THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY EGYPTIAN chronicler al-Maqrīzī pro-vides us with a substantial account of the Black Death in his historical narrative of several thousand pages: the Kitāb al-sulūk lī-ma ‘rifa duwal al-mulūk (The Book of Methods for Understanding the Kingdoms [of the World]). Al-Maqrīzī was a market inspector (muhtasib) as well as a prominent historian. His extensive works have therefore provided modern scholars with a great deal of information about Egypt's economic history. Concerning the plague's arrival in Egypt, al-Maqrīzī's narrative describes a sequence familiar to historians of the Black Death: how, in 1347 CE, a pestilence “worse than any seen before in the Islamic world” began with a ship full of corpses drifting into Alexandria. There were a few sailors still alive; they died soon after—and Egypt's experience with the Black Death began (al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk, 2: 772–73).

Al-Maqrīzī reports that in Alexandria the plague began killing a hundred people a day, and that the death toll subsequently doubled to two hundred a day. As the plague outbreak reached its peak, there were mass funerals for as many as seven hundred people. The plague then spread throughout the Nile Delta, where “no one was left to gather the crops.” In the city of Bilbays at the eastern edge of the Delta, al-Maqrīzī reports that “mosques, shops and lodges were left empty” (al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk, 2: 777–79). When the plague struck Cairo, the sultan and leading members of the ruling regime fled the city, as mass prayers were held in the mosques and the cemeteries. When the plague reached its peak around December of 1348, it was reported that something like 7,000 people died per day. The plague finally abated the following February; in the quiet that followed, Cairo was like a graveyard, still and empty (al-Maqrīzī, al-Sulūk, 2: 780–84).

Scenes of devastation like that of Cairo in February 1349 were to become all too common in Egypt. Plague depopulation in the instance of the Black Death had a deep and long-term impact on Egypt's economy. This article examines the manner in which plague shaped the economic history of Egypt. It assesses the relative scale and scope of rural mortality and argues that plague depopulation led to the collapse of Egypt's economic infrastructure; the analysis that follows is intended to show exactly how and why this happened.