© Landover Baptist Church
European witch hunts of the 15th to 17th centuries targeted witches that were thought to be responsible for epidemics and crop failures related to declining temperatures of the Little Ice Age.
A belief that evil humans were negatively affecting the climate and weather patterns was the "consensus" opinion of that time. How eerily similar is that notion to the the current oft-repeated mantra that Man's actions are controlling the climate and leading to catastrophic consequences?
© CO2 Coalition
The first extensive European witch hunts coincided with plunging temperatures as the continent transitioned away from the beneficial warmth of the Medieval Warm Period (850 to 1250 AD). Increasing cold that began in the 13th century ushered in nearly five centuries of advancing mountain glaciers and prolonged periods of rainy or cool weather. This time of naturally-driven climate change was accompanied by crop failure, hunger, rising prices, epidemics and mass depopulation.
© CO2 Coalition
Large systematic witch hunts began in the 1430s and were advanced later in the century by an Alsatian Dominican friar and papal Inquisitor named Heinrich Kramer. At Kramer's urging, Pope Innocence VIII issued an encyclical enshrining the persecution and eradication of weather-changing witches through this papal edict. The worst of the Inquisition's abuses and later systemic witch hunts were, in part, empowered by this decree.
This initial period of cooler temperatures and failing crops continued through the first couple of decades of the 16th century, when a slight warming was accompanied by improvements in harvests. Clearly, the pogrom against the weather-changing witches had been successful!
Unfortunately for the people of the Late Middle Ages, the forty years or so of slight warming gave ground to a more severe bout of cooling. The summer of 1560 brought a return of coldness and wetness that led to severe decline in harvest, crop failure and increases in infant mortality and epidemics. Bear in mind that this was an agrarian subsistence culture, nearly totally dependent on the yearly harvest to survive.
One bad harvest could be tolerated, but back-to-back failures would cause horrific consequences, and indeed they did.
Comment: This comes on the heels of another discovery showing that the Vikings were 'the first' to (re)discover the New World of North America: Vikings present in North America in 1021 C.E., new dating in Newfoundland suggests
Note that the Azores are believed to have been inhabited by another group of people long before the Vikings: Drone finds lost tomb with 72 ancient skeletons from extinct Canary Islands civilization