In the Islamic Middle East and North Africa, mortality rates also were in the one-third range. To the Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, it seemed “as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion.” In China the presence of chronic war makes it difficult to assess plague mortalities, but between 1200 and 1393 the population of the country fell 50 percent, from about 123 million to 65 million. Today a demographic disaster on the scale of the Black Death would claim 1.9 billion lives.
