Land-use changes across Europe linked to mortality during the Black Death | Hacker News Reader

Land-use changes across Europe linked to mortality during the Black Death

nature.com

88 pointsbenbreen27 comments

Fun fact. Immigration was kept open across Europe during the plague. Poland was an exception and kept their borders closed. They were subsequently spared the ravaging death toll.

“One theory was that Poland’s ruler at the time, Kazimierz the Great, effectively quarantined the whole country by banning all foreigners from crossing the kingdom’s borders, thereby restricting the movement of people who were affected.”

https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/no-way-no-plague-was-po...

And they say travel bans don't work! But that is a very interesting anecdote.

Travel has changed radically since the dark ages. The effectiveness of a travel ban during the dark ages is not a good guide for the effectiveness of one today.

I guess it wasn't obvious, but I was being facetious.

> And they say travel bans don't work!

No, “they” say that performative racist restrictions don’t work against epidemics.

Example of a “travel ban”: closing only direct flights, only from china, only to foreign nationals, when cases are already blowing up stateside and streaming in from other non-banned countries.

Example of an actual travel ban: closing travel from anywhere, to anyone, possibly aside from to local residents and nationals following extensive supervised quarantining.

I agree with you completely. My remark was just tongue-in-cheek.

Poland has a massive land border and much smaller population back then.

How effective was it?

I mean, plenty of people cross into the US illegally today.

I'm guessing it was quite a lot easier to guess who was an outlander if they were travelling through the country. Far fewer people travelled great distances, travel required burdensome preparations, and if you wanted to bring any kind of business with you, you had to travel in some way that was manifestly obvious what you were doing.

Mentioned in the latest blog by Brett Devereaux too, that with 60% of the population dying off in Europe, the remainder abandoned hard scrabble land and moved to better agricultural areas - https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-f...

It's worth also noting the truly terrifying journal of John Clyn who basically lived through, at least some part, of the height of the Black Death. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clyn

> Mentioned in the latest blog by Brett Devereaux too, that with 60% of the population dying off in Europe, the remainder abandoned hard scrabble land and moved to better agricultural areas

30% (or rather, "something like a third"), not 60%.

In general yes but you had areas with more death and the societal collapse afterwards had it's fair share in that.

They estimate 80% of London's population was wiped out in about 2 months. In the country the impact was generally less severe.

I can't begin to imagine the horror.

I feel so fortunate to be alive in this time.

> the remainder abandoned hard scrabble land and moved to better agricultural areas

In Norway, the relatively common last name and place name Ødegaard translates to "abandoned farm" and while not necessarily exclusively caused by the black death it rose to prominence as people took on farms after it.

It's fascinating how visible it still is in naming so many centuries later. (In the UK people might be aware of an Arsenal player with that last name, for example)

-My wife's ancestor, likely the tribe dimwit, found an unoccupied spot around the time of the Black Death, didn't for a moment pause to wonder why this spot of land wasn't already spoken for, and started working the land.

Today, the place is called 'Kaldholen', which more or less translates into 'Cold dump'.

Worst thing is, we still live here, 700 years later.

Often there'd be little choice. Finding land you'd be able to take over or get permission to clear that'd be possible to farm and not taken was not easy even back then.

But I live in London now and while there are things I miss about Norway, the winters are not among them.

I've got really interesting perspective on how it could've been by reading (fictional) "Doomsday Book" by Connie Willis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Book_(novel)

Parallel to this - the Orbis Spike hypothesis postulates land use changes as a result of European colonization of Americas were large enough to cause a significant climate change - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene#European_coloniza...

correlating that severity impact map with the spread-vs-time it suggests that the strain may have been weakening with time (reminds covid?)

https://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/Reformations441/PlagueStat...

Viruses always weaken over time. If they kill their host too quickly, they don't spread.

This is a rule-of-thumb guide to selection pressure, rather than some kind of underlying biological fact. We can trivially observe many disease-causing agents to which this doesn’t apply.

And yersinia pestis is not a virus.

Time to rename it to the "white death"? This seems more accurate.

we really missed a chance to set up the conditions of a new renaissance

Agreed, but the effect of Covid was much, much smaller than the black plague, if only due to much lower fatality rates.

Even without vaccines or treatments, covid wasn’t ever deadly enough to make a big difference. It seems like the mortality was between 1 in a hundred and 1 in a thousand, and at that heavily skewed towards older population.

Latest numbers show the US with ~2.7 deaths/1000 cases. The global rate is higher: 14.3/1000. Just as it was 700 years ago case and death rates as reported by local authorities vary widely across locations.

FWIW US confirmed case rate (cases/million) currently stands at 236000, or 24% of the population. Of course some other countries beat that by a mile: ATM among the top 30 nations (in terms of total cases) the case rate title belongs to Israel which has 370000/million, but interestingly COVID deaths are much lower at 1.04/1000.

Numbers in the UK suggest higher death rates. There seem to have been something in the order of 150,000 excess deaths with fewer than 20 million positives (with a free and extensive testing programme). Both estimates come with caveats but this still suggest that pre Omicron strains had higher mortality rates. The key is using excess deaths statistics which seem much less subjective.

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