Does the seventeenth-century evidence support this analysis? Certainly, the major revolts almost all broke out in a period of unparalleled climatic adversity, notably when a ‘blocked climate’ produced either prolonged precipitation and cool weather or prolonged drought (1618–23, 1629–32, 1639–43, 1647–50, 1657–8 and 1694–6). Some areas suffered for longer: both Scotland (1637–49) and Java (1643–71) suffered the longest droughts in their recorded history. The century also saw a run of ‘landmark winters’, including some of the coldest months on record, and two ‘years without a summer’ (1628 and 1675); and an unequalled series of extreme climatic events – the freezing over of both the Bosporus (1620) and the Baltic (1658); the drying up of China's Grand Canal (1641); the maximum advance of the Alpine glaciers in 1642–4. In 1641 the river Nile at Cairo fell to the lowest level ever recorded, while Scandinavia experienced its coldest winter ever recorded. These various climatic aberrations accompanied a major episode of global cooling that lasted at least two generations: something without parallel in the past 12,000 years. The famines caused by this change in the global climate caused what would today be called a ‘humanitarian crisis’ in which millions of people starved to death.
These same years of dearth also saw rebellions and revolutions, with two distinct ‘peaks’: Normandy, Catalonia, Portugal and its overseas empire, Mexico, Andalusia, Ireland and England in 1639–42; and Naples and Sicily, France, England (again) and Scotland, Russia, the Ottoman empire and Ukraine in 1647–8. Sometimes a link between rebellion and climate change is manifest. Thus, in Scotland, the summer of 1637 (in which Charles I sought to impose his new liturgy) was the driest in two decades, while 1638 (when he refused to make concessions to his Scottish opponents) was the driest in a century. Government innovation and inflexibility at a time of unprecedented climatic adversity led many Scots to join the Covenanting revolt. The earl of Lothian, a prominent landowner, spoke for many when (having described how, in October 1637, ‘the earth has been iron in this land’, ruining the harvest) he wrote ‘I think I shall be forced this term to run away and let the creditors of the estate catch that catch may, for I cannot do impossibilities’. In the event, his lordship did not ‘run away’. He had already signed the formal protest against the new Prayer Book; six months later he signed the National Covenant. In 1640 Lothian led a regiment in the invasion of England, declaring that ‘necessitie made us come from home’ and ‘in our laufull defence WE DARE DIE’.21 In Ireland, too, the failed harvests of 1638–41 caused widespread hardship among the Catholic population, disposing many to support the rebellion that began in October 1641, when ice and snow covered many parts of the island; and then followed ‘a more bitter winter than was of some years before or since seen in Ireland’, which turned the brutal mistreatment of Protestant settlers by their Catholic neighbours into a massacre that would in turn provoke massive retaliation.22 Likewise, in East Asia, the repeated harvest failures caused by adverse weather in the early 1640s had two dramatic political effects. First, the famines and popular rebellions in Jiangnan fatally weakened the Ming as they struggled against the inroads of ‘roving bandits’ from the northwest. Second, drought and cold in Manchuria so reduced harvest yields that the Qing leaders concluded that invading China offered the only way to avoid starvation.23
Climate-induced dearth also contributed to many other rebellions. Perhaps, as Leon Trotsky wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917, ‘the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were, the masses would always be in revolt’ – but the privations inflicted by climate change in the mid-seventeenth century were an exception. The revolts in Évora in 1637, Palermo in 1647, Fermo in 1648, and the ‘Green Banner’ revolts of Andalusia in 1652, began in just the same way as the greatest rebellion of the twentieth century in Petrograd in 1917: when adverse weather ruined a harvest and thereby created a food shortage that brought hungry people onto the streets shouting ‘bread’.24
In such a tense situation, even a small increase in government pressure could produce an apparently disproportionate popular reaction. The revolt of the towns of Sicily in 1647 began when the government decreed an end to the subsidy that had kept down the price of bread; while the Naples revolution a month later began when the viceroy reimposed an unpopular excise on fruit. In both cases, Philip IV overrode the misgivings of his ministers because he needed funds to pay for his wars – despite the fact that domestic rebellion opened a ‘second front’. The same perverse logic prevailed in the French Monarchy, where Louis XIII repeatedly raised taxes in times of high food prices, so that his subjects had no money left to buy bread. ‘Long live the king; death to taxes!’ became the cry of rebellious subjects throughout Europe.
Governments could also stimulate or spread insurrections by other means. Charles I's insistence on imposing a new liturgy on Scotland in 1637 inflamed and united his opponents as nothing else could have done. The desecration by royal troops of the churches in villages that defied them had the same effect in Catalonia in 1640; as did the decision of the Qing regent Dorgon to enforce the head-shaving edict on all males in China in 1645. The revolt of the Catalans would last for 18 years; the resistance of Ming loyalists would last for 38 years. Ineptitude by rulers could also encourage resistance. In Naples the inability of the eletto del popolo to settle a squabble over who should pay the ‘fruit excise’ on the morning of 7 July 1647 allowed Masaniello and his ‘boys’ to galvanize irate bystanders into action. During the summer of 1648, revolts broke out in Moscow when the tsar refused to receive a ‘Supplication’ from his subjects that condemned corruption among his ministers, and in Paris when the regent botched an attempt to arrest her leading opponents as they left a service in Notre Dame cathedral. The ineffective use of force by governments in the initial stages of a rebellion could also prove disastrous. In Barcelona in 1640, in Naples at 1647 and in Messina in 1674, rebellions began just after the galley squadrons based in each port city departed to fight elsewhere.25
The most violent opposition to governments in the mid-seventeenth century often began in a capital city – a circumstance that reflected the greater vulnerability of all urban areas to both climatic change and to government abuse. The major revolts against Charles I and Philip IV all began in a political capital (in Edinburgh, Dublin and London against the former; in Barcelona, Lisbon, Palermo and Naples against the latter), as did other insurrections that rocked and sometimes toppled seventeenth-century regimes: Prague in 1618; Istanbul in 1622, 1648 and 1651; Manila in 1639; Paris in 1648; Moscow in 1648 and 1662; Edo in 1651.
Popular protests alone rarely brought down governments, however, and all the major rebellions of the mid-seventeenth century included members of the secular and, in most Christian and Muslim societies, also the clerical elite. Churchmen headed four rebel governments, at least for a time (Henderson in Scotland, Claris in Catalonia, Rinuccini in Ireland and Genoino in Naples); while throughout the French, Stuart and Spanish Monarchies, clerics preached sermons and published propaganda in support of the rebel cause. In the Polish Commonwealth, the Ukrainian clergy threw its weight behind Khmelnytsky; while in the Ottoman empire the Chief Mufti (the Şeyhülislam) played a pivotal role in legitimizing the deposition (and subsequent murder) of the sultan in 1622 and again in 1648.26
Noblemen, too, took the lead in several European revolts – Condé and Longueville in France; Argyle and Hamilton in Scotland; Antrim and Maguire in Ireland; Essex and Manchester in England – and, in all four countries, virtually the entire nobility participated in the resulting civil war. In Portugal, Duke John of Bragança founded a new royal dynasty in 1640; in Castile, the duke of Medina Sidonia sought to become the head of an independent Andalusia in 1641; while seven years later the duke of Guise established the short-lived ‘Royal Republic of Naples’.27 In the Mughal, Ottoman and Chinese empires, in contrast, the hereditary nobility played virtually no part because their fortunes were too closely linked to the state.
Most of the rema
ining leaders of the major mid-seventeenth rebellions belonged to the intellectual elite. At least 80 per cent of the members of the English House of Commons between 1640 and 1642, and many English peers, had either studied law at the Inns of Court, or gone to university, or both.28 The Fronde in France began with the revolt of its senior judges. Those who had mastered China's national curriculum and started to climb its administrative ‘ladder of success’ by passing the state examinations took the lead both in paralyzing the Ming with factionalism and in opposing the Qing with suicidal energy.
Most insurgents in Europe claimed that they desired only the restoration of an earlier state of affairs which they considered preferable. Thus the rebels in Palermo and Naples demanded a return to the Charters granted by Charles V a century before; the Catalans called for respect for their ancient ‘constitutions’; the Portuguese wanted a return to the relationship with the king created at the union of crowns in 1580 (and when they could not get it, a restoration of the constitutional situation that had prevailed before 1580). Initially, Charles I's enemies also called merely for a return to the past. In England, they demanded government by the crown-in-Parliament, as created by his predecessors; in Ireland the Catholics sought implementation of the ‘Graces’, which would end the recent trend in Protestant expansion at Catholic expense; in Scotland, the Covenanters insisted on retaining their traditional liturgy. In France, the judges wanted a return to the constitutional ‘balance of power’ that they believed had prevailed in the Middle Ages; while the nobles saw the ‘liberties’ and ‘franchises’ won by the blood of their ancestors in the service of the crown as their birthright, and to defend it they felt a ‘duty to rebel’. In Russia, the crowd wanted the tsar to accept their petitions as he and his predecessors had done before.
Rebels in other parts of the world also drew strength from past precedents. In China, Li Zicheng, Zhang Xianzhong and the Qing, all of whom strove to replace the Ming dynasty, cited earlier examples (some of them two millennia earlier) of dynasties that had lost ‘the Mandate of Heaven’; and Wu Sangui would do the same in 1673 when he initiated the Revolt of the Three Feudatories against the Qing. In the Ottoman empire, Kadizade Mehmet and his followers called for a return to the political and religious conventions that had prevailed at the time of the Prophet Mohammed a millennium before. Many others, such as the Swiss in Entlebuch and the Norman Nu-Pieds, demanded a return to a Golden Age when ‘justice’ had prevailed. To quote Crane Brinton once more: ‘Revolutions cannot do without the word “justice” and the sentiments it arouses’.29
Attempts to gain ‘justice’ drew strength, at least in Europe, when supported by legal institutions of unquestioned legitimacy, such as the law courts or Parliament. To this end the rebel leaders in Scotland, Catalonia and Portugal immediately summoned the ‘Estates of the Realm’ to legitimize their challenge to established authority, as well as to enact appropriate policies and vote funds – thus creating an ‘alternative government’ capable of winning widespread support both at home and abroad.30 In Ireland, since the Protestant-dominated Dublin government condemned the rebellion of 1641, the Catholic leaders created their own General Assembly and Supreme Council at Kilkenny, which served for a decade as the government of an independent Ireland (it even boasted its own corps of resident foreign diplomats: an achievement not repeated until the twentieth century). In England, Parliament was already in lawful session when the king declared its members rebels, but both Houses continued to sit until in January 1649 the surviving members of the House of Commons (the ‘Rump’) tried and executed him, and then proclaimed England a Republic with themselves as its sole sovereign body. Meanwhile, in the Dutch Republic, the States-General exploited the death in 1650 of William II of Orange to gain control over the executive functions that he had exercised. In Ukraine, finally, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky from the first sought the approval of the assembly of Cossack freemen for his various actions, including a declaration of independence from the Polish Commonwealth and, later, a treaty of union with Russia that preserved most of the gains won by the initial revolt.31
The unifying appeal of these aims helps to explain why so many seventeenth-century insurgencies lasted so long. The revolt of Bohemia against Habsburg authority in 1618 initiated a war that lasted 30 years. The revolt of Portugal against Habsburg authority in 1640 began a conflict that lasted 28 years; while the Catalan Diputació's repudiation of Philip IV the following year turned the principality into a battleground for 19 years. In Ukraine, the Cossacks' rejection of the authority of the Polish crown in 1648 also led to 19 years of war. The execution of Charles I by his English subjects in 1649, and the proclamation of a Republic, inevitably led to hostilities against the Scots, the Irish and several American colonies (which proclaimed Charles II as their sovereign), and the former Stuart Monarchy remained on a war footing, with a large army and navy even in peacetime, right up to the Restoration in 1660.
Longevity, however, changed the character of most rebellions. As John Wallis later observed about England: ‘As is usual in such cases, the power of the sword frequently [passed] from hand to hand’, because of ‘those who begin a war, not being able to foresee where it wil end’. None of the ‘Five Members’ whom Charles I tried to arrest early in 1642 possessed military experience, and few had held executive office, so they gave way to those like Oliver Cromwell whose actions demonstrated their ability to lead. Likewise, in Naples, the constitutional lawyers Genoino and Arpaja replaced the illiterate demagogue Masaniello, only to lose their places to Gennaro Annese and the duke of Guise, who possessed military experience.32 The rise of a ‘second generation’ of more militant leaders, like Cromwell and Annese, helps to explain why revolutions became more violent the longer they lasted. The experience of resistance habituates leaders to actions that would earlier have seemed intolerable. Moreover, any government, whether established or insurgent, needs to take drastic measures when faced with climatic extremes, famine and war (and in the mid-seventeenth century such challenges occurred with unusual frequency), but regimes that lacked legitimacy (and experience) might resort to more extreme measures to enforce their policies.
Rebellious regimes might also appeal for foreign aid, and in so doing fragment their domestic support. In Ireland, the Catholic Confederacy turned to their co-religionists in Europe, and although the Papacy, France and Spain all provided valuable material assistance, each foreign power had its own agenda and did not scruple to create and exploit damaging domestic divisions in order to achieve them. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Catalan opponents of Philip IV appealed for French assistance; and although French troops and military advisers helped to save Barcelona, Louis XIII demanded that the Catalan leaders abandon their resolve to become an independent republic and instead recognize him as their sovereign. Most spectacular of all, in China, the Ming commander Wu Sangui appealed to his northern neighbours for military assistance against the ‘roving bandits’, and allowed the Manchu Grand Army to pass through the Great Wall to destroy Li's forces; but once this mission had been accomplished, the Manchus claimed that their victory conferred the Mandate of Heaven to rule all China, which they did until 1911.
Within the composite states of Europe, opponents of the same ruler in one area often took active steps to encourage others to rebel. Thus immediately after his ‘acclamation’, King John IV of Portugal sent envoys to Barcelona to make common cause with the Catalan rebels; and somewhat later his principal adviser, the Jesuit António Vieira, went to Rome to invite the Pope to invest John's son as king of Naples (a papal fief). In 1648 in Castile, Don Carlos de Padilla, lynchpin of the ‘conspiracy of the duke of Híjar’, looked to John IV of Portugal for support; and government agents found the name of Don Miguel de Iturbide, who had recently spearheaded successful opposition to royal policies in Navarre, among his papers (see chapter 9). Most striking of all, as soon as news arrived that riots in Palermo against excise duties in 1647 had secured their abolition, the citizens of Naples began to put up ‘pun
gent and bitter invectives’ calling for ‘a revolution like Palermo’; and as soon as the revolution began, ‘some people from Palermo’ urged the Neapolitans ‘to demand everything, in the same way that had happened in Palermo’. One of these ‘Palermitanos’ was Giuseppe d'Alesi, who returned to lead the movement in his native city that secured the same concessions as those granted the previous month to the rebels of Naples. In addition, in both kingdoms, revolt in the capital provoked copycat uprisings in numerous other towns (see chapter 14).
The opponents of Charles I in different parts of his Monarchy likewise created links across borders that aimed to improve their chances of success. Thus some Scottish ministers in northern Ireland found the hostility of the earl of Strafford's religious policies so intolerable that in 1639 they chartered a vessel to take them to Massachusetts (John Winthrop had visited Ulster the previous year), but storms drove them back to their native land. They saw this as a divine sign that they should ‘find an America in Scotland’ and, once arrived there, joined the Covenanters' opposition to Charles I. In Russia, too, disorders spread throughout the empire largely because in June 1648 the capital was full of petitioners from provincial towns, and local uprisings followed as soon as the petitioners returned home with news of the Muscovites' apparently successful defiance of the tsar (see chapter 6). Finally, the peasants of Entlebuch who began the ‘Swiss revolution’ in 1653 sent envoys to mobilize support elsewhere in Canton Luzern and its neighbours (see chapter 8).
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