Ibn Battuta's Processions At Damascus

“Processions at Damascus” was an early example of a personal anecdote, as it pivoted on the author’s encounter with the city’s response to the rampant devastation incited by the Black Death, a title synonymous with the Great Plague and abbreviated as the Plague. The author of the narrative is Ibn Battuta, an explorer of Arabian territories known for publicizing the conclusions he drew regarding their geographical attributes, their prescribed lifestyles and how they came to manifest themselves as their culture, and their societal conventions and how religion functioned as the preeminent factor that determined them. The translated version of “Processions at Damascus” from Arabic to English was featured in the translated work of Battuta, The Travels

Battuta’s written account of Damascus’ population-wide reaction to the destruction caused by the Black Death was composed in July of the same year in which the plague began. Likewise, “Prayers at York”, the label given to English archbishop William de la Zouche’s letter to his official in the city of York, was also written in July of 1348 and also centered itself around the Black Plague. The translated version of “Prayers at York” from Latin to English was featured in the 20th-century publication The Black Death, the original text being conceived by de la Zouche in the English village of Cawood and then sent to his designated

“Prayers at York”, at its core, is a borderline-manipulative call for Christians to “pray” to God, but the behavior described by de la Zouche after the term “pray” seems more aptly categorized as begging: converted sinners should “[urge God] with prayers that he, the kind and merciful Almighty God, should turn away his anger and remove the pestilence and drive away the infection from the people whom he redeemed with his precious blood” (de la Zouche). The adherent execution of Christian religious rituals such as those commanded by de la Zouche, which include holding “devout processions…every Wednesday and Friday in [the] cathedral church, in other collegiate and conventual churches, and in every parish church” (de La Zouche) in their vicinity, conducting a “solemn [chant] of [a] litany” (de la Zouche) relevant to their struggles in the wake of the Black Death, and speaking a “special prayer…in mass every day for allaying the plague and the pestilence” (de la Zouche). De la Zouche ambles on to reiterate his already repeated motif that God will “pardon [them] and come to [their] rescue” (de la