Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Finally, in societies where many protagonists were illiterate, slogans and songs also played an important role in maintaining the coherence of rebellions. Chronicles of the Naples revolution of 1647–8 record some 30 popular slogans, ranging from alarms when the crowd feared a Spanish counter-attack (’Arme, arme! Serra, serra!‘: ‘To arms, close ranks!’) to more aggressive chants (’Ammaza, ammaza‘: ‘Kill, kill’). Some of them rhymed:

  May the people of Naples always advance;

  Long live God and the king of France!

  By far the commonest slogans, in Naples as elsewhere in western Europe, were either economic or political: ‘Long live the king and down with the evil government!’ and ‘Long the king and down with taxes!’64 Some crowds also made social demands in rhyme. In England, a popular song first heard in 1640 had the refrain ‘Heigh then up go we’ attached to verses that attacked the social hierarchy, good manners, ‘wanton women’, subordination and the universities. Many contemporaries later remembered this as the ‘revolutionary catchphrase that preceded the Civil War’, but many more followed. Rump: or an exact collection of the choycest poems and songs relating to the late times. By the most eminent wits, from anno 1639 to anno 1661, published in 1662, contained 210 ‘scandalous, libellous songs’ that had entertained and animated English men and women during the previous decades of turbulence.65

  Other European revolutionary songs included the 54-verse ‘Fadinger Song’ (Upper Austria, 1626); an anthem in honour of Martin Laimbauer (Lower Austria, 1636); the Cossacks’ ‘Victory march’ (Ukraine, 1648); and the ‘New Song of William Tell in the Entlebuch’ (Swiss Confederation, 1653). In Ireland, Gaelic bards composed and sang poems of freedom, and many accounts of the 1641 rebellion record pipers entertaining rioters.66 Some rousing rebel songs composed in the seventeenth century enjoyed a long life. The melody of one of the many songs that commemorated Stenka Razin's revolt of 1670 entered the Western ‘hit parade’ three centuries later as ‘The carnival is over’. Two seventeenth-century revolutionary songs are still sung by crowds today. The Song of the Segadors, with verses protesting against the troops and the policies imposed by the count-duke of Olivares and calling for an armed defence of Catalan liberty, first heard in the summer of 1640, has become the ‘hymn of Catalonia’ (albeit with some modernization of both words and tune).67 In the Dutch Republic, a volume entitled Netherlands Anthem of Commemoration, first published in 1626, included patriotic songs and dances honouring major successes against ‘Spanish tyranny’. One of the most powerful songs – Merck toch hoe sterck (‘See now the strength’), written to celebrate Bergen-op-Zoom's successful resistance to a Spanish siege in 1622 – is still sung today at tense moments during Dutch football matches.68

  Concession or Repression?

  Sophisticated popular revolts placed governments everywhere in a quandary. On the one hand, many saw rebellions as dominoes and feared that failure to respond swiftly and harshly would embolden others. In the words of a bishop in Spanish Peru in 1635 seeking to justify strong measures against a critic of royal taxation, from ‘small sparks are great fires easily set alight, and it is more prudent to remedy the damage in its beginning than to attempt to quench it when difficult or impossible’. The count-duke of Olivares heartily agreed. Two years later he feared that granting concessions to the rebels of Évora

  would lead not only the rest of Portugal but also all His Majesty's realms in Europe, in America and in India to do the same, and with very good reason, because they would risk nothing in doing so since they would know that one miserable town, just by rebelling, had obliged its king to come to terms – and to come to terms favourable to them.

  Shortly afterwards, in Scotland, faced with demands for major constitutional concessions, the marquis of Hamilton (Charles I's cousin and senior adviser on Scottish affairs) issued a similar warning that unless the king refused ‘he might quit his three crowns for they [his opponents] would trample over them all’.69

  On the other hand, although Olivares and Hamilton were correct, ignoring the pleas of desperate or intransigent subjects could also provoke disaster. In the 1620s Francis Bacon asserted that ‘rebellions of the belly are the worst’, and two decades later the English parliamentary leader John Pym worried about the ‘tumults and insurrections of the meaner sort of people’ that would arise if they could not buy bread, because ‘nothing is more sharp and pressing than necessity and want: what they cannot buy they will take’.70 In 1648, facing the worst harvest in living memory, a petition to Parliament from the porters of London warned that unless they received relief, their economic straits would ‘force your petitioners to extremities, not fit to be named, and to make good that saying, that necessity has no law’. A pamphlet entitled The mournful cries of many thousand poor tradesmen likewise reminded Parliament that ‘necessity dissolves all laws and government and hunger will break through stone walls’. That same year, in Italy, the rioters of Fermo opined that ‘it is better to die by the sword than to die of hunger’; while in France a lawyer at Bordeaux reported philosophically to the central government after a major food riot: ‘There is nothing so natural as to fight to save one's life. Since bread is the most common source of food, men work all the harder to possess it. The poor fear that they will never have enough of it, because they are not always sure of having it; and this fear translates, in their minds, shortage into famine.’71

  Mindful of these dangers, many governments granted short-term concessions to protestors. Caprice or scruples on the part of a ruler could also sometimes bring relief. In China, each emperor normally forgave unpaid taxes to celebrate his accession or the birth of an heir. In 1641 Philip IV even established a ‘committee on conscience’ to examine whether any of the taxes he had imposed might have been unjust and therefore offended God, because ‘I do not want to benefit from any tax that has the slightest suspicion of injustice’.72 Many governments also established permanent machinery to consider individual appeals for tax relief. In China, magistrates regularly petitioned the central government for forgiveness or reduction of taxes, or at least for a delay in collection, because their district had suffered from some natural disaster. Not all did so in vain. In Tancheng county, in Shandong province, for instance, the magistrate petitioned the Board of Revenue for tax relief in the wake of a devastating earthquake in 1668: officials from the Board made a personal inspection and, 18 months later, local taxpayers received a 30 per cent reduction, either as ‘forgiveness’ or, if they had already paid, as a rebate. The Board also reduced the county's compulsory labour services for the upkeep of roads and bridges. In the Ottoman empire, the sultan's council spent one day of each week hearing appeals from individuals, villages or groups of villages for a reduction in their tax assessment. Some cited a recent drought, flood or bandit attack, or general depopulation, to argue that the community could no longer meet its obligations; others argued that they were wrongly included in a tax register (often because they were already on another); a few protested against extortion. Although the subsequent inquiry sometimes discovered taxpayers falsely trying to reduce or escape their obligations, normally the government agreed that an error existed in the registers, and therefore reduced or ‘forgave’ the taxes specified in the thousands of petitions they considered.73 In Castile, the law code decreed that royal commands contrary to conscience or the Catholic faith need not be obeyed, and many taxpayers therefore appealed to local judges against over-assessment, or pleaded misfortune or changed circumstances to justify non-payment. The judges often reacted sympathetically and, if they did not (as in the Ottoman empire), the taxpayers might send a petition directly to the crown protesting against their burdens. The king's financial advisers duly considered them – often favourably.74

  Admittedly, the same legal code that tolerated disobedience on grounds of conscience in Castile also treated resistance to authority as a capital offence, but the judges often hesitated to impose draconian penalties for fear of provoking a backlash. Thus although the
supreme court of Castile tried 336 people involved in nine separate anti-seigneurial riots between 1620 and 1685, it sentenced only 10 to death and fewer than 100 to forced labour. Obviously, Castile experienced far more than nine anti-seigneurial riots in this period, so what happened to the rest?75 The saga of a riot at Aldeanueva de Ebro (a village in Spain's Rioja region) and its aftermath offers an instructive example of how sustained procrastination could minimize repression. In 1663 news arrived that the king had sold Aldeanueva, until then part of the royal domain, to a nobleman. Its inhabitants rioted, shouting the universal slogan in such situations – ‘Long live the king and death to the bad government!’ – along with grievance-specific shouts of ‘Let's kill whoever wants to sell us like dogs!’ and, more remarkably, ‘Fuenteovejuna! Fuenteovejuna!’ The last slogan referred to a play of that name written 50 years before by Spain's most famous dramatist, Lope de Vega, about the medieval peasant community of Fuenteovejuna that had rioted against abuse by its lord but afterwards refused to identify the ringleaders. Likewise at Aldeanueva, when agents of the new lord tried to round up some of the philo-thespian rebels none of them would name the ringleaders. A judge therefore declared 67 villagers guilty, but the community appealed the decision right up to the Supreme Court of Castile which, 20 years after the events, ruled that the evidence against those convicted was insufficient and ordered a re-trial – by which time most of the participants were dead. Only two of the rioters ever seem to have received any punishment.76

  In a few cases, violent resistance could produce permanent concessions. Thus in 1641, in southwest France near to the war-zone with Spain, rioters burnt the offices of the king's tax collectors to the ground and ran his officials out of town to shouts of ‘Thieves and taxmen: we'll kill you and exterminate all your kind so that no memory [of you] will remain.’ The town magistrates, fearing reprisals, sent agents to Paris to explain the hardship from which their town suffered and, on this occasion, the king acknowledged the justice of his subjects’ complaints and the unreasonable behaviour of the tax collectors: a letter arrived from the agents that began ‘Gentlemen: give thanks to God! No more taxes!’77 Royal concessions like this received massive publicity – printed posters proclaiming the news went up everywhere – giving the impression that popular resistance ‘worked’; but governments seldom crumbled like this.

  Revolt and resistance always involved high risks because governments normally treated those who opposed them as traitors.78 When the Chinese community in the Philippines rebelled in 1639, for example, the Spanish governor had all Chinese held in captivity shot in cold blood, murdered all Chinese servants in Christian households, and set fire to Manila's Chinese suburb, incinerating all within it. The insurgents would have fared no better in their native land, since both the Ming and Qing Law Codes laid down draconian penalties for all rebels and their families, and most Chinese uprisings therefore ended in mass executions.79 Rebels against the Romanovs in Russia met a similar fate. After the Moscow rising of 1662 against currency debasement and high food prices, the tsar

  Dealt horribly with those involved in the uprising: over 400 persons, not counting those who drowned, have been executed, some beheaded, and [some] hanged. Others have had their feet and hands cut off and their tongues cut out of their throats. They have put 700 [persons] in chains, and these will be sent as soon as possible to Siberia with their wives and children, each one [of the men] with a brand mark burned into his left cheek … Each of the young boys who were found among the rebels – 12 or 14 years old – has had an ear cut off as a warning to others.80

  Likewise in India, according to Emperor Jahangir, although ‘there is scarcely a province in the empire in which, either in battle or by the sword of the executioner, five and six hundred thousand human beings have not, at various periods fallen victims to this fatal disposition to discontent and turbulence’.81

  Many governments in western Europe also made sure defeated rebels received ‘exemplary punishment’ – a phrase that appears repeatedly in official documents, such as those discussing the proper measures to take in the aftermath of the Nu-Pieds of Normandy in 1639. In the event, Louis XIII sent his senior judge, Chancellor Pierre Séguier, to punish the guilty, and he tried over 300 prisoners, sentencing almost 30 to death and 15 more to perpetual exile (with many more sentences passed in absentia on those who had fled). Séguier also levied huge fines on all towns involved, ordered reparations for those whose property had been destroyed, and demanded immediate payment of all tax-arrears (enforced by the troops he brought with him). In 1648, in the wake of the food riots at Fermo in Italy, the town's overlord (the Pope) sent 1,500 troops, who immediately began to hunt down the rioters. Aided by denunciations, printed descriptions of the ringleaders and a papal dispensation to enter churches to arrest those who had sought sanctuary, they eventually captured and tried 30 men. Of these, they executed six and sent ten more as prisoners to row the papal galleys (often equivalent to a sentence of death). They then proceeded to raze the rioters’ houses and those of the other accused who had fled; to confiscate their moveable goods; and to ban 17 of the ineffective magistrates (almost one-third of the town's elite) and their descendants from ever holding public office again.82

  In England, finally, the victors in the Second Civil War executed Charles I and scores of his followers (especially those from Scotland and Ireland), and sentenced thousands more to perpetual servitude (draining the Fens, mining Tyneside coal, and labouring in the American colonies); and in 1685, the Catholic James II exacted a terrible price from the rebels who supported the attempt of his nephew, the Protestant duke of Monmouth, to seize the throne. According to Monmouth's own account, he landed in Devon, in the southwest of England, with scarcely 80 men but four weeks later, when he confronted the royal army he commanded perhaps 7,500. Few escaped. ‘The fight actually continued half an hour,’ the duke observed, with few losses on either side, but ‘great slaughter was made in the pursuit’. Of the 1,300 men captured, the government butchered some immediately, executed almost 300 more (including the duke) after a rapid trial, and sentenced 850 to penal servitude in the American colonies.83

  Even governments that promised pardon and concessions to rebels who surrendered might renege as soon as they had the upper hand. The most notorious example occurred in Naples. When Gennaro Annese and the other rebel leaders agreed to surrender, Don Juan of Austria promised the city's inhabitants a ‘general pardon for all crimes, whether committed through ignorance or malice, even if they involved treason, together with immunity from all excise duties’, and the restoration of the privileges granted by Charles V. But Philip IV later asked a committee of theologians ‘if we were obliged to uphold the pardons granted to the Neapolitans and respect the oaths sworn to respect the privileges. Their response was negative.’ The count of Oñate, who took over from Don Juan as viceroy, announced that his predecessor ‘had acted according to the status he then held, but now it was up to him to proceed according to what he found’, and almost immediately created a network of agents and spies to denounce enemies of Spain, and special courts to try them. Over the next three years, several hundred former rebels – called Masanielos in the Spanish sources – were executed, starting with Annese and several Capopopoli of other towns in the kingdom, and several thousand more were proscribed (they survived only because they fled abroad). Oñate also reneged on many other concessions agreed at the surrender, destroying the marble tablets on the ‘Epitaph’ (Tavolato), which contained a ‘permanent’ copy of the Capitoli secured by Masaniello. Then he tore down the structure itself, replacing it with the ‘Oñate fountain’ that now stands in front of the State Archives.84

  Whether governments opted for concession or repression to restore order, most regarded rebellions as inconsequential unless or until members of the elite became involved. Thus on hearing of a popular uprising in Évora, Portugal's second city, in 1637, the count-duke of Olivares wrote dismissively: ‘Normally we would take very little notice because we
see popular tumults every day without any ill-effects’ – yet half the kingdom was soon in revolt. Cardinal Richelieu was equally dismissive when he first heard of the Catalan revolt three years later, doing nothing because ‘most disorders of this nature are normally just a brush fire (un feu de paille)’ – yet the rebellion continued for almost two decades.85 More rashly, in 1648, Cardinal Mazarin dismissed the ‘Day of the Barricades’ in Paris with exactly the same metaphor: ‘The mild disorders that occurred in this city,’ he reassured a colleague, were ‘just a brush fire which we extinguished as easily as it began’ – yet the French capital had just experienced the worst disorders it had seen in 60 years, or would see again until the French Revolution.

  What Olivares, Richelieu and Mazarin failed to realize was that significant segments of the social elite seethed with resentment, that they sought any plausible excuse to ‘turn petty rifts into major fights’, and that they ‘think that if there is a rebellion they can steal what they want’. An official in the Papal States, forced to flee from rioters in 1648, had a better grasp of the nature of popular revolts: ‘One must never underestimate the facility with which the common people [la Plebe] allow themselves to be persuaded by anyone who expresses concern for their fate,’ he warned the Pope. In particular ‘impassioned gentlemen are highly effective in making the people believe the impossible, especially when clothed in zeal for the public good’.86 Amid all the disasters of the mid-seventeenth century, ‘impassioned gentlemen’ became ‘highly effective in making the people believe the impossible’. They were not alone.