The rapid spread of the Black Death through medieval Europe could have its origins in a massive volcanic eruption, according to new research.
The plague killed between a third and half of the European population in the mid-14th century. But it’s unknown what triggered the pandemic.
Now scientists in Cambridge and Germany have pieced together an extraordinary sequence of events from environmental clues and historical records that they believe solves the mystery.
They say sooty particles trapped deep in the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland suggest there was at least one eruption by an as-yet-unknown volcano in the tropics, around the year 1345, that shrouded the planet in a thick haze of ash and sulphur.
That fits with written evidence from the time, which reports unusually cloudy conditions and dark lunar eclipses, according to the study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
New analysis of tree rings from around the time shows there were three years of stunted growth, suggesting the volcanic haze resulted in cool, wet conditions that would have led to a series of crop failures, according to a team in Cambridge.
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Dr Martin Bauch, one of the study authors and a historian of medieval climate and epidemiology at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, told Sky News that the eruption’s impact on food supply was the key first stage in the sequence of events building up to the pandemic.
“In the years before the Black Death arrives, there is very unusual weather from England, across the Mediterranean to the Levant,” he said.
“That large-scale pattern can only have a climatic explanation and the volcano is a good one because the…
