The Climate and Environment of Byzantine Anatolia: Integrating Science, History and Archaeology

Raphael’s discussion of extreme weather events in the later medieval and early modern periods. Bulliet’s discussion of the decline of Iranian cotton production during the eleventh century draws a causal association between the rise of cotton production and the spread of Islam and a declining Iranian agriculture trig-gered by a signiŞcant cooling of the climate that lasted for over a century.
The broad picture for the Roman world shows favorable andstable climatic conditions from c. 250 b.c.e. to 200 c.e.,giving way thereafter to a far more variable climate, with higher- amplitude fluctuations between cold/dry and warm /wet periods.
Although it began and ended indifferent places at different times, thebop roughly dates from the“Minoan Warm period” c. 1500 b.c.e. to the markedly cooler sev-enth/eighth century c.e(with a solar minimum; see Fig. 3),identiŞed chieşy through the evidence of pollen found in suchnatural deposits as lake beds. Although most clearly evident in the upland valleys of southwest Anatolia, it is also recorded in pollendiagrams from sites in central and northwestern Turkey and parts of Greece. Archaeologists associate this phase with a range of material-cultural phenotypes characteristic of the classical cultures of antiquity.
The good correspondence between the proxy and historicaldata sets breaks down for the late tenth and eleventh centuries; nohint of documented droughts is evident in any of the proxy-climatere cords. The reasons for this divergence are not entirely clear, butnotably only one of the historically recorded droughts (in 1037c.e.) is located in Anatolia; many more occurred in Greece and Macedonia to the west. The absence of reports cannot be attrib-uted to the Byzantines’ loss of central and eastern Anatolia to theTurks, because this loss did not occur until the battle of Manzikertin 1071, and Anatolia provided numerous weather reports (mainlyof cold winters) prior to this date. Hence, although certain parts of the eastern Mediterranean undoubtedly experienced harsh weather conditions during the tenth and eleventh centuries, drought conditions do not appear to have affected all parts of the region.
How we understand the Byzantine response to the crisis of thelater seventh and early eighth centuries depends on the palaeo-climatic work discussed above. It reveals that much, but not all, of Anatolia experienced a wetter climate from the sixth to the later seventh century, possibly stretching into the early eighth century insome areas
The re-occupation of Cappa-docia between 850 and 950 c.e.,however, coincided with an ame-lioration of the climate toward wetter conditions, suggesting thatan increasingly propitious agro-climatic environment may have encouraged the re-establishment of the middle Byzantine rural economy.