The Great Warming

by Brian Fagan

  Preface

  1. For the benefit of those confused by the terms “climate” and “weather,” climate is the accumulation of daily and seasonal weather events over a long period of time. Weather is the state of the atmosphere in terms of such variables as temperature, cloudiness, rainfall, and radiation at a moment in time. In other words, climate is cumulative experience, weather is what you get.

  2. Lamb’s “Medieval Warm Period” is the most commonly used term to describe what he perceived as a period of medieval warming. Many climatologists rightly question whether the term has global validity, on the grounds that it is not well defined and was, in fact, a period of highly variable climatic conditions. Others use the term “Medieval Climatic Anomaly.” In the interest of clarity, I have used “Medieval Warm Period” to the exclusion of other terms, although I occasionally refer to “the warm centuries” as a generic term, even if the centuries weren’t all warm. Experts may cavil, but, after all, “Medieval Warm Period” is convenient, in common use, and widely known. And most serious students of the subject know that the term is something of a misnomer.

  3. Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

  4. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (New York: Verso, 2001). Preface.

  Chapter 1: A Time of Warming

  1. Hubert Lamb, Climate History and the Modern World (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 173.

  2. Discussion in Bruce C. Campbell, “Economic Rent and the Intensification of English Agriculture, 1086–1350.” In Grenville Astill and John Langdon, eds., Medieval Farming and Technology (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 225–50. The essays in this book are a mine of information on medieval agriculture, its yields, and changing technology.

  3. For the Mount Tambora disaster, see Henry Stommel and Elizabeth Stommel, Volcano Weather: The Story of 1816, the Year Without a Summer (Newport, R.I.: Seven Seas Press, 1983).

  4. George S. Philander, Is the Temperature Rising? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 125.

  5. William of Malmesbury (c. 1096–1143) was a monk at Malmesbury in southwestern England and a medieval historian rated second only to the Venerable Bede. His greatest works were Gesta regum Anglorum, a history of the English kings from 449 to 1127, and Historia novella, which continues the story. Book V covers contemporary history, which is where his vineyard observations are to be found.

  6. Lamb, Climate History, chapter 10.

  7. Hubert Lamb and Knud Frydendahl, Historic Storms of the North Sea, British Isles and Northwestern Europe (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  8. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000. Barbara Bray, trans. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971).

  9. Lamb, Climate History, chapter 10.

  10. Hereward the Wake (fl. 1070) is one of the great, but little-known heroes of early English history. We know he was exiled by the Saxon king Edward the Confessor in 1062, returning after 1066 to find his father dead, his brother murdered, and a Norman lord in possession of his home. He became a rallying point for resistance against William the Conqueror. Hereward attacked and sacked Peterborough Abbey in 1070 with the help of a Danish army. When William bribed the Danes to return home, Hereward continued his revolt from a stronghold at Ely. When William finally captured his redoubt, he fled into hiding. His ultimate fate is unknown.

  11. Lamb and Frydendahl, Historic Storms, p. 34, and Brian Fagan, Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World (New York: Basic Books, 2006), p. 101.

  12. M. E. Mann, R. S. Bradley, and M. K. Hughes, “Global Surface Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing over the Past 6 Centuries,” Nature 392 (1998), pp. 779–87, and M. E. Mann, R. S. Bradley, and M. K. Hughes, “Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations,” Geophysical Research Letters vol. 26, no. 6 (1999), pp. 759–62.

  13. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  14. For a discussion, see National Research Council, Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Past 2,000 Years (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2006), pp. 1ff.

  15. Information from Lamb, Climate History, pp. 169–70.

  Chapter 2: “The Mantle of the Poor”

  1. Tertullian, De Anima, vol. 1, XXX.210.

  2. For a general description of the period, see William Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (New York: Viking, 2001). I have drawn extensively on this work here.

  3. Kenneth Clark, Civilization: A Personal View (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 23.

  4. Population: Jordan, Europe, pp. 7–10.

  5. Bruce C. Campbell, “Economic Rent and the Intensification of English Agriculture, 1086–1350.” In Grenville Astill and John Langdon, eds., Medieval Farming and Technology (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 225.

  6. Medieval agricultural technology is a complex subject and generalization is difficult. A summary: Georges Comet, “Technology and Agricultural Expansion in the Middle Ages: The Example of France North of the Loire.” In Astill and Langdon, Medieval Farming, pp. 11–40.

  7. This paragraph is based on Campbell, “Economic Rent,” pp. 233ff.

  8. Paragraph based on Jordan, Europe, pp. 16–17; quote from p. 17. For Southwark, see Martha Carlin, Medieval Southwark (Rio Grande, Oh.: Hambledon, 1996), pp. 250–51.

  9. Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), is the definitive work on the subject. I drew on it extensively here for medieval deforestation.

  10. Land reclamation: Grenville Astill, “Agricultural Production and Technology in the Netherlands, c. 1000–1500.” In Astill and Langdon, Medieval Farming, pp. 89–114.

  11. Williams, Deforesting, p. 105.

  12. This hypothetical scenario is based on Williams, Deforesting, chapter 5 and my own central African forest-clearance experience with subsistence farmers.

  13. Pagans: quoted from Williams, Deforesting, p. 122.

  14. Williams, Deforesting, p. 111.

  15. Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: Study of Monastic Culture. Catherine Misrahi, trans. (London: S.P.C.K., 1978). p. 60.

  16. Quoted from James Westfall Thompson, An Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages, 300 to 1300 (New York: Century, 1908), p. 611.

  17. This passage is based on Fagan, Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World (New York: Basic Books, 2006), chapters 3, 4 and 7, where primary references will be found.

  18. Fagan, Fish on Friday, chapters 5 and 6.

  19. William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), is a superb account of this catastrophic event.

  20. Quote from Martin Bouquet et al., eds., Receuil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France (1738–1904) 21:197.

  21. A recent account of the Black Death: John Kelly, The Great Mortality (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).

  Chapter 3: The Flail of God

  1. Ch’ang Ch’un, The Travels of an Alchemist Recorded by His Disciple Li Chih-Ch’ang. Arthur Waley, trans. (London: Routledge, 1931), p. 104.

  2. John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomew the Englishman’s Latin Encyclopaedia. See R. Barber, The Penguin Guide to Medieval Europe (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 30. The conventional boundary between Europe and Asia is now defined as the Ural Mountains.

  3. Ginghis Khan, sometimes called Chingis Khan or Chingiss Khan, and commonly known as Genghis Khan, has been the subject of numerous books. Leo de Hartog, Khan: Conqueror of the World (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989), is a lucid account. See also George Lane, Genghis Khan and Mongol Rule (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004).

  4. J. A. Boyle, trans., Tarikh-I Jahan Gusha. In The History of the World Conqueror (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 105.

  5. Extracts from The Chr
onicle of Novgorod may be found at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/novgorod1.html. The quote is from the entry for A.D. 1238.

  6. Boyle, History, p. 105.

  7. ‘Ata Malik Jowanyi (Juvaini) (1226–1283) served at the Mongol court from childhood. He became a historian and later governor of Baghdad in about 1260. His history has considerable credibility as he witnessed many of the events described therein.

  8. Maria Shahgedanova, ed., The Physical Geography of Northern Eurasia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), offers a series of technical summaries of central Asian environments. For the steppes, I relied on Alexander Chibilyov, “Steppe and Forest-Steppe,” pp. 248–66.

  9. Willem van Ruysbroeck, The Mission of Friar William of Rubreck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253–1255 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990), p. 118.

  10. Research summarized in E. M. Lavenko and Z. V. Karamysheva, “Steppes of the Former Soviet Union and Mongolia.” In R. T. Coupland, ed., Natural Grasslands: Eastern Hemisphere and Résumé. Ecosystems of the World, vol. 8b (London: Elsevier, 1979), pp. 3–60.

  11. An excellent summary of the domestication of the horse: David W. Anthony, “The ‘Kurgan Culture’: Indo-European Origins, and the Domestication of the Horse: A Reconsideration,” Current Anthropology, vol. 27, no. 4 (1986), pp. 291–313.

  12. A useful, albeit somewhat outdated, account of the Scythians: Tamara Rice, The Scythians (London: Thames & Hudson, 1957).

  13. Herodotus, The Histories. Robin Waterfield, trans. (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4:127, p. 277.

  14. This section draws on Ian Blanchard, “Cultural and Economic Activities in the Nomadic Societies of the Trans-Pontine Steppe,” Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU, vol. 11 (2005).

  15. An excellent summary, with superb photographs, of modern Mongolian nomad life at a time of major political change can be found in Melvyn C. Goldstein and Cynthia M. Beall, The Changing World of Mongolia’s Nomads (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

  16. Elena E. Kuz’mina, “Stages of Development of Stock-Breeding Husbandry and Ecology of the Steppes in the Light of the Archaeological and Palaeoecological Data (4th Millennium bc–8th Century bc).” In Bruno Genito, ed., The Archaeology of the Steppes: Methods and Strategies (Naples: Instituto Universitario Orientale, 1994), vol. 44, pp. 31–72.

  17. Chronicle of Novgorod, 1230; see http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/novgorod1.html.

  18. Rosanne D’Arrigo et al., “1738 Years of Mongolian Temperature Variability Inferred from a Tree-Ring Width Chronology of Siberian Pine,” Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 28, no. 2 (2001), pp. 543–46.

  19. Lane, Genghis Khan, p. 45.

  20. Robert Cowley, ed., What If? (New York: Berkley Trade, 2000).

  Chapter 4: The Golden Trade of the Moors

  1. Anonymous, Toffut-al-Alabi (12th century). Quoted from H. R. Palmer, Sudanese Memoirs: Being Mainly Translations of a Number of Arabic Manuscripts Relating to the Central and Western Sudan (Lagos, Nigeria: Government Printer, 1928), vol. 2, p. 90.

  2. Roderick J. McIntosh, “Chasing Dunjugu over the Mande Landscape: Making Sense of Prehistoric and Historic Climate Change,” Mande Studies, vol. 6 (2004), pp. 11–28. I have drawn heavily on this important paper for the climatic scenario presented here. See also: Robin Dunbar, “Climate Variability During the Holocene: An Update.” In Roderick J. McIntosh, Joseph A. Tainter, and Susan Keech McIntosh, eds., The Way the Wind Blows: Climate, History, and Human Action (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 45–88.

  3. Sharon E. Nicholson, “Recent Rainfall Fluctuations in Africa and Their Relationship to Past Conditions Over the Continent,” The Holocene, vol. 4 (1994), pp. 121–31. See also S. E. Nicholson and J. P. Grist, “A Conceptual Model for Understanding Rainfall Variability in the West African Sahel on Interannual and Interdecadal Timescales,” International Journal of Climatology, vol. 21 (2001), pp. 1733–57.

  4. Gerald Haug et al., “Southward Migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone through the Holocene,” Science, vol. 293 (2001), pp. 1304–7.

  5. Herodotus, The Histories. Robin Waterfield, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3:32.

  6. Endless academic controversy surrounds putative Roman visits to West Africa, but such contacts, if any, were fleeting at best. For a much respected summary of the Saharan trade generally, see E. W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors, rev. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 121.

  7. Camels were first domesticated in Arabia in about 1500 B.C., but did not come into common use until the centuries before Christ. Everything depended on the saddle. At first, camel riders sat on a saddle mounted on the animal’s hindquarters. They used sticks to control their beasts and were so close to the ground that they lost a major advantage of the camel: its height. The north Arabian saddle, a rigid structure mounted over the hump, changed the equation during the five centuries before Christ. Its owner could now carry a modest load and fight from the saddle with sword or spear. So effective was the north Arabian saddle that wheeled carts effectively vanished from southwestern Asia for many centuries. A classic study: Richard W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975).

  8. Quoted from Ian Blanchard, Mining, Metallurgy and Minting in the Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2001), p. 156.

  9. Extended discussion in ibid., pp. 91–102.

  10. Ibid., pp. 153–54.

  11. Nehemiah Levetzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (London: Methuen, 1973), p. 189.

  12. According to Bovill, Golden Trade, p. 81, a nugget twice this size came from Bambuk in about 1900.

  13. Roderick J. McIntosh, The Peoples of the Middle Niger: The Island of Gold (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 257–59.

  14. Ibid., pp. 267–81.

  15. Ibid., p. xv.

  16. This section draws heavily on Roderick J. McIntosh, “Social Memory in Mande.” In McIntosh et al., The Way the Wind Blows, pp. 141–80. I also consulted McIntosh, Peoples of the Middle Niger, and Téréba Togola, “Memories, Abstraction, and Conceptualization of Ecological Crisis in the Mande World.” In McIntosh et al., The Way the Wind Blows, pp. 181–92. All three references contain excellent specialist bibliographies

  17. Susan K. McIntosh, Prehistoric Investigations in the Region of Jenne, Mali. 2 vols. (Oxford, Eng.: British Archaeological Reports, 1980). See also the same author’s “Results of Recent Excavations at Jenné-jeno and Djenné, Mali,” Proceedings of the 11th Panafrican Congress of Prehistory and Related Studies, Bamako (Bamako: Institut des Sciences Humaines, 2005), pp. 115–22.

  18. R. McIntosh, “Social Memory in Mande.” In McIntosh et al., The Way the Wind Blows, pp. 141–80.

  19. The Almoravids were members of the al-Murabitum cult of Islam, who waged jihad in the western Sahara in the eleventh century under Ibn Yasin and later Abu Bakr, who captured Koumbi. See Nehemiah Levetzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (London: Methuen, 1973); also, Bovill, Golden Trade, chapter 7.

  Chapter 5: Inuit and Qadlunaat

  1. Magnus Magnusson and Herman Palsson, eds., The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America (London: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 55.

  2. Common usage is to call Canadian Arctic peoples Inuit, those in Alaska and the Bering Strait region Eskimo. I have followed this convention here.

  3. More on Eskimo and Inuit. The term “Eskimo,” used by the peoples of Alaska and Siberia, is said to be derived from an Algonkin Indian expression: “People Who Eat Raw Meat.” (Or perhaps “The People Who Live Up the Coast.”) Some people consider the word derogatory, so Canadians usually use “Inuit,” which simply means “Humans” in local speech. For the purposes of this book, I have followed Robert McGhee’s pragmatic usage, using “Inuit” for all Eskimos living in northern Alaska, Arctic Canada, and Greenland. They share a language, Inuktituut. Robert McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 104.<
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  4. The best summary of Norse voyaging for the general reader is William W. Fitzhugh and Elisabeth I. Ward, eds., Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), in which authoritative essays on all aspects of the subject will be found, as will an excellent bibliography.

  5. Kirsten Seaver, The Frozen Echo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), is a widely quoted source on Norse Greenland.

  6. A summary of this site will be found in Brian Fagan, Ancient North America, 4th ed. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), chapter 1.

  7. Magnusson and Palsson, Vinland Sagas, p. 99.

  8. The hunting cultures of the Bering Strait are summarized in my Ancient North America, chapters 8 and 9, which should be read in conjunction with McGhee’s Last Imaginary Place. A highly technical and admirably complete analysis will be found in Owen K. Mason, “The Contest Between the Ipiutak, Old Bering Sea, and Birnik Polities and the Origin of Whaling During the First Millennium A.D. Along Bering Strait,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, vol. 17 (1998), pp. 240–325.

  9. See the discussion in Mason, “Contest,” p. 250ff.

  10. Helge Larsen and E. Rainey, “Ipiutak and the Arctic Whale Hunting Culture,” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 42 (1948).

  11. On Ekven, see McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place, pp. 218–19.

  12. Mikhail Bronshtein and Patrick Plumet, “Ékven: L’Art Préhistorique Béringien et l’Approache Russe de l’Origine de la Tradition Culturelle Esquimaude,” Études/Inuit/Studies, vol. 19, no. 2 (1995), pp. 5–59.

  13. McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place, p. 119ff.

  14. Robert McGhee, Ancient People of the Arctic (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1996), has an excellent description of Tuniit culture.