Famine and Population

Many historians have commented that one of the most important factors in the history of any civilization is population. This would seem obvious once stated, but is often overlooked in historical accounts. When we say population is important, we mean the fact that there are people, not the more social issues of whether those people are of a particular class or not. Every civilization has to deal with the problem of either having too many people or not having enough. Sometimes God, in His providence, handles the issue for us. Beginning in 1347 ad, a plague ripped across Europe and devastated the population. We will take the story of that particular event up in a moment. There are other ways that population can be affected without reference to an apocalyptic plague.
The Bible tells us that life is a vapor, and that we are like flowers in a field. These images are meant to remind us of the fragility of life. As we consider the forces of history; the wars, the social changes, and the theology of various periods, we must remember that we are dealing with actual people, like you and I, not abstract characters in a play or novel. Population is nothing but a fancy word for thinking about how many people are in a given place at a given time. The reason population is so important is that, as we mentioned already, without it, there is no civilization.
The fragility of life is affected by weather and food. Weather can be too hot or too cold. Food can be plentiful or in low supply. These two broad factors are often influenced by each other or influence each other. Good weather may produce an abundant supply of food. An abundance of food means people eat better, are stronger, and are more productive. There is also more food to go around. Poor weather can have the opposite effect. A lack of food, often called a famine, will tend to be evidenced by falling population figures for a given time period or region.
Around the end of the thirteenth century (the 1200’s) Europe entered what historians and other scholars call a “little ice age.” A small shift in temperature patterns caused the growing season to be shorter, thus affecting food production. This “little ice age” also affected other weather conditions, causing storms and heavy rain for many areas. These events precipitated what has been called the Great Famine of 1315. It lasted for two years in northern Europe and killed as much as ten percent of the population there. Ten percent doesn’t sound like a high figure. However, prior to this change in conditions, Europe had been experiencing a growth in population. Population figures in countries are often expressed in millions. If there were one million people in Europe, we are talking about the death of 100,000 individuals. The population figures are actually much higher than that. Sometimes individual cities reported deaths of that magnitude. The pattern established in northern Europe continued in southern Europe. The 1330’s and 1340’s saw hunger become a real problem for many cities.
One reason why the change in harvest levels had such a dramatic effect in Europe was that by the 1300’s Europe had reached what some scholars refer to as “the upper limit of its population.”[1] This meant that given the agricultural and technological factors, no more people could be supported. Unless some factor changed, such as an increase in productive land or an advance in technology, the maximum population had been reached. With the changes in temperature that this “little ice age” brought about, the same amount of land was being farmed, but the production level had declined. This meant there was less food for a level population.
A common reaction to this was migration. Many cities grew in size about this time as people moved from the rural areas to the more urban areas. This took place on a grand scale and often accompanies a shift of this magnitude. All across history, severe changes resulting in famine have caused migrations to more populated areas. While this seems counterproductive to us, the idea was that a city has more opportunities to succeed than a small town. We see this paradigm played out in the classical and biblical world over and over again (cf. Ruth) and in more modern times as well. The American novelist, John Steinbeck, based The Grapes of Wrath, on the migration of people from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression of the 19930’s. This reaction to famine is not new, nor has it been replaced in our history.
Many cities saw increases of up to 18% in the years of the famines. This obviously meant that the rural areas saw a marked decrease in their population. Nonetheless, all this marks an overall decrease in population throughout Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Famine was a major contributor to this population decline. Famine led to malnutrition which caused higher infant death rates and lower births in general. However famine was not the only factor. The other major factor in the population decline on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was the bubonic plague, otherwise known as the Black Death.
[1] Jackson Spielvogel. Western Civilization, 4th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1999), 297.