FROM THE GREAT FAMINE TO THE BLACK DEATH

Evil Times: The Seven Years’ Famine

Between the years 1315 and 1322, the cooling global climate caused nearly continuous adverse weather conditions in the northern hemisphere. In Europe, winters were extraordinarily severe: in 1316, the Baltic Sea froze over and ships were trapped in the ice. For many years, unseasonal rains prevented planting in spring or summer, and when a crop did manage to struggle through, it would be dashed by rain and hail in autumn. Amid these natural calamities, dynastic warfare continued in the sodden farmlands of northern and eastern Europe, as the princes of Scandinavia and the Holy Roman Empire fought for supremacy and succession there. In the once-fertile fields of Flanders, French armies slogged through mud in continued efforts to subdue the Flemish population. On the Scottish and Welsh borders, uprisings were ruthlessly suppressed, and the paltry storehouses of the natives were pillaged to feed the English raiders.

The result was human suffering more devastating than that caused by any famine affecting Europe since that time; hence the name “Great Famine” to describe this terrible crisis. Weakened by years of malnutrition and relentless efforts to counteract the climatic effects on the landscape, between 10 and 15 percent of northern Europe’s population perished. Many starved, while others fell victim to epidemic diseases that affected both animals and people. In southern Europe, around the shores of the Mediterranean, the effects of climate change were more muted, and food could be distributed through different channels. Nonetheless, the overall health of this region also suffered from the disruption of trade and the shortage of some staple goods, as well as from the highly unstable political situation we have discussed.

As food grew scarcer, prices climbed unpredictably, making even staple goods unobtainable by the poor. Plans for future crops, which kept hope alive, would be dashed when spring arrived and flooded fields prevented seeds from germinating. People then spent cold summers and autumns foraging for food. Hunting was restricted to the nobility, but even those who risked the death penalty for poaching found little game. Wages did not keep pace with rising costs, and so those who lived in towns and depended on markets had less to spend on scarce provisions. Only a year after the famine began, townspeople were dying of ailments that would not have been fatal in good years.

The effects of the famine were especially devastating for children, since even those who survived were highly susceptible to disease, owing to the severe impairment of their immune systems. It may have been the Great Famine, then, that paved the way for the even more horrific destruction of the Black Death.

A Crisis of Connectivity: Tracking the Black Death

The Black Death is the name given to a global plague pandemic that spread from central Asia to China, northern India, and western Asia with the Mongol conquests, after which it moved into Africa and Europe. Research by teams of historians and scientists over just the past few years has led to the realization that this outbreak of the plague was caused by the same Yersinia pestis microbe responsible for the Justinianic plague of the sixth century. Moreover, this research suggests that it may already have been active by the end of the twelfth century, and decimating Asian communities in the early thirteenth. By 1346, it had reached the Black Sea, where it was transmitted to the Genoese colonists at Caffa and transported by their ships to North Africa, Sicily, and northern Italy. From there, it spread rapidly along global trade routes, advancing about two miles per day on average. By 1350, it had reached Scandinavia and northern Russia, then spread southward again until it linked up with the original waves of infection in its breeding grounds in central Asia, probably somewhere in the region of modern Kyrgyzstan. In Europe, it continued to erupt in local epidemics until the eighteenth century. In Asia and Africa, it was still causing devastating losses of life into the nineteenth century.

Although the absolute (total) mortality caused by other global pandemics has been greater—including the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 and the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic—the percentage of the population affected by the Black Death was higher. In the space of a few decades, 40 to 60 percent of all people in these affected areas had died. The tremendous consequences of this catastrophe and the survivors’ responses to the world left behind will be explored in Chapter 2. But what made this pandemic so deadly, even compared to its early medieval predecessor?

The Yersinia pestis genome was sequenced in 2013 using aDNA from the teeth of Black Death victims buried in London. Epidemiologists have since been able to show that it morphed rapidly into multiple strains after the Justinianic plague. Its bubonic form, which attacks the lymph nodes and produces painful pus-filled buboes in the groin, neck, and armpits, had probably developed in antiquity, and this was the form in which it spread during the sixth century. Thereafter, however, it morphed into even more virulent septicemic and pneumonic variants.

In its bubonic form, the plague microbe is carried by fleas that can live and travel in the fur or feathers of many different animals, including rats, marmots, hamsters, rabbits, camels, and birds. Humans contract it through flea bites or contact with an animal host. Septicemic plague occurs when an infected flea introduces the microbe directly into the human bloodstream, causing death within hours, usually before any symptoms of the disease are obvious. Pneumonic plague, perhaps the most frightening variation, results when particles of Y. pestis are inhaled and infect the lungs, allowing the contagion to spread silently and invisibly, in the same ways as the common cold. Other forms of plague can be contracted by eating an infected animal, and many of its animal hosts were common dietary staples in medieval societies.

One of the things that made the Black Death so terrifying, therefore, was that it was mysteriously inconsistent. Those afflicted by the hideous bubonic plague might actually recover, whereas others—seemingly untouched—might die suddenly, from no apparent cause. Immediate reactions to the plague thus ranged from panic to anger to resignation. Observers quickly realized that the plague was contagious, but precisely how it spread remained unknown. Some believed that it was caused by breathing “bad air” and so urged people to flee from stricken areas, which caused the disease to spread even faster. Another response was the flagellant movement, so called because of the whips (flagella) with which traveling bands of penitents lashed themselves in order to appease the wrath of God. The unruly and sometimes hysterical mobs that gathered around the flagellants aroused the concern of both ecclesiastical and secular authorities, and the movement was suppressed by papal order.

Still others looked for scapegoats and revived old conspiracy theories that implicated Jews in the poisoning of communal water sources. Scores of Jewish communities were attacked and thousands of their inhabitants massacred in parts of the Rhineland, southern France, and the Christian kingdoms of Spain. For example, an important archaeological and forensic study published in 2014 reveals that hundreds of Jews—including children, the elderly, and the disabled—were brutally clubbed and hacked to death by their Christian neighbors in the small Catalonian town of Tàrrega (see Competing Viewpoints on page 34). The papacy and some local authorities tried to halt such attacks, but these efforts usually came too late.