Editing Rungholt (section)

==History==

Documents about Rungholt mostly date from much later times (16th century). Archaeologists think Rungholt was an important town and port. It might have contained up to 500 houses, with about 3,000 people. Findings indicate trade in agricultural products and possibly [[amber]].<ref name="NDR"/><ref name="Focus"/>

The great storm known as the ''[[Grote Mandrenke]]'' (''Store Manddrukning''), sometimes also named after the saint [[Pope Marcellus I|Marcellus]], occurred on 15 or 16 January 1362.<ref name="NDR"/> Estimates put the number of deaths at around 25,000.<ref name="The Guardia, Weatherwatch">{{cite web|author=Stephen Moss |url=https://www.theguardian.com/news/2011/jan/20/weatherwatch-grote-mandrenke |title=Weatherwatch: The Grote Mandrenke|publisher=Guardian |date=2011-01-20 |access-date=2020-01-16}}</ref> Possibly 30 settlements were destroyed, and the coastline shifted east, leaving formerly inhabited land in the tidal Wadden Sea.<ref name="Focus"/><ref name="HN"/>

The vulnerability of the settlement to the storm tide has been attributed to agricultural development: <blockquote>"It was like a natural landscape of peat bogs and fenland. It was very uninhabitable, and they completely colonized it. They completely changed the landscape," ... "Once you remove all this peat and get the water out, you have very, very rich soils that are perfect for agriculture [but] "with rising sea levels and increasing storminess, one day these dikes they built were not sufficient enough, and these settlements just drowned."<ref name=":2" /></blockquote>