Europe is not a continent of deserts, but in the early Middle Ages, Europeans began to assimilate biblical notions of the wilderness by applying the same philosophy to a regionally appropriate context: the forest. In the absence of the arid, rocky deserts of the Middle East, early Christians looked instead to a tangle of trees and briars growing up outside their lonely settlements and recognized some unifying, shape-shifting quality.

Article continues after advertisement

Though to modern eyes these landscapes might seem a world apart, to medieval monks the linguistic parallels were obvious. Early Latin translations of the Bible from the fourth century onwards used terms like desertum and solitudo in their depiction of the wilderness trials of the prophets—that is, emphasizing their empty, uninhabited qualities over climatic ones.

And there was a lot of deserted land in medieval Europe. After the withdrawal of the Roman Empire from much of western Europe, a more general breakdown of civic life unfolded across a period of a millennium or more, among both the formerly colonized nations and the “barbarian” societies that had formed its major trading partners.

A series of deadly pandemics went on to ravage what was left; to those still living, like the Roman historian Procopius, it seemed that “the whole human race came near to being annihilated.” Widespread crop failures linked to an extended period of atmospheric cooling in the sixth century led to widespread and repeated famine.

As the landscape was brought back under control, its wilder elements came to be regarded with ever more suspicion and distrust, as a symbol of earlier misrule.

This rupture was reflected in a rapidly rewilding landscape. Towns were depopulated or abandoned altogether; farmland was left fallow; forests regrew; busy thoroughfares fell silent and grand villas derelict. In turn, these changes were also reflected in the remaining inhabitants’ evolving attitudes towards the natural world and the association of wild places not only with hardship but with fear and the supernatural. In some senses the status of medieval wilderness is peculiar to its time and place, but I believe it also offers us a more general insight into the interaction between a human sense of security and our sentiments towards wild nature. Loss of control, or the fear of it, has a powerful hold on us.

Such a dynamic is far from unique to the Middle Ages.

European settlers’ desperate bid to “dominate” the—to them, foreign and fearful—American wilderness is another clear example; in ancient Assyria and Egypt, rulers ritually hunted lions and hippopotamuses in public exhibitions of their power to bring chaotic elements to heel and assure public safety.

Europe in the Middle Ages was a place of disorder: a time of mass migration, raiding and war, in which the population collapsed by between a third and half, perhaps falling as low as 18 million by the middle of the seventh century. (For comparison, the present-day population is estimated at 750 million.) Pollen profiles reveal much of northern Iberia and large regions of central and eastern Europe largely emptied of their populations during the fifth and six centuries, allowing trees to grow up in place of cultivated crops. This was a dramatic reversal of the forest clearance that had been in process, otherwise uninterrupted, since Neolithic times.

Left unguarded, the wild woods mounted a daring land grab, reclaiming vast regions of previously cultivated land. In Brest in Brittany, for example, forest cover stood at around 40 per cent in 100 BCE, but had ballooned to almost 90 per cent four centuries later. Provence was almost totally abandoned. The story in Transylvania, part of what the Romans called Dacia, is somewhat clouded by present-day nationalist narratives, but seems to have followed a similar pattern. While the Franks, Burgundians, Ostrogoths, Visigoths and their ilk fought among themselves, stealthier territorial claims were being staked in plain sight by beech and oaks and pines. If man was in combat with nature, it was a battle he was losing.

The resurgence of the forests did not last long in the grand scheme of things, the longue durée—although it did play out, in waves, over several hundred years—but this shift in the power balance from the human to the non-human was one that would cast a long shadow. Deeply held fears find expression in folk tales of the dark woods, and cultural biases against the wild animals that might be found there. The European wilderness, the terra deserta, became a symbol of tough times—truly dark ages—that had been endured and overcome, and should not be readily returned to.

Later, around the turn of the millennium, the tide would turn and the European population recovered, doubling between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. The wilderness receded once more; fertile lands were brought back under cultivation, drained, replanted. Wild forests were cut down or coppiced, tracks were beaten and the undergrowth grazed hard back. Fallen masonry was repurposed as new houses, new churches, new walls around new cities.

But as the landscape was brought back under control, its wilder elements came to be regarded with ever more suspicion and distrust, as a symbol of earlier misrule. Urban populations—now living more comfortable, sophisticated and mannered lives, and increasingly unfamiliar with the dark and shadowy woods—came to perceive them as daunting, even threatening, places, the haunt of criminals (true) and ghosts of the troubled dead (difficult to confirm). By the time Dante opened his Divine Comedy in the “selva selvaggia“—the wild wood—in the fourteenth century (“What was this forest savage, rough, and stern, / Which in the very thought renews the fear”), this attitude had become firmly entrenched. In other words: even as wilderness declined, it was claiming an ever-greater presence in the medieval mind.

Fairy tales and more literary “romances” from the later Middle Ages habitually unfold within the dark wood, or the tangled briar grown up around ruined castles—of which there had been many—and star a cast of archetypal woodland characters: the woodsman, the knight, the lost children, the hermit, the plucky outlaw. Wild animals with flashing teeth lurked in the shadows beyond the circle of light: she-wolves, foxes, hungry bears. Mythical creatures, too, soaked in the supernatural; half-men, half-animals who evaded classification—centaurs and satyrs, fauns and werewolves—straddling the boundary between man and beast. The woods could be hiding places of witches and sorcerers, disguised as the old and feeble, but capable of summoning wonder and terrors, charms as well as curses.

Folklore emerges as a kind of dream logic, fabulist interpretations of the fears of the day. It is a means by which a culture digests distressing historical events. “Hansel and Gretel,” for example—and an entire family of stories in the same mould—arose during a time of famine and explores both child abandonment and cannibalism, re-enacting the very darkest days of the so-called “Dark Ages.” (Perhaps the most disturbing variant is told in Romania, in which a little girl is forced to butcher her own brother and cook him into a stew.)

The wild woods, in all their unrestrained glory, came to serve as the theatre in which the fears and preoccupations of medieval society might play out in wolves’ clothing. Where real-life terrors might be decked in the glittering garb of fairy tale, and thus fooled, challenged and ultimately overcome. The forest of myth was an eerie, volatile place, a shelter for untrustworthy and unpredictable characters who might eat you as soon as look at you. But it was a marvelous, magical place too. This was a funhouse reality, in which children were lost and predators roamed, but through which white harts leapt through shafts of sunlight, songbirds trilled, and where honey and berries and acorns might be foraged for free. In which clearings could be cut, huts built, tracks beaten. But which would swallow them right up again, devour them whole, given half a chance.

*

Europe’s crisis of late antiquity is worthy of study in and of itself. But it also tells us a great deal about how attitudes towards nature and wild landscapes evolve in step with social conditions. Cultural and historical context impacts how we interpret the world around us, which in turn impacts how we interact with that world; in this way, wilderness will come to mean different things to different peoples and be lauded or derided in turn.

The wild woods, in all their unrestrained glory, came to serve as the theatre in which the fears and preoccupations of medieval society might play out in wolves’ clothing.

As famine, war, pestilence and death galloped through, religious thought had been taking on an apocalyptic and self-abnegatory fervor. In the face of fresh crisis, belief veered towards asceticism and sometimes mysticism. Inspired by the Desert Fathers and translating their teachings to their local conditions, penitents retreated to hermitages or remote abbeys to reflect—the order and discipline of monastic life, the still of the cloister, appearing increasingly attractive as a way of life in an uncertain world.

Several early Celtic monks, including saints Brendan and Columban, had first sought solitude in ocean voyage—”to find the desert in the impassable sea”—but more commonly they retreated to the forest, as Columban ultimately would, too, in later life.

Their lives were recorded in the form of hagiographies, stories of the saints, often ornamented with folkloric motifs, focusing on marvelous adventures and miraculous doings. One common trope was the taming of wild animals: Saint Francis (1181-1226) famously subdued the ravenous Wolf of Gubbio, which reportedly terrorized the Umbrian city until the saint confronted the beast, which thereafter followed him meekly and subsisted on scraps. Stories of this kind found an enthusiastic audience among people who had psychologically distanced themselves from wild lands, but who were now again coming into direct conflict with the animals that lived there.

The “âge des grands défrichements” saw forest coverage in France, for example, decline by half between 800 and 1300 CE. Similar patterns played out through much of Europe. The Domesday Book reports 90 per cent of natural forest had been cleared from the English lowlands as early as 1086. By 1500, there were firewood shortages across all Europe; in some regions they had resorted to digging moats around woodlands and chaining their entrances to protect them from depredation.

The loss of habitat and reduction in game animals meant that wild predators, normally shy of human contact, were now preying on livestock or making forays into towns and villages to survive. The chronicler Adam of Bremen recorded how residents of that city saw, in 1072, “hogs and dogs desecrating the church…wolves howling in packs in the suburbs of our city, vying with horned owls in horrific contest.” Rabid wolves were recorded terrorizing townsfolk in Wales in 1166, and in south Germany in 1271; Salimbene di Adam’s unapologetically apocalyptic chronicle of 1247 Italy speaks of wolves gathering “in great numbers around the moats of the cities,” howling from the pangs of hunger, before penetrating the walls and devouring anyone sleeping outside. They were known, he said, to “break down wooden house walls and snatch infants from their cradles.”

“Nobody could believe unless they had seen as I have seen the horrible things done during that time,” proclaims the friar. And perhaps, yes, it does beggar belief. Nevertheless, his account exemplifies how wolves were increasingly demonized as the Middle Ages went on; recast in the role of both fairytale villain and harbinger of doom. For medieval people, invasion of the safe enclave of the city was the source of an intense anxiety akin to body horror. Earlier writers had once celebrated “wolf music,” the howl of dissonant chorus in the dark. It promised blood spatter, brotherhood, a bestial intelligence—exhilarating prospects, at a safe distance. Now the call was coming from inside the house.

The wild beasts of the wilderness were thus feared, revered—and persecuted. Wolves were subject to a relentless campaign of murder: trapped, burned, strung up, poisoned and hunted to extinction in most of Europe, all of which was expression of an enmity for the “big bad wolf” of lore which remained ingrained long after real wolves stopped being a threat. And so the demonization of the wolf was imbued with religious overtones, drawing from biblical metaphors of God as shepherd to his Christian sheep, and the wolf as false prophet.

(European settlers would later import lycophobia to North America; in Puritan New England, a legal requirement to set wolf traps was introduced in 1642, and wolf hatred ran feverishly on for centuries. Americans, as Barry Lopez has written, “set wolves on fire and tore their jaws out and cut their Achilles tendons and turned dogs loose on them…they even poisoned themselves, and burned down their own property torching the woods to get rid of wolf havens.”) By the turn of the twentieth century, the species had long disappeared from all of central and northern Europe, and was greatly reduced in the United States too.

The brown bear, which had held totemic, even divine, status in many pagan societies and was employed in royal iconography well into the Middle Ages, also fell sharply from favor. By the eighth century, Charlemagne was organizing mass slaughters of the animal while the Church, wary of its earlier status as living god, denounced the bear as lewd, noting its disturbing resemblance to humans. Saint Augustine went further, declaring the bear to be “the devil himself.” Once widespread across Europe, they are now largely confined to its most remote corners—the Nordic states, the Carpathian Mountains, the Dinaric Alps. From the Middle Ages to the modern era, both wolf and bear clung on in the cultural memory, haunting underbeds and darkened corners. Soon there were more storybook bears than living bears. Even after there were no more wolves to hunt, they lurked on in the minds of those left living. The woods and the forests had become synonymous with fear and danger.

____________________________

From The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness by Cal Flyn. Published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Cal Flyn.