Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Whereas the distressed state of Ireland, steeped in her own blood, and the distracted state of England, threatened with a cloud of blood by a civil war, call for all possible means to appease and avert the wrath of God … [and whereas] public sports do not well agree with public calamities, nor public stage-plays with the seasons of humiliation … being spectacles of pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious mirth and levity … all public stage plays shall cease.

  Parliament would later ban Maypoles and prohibit the celebration of Christmas, and in 1648 it ‘authorized and required’ the magistrates of London ‘to pull down and demolish’ all theatres, to have all actors publicly whipped, and to fine all playgoers, because plays tended ‘to the high provocation of God's wrath and displeasure, which lies heavy upon this Kingdom’.23

  The search for scapegoats targeted individuals as well as activities. In Europe, the climatic and economic disasters of the mid-seventeenth century fed a ‘witchcraze’ in which thousands of people were tried and executed because their neighbours blamed them for causing their misfortunes. Most of the victims were women, many of them unable to support themselves unaided; many lived in marginal areas for crop cultivation – in Lorraine, the Rhine and Main valleys for vines; in Scotland and Scandinavia for cereals – where the impact of global cooling was felt first and worst. Thus in southern Germany, a hailstorm in May 1626 followed by Arctic temperatures led to the arrest, torture and execution of 900 men and women suspected of producing the calamity through witchcraft. Two decades later, the Scottish Parliament likewise blamed a winter of heavy snow and rain followed by a cereal harvest of ‘small bulke’ on ‘the sin of witchcraft [which] daily increases in this land'; and, to avert more divine displeasure, it authorized more executions for sorcery than at any other time in the country's history. A ‘witch panic’ also gripped the Hurons of North America between 1635 and 1645, although most of the accused were men; while in China, too, ‘To anyone oppressed by tyrannical kinsmen or grasping creditors’, a witchcraft accusation ‘offered relief. To anyone who feared prosecution, it offered a shield. To anyone who needed quick cash, it offered rewards. To the envious it offered redress; to the bully, power; and to the sadist, pleasure.‘24

  The popularity of stage plays, sodomy and sorcery as explanations for catastrophe in the seventeenth century paled in comparison with five ‘natural’ scapegoats: stars, eclipses, earthquakes, comets and sunspots. In Germany, a Swedish diplomat wondered in 1648 whether the spate of contemporaneous rebellions might ‘be explained by some general configuration of the stars in the sky'; while, according to a chronicler in Spain, only ‘the malign influence of the stars’ could explain the coincidence that ‘in a single year [1647–8] in Naples, Sicily, the Papal States, England and France’, such ‘atrocities and extraordinary events’ had occurred. A few years later, the Italian historian Majolino Bisaccione likewise argued that only ‘the influence of the stars’ could have created so much ‘wrath among the people against the governments’ of his day.25

  Others blamed eclipses. The author of a Spanish almanac felt complete confidence that a recent eclipse of the sun had produced ‘great upsets in war, political upheavals and damage to ordinary people’ between March 1640 and March 1642 (as well as future catastrophes meticulously charted down to the year 2400). A similar English compilation predicted that the two lunar eclipses and unusual planetary conjunction forecast for 1642 would bring ‘many strange accidents’, namely ‘sharp tertian fevers, war, famine, pestilence, house-burnings, rapes, depopulations, manslaughters, secret seditions, banishments, imprisonments, violent and unexpected deaths, robberies, thefts and piratical invasions’. An otherwise hard-headed chronicler writing two years after the Naples revolution of 1647 blamed it all on a recent solar eclipse; while in Iran, another solar eclipse in 1654 led some ‘Persian wise men’ to assert that it meant ‘that the King had died; others said that there would be a war and blood would be shed; still others said wholesale deaths would occur.‘26 In India, even the Mughal emperors took special precautions during eclipses, staying indoors and eating and drinking little; while in Paradise Lost, composed between 1658 and 1663, John Milton noted the popular panic whenever the sun

  … from behind the Moon

  In dim Eclips disastrous twilight sheds

  On half the Nations; and with fear of change

  Perplexes Monarchs.27

  Many seventeenth-century people also speculated that earthquakes and comets presaged catastrophe – perhaps because the frequency of both increased notably. Thus an account of the destruction wrought by an earthquake, volcano and tsunami in the Azores in 1638 concluded: ‘Let the speculative ponder, and the philosopher search out the cause of so portentous an effect.’ A few years later a Dutch pamphleteer assured his readers that the

  Earthquake not long since felt in the year 1640, was a token of great commotions, and mighty shakings of the kingdomes of the earth, for a little before and shortly thereupon was concluded the revolt of Cathalonia, the falling-off of Portugal, the stirres in Scotland, the rebellion of the Irish, [and] those civill (uncivill) warres, great alterations, [and] unexpected tumults in England.28

  Likewise, when severe tremors shook the buildings of Istanbul in 1648, the Ottoman minister and intellectual Kâtib Çelebi solemnly noted that ‘when an earthquake happens during daytime in June, blood is shed in the heart of the empire’: he was therefore not surprised by the murder of Sultan Ibrahim two months later. Records from Romania mention over 40 earthquakes between 1600 and 1690; while according to the Earthquake Catalogue, a peak of activity occurred in the mid-seventeenth century, especially in the ‘ring of fire’ around the Pacific Ocean, where more than two-thirds of the world's major earthquakes normally occur. Contemporaries saw each eruption as a harbinger of disaster.29

  The mid-seventeenth century witnessed not only a peak of seismic activity but also a rare ‘fireball flux’. The English astronomer John Bainbridge was apparently the first to comment, in 1619, on the ‘many new stars and comets, which have been more [numerous] this last century of the world than in many ages before’. He wrote just after the appearance of three comets in 1618, which excited widespread anxiety. Even before they appeared, Johannes Kepler, the foremost mathematician of his day, warned in his Astrological Almanac for 1618 that the conjunction of five planets in May would cause extreme climatic events; and if a comet appeared as well everyone should ‘sharpen their pens’, because it would presage a major political upheaval. Over the winter of 1618–19, a multitude of books and pamphlets in Europe reminded readers that comets ‘signify wars’ and brought in their wake ‘discord, irritations, deaths, upheavals, robberies, rape, tyranny and the change of kingdoms’, and they predicted dire consequences for humanity following the three ‘blazing stars’ of 1618.30 Some observers were more precise: a Spanish friar argued that the comets would prove especially dangerous for the Habsburg dynasty ‘because they have touched us to the quick with the deaths of the empress, the Archduke Maximilian, and most recently the emperor [Matthias] … May God preserve those members of the House of Austria who are left!‘31

  Astronomers in Ming China also interpreted the three comets of 1618 as a portent of major upheavals, while the chronicles of their northern neighbours in Manchuria contain ‘an overwhelming number of reports of such heavenly signs’. In Russia, the same comets provoked discussion and doleful interpretations among ‘wise men'; in India, a Mughal chronicler claimed that ‘no household remained unaffected’ by fear, and blamed the comets for both an epidemic of plague and the subsequent rebellion of the crown prince; while in Istanbul, writers blamed them not only for the extreme weather (especially the freezing of the Bosporus) but also for the deposition of one sultan in 1618, the murder of another in 1622, and the provincial revolts that followed.32

  Belief in the baleful effects of the comets of 1618 proved remarkably enduring. In 1643 a Dutch pamphleteer claimed that the

  Star with a tail, seen in the year 1618, was a
warning and type of a rod that should come over all Christendome, whereupon followed those bloody effects, those horrible warrs, lamentable wastings, barbarous destruction of countreys and cities, the ruine of so many costly buildings, of so many gentlemen, so many inhabitants, men and women, young and old, in Germanie.

  In 1649 a London newspaper considered that the end of the Thirty Years War the previous year was ‘foretold by the Blazing Star which, in the year the war began, appeared over Europe for thirty days and no more’. A generation later in Boston, Massachusetts, the Reverend Increase Mather devoted three pages of his Kometographia, or a discourse concerning comets to the ‘prodigy’ of 1618 which, he claimed, had ‘caused’ not only a major drought throughout Europe, an earthquake in Italy, a plague in Egypt and ‘the Bohemian and Germanic war, in which rivers of blood were poured forth’, but also ‘a plague amongst the Indians here in New England which swept them away in such numbers, as that the living were not enough to bury the dead’.33

  Some contemporaries blamed the catastrophes that afflicted them on a combination of these natural phenomena. A popular Chinese encyclopaedia argued that ‘when Venus has dominated Heaven, wars have arisen on a great scale, and that when comets have dominated Heaven, there have been conflicts over the succession to the throne'; while the Spanish almanac of 1640 already quoted reminded readers that ‘whenever eclipses, comets and earthquakes and other similar prodigies have occurred, great miseries have usually followed’. In 1638 Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy provided the most comprehensive ‘catastrophe catalogue’ of all. He felt sure that

  The heavens threaten us with their comets, starres, planets, with their great conjunctions, eclipses, oppositions, quartiles, and such unfriendly aspects. The air with his meteors, thunder and lightning, intemperate heat and cold, mighty windes, tempests, unseasonable weather; from which proceed dearth, famine, plague, and all sorts of epidemicall diseases, consuming infinite myriads of men.34

  Others doubted such precise links. One Italian historian expressly ridiculed the idea that ‘certain celestial constellations have the power to move the spirits of the inhabitants of a country to sedition, tumults and revolutions’ in many different places at once; while the comets of 1618 provoked animated debates between astronomers and astrologers over whether or not they were capable of causing ‘catastrophes’. Such uncertainty prompted a handful of observers to suggest an alternative natural scapegoat for the extreme weather of the seventeenth century: fluctuations in the number of sunspots – those dark regions of intense magnetic activity on the solar surface surrounded by ‘flares’ that make the sun shine with greater intensity. Even though they incorrectly argued that more sunspots would produce cooler temperatures on earth (whereas the reverse is true), unlike comet and star-gazers, the early solar astronomers had stumbled on an important cause of climate change in the seventeenth century.35

  The development of telescopes as astronomical instruments after 1609 enabled observers to track the number of sunspots with unprecedented accuracy. They noted a ‘maximum’ between 1612 and 1614, followed by a ‘minimum’ with virtually no spots in 1617 and 1618, and markedly weaker maxima in 1625–6 and 1637–9. And then, although astronomers around the world made observations on over 8,000 days between 1645 and 1715, they saw virtually no sunspots: the grand total of sunspots observed in those 70 years scarcely reached 100, fewer than currently appear in a single year. This striking evidence of absence suggests a reduction in solar energy received on earth.36

  Four other sets of data confirm this hypothesis. First, trees (like other plants) absorb carbon-14 from the atmosphere, and the amount rises as solar energy received on earth declines; and many tree-rings laid down in the seventeenth century contain increased carbon-14 deposits, which suggests reduced global temperatures. Second, between October 1642 and October 1644, Johannes Hevelius of Danzig made daily drawings of the sun that recorded the precise location of all spots, and he later printed his findings in a series of 26 ‘composite disks’ that showed not only the number but also the movement of the spots over a few days (Plate 1). Hevelius's ‘disks’ reveal that sunspots were already rare: he seldom saw more than one or two groups at a time. Third, the aurora borealis (the ‘northern lights’ caused when highly charged electrons from the magnetosphere interact with elements in the earth's atmosphere) became so rare that when the astronomer Edmond Halley saw an aurora in 1716 he wrote a learned paper describing the phenomenon – because it was the first he had seen in almost fifty years of observation.37 Finally, neither Halley nor other astronomers between the 1640s and the 1700s mentioned the brilliant corona nowadays visible during a total solar eclipse: instead they reported only a pale ring of dull light, reddish and narrow, around the moon. All four phenomena confirm that the energy of the sun diminished between the 1640s and the 1710s, a condition normally associated with both reduced surface temperatures and extreme climatic events on earth.38

  A further astronomical aberration also troubled seventeenth-century observers living in the northern hemisphere: the appearance of ‘dust veils’ in the sky that made the sun seem either paler or redder than usual. Thus a Seville shopkeeper lamented that during the first six months of 1649 ‘the sun did not shine once … and if it came out it was pale and yellow, or else much too red, which caused great fear’. Thousands of miles to the east, Korea's royal astronomers reported darkened skies during the daytime on 38 occasions during the seventeenth century. On some days they recorded that ‘the skies all around are darkened and grey as if some kind of dust had fallen’.39 Both the dust and the reddened skies stemmed from an unusual spate of major volcanic eruptions in the mid-seventeenth century. Each hurled sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere where it deflected some of the sun's radiation back into space and, thus, significantly reduced temperatures in all areas of the earth beneath the dust clouds.

  Vivid descriptions have survived for two of these volcanic eruptions. In February 1640, in Chile, Mount Villarica ‘began to erupt with such force that it expelled burning rocks … So much burning ash fell into the river Alipen that the waters burned in such a way that it cooked all the fish there.‘40 Less than a year later, on the other side of the Pacific, a Spanish garrison in the southern Philippines saw one day at noon ‘a great darkness approaching from the south which gradually extended over that entire hemisphere and blocked out the whole horizon. By 1 PM they were already in total night and at 2 PM they were in such profound darkness that they could not see their own hands before their eyes.’ Ash fell on them for 12 hours until, early the following morning, ‘they began to see the moon’. They had just witnessed a ‘force six’ eruption, an event so terrifying that the authorities in Manila mounted an inquiry in which ‘various priests and other trustworthy people’ testified that the eruption was heard at exactly the same time ‘throughout the Philippines and the Moluccas, and as far as the Asian mainland, in the kingdoms of Cochin-China, Champa and Cambodia – a radius of 900 miles, a wondrous thing which seems to exceed the bounds of the natural world’.41 The dust veils produced by the 12 known volcanic eruptions around the Pacific between 1638 and 1644 (apparently an all-time record) combined with the sunspot minimum both to cool the earth's atmosphere and to destabilize its climate (Fig. 2).

  Blame it on El Niño?

  The global cooling caused by reduced sunspot and increased volcanic activity seems to have triggered a dramatic change in the climatic phenomena known as El Niño. In normal years, the surface air pressure in the equatorial region of the Pacific is higher in the east than in the west, which means that easterly winds blowing from America to Australia and South East Asia prevail. In cooler years, however, surface air pressure in the equatorial region of the Pacific falls in the east and rises in the west, so the pattern reverses: westerly winds blowing from Asia to America prevail. El Niño episodes dramatically affect the world's climate. As the air above the equatorial Pacific warms each spring it creates massive rain clouds: in a normal year, these fall on Asia as the �
�monsoon’, which nurtures the harvest, but in an El Niño year the monsoon weakens and heavy rains fall instead on America, causing catastrophic floods. Today this reversal – also known as ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation) – happens about once every five years, but in the mid-seventeenth century it happened twice as often: in 1638, 1639, 1641, 1642, 1646, 1648, 1650, 1651, 1652, 1659, 1660 and 1661. This same period saw some of the weakest East Asian monsoons of the past two millennia.42

  Admittedly historians cannot ‘blame El Niño’ for everything. Some regional climates are El Niño sensitive; others, even though contiguous, are not. Thus, in southern Africa, the eastern Cape is susceptible to El Niño-related droughts whereas the western Cape is not; likewise, droughts in northeast Brazil appear to occur in El Niño years but those in western Mexico do not. The ‘global footprint’ of El Niño normally includes three regions besides the lands adjoining the Pacific: the Caribbean suffers floods; Ethiopia and northwest India experience droughts; and Europe suffers hard winters. In most of the 20 El Niño episodes recorded between 1618 and 1669, and in all 12 between 1638 and 1661, each of these regions experienced adverse weather.