The Ice Age

Spring 1275. The whole of Europe freezes in an endless winter.
Mountain glaciers extend, the surface of some lakes remains frozen.
The sky is dark, full of sulfur aerosols coming from a distant land.
Some twenty years earlier, a tropical volcano, the Samalas, erupted.
The explosion was mega-colossal. To the point of generating a little ice age.

Combined with several successive minima of solar activity,
this planetary cooling era lasted some six hundred years.
Six centuries during which decline and apogee phases alternated.
Meanwhile, under the impulse of several heretic and enlightened scholars,
human societies freed themselves from the yoke of Christianity and evolved.

Slowly but surely, ideas, techniques abounded:
As our knowledge of natural phenomena progressed,
arose the desire, the will, the necessity to tame them, to dominate them.
Extracting more and more resources to produce more energy became needed.
By dissipating into the atmosphere, this surplus put an end to the Little Ice Age ...