ABSTRACT
Scandinavia’s weather pattern did not always match that in the rest of Europe. If the Crusades are seen these days as more of a defensive operation on Europe’s part, perceiving itself to be under assault from an expanding Islam on both Eastern and Western fronts, which is the exact opposite of what the climate tea leaves say, then it still may be true that a “coolish and rainy clime” in Palestine at the close of the eleventh century may have made it more comfortable for European knights to campaign in their chain-mail armor and to forage for crops.43 But those historians who discount the climate altogether from history, such as on the grounds that a 1 degree Celsius change in the weather makes no difference in the grand scheme of events, are missing the obvious point that humans are inevitably part of nature and, therefore, will be ineluctably influenced by their climate.44 Moreover, it ignores both the local variability and impact of dramatic weather events and the long-range scope of major climate shifts, which all too often go unnoticed by contemporaries living through them. The compromising consensus nowadays seems to be that climate necessarily did play a role in history, but only one among many influences in a closely interrelated web, and often less as the motivating factor behind events and more as having a catalyzing or else retarding effect upon other, more conventional causes.45
