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You know that scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom when Indy’s feet are on fire and he’s saying “Water! Water! Water!” and then all of a sudden he gets way too much fucking water? Same thing happened in Central Europe in the 14th century with a post-drought flood that had long-lasting repercussions for the continent.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: July 22, 1342--
People like to live near rivers, because it’s good for transporting things and powering mills to grind grain. Also, people often need to cross rivers, which provided the opportunity to build bridges and say pay me motherfucker to anyone who wanted to use said bridge. As a result, humans have always built settlements near rivers, even though those rivers can flood. It’s kind of an abusive relationship.
It was a perfect storm of fuckery. There had been drought for years, the land as dry as Ben Shapiro’s wife. But the winter of 1342 saw heavy snowfall. Come spring thaw, the melting snow raised the rivers high. Then God said ah shit I’ve been forgetting to rain on Europe for a few years I’ve got some catching up to do and he started to send that shit, and the rivers Rhine, Danube, Elba, and several others got even higher.
Then that flood got biblical. It was on the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene on July 22, 1342 when the cats and dogs really began to fall. That’s a metaphor. The cats and dogs in this tale drowned. So did people. Thousands of them. Cities were wrecked. It was said that in Cologne a boat could pass over the Rhine side of the city’s fortification wall.
Then things really went to medieval excrement. You know that drought they’d had? The ground was the opposite of Cardi B and it couldn’t absorb the water, so it washed all the soil away instead. If you’re a farmer, washing soil away is bad. If you like to eat, having a farmer’s soil washed away is bad.
So people got real hungry. That was horseman number one of that little apocalypse: Famine. Then Pestilence said “Why does Famine get to have all the fun? Me and my pal Death have been working on something cool. We’re calling it the Black Death.” And since people were fucking starving they were in a weakened condition and less likely to fight off that nasty plague that showed up in 1346 leading to at least a third of Europe dying. And being that we’re talking about human history, the fourth horseman, War, had nothing to complain about because he was always kept busy.
The massive soil erosion from the flood can still be found today.
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