The Black Death and the Human Impact on the Environment

Abstract

This article examines how plague depopulation had a direct effect on the environment of the Egyptian province of al-Buh. ayra 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-Buh. ayra. It is estimated that overall agricultural output increased by as much as 50 % between 1250 and 1315. Al-Buh. ayra 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 Nasir, T. ayriyya, 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-Buh. ayra 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.