The Great Famine

The Great Famine (1315-1317)

Name

Institution

Course Number and Name

Instructor

Date

The Great Famine (1315-1317)

Nearly the entire Europe experienced constant rains that persisted throughout the summer and autumn of 1314 and most of 1315 and 1316, resulting in enormous crop failure throughout the country (Baek et al., 2020). Before this event, the country’s population was rapidly growing as a result of the expansion of agriculture. As such, an unexpected shortage in food for the enormous population triggered serious famine. The famine led to the death of approximately 5-12% of the northern European population due to starvation or related illnesses (Smerdon et al., 2019). It prompted class warfare and political discord that destabilized the whole region. As such, daily items including wheat, grain, barley, bread, oats, and salt unimaginably soared such that a lot of people, even if they could access these items, could not afford them. The situation grew worse to the extent of parents abandoning their children to fend for themselves while others resort to stealing and even killing others trying to feed themselves.

Furthermore, other people were given no choice but to eat horses and dogs, and the possibility of cannibalism is also reported. The famine is believed to have worsened the effects of the Black Death, an epidemic of the bubonic plague that affected Europe, Central Asia, and North Africa at the start to mid-1300s. The Black Death outbreak is considered the first of many crises that struck Europe during the Late Middle Ages (DeWitte & Slavin, 2013). Therefore, as the severe winters and cold, rainy summers continued, the famine peaked in spring 1317, and normal weather patterns were experienced in summer 1317. It, however, took five more years before the food supply returned to normal.

The Great Famine (1315-1317) is majorly attributed to the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) experienced by Europe just before the famine. The MCA is a time in the Middle Ages where global climate variation occurred. In particular, warming was experienced in regions such as Europe, North America, and Asia between 830 and 1100 CE, while the Tropical Pacific experienced cooling (Baek et al., 2020). Changes in hydrologic cycles were also evident where the United States, Middle East, Mexico, equatorial Africa, and southern Europe were drier. On the other hand, Eastern South Africa and Northern Europe were wetter. The overall narrative is that farmers during the MCA took advantage of the warm weather and cultivated crops on unsuitable lands, resulting in a surplus of crops that bolstered population increase to three times Europe population at the time (Smerdon et al., 2019). Therefore, the end of the warm period in the 1300s in the northern hemisphere triggered the start of the Little Ice Age. In this period, extensive cooling and a decrease in median worldwide temperatures resulted in cold weather and heavy rains in Europe. Consequently, the torrential rains have a severe impact on food supply across Europe as a result of rotted crops and emergences of diseases that infected livestock (Smerdon et al., 2019). The resulting effect was an inconsistent and inadequate supply of food necessary to feed Europe’s enormous population, leading to the famine between 1315 and 1317.

References

Baek, S. H., Smerdon, J. E., Dobrin, G. C., Naimark, J. G., Cook, E. R., Cook, B. I., … & Scholz, S. R. (2020). A quantitative hydroclimatic context for the European Great Famine of 1315–1317. Communications Earth & Environment, 1(1), 1-7.

DeWitte, S., & Slavin, P. (2013). Between famine and death: England on the eve of the Black Death—evidence from paleoepidemiology and manorial accounts. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 44(1), 37-60.

Smerdon, J. E., Baek, S. H., Dobrin, G. C., Naimark, J., Cook, E. R., Cook, B., … & Cane, M. A. (2019, December). A Paleoclimatic Context for the European Great Famine of 1315-1317. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts (Vol. 2019, pp. PP11C-1399).