Well not from the history books I’ve read. It was one of the reasons the rat population grew.
Don’t believe everything you read in history books.
There is a really good book out there I’d recommend entitled “Inventing the Flat Earth.”
Short version: Washington Irving invented the flat earth myth in writing a history of Columbus because the truth was too complex and too pro-Catholic to work well in a popular history of his day. A.D. White, first president of the Colleges of Arts and Sciences at Cornell (my alma mater) gave the flat earth myth a boost to get it so entrenched in American intellectual lore that it isn’t going to be uprooted.
Some stories are really good stories and offer tidy explanations, but happen to be wrong.