How frequently these disasters occurred and what conditions influenced their severity.
By Dr. Jussi Hanska
Professor of History
Tampere University
Disastrous Times
Before we embark on an analysis of disasters and the means used to protect oneself against them, and to survive and explain them, it is important to establish just how frequently natural disasters occurred, and how important they were from the point of view of everyday life. This is even more important, since the global nature of modern day information and news services causes us to overlook a good deal of such catastrophes when they are only of a local importance. We are informed about natural disasters when they kill enough people, when they happen in our own backyard, or when they endanger some cultural treasures that are considered to be of universal importance. Good examples of such media disasters are the floods in Florence in 1968, and the earthquake that damaged the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi while this book was written.
If an earthquake only destroys some property or kills an ‘insignificant number of people’ we do not get to read about it in our daily newspaper. All these things make modern people perceive natural disasters as something huge and terrifying, which, luckily enough, happens only rarely, and only in certain geographic areas. The fact is however, that natural disasters happen every day and cause huge amounts of economic damage and significant loss of human lives.
This also holds true for the Middle Ages. Here it is impossible to provide a thorough list of all known natural disasters during the Middle Ages, nor is it necessary. The idea is to look into the period of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries using secondary sources to give the reader an impression of how frequently these disasters occurred and what conditions influenced their severity.
Why choose these two centuries? The thirteenth century has traditionally been seen as a time of wealth, growth and prosperity. Even though the image of the thirteenth century as a golden age has been questioned by modern historical research, the fact remains that the climatic conditions were reasonably good from the point of view of agriculture, which, of course, was the single most important issue for the essentially agricultural medieval society. It was a time of relative well being when compared to the centuries immediately preceding or following it.8 The thirteenth century saw no epidemics comparable to the Black Death. Thus it could be labelled as a model century, in which everything was as good as it could be during the Middle Ages.
The Fourteenth century, of course, was completely the opposite. Barbara Tuchman rightly calls it ‘the calamitous fourteenth century’ in her popular book, Distant Mirror. The climatic conditions were much worse than during the preceding century and there was also the Black Death and other outbreaks of the plague. All these problems were aggravated by constant warfare and the problems caused by the great schism.
Looking at the conditions of these two centuries from the view point of natural disasters, one can obtain an idea about what was the scale of these disasters between the good times and bad times. Some natural disasters, such as earthquakes, are of course totally independent from general climatic conditions, but they generated others, such as floods and droughts. It is also worth pointing out, as self-evident or banal it may sound, that the ferocity and damage caused by some disasters was very much dependent on general climatic conditions. People weakened by consecutive crop failures were rather vulnerable to outbreaks of epidemics.
In fact, even during the prosperous thirteenth century, a large share of the European population did not have enough resources to be in the best possible physical condition to tolerate the hardships brought on by natural disasters. Many families were living in a state of perpetual malnutrition, which made them more susceptible to epidemics.9
Robert Fossier has compiled a summary of climatic problems and crop failures in England between the late tenth century and the year 1325. From this catalogue, we can identify one year of total catastrophe during the thirteenth century, that is, the year 1250. Furthermore there were several years with exceptional rains and floods: 1246, 1248 and 1285. In addition, there were outbreaks of epidemic disease during the years 1277 and 1299.10
When we come to fourteenth century England the first thing that needs to be mentioned is the great famine of 1315–1317, which in some regions even lasted until 1322. According to Robert Fossier and H. Neveaux, the famine was caused mainly by several bad harvests. The year 1314 had been average whereas the years 1315 and 1316 were bad. The yield ratio of 1317 was an average one, so that the scarcity ended only with the good harvests of 1318. One average year followed by two years of continuous rains and crop failures was a murderous combination. This was the worst recorded famine during the Middle Ages because of its long duration and wide geographical area. It covered the whole of Germany, Northern France, The British Isles (with the exception of Northern Scotland), and the Southern parts of Scandinavia.11
It has been proposed that this famine was the beginning of the demographic crisis of the fourteenth century. Some historians, however, have claimed that it did not have any long lasting effects on the population. Be that as it may, the fact remains that a considerably large part of the population perished during the famine. Some starved to death, while others died of epidemic diseases. According to Ian Kershaw, the death toll in the countryside was roughly ten percent and in the towns it was probably even more.12 Zvi Razi has calculated that roughly fifteen percent of the tenants of the Halesowen manor perished during the famine.13 It is not clear whether these figures can be generalised to other countries and areas that suffered from the famine, but it is clear that the mortality was very high indeed.
Northern Europe had hardly survived the famine years when it was struck by an even more terrible disaster; the Black Death (1347–1349). Here it is not necessary to go in to the details concerning the havoc caused by this epidemic. Suffice to say that it was not the last outbreak of the plague in the fourteenth century; others were to follow all through the century and beyond.14
The history of these times of massive mortality is well known, but let us now turn our attention to some less well-known disasters, which, nevertheless, were often very important on a local level. Especially so if one takes into account the fact that local catastrophes, say for instance crop failures, were terrible regional killers. There was no strong central government to distribute food to the most needy, and even in the cases where there might have been the will to help, the infrastructure was so undeveloped, and the means of transportation so limited, that the level of assistance was poor at best. Even if there were good enough roads and means of transportation, there was often many ‘custom barriers’ and dangers on route that seriously hindered the chance of help arriving on time.15
If we take a quick look at the sources of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we cannot avoid noticing that such local disasters were very common indeed. Jacques Chiffoleau who has studied the region around Avignon from 1320 to 1480 gives examples of local disasters, which caused serious problems. If we limit ourselves to the fourteenth century alone we find the following disasters. The rivers Rhône and Durance flooded in 1342, 1353, 1359, 1376 and 1398 causing damage to bridges, houses, fields and even people. Extremely cold winter (‘hyems aspera’, ‘grande fregor’) is mentioned on the years 1308–1309, 1311, 1353, 1362, 1364, and 1382. It is very likely that these winters caused at least some damage to agriculture. Furthermore, there were problems with drought in 1355 and 1377. All this leads to the conclusion that in the Avignon region there was a famine every fifth year.16
Jacques Toussaert has studied the religious sentiment of maritime Flanders. In doing so he has put together a list of local catastrophes in the fourteenth century. The coast was seriously damaged by storms in 1317, 1321, 1334, 1356, 1367, 1372 and 1391. These storms caused much more than just a little bit of damage and some fallen trees. For example, in the storms of 1317 whole villages were destroyed. In addition there were serious floods in 1375 and 1399 (not including floods caused by human action during wars). There were also heavy rains, which had serious consequences for the crop yields in 1346, 1360 and 1382. At last, there is some evidence on the local outbreaks of epidemic diseases that caused high mortality to individual villages and areas.17
Many more examples of natural disasters on the local level could be produced by analysing studies concerning local history or extracting the information from medieval chronicles. This, however, is hardly necessary to prove the point. Local natural disasters, even if they did not produce a similar lasting outcry as the Black Death, were nevertheless, often problems of equal magnitude on the local level. To make it worse, they were very common indeed. One may safely assume that every generation had to face at least one serious natural disaster. Therefore there was an unquestionable need for protective measures and means of disaster management.
In the Shadow of the ‘Black Death’
Despite the frequency and importance of various natural disasters there has been a tendency in historical research and writing to overlook them. The notable exception to this trend is the Black Death to which has been devoted an ever increasing number of books and articles.18 While it is completely rational and reasonable that a disaster, which, as proved beyond any doubt, had a huge impact on European history, should be studied vigorously, it nevertheless has produced some side effects, which tend to give us an unbalanced view of the history of medieval Europe. In fact it leads us to two historical misconceptions. First of all, we tend to assume that the Black Death was a unique disaster, unmatched by anything before or after it. This tendency is noted and criticised by Carlo Cipolla in his classic Before the Industrial Revolution.19 Second problem is related to the first one. Once historians have accepted the idea of the uniqueness of the Black Death, they often, though not always, assume that the reactions of medieval men to it were unique as well.
Let us first look more carefully into the assumption that the Black Death was a unique catastrophe. On a macro level this assumption is definitely correct. The mortality rate was without precedent. In fact, reading the latest books by demographically oriented historians, one gets the impression that the death toll of one third once put forward in school books seems to be an under rather than overestimation.
Carlo Cipolla has estimated that the plague killed about 25 million people out of a total European population of round 80 million. This means that a little more than 31 percent of the total population perished.20 Jean-Noël Biraben quite rightly states that the loss of life during the Black Death can be measured with reasonable accuracy only in few cases. The cases he then presents (the parishes of Givry-en-Bourgogne and Saint-Nizier-de-Lyon in France) fit the one-third theory very well. He estimates that the mortality rate in Givry would have been between 27 and 30 per cent, and in Saint Nizier roughly between 25 and 30 percent.21
If we look at the situation in England, by far the best-documented area of Europe thanks to the reasonably well-preserved manorial records, we see that estimations of the overall mortality caused by the plague have varied between 20 and 50 percent. Higher figures come from those historians who have concentrated on a reasonably small and well-documented population (normally tenants of some manor) to count mortality, and generalised their results to the whole of land. Smaller figures are partly based on demographic and partly on indirect evidence. J.C. Russel, for instance, has calculated the level of mortality among landlords in 1348–1349 and generalised these results to the population as a whole.22
Zvi Razi has studied the manor of Halesowen west of Birmingham in Worcestershire. He uses manorial records, which have been reasonably well-preserved, and studies them with very sound methods. According to Razi’s estimation the death toll in Halesowen was at least 40 percent of the tenants of the manor.23 Considering the fact that a great majority of the inhabitants of fourteenth-century England lived in villages, one is tempted to assume that the overall rate of mortality in England was in reality higher than the ‘classical estimation of one third’. The newest study concerning the Black Death in England strongly supports this conclusion. In it Colin Platt puts forward figures presented in recent demographical studies on small communities. These figures vary from one community to another, but none of them are below 40 percent and some rise even over 70 percent.24
To have some geographical variation we may look at the situation in Scandinavia. It has been estimated that the population of Norway was roughly 350,000 around the year 1300. By 1450–1500 it had dropped to around 125,000. Much of this loss was due to the Black Death and the following outbreaks of plague.25 Not to venture too long with the estimations of mortality caused by the Black Death we must remember that it really does not matter whether the actual mortality rate was 20 percent, 70 percent or something in between. It was devastating enough to be viewed as the greatest catastrophe in European history.
In addition to its severity the Black Death was also exceptional for its pan-European effect. The doctor of Pope Clement VI, Guy de Chauliac, wrote that this epidemic did not resemble earlier ones in any respect. They affected only one region while this one was universal. They could be cured, but for this one there was no cure whatsoever.26
All this seems to corroborate the assumption of many historians that the Black Death was a catastrophe of unparalleled magnitude. Why then did I state above that such an opinion is a historical misconception? The answer lies in the adopted perspective. The Black Death is unique from the point of view of historical demography, economic consequences, or from any other universal point of view, but if we descend to the level of the everyday experience of medieval villagers or inhabitants of a small medieval town, we get a slightly modified picture.
It is true that most contemporary chronicles describe the Black Death as the worst catastrophe ever, but it is equally true that if we read these same chronicles a few decades later or before the Black Death, we find a few more ‘worst disasters ever’. It is important to remember that medieval man’s sense of reality was geographically and historically constricted. Collective memory rarely stretched beyond a couple of generations and ‘ancient rights’ were often but a few decades old. The phrase ‘the worst catastrophe ever’ therefore did not necessarily mean the same as it means to us, more likely it simply meant the worst catastrophe within the scope of the memory of the writer, or at most, within the memory of the oldest surviving member of the community.
This becomes apparent if we take a medieval chronicle, for example the chronicle of the Benedictine monastery of Bury St Edmunds. As has been shown, there was a strong tradition of writing history in Bury. Three monks wrote the chronicle. The first one compiled the chronicle from the Creationto 1265, and others continued his work until the year 1301.27 Yet if one looks carefully, the writers of this chronicle never compared contemporary events to earlier ones recorded by themselves or by their predecessors. When some phenomenon needed to be categorised, they invariably trusted either in their own judgement or in the opinions of the oldest living members of the community.
An interesting example is the description of a storm that occurred in January 1295:
‘On 19 January and all that night and the next day a hurricane blew accompanied by heavy, continuous downpour; the storm was so terrible that the centenarians who saw it could remember nothing similar. All the winter seed both in Holland and in the Marshland was almost totally destroyed by the rain.’28
Instead of searching parallel cases from the very chronicle he was writing, the chronicler chose to ask the opinion of the centenarians (‘centenarii’). Had he read a few folios back in his own manuscript, he would have found several examples of similar storms meticulously described in older annals. Yet he chose to interview the centenarians to be able to put this storm in perspective. This and numerous other cases in medieval chronicles clearly prove that the medieval conception of history was different from our’s. It was in many respects limited to the individual’s or his contemporaries’ own lifetime.
This means that while the Black Death was the ultimate disaster for the generation, living through it, it may very well not have been the ultimate disaster for the next generation. This is arguable when it comes to clerics and other literate men who could read about the horrors of the Black Death, but it certainly is true in the case of the large illiterate masses who were living from one crop to another, trying to make ends meet. For them the ultimate disaster was not a distant epidemic they might or might not have heard about. For them the ultimate disaster was the worst disaster that struck their community during their own lifetime.
František Graus, who has studied mostly the conditions in Germany during the fourteenth century, came to the same conclusion. According to him, the occurrence of new plague epidemics reduced the interest to the Black Death at most to a level of antiquarian curiosity. It was a catastrophe, and a terrible one too, but nevertheless, only one in a long chain of catastrophes.29 Even for the learned people who were experiencing consecutive outbreaks of the plague, the Black Death was merely a vague memory of the past, something they did not have the time to think about, for there were enough problems in the face of the present plague, or some other natural disaster.
Let us take another, much later example. R.J. Morris writes on the cholera epidemics that ‘the approach and arrival of these epidemics, especially that of 1832, created a crisis atmosphere in the country quite unlike that produced by any other threat apart from foreign invasion. The normally calm Quarterly Review viewed the approach of ‘one of the most terrible pestilences which have ever desolated the earth’ with considerable horror.’30 Admittedly, cholera was not perceived as the most terrible pestilence, but it certainly caused a public horror comparable to the earlier outbreaks of the plague, which from the demographic point of view were on a totally different scale. For historians of mentalities it is not important how severe the catastrophe actually was, but how it was interpreted and what kinds of reactions it caused.
It can even be speculated that for some contemporaries the Black Death was not the ultimate disaster. They may have lived in an area less affected or even in one of those places which the plague simply passed by. For those people the ultimate catastrophe may very well have been the famine years 1315–1317 or the almost equally catastrophic crop failures of 1332, 1345 and 1348.
It is also debatable how the Black Death was interpreted in more remote and agrarian parts of Europe. Was the majority of the rural population really aware that it was an universal catastrophe instead of something affecting their province or area only? On the other hand, we know that the mobility of people and information was reasonably high in the Middle Ages, much higher than once proposed by those who liked to present the Middle Ages as a thousand years of stability.
Thus, we must take into account that the plague was something totally new and that the information, that is, the horror stories concerning its effect, probably spread also to those areas, which did not suffer as much. It may be that the very novelty; and not necessarily the death toll of the Black Death was the fact that made it a disaster larger than life. We see that in Orvieto this epidemic caused a mental shock for the completely unprepared residents. When the plague returned in 1363 the reactions were not so violent, and the later outbursts produced even more mollified comments in sources.31 The conclusion seems to be that the Black Death was very probably the ultimate disaster for the generation that lived through it, but not necessarily for the generations following it. A cynic might add that it most certainly meant nothing for the numerous medieval generations that had lived before the Black Death.
This apparently self-evident fact brings us back to the second main problem caused by the ‘overemphasis’ of historians on the Black Death. The fact that the Black Death and the sources concerning it are much better known to historians than the sources concerning smaller scale everyday natural disasters poses another serious problem for the history of medieval men in confronting natural disasters. It is a popular misconception that many things that happened and ideas that were presented in connection with the Black Death were somehow unique, or at least were developed or invented during it. While in practise the spiritual responses to the plague were in most cases hundreds of years old. They had been invented for and used against other ‘greatest disasters ever’.
The specific position of the Black Death in historical writing is natural, and there are plenty of completely understandable reasons why it should have been studied more than other natural disasters, which have remained practically untouched by historians. The most important reason is of course the universal nature of the cataclysm. It is undeniable that an unforeseen number of people died because of it. Yet, even this extremely high mortality should be seen in its proper context, and not through modern eyes. There had been several cataclysms that were unforeseen and killed great numbers of people before the Black Death, and they were reported in sources with an equal horror. Epidemics, droughts and floods that killed major parts of the population in some areas were equally terrible for the inhabitants of the area affected than the Black Death was in an European context.
The problem with the sources is to avoid the easy way out, that is, using mostly the printed and readily available sources concerning the Black Death. The sources concerning other natural disasters, which were perhaps not equally destructive and universal, but nevertheless equally fascinating, have not been collected into accessible anthologies. In many cases they remain unprinted, hidden in manuscript libraries and archives. It is vital to use these sources, for only by incorporating them can we obtain the longue duréehistory of medieval men and natural disasters. Only then can we see what was particular for the Black Death and what was standard practise under any threat of natural disaster.
Sources and Problems
Studying the longue durée of medieval men in front of natural disasters within the limits of a single book is bound to cause some difficulties. Some of these difficulties concern the sources, especially the problem of selecting the sources to be studied and those to be left out or used only sporadically. Other difficulties pertain to method.
The most interesting methodological problem the dilemma of collective vs. individual attitudes and mentalities. What can we really know about the worldview of an individual medieval man? In a recent book about the origins of European individualism, the eminent Russian historian Aaron Gurevich writes about the use of psychology in history, or one might say on the history of mentalities:
‘Historians of ideas have uncovered diverse aspects of the picture of the world on which people based their thinking in a particular society, and in this way, they put together hypothetical reconstructions of the sets of values within which that thinking operated. Yet what they were dealing with was mainly collective psychology, the extra personal aspects of individual consciousness, the general attitudes that are shared by members of large and small social groups, while the unique constellation made up of elements of a world picture in the mind of a given, specific individual escapes our attention in the vast majority of cases.’32
Individual views and beliefs about natural disasters would be very interesting, but reaching them seems to be nearly impossible due the fact that medieval people rarely left behind any material describing their inner feelings or their true beliefs. This lack of sources has often been assumed to prove that personal feelings and opinions were utterly unimportant to medieval men. The importance of a collective perception of the world and its phenomena has been emphasised.
Perhaps medieval men were in reality much more individualistic than the surviving sources reveal. One has to remember that writing was not a hobby of every individual. Putting thoughts onto parchment was always an end product of a long process of thinking, planning, and making preliminary notes on fly leafs or wax tablets. To write a book one needed to have a considerable amount of parchment. Writing even a modest and short libellus was a fairly expensive thing to do. It would be naive to think that economic considerations were overlooked when producing books. Because of the expenses involved, it was customary to write books only for a very good reason. The texts that were eventually put on parchment had gone through serious consideration and they were in most cases stripped bare of anything not relevant for the book’s function.
Telling stories about one’s own life, not to mention one’s inner feelings, was not normally considered to be a good enough reason to waste expensive parchment. Even if someone could afford to write such things it was highly unlikely that others would be willing to invest their money in copying them. A good example is the highly personal chronicle of an Italian Franciscan brother, Salimbene de Adam. It is an autobiography disguised in the form of a chronicle. Salimbene tells his readers endless numbers of anecdotes about himself, about his travels, and other material of ‘human interest’. Salimbene’s chronicle was not exclusively or even consciously a biography; it was meant to be an historical work including material suitable for preaching and moral education.33 However, it turned out to be much more personal than was customary in the thirteenth century.
It is probably no coincidence that his chronicle has only survived in one single medieval manuscript and all his other works have completely vanished. As a general rule one can say that interesting details about the history and feelings of individuals were only recorded when they were interesting from the point of view of general didactic purposes. One could say that the majority of medieval literature was in some sense didactic.34
This explains the sad fact that, while there is a good deal of source material concerning the public opinions and reactions to disasters, there are only a few sources that describe personal feelings, opinions and reactions of individual persons. If we forget the writings of the clergy, they are nearly non-existent. Even the rare material that exists is often very difficult to isolate from the endless sea of data contained in the sources. In most cases the few sources that allow us a glimpse on the real world of individual man amount to few odd lines in the pages of a chronicle. If this is not bad enough, there remains the problem of interpreting such fragments correctly. It is not only a question of reading the sources and reproducing the obvious evidence, but of trying to recreate popular and individual responses to catastrophes by reading between the lines and using circumstantial evidence.
To clarify what I mean here it might be useful to take an example. Suppose that we have a chronicle describing a serious natural disaster, say long lasting heavy rains, which threaten to destroy the crops. Let us again suppose that the writer of this chronicle says that a procession was organised with relics of such and such saint, and that all the inhabitants of the town participated barefooted and singing penitential psalms. How are we to know whether all the inhabitants actually took part in the procession, and even if we assume that they did, what was their motivation in doing so? Did they actually believe that the procession was going to stop to the rains, or did they simply participate because it would have been socially or politically unacceptable behaviour not to do so?
Perhaps some people did not want to risk being criticised or being treated harshly because of failing to conform by staying at home? Was going barefooted a sign of true contrition and penance, or simply an age-old custom followed when processioning. These problems are nearly impossible to answer. Therefore it is gratifying to find sources that seem to give us a more reliable description of the general feeling and moods of the public.
Sometimes, however, the reportator of the events indulges himself in describing the feelings of the people affected. Such is the case in some chronicles and, for example, in some reportationes of the sermons of Bernardino da Siena. Even in these cases we have to judge whether the descriptions are reliable and how much rhetorical exaggeration is involved. However, there is, and indeed there must be, a limit to a scepticism. It is difficult to see why the sources should completely dream up reactions of the people in front of disasters.
One way of trying to find out the responses of individual people to natural disasters is to compare modern psychological knowledge of the symptoms and actions of catastrophe victims to stories and descriptions emerging from medieval sources. There are, of course, countless methodological problems connected with using such theories on people living in an essentially different society from ours, and of whom we know only through secondary, and sometimes even misleading sources.
What then are the sources that should be used in studying natural disasters during the Middle Ages? It was fairly common for chroniclers to note all the exceptional meteorological happenings and their effects on people. Famines, floods, storms, earthquakes, heavy rains, droughts and so on were in many cases meticulously recorded in monastic or urban chronicles. The problem with these chronicles is, however, that in many cases they tend to leave us with a rather sketchy description of what had happened. Only rarely do they indulge in telling their readers about the measures taken to overcome the disaster, or the opinions, feelings and attitudes of the victims. Let us present an example. The chronicle of Westminster Abbey describes the drought of 1384 as follows:
‘During this summer there was so great a drought that streams and springs which normally gushed from the ground in ceaseless flow, and indeed, as seemed yet more remarkable, even the deepest wells, all dried up. The drought lasted until the Nativity of the Virgin (8 September)…’35
A drought lasting for the whole of the summer, even drying the deepest wells, would have caused unforeseen suffering among the rural population. In fact, the chronicle does tell us later that in the course of the summer great numbers of cattle died through the shortage of water. This would have caused economic difficulties for the peasants and, most likely, famine and starvation. Nevertheless, the chronicle chooses to remain silent about what happened beyond the fact that there was terrible drought and the death of the cattle. We do not hear the reactions of the peasants, how they felt, or what according to them was the reason for such a disaster. Neither do we know whether they, or someone else, tried to do something to limit the damage and improve their situation.
Too often we end up in such a situation. The sources tell us enough to know that something had happened, but they do not allow us to form a complete picture of the situation. Luckily there are some exceptions to this rule – the only problem is that they are few and far between. This study takes a wide geographical and temporal perspective in order to find sufficient sources to allow us to put them all together, to obtain an overall picture of individual and collective reactions to natural disasters.
What then are these sources? We have already mentioned the chronicles that are the most important descriptive source. The great number of existing medieval chronicles makes it impossible to analyse them all in a book written by a single historian within a reasonable period of time. Thus chronicles are used in the present study in a selective way. In practise this means that such chronicles that have been readily available have been used. No thorough searches have been made to isolate chronicle material.
Two particular chronicles, however, deserve a special mention here: those of Matthew Paris and Salimbene de Adam. These two chronicles I have studied systematically because they are not typical medieval chronicles. Both of these thirteenth-century writers had a wider scope of interest than the average chronicler, and therefore they often describe attitudes and opinions of men in greater detail than most of their contemporaries. This anomalism makes them especially interesting sources for a study of mentalities.
Another important group of sources is formed by the catastrophe sermons. These sermons were delivered in connection with some natural disaster and later on written down to serve as model sermons to be used in equal circumstances. In some cases we get to know the exact time and location of the original sermon. In others we only know the type of catastrophe the sermon was intended to be used in. Sometimes they were, no doubt, written only to be used as models without any real historical context.
Catastrophe sermons are an extremely important group of sources for many reasons. They allow us to know the message communicated by the Church to the faithful in times of crisis. They reflect the doctrine as it was taught to the people, not in the overtly sophisticated form of university theology. These sermons, no doubt, were a major factor forming the ideas and views of the European population over the meaning of natural disasters. They also informed people how the Church expected them to behave under such circumstances. Despite their importance as a means of communication, catastrophe sermons are a genre of sources never used when studying natural disasters, not even in connection with the Black Death.
Another important factor is that catastrophe sermons, despite the fact that sermon studies has been one of the fastest growing areas of medieval studies over the past decade or so, have been a very much-neglected group of sources. Herve Martin mentions them in his thorough book on the preachers in Northern France in the Late Middle Ages.36 Save for two articles I have published, catastrophe sermons have not been studied by anyone.37 Therefore a special emphasis is put on homiletic sources even though this is by no means exclusively a study of medieval catastrophe sermons. Every book has to have its raison d’étre – so it is said. In this case it is the sermons. They considerably broaden the overall view of medieval natural disasters.
The third main group of sources concerning natural disasters are the liturgical sources. There are a reasonably high number of specific prayers, invocations and Masses for catastrophic circumstances. They tell us a great deal about the ceremonies connected with preventing natural disasters and relieving communities from them. Furthermore, there are masses of hagiographical evidence of the battle against natural disasters. Many saints were considered to be specific protectors against these calamities and their miracles include stories of such cases.
In addition to chronicles, sermons and liturgical sources there are other potential genres of sources. Elisabeth Carpentier notes that in Orvieto the government of the city took some positive action to improve the moral standards of its inhabitants even before the Black Death moved in. She supposes that these measures were taken because of the famines of 1346 and 1347. The city officials were willing to avoid further punishment by removing those phenomena that had caused the wrath of God in the first place.38 It is tempting to assume that equal action was taken also in other places in the face of an immediate catastrophe. We can learn more about natural disasters and what kind of action was taken because of them by studying the sources concerning the government of medieval towns. This, however, is done here only when the sources have been readily available, for it would be impossible to search all the regional archives for such material.
In addition to these three source genres, I have used numerous other categories of sources to consolidate the picture drawn from the main sources. The problem, and I realise it painfully well, is that in most cases it is only possible to go through a small proportion of all the relevant material. Nevertheless, it is my firm belief that even with a limited corpus of sources a reasonably clear and homogenous picture of medieval man and natural disaster can be produced.
It is important that the readers should appreciate that it is virtually impossible to master all the genres of the sources used here. Those readers who are specialists of, say liturgy, hagiography or art history, will without doubt find gaps in the evidence pertaining to their particular branch of eruditas. Not all the relevant books have been read, or even the most important single sources used. Nevertheless, it was more important to write a book on the whole phenomenon of medieval man and natural disasters rather than to write a study of catastrophe sermons only, which would have been easier for me, as my previous studies have concentrated nearly exclusively on medieval sermon literature. This essay is meant to raise questions and make suggestions. It is the job of the specialists of different branches of erudition to seek the final answers to these questions and verify or falsify these suggestions with more specific and accurate studies.
The Predecessors
The problem caused by vast amounts and different genres of sources is difficult indeed and it would certainly be impossible if one would have to start from the beginning. Luckily there are plenty of high quality studies that deal with the sources and problems of the present study. In fact, such studies are sufficiently numerous that one has to break the well-established custom of introducing and analysing the most important earlier studies on which this book is built. Instead of numbering a few books or articles I shall try to give a general impression of the state of current historical research on natural disasters. The footnotes will show my debt to individual works and historians.
Serge Briffaud has noticed that, even though natural disasters have always been present somewhere on the horizons of research, they have rarely been the subjects of historical study on their own right.39 By this he means that historical works of earlier generations are full of occasional references to natural disasters, and even some speculation as to their meaning to the relevant issues of the time.
There are, however, a few important exceptions to this rule, The Black Death has for long been studied in its own right. Some attention has also been paid to certain other individual disasters or genres of natural disasters. One of the most thoroughly studied disasters is the great famine of the early fourteenth century.40 Another case of regionally studied natural disasters is the earthquakes in Italy. The motive of these Italian studies has, quite understandably, from the beginning been the vulnerability of the area to earthquakes.41 Yet, even in Italy the study of earthquakes has been marginalized into specific studies concerning them. One seeks in vain earthquakes from the national histories of Italy. The same has been true about the histories of provinces and cities until lately.42
Serge Briffaud continues his analysis of the state of research by stating that whereas natural disasters were once seen to be a way of measuring the level of development of the society in question, now, after the arrival of the (inevitable) nouvelle histoire, they are seen more and more as sources of social and mental functions of society.43 František Graus holds more or less the same opinion. According to him, historians have long concentrated on describing and analysing the damage and death toll of single natural disasters, and failed to study disasters as social phenomena. Only recently have some historians, especially Arno Borst, taken a more holistic attitude, which hec alls ‘Katastrophenforschung’.44 Graus is referring to Arno Borst’s groundbreaking article Das Erdbeben von 1348, which despite its name and concentration on one single natural disaster makes a valuable contribution to understanding such phenomena in general.45
Finally, some interesting studies on natural disasters and their effects in the urban context have been produced in the ever-growing field of urban history. A good example of such activities was the five year long project Destruction and Reconstruction of Towns by the Internationale Kommission für Städtegeschichte. The project produced several publications, the most important one from the point of view of our theme being a collection of essays concerning the destruction of cities through earthquakes, fire and water.46
In practise, this means that the focus of studies during the last few years has transferred from historical demography, and from the history of institutions and economics to the history of mentalities. The statistical counting of the death toll has given way to questions such as how did the society or community deal with natural disasters, and what were their effects on individual persons.
Despite the rising interest of historians in natural disasters, a lot remains to be done. For instance, there still does not exist a general study of natural disasters and their impact on medieval society. In fact, there are only two books that come close to such a synthesis.
One is the Histoire des Fléaux et des calamités en France edited by Jean Delumeau and Yves Lequin.47 Despite the fact that it only discusses the situation in France, many of the points made by the authors are significant and can be generalized to other parts of Europe as well. However, it is not adequately documented, though it is obvious to reader that vast amounts of source material have been used. It is equally obvious that the lack of visible documentation does not in this case mean a lack of academic competence.
The other one is the recent book by Jacques Berlioz on Natural catastrophes and calamities in the Middle Ages.48 Alas, is not a general history of natural disasters in the Middle Ages. It is a collection of articles that were published earlier in different journals. Most of these articles are based on exemplum stories dealing with some kind of natural disasters. The collection of Étienne de Bourbon is particularly well represented. However, the volume contains one previously unpublished article. It is titled Catastrophes naturelles et calamités au Moyen Age.
It is a general view of natural disasters in medieval history. Covering roughly twenty pages it is not very long, but it certainly makes interesting reading. It covers many, although not all, of the topics considered in this essay. On the whole one might say that Berlioz’s book is a cousin of this one. It is a general history of natural disasters seen through one particular source genre, namely exemplum collections, whereas this essay is a general history of natural disasters seen (mostly) through medieval sermons.
See endnotes and bibliography at source.
Chapter 1 (1-2) from Strategies of Sanity and Survival, by Jussi Hanska (Finnish Literature Society, 10.31.2002), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.