IN 1614 RENWARD CYSAT, BOTANIST, ARCHIVIST AND TOWN HISTORIAN OF Luzern, Switzerland, began a new section of his chronicle entitled ‘The Seasons of the Year’, because ‘the past few years have seen such a strange and wondrous succession of changes in the weather’. He decided to
Record the same as a service and a favour to future generations because, unfortunately, on account of our sins, for some time now the years have shown themselves to be more rigorous and severe in the recent past, and we have seen deterioration amongst living things, not only among mankind and the animal world but also in the earth's crops and produce.2
Cysat was correct: ‘a strange and wondrous succession of changes in the weather’ had begun around the globe – and it would continue for almost a century. In west Africa, records reveal a prolonged drought from 1614 until 1619 both for Angola and for the Sahel (the semi-arid belt of savannah south of the Sahara that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea). In Europe, Catalonia suffered ‘the year of the flood’ in 1617: after over a month of continuous rain, a final four-day downpour washed away bridges, mills, drainage works, houses and even town walls. All Europe experienced an unusually cold winter in 1620–1: many rivers froze so hard that for three months they could bear the weight of loaded carts and, most spectacularly, the Bosporus froze over so that people could walk across the ice between Europe and Asia (apparently a unique climatic anomaly).3
Other parts of the northern hemisphere also experienced abnormal weather. Japan endured its coldest spring of the seventeenth century in 1616; while Chinese Gazetteers recorded heavy snowfall in 1618 in subtropical Fujian (almost as rare as the Bosporus freezing over). Four provinces reported a severe winter in 1620, as did four more in 1621. In the Americas, drought afflicted the valley of Mexico for five years out of six between 1616 and 1621, and reduced the crops in the Chesapeake basin so severely that the new Virginia colony almost failed. After six better harvests, the summer of 1627 was the wettest recorded in Europe during the past 500 years, while 1628 was a ‘year without a summer’, with temperatures so low that many crops never ripened. Between 1629 and 1632, much of Europe suffered excessive rains followed by drought. Conversely northern India suffered a ‘perfect drought’ in 1630–1 followed by catastrophic floods in 1632. All of these regions experienced dramatic falls in population.4
Some better weather followed in the 1630s, but then came three of the coldest summers ever recorded in the northern hemisphere. Drought and cold significantly stunted the growth of trees throughout the western United States between 1640 and 1644, while the Canadian Rockies experienced severe and prolonged drought from 1641 until 1653. Since virtually no rain fell in the valley of Mexico in 1640, 1641 and 1642, the clergy of Mexico City organized processions with the ‘Virgen de los Remedios’, an image believed to possess special efficacy in bringing rain, to beg God's intervention before everyone starved to death (the first time the image had ever been used in consecutive years). Early in 1642, John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, noted that
The frost was so great and continual this winter that all the Bay was frozen over, so much and so long, as the like, by the Indians’ relation, had not been so these forty years … To the southward also the frost was as great and the snow as deep, and at Virginia itself the great [Chesapeake] bay was much of it frozen over, and all of their great rivers.
To the north, English settlers on the coast of Maine complained of the ‘most intolerable piercing winter’ and found it ‘incredible to relate the extremity of the weather’.5
Abnormal droughts also prevailed on the other side of the Pacific. The Indonesian rice harvest failed in both 1641 and 1642; and between 1643 and 1671 Java experienced the longest drought recorded during the past four centuries. In Japan the first winter snow of 1641 fell on Edo (as Tokyo was then known) on 28 November, almost the earliest date on record (the average date is 5 January), and both that year and the next saw unusually late springs. According to a 1642 pamphlet published in the Philippines, because of the ‘great drought’ throughout the archipelago ‘a great famine is feared'; and two years later, a resident of Manila recorded that once again ‘there has been much famine among the Indians [Filipinos] because the rice harvest was a poor one on account of the drought’. In North China, numerous Gazetteers reported drought in 1640 and the following year the Grand Canal, which brought food to Beijing, dried up for lack of rain (another unparalleled event); while in the lower Yangzi valley chroniclers recorded abnormal rain and cold throughout the spring of 1642.6
The lands around the Mediterranean also experienced extreme weather at this time. In March 1640 a messenger approaching Istanbul, ‘with snow up to the horses’ knees’, experienced ‘such a frost that I caught two frozen birds on the way simply with my own hand’. Catalonia endured a drought in spring 1640 so intense that the authorities declared a special holiday to enable the entire population to make a pilgrimage to a local shrine to pray for water – one of only four such occasions in the past five centuries. In 1641 the Nile fell to the lowest level ever recorded while the narrow growth rings laid down by trees in Anatolia reveal a disastrous drought. In Istanbul, by contrast, a chronicler recorded that rain flooded areas near Hagia Sophia so that ‘the shops were under water and destroyed'; while in Macedonia, the autumn saw ‘so much rain and snow that many workers died through the great cold’. Early in 1642 the Guadalquivir broke its banks and flooded Seville, and the years 1640–3 were the wettest on record throughout Andalusia.7
Further north, English men and women noted ‘the extraordinary distemperature of the season in August 1640, when the land seemed to be threatened with the extraordinary violence of the winds and unaccustomed abundance of wet'; while in Ireland, frost and snow in October 1641 began what contemporaries considered ‘a more bitter winter than was of some years before or since seen in Ireland’.8 Hungary experienced uncommonly wet and cold weather between 1638 and 1641, while summer frosts repeatedly devastated crops in Bohemia. In the Alps, unusually narrow tree rings reflect poor growing seasons throughout the 1640s, while estate papers record the disappearance of fields, farmsteads and even whole villages as glaciers advanced up to 1.2 miles beyond their current positions (their furthest extent in historical times). In eastern France, each grape harvest between 1640 and 1643 began a full month later than usual and grain prices surged, indicating poor cereal harvests. In the Low Countries, all along the river Maas (or Meuse), floods caused by snowmelt early in 1643 created ‘the greatest desolation that one could imagine: the houses all broken open and overturned, and people and animals dead in the hedgerows. Even the branches of the highest trees contained a number of cows, sheep and chicken.’ In Iceland, the unusual cold and constant rain ruined the hay, and in 1640 farmers resorted to dried fish as fodder for their cattle. Perhaps most striking of all, a soldier serving in central Germany recorded in his diary in August 1640 that ‘at this time there was such a great cold that we almost froze to death in our quarters and, on the road, three people did freeze to death: a cavalryman, a woman and a boy'; while 1641 remains the coldest year ever recorded in Scandinavia.9
Data from the southern hemisphere reveal a similar climatic aberration. In Chile, drought in the 1630s led the chief inquisitor to apologize to his superiors that he could not send them any proceeds from fines and confiscations because ‘for the past three years we have not collected a penny on account of the drought'; while glaciers, tree rings and carbon-14 deposits all show significantly cooler weather in Patagonia in the 1640s.10 In Sub-Saharan Africa, a severe drought afflicted both Senegambia and the Upper Niger between 1640 and 1644; while Angolan records show a unique concentration of droughts, locust infestations and epidemics throughout the second quarter of the seventeenth century, with a major drought and famine in 1639–45.
The decade ended with another bout of extreme weather around the globe. In 1648, on the Isle of Wight in southern England, a local landowner lamented that ‘from Mayday till the 15th of Septe
mber, we had scarce three dry days together’, and when a visitor asked him ‘whether that weather was usual in our island? I told him that in this forty years I never knew the like before’. Meanwhile, in Scotland, ‘The long great rains for many weeks did prognosticate famine’, and produced 'so great a dearth of corn as Ireland has not seen in our memory, and so cruel a famine, which has already killed thousands of the poorer sort’.11 The following winter, the river Thames froze over as far as London Bridge and the barge arrying the corpse of Charles I to its final resting place after his execution on 30 January 1649 avoided ice floes in the river only with difficulty. Other parts of northwest Europe also experienced unusual precipitation that year – 226 days of rain or snow according to a meticulous set of records from Fulda in Germany (compared with an upper limit of 180 days in the twentieth century) – followed by ‘a winter that lasted six months’. In France, appalling weather delayed the grape harvest into October in 1648, 1649 and 1650, and drove bread prices to the highest levels in almost a century, while floods covered central Paris for much of spring 1649. In China, the winter of 1649–50 seems to have been the coldest on record.12
The 1650s brought no respite. In the Dutch Republic, so much snow fell early in 1651 that the state funeral of Stadholder William II had to be postponed because mourners could not reach The Hague, and then the combination of snowmelt and a storm tide caused the worst flooding for 80 years in coastal regions. Catastrophic floods caused by snowmelt also occurred along the Vistula and the Seine. Conversely, 1651 saw the longest recorded drought in Languedoc and Roussillon, the Mediterranean borderlands between France and Spain: 360 days, or almost an entire year. In the Balkans, in spring 1654 ‘it snowed abundantly, [and] the snow covered the ground until Easter. I have never before seen such snowstorms and frost, moisture and cold.’ Even olive ‘oil and wine got frozen in the jars’. England experienced an ‘unusual drought, which has lain upon us for some years, and still continues and increases upon us, threatening famine and mortality'; while in 1658 John Evelyn judged that he and his compatriots had just lived through ‘the severest winter that man alive had known in England: the crow's feet were frozen to their prey; islands of ice enclosed both fish and fowl frozen, and some persons in their boats’.13
The same ‘landmark winter’ of 1657–8 affected other parts of the northern hemisphere. Along America's Atlantic coast, Massachusetts Bay froze over while the Delaware river froze so hard that deer ran across it. In Europe, people rode their horses on the ice across the Danube at Vienna, across the Main at Frankfurt and across the Rhine at Strasbourg, while barge traffic along the rivers and canals of the Netherlands gave way to sledges. The canal between Haarlem and Leiden remained frozen for 63 days. A Swedish ambassador returning home from Edirne (modern Turkey-in-Europe) noted in February 1658 that the weather was so cold that even migrating birds turned back, ‘causing everyone to wonder'; while the Baltic froze so hard that a horse and cart could pass easily from the mouth of the Vistula at Danzig to the Hell Peninsula, and the Swedish army with all its artillery marched 20 miles over the Danish Sound from Jutland to Copenhagen. Inevitably, the following spring brought disastrous flooding as the snow and ice melted: the Seine again inundated Paris and many other towns, while the dikes in the Netherlands broke in 22 different places. Lieuwe van Aitzema, the official historian of the Dutch Republic, devoted two pages of his chronicle to the extreme climatic events around Europe during 1658, ‘a year in which the winter was as harsh and severe at the beginning as at the end’.14
The seventeenth century saw not only extreme climatic events but also unusual concentrations of them. Of 62 recorded floods of the river Seine in and around Paris, 18 occurred in the seventeenth century. In England (and probably elsewhere in northwest Europe), ‘bad weather ruined the harvests of corn and hay for five years from the autumn of 1646 onwards’, with five more bad harvests in a row between 1657 and 1661. Put another way, 10 harvest failures occurred within the space of 16 years. The Aegean and Black Sea regions experienced the worst drought of the last millennium in 1659, followed by a winter so harsh that the Danube at Girugiu (200 miles inland from the Black Sea) froze so hard in a single night that the Ottoman army marched across the ice into Romania, ‘laying waste all the villages and leaving no blade of grass or soul alive anywhere’. An official noted in his journal that, thanks to war and the weather, ‘Transylvania never knew such misery as this last year [1660]’.15 Extreme weather conditions continued in Europe. Ice floes blocked the Vistula with unequalled frequency, and in March 1657 a ship entering the river Elbe encountered ‘mountaines of ice coming downe the river’ and, despite using ‘long poles to keep off the ice’ all night, ‘at day light wee had a mountaine of ice gathered before us, much higher’ than the vessel itself. In 1675 much of the northern hemisphere experienced a ‘year without a summer’. Ice floes repeatedly clogged and even froze the Thames during the 1660s and 1670s, most spectacularly in 1683–4, when ‘there was a whole streete called the broad streete framed quite over the Thames from the Temple to the Bear Garden, and booths built, and many thousands of people walking sometimes together at once’. For six weeks crowds enjoyed ‘severall Bull baitings’ and ‘all manner of debauchery on the Thames’.16
Poland experienced frost on several summer days in 1664, 1666 and 1667, and 109 days with frost in the year 1666–7 (compared with an average of 63 days today). Further south, in Moldavia, in the summer of 1670,
Terrible floods, frequent showers and heavy rainfall day and night raged for three months on end, destroying all of the best wheat, barley, oats, millet and all types of crop. Because they lie in water and are attacked by too much moisture, they neither ripen nor can bear seeds. Nor can the grasses and herbaceous seeds in hay-fields grow, for frost and water; or, if they do, they cannot be harvested [because] the sun never warms or dries up the land.
In 1686 a military engineer on campaign in what is now Romania complained that ‘for three years now, I haven't seen a single drop of rain’. Lakes and rivers dried up, and ‘in the swampy soil, cracks were so deep that a standing man could not be seen … I doubt if there is another example of such a terrible and lasting drought.‘17 In Russia, tree-ring, pollen and peat-bed data show that the springs, autumns and winters between 1650 and 1680 were some of the coldest on record; and, in China, the winters between 1650 and 1680 formed the coldest spell recorded in the Yangzi and Yellow river valleys over the last two millennia. In Africa, finally, according to a Turkish traveller in the 1670s, ‘no one in Egypt used to know about wearing furs. There was no winter. But now we have severe winters and we have started wearing fur because of the cold.’ Meanwhile, in the Sahel, drought in the 1680s became so severe and so widespread that Lake Chad fell to its lowest recorded level.18
Two artefacts from these years still strikingly reflect the unusually cold climate that prevailed. First, the abnormal frost, snow and ice gave rise to the popular genre of ‘winter landscapes’ by Dutch painters: most art galleries possess at least one, and almost all date from the later seventeenth century. Second, the wooden backs of the peerless violins made by Antonio Stradivari of Cremona in northern Italy display remarkably narrow growth rings, reflecting the unique succession of cold summers in the mid-seventeenth century that stunted the growth of the trees with which he worked.
So much abnormal weather led some contemporaries to suspect that they lived in the middle of a major climate change. In June and July 1675 (the century's second ‘year without a summer’), the Paris socialite Madame de Sévigné complained to her daughter, in Provence, that ‘It is horribly cold: we have the fires lit, just like you, which is very remarkable'; and speculated that ‘like you, we think the behaviour of the sun and of the seasons has changed’. A generation later the Kangxi emperor, who collected and studied weather reports from all over China, noted how ‘the climate has changed’. For example, His Majesty noted, ‘in Fujian, where it never used to snow, since the beginning of our dynasty [1636], it has’.19
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The Search for Scapegoats
Early modern people had good reason to monitor and to fear climate change. In the eloquent assessment of historian Thomas C. Smith:
Farming, with its allied tasks, was the principal occupation and nearly the sole source of income for most families, and its rhythms defined the annual cycle of work, rest and worship. Severe annual variations in the harvest reverberated through family life, determining whether the family ate well or meagrely, whether the old might live another winter, whether a daughter could marry.20
Men and women therefore searched anxiously for explanations.
Many attributed natural disasters to divine displeasure. In China, the heavy and prolonged snows in 1641–2 convinced the scholar Qi Biaojia that ‘Heaven is extremely angry'; somewhat later, the Kangxi emperor claimed that ‘If our administration is at fault on earth, Heaven will respond with calamities from above'; while a Chinese folk song from the period reproached the Lord of Heaven for the catastrophic conditions:
Old skymaster, you're getting on,
Your ears are deaf, your eyes are gone.
Can't see people, can't hear words.
Glory for those who kill and burn;
For those who fast and read the scriptures, Starvation.
Similarly, a Jesuit living in the Philippines speculated that the simultaneous eruption of three volcanoes in 1641 meant that ‘Divine Providence wishes to show us something, perhaps to warn us of some approaching catastrophe, which our sins so deserve, or the loss of some territory, because God is angry’.21
Such statements reflected the prevailing ‘peccatogenic’ outlook (from peccatum, the Latin word for ‘sin’): attributing disasters, including military defeats as well as bad weather and famine, to human misconduct. A circular letter written in 1648 by a new president of the Council of Castile, the minister responsible for internal affairs, was typical: ‘The principal cause of the calamities that afflict this kingdom are the public sins and injustices committed’, and punishing the former and ‘administering justice with due rectitude and speed are the most important ways to oblige Our Lord to provide the successes that this Monarchy needs so much’.22 In Germany the Protestant magistrates of Nuremberg commanded citizens to avert divine displeasure by showing moderation in food, drink and fashion and by refraining from sensual pleasure (especially if it involved adultery, sodomy or dancing). For the same reason, their Catholic neighbour, Maximilian of Bavaria, issued a stream of orders that forbade dancing, gambling, drinking and extramarital sex; limited the duration and cost of wedding festivities; forbade women to wear skirts that revealed their knees; proscribed the joint bathing of men and women; and periodically prohibited carnival and Fastnacht celebrations. The same logic appears in an edict issued by the English Parliament in 1642:
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