A Cattle Panzootic in Early Fourteenth-Century Europe

Abstract

In the early fourteenth century, annals, chronicles, correspondence, petitions, and poems all document severe mortalities of cattle in regions as distant as Mongolia and Iceland. Relevant passages from this literature are collected here and used with manorial accounts from England and Wales to illuminate a European cattle panzootic that spread west from central Europe c.1315, in the context of a widespread subsistence crisis (the Great European Famine), persisting in Ireland until c.1325. The origins, duration and extent of the pestilence are considered and a relatively detailed picture of its epizootiology is drawn. How the panzootic might be retrospectively diagnosed and why a diagnosis should be attempted is also discussed.