AbstractIn order to cover a millennium‐long period in climatological studies, several types of information must be taken into consideration. Beyond the regular meteorological observations, historical documentary data may serve as a basic source for the past centuries. For the Carpathian basin, Réthly collected historical documents containing meteorology‐related information. In order to facilitate the analysis of this documentary collection, a special code system using hierarchical subclasses has been defined and applied to approximately 15 000 collected climatological items. The spatial and temporal distributions of temperature‐ and precipitation‐related climate events and extremes have been evaluated using settlement and subregional scales. Also, the geographical distribution of extreme climatological events has been mapped. Annual and seasonal time series have been analysed for the Carpathian basin and compared with other reconstructed temperature and precipitation index time series from other geographical locations outside the Carpathian basin. Copyright © 2004 Royal Meteorological Society