The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 Read Online Free

lore to themselves
and passed their learning from family to family, father to son, from one
generation to the next. Their maritime knowledge was never written
down but memorized and refined by constant use. Norse navigators lived
in intimate association with winds and waves, watching sea and sky,
sighting high glaciers from afar by the characteristic ice-blink that reflects
from them, predicting ice conditions from years of experience navigating
near the pack. Every Norse skipper learned the currents that set ships off
course or carried them on their way, the seasonal migrations of birds and
sea mammals, the signs from sea and sky of impending bad weather, fog,
or ice. Their bodies moved with swell and wind waves, detecting seemingly insignificant changes through their feet. The Norse were tough,
hard-nosed seamen who combined bold opportunism with utterly realistic caution, a constant search for new trading opportunities with an abiding curiosity about what lay over the horizon. Always their curiosity was
tempered with careful observations of currents, wind patterns, and icefree passages that were preserved for generations as family secrets.
    The Norse had enough to eat far from land. Their ancestors had
learned centuries before how to catch cod in enormous numbers from
open boats. They gutted and split the fish, then hung them by the thousands to dry in the frosty northern air until they lost most of their weight
and became easily stored, woodlike planks. Cod became the Norse hardtack, broken off and chewed calmly in the roughest seas. It was no coinci dence Norse voyagers passed from Norway to Iceland, Greenland and
North America, along the range of the Atlantic cod. Cod and the Norse
were inextricably entwined.

    The explorations of the Norse, otherwise known as Vikings or "Northmen," were a product of overpopulation, short growing seasons, and
meager soils in remote Scandinavian fjords. Each summer, young "rowmen" left in their long ships in search of plunder, trading opportunities,
and adventure. During the seventh century, they crossed the stormy
North Sea with impressive confidence, raided towns and villages in eastern Britain, ransacked isolated Christian settlements, and returned home
each winter laden with booty. Gradually, they expanded the tentacles of
Norse contacts and trade over huge areas of the north. Norsemen also
traveled far east, down the Vistula, Dnieper, and Volga rivers to the Black
and Caspian seas, besieged Constantinople more than once and founded
cities from Kiev to Dublin.
    The tempo of their activity picked up after 800. More raiding led, inevitably, to permanent overseas settlements, like the Danish Viking camp
at the mouth of the Seine in northern France, where a great army repeatedly looted defenseless cities. Danish attackers captured Rouen and
Nantes and penetrated as far south as the Balearic Islands, Provence, and
Tuscany. Marauding Danes invaded England in 851 and overran much of
the eastern part of the country. By 866, much of England was under the
Danelaw. Meanwhile, the Norwegian Vikings occupied the Orkney and
Shetland Islands, then the Hebrides off northwestern Scotland. By 874,
Norse colonists had taken advantage of favorable ice conditions in northern seas and settled permanently in Iceland, at the threshold of the Arctic.
    The heyday of the Norse, which lasted roughly from A.D. 800 to about
1200, was not only a byproduct of such social factors as technology, overpopulation and opportunism. Their great conquests and explorations
took place during a period of unusually mild and stable weather in northern Europe called the Medieval Warm Period-some of the warmest four
centuries of the previous 8,000 years. The warmer conditions affected
much of Europe and parts of North America, but just how global a phenomenon the Warm Period was is a matter for debate. The historical consequences of the warmer centuries were momentous in the north. Be tween 800