In his pioneering essay on ‘The General Crisis Debate’ in 1959, Hugh Trevor-Roper used a flamboyant metaphor to describe the impact of the revolutions of the mid-seventeenth century. Afterwards, he wrote, ‘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’ (page xvii above). The chapters in Part II offered support for these claims regarding France, Spain, Britain, Germany and its neighbours; and made parallel assertions for the ‘temperature’ in some areas beyond Europe (China, Russia, Poland and the Ottoman empire). The chapters in Part III argued that Tokugawa Japan, Spanish Italy, Mughal India and its neighbours, as well as some parts of Africa and the Americas, managed to avoid a ‘final thunderstorm’, but still experienced an unpleasant ‘series of rainstorms’.
Trevor-Roper's metaphor does not do full justice to the magnitude of the change. Above all, massive mortality often accompanied the ‘series of rainstorms’, so that fewer – in many regions, far fewer – humans were alive in the 1680s than in the 1640s. In China, the Ottoman empire, Russia and much of Europe, prolonged wars as well as famine and disease caused the death of millions of men, women and children; while hundreds of thousands died in the Gujarat famine in India in 1630–2 and in the Kan'ei famine in Japan in 1641–3. Perhaps the most important characteristic of the ‘new age’ discerned by Trevor-Roper after the mid-century was thus one that he overlooked: far fewer humans faced the risk of famine in the 1690s than in the 1640s and 1650s. The demand for food no longer exceeded local supplies so egregiously.
Yet depopulation alone cannot explain the lack of political upheavals during the ‘climax of the Little Ice Age’. Disasters, as Christof Mauch reminds us, often have a phoenix effect: those who survive a crisis often emerge better prepared to cope with any sequel. Catastrophes ‘have improved emergency preparedness and spurred technological developments; they have also reduced the vulnerability of humans both in the emergent phase of natural catastrophes and during post-disaster recovery’ – a phenomenon sometimes termed ‘Creative destruction’.8 Those who survived the mid-seventeenth century developed a wide variety of ‘coping strategies’. Some involved escapism (indulging in pursuits that dulled the senses amid encircling horror: chapter 20). Others were innovative (limiting the spread of plague through quarantine, and of smallpox through inoculation; planting new crops with greater resistance to climate change; rebuilding towns in brick and stone to reduce the risk of catastrophic fires, and creating fire-insurance companies: chapter 21). Others still involved the resort to new forms of ‘practical’ or ‘scientific’ knowledge, in the hope not only of repairing the damage done by past catastrophes but also of reducing the impact of future ones – a legacy of the Global Crisis that helped to lay the foundations of the Great Divergence between the West and the Rest of the World (chapter 22).
20
Escaping the Crisis
Getting Away From It All
MANY OF THOSE WHO LIVED IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REACTED TO adversity and anxiety which they could neither explain nor avoid in much the same way as their descendants today: some killed themselves; others went to consult a therapist or a cleric; while others found solace in an absorbing pastime. All three categories are difficult to document, because they left few traces in the surviving sources. Some of those who committed suicide subsequently appeared in court records (such as the findings of the juries convened by the coroners of England) or in chronicles (like the Mingmo zhonglie jishi, ‘True record of Late Ming extreme loyalty’, which honoured over 1,000 Chinese men and women who killed themselves rather than obey the Qing conquerors). A few left a note of explanation, like the desperate Chinese elite women who wrote tibishi, ‘poems inscribed on walls’, before killing themselves; or like the Scottish Soldier of Fortune, Patrick Gordon, who became ‘careles of myself’ when he returned to his camp, wounded after trying to rescue his captain in battle, only to receive a reproach for breaking ranks. This ‘did so vexe me’ that, with ‘a desperate resolution’, he ‘rode into the field betwixt’ the two armies ‘to seeke death … swinging my pistol about my head [to] provoke any of them out to exchange bullets’. He was lucky to survive this suicide mission with only flesh wounds.1
Most of those who in adversity sought the advice of doctors, therapists and clerics left even fewer documentary traces – often in the cryptic records kept by those they consulted. Thus the doctors of the first permanent Military Hospital in the world, at Mechelen in the Spanish Netherlands, began to encounter a new ailment among soldiers in the 1640s. They labelled it el mal de corazón – literally, ‘heart-trouble’ but apparently a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder that made men unfit for service. Another diagnosis that probably referred to the same condition was estar roto (‘to be broken’); and, like those with el mal de corazón, sufferers were deemed useless for service and sent home.2 Across the Channel, about forty people each month consulted William Lilly, the most famous astrologer in England, about their future. Most of them were women, who wanted to know ‘Was she with child?’ ‘Should she go on a journey or not?’; ‘If the man she loves be in France or England?’; ‘How long her husband would live and which of them would die first’; ‘Whether she has any enemies’; and, most simple of all, ‘What sort of life she would have?’ Lilly cast each patient's horoscope, on which he based his answer, before recording the details in his case books.3 Lilly's contemporary Richard Napier, an English country parson who gained national fame as a ‘therapist’ (to use today's nomenclature), filled 15,000 folios with his notes on consultations with some 40,000 patients. He deemed over 2,000 to be ‘troubled’, and over 150 ‘suicidal’. Twice as many women as men sought his help with psychological distress, and roughly half of them reported anxieties about courtship, marriage and bearing children. A quarter of them had recently been bereaved. Most of the ‘troubled patients’ also reported economic stress, chiefly through debt (not surprising given the hard times in which they lived). One-third of his ‘troubled’ patients were in their twenties while one-twelfth were over 60 (these two age cohorts comprised, respectively one-quarter and one-fifth of the population at large); and servants formed by far the largest occupational category.4
Richard Napier determined that many of his troubled patients suffered from ‘melancholy’, or ‘clinical depression’, and the same diagnosis occurs in the case-books of Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, the most famous (and best paid) European physician of his day. His clients included Oliver Cromwell, the future Lord Protector, whom Turquet diagnosed in 1628 as ‘valde melancholicus’ (exceedingly depressed); and Princess Elizabeth, Charles I's youngest daughter, of whom Turquet wrote in 1650 that ‘after the death of her father, she fell into a great sorrow, whereby all the other ailments from which she suffered were increased’. She died shortly afterwards.5
Turquet and Cromwell had both read The Anatomy of Melancholy, a book by the Oxford academic Robert Burton that became a best-seller despite its enormous length (over 350,000 words in the first edition, rising to over 500,000 in later ones), which argued that ‘melancholy’ was ‘a disease so grievous, so common’ that ‘in our miserable times’ few ‘feele not the smart of it’. He anatomized at great length the ‘Melancholy which goes and comes upon every smal occasion of sorrow, need, sicknesse, trouble, feare, griefe, passion, or perturbation of the minde, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, heavinesse and vexation of the spirits’, concluding that ‘from these melancholy dispositions, no man living is free’. Burton was no exception. He confessed to his readers that ‘I write of melancholy, by being busie to avoid melancholy’; and like several of Napier's patients, the condition killed him – in 1640 he hanged himself in his college rooms.6
Patients with untreated ‘melancholy’ could endanger others as well as themselves. John Felton, an army officer, was described by his brother as having ‘a melancholy dispositi
on’, while his former neighbour remembered him as ‘a melancholy man much given to reading of books’. Among Felton's reading matter in 1628 was a ‘Remonstrance’ denouncing the duke of Buckingham, Charles I's Favourite. After brooding for several weeks over the accusations it contained, Felton decided to ‘make himself a martyr for his country’. To this end he purchased a kitchen knife made of best Sheffield steel, sidled up behind the duke after breakfast one morning, and killed him with a single stab. Felton had no thought of escape: he had placed two statements justifying the deed inside his hat, in case he died in his attempt, and when instead he had the chance to escape amid the confusion, he announced ‘I am the one’ (thereby ensuring, as he must have anticipated, his arrest, torture and public execution).7
Robert Burton included the medieval Muslim physician and philosopher Avicenna among his numbing barrage of learned citations, because Avicenna's Canon of medicine contained a section on the ‘melancholy’ caused by fear, misfortune and thwarted affections. Burton's Muslim and Jewish contemporaries were, of course, also familiar with Avicenna and with the concept of melancholy (h.uzn in Arabic) as a response to extreme stress, which emerges from a rare surviving report on someone who sought professional advice from a cleric. Although most individual conversations remain forever secret, when Jewish rabbis encountered thorny moral issues they sometimes sought written guidance from their learned colleagues, thus creating a paper trail. A case from the Little Ice Age that involved melancholy arose when a devout Sephardic Jew arrived in Egypt as the fiscal officer of a new provincial governor, leaving his wife behind him in Istanbul. ‘From the day he arrived,’ the local rabbis noted, ‘he was afflicted with various terrible illnesses so that he was falling apart’. First the man consulted Jewish physicians and then, after they gave up on him, a Christian doctor who immediately diagnosed the problem: ‘The illness had turned into melancholia’ because the man's ‘semen had built up and created an abscess in his body, and the vapors were rising to his head and reaching the heart’. The doctor predicted that if the official ‘kept up in this way without discharging, the illness would overcome him’. Jewish doctrine ruled out masturbation, and the official's marriage contract explicitly prohibited bigamy. So he asked the local rabbis for advice. They responded by interviewing both the Jewish and Christian doctors themselves, and then ‘conducted our own very thorough search in the books of the physicians to see whether an illness like this really exists in the world’. They eventually found that Avicenna's Canon contained a description that supported the diagnosis: sexual intercourse. Reasoning that even if they summoned the man's wife from Istanbul, the build-up of semen might kill him before she arrived, the rabbis allowed him to break his marriage oath and marry a second wife so he could ejaculate his way out of melancholy without committing the sin of Onan.8
Samuel Pepys would have had no problem here, for he committed that sin on many occasions and in many places, including the Chapel Royal during a Christmas Eve service – a feat that he recorded in the diary he kept for nine years. He also recorded his sexual encounters with over fifty women – several of them in 1665, when the departure of his wife and servants from London to avoid the Great Plague afforded him unusual freedom to sin. As disease ravaged the semi-deserted capital, according to the coded shorthand entries in his diary, he kissed and fondled waitresses in taverns, harassed maids in churches and bribed a waterman's daughter to masturbate him as her father rowed him down the Thames. He also committed adultery repeatedly, while ‘next door on every side is the plague’, with his mistress (and occasionally with his mistress's daughter). Sex even penetrated his dreams. As the death toll around him rose, he had ‘the best [dream] that ever was dreamed – which was that I had my Lady Castlemaine [the king's mistress] in my arms and was admitted to use all the dalliance I desired with her’.9 In September 1665 he wrote that ‘in this sad time of plague everything else hath conspired to my happiness and pleasure, more for these last three months than in all my life before in so little time. God long preserve it’. The Creator evidently hearkened to His promiscuous servant, because at the end of the year Pepys wrote that ‘I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much [money]) as I have done this plague-time’.10
Seventeenth-century people elsewhere also sinned in order to avoid thinking about the disasters that surrounded them. In Germany, Elector Maximilian of Bavaria denounced in 1636 what he called the ‘frivolous lifestyle’ (leichtfertige Leben) that had developed among his subjects during ‘the recent years of war’. He lamented that ‘Illegitimate pregnancies, especially in the countryside, among unmarried peasants and other common people’ and ‘the abominable vice of adultery’ had become ‘just as common as cursing and blasphemy among old as well as young people of both sexes’. Magistrates and ministers in neighbouring Protestant states agreed: ‘All vices, and particularly swearing, have grown rampant because of the war,’ one lamented; ‘Instead of making people more pious, the war made people nine times worse,’ echoed another. In Japan, four years after watching thousands die in Edo's catastrophic Meireki fire of 1657, Asai Ryōi published his Tales of the floating world, which called upon his readers to ‘live only for the moment’ and to keep melancholy at bay by ‘singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves in just floating, floating; caring not a whit for the pauperism staring us in the face, refusing to be disheartened’.11
In China, many Ming intellectuals and scholar-officials escaped misery in a less flamboyant way by becoming ‘monks on a scale unprecedented in any previous dynastic transition’. Some developed a religious vocation in response to ‘the alienation from government affairs and feelings of despair, failure, worthlessness, and self-blame’ felt by many Ming ministers; others did so after the Qing issued their edicts on tonsure and apparel, because Buddhist monks shaved their entire skull and wore traditional robes. They could therefore not be forced to grow a queue and wear Manchu dress, and could thus avoid overt rejection of the new dynasty (a choice that normally ended in death: see chapter 5 above).12 Some of these refugees entered a monastery and spent the rest of their lives there; while others, especially those whom the Qing wanted to arrest, kept moving from one retreat to another. The latter group included Ye Shaoyuan, who wrote a three-part autobiography describing the misery he saw in and around Shanghai during the Ming-Qing transition. In August 1645, as ‘the enemy descended south in great numbers’ and ‘the orders for cutting hair rained down fast’, he and his four surviving sons began ‘our journey to conceal ourselves as monks’ in the mountains along the Jiangsu–Zhejiang border. Over the next three years Ye noted in his journal the people he met and the things he heard, revealing that the hills around his refuge teemed with former subjects of the Ming disguised as hermits and monks. They paid each other visits and exchanged news, poems and gifts; on one occasion Ye found almost 150 other ‘monks’ at a clandestine ceremony.13
Other discontented or disoriented members of the Han Chinese elite followed the example of their predecessors and cultivated elaborate gardens where they sought seclusion and composed poems, plays and prose. Others succumbed to fatalism. Thus Yao Tinglin, a minor Chinese official living near Shanghai, sensed that with a new dynasty, a new dress code and a new social hierarchy, by 1645 he had entered ‘another world, with no restoring of the old order’, and that he had been ‘reborn in a new world’ – a classic ‘post-traumatic stress’ response. After failing first as a trader and then as a farmer, in 1657 Yao became a minor government official – but he failed at this, too, running up considerable debts. As he entered his fourth decade in 1667, he wrote in his journal: ‘I have the feeling that most of these forty years have been spent for nothing – that I have been through incredible hardship and yet have accomplished nothing so far’. The next year, he therefore resigned his official post, went back to the family village and opened a school. He worked as a teacher for the remaining three decades of his life.14
Some discontented and disoriented Europeans followed simil
ar escapist strategies. In France, the chaos caused by the Fronde led the prominent critic of Mazarin, Robert Arnauld d'Andilly, who also looked after the gardens at the convent of Port Royal des Champs, near Paris, to publish a learned treatise on ‘How to grow fruit trees’, which offered an escape from insoluble political problems via raising, training and pruning trees to maximize their yields – an obvious metaphor for the peaceful pursuits that would restore prosperity. Throughout Europe, the seventeenth century saw the rise of the ‘geometrical garden’, which not only offered a secluded place of escape but allowed those wearied or intimidated by the malign force of nature to tame it at the microcosmic level through obsessively trimmed gardens.15 In England, Charles I sought distraction during his final captivity by annotating his copy of Shakespeare's plays, to ‘improve’ the Bard's language, and wrote down ‘my most impartial thoughts, touching the chief passages, which have been most remarkable or disputed, in my late troubles’, interspersed with prayers, published posthumously as Eikon Basilike. Soon afterwards one of his disheartened supporters, Izaak Walton, wrote an overt invitation to escapism: The Compleat Angler, or the contemplative man's recreation, a conversation between a hunter, a falconer and a fisherman about pastimes that allowed the depressed to escape from the fractured world around them. First published in 1653, it has seen over 400 editions.16
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