Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun, born in Tunis in 1332, is often called the founder of the scientific study of history and society. Centuries before the words sociology, economics, or the philosophy of history existed, he set out to explain something no scholar of his age treated as a science at all: why civilizations rise, and why they fall. This first episode is the origin story of that question, told through the two forces that planted it in him as a child.

The first force was memory. The Banu Khaldun were once a leading noble house of Seville, in al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, and they crossed the sea to North Africa before the city fell to Castile in 1248. Ibn Khaldun grew up in a home that had personally watched a brilliant world end, carrying the learning of al-Andalus into the Hafsid court of Tunis. His father gave him books instead of the sword the family had once carried, and when the finest scholars of the Muslim west arrived in Tunis in 1347, the young Ibn Khaldun studied mathematics, logic, and philosophy under the master al-Abili, who taught him to look past events for the causes underneath them.

The second force was catastrophe. In 1348 and 1349 the Black Death reached the Maghreb, and it took his mother, his father, and many of his teachers, and scattered the survivors to Fez while he was held behind. A boy who had been asking why civilizations decline suddenly watched one contract in front of him in a single year. The episode follows how that loss burned an abstract curiosity into the central purpose of his life, and closes on the sentence the old man would one day write about the plague, in the vast, flat calm of someone who had thought about a wound for fifty years.

The episode draws on Ibn Khaldun's own words, from his autobiography al-Ta'rif and his masterwork the Muqaddimah, alongside the classical chroniclers of the plague, Ibn Kathir, al-Maqrizi, and Ibn al-Wardi, whose first-hand account of the pestilence ended when it killed him. It also draws on modern Islamic history sources to set the scene of the fourteenth-century Muslim west. Islamic honorifics are observed throughout, with peace be upon him following mention of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

Content Warning: this episode describes mass death during the Black Death, including the loss of a child's parents to the plague.

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