The Little Ice Age and the fashion for sleighs at the French court

The forecasters' promise that there will be no summer recalled the run of rainy years in the fourteenth century that heralded, for the Russian lands, the onset of the Little Ice Age. Which would give way to a brief interglacial in the 1440s.

The coldest phase of the Little Ice Age in Europe was the last one, from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth. From the 1740s the European capitals sank into deep snow every winter. The streets of Paris, Saint Petersburg, London, Vienna and Berlin were buried under blizzards, and snowdrifts and gales hindered city traffic. Urban rivers lay frozen for long stretches - but these are mere trifles beside the Bosphorus, which froze over in 1621-1669, and the icing of the Adriatic along its shores in the winter of 1708-1709.

There are many works and theories on the influence of climate on culture, politics and life in general, but today, a little about transport. If almost the whole of the sixteenth century, and even the beginning of the seventeenth, passed with snowless or almost snowless winters, the glacial maximum that followed forced people to adapt, and from the countryside and the northern districts the sleigh spread to almost every town, even those in the south.

The fashion for court sleigh outings in France was introduced as early as Louis XIV. His great-grandson Louis XV, who came to the throne at the age of five, would assemble a truly sumptuous collection of sleighs. In the royal stables, separate hangars were set aside for Louis XV's sleighs. His collection remained in working order for a long time; Marie Antoinette positively fell in love with the sleighs of her husband's grandfather and went out in them from time to time, and in due course went on collecting them and considerably enlarged the "garage".