Climate Data Suggests Famine Worsened Black Death
Posted on 01/07/2016 11:22:02 PM PST by SunkenCiv
When the Black Death swept through Europe in 1347, it was one of the deadliest disease outbreaks in human history, eventually killing between a third and half of Europeans.
Prior work by investigators has traced the cause to plague-carrying fleas borne by rats that jumped ship in trading ports. In addition, historical researchers believe that famine in northern Europe before the plague came ashore may have weakened the population there and set the stage for its devastation.
Now, new research using a unique combination of ice-core data and written historical records indicates that the cool, wet weather blamed for the northern European famine actually affected a much wider area over a much longer period. The work, which researchers say is preliminary, paints a picture of a deep, prolonged food shortage in the years leading to the Black Death...
A widespread famine that weakened the population over decades could help explain the Black Death's particularly high mortality. Over four or five years after arriving in Europe in 1347, the pandemic surged through the continent in waves that killed millions...
Tephra, microscopic airborne volcanic particles, are generally believed absent from cores in European glaciers, make Luongo's assumption-puncturing discovery potentially significant.
Luongo spent several days at the Climate Change Institute last summer performing chemical analyses and examining the volcanic bits through a scanning electron microscope. Each volcanic eruption has a slightly different chemical fingerprint, so he was able to trace the tephra to the 1875 Askja eruption in Iceland, one of the largest eruptions there in history.
Since many eruptions were written about contemporaneously, the ice core's volcanic traces can be used to align ice-core data with written records, providing greater certainty in dating other chemical traces in the ice, such as those from human activities like lead from Roman-era smelting.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.harvard.edu ...
Hmmm. That dovetails interestingly with this: http://www.npr.org/2015/02/28/389595442/rats-blamed-for-bubonic-plague-but-gerbils-may-be-the-real-villains
I haven’t trusted Gerbils since he worked for Hitler.
It is likely that both were the case - disease does, after all, spread more easily through a malnourished population. This sort of thing is never cut-and-dried. A similar effect was brought about in the 17th century by the Thirty Years' War, which had a similar mortality among the farming population. Suddenly food cost a lot of money. When that happens, things change.
The Little Ice Age harmed the ability to grow enough food, putting downward pressure on family size and undermined the feudal order; the Black Death comprehensively shattered the feudal order.
I have read one analysis that suggests that due to the surplus of textiles caused by so many deaths, one consequence was that people began replacing their flax clothing before it was completely useless. This allowed for the recycling of discarded clothing into less expensive and larger scale paper manufacturing that pressured the printing industry to greater efficiency, spurring the development of moveable type printing. That allowed for the inexpensive manufacturing of books that resulted in a literacy boom, and its liberating and democratizing influence.
Heinrich Bimmler was a real bastage too.
I don’t like the sound of these boncentration bamps!
You wouldn’t have had much fun in Stalingrad, would you?
There is a good book “Justinians Flea” which explores how the Plague came to Byzantium brought by grain ships from Egypt. Devastated their population.
There was a similar widespread war, the Hundred Years War, going on in Europe at the time of the Black Death.
In the summers, maybe.
Thanks JV, and actually, despite being past the Xmas season, a good one to post...
The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire
by William Rosen
Kindle edition
website FAQ
Shhh, don't tell anyone but that was at the start of a cold period (little ice age).
:’)
That’s what I was taught 40 years ago.
well when half the people are sick, who is there to grow crops?
nothing happens in a vacuum, everything effects everything else.
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