When war and plague empty the market

This lesson asks you to explain how factors such as war and disease affect the nutritional status of a population group. The museum offers two cases from the medieval Middle East; your class adds cases from Canada and the modern world. The linked records contain graphic accounts of the famine. ¹

Take the card for each case and look at what the writer says about bread, flour or fruit, who could reach it and what it cost. List the causes the writer names, and mark which are war, which are disease and which are disorder.

Read what Miskawayh records about bread and prices before the war for Baghdad was over. In his account of 334 AH the dearth began before the war ended: Mu'izz al-Dawla's camp on the west bank was cut off, and Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn Harun bought him a kurr of fine flour for twenty thousand dirhams ². On the east bank bread was five ratls a dirham because flour came from Mosul; on the west bank a single ratl cost a dirham and a quarter, when it could be found ³. Crossing between the two banks was impossible, and the people of the countryside suffered greatly because the soldiers reaped their crops and carried them off to their camp ³. Miskawayh then writes: "When the strife ended and the new harvest came in, prices fell." ⁴

Our source for 334 AH is Miskawayh's Tajarib al-umam, whose author set out to draw from the history of nations whatever yields an "experience" for politics and the conduct of rule ^{5 6}. At the head of the events of 340 AH he says that most of what he relates afterwards is "seen and witnessed, or a verified report" ^{7 5}; 334 falls before that year, and the museum's record does not say what he relied on for it. The year 448 reaches us in a different way: its record reports what Ibn al-Jawzi wrote in al-Shudhur, and a letter that came from Egypt about three thieves ⁸. It gives a quince, a pomegranate and a cucumber a dinar each ⁸, with no ordinary price beside them, and neither record counts the hungry. A historian reads what the writer recorded, not what befell each household.

For the famine of 334 AH Miskawayh names the war for the city ⁹, the soldiers who reaped the crops of the countryside and the impossible crossing between the banks ³. For 448 AH the record names severe famine and heavy plague in Egypt, and strife, fear and plunder in Iraq ⁸. Which of the two accounts gives a historian firmer ground for naming a single cause of high prices, and why?

• The Baghdad famine of 334 AH: the prices on the two banks and what Miskawayh says of the end of the dearth; its later sections describe the famine itself in harrowing terms.
• The general famine and plague of 448: what the report gives of prices and causes in Egypt and Iraq.
• Tajarib al-umam: Miskawayh's stated aim in his preface, his sources and what he himself witnessed.
• Mu'izz al-Dawla's grants of the Sawad: what Miskawayh says the policy that followed the famine year led to.

Use the two cards above, on the Baghdad famine of 334 AH and the general famine and plague of 448. Make a two-column table: what each writer names as a cause, and what changed in prices, crops or harvest, up to the recovery when the card gives one. Stay with the prices and the causes; you do not need to read the records to do this.