The Black Death, the OG pandemic, responsible for wiping out tens of millions of people across Europe, Asia, and North Africa between 1346 and 1353, might have had a little help from volcanoes.
I am aware that sounds like the plot of a 2010s SyFy Channel movie. But, according to a study in Communications Earth & Environment, one or more massive tropical eruptions in 1345 may have set the stage for Europe’s deadliest pandemic.
The eruptions were so violent that they left several permanent marks on the world, which come in a variety of forms. The eruptions blasted sulfur into the stratosphere, dimming the sun. Written accounts from China to Italy featured the writers complaining of strange darkness and heavy cloud cover.
Ice cores from both poles show massive sulfur spikes dating back to around the time of the eruptions. Europe was plunged into several years of cold, wet summers. Tree rings across the continent sprouted “blue rings,” big indicators of stress. Crop yields tanked! Famine spread! Mass hysteria!
Turns Out Volcanoes Might’ve Played a Role in the Black Death
In response to what surely must have seemed like the apocalypse—the actual end times—Europe’s wealthiest city-states—Florence, Venice, Genoa—did the medieval equivalent of panic-buying toilet paper: they bought grain from the last place still selling it, the Black Sea.
That imported grain saved countless locals and refugees from starvation…and then likely doomed them since those grain supplies came packed with fleas carrying Yersinia pestis, the bacterium behind the Black Death.
Nobody in 1347 could have ever fathomed that the act of buying emergency grain would have helped spread a deadly plague. Ports dependent on shipments got wrecked. Inland cities, like Milan, managed to survive without taking as much damage…for a bit. Once the plague hit the European mainland, it spread, and fast. Between 30 percent and 60 percent of the population died in six years.
Trade kept moving during that time because no one realized it was part of the problem. Wages soared as workers vanished. Wealth shifted. Political systems held. And while the pandemic was horrific, cities learned: quarantines, basic public-health rules, and sanitation slowly improved.
Sounds a lot like today.
The study doesn’t claim volcanoes caused the Black Death. The plague almost certainly would have arrived eventually. But the eruptions appear to have accelerated everything: the famine, the grain imports, the fleas, the pandemic—and all because responsible cities wanted to feed their citizens amid a famine caused by near-apocalyptic volcanic eruptions.
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