Introduction

Although the historiography on the Black Death in Germany has hardly or arguably not uncovered evidence suitable for demographic estimation of population mortality, the sources contain some information on mortality that is suited for presentation, analysis and tentative estimates. The mortality caused by the Black Death in cities can mainly be considered in the light of mortality in occupational groups or social groups such as bakers or city councillors, with unclear representativeness for the general population. Arguably, a number of diverse such data can be taken to indicate an impression of the level of collective mortality, an estimate within wide margins of uncertainty.

Mortality of the Black Death in Bremen

Bremen’s oldest Book of Citizenship (‘Bürgerbuch’) contains a seemingly very interesting entry on the mortality caused by the Black Death in Bremen that is the nearest to regular registration of deaths in the German history of the Black Death. The entry gives the distribution of deaths according to parish purportedly as recorded in registers on the dead arriving at the parish churches for burial that, purportedly, the city council had decided should be kept. No list is extant. This source is much cited, but has, however, some unusual features that arguably make its provenience uncertain, and it is, according to K. Schwarz in his book The Plague in Bremen, clearly spurious. The editors of Bremisches Urkundenbuch comment succinctly on some of the source-critical problems and decide that they are reasonably explicable and do not constitute grounds for rejection. That conclusion is accepted by this author, because they are not evidently untenable and because the motives for concocting seemingly extreme mortality rates according to parish and entering them in the Book of Citizenship are unfathomable. However, as usual, the analysis of the relevant material will at the end of the day decide its usability and usefulness.

The source states that when the pestilence that circulated the world arrived in Bremen, the city council decided that the number of deaths and their personal names should be written down. In Beata Mary’s parish (church), 1,816 personal names were recorded, in St. Martin’s 1,415, in St Ansgar’s 1,922, and in St Stephen’s 1,813, in all 6,966 parishioners in Bremen who had died at the time of the Black Death.