4. Ansaldo, Peste, 16 (Fra Francesco); BL Addl. Ms 21,935/48 (Wallington); Mortimer, Eyewitness accounts, 185 (Thiele and Minck).
5. Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae, Book III, 26, to his nephew, 10 Dec. 1647, and Letter I, to Lord Dorset, ‘20 Jan. 1646’ (but almost certainly 1649).
6. Hobbes, Leviathan, 89.
7. Bisaccione, Historia (1652), 2; Rushworth, Historical collections, I (1659), preface. Howell, Epistolae, also began his collection of letters on historical matters with the outbreak of ‘the wars of Germany’ in 1618.
8. Piterberg, Ottoman tragedy, 1, quoting Kâtib Çelebi; Peterson, Bitter gourd, 35, quoting Wu Yingji (1594–1645), Liudu wenjian lu.
9. Hobbes, Behemoth, 1.
10. Kessler, K'ang-hsi, 131, quoting the personal report of Xizhu to the emperor in 1684.
11. Mather, Heaven's alarm to the world (1681) and Kometographia, or a discourse concerning comets (1683).
12. Luterbacher, ‘Monthly mean pressure reconstructions’, 1,050. Subtelny, Domination, ch. 4, argued that the General Crisis did not grip many areas in eastern Europe until the 1690s: chapter 20 above argues against this interpretation.
13. Hugon, Naples, 16.
14. ‘Thoughts on the late transactions respecting Falkland's islands’ (1771), in Johnson, Works, X, 365–6, italics added. (I thank Jeremy Black for bringing this reference to my attention.)
15. Gladwell, The tipping point (a term first used in 1972, as opposed to ‘turning point’, which dates from 1836); Gaddis, Landscape, 98–9. See also the insights of Waldrop, Complexity, 12, 111.
16. Hill, The world, 13
17. Scott, Weapons of the weak, xvi–xvii.
18. TCD Ms 833/228v, Richard Plunkett's claim to Rev. George Creighton of Lurgan, Co. Cavan, in Creighton's deposition of 15 Apr. 1643.
Part I. The Placenta of the Crisis
1. Voltaire, Essai, II, 756–7. The marquise had read Bossuet's Discourse on universal history (1681) and proclaimed it both boring and Eurocentric. Voltaire set out to do better.
2. Ibid., II, 756–7, 794, 806 and 941–7 (Remarques pour servir de supplément à l'essai sur les moeurs, 1763).
3. In his analysis of the attempted military coup d'état in Spain on 23 Feb. 1981, Javier Cercas argued that the simultaneous hostility to the government of various distinct groups – politicians, journalists, bankers, businessmen, foreign governments, perhaps even the king – together formed ‘the placenta of the coup, not the coup itself. The nuance is key in understanding the coup’ (Cercas, The anatomy, 28). A parallel nuance is the key to understanding the global crisis of the seventeenth century.
Chapter 1 The Little Ice Age
1. Special thanks for help in framing this chapter to William S. Atwell, Rudolf Brázdil, Günhan Börekçi, John Brooke, Richard Grove, Karen Kupperman, Mikami Takehiko, Christian Pfister and José M. Vaquero.
2. Cysat, Collectanea, IV.2, 898. See also Pfister and Brádzil, ‘Climatic variability’, 44–5.
3. Glaser, Klimarekonstruktion, 111, on the extremely cold winter in central Europe in 1620–1; other details from Thorndycraft, ‘The catastrophic floods’; Barriendos and Rodrigo, ‘Study’, and Vanderlinden, ‘Chronologie’, 147.
4. See Pfister, ‘Weeping in the snow’, 33 and 50, and Garnier, ‘Grapevine’, 711, on 1626–8; Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire humaine, 337–48, on France's ‘biennat super-aquatique’ (1629–30); and ch. 13 above on India's ‘perfect drought’.
5. García Acosta, Desastres, I, 177–8 (the clergy took the Virgin on procession six more times before 1668, an unequalled frequency); Dunn, The Journal of John Winthrop, 368, 384 and 387, Kupperman, ‘The puzzle’, 1,274, quoting Thomas Gorges. Ludlam, Early American winters, 15 and 18–22, charts New England's ‘landmark winter’ of 1641–2.
6. Arakawa, ‘Dates’, 222 (only 1699 and 1802 saw snow earlier); Aono, Climatic reconstruction, 92; Blair and Robertson, The Philippine islands, XXXV, 123 and 184, from reports on events in 1640–2 and 1643–4.
7. Teodoreanu, ‘Preliminary observations’, 190, quoting Achacy Taszychi; Yilmazer, Topçular, 1,145, 1,156, 1,164, 1,173; Odorico, Conseils et mémoires de Synadinos, 163, 169; www.ucm.es/info/reclido/es/basesdatos/rainfallindex.txt, accessed 31 Jan. 2010.
8. Naworth, A new almanacke, sig C2; BL Harl. Ms 5,999/29v, ‘Discourse’ by Henry Jones and others, Nov. 1643.
9. Buisman, Duizend jaar weer, IV, 469–70 (quoting a burgher of Liège); Peters, Ein Söldnerleben, 166, diary entry at Neustadt-an-der-Saale, 7 Aug. 1640 (I thank David Parrott for this reference).
10. Vicuña Mackenna, El clima de Chile, 43–4, Dean Tomás de Santiago to the Tribunal of Lima, 23 June 1640. Taulis, De la distribution, 17, shows a four-year drought in Chile 1636–9; Villalba, ‘Climatic fluctuations’, and Martínson, Natural climate, 27, both show cooler temperatures in Patagonia in the 1640s and 1660s.
11. Bamford, A royalist's notebook, 120–1; Laing, Letters and Journals, III, 62; Gilbert, History of the Irish Confederation, VI, 270–1.
12. Buisman, Duizend jaar weer, IV, 499–500.
13. Teodoreanu, ‘Preliminary observations’, 190, quoting Archdeacon Paul of Aleppo; Abbott, Writings, III, 225–8, Proclamation of 20/30 Mar. 1654; De Beer, Diary of John Evelyn, 388, 393.
14. Ådahl, The sultan's procession, 48, entry for 27 Feb. 1658; City Archives, Danzig, 694 f. 149 (I thank Robert Frost for this reference); Van Aitzema, Saken, IX, book 38, pp. 124–6. For the Swedish march, see ch. 8 above. Teodoreanu, ‘Preliminary observations’, 188, notes that Romanian sources recorded unusually severe winters in 1656–7, 1657–8 and 1659.
15. Garnier, Les dérangements, 85; Thirsk, ‘Agricultural policy’, 301; Hoskins, ‘Harvest fluctuations’, 18; Teodoreanu, ‘Preliminary observations’, 190, quoting Evliya Çelebi; Cernovodeanu and Binder, Cavalerii Apocalipsului, 90, quoting the Journal of Mihail Teleki, Chancellor of Transylvania, for 1661.
16. Gordon, Diary, II, 272; Goldie, The entring book, II, 450. Goad, Astrometeorologia, 77–8, printed data on ice in the Thames ‘collected from the observations of leisure times of above thirty years’; Garnier, Les dérangements, figure 27, shows that winter 1683–4 was the coldest recorded in England (and almost in France, too)
17. Gordon, Diary, I, 132 (the Vistula froze so hard in Nov. 1656 that the Swedish army and its artillery marched across); Cyberski, ‘History of the floods’, 809–10; Teodoreanu, ‘Preliminary observations’, 191–2, quoting a Moldavian bishop in July 1670, and Philippe Le Masson du Pont in 1686.
18. Jones, History and climate, 12 (Russia) and 22–3 (Jan Antoni Chapowicki's diary); Ge, ‘Winter half-year temperature reconstructions’, 939, figure 3 (China); Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, X, 508 (Egypt: I thank Jane Hathaway for both reference and translation.)
19. Silvestre de Sancy, Lettres, III, 321 and 345, to Mme de Grignan, 28 June and 24 July 1675; Marks, Tigers, 195, quoting the Da Qing sheng zu (Kangxi) shi lu for 1717.
20. Smith, Nakahara, 107.
21. Smith, The art of doing good, 162, quoting Qi's diary; Wu, Communication and imperial control, 34–6, quoting Kangxi; poem in Scott, Love and protest, 140; Magisa, Svcceso raro – half of his six pages discussed possible ‘implications’.
22. AM Cádiz 26/127, Cabildo of 21 Aug. 1648, with a copy of a letter from Don Diego de Riaño y Gamboa to all town councils, 1 Aug. 1648, ordering that it be transcribed in the council registers ‘so that your successors will know about this letter’.
23. Haude, ‘Religion’, 541; and Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances, 26–7 and 1,070–2, ‘Order for Stage-playes to cease’ (12 Sep. 1642 NS) and ‘An Ordinance for the utter suppression and abolishing of all Stage-Plays’ (21 Feb. 1648 NS). England's theatres remained closed in law, if not always in fact, until the Restoration in 1660. Likewise, in Castile, Philip IV (although an avid theatregoer) ordered all theatres to close in 1644 after the death of his queen and again after the death of his son and heir in 1646; while his sister Anne, Queen Regent of France, a
lso closed all the kingdom's theatres in 1648. I thank Rachael Ball for drawing this coincidence to my attention.
24. Balfour, Historical works, III, 436–7; Larner, Source book, sub annis 1649–50; Larner, Enemies of God, 61 and 74–5; Kuhn, Soulstealers, 229 (recognizing that his analysis applies to other cases of ‘scape-goating’ through the ages). I thank Kathryn Magee Labelle for the information on the Huron ‘witch panic’. See further examples in Behringer, Witches and witch-hunts; Oster, ‘Witchcraft’; and Roper, Witch craze.
25. Porschnev, ‘Les rapports’, 160, quoting Johann Adler Salvius; BNE Ms 2378/55, ‘Reboluciones de Nápoles’; Bisaccione, Historia, 510.
26. BNE Ms 2371/634, Prognosticon (1640); Naworth, A new almanacke (1642), sig. C2; Graniti, Diario, I, 4 (Francesco Capecelatro); Bournoutian, The Chronicle of Deacon Zak'aria of K'anak'er, 156. The 1654 eclipse also caused widespread apprehension in Europe: see Labrousse, L'entrée de Saturne, and ch. 22 above.
27. Moosvi, ‘Science and superstition’; Milton, Paradise Lost, book I, lines 596–9.
28. Anon., A true and strange relation, 7 (an account with two engravings of ‘the burning island’ created in July 1638); [Voetius], Brittish lightning, sig. A3.
29. Kâtib Çelebi, Fezleke, II, 326; Nicoară, Sentimentul de insecuritate, I, 77–8; Mallet and Mallet, The earthquake catalogue, plate IV, shows a peak in earthquake activity around 1650. Other sources testify to the prevalence of unusually destructive events: for example, earthquakes followed by tsunamis destroyed the Spanish colonial port cities of Santiago de Chile in 1657 (see Rosales, Historia general, 191–2), and Lima in 1684.
30. Bainbridge, An astronomicall description, 30–1; Pacheco de Britto, Discurso, fos A11–11v; Kepler, Prognosticum astrologicum … 1618, 158, 163–4 and 171 (see also p. 176 for his glee at such accurate forecasting in his Prognosticon for the following year). See also Drake and O'Malley, The controversy on the comets of 1618; Urbánek, ‘The comet of 1618’; and Thiebault, ‘Jeremiah’, 441, quoting the striking sermon of Elias Ehinger.
31. BR Ms II-551/120v–124v, Fray Diego de la Fuente to the count of Gondomar, London, 11 Apr. 1619.
32. Wakeman, The great enterprise, 57; Roth, ‘The Manchu-Chinese relationship’, 7–8; Biot, ‘Catalogue’, 56–7; Brook, The confusions of pleasure, 163–7; and Moosvi, ‘Science and superstition’, 115, quoting the Iqbalnama-i Jahangiri.
33. [Voetius], Brittish lightning, sig. A3; The Moderate Intelligencer, 202 (25 Jan.–1 Feb. 1649); Mather, Kometographia (1683), 108–11 – a book occasioned by concern over the comets of 1680 and 1682.
34. Xie Zhaozhe, Wu za zu (1608), quoted in Elvin, ‘The man who saw dragons’, 34; BNE Ms 2371/634, Prognosticon (1640); Burton, Anatomy, 1638 edn (Partition I, section I, subsection 1, ‘Diseases in generall’).
35. Birago Avogadro, Turbolenze di Europa, 369; Bainbridge, An astronomicall description, 30–1; Riccioli, Almagestum novum, 96. Hoyt and Schatten, The role, 106–7, review the opinions of Schyrler, Riccioli, Kirchner, Goad and Hooke (all of whom argued that sunspots affected climate).
36. Hoyt and Schatten, The role, 14–20, list observations of sunspots with telescopes between 1610 and 1650, corrected by Usoshin, ‘Reconstruction’, 302; and Vaquero, ‘Revisited sunspot data’, table 2. Spörer, ‘Über die Periodicität der Sonnenflecken’, and Maunder, ‘The prolonged sunspot minimum’, both noted that the few sunspots observed – in 1660, 1671, 1684, 1695, 1707 and 1718 – ‘correspond, as nearly as we can expect, to the theoretical dates of maximum’. See also Moberg, ‘Highly variable’, and the attached database.
37. Auroras occur more often, and can be observed at more southerly latitudes, when sunspots are numerous.
38. Eddy, ‘The “Maunder Minimum”’, 268. Since Eddy's landmark paper of 1976, satellite images have confirmed that the sun's ‘luminosity’ matches the sunspot cycle, reaching its minimum during each sunspot minimum. See also the graph showing how global surface temperatures track sunspot activity in Martinson, Natural climate, 98.
39. Amelang, A journal of the plague year, 100, from the chronicle of Andrés de la Vega; Atwell, ‘Volcanism’, 41; Yi, ‘Meteor fallings’, 205–6 and 217. The same Korean astronomers observed frequent meteor showers, with a peak in the 1640s, which could likewise create (or inspissate) dust veils.
40. Ovalle, Histórica relación, 302–3.
41. Magisa, Svcceso raro de tres volcanes. Delfin, ‘Geological, 14C and historical evidence’, identified the volcano as Mt Parker; Atwell, ‘Volcanism’, 33, proposed that this was a ‘force six’ eruption. Several European volcanoes also erupted at this time: notably Vesuvius in 1632, Etna in 1646 and Santorini in 1650. Each produced a dramatic local impact: the Santorini eruption covered the harvest with ash and caused a destructive tsunami: subsequent generations referred to this period as ‘the time of evil’ (see Friedrich, Fire in the sea).
42. Gergis and Fowler, ‘A history of ENSO events’, 370–1. Some of these dates differ slightly from those listed by Diaz and Markgraf, El Niño, 122–3, but this often reflects the fact that ENSO events often occur in winter and thus span two calendar years. McIntosh, The way the wind blows, 58 table (c), displays proxy data for Pacific Ocean temperatures around the Galápagos Islands that reveal the 1630s and 1640s as the greatest anomaly in the entire series 1600–2000. Jones, Climatic variations, 388–9, shows no coral formation at all in 1641 at Urvina Bay, in the Galápagos – the only year of zero growth ever recorded. For the weaker monsoons, and the suggestion that these reflect a reduction in solar energy received on earth, see Zhang, ‘A test of climate’.
43. Liu, ‘A 1000-year history’, 458–9.
44. AGI Filipinas 28/100, Petition of Diego de Villatoro, 25 Aug. 1676, with further information in idem 28/90, Memorial from Villatoro. I thank Bethany Aram for locating these documents. García, ‘Atmospheric circulation’, 2,444 (especially the graph), 2,446–7 (ship losses) and 2,452 (return voyages), reveals the longer voyages around the time when Villatoro wrote his memorial, using a database of over 150 outward voyages from Acapulco to Manila and an unspecified number of returns between 1591 and 1802.
45. Rind and Overpeck, ‘Hypothesized causes’, 366–9, suggested that volcanic eruptions increased ENSO activity. Richard Grove and Lonnie Thompson suggested the converse possibility – that the shift of sea levels in the Pacific in El Niño years may increase volcanic activity – in a discussion at OSU's Mershon Center in April 2001.
46. Elvin, ‘Blood and statistics’, 149, quoting the prefectural Gazetteer of Jiaxing (Zhejiang). Pfister, ‘Litte Ice Age-type impacts’, 197–8, details how adverse temperature and precipitation affect grain, hay and vine production.
47. Song Yingxing, Tiangong kaiwu, translated as Chinese technology in the seventeenth century, 5.
48. Teodoreanu, ‘Preliminary observations’, 191, quoting a Moldavian bishop in July 1670. For another example (among many) of mice infestation, see Heberle, Zeytregister, 159.
49. Costin, Letopiseţul Ţărîi Moldovei, 196–7 (my thanks to Mircea Platon for finding and translating this item). Records from many other countries mention infestations of locusts (albeit not so vividly): see, for example, pages 125–6, 170 and 198 above.
50. Myllyntaus, ‘Summer frost’, 77–8 and 83. Significantly, the Finns have a special word for a summer frost: kesähalla.
51. Song Yingxing, Tiangong kaiwu, 4.
52. Kaplan, The famine plot, 62–3.
53. Ibid., 63; De Waal, Famine that kills, quoted in idem, ‘A re-assessment’, 470–1.
54. Cipolla, Cristofano and the plague, 149–50 (hospital in Prato); Fogel, ‘The escape’, 8–9 (the rest). In the seventeenth century, only English colonists in America attained current levels of nutrition: each male colonist in Virginia apparently consumed over 2,300 calories above his basic metabolic requirement (we lack figures for women and children).
55. Dyson, ‘Famine in Berar’, 99, quoting the Hyderabad Residency Sanitary Report for 1897.
> 56. Smith, The art of doing good, 54, quoting Yang, ‘A record of distributing padded jackets (Shi mianao ji)’ (1612); Sibbald, Provision for the poor in time of dearth, 1–2.
57. Hacquebord and Vroom, Walvisvaart, 133–4. When children are starving or seriously ill, their long bones cease to grow and instead form a small ridge visible on their skeletons known as ‘Harris lines’: many of the skeletons from Smeerenburg had ‘Harris lines’. The measurement of surviving skeletons from northern Europe has revealed that average heights dropped by more than 2 inches between the 1450s and the 1750s: Steckel, ‘New light on the “Dark Ages”’.
58. Komlos, ‘An anthropometric history’, 159; Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), quoted page xxiii above. Records for other early modern armies that measured soldiers at enlistment also show a marked reduction in height among those who grew up in periods of dearth. See, for example, Baten, ‘Climate’, 29 (on eighteenth-century Bavarian soldiers).
59. Semedo, Historica relatione, 6–7, 13. Semedo arrived in South China in 1613 and remained, with some breaks, until 1637. He wrote soon afterwards.
60. Winthrop papers, II, 111, ‘General observations for the plantation of New England’ (1629); Andrews, The colonial period, 612–13, quoting Gorges (1611), the Virginia Company (1624) and many others; Canny, The origins of empire, 20, quoting Thomas Bowdler's ‘Common Place Book’ for 1635–6.
61. Qing shilu [Veritable records of the Ming] VIII, ch. 86, p. 149, edict of the Yongzheng emperor 2 Nov. 1729 (translated by Ying Bao); Lenihan, ‘War and population’, 8, quoting Lawrence, The interest of England; Hull, The economic writings, I, 149–51; Mortimer, Eyewitness accounts, 78, quoting Hans Conrad Lang; Antony and Christmann, Johann Valentin Andreä, 128; Arnauld, Lettres, II, 433, to the queen of Poland, 28 Jan. 1654 (‘le tiers du monde étant mort’).
62. Hayami and Tsubochi, Economic and demographic developments, 155 (Shi Zhihong); Lenihan, ‘War and population’, 20–1; Franz, Der dreissigjährige Krieg, 59; Jacquart, ‘“La Fronde”’, and Garnier, ‘Calamitosa tempora’, 8–9 (see also Fig. 34 above).
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