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Geografia d'Europa: textos de suport |
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Documentary evidence on climate in sixteenth-century Europe
Pfister C.; Brazdil R.; Glazer R.; Barriendos M.; Camuffo D.; Deutsch
M.; Dobrovolny P.; Enzi S.; Guidoboni E.; Kotyza O.; Militzer S.; Racz
L.; Rodrigo F.S.
C. Pfister, Institute of History, University of Bern, Unitobler, CH-3000
Bern 9, Switzerland
Abstract
The known documentary climatic evidence from six European countries - Switzerland,
Germany, the Czech Republic, ancient Hungary, Italy and Spain - is presented
and classified in this article. The sixteenth century witnessed an increase
in the number and variety of sources in Switzerland, Germany and the Czech
Republic as well as in the western and northern parts of ancient Hungary
(present Slovakia). In northern Italy, the relevant sources are more abundant
and widespread than in central Europe,
but they have hardly been explored. Town chronicles written by members
of the literate elite comprise the basic type of evidence in central Europe
(including northern Italy and Hungary). This kind of source reports exceptional
climatic events (e.g. anomalies and natural disasters) along with their
impact on the environment and on society. Documentary data are the only
evidence known to exist for reconstructing time series of natural disasters
prior to the twentieth century. In order to document the extreme character
of an event, chroniclers frequently referred to features in the cryosphere,
biosphere or hydrosphere that were known to be more accurate yardsticks
of temperature and precipitation patterns than subjective impressions.
When records of such events are compiled with the description of some of
the known effects, the results can be transformed into a severity index.
Whereas chroniclers usually focused upon extreme events, long, continuous
and seemingly homogeneous series of different kinds of proxy data are drawn
from administrative records. Most of them are connected to the timing of
certain kinds of agricultural work (hay-making, beginning of grain harvest
or vintage) or to the amount and quality of agricultural production (per
hectare yield of vineyards, sugar content of wine, etc.). In most cases
the timing of these works was found to be directly related to temperature
patterns over the preceding months and weeks. All the Iberian peninsula
towns, which had an institutionalized municipal authority, have preserved
documents generated from the late Middle Ages. These records frequently
contain references to floods and meteorological anomalies such as droughts
and long wet spells. They also include mention of the system of rogations,
those religious rites performed in a standardized way within the Spanish
world with a view to putting an end to an alleged meteorological stress.
The data for Switzerland, Hungary and Spain as well as much of the data
for Germany are stored in the EURO-CLIMHIST database set up at the Institute
of History at the University of Bern. At present, EURO-CLIMHIST comprises
some 600,000 data for the period from AD 750 to the beginning of the period
of instrumental networks. About 120,000 records for Germany are currently
stored in a data bank called HISKLID located at the Department of Geography
of the University of Wurzburg. The database for the Czech Republic includes
records for the time-span AD 975-1900 and is housed with the Department
of Geography of Masaryk University
in Brno. Data on Italy were collected with different purposes and are stored
in two data banks, the CNR-ICTIMA (climatic data and natural disasters)
and the SGA (extreme events).
SOURCE:
| Climatic Change |
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| Volume 43, Issue 1 |
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| 1999 |
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| Pages 55-110 |
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Última actualització: 28 d'agost de 2000