Famine sweeps Latin Europe

1033

Bad harvests and relentless rain brought a millennial famine that chroniclers likened to the apocalypse itself. Rodulfus Glaber described cannibalism in French markets, bodies stacked in pits, and monks abandoning their cloisters. The calamity coincided with the thousand-year anniversary of Christ's passion and fed apocalyptic preaching. When the rains finally stopped and harvests recovered, Glaber wrote, the whole world seemed to shake itself and don a white robe of new churches.