This paper reexamines the sources used by N. Fancy and M.H. Green in “Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)” (Medical History, 65/2 (2021), 157–177). Fancy and Green argued that the Arabic and Persian descriptions of the Mongol sieges in Iran and Iraq, and in particular, in the conquest of Baghdad in 1258, indicate that the besieged fortresses and cities were struck by Plague after the Mongol sieges were lifted. This, they suggested, is part of a recurrent pattern of the outbreak of Plague transmitted by the Mongol expansion across Eurasia. Fancy and Green concluded that the primary sources substantiate the theory driven by recent paleogenetic studies indicating that the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century set the stage for the massive pandemic of the mid-fourteenth century. The link between the Plague outbreak and the Mongol siege of Baghdad relies on three near-contemporaneous historical accounts. However, our re-examination of the sources shows that the main text (in Persian) has been significantly misunderstood, and that the two other texts (in Syriac and Arabic) have been mis-contextualized, and thus not understood properly. They do not support the authors’ claim regarding Plague epidemic in Baghdad in 1258, nor do other contemporary and later Arabic texts from Syria and Egypt adduced by them, which we re-examine in detail here. We conclude that there is no evidence for the appearance of Plague during or immediately after the Mongol conquests in the Middle East, certainly not for its transmission by the Mongols.

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瘟疫和蒙古人对巴格达的征服（1258）？重新评估来源

本文重新审视了 N. Fancy 和 MH Green 在《瘟疫与巴格达陷落 (1258)》中使用的资料来源（医学史，65/2 (2021), 157–177）。范西和格林认为，阿拉伯语和波斯语对蒙古人围困伊朗和伊拉克，特别是 1258 年征服巴格达的描述表明，在蒙古人的围困解除后，被围困的堡垒和城市遭受了瘟疫袭击。他们认为，这是蒙古人在欧亚大陆扩张传播的鼠疫反复爆发模式的一部分。范西和格林得出的结论是，主要来源证实了由最近的古遗传学研究驱动的理论，表明十三世纪蒙古人的征服为十四世纪中叶的大规模流行病奠定了基础。鼠疫爆发与蒙古人围攻巴格达之间的联系依赖于三个几乎同时期的历史记载。然而，我们对来源的重新审查表明，主要文本（波斯语）被严重误解，而其他两个文本（叙利亚语和阿拉伯语）被错误地语境化，因此没有正确理解。他们不支持作者关于 1258 年巴格达瘟疫流行的说法，也不支持他们引用的来自叙利亚和埃及的其他当代和后来的阿拉伯文本，我们在这里重新详细审查。我们的结论是，没有证据表明鼠疫在蒙古征服中东期间或之后立即出现，当然也没有证据表明鼠疫是由蒙古人传播的。