← Back to Articles | Original (German)
Anyone who writes a book usually has certain ideas and guidelines. But sometimes things turn out differently; while working, it turns out that two book covers are not enough. This is what happened to Johannes Preiser-Kapeller from the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. When he worked on it in 2014 as part of a research stay funded by the Onassis Foundation, he had no idea that four book covers, i.e. two books, would ultimately be necessary. Seen this way, “The First Harvest and the Great Famine – Climate, Pandemics and the Change of the Old World to 500 AD.” the first part, which is then followed by part two ("The Long Summer and the Little Ice Age - climate, pandemics and the changes in the Old World from 500 to 1500 AD."). The fact that both volumes have an identical foreword is the logical consequence of the fact that it is a work that has a total length of over 800 pages.
What's it about? The author has a clear intention: "The aim of the two volumes [...] is to embed climatic and epidemic factors in the presentation of the transformation of the Old World from antiquity through the Middle Ages to modern times in the context of current debates in global history, and not a series of misfortunes, even if human suffering is repeatedly visible in depressing dimensions."
If today climate change is proven with measurable data, which in very few cases goes back to the 19th century, the historical analysis is based on so-called proxy data. These are data sources that allow conclusions to be drawn in a roundabout way. For example, pollen analysis can be used to reconstruct the climate-related composition of vegetation from long periods in moors. Naturally, absolute age dating in these “archives of nature” is hardly possible. The “society archives”, on the other hand, are based on dated records, mostly in written form, the analysis of which also allows conclusions to be drawn about the climate. Their synoptic evaluation, ideally with evidence from the “archives of nature”, then allows conclusions to be drawn about social changes, such as pandemics, the abandonment of settlements, wars, etc.
If there is no doubt today about human influence on the climate, we may not have been the first. On page 15 (Volume 1), Preiser-Kapeller quotes the American paleoclimatologist William F. Ruddiman, who supports this thesis. According to this, "the spread of agriculture since the Neolithic over the last 10,000 years led to a slow increase in the proportion of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere and thus to the stabilization of a warmer climate trend." (William F. Ruddiman: Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate, 2005). However, Ruddiman's theses that the spread of agriculture since the Neolithic led to a slow increase in carbon dioxide and methane levels are still controversial today, Preiser-Kapeller confirms, especially since the pre-industrial increase cannot be clearly verified as being caused exclusively by humans.
Volume 2 mentions the enormous, landscape-changing extraction of wood for mining. On page 340 you learn that in 1530 the salt works in Hallein, where 22,000 tons of salt were produced, required 130,000 cubic meters of wood. Visually, this would correspond to a pile of wood that is two meters high, 1.2 meters wide and 54 (!) kilometers long. But that's not all: "By 1590, production and demand for wood had doubled, which corresponded to at least a third of the logging in all of Salzburg." In the south of Salzburg, gold mining in Rauris between 1490 and 1521 led to a reduction from 1.1 million to 200,000 tribes in the Rauris Valley; it was similar in the Gastein Valley. Of the original 900,000 tribes, 240,000 remained. This resulted, among other things, in increased erosion rates and increased avalanches.
Conclusion: The two books "The First Harvest and the Great Hunger" and "The Long Summer and the Little Ice Age" should be viewed as a work that shows the development of human history in the mirror of close interactions with nature. The author knows how to present the analysis of the numerous sources from a wide range of disciplines in a readable and convincing manner. (Thomas Hofmann, January 23, 2026)