Climate changes in the Middle Ages of Western Europe: an attempt at synthesis

Bastos, Rosário; Pereira, Olegário Nelson Azevedo; Dias, João Alveirinho

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.2/11536

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Authors

Bastos, Rosário

Pereira, Olegário Nelson Azevedo

Dias, João Alveirinho

Abstract(s)

Addressing climate changes during the Middle Ages involves a twofold artificialization of reality, because: (a) climate change is not static and therefore does not fall into time barriers; (b) the division of history by epochs is an artificialism. In fact, these historical and climatic periods vary depending on the region of the globe considered and usually focus on a paradigm largely confined by the Western view. Nevertheless, we used conventional periodization, only for ease of exposure of the points addressed. Let's assume the conventional periodization of the Middle Ages: 5th-15th centuries. Let us move on to the basic question: what are the main weather periods of this chronology? Beginning with the distinction between climate and atmospheric weather we must consider this is the weather at a giver time and place while climate is measured from a series of indicators (temperature, pressure, humidity, rainfall, radiation, etc.) whose sequential records allow to trace the "climatological standards". Naturally, in the Middle Ages, it is not possible to determine climate standards, so we are limited to the interpretation of proxies, preferably using multiproxies. For the Medieval times, we have to highlight the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). The chronological demarcation of this period is highly controversial. One thing seems certain: from the peak of Roman global warming, we enter a phase of softening and then cooling that will have extended until the beginning of the High Middle Ages. Around the 7th and 8th centuries there was a slight reversal of the global cooling trend. However, the MWP really started around the 900/1000s. In the Late Middle Ages there is a climatic inversio anomaly". They felt the first manifestations of the Little Ice Age. The scarce studies on medieval climate oscillations are even rarer that refer to the impact they had on the lives of the populations who lived then. This approach is what we propose! Not wanting to be deterministic about the role of climate in human history, since many were (and are) the factors that condition it, it is impossible to fail to underline its importance as a major element in the evolution of human communities over time. Is there a correlation (if so, indirectly) between the MWP and Viking expeditions to Iceland (9th century), Greenland (in the late 10th century) and North America (mid-11th century)? Or demographic growth and concomitant intensification of agriculture with the conquest of new fields of cultivation? Or the crusades to the Holy Land (11th-13th centuries)? Or, yet the construction of the great Gothic monuments that marked an epoch that G. Duby called "the time of cathedrals"? And, oppositely, to what extent was the time of contraction (or trend B) of the Early Middle Ages influenced by the worsening climate of the 14th and 15th centuries that impelled Europe beyond itself, with the Iberian kingdoms starting an overseas expansion, for instance? It all requires better and more in-depth studies, for now, we propose only a possible synthesis!