XPost: soc.history   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   Did the ‘Black Death’ Really Kill Half of Europe? New Research Says   
   No.   
   By Carl Zimmer, Feb. 10, 2022, NYT   
      
   In the mid-1300s, a species of bacteria spread by fleas and rats   
   swept across Asia and Europe, causing deadly cases of bubonic plague.   
   The “Black Death” is one of the most notorious pandemics in historical   
   memory, with many experts estimating that it killed roughly 50 million   
   Europeans, the majority of people across the continent.   
      
   “The data is sufficiently widespread and numerous to make it likely   
   that the Black Death swept away around 60% of Europe’s population,”   
   Ole Benedictow, a Norwegian historian and one of the leading experts   
   on the plague, wrote in 2005. When Dr. Benedictow published “The   
   Complete Black Death” in 2021, he raised that estimate to 65%.   
      
   But those figures, based on historical documents from the time,   
   greatly overestimate the true toll of the plague, according to a   
   study published on Thursday. By analyzing ancient deposits of pollen   
   as markers of agricultural activity, researchers from Germany found   
   that the Black Death caused a patchwork of destruction. Some regions   
   of Europe did indeed suffer devastating losses, but other regions   
   held stable, and some even boomed.   
      
   “We can't any longer say that it killed half of Europe,” said Adam   
   Izdebski, an environmental historian at the Max Planck Institute for   
   the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and an author of the   
   new study.   
      
   In the 14th century, most Europeans worked on farms, which required   
   intensive labor to yield crops. If half of all Europeans died between   
   1347 and 1352, agricultural activity would have plummeted.   
      
   “Half of the labor force is disappearing instantly,” Dr. Izdebski   
   said.   
   “You can't maintain the same level of land use. In many fields you   
   wouldn't be able to carry on.”   
      
   Losing half the population would've turned many farms fallow. Without   
   enough herders to tend livestock, pastures would've become overgrown.   
   Shrubs and trees would've taken over, eventually replaced by mature   
   forests.   
      
   If the Black Death did indeed cause such a shift, Dr. Izdebski and   
   his colleagues reasoned, they should be able to see it in the species   
   of pollen that survived from the Middle Ages. Every year, plants   
   release vast amounts of pollen into the air, and some of it ends up   
   on the bottom of lakes and wetlands. Buried in the mud, the grains   
   can survive sometimes for centuries.   
      
   To see what pollen had to say about the Black Death, Dr. Izdebski   
   and his colleagues picked out 261 sites across Europe — from Ireland   
   and Spain in the west to Greece and Lithuania in the east — that held   
   grains preserved from around 1250 to 1450.   
      
   In some regions, such as Greece and central Italy, the pollen told a   
   story of devastation. Pollen from crops like wheat dwindled.   
   Dandelions   
   and other flowers in pastureland faded. Fast-growing trees like birch   
   appeared, followed by slow-growing ones like oaks.   
      
   But that was hardly the rule across Europe. In fact, just 7 out of 21   
   regions the researchers studied underwent a catastrophic shift. In   
   other places, the pollen registered little change at all.   
      
   In fact, in regions such as Ireland, central Spain and Lithuania,   
   the landscape moved in the opposite direction. Pollen from mature   
   forests became rarer, while pasture and farmland pollen became even   
   more common. In some cases, two neighboring regions veered off in   
   different directions, with the pollen suggesting one turned to forest   
   while the other turned to farms.   
      
   Although these findings suggest that the Black Death was not as   
   catastrophic as many historians have argued, the authors of the   
   new study didn’t offer a new figure for the real toll of the   
   pandemic. “We’re not comfortable sticking our neck out,” said   
   Timothy Newfield, a disease historian at Georgetown University and   
   one of Dr. Izdebski’s collaborators.   
      
   Some independent historians said that the new, continentwide study   
   agreed with their own research on particular European locales. For   
   example, Sharon DeWitte, a biological anthropologist at the University   
   of South Carolina, has found that skeletal remains from London during   
   that period showed evidence of a modest toll from the pandemic. That   
   made her wonder if the same was true for other parts of Europe.   
      
   “It’s one thing to have a reasonable suspicion, and quite another   
   to produce evidence, as these authors do,” Dr. DeWitte said. “That’s   
   really exciting.”   
      
   Joris Roosen, the head of research at the Center for the Social   
   History of Limburg in the Netherlands, said that the Black Death   
   did not stand out in his own historical research of Belgium.   
   Dr. Roosen measured the toll of the Black Death by looking at the   
   inheritance tax that was paid in a province called Hainaut. Deaths   
   from bubonic plague indeed caused a spike in inheritance taxes, but   
   Dr. Roosen found that other outbreaks in later years created spikes   
   that were just as big or even bigger.   
      
   “You can follow that for 300 years,” he said. “Every generation,   
   in essence, is suffering from a plague outbreak.”   
      
   But other experts were not convinced by the new study’s findings.   
   John Aberth, the author of “The Black Death: A New History of the   
   Great Mortality,” said the study did not change his view that about   
   half of Europeans across the continent died.   
      
   Dr. Aberth said he doubted that the plague could spare entire   
   regions of Europe as it ravaged neighboring ones.   
      
   “They were highly interconnected, even during the Middle Ages, by   
   trade, travel, commerce and migration,” Dr. Aberth said. “That’s   
   why I am skeptical that whole regions could have escaped.”   
      
   Dr. Aberth also questioned whether a region’s shift to crop   
   pollen necessarily meant that the population there was booming.   
   He speculated that people might have been wiped out by the Black   
   Death only to be replaced by immigrants taking over the empty land.   
      
   “Immigration of newcomers into an area could have made up for   
   demographic losses,” Dr. Aberth said.   
      
   Dr. Izdebski acknowledged that people were immigrating around   
   Europe at the time of the bubonic plague. But he argued that   
   their documented numbers were too small to replace half the   
   population.   
      
   And he also noted that huge waves of migrants would've had to   
   come from other parts of Europe that supposedly were also wiped   
   out by the Black Death.   
      
   “If you need hundreds of thousands of people to come in, where   
   would they come from if everywhere, half of the population died?”   
   he asked.   
      
      
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