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Date: 9 October 2012 01:47
Subject: [roeoz] Digest Number 5532

3. The hunger claims – Mediterranean Basin in the 11th Century
From: Ilan G

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3. The hunger claims – Mediterranean Basin in the 11th Century
Posted by: “Ilan G” ilgo_au@yahoo.com.au ilgo_au
Date: Mon Oct 8, 2012 4:46 am ((PDT))

Fascinating research! article about the book:
“The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the
Decline of the East, 950-1072″
from:
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-holidays/sukkot/the-hunger-claims.premium-1.468500
>
>
> The hunger claims
>
>
> If we want proof of how extreme weather conditions can effect
> political change, Prof. Ronnie Ellenblum says we just need to look
> to the Mediterranean Basin a thousand or so years ago.
>
> By Asaf Shtull-Trauring
> <http://www.haaretz.com/misc/writers/asaf-shtull-trauring-1.288285> |
> Oct.06, 2012 | 1:54 AM
>
>
>
>
> Nothing like it had been seen in Egypt for centuries. “The city is
> paralyzed, there are no buyers and no sellers,” an 11th-century Jewish
> merchant wrote describing Fustat, near Cairo. “All eyes are on the
> Nile. May God in his mercy raise the river waters.”
>
> Beginning in the late 10th century and continuing throughout the 11th
> century, Nile Valley residents documented a long series of droughts,
> the worst of which reduced the population to hunger. At their height,
> these periods of drought were on a biblical scale – there were five,
> six and sometimes even seven consecutive years in which rainfall all
> but ceased. The worst and most devastating period was from 1052 to
> 1073 when, on average, a drought year was recorded every two years.
>
> The Nile River’s decreased flow during these recurrent drought periods
> dealt a blow to the entire region, forcing the population beyond
> Egypt’s borders. The reason for this was the reliance of people living
> in the Eastern Mediterranean basin on two main water sources, enabling
> them to develop the agricultural lifestyle that sustained them: winter
> rains in the Levant, and rains that originated in areas south of the
> Sahara, which feed the Nile. The likelihood of both these sources
> faltering at the same time is small. But in the 11th century that
> exact scenario came to pass. It was not only the populace of Egypt
> that suffered from lengthy droughts but also their Levant neighbors in
> Syria and Palestine.
>
> The plight of the region’s residents did not end with that double
> whammy. Written testimony from the area north of the Levant shows that
> the Eastern Mediterranean basin suffered a third climatic blow that
> century that was no less harsh. Between 1027 and 1060, the steppes of
> Central Asia, Iran, Iraq, Armenia and the Balkans endured especially
> cold winters. The severe cold also caused drought in many areas, the
> flocks belonging to the nomadic pastoralist tribes froze, for many
> years winter snow fell on Baghdad and the Tigris partially froze over.
>
> Between one bad weather period and another, there were also good years
> when comfortable climatic conditions and timely rains enabled economic
> and cultural growth. But when drought and cold pummeled the region
> successively, or in tandem, they led to a significant reduction in the
> crops on which the populace depended.
>
> The damage to agricultural yield had far-reaching social and political
> consequences: “A rise in food prices, turmoil and riots, hunger,
> plagues, mass death, urban flight, population movements, persecution
> of minorities, persecution of anyone who was alien and different, and
> forcible religious conversion resulted,” explains Prof. Ronnie
> Ellenblum, a geographer and historian at the Hebrew University of
> Jerusalem.
>
> In his book “The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change
> and the Decline of the East, 950-1072,” which was published last month
> ?(Cambridge University Press?), Ellenblum describes what he calls “the
> anatomy of collapse.” He says the roots of this collapse go back to a
> series of extreme climatic events that occurred in the 11th century.
> He draws a connection between the extreme climatic phenomena in Egypt,
> the Levant and Central Asia, and social and political upheavals that
> brought about the decline of major cities and mass migration, altering
> the face of the Eastern Mediterranean basin substantially.
>
> *Shrinking cities*
>
> Ellenblum had not intended to conduct such a wide-ranging study. At
> the start, he was focused on the history of Jerusalem in the Middle Ages.
>
> “I discovered that even before Jerusalem was conquered by the
> Crusaders, the size of its territory and population had shrunk,” he
> says. “When the Crusaders arrived there was no aqueduct, and the water
> supply was based entirely on rainwater. I once lectured on this and
> explained that the aqueducts had broken down over the generations and
> the technological skills required to fix them, which were known in the
> Roman era, had been lost. A student came up to me and said, ‘What’s
> the big deal about fixing a canal or building a bridge? I don’t buy
> that.’ I replied that it was the standard explanation. The moment I
> said that it hit me, and I promised that I would look into the
> phenomenon of shrinking cities in the 11th century.”
>
> As he delved into documents of that period, it became apparent to
> Ellenblum that the decline of the cities in our region was a
> widespread phenomenon: “Tiberias, which had reached its biggest size
> ever in the 1030s, went into decline before the century’s end. Ramle,
> which was quadruple the size of Jerusalem at the start of the century,
> was practically empty of residents when the Crusaders arrived in the
> year 1099. Something had happened there. Nearly all the cities that
> were built in the Land of Israel in the Classical and Early Muslim
> periods, and some of the land’s agricultural areas, declined in the
> 11th century.”
>
> Ellenblum ascribes that decline to consecutive drought years, which
> dried up many springs that provided water to farming communities ?(a
> similar phenomenon has been taking place in recent years in the
> Jerusalem Hills?) and to the aqueducts. He soon learned that a similar
> phenomenon occurred throughout the Eastern Mediterranean basin.
>
> “During this period,” he explains, “something happened to all of Roman
> urban culture, which had continued to exist for another thousand years
> in the East. Jerusalem, Fustat, Tiberias, Constantinople, Kairouan in
> North Africa and Muslim Baghdad – all these cities declined.”
>
> The 1030s were a particularly difficult time in Baghdad, the capital
> of the Muslim Empire. The winters during that decade were especially
> severe, and during more than half of them it snowed in the city. ?(“In
> 1038 heavy snows fell twice on Baghdad and did not melt for many days,
> and the cold in December was so fierce the water completely froze for
> six days,” a chronicler of the time wrote?). The extreme weather
> conditions prompted loss of crops, a series of droughts, a rise in
> food prices, hunger and plagues that caused a substantial reduction in
> the population. The violence between Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims
> increased, persecution of the Jews worsened, and street gangs that
> attacked people and looted property grew more powerful.
>
> According to Ellenblum, this explains why the academies of Sura and
> Pumbedita – which operated in Baghdad at the time and were the most
> important centers for Jewish study in the east – ceased to exist in
> the late 1030s, and their closure brought an end to the period of the
> Geonim (heads of the academies).
>
> “Some have claimed that the academies in Baghdad lost their eminence
> gradually,” he says, “but not too many years earlier, the head of the
> Jerusalem academy sent his son to study at the academy of Baghdad.” In
> other words, the Babylonian academy was still in its prime a few years
> before it closed down.
>
> The closure of the Baghdad academies – and later on also the academy
> in Jerusalem – had significant consequences for the Jewish world. “In
> the wake of this, the centers of study ceased to exist in the east and
> moved to Spain, France, and the lands of Ashkenaz,” Ellenblum says.
> “This is a good example of processes that take place simultaneously,
> but those who wrote about the history of the Jews did not deal with
> the history of Baghdad itself or with the social history of the
> region, and therefore did not make the connection between the phenomena.”
>
> According to Ellenblum, the weakening of Baghdad created the
> conditions for an even graver blow to the Muslim Empire’s capital a
> few years later, in the 1050s.
>
> “That is when nomads from the north conquered Baghdad – the largest
> and most important city in the western hemisphere, an enormous city,
> the center of government, the center of study. Today it is hard to
> imagine the importance of that city, and the importance of the
> scholars who were active there and in Iran,” he notes. “Those were the
> people who developed algebra, geography, medicine, and who were
> familiar with all of the Greek philosophical writings and the
> commentaries on them. They were conquered by nomads who did not know
> how to read and write, who came from the Asian Steppes, entered
> Baghdad, encountering no resistance, and became its rulers.”
>
> Those nomads were the Seljuks, tribes of Turcoman cattle herders that
> in the 11th century migrated to the Middle East and gained control of
> large areas of the Muslim Empire, including Baghdad. Later on, the
> Seljuks defeated Byzantium and wrested control of Asia Minor.
>
> Ellenblum cites written sources that attest that the Turcoman tribes
> were forced to migrate southward because of the fierce cold spells
> that swept their habitats. Their flocks froze in the harsh cold, and
> they went in search of other areas where they could make a living.
>
> Ellenblum points out that the climatic events – severe droughts in the
> Levant and the Nile Valley, and cold spells in the north – reached
> their apex in the 1050s. During that decade, the cold spells and
> droughts simultaneously pummeled the whole Eastern Mediterranean basin.
>
> “The entire region, from Baghdad all the way to Constantinople, filled
> up with nomads – some of whom had migrated 1,500-2,000 kilometers.
> They conquered and looted everything they came across, and caused a
> cultural collapse,” he says.
>
> Byzantium, too, was also contending with an invasion of tribes of
> Turcoman origin – the Pechenegs and the Uzes. These tribes came to the
> region from the direction of Ukraine via the Balkans. According to
> Ellenblum, these tribes too went southward following a series of harsh
> winters.
>
> *’Economic crisis’*
>
> In the years 1045-1080, the invasion of the nomads who had penetrated
> Byzantium from the north led to a reduction of its territory to a
> tenth of what it had been until then. The nomadic tribes conquered
> broad areas in the Balkans and Asia Minor, “which never went back to
> being part of the Byzantine Empire,” Ellenblum says.
>
> While Byzantium battled the invaders from the north, nomadic tribes
> from the Arabian Peninsula arrived in North Africa. During the
> previous millennium, there were extensive and fertile farmlands in
> North Africa, which at their height provided a large share of Rome’s
> food. The nomads destroyed Kairouan, a key city in North Africa ?(now
> part of Tunisia?). “The whole agricultural province of North Africa
> was abandoned in that period,” Ellenblum says. As early as the 14th
> century, the Muslim historian and social scholar Ibn Khaldun accused
> the nomads of destroying the rich region of North Africa. Many modern
> historians followed suit, Ellenblum notes, but he also says the nomads
> who reached North Africa were themselves victims of the Middle East
> shortages in the 1050s. He adds that similar phenomena occurred in the
> Negev as well. “I and some of my colleagues think that agriculture had
> been practiced in the Negev up until that time, but then it stopped.”
>
> In that decade, the populace of Egypt suffered droughts and terrible
> hunger. The phenomenon recurred later on, between 1065 and 1072.
> “Fustat, which had been the capital of Egypt and whose population had
> numbered hundreds of thousands, was almost completely abandoned during
> the famines of 1052-1059 and 1065-1072,” Ellenblum says. The rule of
> the Caliph, who prior to the famine was one of the strongest rulers in
> the region, deteriorated then. For the first time in the history of
> Egypt – which in the past had served as the breadbasket of the
> Mediterranean – the government had to turn to Byzantium for help and
> ask for wheat shipments. But the rulers of Byzantium were in serious
> crisis at the time and unable to provide the food support they
> promised to send. Ultimately, the ruler’s palace in Egypt was looted
> of its treasures by soldiers who had not been paid.
>
> In contrast to Baghdad, Byzantium and North Africa, the economic
> crisis in Egypt during the 1050s did not lead to a change of
> government, but the small Christian population and the nomadic
> population in the region grew significantly.
>
> Even if the climatic aspects are central to Ellenblum’s study, he has
> based his thesis solely on historical documents. “According to climate
> studies, around the years 1000-1100 there were relatively hot
> temperatures in Europe and the northern Atlantic Ocean. The data also
> hint at low average temperatures in western Asia,” he observes.
> “However, every such measurement of short-term catastrophes contains
> an inaccuracy that does not permit us to establish when an extreme
> climate event occurred, how powerful it was and which area it
> affected, and usually the inaccuracy is longer than the catastrophe
> itself.”
>
> Ellenblum relied on 11th-century documents, letters, bureaucratic
> papers and chronicles from various areas of the Eastern Mediterranean
> basin, in 12 languages. “There isn’t a single scholar who can read all
> 12 languages in which they wrote in the region in that era,” he says.
> “Some of the documents I read on my own, and in decoding some of the
> texts I availed myself of translations and colleagues with the
> appropriate background. Ultimately, I took all the information I could
> get – thousands of texts, all of which describe in a consistent and
> analogous manner the same extreme events.”
>
> One of his main conclusions is that “the strongest factor in all of
> these upheavals is food prices. That is the great engine through which
> climate impacts the population. The moment that food prices go up,
> agitation begins. In the past two years the food prices in the world
> have gone up steeply, and they are continuing to go up. The reasons
> for this are economic, but extreme events such as drought in the
> Midwestern United States or floods in Australia play a part in the
> rise of food prices.”
>
> According to Prof. Ellenblum, “this is an important part of the
> explanation for what is happening around us today.”
>