XPost: alt.history

Did the ‘Black Death’ Really Kill Half of Europe? New Research Says
No.
By Carl Zimmer, Feb. 10, 2022, NYT

In the mid-1300s, a species of bacteria spread by fleas and rats
swept across Asia and Europe, causing deadly cases of bubonic plague.
The “Black Death” is one of the most notorious pandemics in historical memory, with many experts estimating that it killed roughly 50 million Europeans, the majority of people across the continent.

“The data is sufficiently widespread and numerous to make it likely
that the Black Death swept away around 60% of Europe’s population,”
Ole Benedictow, a Norwegian historian and one of the leading experts
on the plague, wrote in 2005. When Dr. Benedictow published “The
Complete Black Death” in 2021, he raised that estimate to 65%.

But those figures, based on historical documents from the time,
greatly overestimate the true toll of the plague, according to a
study published on Thursday. By analyzing ancient deposits of pollen
as markers of agricultural activity, researchers from Germany found
that the Black Death caused a patchwork of destruction. Some regions
of Europe did indeed suffer devastating losses, but other regions
held stable, and some even boomed.

“We can't any longer say that it killed half of Europe,” said Adam Izdebski, an environmental historian at the Max Planck Institute for
the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and an author of the
new study.

In the 14th century, most Europeans worked on farms, which required
intensive labor to yield crops. If half of all Europeans died between
1347 and 1352, agricultural activity would have plummeted.

“Half of the labor force is disappearing instantly,” Dr. Izdebski
said.
“You can't maintain the same level of land use. In many fields you
wouldn't be able to carry on.”

Losing half the population would've turned many farms fallow. Without
enough herders to tend livestock, pastures would've become overgrown.
Shrubs and trees would've taken over, eventually replaced by mature
forests.

If the Black Death did indeed cause such a shift, Dr. Izdebski and
his colleagues reasoned, they should be able to see it in the species
of pollen that survived from the Middle Ages. Every year, plants
release vast amounts of pollen into the air, and some of it ends up
on the bottom of lakes and wetlands. Buried in the mud, the grains
can survive sometimes for centuries.

To see what pollen had to say about the Black Death, Dr. Izdebski
and his colleagues picked out 261 sites across Europe — from Ireland
and Spain in the west to Greece and Lithuania in the east — that held
grains preserved from around 1250 to 1450.

In some regions, such as Greece and central Italy, the pollen told a
story of devastation. Pollen from crops like wheat dwindled.
Dandelions
and other flowers in pastureland faded. Fast-growing trees like birch
appeared, followed by slow-growing ones like oaks.

But that was hardly the rule across Europe. In fact, just 7 out of 21
regions the researchers studied underwent a catastrophic shift. In
other places, the pollen registered little change at all.

In fact, in regions such as Ireland, central Spain and Lithuania,
the landscape moved in the opposite direction. Pollen from mature
forests became rarer, while pasture and farmland pollen became even
more common. In some cases, two neighboring regions veered off in
different directions, with the pollen suggesting one turned to forest
while the other turned to farms.

Although these findings suggest that the Black Death was not as
catastrophic as many historians have argued, the authors of the
new study didn’t offer a new figure for the real toll of the
pandemic. “We’re not comfortable sticking our neck out,” said
Timothy Newfield, a disease historian at Georgetown University and
one of Dr. Izdebski’s collaborators.

Some independent historians said that the new, continentwide study
agreed with their own research on particular European locales. For
example, Sharon DeWitte, a biological anthropologist at the University
of South Carolina, has found that skeletal remains from London during
that period showed evidence of a modest toll from the pandemic. That
made her wonder if the same was true for other parts of Europe.

“It’s one thing to have a reasonable suspicion, and quite another
to produce evidence, as these authors do,” Dr. DeWitte said. “That’s really exciting.”

Joris Roosen, the head of research at the Center for the Social
History of Limburg in the Netherlands, said that the Black Death
did not stand out in his own historical research of Belgium.
Dr. Roosen measured the toll of the Black Death by looking at the
inheritance tax that was paid in a province called Hainaut. Deaths
from bubonic plague indeed caused a spike in inheritance taxes, but
Dr. Roosen found that other outbreaks in later years created spikes
that were just as big or even bigger.

“You can follow that for 300 years,” he said. “Every generation,
in essence, is suffering from a plague outbreak.”

But other experts were not convinced by the new study’s findings.
John Aberth, the author of “The Black Death: A New History of the
Great Mortality,” said the study did not change his view that about
half of Europeans across the continent died.

Dr. Aberth said he doubted that the plague could spare entire
regions of Europe as it ravaged neighboring ones.

“They were highly interconnected, even during the Middle Ages, by
trade, travel, commerce and migration,” Dr. Aberth said. “That’s
why I am skeptical that whole regions could have escaped.”

Dr. Aberth also questioned whether a region’s shift to crop
pollen necessarily meant that the population there was booming.
He speculated that people might have been wiped out by the Black
Death only to be replaced by immigrants taking over the empty land.

“Immigration of newcomers into an area could have made up for
demographic losses,” Dr. Aberth said.

Dr. Izdebski acknowledged that people were immigrating around
Europe at the time of the bubonic plague. But he argued that
their documented numbers were too small to replace half the
population.

And he also noted that huge waves of migrants would've had to
come from other parts of Europe that supposedly were also wiped
out by the Black Death.

“If you need hundreds of thousands of people to come in, where
would they come from if everywhere, half of the population died?”
he asked.

Monica Green, an independent historian based in Phoenix,
speculated that the Black Death might have been caused by two
strains of the bacteria Yersinia pestis, which could have caused
different levels of devastation. Yersinia DNA collected from
medieval skeletons hints at this possibility, she said.

In their study, Dr. Izdebski and his colleagues didn't examine
that possibility, but they did consider a number of other factors,
including the climate and density of populations in different parts
of Europe. But none accounted for the pattern they found.

“There's no simple explanation behind that, or even a combination
of simple explanations,” Dr. Izdebski said.

It’s possible that the ecology of rats and fleas that spread
the bacteria was different from country to country. The ships
that brought Yersinia to Europe may have come to some ports at
a bad time of the year for spreading the plague, and to others
at a better time.

Working on the study during the spread of a different pandemic
playing out across multiple continents, Dr. Izdebski said that
there were lessons to draw from the Black Death in the age of
the coronavirus.

“What we show is that there are a number of factors, and it’s
not easy to predict from the beginning which factors will matter,”
he said, referring to how viruses can spread. “You cannot assume
one mechanism to work everywhere the same way.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/10/science/black-death.html

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