The heat waves of 2003 in Western Europe and 2010 in Russia, commonly labelled as rare climatic anomalies outside of previous experience, are often taken as harbingers of more frequent extremes in the global warming-influenced future. However, a recent

Changes in climate affected human societies throughout the last millennium. While European cold periods in the 17th and 18th century have been assessed in detail, earlier cold periods received much less attention due to sparse information available. New evidence from proxy archives, historical documentary sources and climate model simulations permit us to provide an interdisciplinary, systematic assessment of an exceptionally cold period in the 15th century. Our assessment includes the role of internal, unforced climate variability and external forcing in shaping extreme climatic conditions and the impacts on and responses of the medieval society in north-western and central Europe. Climate reconstructions from a multitude of natural and anthropogenic archives indicate that the 1430s were the coldest decade in north-western and central Europe in the 15th century. This decade is characterised by cold winters and average to warm summers resulting in a strong seasonal cycle in temperature. Results from comprehensive climate models indicate consistently that these conditions occurred by chance due to the partly chaotic internal variability within the climate system. External forcing like volcanic eruptions tends to reduce simulated temperature seasonality and cannot explain the reconstructions. The strong seasonal cycle in temperature reduced food production and led to increasing food prices, a subsistence crisis and a famine in parts of Europe. Societies were not prepared to cope with failing markets and interrupted trade routes. In response to the crisis, authorities implemented numerous measures of supply policy and adaptation such as the installation of grain storage capacities to be prepared for future food production shortfalls

Abstract. This paper applies the methods of historical climatology to present a climate reconstruction for the area of the Burgundian Low Countries during the 15th century. The results are based on documentary evidence that has been handled very carefully, especially with regard to the distinction between contemporary and non-contemporary sources. Approximately 3000 written records derived from about 100 different sources were examined and converted into seasonal seven-degree indices for temperature and precipitation. For the Late Middle Ages only a few climate reconstructions exist. There are even fewer reconstructions which include spring and autumn temperature or any precipitation information at all. This paper therefore constitutes a useful contribution to the understanding of climate and weather conditions in the less well researched but highly interesting 15th century. The extremely cold winter temperatures during the 1430s and an extremely cold winter in 1407/1408 are striking. Moreover, no other year in this century was as hot and dry as 1473. At the beginning and the end of the 1480s and at the beginning of the 1490s summers were considerably wetter than average.