Climatic shifts shaped Europe’s medieval agricultural and economic transformation.

Evidence

In Europe, a ‘Little Ice Age’ starting about 1300 climaxed between 1550 and 1850 and has been succeeded by warmer temperatures in the twentieth century.” McNeill, Plagues and People, Anchor Books, Garden City, 1977, p. 297 n. 23. Wallerstein, referring to the work of Gustaf Utterstrom, makes a similar point: “Utterstrom reminds us that climatic change might have had special bearing on the earlier periods in the transformation of Europe. ‘The primitive agriculture of the Middle Ages must have been much more dependent on favorable weather than is modern agriculture with its high technical standards.’” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1762