Europe’s Great Famine of 1315–1317 is considered one of the worst population collapses in the continent’s history. Historical records tell of unrelenting rain accompanied by mass crop failure, skyrocketing food prices, and even instances of cannibalism. These written records strongly suggest Europe’s Great Famine was caused by several years of devastating floods that began in 1314, but they can’t tell us how this flooding compares to historic averages, or its full geographical extent.
Now, new research using tree ring records confirms the historical data, showing the years of the Great Famine were some of Europe’s wettest. A team of researchers from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Columbia University quantified the extent of Great Famine flooding and found the years 1314, 1315, and 1316 were the fifth-wettest sequence of summers on record over a 700-year period. Read More