of roughly 45 days, from October 15 to November 30, with the timing being earlier as one moved south along the Nile Valley. Filling the basins took approximately the same amount of time , but filling time could vary if the flood were unusually high or unusually low. See also Ibn Mammātī, Qawānīn, 76–77.
- 45.
Estimated Upper Egyptian flood basin acreage of 1.635 million faddāns, some 1 million hectares. See Borsch, Black Death , 71–72. Convert 1 million hectares into meters squared, and multiply the result by 1.25 meters, the average height of water in the Upper Egyptian flood basins, and the result is 12.26 billion cubic meters (12.26 trillion liters) of flood water held back in the Coptic months of Misrā and Tūt (i.e. from mid-August to early October).
- 46.
If the entire flood basin of Upper Egypt were abandoned, it would send an additional 12.26 billion cubic meters of Nile water to Cairo. This 12.26 billion cubic meters is then divided by 3.456 million seconds (i.e. forty days’ worth of seconds). The resulting addition to volumetric flow in the Nile at Cairo, at peak flood time , at the flood maximum, would be a stupendous additional volumetric flow of 3,547 cubic meters per second. For Buckley’s observations, see Robert Burton Buckley, Irrigation Works in India and Egypt (London : E. & F. N. Spon, 1893), 34. Buckley describes how the ‘cuts’ (quṭūʿ vs. British masonry regulators) let water drain out of the basins at an astonishing rate; the increased discharge (90,000 cubic feet per second more) would raise the level at Cairo by 4.5 feet (i.e. 1.4 meters or 2.6 cubits) in 30 hours.
- 47.
We use a curve-fit derivation from Professor Joyce Brown’s Mathematics 356: Numerical Analysis, Spring 2012. The resulting equation is y = 1.42x5–34.17x4+319.58x3–1315.83x2+3229x–1920. Many thanks to students who derived this equation: Shafayet Khan, Ryan Kidinski, Megan Libbey, Brittany Ouellette, Ross Petrain, Michael Weselcouch.
- 48.
Fekri Hassan, “Extreme Nile Floods and Famines in Medieval Egypt (AD 930–1500) and their Climatic Implications,” Quaternary International 173–174 (2007): 101–112; Fekri Hassan, “Historical Nile Floods and Their Implications for Climatic Change ,” Science 212, no. 4499 (June 5, 1981): 1142–1145.
- 49.
Buckley, Irrigation , 12.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Borsch, S. (2017). The Black Death and the Human Impact on the Environment. In: Schenk, G. (eds) Historical Disaster Experiences. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49163-9_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49163-9_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49162-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-49163-9
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)