Large fires and climatic variability in urban Europe, 1500–1800

Several hundred large urban fires occurred in Europe during the
early modern period, but they did not take place randomly. This article charts
their incidence and reveals a peak in the seventeenth century, coinciding with
some of the coolest periods of the Little Ice Age. This apparent paradox can
best be explained by climatic variability, since overall cooling was accompanied
by numerous warm, dry anomalies. While the cause of fires was usually human
activity, and small fires happened frequently, this paper shows that many of the
largest conflagrations of the early modern period took place in years of such
hot and/or dry climatic anomalies, and closer analysis of individual fires con-
firms that these meteorological conditions facilitated their spread. This strongly
suggests that climatic variability associated with the Little Ice Age was a major
determinant of the timing of large fires in Europe. Over the same broad period,
climatic disasters linked to cooler and damper conditions contributed to social
and political instability, and there is evidence that this in turn undermined fire
prevention and control and thus further increased the likelihood of small fires
becoming large ones.