The Millennium project is a multidisciplinary consortium of more than 38 partners from 16 European countries bringing together historians, chemists, physicists, biologists, geographers, climate modellers and geologists in a multi-disciplinary effort to reconstruct the climate of Europe over the last 1000 years using historical documents ranging from ships logs, church annals and harvest records, and natural archives such as tree rings, insect and plant remains from lakes and peat bogs, ice cores and sea shells. Reconstructing the climate of the past is important because it will allow us to say whether the warming seen in recent years is really unusual.