A Kurd goatherd in the modern day, in the fields around Malatya
Part 8: The Pestilence in the East
The Pestilence brought ravages, death, and chaos to so many different regions that it would be unproductive to truly examine them all. While the disease itself is most famous for the rapid population decline it brought upon Europe, our focuses must invariably be turned to other lands. First, we look to one of the lands most resoundingly changed of all of those affected: eastern Anatolia.
Where before the land was dotted with large cities and major defenses, from Charpete to Erzurum, inhabited by Armenians, Turcomen, and Jews alike, it was now an empty and howling land. As the Pestilence swept over Anatolia from the west, each and every one of these cities was absolutely devastated. The streets of Erzurum were empty of the typical merchants and passers-by, instead packed with the unmoving dead and the limp vagrants, brought into the city from the countryside by the famined fields, no farmers to plough them. The garrisons which once guarded the citadel of Charpete were sickly and weak, unable to even pick up their spears and swords for the bursting of buboes and the weakening of bones. The nobles and magnates of Malatya looked out over their city and the countryside surrounding, the location of that great battle not too long ago, as the sickly groans of pestilential peasants rose up into the great blue sky. However, something unique about the eastern lands of the Sultanate, something which the lands to the west did not have, were mountain-dwelling nomads, relatively shielded from the ravages of the plague.
Due to the high mountain peaks of the Armenian Highlands and the Zagros range of western Iran, the Pestilence had some difficulty spreading to the east of Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Cities such as Tabriz, Mosul, Ardabil, Kermanshah, and others were just as surely devastated by the spread of the Pestilence, but the mountain and valley nomads kept their distance from the cities, maintaining their herds of sheep and goats and protecting themselves from the Pestilence, for the most part at least.
These nomads were a very diverse bunch, a mix of Arabs, Turcomen, Yazidis, and, most importantly, that group known as the Kurds. The Kurds were not a truly united people like their linguistic brethren the Yazidis are, but rather the term “Kurdish” is used simply to describe all manner of Iranian-speaking nomads, “dwellers in tents” as they were also referred to. Kurds had, in centuries past, become very prominent in the affairs of the middle east, for Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub was of Kurdish origin, and the glorious dynasty which he established in Egypt and al-Sham was of the same descent. However, with the destruction of the family of Salah ad-Din and the construction of the government of slaves in Egypt, the Kurds have returned to their more ancient state, that of nomads of the Armenian Highlands, the Zagros, and al-Jazira.
There are few records of the very beginning of the process that would become known as Kurdification, for the officials in the cities cared little for the migration of nomads in the wilderness and countryside. It can be safely assumed that the fields left empty by the sudden die-off of the rural peasantry quickly became fallow over the years of the Pestilence, and after decades of abandonment the once fertile fields turned over to grassy pastures, spreading out from the cities in all directions. The journal of the Pontic merchant Cyrus Alexopoulos describes what he saw when traveling to the city of Malatya from his base in Trebizond:
“The roads which lead to Melitene are ragged, with flagstones broken and grasses
reaching toward the sky above, and the farmsteads for all around are ruined and
collapsed. When I began my career, such things would cause worry, for fear of bandits
or of marauders, but none remain in the countryside today. At least our horses can feast
on the unkempt grasses. Nothing was lost or stolen. The city’s walls can be seen in the
distance, only a parasang away.”
As the cities receded, the nomads expanded, and it is with this that the Kurds came to dominate the countryside. Eastern Anatolia became a sea of nomadism with occasional dots of settled life, cities of Turks, Romans, and Armenians surrounded on all sides by Kurds and those of other groups that became subsumed by the Kurdish culture. By the 1450s, the territory of Iranian-speakers in eastern Anatolia would reach deep into the Armenian Highlands, and almost reaching past the Euphrates in the east. This rapid expansion of the nomadic culture would have many downfalls however: as the Pestilence abated, the peasants attempted to return to their fields, fields which had long ago turned over to pasture for Kurdish goats and sheep. Clashes between Turcoman peasants and Kurdish nomads were not an uncommon sight, and numerous concessions had to be made to the nomads for the central government at Iconium to extract even a modicum of agricultural production out of the east.
While it has not been examined in as much scholarly depth as it could be, the relationship of the strange Yazidis to this Kurdification process of the 14th and 15th (8th and 9th) centuries is a complex and fascinating one. While Muslim Kurds were just as likely to attack the Yazidis for their “devil-worship” as any Arab or Turcoman was, Yazidi population boomed just as much as that of Muslim Kurds. Yazidi temples from this period are found in the mountains around Malatya and Erzurum, indicating a spread of such groups that far north. Many Yazidi priests today have interesting things to say regarding the Kurdification, believing that the expansion of the Yazidis was, in part, due to their descendance from Shehid bin Jer and the auspices of Tawuse Melek, giving fortune and fertility to the Yazidis of the highlands, for a time at least.
Just as the nomadic ancestors of the Turcomen had flown into the valleys and lowlands of Anatolia three centuries before, so now the Kurds expanded into the valleys and mountains of the eastern highlands, bringing with them goats and sheep just as much as horses and conflict.
