Palaeoecological data indicates land-use changes across Europe linked to spatial heterogeneity in mortality during the Black Death pandemic

A. Izdebski (1, 2) , P. Guzowski (3) , R. Poniat (3) , L. Masci (4, 5) , J. Palli (6) , C. Vignola (1, 5) , M. Bauch (7) , C. Cocozza (1, 8) , R. Fernandes (1, 9, 10) , F. C Ljungqvist (11, 12, 13) , T. Newfield (14, 15) , A. Seim (16, 17) , D. Abel-Schaad (18) , F. Alba-Sánchez (18) , L. Björkman (19) , A. Brauer (20, 21) , A. Brown (22, 23) , S. Czerwiński (24) , Ana Ejarque (25, 26) , M. Fiłoc (27) , A. Florenzano (28) , E. D Fredh (29) , R. Fyfe (30) , N. Jasiunas (31) , P. Kołaczek (24) , K. Kouli (1, 32) , R. Kozáková (33) , M. Kupryjanowicz (27) , P. Lagerås (34) , M. Lamentowicz (24) , M. Lindbladh (35) , J. A López-Sáez (36) , R. Luelmo-Lautenschlaeger (36, 37) , K. Marcisz (24) , Florence Mazier (38) , S. Mensing (39) , A. M Mercuri (28) , K. Milecka (24) , Y. Miras (40) , A. M Noryśkiewicz (41) , E. Novenko (42, 43) , M. Obremska (44) , S. Panajiotidis (45) , M. L Papadopoulou (46) , A. Pędziszewska (47) , S. Pérez-Díaz (48) , G. Piovesan (6) , A. Pluskowski (23) , P. Pokorny (49) , A. Poska (50) , T. Reitalu (50) , M. Rösch (51) , L. Sadori (5) , C. Sá Ferreira (52) , D. Sebag (53) , M. Słowiński (54) , M. Stančikaitė (55) , N. Stivrins (31) , I. Tunno (56) , S. Veski (50) , A. Wacnik (57) , A. Masi (1, 5)

1 MPI-SHH - Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
2 UJ - Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie = Jagiellonian University
3 University of Bialystok
4 Department of Earth Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome
5 UNIROMA - Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza" = Sapienza University [Rome]
6 Università degli studi della Tuscia [Viterbo]
7 GWZO - Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe
8 ArchaeoBioCenter, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, München, Germany
9 School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
10 MUNI - Masaryk University [Brno]
11 Stockholm University
12 Bolin Centre for Climate Research
13 Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study [Uppsala]
14 Department of History, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA
15 Department of biology, georgetown University, Washington DC
16 Chair of Forest Growth and Dendroecology
17 Institute of Botany [Innsbruck]
18 UGR - Universidad de Granada = University of Granada
19 Viscum Pollenanalys & Miljöhistoria, Nässjö, Sweden
20 GFZ - German Research Centre for Geosciences - Helmholtz-Centre Potsdam
21 Institute of Geosciences [Potsdam]
22 Wessex Archaeology [Salisbury]
23 Department of Archaeology and Centre for Past Climate Change, University of Reading, Reading, UK
24 UAM - Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu = Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań
25 GEOLAB - Laboratoire de Géographie Physique et Environnementale
26 UMR ISEM - Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier
27 Department of Palaeobiology, Faculty of Biology, University of Białystok, Białystok, Poland
28 Laboratory of Palynology and Palaeobotany, Department of Life Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy
29 UiT - The Arctic University of Norway [Tromsø, Norway]
30 SoGEES - School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences [Plymouth]
31 LU - University of Latvia
32 NKUA - National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
33 Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague
34 The Archaeologists, National Historical Museums, Lund, Sweden
35 Southern Swedish Forest Research Centre
36 Environmental Archaeology Research Group, Institute of History, CSIC, Madrid, Spain
37 Department of Geography, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
38 GEODE - Géographie de l'environnement
39 Department of Geography, University of Nevada, Reno, USA
40 HNHP - Histoire naturelle de l'Homme préhistorique
41 Nicolaus Copernicus University [Toruń]
42 MSU Faculty of Geography [Moscow]
43 Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation
44 Institute of Geological Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences
45 Laboratory of Forest Botany-Geobotany, School of Forestry and Natural Environment, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
46 University of Cologne
47 Faculty of Biology [Gdansk, Poland]
48 Universidad de Cantabria [Santander]
49 UK - Univerzita Karlova [Praha, Česká republika] = Charles University [Prague, Czech Republic]
50 Institute of Geology at Tallinn
51 Universität Heidelberg [Heidelberg] = Heidelberg University
52 QUB - Queen's University [Belfast]
53 IFPEN - IFP Energies nouvelles
54 Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization, Polish Academy of Sciences
55 Nature Research Centre, Institute of Geology and Geography, Vilnius, Lithuania
56 Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (CAMS), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence, CA, USA
57 W. Szafer Institute of Botany, Polish Academy of Sciences

The Black Death (1347–1352 ce ) is the most renowned pandemic in human history, believed by many to have killed half of Europe’s population. However, despite advances in ancient DNA research that conclusively identified the pandemic’s causative agent (bacterium Yersinia pestis ), our knowledge of the Black Death remains limited, based primarily on qualitative remarks in medieval written sources available for some areas of Western Europe. Here, we remedy this situation by applying a pioneering new approach, ‘big data palaeoecology’, which, starting from palynological data, evaluates the scale of the Black Death’s mortality on a regional scale across Europe. We collected pollen data on landscape change from 261 radiocarbon-dated coring sites (lakes and wetlands) located across 19 modern-day European countries. We used two independent methods of analysis to evaluate whether the changes we see in the landscape at the time of the Black Death agree with the hypothesis that a large portion of the population, upwards of half, died within a few years in the 21 historical regions we studied. While we can confirm that the Black Death had a devastating impact in some regions, we found that it had negligible or no impact in others. These inter-regional differences in the Black Death’s mortality across Europe demonstrate the significance of cultural, ecological, economic, societal and climatic factors that mediated the dissemination and impact of the disease. The complex interplay of these factors, along with the historical ecology of plague, should be a focus of future research on historical pandemics.

Domaines: Etudes de l'environnement; Sciences de l'environnement; Histoire

A. Izdebski, P. Guzowski, R. Poniat, L. Masci, J. Palli, et al.. Palaeoecological data indicates land-use changes across Europe linked to spatial heterogeneity in mortality during the Black Death pandemic. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2022, 6, pp.297-306. ⟨10.1038/s41559-021-01652-4⟩. ⟨hal-03565766⟩