The Great European Bovine Pestilence of 1318–1320 is the largest documented pre-modern livestock mortality event in European history. It killed approximately 60–80% of the European cattle population — millions of animals — across northern Europe in approximately 30 months, in direct overlap with the final years of the Great Famine of 1315–1322. The two crises compounded each other: the famine had already reduced the surviving European population’s capacity to feed itself; the cattle plague removed the surviving plough teams, the dairy herd, and the meat supply from a food economy that was already in collapse.
The pestilence was probably rinderpest — the cattle disease caused by the Rinderpest morbillivirus, the closely-related viral cousin of the human measles virus. Rinderpest produces a severe febrile illness in cattle, sheep, goats, and wild ruminants, with mortality approaching 100% in unexposed populations. The disease was endemic in the Eurasian steppe cattle population through the medieval and early-modern periods, periodically broke out into the European-cattle population through trade-route or military-movement vectors, and was the cause of every subsequent major European cattle plague until the development of effective veterinary vaccines in the late 19th century. The 1318 outbreak was probably the result of cattle-trade contact between the European herds and the eastern-steppe reservoir, although the specific introduction vector has not been identified in surviving documentary sources.
The chronology
The pestilence was first reported in the eastern European cattle-trading regions in late 1317 — the manorial accounts of monastic estates in eastern Germany and modern Poland record unusual cattle mortality through autumn and winter 1317–1318. The outbreak reached the western European cattle-belt (the Low Countries, northern France, eastern England) by spring 1318 and was widespread across the entire northwestern European cattle population by autumn 1318.
The mortality curve in 1318–1320 was approximately exponential through the first six months and approximately catastrophic through the following 18. The Slavin reconstruction of the English manorial accounts (which are the single best surviving source for the outbreak’s mortality, because the English manorial-accounting system of the period was comprehensively recording cattle ownership and movement at every major estate) shows the English cattle population dropping from approximately 5.5 million in 1317 to approximately 1.5 million by 1322 — a 70% loss in approximately four years.
The Continental cattle population followed the same approximate trajectory at slightly different times. The Flemish cattle population collapsed earliest (early 1318); the French cattle population collapsed through mid-1318; the German cattle population through late 1318 and 1319. The Mediterranean cattle population (Spain, Italy) experienced a less severe outbreak — partly because Mediterranean cattle populations were lower-density and partly because the rinderpest viral transmission was less efficient in the warmer southern climates.
The economic impact
The bovine pestilence had three compounded economic effects.
The plough-team collapse. Medieval European cereal agriculture was substantially built on the use of paired oxen for ploughing. A typical English manorial plough team was four oxen; a fully-staffed manor of approximately 1,000 acres of arable land required approximately 24–32 working oxen. The 1318–1320 loss of approximately 70% of those oxen substantially eliminated the ploughing capacity of the affected estates. The 1320–1325 manorial accounts record approximately 40–60% of formerly-arable land being left fallow because there were no oxen available to plough it.
The substitution of horses for the missing oxen was attempted on some estates but was substantially inefficient — horses are stronger but consume more fodder per kilogram of pulling power, and the post-famine fodder supply was constrained. Some estates adopted human-pulled ploughs — the plough by hand — which were less productive per worker-hour and produced lower per-acre yields. The combined effect was a multi-year reduction in European cereal production at exactly the moment the Great Famine had already reduced the buffer stocks.
The dairy collapse. Medieval northern European nutrition was dependent on dairy products (butter, cheese, fresh milk) as the principal source of protein and fat for the working agricultural population. The 1318–1320 cattle losses eliminated the dairy herd; the surviving 30% of European cattle were the youngest and most-productive milking animals, but the absolute reduction in milk supply was approximately 70%. The associated reduction in available butter, cheese, and milk constrained the working-population’s nutritional status through 1320–1325 and is one of the principal explanations for the elevated background-mortality rate that the surviving English parish registers record through the 1320s.
The meat collapse. Medieval European meat consumption was seasonal (peak in autumn after the harvest, when surplus cattle were slaughtered for winter preservation), but cattle were the principal red-meat source for European urban populations through the period. The 1318–1320 losses reduced meat availability by approximately 70% for several years. The surviving cattle were too valuable as breeding stock and plough-team replacements to be slaughtered for meat through the recovery period of 1320–1330; meat consumption was reduced through approximately a generation.
The compound impact
The combination of the Great Famine (peak years 1315–1317) and the bovine pestilence (peak years 1318–1320) produced one of the worst multi-year mortality events in European history before the Black Death of 1347–1351. The estimated total mortality across northern Europe from the combined effects of the famine and the cattle plague is approximately 10–15% of the pre-1315 population — roughly comparable to the Black Death in the long-run mortality fraction although spread across about seven years rather than the Black Death’s three.
The compound effects were synergistic rather than additive. The famine of 1315–1317 had reduced the surviving population’s general health, increasing vulnerability to subsequent disease exposure. The 1318–1320 cattle plague removed the dairy and meat supplies on which the famine-recovery diet depended. The 1320–1325 ploughing-capacity reduction extended the food shortage for years beyond the immediate famine. The surviving European population was poorer, malnourished, and demographically thinned for approximately a generation.
The European cattle population recovered by 1350, mostly through breeding from the surviving 30% — although the genetic bottleneck effects of the 1318–1320 die-off are still visible in modern genetic surveys of European cattle breeds. The Spanish, Italian, and Hungarian cattle populations contributed to the restocking of the northwestern European herds through the 1330s and 1340s; the post-1318 European cattle herd was more genetically diverse than the pre-1318 herd had been.
The 1318 bovine pestilence was the first of approximately a dozen major European cattle plagues over the following five centuries. Subsequent major outbreaks struck in 1745–60 (the Great Rinderpest of 18th-century Europe, which prompted the founding of the first European veterinary school at Lyon in 1762), in 1856–67 (the Great Continental Rinderpest, which produced the founding of the British Royal Veterinary College and the consolidation of European veterinary infectious-disease law), and in the early 20th century. Rinderpest was eradicated globally by an FAO-led vaccination programme in 2011 — only the second disease (after smallpox in 1980) to be successfully eradicated by deliberate human intervention. The 14th-century European cattle population that died in 1318–1320 had been killed by approximately the same virus that was finally eliminated from the planet exactly 691 years later.