Medieval Life in the Little Ice Age

For roughly five hundred years, from around 1300 to the mid-19th century, Europe and parts of the wider world experienced a prolonged period of cooling that no one had a name for while it was happening. The Great Famine of 1315–1317, the River Thames freezing solid enough for frost fairs, an army marching across frozen sea ice, the great witch hunts, the disappearance of the Norse settlements in Greenland, and finally the “Year Without a Summer” in 1816—this video follows that five-hundred-year journey through surviving historical records and climate data. Watch until the end to discover why it took humanity another century to finally give a name to the disaster it had already lived through. Sources: Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (Basic Books, 2000) — one of the most widely cited foundational works on the Little Ice Age. Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2013) — examines the connection between 17th-century climate change and global political crises. Wolfgang Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate (Polity, 2010) — analyzes the relationship between colder climates and waves of witch hunts. Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2011) — explores the impact of the Little Ice Age beyond Europe. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information — paleoclimate data, including tree rings and ice cores, used to reconstruct temperatures during this period (ncei.noaa.gov). NASA Earth Observatory, “Little Ice Age” — scientific overview of its possible causes, including solar activity and volcanic eruptions (earthobservatory.nasa.gov).