A new study confirms: The Black Plague was not global and did not kill half the population of Europe

The Black Plague, which struck Europe between 1346 and 1353, has long been believed to have been the most devastating pandemic in Europe, killing between 30 and 50 percent of the population. And based on popular traditions and documents of state or church officials at the time, it is believed that he did not leave any corner of the continent except his income.

However, these documents do not cover the geography of all countries of the continent; Documents documented the aftermath of the plague in Italy and England in detail, while there was scant evidence for other countries, such as Poland.

Therefore, a recent study - published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution on February 10 - was interested in revealing different ways to find out the extent of black plague deaths in various parts of the continent.

According to the report , published by The Conversation, researchers used 1,634 fossil pollen samples from 261 lakes and wetlands in 19 European countries.

Natural preservatives

Lakes and wetlands are nature's preserved records; It constantly accumulates the remains of living organisms, soil, rocks and dust. These muddy sediments can hold hundreds and thousands of years of environmental change in between. The upper layers of sediment represent the present, while the past lies in the lower layers.

Since the structure of pollen grains consists of durable polymers and has a distinct shape for each plant, it can be counted and distinguished in different sediment samples. Therefore, it allows scientists to reconstruct the scene that was in that region, and to know the changes that affected it over time.

Therefore, if we assume that a third or half of the population of Europe died during the plague, we would expect a significant decrease in the cultivated areas in the Middle Ages. Therefore, scientists used advanced statistical techniques to test the validity of this hypothesis in different regions of the continent.

Black plague environment

Indeed, scientists have discovered that the human race declined dramatically in parts of Europe after the arrival of the Black Plague; Evidence of this was seen in southern Sweden, central Italy and Greece. In contrast, no evidence of human population decline has been seen in regions such as Catalonia or the Czech Republic.

Labor-intensive agriculture has also increased in other countries, such as Poland, the Baltic states and central Spain; The expansion of the agricultural area continued without interruption throughout the late Middle Ages (1225 to 1500 AD). Hence, the death rate was not universal, and the Black Plague was not a global catastrophe.

This new account of the Black Plague as a local disaster fits with what we know about how plague spread between people and in rodents and fleas; Plague is a disease of wild rodents and fleas. Humans are considered occasional hosts, as they are not able to tolerate the disease for long.

The demographic impact of the black plague

Since the early 1900s, historians have focused on rats and their fleas in their explanation of how it was transmitted to humans, and have speculated that it behaves similarly in many places.

Although how it is transmitted from rodents to humans has been and continues to be studied, we know that its spread in human societies occurs through several ways, and humans are most often infected with flea bites. Once transmitted to humans, human behavior—as well as living conditions, lifestyle, and the local environment—affects the plague's ability to spread. So, societies respond differently to plague, so we should not expect plague to always spread in the same way.

Hence, this new account of the Black Plague prompts us to rethink how it spread, how it affected about 75 to 90% of Europeans who were living in the countryside, their lifestyle and their movements in the course of the epidemic, and what factors helped the spread and transmission of rodents.

The discovery that there was such an astonishing local diversity of the aftermath of the Black Plague leads us to be cautious as we make quick generalizations about how it spread and the extent of the impact of one of history's most famous epidemics.