It is often difficult to assign a precise age to discoveries. Manorial surveys were very common throughout the Middle Ages, in particular in France and England, the Book of Hearths from Italy in 1244, earliest being the Domesday Book in 1086. Popular uprisings, such as the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and not until the later 15th century did the lower classes start to gain benefits. By 1500 the total population of Europe was substantially below that of 200 years earlier. The appearance, or disappearance, of settlements, for example after the Black Death the archaeological record shows the abandonment of upwards of 25% of all villages in Spain. Most of what is known about Medieval demographics comes from written records, which can be categorized into descriptive accounts, and administrative accounts. These records can be divided in to two categories: surveys and serial documents. Serial records come in different forms. The earliest are from the 8th century and are land conveyances such as sales, exchanges, donations, and leases. Other types of serial records include death records from religious institutions, Book of the Dead (late 14th century onward), and baptism registrations.
Dictionary of the Irish Language based mainly on Old and Middle Irish Materials (Compact Edition, Dublin, 1983), the Buidhe Conaill is a relapsing fever with accompanying jaundice. `Yellow (Plague) of Conaill' for there is an old Irish name Conall (`strong as a wolf') but, as we now see, it means `yellow aftermath'. The Oxford English Dictionary has long defined the Yellow Plague as `jaundice', agreed to by most medical historians who believe it to be either a virulent form of jaundice or jaundice as a complication arising after a form of the bubonic plague, which was a condition from inflamed swelling of glandular parts of the body - the lymph nodes or buboes.
In 430, however, an outbreak of a plague hit Athens. The plague ravaged the densely packed city, and in the long run, was a significant cause of its final defeat. The plague wiped out over 30,000 citizens, sailors and soldiers and even Pericles and his sons. Roughly one quarter of the Athenian population died. The plague was a disaster which they could never hope to recover from, as Athenian manpower was drastically reduced and even foreign mercenaries refused to hire themselves out to a city riddled with plague. The fear of plague was so widespread that the Spartan invasion of Attica was abandoned, as their troops were unwilling to be near the diseased enemy.
The Yellow Plague which wiped out one third of the population of Ireland during AD 664-668 is thought to have been a recurrence of the Plague of Justinian which had its origins at Pelusium in Egypt in AD 542. By means of merchant ships it was spread to Constantinople where, in that year, it wiped out 10,000 people in one day. The emergence of bubonic plague (the Plague of Justinian), the migration of Mongolian tribes towards the West, the end of the Persian empire, the rise of Islam and the end of various civilizations in Central and South America. Tree ring analysis by dendrochronologist Mike Baillie, Queen's University, Belfast, shows abnormally little growth in Irish oak in 536 and another sharp drop in 542, after a partial recovery. Similar patterns are recorded in tree rings from Sweden and Finland, in California's Sierra Nevada and in rings from Chilean Alerce trees. The term plague (Wikipedia) is usually defined as a pestilence, an epidemic disease causing a high rate of mortality. Plagues of disease are a serious factor in the development of human civilization, impacting and altering the course of wars, migrations, population growth, urbanization, and cultural development. In the New World, first contact with Europeans brought similar overwhelming pandemics of measles and smallpox, though not of bubonic plague, that led to the a drastic drop in population and the collapse of American cultures.
It had reached Gaul by AD 546 where Gregory of Tours (c. AD 538-594) says that its symptoms compared to lues inguinaria, seeming to identify it as a bubonic plague.
By means of merchant ships it was spread to Constantinople where, in that year, it wiped out 10,000 people in one day. It had reached Gaul by AD 546 where Gregory of Tours (c. AD 538-594) says that its symptoms compared to lues inguinaria, seeming to identify it as a bubonic plague. By AD 547 it had reached the island of Britain where the Annales Cambriae (Welsh annals, the earliest copy surviving from the 10th Century) record the death from it of Maelgwyn Hir (the Tall), King of Gwynedd. He was one of the most powerful rulers of 6th Century Britain who some regarded as the original Arthur being rebuked by Gildas in his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (written c. AD 560) and referred to as `dragon of the island' (Pendragon?).
Bede writes: `This pestilence did no less harm in the island of Ireland. Many of the nobility and of the lower ranks of the English nation were there at that time, who, in the days of the Bishops Finan and Colman, forsaking their native land, retired thither, either for the sake of divine studies, or of a more continent life; and some of them presently devoted themselves to a monastic life; other chose rather to apply themselves to study, going about from one master's cell to another. The Irish willingly received them all, and took care to supply them with food, as also to furnish them with books to read, and their teaching, all gratis.'
In AD 561-556 the plague is now recorded in Ireland and named in the Irish Annals and Chronicles as the Buidhe Conaill - the Yellow Conaill. We will deal with the meaning of this name in a moment. By this time, patronymics descend from the north a few generations removed from the native origin. The bulk of ogham inscriptions survive on stone memorials from the 5th and 6th Centuries AD. This form of early writing was named after Ogma, the Irish god of eloquence and literacy. A few ogham inscriptions are found in other parts of Ireland and then, as the Irish travelled, they occur in South Wales, where the Irish established the kingdom of Dyfed, founded by the Déisi of Munster (there 15 inscribes stones in Pembroke), then in Cornwall, Isle of Man and Scotland.
to transcribe ogham thanks to a key given in the Book of Ballymote, compiled in Sligo in 1390 by Magnus Ó Duibhgeánnáin which copies a text that is dated to the 11th Century. The book also contains bardic tracts on poetic metre and grammar and an Irish translation of the Aenid. It seems, according to the manuscripts, some letters were added later to the original ogham found on inscriptions, and these introduced symbols for complicated sound values - ea, oi, Uí oi, ae and were called forfeda (from forfid - additional letters). These represented the défogur or double-vowel sounds. More fancifully forfeda were given non Irish values such as K, TH, P, PH and X. The main letters had the equivalents of A, O, U, E, I; H, D, T, C, Q; B, L, F, S, N; and M, G, NG, Z, R.
This passage also underlines the Irish records that many of the Anglo-Saxon kings, princes and nobility went to Ireland to receive their education at this time and were welcomed by the Irish as Eadulf is an illustration in the stories.
The Irish records also name of numerous kings, princes, abbots and bishops from all over the country and recounts the flight of Bishop Colman and his followers from Cork to Inis Bó Finne (Inishboffin) one of the western islands, to escape its ravages. Even the joint High Kings of Ireland, Diarmuid and Blathmac mac Aedha Slaine, were not immune from the mortalitas magna and well-known churchmen such as St. Aileran of the Wisdom and St. Féchine of Fore also perished. In one short period four abbots of Bangor - Berach, Cumine, Colm and Mac Aedha - died one after the other. The Féilire Óengus (c. AD 800-850) record that St Ultan, bishop of Ardbraccan in Co Meath, survived the Yellow Plague and established orphanages for the children of those who had perished.
The Féilire Óengus (c. AD 800-850) record that St Ultan, bishop of Ardbraccan in Co Meath, survived the Yellow Plague and established orphanages for the children of those who had perished.
Bubonic plague outbreaks
Estimates of total population of Europe are speculative, but at the time of Charlemagne it is thought to be between 25 and 30 million, and of this 15 million are in Carolingian France.
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1000-1250 In the 11th century, people began to move outward into the wilderness, in what is known as the "great clearances". During the High Middle Ages, forests and marshes were cleared and cultivated. 1250-1350 By 1300 Europe had become, some say, overpopulated. England, which had around 1 million people in 1086, was estimated to have close to 7 million. France in 1328 (which was geographically smaller than France is today) was believed to have 20 million people, which it would not surpass again until the 18th century. The region of Tuscany had 2 million people in 1300, which it would not reach again until 1850. Overall, the population of Europe is believed to have reached a peak of around 100 million. By comparison 15-member states-strong European Union in 2000 had a population of 377 million [1]. This compares to grain yields which in the 14th century were between 2:1 and 7:1 (2:1 means for every seed planted, 2 are harvested). Modern grain yields are 300:1 or more, but the population is only four times as much. Starting with the Great Famine in 1315, then the Hundred Years War and the Black Death of 1348-1350, the population of Europe plummeted. The period between 1348 and 1420 witnessed the heaviest loss. In Germany, about 40% of the named inhabitants disappeared. The population of Provence was reduced by 50% and in some regions in Tuscany 70% were lost during this period. The catastrophes were Malthusian checks on a population too large for its available resources. Populations continued to fall and remained low almost to the 16th century. Thus, classic Malthusian theory does not offer a fully satisfactory explanation.
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The plague went on to destroy up to a quarter of the human population of the eastern Mediterranean. A second major plague wave in 588 spread through the Mediterranean into what is now France. A major pandemic would not appear again in Europe until the Black Death of the 14th century, almost 1000 years later.
Bubonic plague is an infectious disease that is believed to have caused several epidemics or pandemics throughout history. In A.D. 588 a second major plague wave spread through the Mediterranean into what is now France. A maximum of 25 million dead is considered a reasonable estimate. Plague has a long history as a biological weapon. Historical accounts from medieval Europe detail the use of infected animal carcasses, by Mongols, Turks and other groups, to contaminate enemy water supplies. Plague victims were also reported to have been tossed by catapult into cities under siege.
The disease was bubonic plague, present in two forms: one that infected the bloodstream, causing the buboes and internal bleeding, and was spread by contact; and a second, more virulent pneumonic type that infected the lungs and was spread by respiratory infection. The presence of both at once caused the high mortality and speed of contagion. The ships had come from the Black Sea port of Caffa (now Feodosiya) in the Crimea, where the Genoese maintained a trading post. In both types everything that issued from the body- breath, sweat, blood from the buboes and lungs, bloody urine, and blood-blackened excrement- smelled foul. Depression and despair accompanied the physical symptoms, and before the end "death is seen seated on the face." As added up by Pope Clement VI at Avignon, the total of reported dead reached 23,840,000. In the absence of a concept of contagion, no serious alarm was felt in Europe until the trading ships brought their black burden of pestilence into Messina while other infected ships from the Levant carried it to Genoa and Venice.
By January 1348 it penetrated France via Marseille, and North Africa via Tunis. Shipborne along coasts and navigable rivers, it spread westward from Marseille through the ports of Languedoc to Spain and northward up the Rhone to Avignon, where it arrived in March. It reached Narbonne, Montpellier, Carcassonne, and Toulouse between February and May, and at the same time in Italy spread to Rome and Florence and their hinterlands. Between June and August it reached Bordeaux, Lyon, and Paris, spread to Burgundy and Normandy, and crossed the Channel from Normandy into southern England. From Italy during the same summer it crossed the Alps into Switzerland and reached eastward to Hungary. In a given area the plague accomplished its kill within four to six months and then faded, except in the larger cities, where, rooting into the close-quartered population, it abated during the winter, only to reappear in spring and rage for another six months.
In 1349 it resumed in Paris, spread to Picardy, Flanders, and the Low Countries, and from England to Scotland and Ireland as well as to Norway, where a ghost ship with a cargo of wool and a dead crew drifted offshore until it ran aground near Bergen. From there the plague passed into Sweden Denmark, Prussia, Iceland, and as far as Greenland. Leaving a strange pocket of immunity in Bohemia, and Russia unattacked until 1351, it had passed from most of Europe by mid-1350.
Although the mortality rate was erratic, ranging from one fifth in some places to nine tenths or almost total elimination in others, the overall estimate of modern demographers has settled- for the area extending from India to Iceland-around the same figure expressed in Froissart's casual words: "a third of the world died." His estimate, the common one at the time, was not an inspired guess but a borrowing of St. John's figure for mortality from plague in Revelation, the favorite guide to human affairs of the Middle Ages.
France was plunged into turmoil by the Hundred Years War (1337-1450).
In Paris, where the plague lasted through 1349, the reported death rate was 800 a day, in Pisa 500, in Vienna 500 to 600. The total dead in Paris numbered 50,000 or half the population. The total dead in Paris numbered 50,000 or half the population. Florence, weakened by the famine of 1347, lost three to four fifths of its citizens, Venice two thirds, Hamburg and Bremen, though smaller in size, about the same proportion. At Givry, a prosperous village in Burgundy of 1,200 to l,500 people, the parish register records 615 deaths in the space of fourteen weeks, compared to an average of thirty deaths a yeare in the previous decade. The first wave swept through Europe in 1347-1350, and there were six more waves between 1350 and 1400 as each new generation of potential victims, not immune to the plague, appeared. The population of Europe was cut by half by 1400. This is probably the closest approach to the effects of a thermonuclear war in history.
The problem was complicated by the fact that English monarch Henry II had married Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose holdings - much of southwestern France - passed under partial control of England. Edward III of England seems to have launched the war to gain total sovereignty over the region. At the battles of Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1416), English commoners, armed with Welsh longbows, slaughtered French knights and Italian and Swiss mercenaries armed with more powerful but slower crossbows. At the lowest ebb of French fortunes, the French were rallied by Joan of Arc, who was captured by the English, tried on trumped-up charges of heresy, and burned at the stake in 1431.
In the midst of all these upheavals, the Church was scarcely in a position to offer comfort. Since 1309 the Pope had resided at Avignon in southern France, rather than Rome. The "Babylonian Exile" began after the King of France attempted to tax the incomes of Church officials. The Pope responded by forbidding secular rulers to tax the Church and threatening to excommunicate the King, whereupon agents of the King attempted to kidnap the Pope. When a French Pope was elected in 1309, he moved to Avignon for safety and to be closer to his French mistress.
The Pope was still ruler of much of central Italy - the Papal States, but that rule turned out to be impossible to enforce from Avignon. Revolts were frequent, inspired by resentment at the Papal exile, the general air of corruption, and heavy taxes to support the lush lifestyles of Avignon. They were fanned by the city-states of northern Italy, who were profoundly uncomfortable at having French power on both sides and who hoped to pick up any pieces of the Papal States that broke off. During one revolt, Cardinal Robert of Geneva subdued the town of Cesena and had about 5,000 civilians massacred, for which he earned the undying hatred of the Italians and the nickname "Butcher of Cesena."
It involved a strange military religious order called the Knights Templars, a uniquely medieval institution that was a combination religious order and private army. The Knights Templars were originally conceived as the military arm of the Church during the Crusades, and by the 1300's they had amassed a vast treasury. King Philip the Fair of France saw the Templars as a source of revenue, and in 1307 he swept down on the Templars and had every one in France arrested on the same night. It's a measure of the degree to which the Templars had become soft and slack that Philip could make the doubtless elaborate preparations for his assault and the Templars had not a clue that it was about to happen. To justify the takeover, Philip staged show trials in which the Templars were accused of homosexuality (probably at least partly true) bestiality, devil-worship, and every other dark superstition of the time. In 1314 the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was executed. Before being executed, he called down a curse on the King and on France, and summoned the King and the Pope to meet him before God's judgement throne in a year. The Pope died within a month, Philip seven months later. For decades France saw a succession of short-lived rulers, seemingly demostrating the power of the curse.