The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century

How a seven-year cycle of rain, cold, disease, and warfare created the worst famine in European history   In May of 1315, it started to rain. It didn’t stop anywhere in north Europe until Au­gust. Next came the coldest winters in a millennium. Two separate animal epidem­ics killed nearly eighty percent of northern Europe’s livestock. Wars between Scotland and England, France and Flanders, and two rival claimants to the Holy Roman Empire destroyed all remaining farmland. After seven years, the combination of lost harvests, warfare, and pestilence would claim six million lives—one eighth of Eu­rope’s total population.   William Rosen draws on a wide ar­ray of disciplines, from military history to feudal law to agricultural economics and climatology to trace the succession of traumas that caused the Great Famine. With dramatic appearances by Scotland’s William Wallace, a luckless Edward II and his Queen Isabella, the onetime French princess who invaded her adopted coun­try, deposed her husband, and put her son, Edward III, on the throne, history’s best documented episode of catastrophic cli­mate change comes alive, with powerful implications for future calamities.

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