Although it is clear that locust invasions also caused damages in medieval East Central Europe, there are only a few cases when the ’eastern section’ of these invasions can be traced in contemporary domestic (i.e. Hungarian, Polish) or western (e.g. Austrian) evidence. Using domestic documentation, providing a broader European overview of contemporary occurrences, and applying the regularities traced in a millennial database of locust invasions, as well as long-term natural scientific information, a significant number of locust invasions – occurred in East Central Europe and presumably also in East-Southeast Europe – can be reconstructed. These results may question some prevailing views that (large) locust invasions had (much) more frequently occurred in the late than in the high medieval period.
The new results will be presented, with using maps and an overview graph, in a short (15-20 minutes) presentation.
Andrea Kiss has been a lecturer of environmental/landscape and climate history, and a research fellow at Szeged university (Hungary). From 1 May she is a senior research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environmental History in Munich, Germany. She holds MA-s in History and Hungarian Medieval Studies, an MSc in Geography from Szeged University, and an MA and PhD in Medieval Studies from Central European University. Up to the present, she has published ca. 60 scientific papers, predominantly related to the environmental (climate, landscape) history of the Carpathian Basin, and has also been a co-author in a number of international, European-scale team-publications.
