People across the UK and Europe are sweltering under a blazing heatwave that scientists are warning could be the start of a record-breaking summer of high temperatures., but at least in modern times there are scientists to make sense of the forecasts. For people in 1540, the year of the hottest summer ever recorded, it would have seemed like the apocalypse had arrived.
By November 1539, residents in southern Italy and Spain knew something was wrong. It was winter, but no rain had arrived. Winter in Italy was dry and warm, “like July”, according to one record from the time. A few months later, people in Northern Europe also began to panic. Week after week, month after month, no rain fell.. Throughout Europe, from the UK to Poland, eleven months passed with hardly any rain and blistering temperatures.
Trees shed their leaves in the height of summer, grapes withered on the vine, the river Rhine in GermanyVicars begged for rain during Sunday sermons, soldiers were deployed to guard water fountains, and villagers in France hid in their cellars to escape the daytime heat. Catholics and Protestants accused each other of arson as wildfires swept through villages. There were kidnappings and reprisal killings, and villagers barricaded themselves into their homes in fear of the violence. Dysentry from contaminated water killed thousands of people, and farm labourers collapsed while working in the fields.
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