Factores climáticos de las variaciones históricas de los precios de los cereales en el nordeste de la península ibérica en el siglo XVII

The 17 th century knew in Spain several periods of agricultural crisis producing shortages in staple foods and a rising in grain prices. The fluctuations of the prices of wheat, barley and rye are relatively well documented in several areas of the country, however, the knowledge about the influence of climatic and environmental factors on these variations is still limited. In this work, we present the historical records of grain prices of four cities of different geographical areas in northeastern Iberian Peninsula during period 1630-1660, and they are compared with drought indices, reconstructed from documentary and dendroclimatic proxies. We observed that prices variations coincide with regional anomalies in spring-summer drought. Direct correlations between them are low (0.19), however, if analysis is focused on extreme values, the climatic influence is higher: prices are high during dry periods and lower during wet periods. This correspondence is higher in previous and following years to the Guerra dels Segadors , showing that the exchange of goods and the coherence of data were controlled by sociopolitical and environmental factors, being the latter more influential in peacetime.