The Third Horseman
The Third Horseman
The Third Horseman
Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century
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"How a seven-year cycle of rain, cold, disease, and warfare created the worst famine in European history ... In May 1315, it started to rain. It didn't stop anywhere in north Europe until August. Next came the four coldest winters in a millennium. Two separate animal epidemics killed nearly 80 percent of northern Europe's livestock. Wars between Scotland and England, France and Flanders, and two rival claimants to the Holy Roman Empire destroyed all remaining farmland. After seven years, the combination of lost harvests, warfare, and pestilence would claim six million lives--one eighth of Europe's total population. William Rosen draws on a wide array of disciplines, from military history to feudal law to agricultural economics and climatology, to trace the succession of traumas that caused the Great Famine. With dramatic appearances by Scotland's William Wallace, and the luckless Edward II and his treacherous Queen Isabella, history's best documented episode of catastrophic climate change comes alive, with powerful implications for future calamities"--
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Pros: lots of information, political components told like a story with digressions on economics, weather, etc.,
Cons: I personally found the weather talk - though essential to the subject of the book - dryly told and boringly technical
This is an examination of the effects of the end of the medieval warm period during the reign of King Edward II of England. The book gives some background into the population explosion and increased farming that took place during the 400 hundred years when Europe experienced warmer temperatures (including the Viking expansion into Greenland), before delving into the political trials England faced at the time. Much of the book is given over to the war between England and Scotland and how it affected politics (Scotland allied with France at times to force England to back off) and economics (Scotland raided the English border over and over again, forcing the king to raise armies, draining his coffers). Two chapters - of particular interest to me - detailed the effects of the wet, cold weather on crops and the diseases that accompanied the resulting famines, decimating herds across England and the Continent.
While I found some of the weather discourse too technical and therefore boring, the rest of the book was very readable and fascinating.
If you're interested in how politics and the weather can combine to created a famine, and what else famine brings with it, this is a great book. Similarly, if the politics of England and Scotland or the lives and times of Edward the first and, predominantly the second, interest you, then definitely give this book a go.
