The Floods of 589 and Climate Change at the Beginning of the Middle Ages: An Italian Microhistory

It always rains in the Middle Ages. In modern cinema, for instance, from Bergman's classic Seventh Seal to Fuqua's more recent King Arthur (2004), medieval weather is bad. That medieval weather was significantly worse than what came before it and after it is not a view restricted to a few unreflective movie directors: numerous scholarly texts also depict the epochal shifts at the end of antiquity, and at the beginning of modernity, taking place in a context of climate deterioration and repeated catastrophic meteorological events.