ABSTRACT
The late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries constitute a very unsettled period for the people living in the eastern and southern Habsburg borderlands, i.e. in the historical Duchies of (Lower) Austria, Styria and Carinthia in present-day Austria, and in Carniola in modern Slovenia. The inhabitants faced Ottoman raids and Hungarian occupation, destruction of their fields by locust invasions, disease and extreme weather. This chapter aims to look at the convergence of environmental, political and cultural factors causing this scenario of crisis in an exposed borderline region, focusing on the 1470s and the 1540s, when extremely hot and dry years (1473 and 1540 – presumably the hottest years in the second millennium) were followed by locust plagues which lasted for several years. In combination with the wars and diseases of that time, people perceived those substantial threats as the arrival of the apocalyptic riders in the Book of Revelation: hunger, war and disease, all together leading to death. This interpretation is evident both through written and pictorial documentary sources. Several examples of the so-called “Gottesplagenbilder” (images of divine plagues), e.g. from Graz (around 1480/1485) and Waidhofen an der Ybbs (around 1550), have survived and testify to this pattern of interpretation of environmentally and politically induced disasters.
