Rain Page 5
In 1315, the downpours began on Pentecost in May and continued “almost unceasingly throughout summer and autumn.” Floodwaters ran so deep through Malmesbury, the oldest borough in England, its chronicler “thought that the prophecies in the fifth chapter of Isaias were being fulfilled.” Throughout northern Europe, the deluges broke through mills, bridges, and other businesses and infrastructure. The Danube burst its banks three times in Austria and Bavaria. On Austria’s Mur River alone, high waters swept away fourteen bridges.
Along the coasts, storms and floods battered Normandy, and Flanders at the North Sea. That August, King Louis X of France planned a military attack on Flanders. But rains soaked the advancing soldiers day and night, “in most miraculous fashion such as no mortal then living had ever seen.” The lowlands of Flanders turned to bogs. When the soldiers galloped forth, “so wet was the ground that the horses sank into it up to their saddle girths,” wrote the medieval historian Henry Lucas. “The men stood knee-deep in the mud, and the wagons could be drawn only with the greatest difficulty.” Stuck in their flooded tents and running short of food, the French soldiers retreated. The Flemings thanked God for the rains. At least until famine set in.
From the Pyrenees mountain range in southern France to England and Scotland, across the Holy Roman Empire and east into Poland, the torrential summer rains prevented grain from maturing. That meant no autumn seeding of wheat and rye. Then spring rains made it impossible to sow oats, barley, and spelt. Hay could not be cured. In England, the price of wheat quadrupled in 1315, and then doubled again by the end of the year.
In the prior century, population growth had spread many rural families onto marginal farmlands that could eke out crops in good rains. The lands proved inadequate for absorbing downpours that cut deep gullies into the countryside and washed off thousands of acres of thin topsoil. In some rural areas, as much as half the arable land vanished. Crops failed. Herds and flocks withered. As domestic animals and fowl became scarce, so did meat and eggs. The anemic grain had little nourishing power. Families foraged in the sopping fields, gnawing on leaves and roots.
Of the many famines that have struck since the rise of agriculture, the Great Famine of 1315–1322 is one of the few ascribed largely to unremitting rains. Without harvest, people became so hungry they turned to eating dogs, cats, and horses. “Horse meat was precious; plump dogs were stolen,” wrote the English Benedictine Johannes of Trowkelowe. When there was nothing left to consume, families began to abandon farms. They solicited charity from relatives, wandered the countryside as beggars, or poured into the cities. Entire villages were deserted. Farmers became laborers. The year 1316 was the worst for cereal crops in the Middle Ages. A Flemish observer wrote: “The people were in such great need that it cannot be expressed. For the cries that were heard from the poor would move a stone, as they lay in the street with woe and great complain, swollen with hunger.”
Churches and almshouses saved countless lives by cooking up pottages with whatever nourishment they could find and ladling it out to the starving. Abbeys and monastic houses reported that the victims came from almost all social lines, though the majority were poor. In Tournai, “men as well as women from among the powerful, the middling, and the lowly, old and young, rich and poor, died daily in such great numbers that the air was almost wholly corrupted” by their stench. In Holland, “rich and poor alike found it impossible to secure food; they roved along the roads and footways and laid their starved forms down to die,” Lucas wrote.
Disease spread quickly through weakened bodies living in damp conditions. In the rains, dead bodies “began to decompose at once.” In cities from Erfurt in Germany to Colmar in France, authorities dug huge trenches to bury thousands of dead townsfolk. Scholars estimate the Great Famine of 1315–1322 killed some 3 million people, roughly 10 percent of those living in rain-swamped northern Europe in the early fourteenth century. It must have seemed like the end of the world. But the next Horseman of the Apocalypse to come galloping in on bad weather, the Black Death, would kill numbers much larger.
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In fourteenth-century letters and chronicles, tales of the disease then called “the great mortality” or “pestilence,” later christened the Black Death, always seemed to begin with strange rain. A musician in the papal court of Avignon wrote home to Flanders in 1348 that when the great mortality began: “On the first day it rained frogs, serpents, lizards, scorpions and many venomous beasts of that sort. On the second day thunder was heard, and lightning flashes mixed with hailstones of marvelous size fell upon the land, which killed almost all men, from the greatest to the least. On the third day there fell fire together with stinking smoke from the heavens, which consumed all the rest of men and beasts, and burned up all the cities and castles of those parts.” (The musician’s patron would soon die of the pestilence.)
In fact, real rain foreshadowed the Black Death much as it had the Great Famine. When normal weather patterns returned in the 1320s, northern Europe arose from famine and saw a relatively prosperous few decades. French historians refer to the period as the monde plein. But the “full world” did not last long. The early 1340s brought the heaviest summer rains and flood disasters of medieval times, wrecking great bridges, washing away towns, and wiping out crops. Then, in 1344, extreme rains gave way to extreme drought. Localized famines set in; scholars believe these and the Great Famine helped make the Black Death as severe as it was, weakening the population. The stress of childhood hunger would have created a lifelong susceptibility to disease.
What we know as bubonic plague came riding into Europe not on slithering serpents, but on a tiny insect, the flea, which came riding on a rat, which came riding on Mongol supply trains traveling from southern China across Eurasia. The bacterium, Yersinia pestis, lives on wild rodents and spreads among them via fleas, which sometimes jump to humans. If Y. pestis reaches the lungs, it turns into the deadly pneumonic plague. When a victim coughs, infected droplets spew into the air, infecting the next person and the next and the next. Once infected, a person can die within a day.
The Black Death entered—and might have even been catapulted—at the besieged port of Caffa (now Feodosija, Ukraine). Thousands of Tartars were entrenched there, having surrounded the city walls, behind which Christian merchants were taking cover. An Italian notary named Gabriele de’ Mussi wrote that a horrid and fast-spreading disease struck the Tartars, who began to die en masse. Medical attention was useless; they would perish soon after “coagulating humours” showed up in their armpits and groins. Stunned and stupefied by their misfortune, de’ Mussi wrote that the final survivors made a last-ditch effort to smite their enemies: “They ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside.” Soon, almost everyone who had been near “fell victim to sudden death after contracting this pestilential disease, as if struck by a lethal arrow which raised a tumor on their bodies.” Some modern scholars discount the claim. Others who have examined it, such as the University of California biological weapons expert Mark Wheelis, believe it was a plausible and spectacular attack of biological warfare.
From Caffa, fleeing Genoese ships unwittingly carried the rats, with their fleas and their Y. pestis, to Genoa and Pisa. At least 35 percent of Genoa’s population died in the first sweep of Black Death, which then spread across western Europe. The population of Paris was cut down by at least two-thirds between 1328 and 1470. The plague entered Britain through several ports, including Bristol, “where almost the whole strength of the town perished.” By 1349, it had crept north to Scotland, where “nearly a third of mankind were thereby made to pay the debt of nature.” In the end, an estimated third of the European population succumbed to bubonic plague, with regional death rates between 10 and 60 percent. No event in European history, including war, has left such devastation.
And what of the rain? Only recently have researchers begun to unravel the extent to which the prevalence of Y.
pestis increases with warmer temperatures and wetter weather. Biologists using tree-ring data to reconstruct historical climate find that the years of Black Death in Europe in the fourteenth century were both warmer and increasingly wet. They found the same during a third pandemic, which began in Asia in the mid-nineteenth century and killed millions of people in China and India. They find the same today. A global consortium of scientists studying Y. pestis in great gerbils in Central Asia, where human plague is still reported regularly, found its prevalence increases with warmer springs and wetter summers.
The story is never so simple, as severe drought can spur plague, too—that’s because it sends rodents on the move. During the American yellow fever plagues of the nineteenth century, heavy summer rains could spur outbreaks, as standing water created breeding grounds for the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti. At the same time, a good, hard rain was the only hope of washing away the sewage, rotting dead animals, and other filth that helped spread the disease in cities such as Memphis in the days before sanitation and plumbing.
Rain can be a Janus; at once the face of salvation and despair. In the days before meteorological science could help explain it, extreme rain also brought damnation—as the storm-weary began pointing fingers at one another, looking to lay blame.
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In late August 1589, a dozen of the fittest ships in the Danish fleet set across a tempestuous North Sea to carry a fourteen-year-old princess bride to her new husband and new home. King James VI of Scotland had seen the fair Anna of Denmark only in a miniature portrait. He’d arranged a marriage by proxy in her country to avoid a union with Catherine of Navarre. Following her wedding-sans-groom in a palace by the sea, Anna boarded the ship of the Danish admiral Peter Munch, charged with delivering his royal passenger to her Scottish kingdom.
In the crossing, the ships met ordinary storms. When they had nearly reached their destination, an extraordinary gale flew at them from the coast. Twice, they came within sight of Scotland’s cliffs, and twice, they were pushed back by a phalanx of rain and “baffling winds” that ultimately blew them all the way to Norway. Munch thought the tempest uncommonly fierce, even for the North Sea. So much so, he began to believe “there must be more in the matter than the common perversity of winds and weather.”
He believed the rains and winds were being conjured up by witches.
Munch attempted a third approach. Yet another squall roiled up, this one worse than the last. “The whole fleet was dreadfully tossed,” none more severely than the admiral’s ship carrying the bride-queen. The dastardly winds snapped a cannon from its moorings and hurled it across the deck, where it killed eight Danish soldiers before young Anna’s eyes and “very nearly destroyed her.”
The gale kicked Munch’s sinking ship north into a Norwegian sound. There, an unseasonable ice storm set in, forcing Anna, Munch, and his surviving crew to hunker down in a miserable village that “produced nothing eatable.” Anna wrote distressed letters describing the storms and her near-drowning to her new husband, delivered by a young Danish sailor who agreed to cross the wintry seas for the cause. In what historians describe as the single brave act of his life, King James stocked royal ships with delicacies, meats, wines, and hundreds of attendants, and joined the rescue party to fetch his bride from her icy outpost. The troupe embarked October 20 and met a solid month of more horrid weather, not reaching Anna until November 19.
After an awkward first embrace, the couple came together with “past familiaritie and kisses,” wrote the Scottish diplomat Sir James Melville, relieved to be united against the diabolical weather still stirring between the Norwegian mountains and the North Sea. Conditions remained too uncertain to sail to Edinburgh for a planned royal wedding. So they held a makeshift ceremony in Oslo, then a third wedding in Denmark, after being led south by four hundred troops sent by the king of Sweden to guide them through his snowy dominion.
The royal couple’s return voyage to Scotland confronted yet more “unnatural weather,” with the English navy guiding them into the Firth of Forth through a treacherous mist. They finally arrived in Edinburgh in May 1590, when Anna became Queen Anne in an elaborate coronation.
King James had been skeptical of the witchcraft frenzy sweeping Europe. Now, having lived through the freakish gales, he could no longer deny the evidence. The king became as convinced as Admiral Munch and many others in the storm-battered populace that witches had brewed the worst weather in memory to keep the new queen from ascending her throne.
An aging midwife, Agnes Sampson, and a local schoolmaster, James Fian, would pay unspeakably for the squalls. They were among thousands of accused witches tortured, garroted, hanged, or burned for the devilish rains, snows, freezes, floods, harvest failures, sickness, infertility, livestock epidemics, and other miseries that plagued Europe in the years between 1560 and 1660. The worst of the witchcraft persecutions line up with the worst decades of the Little Ice Age.
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When Americans think of witches and witch trials, our minds turn to Salem in Massachusetts, home to the severest persecutions in the English colonies, with 185 people accused and 19 eventually executed for witchcraft. Salem’s notoriety is due to the city’s obsession with marketing and branding itself as the world’s witch capital. Historians who study witch hunts, trials, persecutions, and executions define Salem as a “small panic” compared with the witch hysteria that swept Europe in the stormiest years of the Little Ice Age.
It is hardly a history to crow about on the Web and in the wax museum. The German historian Wolfgang Behringer has calculated at least 50,000 legal executions for witchcraft in Europe, half of those within the boundaries of present-day Germany. About 80 percent of the victims were female, explanations for which stretch to the story of Eve and its assumption that women were more susceptible to the Devil’s temptations.
Like the spread of humans during dry times in Africa, Behringer finds climate just one of many answers for the rage of witch-hunting in Central Europe. But the crime of witchcraft began its rise in the fourteenth century, running in parallel to the rise of the Little Ice Age. A German woodcut from 1486 shows a sorceress conjuring enormous chunks of hail. A frontispiece from a 1489 pamphlet called Weather Magic depicts two hags adding ingredients including snakes and chickens to a tall cauldron, as a storm bursts overhead. A colored Swiss painting from 1568 portrays a dance around the Devil, with witches in the background brewing up a storm that runs straight from cauldron to sky.
Persecutions reached their peak during the worst years of the climate extremes, in the decades before and after 1600. The crime disappeared from the penal catalogs after the end of the age—when the sun emerged along with more enlightened explanations for the weather.
The western coastal fringes of Europe, which enjoyed more temperate weather and less vulnerability to famine, saw far fewer witchcraft accusations. Suspicions were rampant in densely populated Central Europe, which was also hit by the greatest climate extremes. It happened that people who lived with the weakest infrastructure and farmed some of the worst soils also faced the most extreme rains and the harshest winters of the Little Ice Age.
Superstition had it that, in addition to conjuring storms, witches could sow disease, kill children, and make men, women, and farm animals impotent. The accusations reflected the miseries people faced in the Little Ice Age: childlessness, disease, sudden death of children, livestock epidemics, harvest failures, late frosts, freak hailstorms, and extreme rains. “The idea that misfortunes of this kind happened by chance was alien to many Europeans of that period,” says Behringer. “Witches were the scapegoats that people needed to explain the disasters of the age.”
Beginning around 1580, reports of witch-hunting and executions no longer referred to individuals, but to mass round-ups. Published that year in southwestern Germany, a pamphlet titled Two Newspapers, What Kind of Witches Were Burned gives a hint of the accusations and scope, detailing 114 executions of witches who “had mainly confessed to
having caused damage to cash crops like grain and grapevines by hail and thunderstorms, as well as the laming and killing of children,” writes Behringer. In 1582, a similar sheet reported “the devastating storms in August that had destroyed grain and grapevines, and the subsequent burnings: In the Landgraviate of Hessen, where ten women were burned; a small village in the Breisgau, where thirty-eight women were burned; the small town of Turkheim in the Alsace, where forty-two women and a male ringleader were burned; and Montbeliard, where forty-four women and three men were convicted of weather-making and executed on 24 October.”
In much of Central Europe, historians have found that the persecutions grew from the grass roots: Villagers harangued reluctant local courts and prince-bishops to do something about the foul weather by rounding up storm makers. But the witch hysteria and executions in Scotland and England debunk the notion that belief in witchcraft was characteristic of primitive, uneducated people such as peasants and serfs. In Scotland, the zeal for witch-hunting came straight from the top—from the same King James who gave us the King James Bible.
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So convinced was the king that the tempests of 1589 and 1590 were a murder plot to keep him from his queen, James became personally involved in the investigation, interrogations, and trials of the mortals believed to have worked with Satan to conjure the storms. Known as the North Berwick Witches, they were rumored to have been meeting late in the night at the kirk, or church, at North Berwick, about twenty miles from Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth.