# No fires in the middle ages? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 20, 2005, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-fires-in-the-middle-ages/322501 "2005-09-20T05:38:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![HPL](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3da27b/32.png) [@HPL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HPL)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2005, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-fires-in-the-middle-ages/322501/1 "2005-09-20T05:38:35Z")
I’ve been doing some research on cities in Europe that burned during the middle ages. And it’s been rather hard to do. Even wikipedia has been little help. > **[Great Fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_fire)** > > Great Fire or The Great Fire may refer to: In fact, it’s downright strange. I can’t be the only one who finds it odd that between 1 AD and 1666 AD, there’s a grand total of 3 major fires in Europe, but in the next 400 years, there a couple dozen. I can only think of a couple reasons. 1.) Wikipedia has a very incomplete list. 2.) Nobody who could write bothered to mention their city catching fire. 3.) The people of the middle ages were very concerned with fire safety. 4.) There were no cities big enough to burn until the rennsisance. Obviously a couple of these make no sonse. Anyone want to help me out here? ---
**Author:** ![HPL](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3da27b/32.png) [@HPL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HPL)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2005, 5:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-fires-in-the-middle-ages/322501/2 "2005-09-20T05:40:02Z")
Forgot one. 5.) Documentation from the middle ages is extremely lacking. ---
**Author:** ![Mathochist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c89c15/32.png) [@Mathochist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mathochist)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2005, 5:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-fires-in-the-middle-ages/322501/3 "2005-09-20T05:49:59Z")
> [@HPL](#): > > I’ve been doing some research on cities in Europe that burned during the middle ages. And it’s been rather hard to do. Even wikipedia has been little help. > > [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great\_fire](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_fire) > > In fact, it’s downright strange. I can’t be the only one who finds it odd that between 1 AD and 1666 AD, there’s a grand total of 3 major fires in Europe, but in the next 400 years, there a couple dozen. > > I can only think of a couple reasons. > > 1.) Wikipedia has a very incomplete list. > > 2.) Nobody who could write bothered to mention their city catching fire. > > 3.) The people of the middle ages were very concerned with fire safety. > > 4.) There were no cities big enough to burn until the rennsisance. > > Obviously a couple of these make no sonse. > > Anyone want to help me out here? Most “great fires” left no survivors who could write? ---
**Author:** ![hildea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/ebca7d/32.png) [@hildea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hildea)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2005, 5:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-fires-in-the-middle-ages/322501/4 "2005-09-20T05:59:36Z")
I’d go for 1) and to some extent 5). A couple more from here: [http://www.facts-about.org.uk/random-facts-about-great-fires-in-history.htm](http://www.facts-about.org.uk/random-facts-about-great-fires-in-history.htm) > [@](#): > > In 1106 Venice, then a city of immense opulence, was almost, wholly consumed by a fire, originating in accident or incendiarism. > > In 1212 the greater part of London was burned. ---
**Author:** ![Askance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/askance/32/8281_2.png) [@Askance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askance)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2005, 6:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-fires-in-the-middle-ages/322501/5 "2005-09-20T06:28:40Z")
> [@HPL](#): > > Forgot one. > > 5.) Documentation from the middle ages is extremely lacking. Most of the people who could write were monks, most of whom lived outside the cities? ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2005, 7:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-fires-in-the-middle-ages/322501/6 "2005-09-20T07:01:29Z")
> [@](#): > > 2.) Nobody who could write bothered to mention their city catching fire. Alternatively, cities (or significant portions) burned with such regularity that it has not been deemed worthy of individual report. Istanbul/Constantinople has suffered over 60 fires large enough to be recorded, not all of them from Christian or Turkish invaders. I was able to find a mention of a number of European cities burning through history, but nearly all were mentioned in respect to warfare. Another possibility: at the times when most cities burned, they were little more than villages and so did not merit mention. (How many people outside Southeast Michigan know that Detroit burned to the ground in 1805?) I had wondered whether, as cities got large enough to be important, they may have been built of brick and stone with slate or clay roofs, so that while a single house might ignite from candles or fireplaces, adjacent houses were slower to catch fire from sparks, but it seems that those construction techniques went dormant between the fifth century and the fourteenth century, so that was not the answer. I don’t think that 5) applies. I suspect that a thorough search on any individual city’s history will turn up records that note the dates of large fires, but none of them tend to make it into cursory histories such as Wikipedia or other web sites. ---
**Author:** ![bonzer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/45deac/32.png) [@bonzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bonzer)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2005, 11:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-fires-in-the-middle-ages/322501/7 "2005-09-20T11:53:21Z")
In the case of London, 1666 was exceptional but there were plenty of “great fires” before that. The extreme list is that given by Peter Ackroyd in his _London: The Biography_ (Chatto, 2000, p218): > [@](#): > > London burned in 764, 798, 852, 893, 961, 982, 1077, 1087, 1093, 1132, 1136, 1203, 1212, 1220 and 1227. R.S. Fitter, writing _London’s Natural History_ after the Second World War, noted that ‘The constant laying waste of large areas of the city must have made the aspect of medieval London often a good deal more like the blitzed London of 1945 than most people realise’. Ackroyd isn’t the most reliable of references and I suspect that some of these would be better described as major fires that destroyed large neighbourhoods. (Though, while the Great Fire destroyed about four-fifths of the City, it didn’t spread much west of it and the wider city was largely untouched.) However, Roy Porter (_London: A Social History_, 1994; Penguin, 1996, p29) also states that there were four “devastating” fires between 1077 and 1136. It’s the 1136 conflagration that tends to be most frequently mentioned in histories of the city. This destroyed buildings between London Bridge and St Clement Danes, which is further than the Great Fire reached. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2005, 12:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-fires-in-the-middle-ages/322501/8 "2005-09-20T12:50:28Z")
Record are written on paper/parchment/vellum, which…_burns?_ ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2005, 1:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-fires-in-the-middle-ages/322501/9 "2005-09-20T13:48:37Z")
Why do you think they were called the Dark Ages? ---
**Author:** ![CBCD](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/9fc348/32.png) [@CBCD](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CBCD)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2005, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-fires-in-the-middle-ages/322501/10 "2005-09-20T14:39:33Z")
Wikipedia might not be complete. ---
**Author:** ![APB](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8e8cbc/32.png) [@APB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/APB)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2005, 10:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-fires-in-the-middle-ages/322501/11 "2005-09-22T10:08:24Z")
Random list of examples - 1180 Chester 1340 Lucerne 1421 Amsterdam 1452 Amsterdam (again) 1491 Dresden 1536 Delft (although it’s the 1654 gunpowder explosion that’s the more famous) 1541 Prague 1652 Glasgow 1656 Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle 1662 Passau 1681 Trondheim 1694 Warwick Not all of these necessarily involved the complete destruction of the whole city. But then contemporary records - and, yes, this was a type of event particularly likely to get recorded - often give no real details as to the precise extent of the damage. So it’s very obviously 1.)