Nevertheless, the surviving written sources are often incomplete because of the destruction of documents that once existed – sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately. The sources concerning the numerous urban revolts that rocked Romanov Russia in 1648 offer a telling example of accidental loss. Only the revolt of the small Siberian town of Tomsk has left a considerable documentary trace, because officials stationed east of the Urals reported to the Siberian Ministry, whose archives remain largely intact. By contrast, their colleagues west of the Urals reported to other ministries in Moscow, most of whose archives were later either destroyed by fire or discarded. Historians can therefore reconstruct the minor troubles in Tomsk in considerable detail, whereas most of what we know about the major uprising in Moscow, which resulted in the murder of several ministers of the tsar and the burning of half his capital, comes from a couple of reports smuggled out of the country by foreigners (see chapter 6 above). Gaps that are not accidental but deliberate also abound. In Britain, in the 1630s, the growing tension between Charles I and his subjects led many protagonists to avoid entrusting their thoughts to paper. Some ceased to write at all (in 1639 an Irish nobleman wanted to visit a colleague because, he claimed, ‘I have much to say to your lordship which I cannot trust to paper’), while others burnt sensitive correspondence (‘The more I think of the business of this letter [of yours and my reply],’ wrote a Caroline courtier, the more he favoured ‘burning them so soon as their business is answered and ended’). In China, the victorious Qing announced in 1664 that ‘should officials or commoners have in their homes books that record historical events of the late Ming, they should be sent in’ to the nearest magistrate, who would destroy them.7 It is particularly difficult for historians to fill silences like these, which have been deliberately created.
Two other ‘silences’ in the sources used by historians to explain the seventeenth-century crisis arose because data for systematic study became available only after the 1950s: records concerning climatic and population change. In 1955 the meteorologist Marcel Garnier published a study suggesting that the annual date on which French communities began to harvest their grapes reflected the prevailing temperature during the growing season. Looking back in 2011, Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie recalled that he decided to become a historian of climate upon reading Garnier's work, and he published his path-breaking History of the climate since the year 1000 in 1967. Since then, climatologists have collected and published climatic observations from various locations around the world; while historians of climate – notably Hubert Lamb in the United Kingdom, Christian Pfister in Switzerland, Rudolf Brázdil in the Czech Republic, Mikami Takehiko in Japan, as well as Le Roy Ladurie in France, and their disciples – have studied the correlations and coincidences between these data and political and social upheavals.8
Just after Garnier published his article on how to measure climate before the era of scientific instruments, a team drawn from the French Institute of Demographic Studies and the French archives showed how to use the registers of births, marriages and deaths kept in each parish to reconstruct family size and demographic trends before the era of national censuses. First in France and then in other European countries, enthusiasts began to transcribe entries in surviving parish registers to create ‘family dossiers’, while scholars calculated rates of mortality and nuptuality. In the 1960s, after a visit to Europe, economic historian Hayami Akira realized that the annual registers of believers kept by every Buddhist temple in Japan offered, in some ways, a superior source to parish registers because they were already organized by families. In China, other demographers studied the detailed life records kept by the Qing dynasty of all its members. Here, too, teams of historians painstakingly transcribed records and calculated demographic trends.9 By 2012, almost all the climatic and demographic data available around the world pointed to a series of major crises for much of the seventeenth century.
Since 2000, several path-breaking works have sought to link these serial data with specific historical events: Timothy Brook, The troubled empire (about China) and Vermeer's hat (a set of connected histories from the seventeenth century); John Richards, The unending frontier (an environmental history of the early modern world); Bruce Campbell, ‘Nature as historical protagonist’ (about the calamitous fourteenth century); and Sam White, The climate of rebellion (about the seventeenth-century Ottoman empire). All four authors placed environmental factors at the centre of their explanations, and I have learned much from their pioneering work. In particular, I gave careful consideration to the thesis advanced by John Richards that the early modern world progressed smoothly towards growing productivity, as ecological exchanges diversified food sources, while more intensive methods and expanding areas increased agricultural yields. Nevertheless, the mid-seventeenth century seemed to me a ‘hiccup’, a period of adjustment, in which adverse climatic, economic and political conditions retarded (and in some areas halted) the benefits of the broader environmental changes which Richards described. I deeply regret that I cannot sit down with him again to reconcile our slightly different perspectives.
Bruce Campbell's publications (listed below), use data from both the human and the natural archive to demonstrate that the northern hemisphere experienced a crisis in the fourteenth century similar in many respects to that of the seventeenth, with climatic adversity and microbial mutation leading to increasingly violent competition for resources, a wave of violent unrest, and massive mortality. Interested readers can therefore compare and contrast the two calamities, and draw conclusions about their relative severity – but it is already evident that our recent past includes major and prolonged environmental disasters that affect continents if not hemispheres. ‘Like it or not’, the role of climate change in inducing crises in human history is also ‘here to stay’.
Abbreviations Used in the Bibliography and Notes
ACA Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Barcelona
CA Consejo de Aragón (Papers of the Council of Aragon)
AGI Archivo General de Indias, Seville
IG Indiferente General (consultas of the Council of the Indies)
México (correspondence of the Council of the Indies with New Spain)
Perú (correspondence of the Council of the Indies with Peru)
AGNM Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico
CRD Cédulas Reales Duplicadas (copies of orders received from Madrid)
AGRB Archives Générales du Royaume/Algemeen Rijksarchief, Brussels
Audience Papiers d'État et d'Audience (papers and correspondence of the Brussels government in French)
CC Chambre des Comptes (treasury accounts of the Brussels government)
SEG Secrétairerie d'État et de Guerre (papers and correspondence of the Brussels government in Spanish)
AGS Archivo General de Simancas
CJH Consejos y Juntas de Hacienda (papers of the Spanish Council of Finance)
CMC Contaduría Mayor de Cuentas (with época and legajo: Spanish treasury papers)
CS Contaduría del Sueldo (with época and legajo: Spanish treasury papers)
Estado Negociación de Estado (papers of the Spanish Council of State)
GA Guerra Antigua (papers of the Spanish Council of War)
SP Secretarías Provinciales (papers of the Council of Italy)
AHEB Arquivo Histórico do Estado de Bahia, Bahia, Brazil, Seçâo Colonial (correspondence of the viceroy of Brazil)
AHN Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid
Consejos Consejos suprimidos (papers of the Spanish Council of Castile)
Estado Consejo de Estado (papers of the Spanish Council of State and of the Council of Portugal)
AHR American Historical Review
AM Archivo Municipal
AMAE (M) Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Madrid, Manuscritos
AMAE (P) Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Paris
CPA Correspondance Politique: Angleterre (correspondence of the French government with diplom
ats in Britain)
CPE Correspondance Politique: Espagne (correspondence of the French government with diplomats in Catalonia)
ANF Archives Nationales de France, Paris
AP Archives Privés 260 and 261 (155 Mi 1–168 and 161 Mi 1–47) (Archive of Marshal Vauban)
APW Repgen, K., ed., Acta Pacis Westphalicae: series I, Instructions; series II, Correspondence; series III, Diaries – each series with multiple sub-series (II Abteilung B, die französischen Korrespondenzen; Abteiling C, die schwedische Korrespondenzen; and so on); each Abteilung contains multiple volumes
AUB Aberdeen University Library
Ms Ms 2538, ‘Triennial travels’ of James Fraser, a Divinity student at Aberdeen University, in Europe 1657–8 (3 vols)
BL British Library, London, Department of Western Manuscripts
Addl. Additional Manuscripts
Cott. Cotton Manuscripts
Eg. Egerton Manuscripts
Harl. Harleian Manuscripts
Lans. Lansdowne Manuscripts
BNE Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, Colección de manuscritos
BNF Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, Cabinet des Manuscrits
Ff. Fonds français
Ms. Esp. Manuscrit espagnol
BNL Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon, Manuscripts
Bod. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Department of Western Manuscripts
BR Biblioteca Real, Madrid, Colección de manuscritos
BRAH Boletín de la Real Academia de Historia
BRB Bibliothèque Royale Albert 1er, Brussels, Collection des manuscrits
CC Climatic Change
CHC Cambridge History of China, ed. D. Twitchett et al., 15 vols, some in two parts (Cambridge, 1978–2009)
CHJ Cambridge History of Japan, ed. J. W. Hall et al., 6 vols (Cambridge, 1988–99)
Co. Do. In. Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España
CSPC Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, ed. W. N. Sainsbury et al., 45 vols (London, 1860–1994)
CSPD Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series. Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth I and James I, ed. S. C. Lomax and M. A. Everett Green, 12 vols (London, 1856–72)
CSPD Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series. Charles I, ed. J. Bruce and W. D. Hamilton, 23 vols (London, 1858–97)
CSPI Calendar of State Papers relating to Ireland. James I, ed. C. W. Russell and J. P. Prendergast, 5 vols (London, 1872–80)
CSPI Calendar of State Papers relating to Ireland of the Reign of Charles I, ed. R. P. Mahaffy, 4 vols (London, 1900–4)
CSPV Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts relating to English affairs, existing in the archives and collections of Venice, and in other libraries of Northern Italy, 1202–1674, ed. H. F. Brown et al., 28 vols (London 1864–1947)
CSSH Comparative Studies in Society and History
DMB Dictionary of Ming Biography, ed. Carrington Goodrich and Fang Chaoying, 2 vols (New York, 1976)
ECCP Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period, ed. A. Hummel, 2 vols (Washington, DC, 1943)
EcHR Economic History Review
EHR English Historical Review
EI Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edn, ed. P. J. Bearman et al., 12 vols (Leiden, 1960–2003, also accessible on the web)
HAG Historical Archive, Goa, Manuscripts (correspondence of the viceroy of the Portuguese Estado da India and his Conselho da Fazenda)
HJ Historical Journal
HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission
IJC International Journal of Climatology
IJMES International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies
IVdeDJ Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan, Madrid, Manuscript Collection (with ‘envío’ and folio number)
JAS Journal of Asian Studies
JEEH Journal of European Economic History
JESHO Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
JIH Journal of Interdisciplinary History
JJS Journal of Japanese Studies
JMH Journal of Modern History
JWH Journal of World History
MHE Memorial Histórico Español
PLP Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament, ed. M. Jansson, 7 vols (Rochester, NY, 2002–7)
P&P Past & Present
PRO Public Records Office (now The National Archives), London
SP State Papers (correspondence of the English secretaries of state)
RAS Riksarkivet, Stockholm
Diplomatica Muscovitica (correspondence from Swedish diplomats in Russia)
Manuskriptsamlingen (manuscript collections)
RPCS Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, 2nd series, ed. David Masson and P. Hume Brown, 6 vols (Edinburgh, 1899–1908)
SCC Science and Civilization in China, ed. Joseph Needham and associates, 7 vols, vols 4–7 have multiple parts (Cambridge, 1954–2008)
SCJ Sixteenth Century Journal
TCD Trinity College Dublin
Ms Manuscripts: the 33 volumes of ‘Depositions’, now available in digitized form at <1641.tcd.ie>
TRHistS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
WMQ William and Mary Quarterly
Notes
Prologue
1. Benton, When life nearly died, on the event that ended the Permian Age; Alvarez, T-Rex, on the Younger Dryas; and Ambrose, ‘Late Pleistocene’, on the eruption of Mount Toba, Sumatra, around 71,000 BC.
2. Weiss, ‘The genesis and collapse’, noted the simultaneous collapse around 2200 BC of Akkad, the world's first empire, and of the Indus and other civilizations in western Asia amid evidence of general drought and desiccation. Yancheva, ‘Influence’, noted the simultaneous collapse of the Maya and Tang and postulated a change in the monsoon pattern to explain it.
3. Campbell, ‘Nature’, 284; Brook, The troubled empire, 72.
4. Le Roy Ladurie, Times of feast, times of famine, 119, 289; de Vries, ‘Measuring the impact of climate’, 23. Mauelshagen, Klimageschichte, 16–35, charts the development of historical climatology down to 2009. In 2010 and 2011, Timothy Brook, Bruce Campbell and Sam White all published path-breaking studies (on China, western Europe and the Ottoman empire, respectively) that integrate climate into historical explanations.
5. Fortey, ‘Blind to the end’, New York Times, 26 Dec. 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/26/opinion/26ihtedfortey.html. See also idem, The earth: an intimate history. On the long reign of the ‘disaster deniers’ see Bankoff, Cultures of disaster; Mauch and Pfister, Natural disasters; Juneja and Mauelshagen, ‘Disasters’; and Benton, When life nearly died, ch. 3.
6. 2011 disasters in numbers prepared by the International Disaster Database at the Université Catholique, Louvain, Belgium: www.emdat.be, accessed 12 Mar. 2012.
7. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore.html contains ice-core data from throughout the world, including polar and low-level mountain ice caps and glaciers.
8. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pollen.html contains pollen data series archived before 2005. Data contributed since then are available for download at http://www.neotomadb.org/.
9. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/treering.html, the International Tree-Ring Data Bank, contained in 2010 annual measurements of ring width or wood density from over 2,000 sites on six continents. Brázdil, ‘European climate’ and idem, ‘Use’, provide more detail on each category and also list recent publications based on them.
10. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/speleothem.html lists available data sets by continent, with links to each site.
11. For example, Barriendos, ‘Climatic variations’ and ‘Climate and culture’, used rogation ceremonies to measure drought in early modern Spain; while Neuberger, ‘Climate’, extracted meteorological information from some 12,000 paintings dated between 1400 and 1967 in 41 US and European art museums. Further examples in Brázdil, ‘European climate’, 10–13.
12. Mauelshagen, Klimageschichte, 36–59, and Garnier, Les dérangements, 24–48, provide e
xcellent overviews of the sources, and a chronology of their exploitation.
13. Trevor-Roper, ‘The general crisis’, 50. A generation earlier, Sir George Clark had noted ‘a change of atmosphere between the earlier part of the [seventeenth] century and the later, a change accompanied by storms’ (Clark, The seventeenth century, ix).
14. Camuffo, ‘The earliest temperature observations’, a study based on almost 40,000 readings taken between 1654 and 1667 with identical thermometers at an international network of climate observation stations established by Tuscany.
15. F. E. Matthes, an expert on glaciers, coined the term ‘Little Ice Age’ in 1939: ‘We are living in an epoch of renewed but moderate glaciation – a “little ice age”.’ The term now refers to the period 1350–1750, with its maximum intensity in the seventeenth century.
16. Le Roy Ladurie, Times of feast, 2. Presciently, Le Roy predicted that computers might change this: ibid., 303.
17. In 2012 the ‘Euro-Climhist’ database at Bern, Switzerland, included 1.2 million records, just for Europe.
18. BL Harl 390/211, Mede to Sir Martin Stuteville, 24 Feb. 1627. Mede's ‘star pupil’ at Christ's was John Milton.
19. Appleby, ‘Epidemics and famine’, 663.
Introduction
1. Burton, The anatomy, 3–4 (‘Democritus to the Reader’); Calendar of the Court Minutes, i, Directors of the East India Company to their agents in Surat, Nov. 1644; Whitaker, Ejrenopojos [The Peacemaker], 1–2, 9, on Haggai 2:7, ‘And I will shake all nations’.
2. Elliott and La Peña, Memoriales y cartas, II, 276.
3. Porschnev, ‘Les Rapports’, 160, quoting Johan Adler Salvius; Mentet de Salmonet, Histoire des troubles de la Grande Bretagne, ii; Parival, Abrégé, ‘Au lecteur’ and 477.
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