The European Mortality Crises of 1346–52 and Advent of the Little Ice Age

Campbell, Bruce M.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-54337-6_2

Cited by 18 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…A number of scholars have attempted to untangle past climate–plague relationships (Stothers 1999 ; Rossignol and Durost 2007 ; Schmid et al 2015 ; Elliott 2016 ; Campbell 2017 ; Green 2018 ; Newfield 2018a ). To establish whether climatological and environmental factors influenced the emergence of past Mediterranean pandemics knowing where and when the outbreak began, and its pathogenic identity, are fundamental, as are high quality, long-running climate records from different archives, which resolve various aspects of climate and environment change at high spatial and temporal resolution and which also cover the full annual cycle.…”

Section: Plagues and Climate In Mediterranean History Some Initial Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Past pandemics and climate variability across the Mediterranean

Luterbacher

Newfield

Xoplaki

et al. 2020

Euro-Mediterr J Environ Integr

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The influence that meteorological, climatological and environmental factors had on historical disease outbreaks is often speculated upon, but little investigated. Here, we explore potential associations between pandemic disease and climate over the last 2,500 years in Mediterranean history, focusing on ancient disease outbreaks and the Justinianic plague in particular. We underscore variation in the quality, quantity and interpretation of written evidence and proxy information from natural archives, the comlexity of identifying and disentangling past climatological and environmental drivers, and the need to integrate diverse methodologies to discern past climate-disease linkages and leverage historical experiences to prepare for the rapid expansion of novel pathogenic diseases. Although the difficulties entailed in establishing historical climate-pandemic linkages persist to the present, this is a research area as urgent as it is complex and historical perspectives are desperately needed.

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Section: Plagues and Climate In Mediterranean History Some Initial Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Past pandemics and climate variability across the Mediterranean

Luterbacher

Newfield

Xoplaki

et al. 2020

Euro-Mediterr J Environ Integr

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“…The incentive for the famished to search for food leads to significant migration and inevitably to demographic problems involving a considerable population decline but also the redistribution and restructuring of the remaining population in an area. In most cases, manpower inadequacy is also typical and contributes to the exacerbation of the area's reduced productivity potential [2,7,11,24,38,60,71,72].…”

Section: Agro-meteorological Conditions and The Societal Chain Reactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Agro-Meteorological Caused Famines as an Evolutionary Factor in the Formation of Civilisation and History: Representative Cases in Europe

Charalampopoulos

Droulia

2020

Climate

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Throughout history, food adequacy has been one of the most critical parameters for the survival of human societies. The prevailing atmospheric conditions have always been recognised as the primary and most uncontrolled factors that determine crop production, both quantitatively and qualitatively. However, this is only a part of the effects chain. In order to assess the magnitude of the potential cultural impacts of weather changes in a region, it is crucial to comprehend the underlying mechanism of successive consequences that relate the proximate causes, which in our case are the adverse Agro-Meteorological Conditions (AMC), to their effects on society. The present study focuses on the analysis of the impacts’ mechanism on human societies. Moreover, several characteristic agro-meteorological events that have led to significant changes in European civilisation are presented as case studies. The results highlight the linkage between weather and its impact on history evolution based on Agro-Meteorological Famine (AMF). The proposed concept and its analysis by the schematic presentation are in corroboration with the documented historical events of European history. Moreover, the presented connections between weather, agricultural production, and society revealed the significant contribution of the short-term adverse weather conditions on the mechanism of the human civilisation evolution.

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Palaeoecological data indicates land-use changes across Europe linked to spatial heterogeneity in mortality during the Black Death pandemic

et al. 2022

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The Black Death (1347–1352 ce) is the most renowned pandemic in human history, believed by many to have killed half of Europe’s population. However, despite advances in ancient DNA research that conclusively identified the pandemic’s causative agent (bacterium Yersinia pestis), our knowledge of the Black Death remains limited, based primarily on qualitative remarks in medieval written sources available for some areas of Western Europe. Here, we remedy this situation by applying a pioneering new approach, ‘big data palaeoecology’, which, starting from palynological data, evaluates the scale of the Black Death’s mortality on a regional scale across Europe. We collected pollen data on landscape change from 261 radiocarbon-dated coring sites (lakes and wetlands) located across 19 modern-day European countries. We used two independent methods of analysis to evaluate whether the changes we see in the landscape at the time of the Black Death agree with the hypothesis that a large portion of the population, upwards of half, died within a few years in the 21 historical regions we studied. While we can confirm that the Black Death had a devastating impact in some regions, we found that it had negligible or no impact in others. These inter-regional differences in the Black Death’s mortality across Europe demonstrate the significance of cultural, ecological, economic, societal and climatic factors that mediated the dissemination and impact of the disease. The complex interplay of these factors, along with the historical ecology of plague, should be a focus of future research on historical pandemics.

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The European Mortality Crises of 1346–52 and Advent of the Little Ice Age

Cited by 18 publications

References 42 publications

Past pandemics and climate variability across the Mediterranean

Past pandemics and climate variability across the Mediterranean

The Agro-Meteorological Caused Famines as an Evolutionary Factor in the Formation of Civilisation and History: Representative Cases in Europe

Palaeoecological data indicates land-use changes across Europe linked to spatial heterogeneity in mortality during the Black Death pandemic

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