page_title: Plague of Amwas
section_title: Origins and political setting
hierarchical_section_title: Plague of Amwas / Origins and political setting
caption_attribution_description: Emmaus Nicopolis
context_page_description: The plague of Amwas, also spelled plague of Emmaus, was a bubonic plague epidemic that afflicted Islamic Syria in 638–639, toward the end of the Muslim conquest of the region. It was likely a reemergence of the mid-6th-century Plague of Justinian. Called after Amwas in Palestine, the principal camp of the Muslim Arab army, the plague killed up to 25,000 soldiers and their relatives, including most of the army's high command, and caused considerable loss of life and displacement among the indigenous Christians of Syria. The appointment of Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan to the governorship of Syria in the wake of the commanders' deaths paved the way for his establishment of the Umayyad Caliphate in 661, while recurrences of the disease may have contributed to the Umayyad dynasty's downfall in 750. Depopulation in the Syrian countryside may have been a factor in the resettlement of the land by the Arabs unlike in other conquered regions where the Arabs largely secluded themselves to new garrison cities.
  The plague of Amwas received more attention in the Arabic sources than any other epidemic until the 14th-century Black Death.
context_section_description: The plague of Amwas (ta'un Amwas in Arabic) was likely a bubonic plague epidemic, though the sources do not elaborate on specific symptoms of the disease. It was the second recorded plague of the Islamic era, which began in the 620s, and the first to directly afflict the Muslims. It was likely a reemergence of the Plague of Justinian, which originated in Pelusium (near modern Suez) in 541 CE and spread west to Alexandria and east to Palestine before reaching the Byzantine capital Constantinople in 541–542 and afflicting the rest of Europe and the Sasanian Empire, as noted by the Byzantine historian Procopius (d. c. 570). The Plague of Justinian recurred in at least nine to twelve cycles throughout the mid-6th century and the 7th century.
  The first caliph (head of the Muslim community) Abu Bakr (r. 632–634) dispatched four armies from Medina led respectively by Amr ibn al-As, Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan, Shurahbil ibn Hasana and Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah to conquer Byzantine Syria (Abu Ubayda may not have been dispatched until after the accession of Abu Bakr's successor Caliph Umar in mid-634). Amwas, the Arabic name for Emmaus-Nicopolis, had been a fortified Roman army camp in the 1st century CE, which grew into a small city by the early 3rd century. It was captured by the Muslims from the Byzantines following the Battle of Ajnadayn in 634 or the Battle of Yarmouk in 636. At the onset of the plague, the site served as the principal camp of the Arab Muslim troops in Syria where spoils were divided and soldiers paid.
caption: The site of Emmaus-Nicopolis, called 'Amwas' by the Arabs. The plague of Amwas first struck the Muslim Arab troops encamped there before spreading across Syria–Palestine and affecting Egypt and Iraq
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