Famine from 1315-1317

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Apocalypse in a contemporary representation

The famine of 1315-1317 , sometimes referred to as the great famine , was a famine in large parts of Europe. Torrential rains destroyed the harvests in the years 1315 to 1317. Long winters and floods aggravated the food situation. Famine and animal diseases continued to occur until 1322. Affected were Germany , France , the Netherlands , the British Isles , Scandinavia , Eastern Europe , Spain and, to a lesser extent, Northern Italy . Grain prices rose enormously, people ate unhealthy substitutes or even contaminated animals. Several million people died. In many places, the church yards had to be expanded, entire villages died out and became devastation .

Hydrological reconstructions of the spring and summer soil moisture show the extremely wet years, which began in 1314 on the British Isles and in what is now France, in 1315 and 1316 across Central Europe , the south of Scandinavia to the Black Sea and the Baltic States . In 1317 conditions in Western and Central Europe normalized. Southern Italy was largely spared, the north-east of Scandinavia shows an opposite pattern.

The damp and cold weather of the years 1315–1317 encountered a vulnerable society: In the High Middle Ages , large parts of Europe saw strong population growth. Agriculture was intensified and extended to marginal areas , agricultural goods were increasingly shared. According to the British economic historian Michael M. Postan, agricultural production had peaked at the beginning of the 14th century, and land depletion increased thereafter. The British historian Philip Slavin points to a number of institutional circumstances - a hoarding of grain to speculate on price increases, armed conflicts, a transport system susceptible to damp weather, and inadequate opportunities for poor farmers to store grain - which would have made a famine out of the crop failures .

literature

  • William C. Jordan: The Great Famine. Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century. Princeton UP, 1996, ISBN 0-691-05891-1 .
  • Ronald D. Gerste: How the weather makes history. Disasters and climate change from ancient times to today. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Guido Alfani, Cormac Ó Gráda: Famine in European History . Cambridge University Press, September 2017, Famines in Europe: An Overview, doi : 10.1017 / 9781316841235 .
  2. ↑ Fabio Romanoni: Il Libro dei Censi (1315) del Monastero di San Pietro in Verzolo di Pavia . ( academia.edu [accessed October 8, 2019]).
  3. ↑ Werner Rösener : The farmers in European history. Beck, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-406-37652-5 , pp. 90f.
  4. ↑ Edward R. Cook et al. a .: Old World megadroughts and pluvials during the Common Era. Science Advances , 11/2015 (The spatial and temporal development is shown in more detail in the appendix, Fig.S15.Maps of the great European famine. ).
  5. ↑ Werner Rösener: The warmth optimum of the high Middle Ages. Observations on the climate and agricultural development of the High and Late Middle Ages . In: Journal of Agricultural History and Agricultural Sociology . No. 1 , 2010, p. 24-25 .
  6. ↑ Philip Slavin: The 1310S event . In: The Palgrave Handbook on Climate History . 2018, p. 495-515 , doi : 10.1057 / 978-1-137-43020-5_33 .