Fleas and rats carried bubonic plague, which killed hundreds of thousands of people by the mid-1300s. One of the most infamous pandemics in history, the “Black Death” claimed the lives of an estimated 50 million Europeans, the majority of the continent’s population.

One of the world’s foremost authorities on the epidemic, Norwegian historian Ole Benedictow, argued in 2005 that “the facts are sufficiently extensive and numerous to make it plausible that the Black Death wiped out roughly 60% of Europe’s population. In 2021, Dr. Benedictow released “The Complete History of the Black Death,” in which he increased that figure to 65 percent.

According to a research released on Thursday, such statistics, which were based on historical sources from the period, vastly exaggerate the exact toll of the disease. Researchers in Germany discovered that the Black Death left a patchwork of death in ancient pollen deposits that were employed as indicators of agricultural activity. While some parts of Europe were devastated, others remained steady, and a few even saw a resurgence.

“We can no longer argue 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 research.

Most Europeans worked on farms in the fourteenth century, which needed a lot of hard effort to produce food. Between 1347 and 1352, if half of all Europeans had perished, agricultural production would have collapsed.

Dr. Izdebski remarked, “Half of the work force is gone immediately.” This amount of land utilization cannot be maintained.” You’d be unable to continue in many areas.”

Many farms would have gone to waste if half the people had died off. In the absence of sufficient herders, pastures would have become unmanageable. When shrubs and trees took over, mature forests would ultimately take their place.

Dr. Izdebski and his colleagues reasoned that if the Black Death was responsible for such a change, they should be able to discern it in the pollen that persisted from the Middle Ages. Some of the pollen that plants discharge into the air each year ends up in lakes and marshes. Grains may persist for decades or even millennia if they are submerged in mud.

From Ireland and Spain to Greece and Lithuania, Dr. Izdebski and his team selected 261 locations throughout Europe that had pollen that had been preserved between 1250 and 1450.

The “Black Death”

Some sections of Europe were spared by the Black Death while others were devastated, according to studies of pollen from ancient times.

Devastation may be seen in the pollen in Greece and central Italy. Crop pollen, such as wheat pollen, was decreasing. Grassland flowers, including dandelion and other dandelions, faded. The first trees to develop were birches, followed by oaks and other slow-growing plants.

However, this was the exception rather than the norm across Europe. Only seven of the 21 areas examined by the researchers experienced a major alteration. There was no noticeable difference in the pollen count in other areas.

In reality, the landscape shifted in the other direction in places like Ireland, central Spain, and Lithuania. Pollen from mature woods decreased in abundance, whereas pollen from pastures and agriculture increased. Occasionally, pollen evidence suggests that two adjacent places diverged in separate ways, with one becoming a forest and the other becoming a farm.

This study’s results show that the Black Death was not quite so devastating as many historians have claimed, but it does not provide a fresh estimate of the true death toll caused by this disease.. “We’re not comfortable sticking our neck out,” said Timothy Newfield, a disease historian at Georgetown University and one of Dr. Izdebski’s collaborators.

According to several independent historians, the new, continent-wide study was in agreement with their own research on specific European places. While the epidemic may have had a little toll on London at that time, a University of South Carolina bioarchaeologist has identified signs of it in the skeletal bones of those who lived there. She wondered whether the same was true in other European countries.

According to Dr. DeWitte, “having a reasonable suspicion” is one thing, but “producing proof, as these writers do,” is quite another. I’m definitely looking forward to that.

Joris Roosen, research director of the Netherlands’ Center for the Social History of Limburg, noted that in his own historical study of Belgium, the Black Death did not stand out. Dr. Roosen used the inheritance tax paid in a region named Hainaut to estimate the death toll of the Black Death. Bubonic plague deaths did generate an increase in inheritance taxes, but Dr. Roosen showed that additional epidemics in following years induced increases that were equally as large or perhaps larger than those caused by the bubonic plague.

For the next three hundred years, he remarked, “you may follow it.” “In essence, every generation is afflicted by a plague epidemic.”

However, several experts were skeptical about the conclusions of the current research. There was no change in John Aberth’s belief that nearly half of Europeans were killed by the Black Death, according to a research published in “The Black Death: A New History.”

As the disease decimated neighboring countries, Dr. Aberth thought that Europe would be spared.

“Trade, travel, business, and migration kept them closely linked even throughout the Middle Ages,” stated Dr. Aberth. Hence, my skepticism about the possibility of whole areas escaping.

He also questioned if the use of agricultural pollen was inevitably an indication that the population in a certain area had grown significantly in recent years He hypothesized that the Black Death had wiped away the population, only to be replenished by newcomers moving into the void left behind.

Immigration of immigrants might have compensated for population declines, according to Dr. Aberth.

Dr. Izdebski admitted that during the bubonic plague, people were travelling across Europe. He contended, however, that the reported numbers of these people were insufficient to replace half of the current population.

There would have had to be enormous migrations from other regions of Europe that were reportedly wiped off as well.

His next question was, “How will you get hundreds of thousands of people if half the population of every country dies? “.

Black Death may have been caused by two strains of the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which might have resulted in various degrees of destruction, according to Monica Green, an independent historian in Phoenix. Her findings are supported by DNA from medieval remains, according to Yersinia.

They didn’t look into that possibilities in their research, but they also looked at the climate and population density in various areas of Europe. However, no one could explain the pattern they discovered.

Dr. Izdebski said, “There is no simple explanation or even a mixture of basic explanations” for this.

If the rodents and fleas that spread the bacterium were different from nation to country, it’s feasible that the bacteria would not have been transmitted. There is a possibility that the ships that introduced Yersinia to Europe arrived at ports at different times of the year, each with its own advantages and disadvantages for spreading the plague.

While working on the research during the outbreak of a separate pandemic, Dr. Izdebski believed there were lessons to be learned from the Black Death in the era of coronavirus.”

It’s not possible to forecast which circumstances will play a role in the propagation of a virus, he added, alluding to how viruses might propagate. It is impossible to presume that a single mechanism would perform the same way in all situations.