The Black Death did not cause huge numbers of deaths everywhere, a pollen study shows.

The current pandemic is certainly no fun, but the number of deaths still lags far behind that of the Black Death. By the middle of the fourteenth century, it is estimated that up to 50 percent of the European population would have died from the plague.

Now a team led by paleobotanist Alessia Masic, from the Max Planck Institute of Human History, important caveats to that figure. from their study on pollen it would appear that the effects of the Black Death differed considerably by region.

Not a complete picture

How do we even know what the Black Death did almost seven hundred years ago? Mainly thanks to written sources. Unfortunately, such documents do not provide a complete picture for the whole of Europe. There are many sources for certain areas in England, France, Italy and the Netherlands, while hardly anything can be found about Finland, Scotland and Hungary, for example.

Furthermore, many of these texts deal with urban areas, while at least three quarters of the population lived in rural areas at the time. That too can give a distorted picture, write Masi and colleagues. Because it is quite conceivable that the plague was more deadly in places where people lived close together and hygiene left a lot to be desired.

Nevertheless, the much-described areas are regarded as representative of the whole of Europe. And then you arrive at estimates in which up to half of the European population at the time was killed by the plague. That would equate to 50 to 200 million deaths. (By comparison, 5.8 million people have died from Covid at the time of writing.)

Pandemic as an explanation

But were the effects of the plague equally bad everywhere? To investigate, Masi and her team looked at pollen in lakes and wetlands. This gives an idea of ​​how much grain was grown in the area in a certain period and how much was done on livestock. If for a while this is much less than before, this indicates a lack of labor – for example due to the plague.

It is also possible to deduce from pollen how much new afforestation has appeared. This afforestation can then indicate fields that were no longer worked. And that too may have been a result of the plague.

“Changes in pollen precipitation are a good way to study land use change,” says Koen Deforce, archaeobotanist at the University of Ghent and not involved in the research. “And given the high number of sites and samples examined for this study, the conclusions about those land use changes are likely to be reliable. It also seems plausible to me that these changes can be largely explained by the current pandemic.”

‘Not everywhere catastrophic’

In the areas where, according to written sources, the plague would have wreaked havoc, pollen did indeed show a significant decline in agriculture. This was the case, for example, in parts of Scandinavia, France, the south of Germany, Greece and Italy.

But in other areas, agriculture did not decline at all, such as in northern Spain. What is called, in one part of Europe more grains were grown around and after the period when the plague swept the continent. This applied, for example, to a large part of Poland, the Baltic States, Ireland and central Spain.

“This means that Black Death mortality was not universal, and not universally catastrophic,” concluded Masi and two of her colleagues in a statement. accompanying article on the website The Conversation†

emergency crop

Deforce can go a long way with that. “The conclusion that there were regional differences in land use changes and therefore probably also in mortality seems very plausible to me.” He does indicate, however, that the most densely populated parts of Europe at the time, such as Flanders, northern Italy and southern Spain, were not included in the study.

Yvonne van Amerongen of the independent archaeological research bureau Archol in Leiden it is a pity that the Netherlands and West Germany have not been included, although research has been done into this. “From a study by Corrie Bakels For example, it appears that in Central Limburg buckwheat was grown as a kind of emergency crop during this period. Buckwheat grows quickly and on all kinds of substrates, and requires relatively little manpower. This shows that humans were still present in the report and that they used a different strategy to obtain food.”

Furthermore, Van Amerongen notes that the researchers do not specify whether there are areas where their findings contradict the historical sources. “That could be interesting areas.”

Finally, Van Amerongen states that the fact that local fields produced less does not necessarily mean that the people there died en masse from the plague. “Perhaps there was less demand for grain from the cities, where the plague seems to have made more victims.”

Don’t generalize too easily

If there were indeed areas where the Black Death wreaked havoc on much less, that raises the question of how many people died at the time. However, the study makes no statements about this.

Also, the scientists can only guess at the causes of the regional differences. In any case, it is not as simple as ‘the more densely populated an area, the more deadly the plague’. Factors such as trade routes, weather and climate will also have played a role.

Well, that’s how Masi and colleagues write The Conversation, their study shows that we “shouldn’t generalize easily when it comes to the spread and impact of history’s most infamous pandemic”. The same is true, they continue, for other past pandemics, often described in even fewer sources.

“Pandemics are complex phenomena with a regional history,” says Adam Izdebskicone of the researchers, in a press release† “We already saw that with covid, and we have now also shown that for the Black Death.”