The impact of volcanoes on the Black Death

Scratch the surface, and underneath I’m still an enthusiastic History teacher; I’ve just no students to teach. So I find things like this Open Culture article, which helps piece together how the Black Death came to wipe out ~50% of Europe’s population in the 14th century, fascinating. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the recent war in Iran, with associated global shocks, are legible to us as we live in a global society based on scientific understanding. That wasn’t true ~650 years ago, so understanding how it all came about, and the impact it had, takes painstaking work. If new findings by researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe are to be believed, a volcano’s eruption helped lead to the outbreak and spread of the Black Death across Europe in the fourteenth century. In the video above, British history and environmental science specialist Paul Whitewick explains the evidence on a visit to one of the…