The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (6 page)

These voyages were wracked by human and natural dangers: hostile indigenous people, polar bears, icebergs, sudden storms far offshore where
rogue waves might swamp a laboring ship before the steersman could
bear off before the menacing sea. But the greatest danger was suddenly
massing sea ice, which could crush a stout Norse merchant ship in minutes. Even in summer, crewmen kept axes handy, ready to chip mantles of
ice off the rigging before the boat became top heavy. The prudent navigator kept well clear of the ice margins, using word of mouth and years of
experience to navigate Greenland waters. We know some of these verbal
sailing directions from Konungsskuggsjd (The King's Mirror), a compendium of information about Greenland and adjacent lands written in
the form of a sage's advice to his son in 1260. The anonymous author
writes: "There is more ice to the northeast and north of ... [Greenland]
than to the south, southwest, and west; consequently, whoever wishes to
make the land should sail around it to the southwest and west, till he has
come past all those places where ice may be looked for, and approach the
land on that side."4

Abundant cod and centuries of unusually mild conditions allowed the
Greenlanders to voyage to North America and trade freely with Iceland
and Norway in walrus ivory, wool, and even falcons. Their ships often
carried exotic, valuable cargoes. In 1075, a merchant named Audun
shipped a live polar bear from Greenland as a gift to King Ulfsson of
Denmark. Four centuries later, no one would have dared carry such a
cargo eastward. If not for the Medieval Warm Period, hundreds of years might have passed before anyone colonized Greenland and voyaged beyond its fjords.

As the Medieval Warm Period dawned and the Vikings crossed to Greenland and North America, Europe was a patchwork of feudal states and
warring lords, unified only by the Christian faith. King Charlemagne
founded his Frankish empire in 800. The Holy Roman Empire came into
being in 962 but offered little security. The Norsemen ravaged the northern coasts for more than two hundred years, then acquired a veneer of
culture from the lands where they settled. Knut the Dane, or "Canute the
Great" (1016-35), famous for his attempts to control the tides, presided
over a North Sea empire that linked Britain and Denmark. William the
Bastard, Duke of Normandy, conquered the kingdom of England in
1066. He parceled out his new domains among his Norman lords and
created a feudal realm, a dense network of contractual relationships,
which connected the highest to the lowest in the land. Not that the vagaries of the weather made William's task easier. Persistent northwesterly
winds delayed his Channel crossing until October. Furthermore, two centuries of warm conditions had caused significant sea level rises. A shallow
fjord extended deep into eastern England as far as Norwich. The lowlying English fenlands became a labyrinth of shallow channels and islands
so difficult of access for an invader that the Anglo-Danish inhabitants of
the city of Ely, led by Hereward the Wake, were able to hold off the Normans for a decade after 1066.

For all the conquest and adventuring, Europe was a rural continent.
Long before the Romans tamed Britain and Gaul two thousand years ago,
Europe's economy was anchored to the land and the sea, where the vagaries of floods, droughts, and severe winters affected everyone's economic fortunes. Several wet springs and cool summers in a row, a sequence of severe Atlantic winter storms and floods, a two-year
drought-such brief climatic variations were sufficient to put people's
lives at risk. The annual harvest drove everyone's fortunes, monarch and
baron, small-town artisan and peasant. The generally stable weather of the Medieval Warm Period was an unqualified blessing for the rural poor
and small farmers.5

Summer after summer, warm settled weather began in June, and extended into July and August and through the hectic days of late summer.
Medieval paintings tell the story of bountiful harvest. A French book of
the seasons shows men and women in the March fields, in the shadow of
strongly fortified castle walls. The fields are small, often divided into
strips. Women and children crouch over furrowed land, pulling weeds before planting begins. In the foreground, a bearded man with leather hat
and leggings plows a furrow with an iron-tipped plow drawn by two patient oxen. A shepherd and his dog drive a flock of sheep across fallow
land toward the castle, while the leafless vines in a walled field under the
walls stand still in the early spring day. In the lower corner, a peasant
pours seed for planting into a waiting sack.

The poor lived off the land, supplementing their harvests with fishing
and hunting in dense forests. For the wealthy, hunting was a sport. Gaston Febus's Book of the Hunt, written in France in 1387, proclaims the author's expertise at hunting stags with dogs. The pictures depict lords pursuing their prey through forests, their dogs leaping for the kill. Other
illustrations show how Febus used nets for trapping hares and foxes, with
men hard at work spinning fine rope and fabricating nets of different
grades, the finest being used for capturing pigeons, even songbirds. After
the hunt, the hunters gathered for a fine feast in the open air, their horses
grazing nearby, the dogs scavenging for scraps. The nobility had a passion
for hunting with falcons. In a mid-thirteenth-century book on falconry
published in Sicily, two falcon handlers with thick leather gauntlets display their birds, one of which is picking with its beak at its jess (tether).

Despite wars, Crusades, schism and other strife, the Medieval Warm
Period was a bountiful time for Europe. In the deep countryside, the even
tenor of rural existence unfolded year after year. Life centered on the endless processions of seasons, on the routines of planting and harvest, cycles
of good years and bad, and on the timeless relations between lords and
their serfs. Innumerable tiny, largely self-sufficient hamlets nestled in remote valleys and on the edges of thick woodlands, their inhabitants living
close to the soil, where everything depended on the bounty of summer
harvests and the living one could wrest from the land.

Most years passed with good harvests and enough to eat. Average summer temperatures were between 0.7 and 1.0°C above twentieth-century
averages. Central European summers were even warmer, as much as
1.4°C higher than their modern averages. May frosts, always a hazard for
warmth-loving crops, were virtually unknown between 1100 and 1300.
The summer months were consistently sufficiently warm and dry for
vineyards to spread across southern and central England, as far north as
Hereford and the Welsh borders. Commercial vineyards flourished 300
to 500 kilometers north of their twentieth-century limits. During the
height of the Warm Period, so many lords quaffed prime English wines
that the French tried to negotiate trade agreements to exclude them from
the Continent.

Rural and urban populations rose sharply during medieval times. New
villages sprang up on hitherto uncleared lands. Thousands of hectares of
woodland fell before farmers' axes in a medieval practice called assarting.
Warmer summers and mild winters allowed small communities to grow
crops on marginal soils and at higher altitudes than ever before-350 meters above sea level on the hills of Dartmoor in southwestern England, on
the Pennine Moors in the northeast, where, in the thirteenth century,
shepherds complained about the encroaching cultivation of prized grazing range, and on the summits of southeastern Scotland's Lammermuir
Hills, 320 meters above sea level. Today, neither Dartmoor nor the Pennine Moors support crops and the upper limit of cereal growth in the
Lammermuirs is well below that of 1250. In 1300, one farm owned by
Kelso Abbey in southern Scotland had over 100 hectares of land under
cultivation, supported 1,400 sheep and sixteen shepherds' householdsall at 300 meters above sea level, well above today's limit. By the same
year, thousands of farmers had settled on high ground and on marginal
lands throughout England and Scotland, which placed them at risk of
crop failure.

In Scandinavia, settlement, forest clearance, and farming spread 100 to
200 meters farther up valleys and hillsides in central Norway, from levels
that had been static for more than 1,000 years. Wheat was grown around
Trondheim and hardier grains such as oats as far north as Malagan, at latitude 62.5° north. The height change hints at a rise in summer temperatures of about a degree Centigrade, a similar increase to that across the North Sea in Scotland. Farming became considerably easier in the Scottish highlands as a result, as forests spread outward into hitherto treeless
environments. Far to the south in the Alps, tree levels rose sharply and
farmers planted deeper and deeper into the mountains. During late prehistoric times, numerous copper mines had flourished in the Alps until
advancing ice sealed them off. Late medieval miners reopened some of
the workings when the ice retreated. Higher rainfall spread over much of
southern Europe and the western Mediterranean. As a result, some Sicilian rivers were navigable in ways that would be impossible today. Medieval bridges, like the one in Palermo, still span them but are far longer
than now necessary, simply because the rivers were wider nine hundred
years ago.

In theory, European society was well ordered. "Every man should have a
lord," proclaimed the Treaty of Verdun in 843. Only the Pope and the
Holy Roman Emperor in Constantinople were exempt from this stricture, and they were vassals of the Lord. In practice, feudal society was intensely hierarchical, a confused mass of conflicting dependencies and loyalties, intersected by exceptions and exemptions and ridden with constant
litigation. At the local level, the lord of a manor granted a plot of land to
each of his serfs in exchange for service as unpaid laborers on his
demesne. Enserfinent implied a contract that traded land for service, protection for loyalty. Almost every rural European was conditioned by his
or her position in a complex social order, hemmed in by legal and emotional ties of dependence that gave people some security but no personal
freedom. But all on the land, lord and commoner alike, counted their
blessings of fine weather and usually good harvests and attributed them
to God's grace.

In that devout age, everyone's fate was in the hand of the Lord. People
lived at God's mercy, with only their piety to intercede for them, expressed in prayer and mortar. Gratitude came from chant and prayer,
from lavish offerings and, above all, from a surge of cathedral building. The energetic Suger, Abbot of Saint Denis (d. 1151), was a shaper of European politics, an adviser to monarchs who even governed France when
King Louis VII went on the Second Crusade. He found time to patronize
the development of the soaring Gothic architectural style, where the
skeletal structure of a cathedral held up a higher and lighter building,
with more space for windows than earlier, more massive Norman
churches.6 Gothic churches were towering frameworks of masonry
columns or pillars, supported on the outside by flying buttresses. Their
architects made brilliant use of stained glass to tell stories, to depict the
Christian cosmos, with a great rose window over the front wall of the
cathedral. The stone tracery gave the appearance of a rose, the brightly
colored glass set in lead in an ancient symbol of human love transcending
passion. Sculptures on the external and internal walls of the cathedral
represented biblical stories, the four Gospels, the Last Judgment, and
other manifestations of Christian belief. Abbot Suger himself appears as a
small figure kneeling in prayer in a small corner of one of the stained glass
windows of his own abbey, itself a masterpiece of Gothic artistry.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were golden years of architects,
masons, and carpenters, who moved from cathedral to cathedral, taking
their evolving ideas with them. They created works of genius: Notre
Dame, on the Ile de le Cite in the heart of Paris, commissioned by Bishop
Maurice de Sully in 1159 and built over two centuries; the ethereal places
of worship at Rheims and Sens; the choir of Canterbury Cathedral in
southern England, erected in the 1170s, and Lincoln to the north, a triumph of vaulting, begun in 1192. The ultimate aesthetic effect came at
the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, completed on April 25, 1248, smaller than
the great cathedrals and "an edifice of exquisite delicacy and light, its tall,
slender windows filled with brilliant expanses of stained glass." 7 Cathedrals are never completed, for they are built, then rebuilt, restored, added
to, and sometimes abandoned or damaged in war by later generations. But
the surge in Gothic cathedral building, financed by an outpouring of surplus resources, labor, and wealth, was never emulated in later centuries.