ABSTRACT
The Black Death – which circumnavigated Europe, from the Crimea toMessina, through western Europe to Scandinavia, and eventually to Moscow,in less than five years – was Europe’s worst demographic calamity. Horrors such as the famine of 1315 to 1317, Europe’s most severe, claimed no more than 10 percent of certain populations but struck only northern Europe. Even the world wars of the twentieth century were minor in comparison, scything little more than 3 percent of Europe’s population. Estimates of the Black Death’s toll in the period 1348 to 1352 have, of late, moved upward to half or more of Europe’s population. Such estimates derive from places where the statistics are reliable and not just from reports of horrified chroniclers, monks, and merchants. The records of vacant benefices for priests in England hovered just under 50 percent; for Barcelona, they were even higher at over 60 percent. Manorial records for Cambridgeshire and similar ones for Saint-Flour in the Massif Central of France show some villages losing as many as 80 percent of their inhabitants. The death-toll in Florence may have been as high, with the population sinking from 120,000 to as low as 25,000, and other places without tax or manorial records may have suffered still greater devastation. Chroniclers claimed that the Black Death left Trapani, a Sicilian port, completely uninhabited.1
