In popular imagination, the Black Death is the most devastating pandemic to have ever hit Europe. Between 1346 and 1353, plague is believed to have reached nearly, if not every, corner of the continent, killing 30-50 percent of the population.
, we used 1,634 samples of fossil pollen from 261 lakes and wetlands in 19 European countries. This vast amount of material enabled us to compare the Black Death's demographic impact across the continent.
We can tap these archives by coring them and analyzing samples taken from the cores at regular intervals, from the top to the bottom .We relied on pollen analysis in our study. Because pollen grains are built of durable polymer and differ in shape between plants, they can be counted and identified in each sediment sample. These grains allow us to reconstruct the local landscape and changes over time. They shine a light on human land use and the history of agriculture.
If a third or half of Europe's population died within a few years, one might expect a near collapse of the medieval cultivated landscape. By applying advanced statistical techniques to available pollen data, we tested this scenario, region by region.We discovered that there were indeed parts of Europe where the human landscape contracted dramatically after the Black Death arrived. This was the case, for instance, in southern Sweden, central Italy and Greece.
This means the Black Death's mortality was neither universal nor universally catastrophic. Had it been, sediment records of Europe's landscape would say so.This new narrative of a regionally variable Black Death fits well with what we know about how plague can spread to and between people, and how it can circulate in urban and wild rodents and their fleas. That plague did not equally devastate every European region should not surprise us.
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