ABSTRACT
Historical backdrop: prelude to a public health and social crisis No other region of the Roman world changed so inexorably as northern Africa at the end of Antiquity. What was at one time a prosperous breadbasket for the Roman Empire retained only the shell of its former glory in the centuries after the sack of Carthage in 439 ce. Economic output plummeted, trade throughput dried up, urban centres emptied in favour of greener pastures to the north and east, and material culture reached a low ebb. What caused these changes? As with all changes in global order, there are those who gain and those who lose. North Africa of this period was condemned as much by its geography and natural nemeses as by invading armies. Military and economic marginalization of this part of the former empire was often accompanied by the scourge of acute infectious diseases such as plague, smallpox, and other ailments found in urban and agricultural settlements, along with the physical disabilities often found in tandem, all of which played a somewhat unacknowledged role in ushering in the end of a Roman and Byzantine North Africa and the rise of a wholly Islamic civilization. This chapter analyzes the effect of infectious disease and physical disability in this social transition and shows how the everyday realities of sickness and death and the medicine to treat the former spanned and shaped these two distinct cultural epochs. Was the way in which early medieval Muslims viewed disease and disability in historical continuity with pre-Islamic Antiquity or was it a form of rupture with the past?
