WI: Climate Changes

How would civilization react if earth entered a smaller Ice Age (although much bigger than "Little Ice Age")somewhere doing the Dark Middle Ages (~500AD) with growing Ice Caps reaching down making northern Europe inhabitable, with the Ice reaching down to the Baltics, and the rest of Europe that much colder?
 
How would civilization react if earth entered a smaller Ice Age (although much bigger than "Little Ice Age")somewhere doing the Dark Middle Ages (~500AD) with growing Ice Caps reaching down making northern Europe inhabitable, with the Ice reaching down to the Baltics, and the rest of Europe that much colder?

Well, even during the last Ice Age (which ended around 12000 yrs B.P. give or take a century) the glaciers took literally hundreds of years to advance or retreat so you wouldn't get an ice cap in the Baltic realistically until the 14th or 15th century. However this would have been preceded by a gradually cooling climate preventing agricultural subsistence for the Northern 2 thirds of Europe. Around the Mediterranean people should be more or less fine but migrations fleeing the freezing North would definitely alter the political climate.
 
yeah ... i know it would take some time ... prehaps wave a much stronger migration period crashing Rome as a early butterfly for it
 
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