An Ancient Diary Reveals How 3 Horrifying Summers May Have Altered the Path of an Entire Nation

Yahoo

19-02-2025

An abnormally cold period known as the Little Ice Age significantly cooled down most of Europe during the late 16th through early 19th centuries, but historical documents reveal it had the opposite effect on some regions.
Transylvania experienced some cold flashes, but mostly suffered from punishingly hot summers that resulted in famine and a boom in the rodent population that spread the Bubonic Plague.
While the Little Ice Age was not caused by human activity, researchers think that historical records like this are valuable in helping us determine how to prepare for natural disasters and prevent anthropogenic climate change in the future.
The yellowed and sometimes barely legible pages of 16th-century texts speak of disaster after disaster—from the Black Death to locust invasions to a period of intense climate change that ravaged Transylvania.
The Little Ice Age, as it's now known, was a period during which the expansion of mountain glaciers had a severe impact on the European climate. From the 16th to the mid-19th century, the unusual weather patterns caused most of Europe to experience what seemed like an everlasting winter. But, oddly enough—as a team of researchers found out when they looked through pages of chronicles and diaries from the period—Transylvania instead suffered from strangely hot weather that led to famine and a Bubonic Plague epidemic.
'The analysis of the periods in which the testimonies were recorded indicates that the great majority of the analyzed century is characterized by relatively warm weather, with hot summers and hot years, particularly cold winters and cold years, being mentioned very rarely,' the research team said in a study recently published in Frontiers in Climate.
People have a tendency to record extremes in weather. For instance, there was once a summer that saw hail the size of goose eggs, and it was so warm one autumn that strawberries were still growing in October. Years for which few weather records (if any) can be found probably mean that those years saw a brief respite in extreme weather.
The Little Ice Age did bring a few cold flashes to the Transylvania region. Some writings from 1510 record a winter so harsh that hay for livestock dried up and led to a string of thefts, while others from 1550 recall a winter that dragged on until May. But alas, much more common were the heat waves, which written records attest continued for several consecutive years.
There were three significant hot periods in Transylvania at the time, but the worst undoubtedly started in 1527, and is thought to be the longest period of hot weather during the entire 16th century. There were eleven years of scorching, dry summers that often led to locust invasions—sometimes, it even became unnaturally dark during the day because the entire sky was thick with locusts. Grain crops were destroyed by the insects and led to famine. It only grew worse from there.
'The poor harvests of the rainy years and the atypical weather from the fall of 1553 and the winter towards 1554, sunny as if it were spring, caused the malnutrition that facilitated the terrible plague epidemic of 1553–1554, especially in the south of Transylvania,' one written record states.
While mortality from starvation increased during the famine, nothing took so many lives as the Bubonic Plague. Warmer climates can cause rodent populations to explode, and this is most likely how the Plague—which was carried largely by fleas on rodents such as rats—spread through Transylvania. Also known as the Black Death, the Bubonic Plague had at least a 60-80% mortality rate, and easily wiped out much of a population already weak from famine. Some tried fleeing to the mountains to escape it, but only ended up starving to death.
While many people of the time believed that storms, infestations, and disease were some form of divine retribution, scientists now know that disruptions in climate have much more tangible causes. The Little Ice Age was not the result of human activity, but the researchers who read through all these accounts think that such documents could teach us more about those causes and possibly help us prevent anthropogenic climate change in the future.
'By corroborating historical sources with modern proxy data, not only a deeper understanding of past climate variability,' the team said in the study, 'but also obtaining relevant information for managing current and future climate variability.'
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