Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  26. Loewenson, ‘Moscow rising’, 153 (English translation of a Dutch eyewitness account); Platonov, ‘Novyi istochnik’, 9 (‘Kurtze Beschreibung’).

  27. Baron, Olearius, 208 (‘We must have you too’); RAS, Diplomatica: Muscovitica 39, Pommerenning to Christina, 16 July 1648 (the musketeers' answer); Loewenson, ‘Moscow rising’, 153 (their number and pay arrears); Platonov, ‘Novyi istochnik’, 10 (the soothing words). Note that the last source implies that 6,000 musketeers were involved, but this may mean 6,000 in the capital rather than 6,000 inside the Kremlin at the crucial moment. Kivelson, ‘The Devil’, 739, working from a Russian translation of this document, states that the crowd only entered the Kremlin after the musketeers declared in their favour, but the original states the reverse.

  28. Loewenson, ‘Moscow rising’, 153. Platonov, ‘Novyi istochnik’, 13 (‘they did not leave a nail in a wall’).

  29. Loewenson, ‘Moscow rising’, 154. See also Baron, Olearius, 208–9.

  30. RAS, Diplomatica: Muscovitica 39, n.p., Pommerenning to Christina, 16 July 1648, mentioned ‘houses on a list’ (annoterades huss); Loewenson, ‘Moscow rising’, 155, noted ‘some relation’ of houses ‘about 36 in number’ to be burned. Kivelson, ‘The Devil’, 740 n. 21, and Platonov, ‘Novyi istochnik’, 14, quote sources that detail 70 or so houses burned.

  31. RAS, Diplomatica: Muscovitica 39 n.p., Pommerenning to Christina, 16 July 1648.

  32. Loewenson, ‘Moscow rising’, 155; RAS, Manuskriptsamlingen 68, Peter Loofeldt, Initiarum Monarchiae Ruthenicae, p. 91; RAS, Diplomatica: Muscovitica 39 n.p., Pommerenning to Christina, 16 July 1648.

  33. Avrich, Russian rebels, 55; Platonov, ‘Novyi istochnik’, 19; Kivelson, ‘The Devil’, 747 (quoting a nobleman's servant).

  34. Ellersieck, ‘Russia’, 89, citing Pommerenning to Christina, 6 July 1648, which Ellersieck decoded himself.

  35. Torke, Staatsbedingte Gesellschaft, 223–4, notes 71 petitions submitted between 2 June and 31 July 1648 OS. Vernadsky, Source book, I, 246, prints the decree of 1 June 1649 OS expelling the English merchants.

  36. Ladewig Petersen, The crisis, 34, showed that grain prices at Danzig – the largest mart for Baltic cereals – peaked in 1648. Stevens, Soldiers, 42, lists 1648 as a year of harvest failure; and PRO PRO 22/60, no 73, Charles I of Great Britain to Tsar Alexei, 1/11 June 1648, reported that his agents had been able to buy only 30,000 instead of 300,000 measures of grain because of the ‘scarcity and conditions’ in Muscovy.

  37. See Pokrovskii, Tomsk, especially the tables on pp. 177 and 186.

  38. Davies, State, 237, report of Governor Roman Boborykin. On the revolt of Kozlov, see ibid., 224–42.

  39. Details from Anpilogov, ‘Polozhenie gorodskogo’. Torke, Staatsbedingte Gesellschaft, 224–32, provides an admirable survey of the spread of unrest in 1648–9.

  40. Hellie, Enserfment, 136, quoting later testimony from Patriarch Nikon.

  41. Kivelson, ‘The Devil’, 752, quoting a memorandum later compiled by Prince Odoevskii, who headed the committee that drafted the code. Vernadsky, Source book, I, 222–3, prints the summons for Novgorod to choose delegates to the Zemskii Sobor, 26 July 1648, issued by the leading nobles and not by the tsar himself.

  42. RAS, Diplomatica: Muscovitica 39 n.p., Pommerenning to Christina, 4 and 18 Oct. 1648 OS, with the translation of decoded passages as corrected by Ellersieck, ‘Russia’, 83–4. In his letter of 30 Dec. 1648, loc. cit., Pommerenning stated that each strelets had received 25 roubles in the course of the year.

  43. Blum, Lord and peasant, 263 (a lord who murdered someone else's peasant without premeditation ‘had to replace the slain peasant with the best of his own peasant families’). See also Kolchin, Unfree labor, 41–2; Hittle, The service city, 66–9; and the entire text at http://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/1649-Uljhtm#ch11, accessed 9 Apr. 2012 (all but 4 of its 34 sections concerned fugitive serfs).

  44. The fugitive-serf article was almost the last to be finalized, suggesting that it was the most contested: Hellie, Enserfment, 137–8.

  45. RAS, Diplomatica: Muscovitica 39 n.p., Pommerenning to Christina, Moscow, 17 Nov. 1649.

  46. Figures from Frost, After the Deluge, 7 n. 8 (Wiśniowiecki), and Sysyn, ‘Ukrainian social tensions’, 65 (landholders) and 57–8 (Jews). For distribution, see Stampfer, ‘Maps of Jewish settlements’; for the Cossacks as a ‘reservoir of malcontents’, see Gordon, Cossack rebellions.

  47. Plokhy, The Cossacks, 136, quoting a report by Stanislaw Koniecpolski to the Diet in 1631.

  48. Sysyn, Kysil, 83, quoting Adam Kysil's second ‘Discourse’ on the Cossack problem in 1637. Beauplan, Description, described and drew Kodak fort just before the revolt.

  49. Plokhy, The Cossacks, 143, chronicle of Lviv.

  50. Hrushevsky, History, VIII, 222, report by Kysil, Feb. 1648.

  51. Hannover, Yaven Metzulah (which literally means ‘Deep mire’, first published in 1653), 27–8. Beauplan, Description, 449, also commented on the extreme demands of the Polish landowners; Hrushevsky, History, VIII, 355–6, described the burden of billeting and the atrocities.

  52. Hrushevsky, History, VIII, 350–5, and Plokhy, The Cossacks, 190–206, discuss evidence of Jewish exploitation. Raba, Between remembrance and denial, 14–18, discusses the spread of anti-Semitic propaganda.

  53. Wrocław, Ossolineum, Ms 188/455v, 462, 463, 465v, 491, 499v, diary of Marcin Goliński of Kasimiersz (the Jewish quarter of Kraków); Beauplan, Description, 473–4 (on winters) and 471 (on locusts), reflecting 17 years living in Ukraine

  54. Wrocław, Ossolineum, Ms 2389/1, A. Bielowski, ‘Okolice i podania’; Wrocław, Ossolineum, Ms 188/516 (diary of Goliński); and Namaczyńska, Kronika, 27–9.

  55. Hrushevsky, History, VIII, 370–1 and notes, and 396, discusses the royal response and letters, concluding that almost certainly Khmelnytsky lied.

  56. Ibid., VIII, 397, quoting a Russian source. He also argues that the khan welcomed a rebellion against Władysław as a way to forestall his proposed attack.

  57. Ibid., VIII, 411, Kysil to Primate Lubienski of Gniezno, 31 May 1648. Some Polish writers have asserted that Khmelnytsky issued a proclamation immediately after his victory at Korsun calling for a general revolt, but ibid., 412 n. 54 refutes them.

  58. Ibid., VIII, 413 quotes both contemporary sources. I thank Mirosław Nagielski for pointing out the significance of the aristocratic arsenals.

  59. Hrushevsky, History, VIII, 450–1, quoting the ‘Victory March of the Khmelnytsky Uprising’. Yakovenko, ‘The events of 1648–1649’, provides other examples of the literature of hate generated by the revolt.

  60. Hannover, Abyss of despair, 50–77; see also the testimony in Hrushevsky, History, VIII, 439–49, and the careful analysis of Stampfer, ‘What actually happened?’ All dates are given according to the Gregorian Calendar (New Style) used in Poland, and not according to the Old Style used in Ukraine and Russia.

  61. Figures from Stampfer, ‘What actually happened?’; Bacon, ‘The House of Hannover’, 179–80 and 191. Raba, Between remembrance and denial, ch. 1 reviews the numerous accounts of the massacre written by contemporaries. Many assumed that the massacre had been carefully planned but no evidence of preparation has materialized: sectarian hatred apparently sufficed. In 1650, Poland's Jewish leaders proclaimed a fast to commemorate the second anniversary of the day when the massacres began at Nemyriv, and commissioned a special elegy for what Jewish chronicles from the seventeenth century onwards called Gezeirot ta'h ve-ta't: ‘The Decrees of 408–409’ (that is, 5,408 and 5,409 in the Jewish calendar, or 1648–9 in the Christian one).

  62. Wrocław, Ossolineum, Ms 189/56; The moderate intelligencer, CLXXVII (12–19 Oct. 1648 OS), quoting a report from Danzig dated 2 Oct. 1648.

  63. See Plokhy, The Cossacks, 220–35; Hrushevsky, History, VIII, 517–19; and Sysyn, ‘Ukrainian-Polish relations’, 63, 67 and 69–71.

  64. Hrushevsky, History, VIII, 535, Khmelnytsky speech to Kysil, Feb. 1649.

 
; 65. Plokhy, The Cossacks, 220; Hrushevsky, History, VIII, 520–1 and 541–2, Khmelnytsky's terms delivered to the commissioners, 24 Feb. 1649 OS.

  66. Hrushevsky, History, VIII, 522, recording the commissioners' impressions in Dec. 1648 and Feb. 1649; Hrabjanka, The great war.

  67. Hrushevsky, History, VIII, 589–90 (the Cossacks' demands) and 593–5 (the royal concessions) at Zboriv, both dated 18 Aug. 1649. Vernadsky, History, V, 447, reports negotiations between the Cossacks and Moscow.

  68. RAS, Manuskriptsamlingen 68, Loofeldt, Initiarum Monarchiae Ruthenicae, pp. 93 and 97–9.

  69. Ibid., pp. 98–9.

  70. Davies, Warfare, 103–11, and Vernadsky, History, 463–81, provide a detailed account of the negotiations leading up to the ‘Union’ of January 1654 and the terms confirmed in Moscow the following March. What happened at Pereiaslav is bitterly contested by Ukrainian and Russian historians, the former claiming that the Union was intended only as a temporary measure, the latter asserting that it was meant from the first to be permanent. Whatever the Cossacks' intentions, it seems certain that from the first Alexei and his ministers saw the Union as permanent.

  71. RAS, Manuskriptsamlingen 68, Loofeldt, Initiarum Monarchiae Ruthenicae, 99–100.

  72. Roberts, Sweden as a great power, 163–9, minutes of the Swedish council of the realm, 8–12 Dec. 1654, reveals the reaction to Russia's invasion of Poland. The council approved mobilization, without deciding whether to attack Poland or, in return for certain concessions, to ally with Sweden against Russia. The council considered the risk that an invasion might lead Poland to collapse and then ally with Russia – precisely what happened – but deemed the risk of further Russian expansion far worse.

  73. In 1886 Henryk Sienkiewicz entitled a historical novel about Poland in the mid–seventeenth century Potop, and the name has stuck. The current division of Ukraine between an eastern part that favours a closer union with Russia and a pro-Western part largely reflects the divisions created after 1656.

  74. Brown, ‘Tsar Alexei’, 124, order of Alexei to Prince Trubetskoi, late May 1654.

  75. Karpinski, W walce z niedwidzialnym wrogiem; Rykaczewski, Lettres de Pierre des Noyers, 393, letter from Poznań, 8 Apr. 1658; Namaczyńska, Kronika, 35.

  76. Davies, Warfare, 132.

  77. Gieysztorowa, Wstep do demografii staropolskiej, 188–90; Bogucka, ‘Between capital, residential town and metropolis’, 206–7; Reger, ‘In the service of the tsar’, 49; Stevens, Russia's wars, 160.

  78. Jones, History and climate, 12.

  79. Cherniakova, Karelia, 121 (families with sons in Megorsk Pogost according to the 1678 census), and 122 (details on the deaths of 1,092 males in the war).

  80. Frost, After the Deluge, 72–3, quoting a report by Piotr Galiński, 30 Apr. 1656.

  81. Hellie, ‘The costs’, 64–6.

  82. Sargent and Velde, Big problem, 259–60, for the copper/silver exchange rate (with a striking graph). On the riots of 1662, see the eyewitness accounts of RAS, Diplomatica Muscovitica 602, n.p., Adolph Ebbers to King Charles XI, 10 and 18/24 June, 25/29 July and 21 Aug. 1662 (all dates Old Style); and Gordon, Diary, II, 159–62. See also Torke, Die staatsbedingte Gesellschaft, 244–52.

  83. O'Brien, Muscovy, 120, quoting the French ambassador in Feb. 1667 and the English resident in Sep. 1667. Vernadsky, A source book, I, 304, prints parts of the truce of Andrusovo signed on 9 Feb. 1667 NS, including the clause that left Kiev under Russian control for two years. The truce stipulated that the parties should meet again in two years to reach a permanent settlement, failing which, they should meet again every two years until they agreed.

  84. Crummey, ‘The origins’, 131, quoting Avraamii.

  85. Michels, At war, 211–16, citing the investigation by church authorities after 1666 (quotation from p. 211).

  86. Avrich, Russian rebels, 65, and Khodarkovsky, ‘The Stepan Razin uprising’, 8, both quote this 1667 document.

  87. Avrich, Russian rebels, 76 and 78–9, quoting documents from 1670.

  88. Details from ibid., 88–97, and Khodarkovsky, ‘The Stepan Razin uprising’, 14–18. No evidence exists that Razin possessed letters from Nikon: see Khmelnytsky's similar claim on page 170 above.

  89. Avrich, Russian rebels, 115. Stenka Razin has inspired stories and folksongs: see idem, 121–2. In 1964, Yevgeny Yevtushenko composed the poem, ‘The execution of Stenka Razin’.

  90. Tsar and patriarch condemned all these religious dissidents as schismatics (raskol'niki) and, in order to identify them, used the new liturgy as a litmus test. This allowed later Old Believers to claim all dissidents as their precursors but Michels, At war, chs 4–6, shows that (until at least 1700) although all Old Believers were raskol'niki, not all raskol'niki were Old Believers.

  91. Cherniavsky, ‘The Old Believers’, figure on p. 21. Cherniakova, Karelia, 231, provides a striking map of places in Karelia where peasants either rebelled against their ecclesiastical masters or burned themselves to death.

  92. Sysyn, ‘The Khmelnytsky rising’, 167; Davies, Warfare, 188, followed by a detailed analysis of the later fate of each protagonist.

  93. Details from Bushkovitch, Religion and society, chs 6–7, and Lewitter, ‘Poland, the Ukraine and Russia’. Population figures from Davies, Warfare, 198–201. Subtelny, Domination, 130–7, notes the brief but unsuccessful bid for independence made by Hetman Mazeppa, 1706–9.

  94. Hellie, Enserfment, 256 n. 59. Hellie, The Muscovite Law Code, provides a bilingual Russian and English edition. I thank Matthew Romaniello for sharing with me his insights on the Ulozhenie.

  95. Gordon, Diary, II, 138–9, anno 1661 but probably written some years later.

  96. Romaniello, ‘Through the filter of tobacco’, 914, citing a diplomat with the Carlisle mission in 1663.

  Chapter 7 The ‘Ottoman tragedy’, 1618–83

  1. Special thanks for help in preparing this chapter to Günhan Börekçi, John Curry, Kaan Durukan, Suraiya Faroqui, Matt Goldish, Jane Hathaway, Colin Imber and Oktay Özel. I thank Allen Clarke for translating Arabic material for me, and Günhan Börekçi not only for analyzing and translating Turkish sources but also for hosting me at the XI ‘Congress of Social and Economic History of Turkey’ in Ankara in 2008, at which I learned so much.

  2. Firpo, Relazioni, XIII, 170, Relazione of Lorenzo Bernardo, 1592; Sandys, A Relation of a Journey (1615), 46. Distances from Pitcher, An historical geography, 134, and Çetin, XVII. ve XVIII, 17–22.

  3. Baer, ‘Death in the hippodrome’, 64.

  4. Details from Darling, Revenue-raising, 248–9, 281; EI, IV, 560–1, ‘Kānūn’; and Fodor, ‘Sultan, imperial council, Grand Vizier’. Although the council (divan) met in an open hall with a grill behind which, in theory, the sultan secretly listened, he rarely seems to have done so.

  5. According to EI, s.v. ‘Devshirme’, recruiters might ‘collect’ one boy aged between 8 and 20 from every 40 Christian households in each village once every five years. They rarely recruited in towns, but promising boys captured in wars and raids often joined the ‘sultan's slaves’.

  6. Figures from Jennings, ‘Firearms’, 341, and Kunt, ‘The Köprülü years’, 31. The central government maintained strict segregation between sipahis and Janissaries in an attempt to prevent them making common cause.

  7. See EI, s.v. ‘Fatwā’. The fatwā was always very short, frequently just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (compare the similarly terse opinions voiced by the confessors of the Spanish Habsburgs: see ch. 9 above).

  8. Tezcan, ‘Searching for Osman’, 105–9.

  9. Zilfi, Politics of piety, 33, notes ‘Slimey’ Hüseyn. According to legend, the Janissaries' distinctive white headdress came from Hajji Bektash, whose disciples founded the Bektashi Order: Hathaway, A tale, 88, 100.

  10. Öz, ‘Population fall’, Özel, ‘Banditry’ and Özel, ‘Population changes’, document the population losses in Anatolia; D'Arrigo, ‘A 350-year (AD 1628–1980) reconstruction’, provides climatic data.


  11. Kiel, ‘Ottoman sources’ 99, 102, on Greece and Bulgaria; McGowan, Economic life, 106–7, on Manastir; Odorico, Conseils et mémoires, 163, 169 and 171 on Macedonia. Hütterroth, ‘Ecology’, 21–2, denies that the Little Ice Age affected the Ottoman empire, but cites only outdated research.

  12. Grove and Conterio, ‘The climate of Crete’, 241–2, report the storm of January 1645 and note that it ‘seems to have been more intense than those of the [twentieth] century’. Information on Safed gathered from local sources in 2002. On Egypt, see Mikhail, Nature and empire, 23 and 123; and Ibrahim, Al-Azmat, appendix 11.

  13. Özel, ‘Banditry’, 69. His calculations of bandit size support those of Koçi Beg, Risale, in the 1630s. The size, structure and movement of the population of the Ottoman empire is the subject of great controversy: Özel, ‘Population changes’, offers an excellent overview. Details from ibid., 180–1, 186–7 and 190–2; Cook, Population pressure, 10–27; McGowan, Economic life, 139–40 and 145–6; Barkey, Bandits, 220–6; Faroqhi with Erder, ‘Population rise’; Faroqhi, Coping with the state, 23–33, 40–3, and 86–97; and Inalcik, An economic and social history, 438–47 (also by Faroqhi).

  14. On the title, applied by Katib Çelebi to the deposition and murder of Osman, see Piterberg, Ottoman tragedy, 1.

  15. Börekçi, ‘Factions and favorites’, 82–3, quoting Francesco Contarini, the Venetian agent in Istanbul, 3 Jan. and 18 Sep. 1604.

  16. Tezcan, Searching for Osman, 110, on the entitlements of the mevali, and 201, of Osman's revocation. Note that Osman also had his eldest brother murdered before leaving the capital, a fratricide that the Chief Mufti refused to sanction, giving the sultan another grievance against the clerical elite: Finkel, Osman's dream, 198.

  17. White, The climate, 193, quoting Bostanzade Yahya; Anon., The strangling and death, 13. Pecevi Tarihi, II, 349–50, and Topcular Katibi Abdulkadir (Kadri) Efendi Tarihi, 687, both describe the freezing of the Bosporus early in 1621.

  18. Hasan Beyzade Tarihi, 338–9 (my thanks to Günhan Böreçki for translating this reference); White, The climate of rebellion, 197–8, quoting Bostanzade Yahya. The sources are confused, but I follow the account of Tezcan, Searching for Osman, 229–30. Hathaway, ‘The Evlād-i ‘Arab’, argues plausibly that tensions between the devşirme recruits raised in the Balkans and Anatolia, and those raised in the Caucasus and the Arab lands, contributed to the confrontations of 1622–3.