The Curse of Magdalene

When Apocalypse Grazed the World a Second Time Over

In 2005, in an online article in the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a climatologist at the Institute of Geography of the University of Bern wrote that under normal weather conditions—although the jury remains out on what’s “normal” anyway—it takes the elements two thousand years to wash away thirteen billion metric tons of soil.¹ Of course, that’s a rather simplistic number because the total amount of erosion depends, above all, on the total area in consideration. For example, while the NZZ piece quotes what comes to less than seven million tons a year, a 1998 study posited nearly a thousand times as much for China.² The value in the NZZ article is for Western Europe, and even that number changed dramatically in a 2015 Global Agriculture piece that claimed nearly a billion tons annually.³ At any rate, thirteen billion tons is a lot of arable earth, and even the most pessimistic of estimations would allow at least a decade for an erosion of that volume across the size of western Europe. A flood in July 1342 did it in a matter of days.⁴

A deluge of this magnitude should be expected to have lasting consequences. In this case, the consequences were historic, timeline-altering. Not just for Europe but the whole world. This story attempts to answer two questions—what triggered the flood and what came out of it. We explore this subject because its significance in the course of world history is comparable to none other than the Bronze Age collapse of the twelfth century BC and the volcanic winter of 536 AD. We explore this today because despite its paradigm-shifting role, it’s rarely spoken of in the larger conversation on world or even European history.

The Big Freeze

Three volcanic eruptions had triggered the big freeze of 536 AD which led to the Fall of Rome in the west and the Guptas in the east; and brought “Kaliyuga” to India. History, especially in the context of climate, is cyclical. It repeats. That’s what happened in 1257 when an Indonesian volcano named Samalas went off leaving behind a caldera that we now call Lake Segara Anak. The VEI7 eruption is counted among the largest of the Holocene and it triggered, as expected, a spell of catastrophic freeze all over the world also known as the Little Ice Age or LIA. The initial phase lasted twenty-five years through 1300. This is unusually long disruption for a single eruption. Which is why a 2012 paper suggests there were three more during these twenty-five years, further accelerating the freeze.⁵ Then came a little thaw and with it, torrential rains that washed away swathes of farms all over Europe. All of this culminated in the Great Famine of 1315–1317, also referred to as The Great Hunger.

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The spring of 1315 was especially harsh, not so much due to the thaw, but rather because of the heavy rains. Excessive rains and cool temperatures stunted crop growth, leading to successive harvest failures. The situation persisted through 1316 and into the summer of 1317. Europe would not fully recover until 1322. To add further to what was already a mountain of miseries, a severe outbreak of cattle disease, likely a rinderpest infestation, dramatically reduced livestock populations, particularly sheep and cattle between 1319 and 1320.⁶ In England, the worst affected, they called it the Great Bovine Pestilence.⁷ Here, the scarcity of milk and dairy would last through as late as 1332.⁸ And then came the locusts.

Less than two decades after the famine, a colossal swarm of locusts rose in Hungary and fluttered its way up the Danube in search of food.⁹ By August 1338, it had reached Lower Austria. Contemporary accounts, particularly the autobiography of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, peg the swarm’s spread at an apocalyptic seven miles.¹⁰ It was so dense, he wrote, it blocked out the sun. From Austria, the swarm continued its relentless advance through Europe, along the Rhine, gobbling up farm after farm in Bohemia, Franconia, Lombardy, and in his words, all over the world.¹¹ Such was the scale of devastation that the 1347 seal of one Niklas Fronauer, a nobleman from Lower Austria, features a coat of arms with a locust.¹² The Fronauer family lived in the first half of the fourteenth century near Krumbach and Würflach, not too far from Vienna and close to today’s Austria-Germany border.¹³ This was one of the worst hit parts of Europe. Heraldic research reveals that the use of a locust as a heraldic charge is quite rare as it does not typically reflect canting arms.¹⁴ Most heraldic instances of locusts found in databases and collections are either undated, from the early-modern period, or later.

The “Ice Age” was not done though, the thaw was fatally deceptive. The winter of 1341-42 brought another devastating spell of snowstorms. The LIA was a period of intense glaciation, a phenomenon that only compounded further during winters. Advancing glaciers obliterated towns and villages across Scandinavia and the Alps.¹⁵ Artworks from the period show people ice-skating on the Thames and on Dutch canals.¹⁶ These were relatively ice-free areas before and after the LIA.¹⁷ People struggled to make sense of this long winter and with locusts, the end times must have seemed near. Some thaw arrived in spring which at first seemed like a welcome relief from the hopelessly frigid winter, but soon turned out to be a whole other stratosphere of devastation.