paragraph_text: Plague Over England is a play written by Nicholas de Jongh, based on a real-life incident when actor John Gielgud was arrested for lewd behavior in 1953; it provides an insight into the changes in the lives of gay people over the last fifty years. It received universally positive reviews when it received its world premiere at the Finborough Theatre in 2008, and subsequently transferred to the West End with an updated cast for a limited run.

paragraph_text: Sparta and its allies, with the exception of Corinth, were almost exclusively land based powers, able to summon large land armies that were very nearly unbeatable. Under the direction of Pericles, the Athenians pursued a policy of retreat within the city walls of Athens, relying on Athenian maritime supremacy for supply while the superior Athenian navy harassed Spartan troop movements. Unfortunately the strategy also resulted in adding many people from the countryside to an already well - populated city, introducing a severe crowding factor as well as resource shortages. Due to the close quarters and poor hygiene exhibited at that time Athens became a breeding ground for disease and many citizens died including Pericles, his wife, and his sons Paralus and Xanthippus. In the history of epidemics the 'Plague' of Athens is remarkable for its one - sided affliction and bias on the ultimate outcome of a war.

paragraph_text: A process of standardisation started in the Middle Ages, especially under the influence of the Burgundian Ducal Court in Dijon (Brussels after 1477). The dialects of Flanders and Brabant were the most influential around this time. The process of standardisation became much stronger at the start of the 16th century, mainly based on the urban dialect of Antwerp. In 1585 Antwerp fell to the Spanish army: many fled to the Northern Netherlands, where the Dutch Republic declared its independence from Spain. They particularly influenced the urban dialects of the province of Holland. In 1637, a further important step was made towards a unified language, when the Statenvertaling, the first major Bible translation into Dutch, was created that people from all over the new republic could understand. It used elements from various, even Dutch Low Saxon, dialects but was predominantly based on the urban dialects of Holland of post 16th century.

paragraph_text: The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia and peaking in Europe from 1346 to 1353. The bacterium Yersinia pestis, resulting in several forms of plague, is believed to have been the cause. The plague created a series of religious, social, and economic upheavals, which had profound effects on the course of European history.

paragraph_text: The Plague Court Murders is the first Sir Henry Merrivale mystery, by the American writer John Dickson Carr, who wrote it under the name of Carter Dickson. It is a locked room mystery of the subtype known as an "impossible crime".

paragraph_text: From around 750, during the Abbasid Caliphate, women “became renowned for their brains as well as their beauty”. In particular, many well known women of the time were trained from childhood in music, dancing and poetry. Mahbuba was one of these. Another feminine figure to be remembered for her achievements was Tawaddud, "a slave girl who was said to have been bought at great cost by Hārūn al-Rashīd because she had passed her examinations by the most eminent scholars in astronomy, medicine, law, philosophy, music, history, Arabic grammar, literature, theology and chess". Moreover, among the most prominent feminine figures was Shuhda who was known as "the Scholar" or "the Pride of Women" during the 12th century in Baghdad. Despite the recognition of women's aptitudes during the Abbasid dynasty, all these came to an end in Iraq with the sack of Baghdad in 1258.

paragraph_text: In England, in the absence of census figures, historians propose a range of preincident population figures from as high as 7 million to as low as 4 million in 1300, and a postincident population figure as low as 2 million. By the end of 1350, the Black Death subsided, but it never really died out in England. Over the next few hundred years, further outbreaks occurred in 1361–62, 1369, 1379–83, 1389–93, and throughout the first half of the 15th century. An outbreak in 1471 took as much as 10–15% of the population, while the death rate of the plague of 1479–80 could have been as high as 20%. The most general outbreaks in Tudor and Stuart England seem to have begun in 1498, 1535, 1543, 1563, 1589, 1603, 1625, and 1636, and ended with the Great Plague of London in 1665.

paragraph_text: The Ali ebn-e Sahl mausoleum is a historical mausoleum in Isfahan, Iran. The mystic Abolhassan Ali ebn-e Sahl Azhar Esfahani lived in the era of the Al-Mu'tadid, the Abbasid caliph. He had a khanqah and a school in the north of the Toghchi cemetery. He died in 894 in Isfahan and was buried in his khanqah.

paragraph_text: Marion Freisler (10 February 1910 in Hamburg – 21 January 1997 in Munich), née Russegger was the wife of Roland Freisler, the infamous judge and chairman of the Nazi "Volksgerichtshof" (People's Court), who died in 1945 during an air raid in Berlin. She is sometimes mistakenly referred to as Anna Freisler.

paragraph_text: The first European epidemic of the bubonic plague dates back to the mid 6th century and is called the Plague of Justinian. The largest plague epidemic was the Black Death in Europe in the 14th century. In medieval times, the large loss of people (due to the bubonic plague) in a town created an economic disaster. Community plague doctors were quite valuable and were given special privileges; for example, plague doctors were freely allowed to perform autopsies, which were otherwise generally forbidden in Medieval Europe, to research a cure for the plague.In some cases, plague doctors were so valuable that when Barcelona dispatched two to Tortosa in 1650, outlaws captured them en route and demanded a ransom. The city of Barcelona paid for their release. The city of Orvieto hired Matteo fu Angelo in 1348 for four times the normal rate of a doctor of 50-florin per year. Pope Clement VI hired several extra plague doctors during the Black Death plague. They were to attend to the sick people of Avignon. Of 18 doctors in Venice, only one was left by 1348: five had died of the plague, and 12 were missing and may have fled.

paragraph_text: During the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Strasbourg, the city was heavily bombarded by the Prussian army. The bombardment of the city was meant to break the morale of the people of Strasbourg. On 24 and 26 August 1870, the Museum of Fine Arts was destroyed by fire, as was the Municipal Library housed in the Gothic former Dominican church, with its unique collection of medieval manuscripts (most famously the Hortus deliciarum), rare Renaissance books, archeological finds and historical artifacts. The gothic cathedral was damaged as well as the medieval church of Temple Neuf, the theatre, the city hall, the court of justice and many houses. At the end of the siege 10,000 inhabitants were left without shelter; over 600 died, including 261 civilians, and 3200 were injured, including 1,100 civilians.

paragraph_text: Classical immunology ties in with the fields of epidemiology and medicine. It studies the relationship between the body systems, pathogens, and immunity. The earliest written mention of immunity can be traced back to the plague of Athens in 430 BCE. Thucydides noted that people who had recovered from a previous bout of the disease could nurse the sick without contracting the illness a second time. Many other ancient societies have references to this phenomenon, but it was not until the 19th and 20th centuries before the concept developed into scientific theory.

paragraph_text: During the British Raj, famines in India, often attributed to failed government policies, were some of the worst ever recorded, including the Great Famine of 1876–78 in which 6.1 million to 10.3 million people died and the Indian famine of 1899–1900 in which 1.25 to 10 million people died. The Third Plague Pandemic in the mid-19th century killed 10 million people in India. Despite persistent diseases and famines, the population of the Indian subcontinent, which stood at about 125 million in 1750, had reached 389 million by 1941.

paragraph_text: Leonora Sanvitale (Contessa di Scandiano) (c. 1558–1582) was a noblewoman and singer at the Este court at Ferrara, and along with her stepmother Barbara Sanseverino, was among the most "brilliant" noblewomen at the court. She joined the court in 1576 when she married Giulio Tiene, Count of Scandiano. Before this she had been at the court in Parma. Previously she had attracted the attention of both Torquato Tasso and the Duke of Rome in 1573. She was a member of the first incarnation of the "concerto delle donne" and sang in the court's "musica secreta".

paragraph_text: The plague disease, caused by Yersinia pestis, is enzootic (commonly present) in populations of fleas carried by ground rodents, including marmots, in various areas including Central Asia, Kurdistan, Western Asia, Northern India and Uganda. Nestorian graves dating to 1338–39 near Lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan have inscriptions referring to plague and are thought by many epidemiologists to mark the outbreak of the epidemic, from which it could easily have spread to China and India. In October 2010, medical geneticists suggested that all three of the great waves of the plague originated in China. In China, the 13th century Mongol conquest caused a decline in farming and trading. However, economic recovery had been observed at the beginning of the 14th century. In the 1330s a large number of natural disasters and plagues led to widespread famine, starting in 1331, with a deadly plague arriving soon after. Epidemics that may have included plague killed an estimated 25 million Chinese and other Asians during the 15 years before it reached Constantinople in 1347.

paragraph_text: Bonaparte began with an army of 13,000 men; 1,500 were reported missing, 1,200 died in combat, and thousands perished from disease—mostly bubonic plague. He failed to reduce the fortress of Acre, so he marched his army back to Egypt in May. To speed up the retreat, Bonaparte ordered plague-stricken men to be poisoned with opium; the number who died remains disputed, ranging from a low of 30 to a high of 580. He also brought out 1,000 wounded men. Back in Egypt on 25 July, Bonaparte defeated an Ottoman amphibious invasion at Abukir.

paragraph_text: In 1466, perhaps 40,000 people died of the plague in Paris. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the plague was present in Paris around 30 per cent of the time. The Black Death ravaged Europe for three years before it continued on into Russia, where the disease was present somewhere in the country 25 times between 1350 to 1490. Plague epidemics ravaged London in 1563, 1593, 1603, 1625, 1636, and 1665, reducing its population by 10 to 30% during those years. Over 10% of Amsterdam's population died in 1623–25, and again in 1635–36, 1655, and 1664. Plague occurred in Venice 22 times between 1361 and 1528. The plague of 1576–77 killed 50,000 in Venice, almost a third of the population. Late outbreaks in central Europe included the Italian Plague of 1629–1631, which is associated with troop movements during the Thirty Years' War, and the Great Plague of Vienna in 1679. Over 60% of Norway's population died in 1348–50. The last plague outbreak ravaged Oslo in 1654.

paragraph_text: The Black Death ravaged much of the Islamic world. Plague was present in at least one location in the Islamic world virtually every year between 1500 and 1850. Plague repeatedly struck the cities of North Africa. Algiers lost 30 to 50 thousand inhabitants to it in 1620–21, and again in 1654–57, 1665, 1691, and 1740–42. Plague remained a major event in Ottoman society until the second quarter of the 19th century. Between 1701 and 1750, thirty-seven larger and smaller epidemics were recorded in Constantinople, and an additional thirty-one between 1751 and 1800. Baghdad has suffered severely from visitations of the plague, and sometimes two-thirds of its population has been wiped out.

paragraph_text: The Umayyads have met with a largely negative reception from later Islamic historians, who have accused them of promoting a kingship (mulk, a term with connotations of tyranny) instead of a true caliphate (khilafa). In this respect it is notable that the Umayyad caliphs referred to themselves not as khalifat rasul Allah ("successor of the messenger of God", the title preferred by the tradition), but rather as khalifat Allah ("deputy of God"). The distinction seems to indicate that the Umayyads "regarded themselves as God's representatives at the head of the community and saw no need to share their religious power with, or delegate it to, the emergent class of religious scholars." In fact, it was precisely this class of scholars, based largely in Iraq, that was responsible for collecting and recording the traditions that form the primary source material for the history of the Umayyad period. In reconstructing this history, therefore, it is necessary to rely mainly on sources, such as the histories of Tabari and Baladhuri, that were written in the Abbasid court at Baghdad.

paragraph_text: To advance these goals, it sought to send a mission led by a bishop into Central Africa; Charles Mackenzie was duly consecrated in 1860 and led an expedition in 1861 up the Zambezi into the Shire Highlands. This first expedition was more or less disastrous. The area chosen as a base, near Lake Nyasa (Lake Malawi), proved highly malarial; Bishop Mackenzie died there of the disease on 31 January 1862, along with many local people and three others among the tiny missionary party. Early conversion efforts from this base yielded little result, and supplies ran out or were destroyed during a period of famine. The mission then withdrew from the area, abandoning the graves of the missionaries who had died there, and though it established a new presence in Zanzibar many years passed before it returned to Malawi. Bishop Tozer, Mackenzie's successor, deemed the mission's early years ``a miserable failure ''.

Question: At most, how many people died of plague in the city where the Abbasid court was based?
Answer: two-thirds of its population