The Black Plague, or Black Death, was the most destructive pandemic of mankind. Until now we believed that from 1346 to 1353, the Black Plague reached every corner of Europe killing 30-50% of its population. The estimates were based on texts of the time, mainly of the states and the church. However, as with all medieval sources, the geographical coverage of the record is not equal.
Some developed countries of the time, such as Italy and England, can be studied accurately, but the same is not true of others such as Poland. A new study has studied these imbalances and found a new way of estimating disaster.
Thus, 1,634 species of fossil pollen from 261 lakes and wetlands in 19 European countries were studied. Thus, the demographic impact on the Old Continent could be estimated, with the results showing that deaths were not the same everywhere. Pollen revealed changes in landscape over time and land use by humans. If one third of Europe’s population died, one would see a collapse in agricultural activity.
The study showed that there were indeed areas where agricultural activity fell sharply when Mavri Panoli arrived. Such places include Greece, central Italy and southern Sweden.
In other regions, such as the Czech Republic and Catalonia, however, there was no decrease, while in Poland and the Baltic countries there was an increase in activity. Thus we conclude that the deaths from the Black Plague were not universal and evenly distributed.
So Black Plague may be the “mother of all pandemics” but it needs to change how we use it as a model for other pandemics. The concentration of the population, the urban centers, the province, the different habits of the peoples, all played a role in the uneven distribution of the pandemic.
The research was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
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