鈥淲hat the historians mainly tell us is that half of the people that lived in Europe died due to the Black Death,鈥� says at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, referring to the outbreak of plague in the 14th century caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. 鈥淏ut it鈥檚 hard to say if it is true or not.鈥� Masi鈥檚 recent work certainly gives pause for thought.
The 50 per cent figure relies heavily on written records, but these are sparse and mainly from urban areas in a handful of countries 鈥� England, France, Italy and the Netherlands. Some cities probably did endure death rates of 50 per cent or more. 鈥淔or London, the impact was terrible,鈥� says Masi. But in the 14th century, only around 10 per cent of people lived in towns and cities. In order to get a full measure of the impact, you have to look at rural populations.
Mortality records for these areas are sparse at best, so Masi and her colleagues turned to pollen. Their hypothesis was that if the plague really did wipe out half of the population, the pollen record would show it. Labour-intensive cereal fields would give way to pasture and, eventually, wild forest as demand for food plummeted, labour shortages bit and agriculture was abandoned. 鈥淚f a lot of people die, there are not enough people to cultivate the fields, so what we did is to check if there was cereal cultivation before and what happened after,鈥� says Masi.
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She and her colleagues compiled pollen records from lakes and bogs across Europe dating from 1250 to 1450, roughly a century either side of the Black Death. In some places, the standard narrative of massive mortality stood up. Parts of Scandinavia, France, the Byzantine and Holy Roman empires and the Papal States in what is now Italy all show clear signs of agricultural abandonment. In other places, however, . Castile on the Iberian peninsula, Ireland, Poland and Russia seem to have prospered through the Black Death; rural England shows no signs of decline despite the carnage in London.
Overall, says Masi, 鈥渋t is not possible that half of the people died鈥�. That figure only gained traction in the 19th century, she adds, when historians extrapolated from sparse written records.
Similar claims of exaggerated mortality have been levelled at the first plague pandemic, often known as the Justinianic plague after the Byzantine emperor Justinian I who was on the throne when it broke out in AD 541. From Constantinople, it spread around the Mediterranean and on to northern Europe and the Middle East, finally ending in the mid 8th century. Historical sources suggest that its mortality rate was 25 to 50 per cent, and that the cataclysm helped to bring down Roman civilisation, ushering in the so-called Dark Ages.
Y. pestis was certainly in the right place at the right time: its from the afflicted areas. However, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel says there is of a devastating pandemic in the 6th to 8th centuries. 鈥淲e looked at all the data sets that we would expect to find plague, or some signal of plague, in them and we were not able to see that.鈥�
Pollen records again show no sign of agricultural abandonment. There is no increase in mass burials, no disruption to coin production and no chronicle of an unfolding catastrophe in written records. Tens of thousands of Egyptian papyri from the years when the plague was supposedly raging there, for example, don鈥檛 mention it at all.
All told, the record suggests that, though Constantinople was probably devastated by the first wave and there may have been other local high-mortality outbreaks, there was no pandemic, says Mordechai. Masi and her team also have pollen data from the first pandemic and will publish their own analysis in due course. 鈥淚t鈥檚 difficult to see how such a massive event that kills half of all the people would not find more discussion in historical sources,鈥� says Mordechai.
