Thousand-year history of northeastern Europe exploration in the context of climatic change: Medieval to early modern times
2016
Klimenko, Vladimir
The extreme northeastern Europe constitutes a marginal historical transition zone from the, at least partially, agriculturally based economy of North Russia and the hunting-gathering economy of the indigenous Finnish and Samoyed peoples of the North. Climate and trade are crucial for the economy, and these are assumed to be the two main factors in understanding the regional historical development. I present a multi-archive mean annual temperature reconstruction for northeastern Europe spanning the past two millennia, which is used to develop a comparative chronology of climatic and historical events in the study region. It is argued that climate had a profound impact on the Slavic population’s economy and directions of migration, facilitating penetration into higher latitudes in warmer and abandonment in colder climatic phases. It is virtually certain that the mode and speed of development and northeastward expansion of the Russian State from the Middle Ages to the Modern Time were in many ways dependent on natural and geographical factors.
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