Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  A ‘public sphere’ Elsewhere?

  Although Islam is a ‘religion of the book’, and although Arabic is an alphabetic language, few parts of the vast Muslim world saw the emergence of anything resembling a ‘public sphere’ in the seventeenth century. ‘The Blacks’ of West Africa, according to a French missionary, ‘do not write: except for the marabouts [Sufi sheikhs] and some great lords, no one knows how to read or write’. Moreover, according to a French merchant who lived in Senegal in the 1670s, ‘scarcely anyone, except those who want to be marabouts, study’ – and even then, he added superciliously, ‘they learn nothing except reading and writing. They devote themselves to no learned subject.’73 It seems likely that many other parts of the Islamic world resembled Senegal: literacy remained confined to the clergy and involved only religious learning.

  India, by contrast, boasted both a large literate population and a rich literary culture. In the Mughal empire, an army of scribes ‘copied and produced manuscripts in the hundreds of thousands’ both in Persian and in the various languages of the subcontinent, some of them dealing with statecraft and politics; but their readership – and therefore their impact on the political life of the richest state on earth – thus far remains unknown. In south India, however, ‘everyday records were not penned on paper, but rather pressed into palm leaves, creating manuscripts that to survive had to be recopied each century’. Therefore most surviving Tamil documents from the period are poems, since only poems were deemed worthy of permanent preservation. In the Hindu states, finally, intellectuals deemed mere ‘events’ insignificant and so few written accounts recorded them.74

  The intellectual life of the Ottoman empire was very different. The learned official Kâtib Çelebi (1609–57) read works both in Arabic and (thanks to the help of a French convert to Islam) in some Western languages, and eventually made a list of ‘the many thousands of volumes in the libraries I had personally examined, and the books which for twenty years the book-sellers had been bringing me in a steady stream’. His bibliography contained almost 15,000 titles. Although the sultans allowed no work in Arabic to be printed, over 20 manuscript copies of Kâtib Çelebi's bibliography survive today, which suggests a widespread interest in learning.75 Assessing the actual impact of this literature is far harder. For example, Kâtib Çelebi made no effort to circulate a penetrating analysis of the problems facing the Ottoman state, which he composed in 1653. ‘Since I knew that my conclusions would be difficult to apply,’ he wrote, ‘I took no further trouble about it’. He merely hoped that ‘a sultan of some future time will become aware of it’ (see chapter 7 above).

  The Ottoman sultans allowed only two groups of their subjects to use printing presses: Orthodox Christians and Jews. In 1627 Patriarch Cyril Lukaris of Constantinople (born a Venetian subject in Crete and educated at Padua University) imported a Greek-language printing press from England on which, with the aid of two Protestants, he produced editions of Patristic texts. But the jealous Catholics resident in the Ottoman capital persuaded the sultan that this was a seditious venture, and he shut down the printing press within a few months (and later deposed and executed Lukaris).76 This development left only the presses of Jewish printers in Istanbul and Thessaloniki, who turned out Hebrew works in fascicles (rather than in completed books), which allowed authors to receive comments that could be addressed in later segments. These printed works were distributed at synagogues on Shabbat, deposited in libraries (some of them public) and sent to notable scholars (some of whom made copies for use by their students), ensuring that news and ideas circulated far and fast. In the 1650s the Jewish community of the Anatolian port-city of Izmir, of which Shabbatai Zvi had been a member, began to print works not only in Hebrew but also in Spanish, including a new edition of Manasseh ben Israel's influential Hope of Israel.77

  Just as in China, travellers played a major role in spreading news and ideas within the Ottoman empire. The central government tried to ensure that its senior officials rotated posts, so that they did not ‘put down roots’ in any area, and although the system did not always succeed, thousands of senior administrators, judges and soldiers travelled from one location to another at regular intervals. The career of Evliyā Çelebi (1611–?80) offers an interesting example. Trained in Istanbul for a career in government service, he kept a detailed record of his assignments in Africa, Asia and Europe on military campaigns and on business, fiscal and diplomatic missions – during which he met and conversed with thousands of people. His account eventually filled ten volumes.78 Many other Muslims travelled around the empire to study with noted teachers. For example, Sheikh Niyāzī-i Mīşri (1618–94), born in a small Anatolian town, went to a neighbouring city with many medreses to study the Qur'an before migrating to Cairo (whose popular name at that time, ‘Mīşr’, he adopted). For three years Niyāzī-i Mīşri lived in the city, attending classes in the ‘university’ attached to the al-Azhar mosque, and residing in a Sufi lodge: both there and in the numerous marketplaces and coffee houses of Cairo, he met and conversed with scholars from all over the Muslim world. Then he wandered through western Anatolia and the Balkans, eventually attracting followers of his own who came to study with him. In the 1640s he went into exile, first on the island of Rhodes and then on Lesbos, for suggesting that Sultan Ibrahim, all his sons and his leading ministers were ‘Jewish’ – a taint that (if true) rendered them unfit to rule over Muslims – and proposing the replacement of the ‘corrupted’ house of Osman with the Crimean khans. Yet despite his exile, Mīşri boasted many followers who read copies of his writings and formed a small Sufi order after his death.79 Although Niyāzī-i Mīşri never went to Mecca, many others did, for Islam expects every male Muslim to make a pilgrimage (hajj) there at least once. Along the way, as well as at their destination, pilgrims met people from other places with different experiences, skills and information, and thus expanded their mental horizons.

  The history of two other religious movements – the Kadizadeli and the Shabbateans – demonstrates how far and how fast news and ideas could travel in the mid-seventeenth-century Muslim world. Disciples spread the teachings of Kadizade Mehmet all over the Ottoman empire. When Evliyā Çelebi visited a remote town in eastern Anatolia in the 1650s, he witnessed a government soldier who claimed to be a Kadizadeli destroy a beautifully illustrated Persian manuscript because, he said, it contained pictures of humans and so was contrary to the teachings of the Prophet. The numerous Ottoman soldiers stationed in Egypt also included disciples of Kadizade. As late as 1711, long after the movement had faded in the capital, a group of soldiers from Anatolia who had recently read the treatise that formed the cornerstone of Kadizadeli teaching ran amok in Cairo, defacing the tombs of local religious zealots and assailing the city's religious elite.80

  The speed with which news of Shabbatai Zvi's meteoric career spread within the Ottoman empire and beyond is more surprising, both because Judaism was not the official faith of any state and because most rabbis and many Ottoman officials regarded him as a fraud (see chapter 7 above). Nevertheless, six months after Nathan of Gaza declared Shabbatai to be the Messiah in May 1665, the news had spread throughout the Jewish communities of North Africa from Cairo to Salé, on Morocco's Atlantic coast. It also reached Istanbul, and from there spread to Jewish communities in the Balkans, Hungary, Moldavia and the Crimea; while Jewish printers in the Ottoman capital published two volumes of devotions composed by Nathan, one for nocturnal use and the other ‘arranged to be said daily, brought from the Land of Zvi [Palestine]’.81 As soon as Shabbatai announced in December 1665 that he intended to travel to Istanbul to confront the sultan, thousands of Jews ‘from Poland, the Crimea, Persia and Jerusalem, as well as from Turkey and the Frankish lands’ converged on the Ottoman capital, and they were there to greet him when he arrived two months later.82 Shabbatai's fame even reached the Americas: Jewish communities in the Caribbean islands expressed interest, while in Boston, Massachusetts, Increase Mather preached several sermons that drew atten
tion to the ‘constant reports’ received ‘that the Israelites were upon their journey towards Jerusalem, from sundry foreign parts in great multitudes’.83

  This rapid diffusion of Shabbatai's message on four continents reflected not only its appeal at a time of millenarian excitement within both Judaism and Christianity, but also the impressive network of ‘connectors’ who linked the Jewish communities of the eastern Mediterranean with the rest of the world. Shabbatai himself had lived in many cities of the Ottoman empire before 1665, while his father had worked for the English merchants in Izmir, and his Polish-born wife had lived in Amsterdam, Venice and Livorno as well as in Egypt. Nathan of Gaza and the others rabbis who joined Shabbatai's entourage each boasted an extensive network of personal contacts whom they deluged with letters and (later) personal visits authenticating the Messiah's claims. In addition, western merchants and diplomats resident in the Ottoman empire wrote detailed reports to their principals, spreading the news along Europe's Atlantic coast as far as Hamburg, where the rabbis inserted a blessing for Shabbatai in their prayers. In just 18 months, Shabbatai and his network of ‘connectors’ had turned the claim made by an obscure Jewish scholar in Hebron into a world-wide movement. Only news of his apostasy in September 1666 put an end to it.84

  The Rule of the Few

  Despite the existence of extensive networks, new and old, for ‘spreading the word’ about important events, most of those events originated with a very small group of people who played a disproportionate role in ‘turning the world upside down’ (to use a popular phrase in Revolutionary England). Thus in 1640, a contemporary who watched the segadors rampage through the streets of Barcelona guessed that the hard core numbered no more than 500. The following year, Lord Maguire planned to take Dublin with fewer than 200 men (an enterprise that fewer than 40 English officers accomplished in 1659); and about the same number enabled Sir Phelim O'Neill to capture almost all the strongholds of Ulster. In 1647 Masaniello began with no more than 30 ‘ragazzi’, many of them teenagers, when he turned a dispute over fruit excise in Naples into revolution; while Giuseppe d'Alesi had 12 co-conspirators when he seized control of Palermo. Both consolidated their authority with fewer than 500 ‘men and boys’.85 The following year Bohdan Khmelnytsky began his Cossack revolt with no more than 250 followers; the men ‘with blackened faces so they would not be known’ who destroyed government records in the Andalusian town of Lucena also numbered 500; and Guru Hargobind, the Sikh leader, likewise led no more than ‘500 youths’. Even successful revolutions might involve surprisingly few actors. In 1640 the coup d'état in Lisbon, a city of 175,000 people, that permanently restored Portuguese independence, involved at most 40 noblemen with about 100 followers; while 20 years later, George Monck entered London, a city of perhaps 250,000 inhabitants, with fewer than 6,000 soldiers, exhausted after a 350-mile march in winter from the Scottish border. They nevertheless sufficed to end Britain's Republican experiment for ever.

  The explanation for such asymmetry – for how ‘little things make a big difference’ – lies in contingency, and especially in timing. In the words of a frustrated but perceptive French diplomat in London during the Civil War, ‘affairs here change so fast that one no longer reckons time by months and weeks, but by hours and even by minutes’.86 The same was true elsewhere. In Ireland, the Catholic rebellion gained unstoppable momentum when the O'Neills and their allies persuaded the castellans of half a dozen Ulster forts to admit them on the night of 22–23 October 1641 – only a few hours before a warning arrived from Dublin. Six years later, the duke of Arcos lost control of events in Naples in the few minutes it took for Masaniello and his ‘boys’ to win over the holiday crowds in the Piazza del Mercato. In each case, the government disposed of far superior resources right up until the ‘tipping point’, but the failure to deploy them in timely fashion proved fatal because the new information networks rapidly spread the ‘contagion’ of revolutionary ideas – just as, a century later, the failure of British patrols to detain Paul Revere on his ride allowed him to spread the ‘virus’ that would begin the American Revolution.

  PART V

  BEYOND THE CRISIS1

  THE POLITICAL, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC UPHEAVALS KNOWN AS THE GENERAL Crisis largely ceased in the 1680s, yet global cooling continued for another generation. Average temperatures in 1687–1700 were 1.5°C lower than in the preceding decade; and in the Paris region, the average monthly temperature fell below freezing eight times between 1691 and 1697 – a phenomenon never seen again. The 1690s saw by far the coldest period in several long runs of European temperature records, leading climatologists to christen the decade the ‘climax of the Little Ice Age’.2 Although these oscillations may seem small, they were in fact enormous – especially in such a short period – since each change of 0.1°C advances or retards the ripening of crops by one day. The global cooling of the 1690s delayed harvests by an average of two weeks in temperate zones, and by far more in sub-boreal regions. Sea temperatures around the Orkney Islands and Scandinavia in the 1690s were 5°C lower than today. In June 1695, after perhaps the worst winter in the past 500 years, it snowed as far south as Lviv in the Ukraine; and a series of cool summers caused widespread crop failures.

  Then, after a spell of warmer weather, in 1708–9 Europe suffered what survivors would call the ‘Great Winter’. On the night of 5–6 January 1709, the temperature in Paris fell from 9°C to –9°C, and stayed well below freezing for almost three weeks; Saintes on France's Atlantic coast received 24 inches of snow; on France's Mediterranean coast temperatures plunged to –11°C; at Venice, the rich went skating on the lagoon. January 1709 was the coldest month recorded in the past 500 years. Although temperatures rose in February, they fell again just as the winter cereal crops began to sprout, killing them all. The price of grain reached its highest level of the entire ancien regime (Fig. 51).3

  The underlying causes of this global cooling remained the same as before. Astronomers still saw virtually no sunspots. El Niño episodes increased in frequency (1687–8, 1692, 1694–5 and 1697). Volcanic activity peaked in 1693–4 (with major eruptions at Serua in Indonesia, Hekla in Iceland and Komagatake in Japan, all VEI 4; and at Vesuvius and Etna in Italy, both VEI 3) and again in 1707–8 (with at least ten major eruptions, including Vesuvius and Santorini, both VEI 3, and Mount Fuji, VEI 5, which released perhaps 30,000 cubic feet of volcanic ash, some of which fell on Edo, some 62 miles away). Temperatures fell throughout the northern hemisphere.4

  51. The ‘Great Winter’ of 1708/9.

  Dozens of people across France recorded the moment when rain turned to snow, and water turned to ice, at Epiphany 1709. Their attention reflected not only the rapid progress of Siberian air from Flanders to the Mediterranean – one of the last recorded ‘extreme weather events’ of the Little Ice Age – but also an increased awareness of climate change, and of the dangers that it posed. The year 1709 saw not only the coldest months recorded in the past five hundred years but also an abnormally wet summer.

  As usual, extreme natural phenomena caused widespread human distress. In autumn 1690 Ottoman troops in the Balkans endured from ‘snow, rain and frost. The snow, being as high as the horses' chests, barred the roads, and the infantry could no longer move on; many animals dying, the officers were left to go on foot.’ Everyone experienced great ‘shortage of provisions’ and ‘the hardships and sufferings they endured had never been seen before’. In China, an extensive drought produced widespread famine in 1691–2; while in New Spain, in those same years, hailstorms, a plague of locusts and torrential rains followed by drought and early frosts destroyed two maize harvests in a row and initiated a prolonged drought that lasted until 1697. Across the Atlantic, in Finland, some 500,000 people perished during the famine years of 1694, 1695 and 1696, and it took six decades for the country's population to recover.5 In France, winter ice and summer rains in 1693–4 caused misery ‘unknown in the memory of man’ and ‘without parallel in past centuries’; and between 1691 and 1701
climate change killed over a million people – a mortality, as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has observed, equal to France's losses during the Great War, but culled from a population that numbered only 20 (not 40) million. A further 600,000 French men and women died during the Great Winter. In addition, those who survived these famines remained stunted for life, reaching an average height of only 5 feet – among the shortest Frenchmen ever recorded.6

  As in the mid-seventeenth century, these episodes of climatic adversity occurred in wartime. Hostilities between Louis XIV of France and his enemies convulsed western Europe between 1689 and 1697, and again between 1702 and 1713; the Great Northern War between Charles XII of Sweden and his enemies affected much of eastern Europe between 1700 and 1721; the Qing emperor Kangxi led huge armies in the conquest of Inner Asia in the 1690s; while the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb campaigned ceaselessly against the Marathas and their allies in central India. All of these wars involved heavy taxation and caused widespread devastation.

  It is therefore astonishing that although the persistence of war and global cooling caused misery and suffering on a scale that resembled the 1640s and 1650s, it was not accompanied by similar social and political upheavals – that is: the climax of the Little Ice Age did not coincide with the climax of the General Crisis. Admittedly, popular ‘tumults’ broke out in several cities of New Spain, including the viceregal capital, and in some regional capitals of the Ottoman empire; while in France, the famine of 1709 that followed the ‘Great Winter’ provoked almost 300 anti-tax revolts and far more bread riots. Even in Paris, crowds pillaged the bakeries and stoned the city guard. But none of these upheavals attracted the participation of ‘people who hope only for a change’ – the alienated aristocrats, intellectuals and clerics who had challenged and sometimes overthrown governments a generation before. Moreover the unrest of 1709 remained unequalled until 1789. There were no more Frondes. The ‘fatal synergy’ had ended.7