Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  • Pictorial representations of natural phenomena (paintings or engravings that show the position of a glacier's tongue in a given year, or that depict ice floes in a harbour during a winter of unusual severity).11

  • Epigraphic or archaeological information, such as inscriptions on structures that date flood levels, or excavations of settlements abandoned because of climate change.

  • Instrumental data. Starting in the 1650s, in Europe, some observers regularly recorded weather data, including precipitation, wind direction and temperatures.12

  The failure of most historians to exploit the data available in these two ‘archives’ for the seventeenth century is particularly regrettable, because an intense episode of global cooling coincided with an unparalleled spate of revolutions and state breakdowns around the world (including Ming China, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Spanish Monarchy), while other states came close to revolution (notably, the Russian and Ottoman empires in 1648; and the Mughal empire, Sweden, Denmark and the Dutch Republic in the 1650s) (Fig. 1). In addition, Europe saw only three years of complete peace during the entire seventeenth century, while the Ottoman empire enjoyed only ten. The Chinese and Mughal empires fought wars almost continuously. Throughout the northern hemisphere, war became the norm for resolving both domestic and international problems.

  Historians have christened this age of turmoil ‘The General Crisis’, and some have seen it as the gateway to the modern world. The term was popularized by Hugh Trevor-Roper in an influential essay, first published in 1959, which argued that

  The seventeenth century did not absorb its revolutions. It is not continuous. It is broken in the middle, irreparably broken, and at the end of it, after the revolutions, men can hardly recognize the beginning. Intellectually, politically, morally, we are in a new age, a new climate. It is as if a series of rainstorms has ended in one final thunderstorm which has cleared the air and changed, permanently, the temperature of Europe. From the end of the fifteenth century until the middle of the seventeenth century we have one climate, the climate of the Renaissance; then, in the middle of the seventeenth century, we have the years of change, the years of revolution; and thereafter, for another century and a half, we have another, very different climate, the climate of the Enlightenment.13

  But of ‘climate’ in its literal sense Trevor-Roper said not a word, even though the upheavals he described occurred during a period marked by global cooling and extreme weather events.

  The climatic evidence is both clear and consistent. Daily readings from an international network of observation stations reveal that winters between 1654 and 1667 were, on average, more than 1ˆC cooler than those of the later twentieth century.14 Other records show that 1641 saw the third coldest summer recorded over the past six centuries in the northern hemisphere; the second coldest winter in a century experienced in New England; and the coldest winter ever recorded in Scandinavia. The summer of 1642 was the 28th coldest, and that of 1643 the 10th coldest, recorded in the northern hemisphere over the past six centuries; while the winter of 1649–50 seems to have been the coldest on record in both northern and eastern China. Abnormal climatic conditions lasted from the 1640s until the 1690s – the longest as well as the most severe episode of global cooling recorded in the entire Holocene Era – leading climatologists to dub this period ‘The Little Ice Age’.15

  1. The Global Crisis.

  Although Europe and East Asia formed the heartland of the ‘General Crisis’, the Mughal and Ottoman empires, like the European colonies in America, also experienced episodes of severe political disruption in the mid-seventeenth century.

  This volume seeks to link the climatologists’ Little Ice Age with the historians’ General Crisis – and to do so without ‘painting bull's eyes around bullet holes’: without arguing that global cooling ‘must’ have somehow caused recession and revolution around the world simply because climate change is the only plausible common denominator. Le Roy Ladurie was absolutely correct to insist in 1967 that ‘The historian of seventeenth-century climate’ must ‘be able to apply a quantitative method comparable in rigour if not in accuracy and variety to the methods used by present-day meteorologists in the study of twentieth-century climate’, and he regretted that this goal was then unattainable.16 The sources now available, however, allow historians to integrate climate change with political, economic and social change with unprecedented precision. Accounts of climatic conditions in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas in the mid-seventeenth century abound, while millions of measurements of tree-rings, ice-cores, pollen deposits and stalactite formations are available.17

  Nevertheless, the new data, however abundant and however striking, must not turn us into climatic determinists. As early as 1627, Joseph Mede, a polymath with a special interest in astronomy and eschatology who taught at Christ's College, Cambridge, pointed out a methodological pitfall: any increase in observations may simply reflect an increase in the number of observers. Thus when he heard almost simultaneously about an earthquake near Glastonbury and ‘another prodigie from Boston [Lincolnshire] of fire from heaven’, Mede observed sagely: ‘Either we have more strange accidents than was wont, or we take more notice of them, or both.’ Subsequent research has corroborated Mede's surmise. For example, while modern astronomy has confirmed that the seventeenth century indeed witnessed an unusual frequency of comets, humans took ‘more notice of them’ – both because the proliferation of telescopes enabled more of them to be seen from earth, and because dramatic improvements in gathering and disseminating news meant that every sighting soon became known to more people.18

  A second obstacle to the accurate assessment of climatic data by historians is the role of infrastructure and contingency. On the one hand, the deleterious consequences of colder or wetter weather may be mitigated if a community has either a well-stocked granary or access to food imported through a neighbouring port. On the other hand, war may create famine even in a year of bountiful harvest by destroying or disrupting the food supply on which a community depends. In the aphorism of Andrew Appleby: ‘the crucial variable’ was often ‘not the weather but the ability to adapt to the weather’.19 This volume therefore examines not only the impact of climate change and extreme climate events on human societies during the seventeenth century, but also the various adaptive strategies taken to survive the worst climate-induced catastrophe of the last millennium.

  Introduction: The ‘Little Ice Age’ and the ‘General Crisis’

  IN 1638, FROM THE SAFETY OF HIS OXFORD COLLEGE, ROBERT BURTON informed readers of his best-selling book, The anatomy of melancholy, that ‘every day’ he heard news of

  War, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions; of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turky, Persia, Poland, etc; daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times affoord; battels fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwracks and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarums.

  Four years later, the English Civil War started and a group of London merchants lamented that ‘All trade and commerce in this kingdom is almost fallen to the ground through our own unhappy divisions at home, unto which the Lord in mercy put a good end. And as the badness of trade and scarcity of money are here, so is all Europe in little better condition, but in a turmoil, either foreign or domestic war.’ In 1643 the preacher Jeremiah Whitaker warned his hearers that ‘[These] days are days of shaking, and this shaking is universal: the Palatinate, Bohemia, Germany, Catalonia, Portugal, Ireland, England.’ Normally, Whitaker argued, God ‘shakes all successively’, but now it seemed that He planned to ‘shake all nations collectively, jointly and universally’. Indeed, he speculated, so much simultaneous ‘shaking’ must herald the Day of Judgement:1

  That same year, in Spain, a tract entitled Nicandro [The victor] made the same point.

  Sometimes Providence condemns the world with universal and evident cal
amities, whose causes we cannot know. This seems to be one of the epochs in which every nation is turned upside down, leading some great minds to suspect that we are approaching the end of the world. We have seen all the north in commotion and rebellion, its rivers running with blood, its populous provinces deserted; England, Ireland and Scotland aflame with Civil War.

  ‘What area does not suffer,’ the Nicandro concluded rhetorically, ‘if not from war, then from earthquakes, plague and famine?’, repeating: ‘This seems to be one of the epochs in which every nation is turned upside down, leading some great minds to suspect that we are approaching the end of the world.‘2

  In Germany, a Swedish diplomat expressed alarm in 1648 at a new bout ‘of revolts by the people against their rulers everywhere in the world, for example in France, England, Germany, Poland, Muscovy, the Ottoman empire’. He was well informed: civil war had just begun in France, and continued to rage in England; the Thirty Years War (1618–48) had left much of Germany devastated and depopulated; the Cossacks of Ukraine had rebelled against their Polish overlords and massacred thousands of Jews; revolts rocked Moscow and other Russian cities; and an uprising in Istanbul led to the murder of the Ottoman sultan. The following year, a Scottish exile in France concluded that he and his contemporaries lived in an ‘Iron Age’ that would become ‘famous for the great and strange revolutions that have happened in it’. In 1653, in Brussels, historian Jean-Nicolas de Parival used the same metaphor in the title of his book, A short history of this Iron Century, containing the miseries and misfortunes of recent times. ‘I call this century the “Iron Century”’, he informed his readers, because so many misfortunes ‘have come together, whereas in previous centuries they came one by one’. He noted that rebellions and wars now ‘resemble Hydra: the more you cut off their heads, the more they grow’. Parival also noted that ‘The elements, servants of an irate God, combine to snuff out the rest of humankind: mountains spew out fire, the earth shakes, plague contaminates the air’, and ‘the continuous rain causes rivers to flood’.3

  Seventeenth-century China also suffered. First, a combination of droughts and disastrous harvests, rising tax demands and drastic cutbacks in government programmes unleashed a wave of banditry and chaos. Then, in 1644, one of the bandit leaders, Li Zicheng, declared himself ruler of China and seized Beijing from the demoralized defenders of the Ming emperor (who committed suicide). Almost immediately, China's northern neighbours, the Manchus or Qing, invaded and defeated Li, entered Beijing, and for the next 30 years ruthlessly extended their authority over the whole country. Several million people perished in the Ming-Qing transition.

  Few areas of the world survived the mid-seventeenth century unscathed. North America and West Africa both experienced famines and savage wars. In India, drought followed by floods killed over a million people in Gujarat between 1627 and 1630; while a vicious civil war in the Mughal empire intensified the impact of another drought between 1658 and 1662. In Japan, following several poor harvests, in 1637–8 the largest rural rebellion in modern Japanese history broke out on the southern island of Kyushu. Five years later famine, followed by a winter of unusual severity, killed perhaps 500,000 people.

  The fatal synergy that developed between natural and human factors created a demographic, social, economic and political catastrophe that lasted for two generations, and convinced contemporaries that they faced unprecedented hardships. It also led many of them to record their misfortunes as a warning to others. ‘Those who live in times to come will not believe that we who are alive now have suffered such toil, pain and misery,’ wrote Fra Francesco Voersio, an Italian friar, in his Plague Diary. Nehemiah Wallington, a London craftsman, compiled several volumes of ‘Historical notes and meditations’ so that ‘the generation to come may see what wofull and miserable times we lived in’. Likewise Peter Thiele, a German tax official, kept a diary so that ‘our descendants can discover from this how we were harassed, and see what a terribly distressed time it was'; while the German Lutheran Pastor Johann Daniel Minck did the same because, ‘without such records … those who come after us will never believe what miseries we have suffered’.4 According to the Welsh historian James Howell in 1647, ‘‘Tis tru we have had many such black days in England in former ages, but those parallel'd to the present are to the shadow of a mountain compar'd to the eclipse of the moon’; and he speculated that

  God Almighty has a quarrel lately with all Mankind, and given the reins to the ill Spirit to compass the whole earth; for within these twelve years there have the strangest Revolutions and horridest things happened, not only in Europe but all the world over, that have befallen mankind (I dare boldly say) since Adam fell, in so short a revolution of time … [Such] monstrous things have happened [that] it seems the whole world is off the hinges; and (which is the more wonderful) all these prodigious passages have fallen out in less than the compass of twelve years.5

  In 1651, in his book Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (then a refugee from the English Civil War living in France) provided perhaps the most celebrated description of the consequences of the fatal synergy between natural and human disasters faced by him and his contemporaries:

  There is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of Time; no arts; no letters; no society. And, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.6

  When did this fatal synergy commence? In his History of the civil wars of these recent times of 1652, the Italian historian Majolino Bisaccione traced the sequence of ‘popular revolts in my lifetime’ back to the rebellion of Bohemia in 1618, which had attracted the support of some German Protestants, led by Frederick of the Palatinate, and so began a civil war in Germany. Seven years later, the English antiquarian John Rushworth agreed. When he sought to explain, ‘how we came to fall out among ourselves’ in the English Civil War, he too started his account back in 1618 because his research convinced him that the conflict originated in ‘the causes and grounds of the war in the Palatinate, and how far the same concerned England, and the oppressed Protestants in Germany’. Rushworth also noted the appearance of three comets of unusual brilliance in 1618, which (like almost all his contemporaries) he interpreted as a harbinger of evil. He therefore ‘resolved that very instant should be the Ne Plus Ultra of my retrospect’.7

  The available evidence amply vindicates the chronology proposed by Bisaccione and Rushworth. Although Europe had experienced many earlier economic, social and political crises, they remained largely isolated and relatively short-lived. By contrast, the Bohemian revolt began a prolonged conflict that lasted three decades and eventually involved all the major states of Europe: Denmark, the Dutch Republic, France, Poland, Russia, Sweden, the Swiss Confederation and, above all, the Stuart and Spanish Monarchies. The year 1618 also saw long-running crises commence in two other parts of the world. In the Ottoman empire, a palace faction deposed the sultan (the first such event in the history of the dynasty), unleashing a series of catastrophes that a generation later the scholar-bureaucrat Kâtib Çelebi would term Haile-i Osmaniye: ‘The Ottoman Tragedy’. Meanwhile, in East Asia, Nurhaci, leader of a tribal confederation in Manchuria, declared war on the Chinese emperor and invaded Liaodong, a populous area of Chinese settlement north of the Great Wall. Some observers immediately realized the significance of this step. Years later, Wu Yingji, a gentleman-scholar, recalled ‘a friend telling me, when the difficulties began in the eighth month of 1618 in Liaodong, that the state would have several decades of warfare; and my thinking that his words were absurd because the state was quite intact’. Nevertheless the ‘friend’ had been right: the Manchu invasion initiated almost seven ‘decades of warfare’.8

  These events took place ag
ainst a background of extreme weather events. Many parts of sub-Saharan Africa suffered a serious drought between 1614 and 1619; Japan experienced its coldest spring of the seventeenth century in 1616; heavy snow fell in subtropical Fujian in 1618; the winter of 1620–1 was intensely cold in Europe and the Middle East; drought afflicted both the valley of Mexico and Virginia for five years out of six between 1616 and 1621. Finally, 1617 and 1618 marked the beginning of a prolonged aberration in the behaviour of the sun, signalled first by the reduction and then by the virtual disappearance of sunspots. For all these reasons, this book follows the lead of Bisaccione, Rushworth, Kâtib Çelebi and Wu Yingji's friend: 1618 is ‘the Ne Plus Ultra of my retrospect’.

  When did the fatal synergy end? Here the evidence is less consistent. In 1668 Thomas Hobbes began Behemoth, his account of the English Civil Wars, by observing that

  If in time, as in place, there were degrees of high and low, I verily believe that the highest of times would be that which passed between the years 1640 and 1660. For he that thence, as from the Devil's Mountain, should have looked upon the world and observed the actions of men, especially in England, might have had a prospect of all kinds of injustice and all kinds of folly that the world could afford.9

  Yet exactly 20 years later another revolution occurred: William of Orange landed at the head of the largest army ever to invade first Britain and then Ireland, in both of which he created a new regime. On the European continent, most of the contentious issues unleashed by the revolt of Bohemia were resolved between 1648 and 1661, but France's invasion of the Palatinate in 1688 generated a new conflict. In the Ottoman empire, in the 1650s the Grand Vizier Köprüllük Mehmet managed to end the cycle of domestic rebellion and, during the following decade, his son and successor defeated all foreign enemies and the empire began to expand again; but the defeat of the Turkish army before Vienna in 1683 halted the Ottoman advance into Europe and led to the deposition of another sultan.