| A contemporary Buda citizen marked 1507 in his diary as the year of the very great drought in Hungary, resulting a significant shortage of crops, wine and hay. In the same time, a rather extensive set of evidence about this drought - combined with other natural hazards such as hails, thunderstorms, (convective) rains, flood(s) - and their consequences, concerning a large area in the central and north-eastern parts of the Carpathian Basin, were also described in the account book of the bishop of Eger. In the poster presentation, the following questions are discussed in more detail:
1) the types of the hazards and extreme events that affected the study area in 1507 (and probably also in 1506 and 1508);
2) locations and the extension of areas affected by the extreme events: more (and less) affected areas, spatial differences and overlaps;
3) damages and other immediate consequences: material loss (building), bad harvests (e.g. grain, honey), high prices;
4) multiannual consequences and the importance of 1508: further natural hazards, shortages of food and animal products, poverty, tax reduction - and the perception of these events;
5) Central European parallels (e.g. drought in the southern German areas, destructive hailstorms in Austria).
The presented case study provides an especially well-documented example (reported in different contemporary source types) for a late medieval drought year (or dry period) occurred in East Central Europe: the drought was accompanied by other, mainly convective events that affected agriculture and society in numerous ways. Based on the sometimes more detailed, sometimes fragmentary information we can state that - in spite of the general reference(s) on the "very great drought in the country" - considerable spatial differences occurred both concerning the severity and the type of events that affected extensive areas (but not necessarily the entire country that covered most of the Carpathian Basin at that time). |