Centuries Ago, Europeans Were Plagued by Constant Flooding, With 16 Major Events That Killed Thousands Over the Course of Just Three Years

In July 1342, the Magdalena Flood devastated large swaths of Central Europe. Thousands of people died in the catastrophic incident, which also destroyed bridges, settlements and crops. Now, however, researchers say the flood was not an isolated event.

Instead, it was just one part of a sequence of floods that ravaged the region over nearly two years. These findings, published August 12 in the journal Nature, not only provide a clearer picture of medieval climate and history, but could also help inform modern flood-management decisions. The Magdalena flood, also known as the Magdalene flood or the St.

Mary Magdalene’s flood, is considered one of the worst natural disasters to strike Central Europe in the past 1,000 years. Yet despite the flood’s impact, historians know surprisingly little about the event. To remedy that, historians, geographers, climatologists and other specialists spent years combing through medieval archives, including administrative records, church texts, legal documents and personal writings.

By the time they were finished, they had reviewed more than 1,000 pieces of evidence related to the floods. Using the collection of records, the researchers were able to piece together a more comprehensive picture of what was happening in Europe in the early 1340s. They determined that a series of 16 floods occurred between late 1341 and 1343.

The year 1342 alone “had the greatest number of great and outstanding floods reported in the past 700 years in Europe,” per the study. As Martin Bauch, a study co-author and medieval historian with the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, tells Science, it was “kind of bad luck to be alive in the 1340s.” The repeated disasters appear to have influenced flood-management practices in the years that followed. The researchers identified a shift toward more robust bridges, river regulation, stronger flood defenses and other forms of mitigation.

What caused the series of floods? Some medieval observers interpreted the disasters through religious or supernatural frameworks, while Paris-based astronomers reportedly attributed the unusual sequence to a particular constellation. Today, however, researchers think that natural climate factors may have caused the floods.