The Land That Never Was by Vasily Pasetsky

In winter, snowfalls and frosts were often observed in southern Europe. However, cold, rainy summers were common throughout the 15th century. A direct consequence of this climate was the mass famine of the first half of the 14th century.įrom around the 1370s, temperatures in Western Europe began to rise slowly, and mass famine and crop failures ceased. Petrarch and Boccaccio recorded that in the XIV century. Winter frosts began to affect even northern Italy. In Scotland and northern Germany, viticulture and wine production ceased. Heavy rains and unusually harsh winters killed several crops and froze fruit orchards in England, Scotland, northern France and Germany. According to the French Chronicle of Matthew of Paris, the traditionally warm summer of 1311 was followed by four gloomy and rainy summers of 1312-1315. In the 1310s, Western Europe, judging by the chronicles, experienced a real ecological disaster. Researchers believe that the onset of the Little Ice Age was associated with a slowdown in the current of the Gulf Stream around 1300. The Little Ice Age was preceded by a low climatic optimum (approximately X-XIII centuries) - a period of relatively warm and even weather, mild winters and the absence of severe droughts. In Northern and even Central and Southern Europe: Holland, Germany, Austria, northern Italy in Paris, canals and lakes were frozen. The climate of the 17th and 18th centuries was very different from the climate of our time winters in Europe were much colder. It is the coldest in terms of average annual temperatures over the past two thousand years. Small glacial period - period cooling that took place on Earth during the XIV-XIX centuries.

The Land That Never Was by Vasily Pasetsky