In the list of catastrophes, the Mongol Wars should probably be included: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_E...
Some estimates are that 11% of the world's population was killed during this time.
Some estimates are that 11% of the world's population was killed during this time.
My first thought when I started reading TFA was that the list of catastrophes to consider would be biased because more recent events have better records. Maybe that's why the author decided on the 1500 cut off?
If you restrict to the single "worst" decade then the Mongol invasions would have been high enough to make the list, but I didn't want to start making too many manual adjustments to the data, so I left it as-is.