Exactly 683 years ago on this day (in 1342) disaster struck when one of the largest floods ever struck Central Europe

[Lakigigar]

St. Mary Magdalene's flood - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Moment of silence

From the wikipedia

St. Mary Magdalene's flood (German: Magdalenenhochwasser) was the largest recorded flood in central Europe with water levels exceeding those of the 2002 European floods. It occurred on and around the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene, 22 July in 1342.

Following the passage of a Genoa low, the rivers Rhine, Moselle, Main, Danube, Weser, Werra, Unstrut, Elbe, Vltava and their tributaries inundated large areas. Many towns such as Cologne, Mainz, Frankfurt am Main, Würzburg, Regensburg, Passau and Vienna were seriously damaged. Even the river Eider north of Hamburg flooded the surrounding land. The affected area extended to Carinthia and northern Italy.

It appears that after a prolonged hot and dry period, continuous rainfalls occurred, lasting several consecutive days and amounting to more than half of the mean yearly precipitation. Since the dry soil was unable to absorb such amounts of water, the surface runoff washed away large areas of fertile soil and caused huge inundations destroying houses, mills and bridges. In Würzburg, the then-famous Steinerne Brücke (Stone Bridge) was washed away, and in Cologne it is said that a rowing boat could pass over the city's fortifications. A precise number of casualties remains unknown, but it is believed that in the Danube area alone, 6,000 people perished. The results of the erosion can still be noticed today. The volume of the eroded soil during this short incident (a few days) is determined to be more than 13 billion metric tons, a volume that is washed away under normal climate conditions over a period of 2,000 years.

It is assumed that the loss of fertile soil led to a serious drop in agricultural production. In addition, the following summers were wet and cold, so that the population suffered from widespread famine. Whether the spreading of the Black Death between 1348 and 1350, killing at least a third of the population in central Europe, was facilitated by the weakened condition of the population is a matter of discussion.

On volcanocafe, they've also devoted an article to it, so there's more detail there

The 1342 St Mary Magdalene flood

Living near a river had its advantages. Transport was easy: you were well connected to other cities on (navigable) water ways, and trade was a reliable way to wealth. In the Middle Ages, the Hanze …

www.volcanocafe.org

I don't know if the devs will include event like this since it happened only five years after the games start date, or whether events like these will be dynamic. But yes these people did not have an easy time. The Black Death, one of the largest flood recorded and the largest earthquake recorded in Central Europe all happened within a timespan of 15 years, within 20 years of the game's start.

It may have weakened the population before the arrival of death itself.

 

[Nconstruct]

As someone effected by the flood (Danube) I can stay yes it eroded alot in some floodplains between Regensburg and Straubing to this day there is only 50cm of soil, everything beneath is sand, and the landscape still is so flat it feels kinda washed away.

Even today the soil can hold nearly no water, my father is a farmer and we need to pump ground water to water all plants, even wheat which need really not much.

That said, I think the negative modiviere could be permanent, or otherwise buffs it till this point and then make it as is now

 

[prinscky]

I think this is a worldwide phenomenon, yellow river also recorded frequent big floods in 1330s and 1340s, and to a level that stopped the transport between north and south in China.

 

[Lakigigar]

I think this is a worldwide phenomenon, yellow river also recorded frequent big floods in 1330s and 1340s, and to a level that stopped the transport between north and south in China.

This was a period of climate change, and was basically the earliest signs of the cooling trend that would be known as the Little Ice Age. This phase also likely was one of the factors that contributed to the Black Death and its origin/spread.

Part from the article on volcanocafe

The bridge at Frankfurt was rebuild in 5 years. But the climate had been deteriorating, as this was the early years of the Little Ice age. Around 1342, the advancing sea ice caused the traditional sea route between Iceland and Greenland, at 65 degree latitude, to be abandoned. Later ships followed a more southerly route. 1345 and the following years were cool and very wet. In 1347, Germany had snow in September. Iceland had a string of extreme winters from 1348 to 1351; in 1348 sea ice enveloped the country. The extreme weather was not entirely climatic. There had been a major volcanic eruption, in 1345, which left its trace in the Greenland ice core record. The poor weather seems likely related to this.

The next problem started around the Crimea, where the wet weather of 1345 drove rats from the fields into towns, searching for food. They carried a dreadful disease with them. In 1346, the first reports of the black death reached Europe. The following year the epidemic arrived in earnest. Florence was decimated in 1348; even the dogs succumbed. By 1349, the epidemic had spread across Europe. The population of Europe would not recover for another century. To the survivors, the string of ever worsening disasters must have seemed like the end of the world.

Early 1300s also saw some volcanic activity and pretty bad weather, i've read before. Also this is when the Viking colonies in Greenland also started getting in trouble which has a series of three articles on that specific topic (also because it is likely related again to volcanic activity and climate change):

Vanished Vikings of the West: the fall of Greenland

Colonization is recreation. It features on board and computer games, from Simcity to Civilization, and from Settlers of Catan to Musk at Mars (ok, that one is apparently not a game). The games invi…

www.volcanocafe.org

Vanished Vikings of the West: the Eastern Settlement

In part I, we have discussed how the Greenland Vikings lived. After the initial settlement around 1000 AD, there was a century of expansion as they made their homes and explored – and used – the No…

www.volcanocafe.org

Vanished Vikings of the West: Demise of the Western Settlement

In Part I, we looked at the Viking colonization of Greenland, and the failure of their settlement in America. In Part II we saw the fall of the Eastern Settlement. Now we will look at an even more …

www.volcanocafe.org

I will quote the most relevant part of the first article

By the middle of the 14th century, trade with Greenland had diminished so much that in Europe ivory became in short supply. This reflects the lack of shipping opportunities. It became even worse during the years of the Black Death when few ships sailed the North Atlantic. (One visiting bishop in Iceland was stuck for four years because no ship came for him.) The Norwegian royal vessel was itself lost in 1367 and after that there was little contact between Norway and Greenland. A consequence of the diminishing trade was that the Black Death never made it to Greenland. It did get to Iceland, though with 50 years delay.

In the absence of trade, we do not know whether the hunts at Disko Bay still continued. The contacts between the Eastern and the Western Settlements had been decreasing. Travel between the two took 6 days, and was only possible in summer when there was much else to do. After a while, the only recorded visits were to pay taxes. The last such record was in 1327.

The Eastern Settlement also became isolated. The last documented visit by people from Iceland was in 1406-1410, with circumstantial (and unconvincing) evidence that the same people returned in 1418-1420. After that the Greenland Vikings were never seen again, at least by people which documented the visit. This was the time that European fishermen began to frequent the Newfoundland region for cod. New designs for boats had improved speed of travel, and now it was possible for the fishermen to make the journey within one summer. Before that, they would have had to winter. There may have been contact between the fishermen (mainly from the Basque region and from Bristol) but this is speculation.

In 1410 all had been well with the Eastern Settlement. But within decades it would be gone. Archaelogical evidence shows that the best farms reverted to wild meadows around 1450. At the very least this means there were no longer any cows, and at the worst it means there were no longer any farmers and the last true Vikings were gone.

It took many years for the disappearance of Greenlanders to be noticed. After 1500 even the pope expressed concern, and expeditions were planned to find them. But by that time the location of the settlement had been forgotten. People searched the east coast, opposite Iceland, being confused by the name ‘Eastern Settlement’. But this coast is unreachable due to ice. John Davis visited the western coast several times around 1585 while searching for the northwestern passage but he did not find anyone. The settlement was rather far from the coast, of course, and would not have been visible from the sea. The Eastern Settlement was found only when a Norwegian missionary, Egede, spend a winter on the coast, barely survived, and decided to move further in-land. He traveled widely in the area, and his Inuit guides showed him the remains of the Eastern Settlement, including the roofless church of Hvalsey. This was in 1723, almost 300 years after the failure of the colony. Egede, and others after him, thought this was the Western Settlement and that the Eastern Settlement would be on the east coast. This expectation was only disproven in the late 1800’s. The North American settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows was found only in 1960. It really is possible for nations to be fully lost.

This is in EU5. Western settlement is in northwest and eastern settlement in southeast. Only the eastern settlement is colonized. EU5 already portrays the western settlement as lost (even though a case can be made that it was not yet entirely lost at the start date but it was very close or near extinction.) The eastern settlement survived for a bit longer, but vanished somewhere between 1410-1450. And there was pretty high volcanic activity later in 15th century too (An eruption in 1453 which made the skies look orange over Constantinople during its siege and fall, a big eruption in 1458 and the massive Icelandic basalt eruption Veiovotn in 1477) so cooling likely would have occured then too.