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

Abstract

She studies the early modern history of medicine, epidemic diseases, and the rise of public health in the Mediterranean world. She is the author of several articles and her first book, entitled Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is also editing a collection of articles entitled Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean (contracted by Ashgate Press). In conjunction with this research, she teaches courses on epidemic diseases in world history, with a particular focus on plague. In her teaching, she incorporates research findings from bioarcheology, genetics, and climate history. She is the recipient of an NEH Fellowship for study at the American Research Institute in Turkey, a Senior Fellowship from Koç University's Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, and a Turkish Cultural Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship. She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago.

Plague Depopulation and Irrigation Decay in Medieval Egypt

“…Mikhail, whose work studies the trail of plague mortality stretching all the way to the nineteenth century, focuses attention on the environmental history of plague, and his innovative use of archival court records gives him a unique perspective on the disease's long-term tenure in the eastern Mediterranean. Long after plague had been banished from Europe it endured in the Middle East, and it continued to haunt Egypt, with outbreaks recurring approximately every nine years for over half a millennium, from 1347 to 1894 (see also Varlīk 2014, in this issue).…”

Past pandemics and climate variability across the Mediterranean

“…Like the Justinianic plague, the Black Death marked the arrival in the region of Yersinia pestis, the cause of bubonic, pneumonic and other varieties of plague. For more than two centuries following the 6th-century pandemic, and five following the 14th-century pandemic, Y. pestis would repeatedly reemerge within the Mediterranean region and Europe, often claiming vast numbers of lives, as in Egypt 1429-30 CE, Spain 1596-1602 CE and Italy 1629-31 CE (Biraben 1975;Stathakopoulos 2004;Borsch 2005;Alfani 2017;MacKay 2019;Varlik 2014).…”

Editor's Introduction to Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death

“…3 Their skepticism arose from the fact that the speed of the disease's spread, and the level of well-documented human mortality it caused during the fourteenth century, in no way match the patterns seen in the Third Plague Pandemic, which is normally dated from around 1894 to the 1930s and during which the foundation was laid for our modern bacteriological and epidemiological understandings of the pathogen and the disease it causes in animals and humans. There is good reason, now, to question the role that early twentieth-century epidemiology has played in our general constructions of plague's histories, because plague is not always or everywhere the same in its vectors or animal hosts (Royer 2014; see Varlık 2014 andCarmichael 2014, both in this issue). Nevertheless, rather than dismiss the skeptics' focus on the discrepancies between twentieth-century understandings of plague's epidemiology and our medieval evidence, this collection of essays is motivated by an acceptance of the discrepancies.…”