Waiting for the End of the World?

New Perspectives on Natural Disasters in Medieval Europe

Christopher M. Gerrard, Paolo Forlin, Peter J. Brown, Christopher M. Gerrard, Paolo Forlin, Peter J. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000091762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Waiting for the End of the World? addresses the archaeological, architectural, historical and geological evidence for natural disasters in the Middle Ages between the 11th and 16th centuries. This volume adopts a fresh interdisciplinary approach to explore the many ways in which environmental hazards affected European populations and, in turn, how medieval communities coped and responded to short- and long-term consequences. Three sections, which focus on geotectonic hazards (Part I), severe storms and hydrological hazards (Part II) and biophysical hazards (Part III), draw together 18 papers of the latest research while additional detail is provided in a catalogue of the 20 most significant disasters to have affected Europe during the period. These include earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, storms, floods and outbreaks of infectious diseases. Spanning Europe, from the British Isles to Italy and from the Canary Islands to Cyprus, these contributions will be of interest to earth scientists, geographers, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and climatologists, but are also relevant to students and non-specialist readers interested in medieval archaeology and history, as well as those studying human geography and disaster studies. Despite a different set of beliefs relating to the natural world and protection against environmental hazards, the evidence suggests that medieval communities frequently adopted a surprisingly 'modern', well-informed and practically minded outlook.

1
RESEARCHING NATURAL DISASTERS IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

Peter J. Brown, Paolo Forlin and Christopher M. Gerrard

In a world of global social media, we are all too familiar with modern images of destruction caused by natural disasters and vulnerable human populations struggling to cope with the aftermath (eg Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The Haiti earthquake in 2010, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011, the Yunnan earthquake in 2014, the 2014−16 Ebola outbreak, the Kathmandu earthquake of 2015, the 2017 Sierra Leone mudslide, the Sulawesi earthquake and tsunami in 2018; few will have escaped news of these events over the past decade wherever they might live. The raw energy unleashed by natural hazards can sweep away settlements, destroy housing and infrastructure, cause large numbers of fatalities, transform entire landscapes and lay waste to agricultural produce and livestock. National governments and international aid organisations respond to rescue survivors, establish temporary housing for those displaced and bring in emergency aid, equipment and expertise. As a consequence, terms such as ‘risk management’, ‘vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ have well and truly entered the public lexicon, and awareness of environmental hazards has perhaps never been higher.

Figure 1.1 The devastating impact of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami at Meulaboh (Indonesia)(US Navy, public domain)

Figure 1.2 Cows killed by rinderpest in South Africa, 1869 (Wikimedia, public domain)

We think of these as wholly modern responses, but they are not. No human being, no society, has ever inhabited a totally risk-free environment. Nor are our modern reactions to disasters as coldly informed by technological or scientific practicalities as we might like to believe; religious beliefs continue to shape perceptions of the natural world in many societies around the globe—just as they did in the past (eg Hanska 2002). The extraordinary accusation in 2014 by an English local government councillor that the storms and floods of the preceding winter were ‘divine retribution for the government’s decision to legalise gay marriage’ (The Guardian 18 January 2014) may not reflect the views of the rest of the nation, but it reveals just how shallowly some notions can lie buried. Natural hazards link us to history and archaeology in unexpected ways; the ‘memory’ of the risks they carry may condition the responses of the community for decades or longer. For researchers, an understanding of the frequency and magnitude of past earthquakes will be crucial to any assessment of average return periods and occurrence probabilities, particularly for seismic events (Wisner et al 2011). However we look at it, the study of natural disasters links us intimately with our history.

This book is specifically about natural disasters in the later Middle Ages in Europe. It provides an overview of the many environmental hazards which threatened people in the past, such as earthquakes, severe weather, floods and disease, and shows how medieval societies responded to these threats. This topic was selected as the theme of the Society for Medieval Archaeology’s annual conference in December 2016, held in Oxford, UK. While the focus of the volume is archaeological, the topic will be approached holistically; the study of disasters is (and should always be) an interdisciplinary endeavour. A number of contributions, therefore, seamlessly meld documentary and material evidence (see Standley, Chapter 13) while others approach the topic from either an historical perspective (see Curtis, Chapter 15) or through the lens of another discipline such as philosophy (see Ware and Whittington, Chapter 8). To highlight the range and impact of individual events, the editors have compiled a catalogue of 20 significant natural disasters which affected medieval Europe. Although this part of the world has been one of the less dangerous places to inhabit, it was this period which arguably hosted the greatest volcanic event of the past 2,000 years in 1257–58, some of the most destructive earthquakes and tsunamis, the most serious famine in recorded history between 1315 and 1321 and the worst crisis in public health during the Black Death of 1346–53.

Thanks to a generation of research by earth scientists, geographers, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and climatologists, a growing number of specialists are becoming committed to mobilising evidence from archaeological excavation, standing buildings, place-names, and socio-economic history in order to recuperate the voices of those who experienced these catastrophic events. These scholars are motivated in different ways. For some, this is a topic which has resonance and relevance for today’s world because there may be direct applications to modern disaster-management strategies which could help to anticipate future disasters and perhaps even to prevent them. This is particularly so in the case of tectonic hazards where large sets of ‘big data’ are available at a continental scale through catalogues such as AHEAD (Archive of Earthquake Data) and SHEEC (European Earthquake Catalogue 1000–1899). For other contributors, reconstructing what transpired when historical populations were hit by natural disasters is not only a fascinating exercise—opening a window on a community at one of its most vulnerable moments, sometimes a window of only a few minutes—it also holds the potential to understand how people coped and recovered, or why they did not. The study of natural disasters is ultimately about people. As one author has put it, ‘we cannot be just students of disaster. We must first be students of society and culture’ (Oliver-Smith 1986, 25).

BACKGROUND

Highly destructive events have long been the catalyst for research into the occurrence and impact of specific types of hazard—the 1703 storm in the British Isles (Defoe 1704) and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake (Araújo 2006) being early and well known examples. The study of disasters is certainly not new. At first, interest was generally limited to a specific type of hazard, often in the form of catalogues, rather than natural disasters as a discrete category. Research into the social impacts of natural disasters then accelerated during the post-war years, stimulated by American social scientists who saw these events as proxies through which they might model the social responses provoked by military emergencies, such as a foreign nuclear strike (Quarantelli 1987). Seen in this context, the causes of disaster were sought externally and human communities portrayed as victims forced to react to threats.

Since the 1980s, natural disasters have been recast as events which are best understood as the result of, on the one hand, naturally occurring processes (such as precipitation, seismic activity or cyclonic conditions) and, on the other, cultural decisions (such as the location of human settlement, clustering of high population densities and/or economic interests in areas vulnerable to hazards, etc). These interactions between human society and the natural environment can be conceptualised through a word equation (Figure 1.3) which posits that, in any given situation, risk (meaning the probability of a hazard occurring) is the product of the natural hazard (or threat to humans and their welfare) and the vulnerability of the local population (something which may be affected by a multitude of considerations, including proximity to the source of the hazard, the cultural understanding of the danger posed by the hazard, and the levels of inequality and access to resources within the society). This rephrasing of the conceptual framework applied to natural disasters has been accompanied by a steady growth in interest, both popular and scholarly, in the subject. Research priorities have been galvanised by initiatives such as the United Nations Decade for Disaster Risk Reduction (between 1990 and 1999) as well as the growing realisation that an interdisciplinary approach to disasters is fundamental to addressing the risk that natural hazards will pose in the future as a result of accelerating development and population expansion (Ismail-Zadeh et al 2017). Two points might be underlined here. Firstly, as a number of scholars have repeatedly pointed out (Oliver-Smith 1999; Juneja and Mauelshagen 2007; Krüger et al 2015), natural events are no longer seen as the sole causes of but rather as precipitants or triggers for crisis and, as a result, it may be questioned whether disasters are really ‘natural’ at all, given that disasters emerge as an expression of social vulnerabilities. Secondly, greater stress (although arguably still not enough) is now placed on analysis of the political, social and economic context of a disaster, what is sometimes referred to as ‘cultural framing’ or (less comfortably) ‘cultural profile’, before interpreting the reactions of the community and the role of local agency in the unfolding of events (Janku et al 2012). In simplistic terms, it is this shift in conceptual approach which opens the door for archaeologists and social historians to make a more significant contribution (eg Bankoff 2003).

Figure 1.3 A word equation which conceptualises the risk of any given natural disaster as a product of both the hazard (or hazards) and the vulnerability of the local population (© Peter J. Brown)

Social scientists have proposed a number of theoretical models which offer useful frameworks through which to approach the impact of disasters on human populations. In this book, we make use of three of these. The first is the ‘disaster cycle’ (Figure 1.4), which can be applied to any natural disaster and encapsulates the responses of an affected human population through different stages as a continuously repeating cycle, operating at multiple levels (Alexander 2002, 6). Another is the concept of adaptive cycles (Figure 1.4; Holling and Gunderson 2002, 34), which provides a framework to model how complex systems, such as human societies, reorganise themselves in the aftermath of, often recurring, disturbances—such as natural hazards. This is achieved by breaking down the impact of a disturbance into four key stages: Ω phase—release (the occurrence of a disturbance), α phase—reorganisation (the system reacts to the new situation), r phase—exploitation (advantage is taken of new possibilities created by the disturbance) and k phase—conservation (the establishment of a new equilibrium). The flexibility of this model, which can be applied to many different settings and scenarios, is both a strength and a weakness. Finally, therefore, we refer to the ‘risk management flowchart’ (Figure 1.5) developed by Smith and Petley (2009, 65), which, while largely compatible with the concept of adaptive cycles, is more closely tailored to the reality of situations generated as a result of the interplay of natural hazards and human societies. Importantly, this model shows how societies can improve their coping strategies over time as a result of repeated exposure to disasters, something we consider to be important with respect to our medieval case studies.

Figure 1.4 Theoretical frameworks of disaster combining the disaster cycle (central and inner rings), which breaks down the responses of human populations to disasters into a number of successive stages, and the concept of adaptive cycles (outer ring), which models how co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and plates
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Researching natural disasters in the later Middle Ages
• PART I Tectonic hazards
• PART II Severe storms and hydrological hazards
• PART III Biophysical hazards
• PART IV Catalogue
• Index