ORoame

• jordan 1996
• dewitte website
• slavin: bovine pestilence
• rat/gerbil reservoir
• grape harvest
• Lima article
• Lucas article (1930) is too old, find something more recent.

Climate Change and the Great Famine

As Europe moved out of the Medieval Warm Period and into the Little Ice Age, a decrease in temperature and a great number of devastating floods disrupted harvests and caused mass famine. The cold and the rain proved to be particularly disastrous from 1315 to 1317 in which poor weather interrupted the maturation of many grains and beans and flooding turned fields rocky and barren. Scarcity of grain caused price inflation, as described in one account of grain prices in Europe in which the price of wheat doubled from twenty shillings per quarter in 1315 to forty shillings per quarter by June of the following year. Grape harvests also suffered, which reduced wine production throughout Europe. The wine production from the vineyards surrounding the Abbey of Saint-Arnould in France decreased as much as eighty percent by 1317. During this climatic change and subsequent famine, Europe's cattle were struck with Bovine Pestilence, a pathogen of unknown identity (although some modern interpretations cite anthrax, foot-and-mouth disease, or rinderpest). The pathogen began spreading throughout Europe from Eastern Asia in 1315 and reached the British Isles by 1319. Manorial accounts of cattle populations in the year between 1319 and 1320, places a sixty-two percent loss in England and Wales alone. In these countries, some correlation can be found between the places where poor weather reduced crop harvests and places where the bovine population was particularly negatively affected. It is hypothesized that both low temperatures and lack of nutrition lowered the cattle populations immune system and made them vulnerable to disease. The proliferation of dead or unhealthy cattle drastically affected dairy production, and the output did not return to its pre-pestilence amount until 1331. Much of the medieval peasants' protein was obtained from dairy, and milk shortages likely caused nutritional deficiency in the European population. Famine and pestilence, exacerbated with the prevalence of war during this time, lead to the death of an estimated ten to fifteen percent of Europe's population.

Climate Change and Plague Epidemic Correlation

The Black Death was a particularly devastating epidemic in Europe during this time, and is notable due to the amount of people who succumbed to the disease within the few years the disease was active. It was fatal to an estimated thirty to sixty percent of the population where the disease was present. While there is some question of whether it was a particularly deadly strain of Yersinia pestis that caused the Black Death, research indicates no significant difference in bacterial phenotype. Thus environmental stressors are considered when hypothesizing the deadliness of the Black Plague, such as crop failures due to changes in weather, the subsequent famine, and an influx of host rats into Europe from China. The Black Death was so devastating that a comparable plague in terms of virulence had not been seen since the Justinian plague, prior to the Medieval warm period. This gap in plague activity during the Medieval Warm Period contributes to the hypothesis that climate conditions would have affected Europe's susceptibility to disease when the climate began to cool during the arrival of the Little Ice Age in the 13th century.