Global Crisis

War, Climate Change, & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century

Geoffrey Parker

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780300189193
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The acclaimed historian demonstrates a link between climate change and social unrest across the globe during the mid-17th century.

Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects ofwhat historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas.

In this meticulously researched volume, historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who experienced the many political, economic, and social crises that occurred between 1618 to the late 1680s. He also incorporates the scientific evidence of climate change during this period into the narrative, offering a strikingly new understanding of the General Crisis.

Changes in weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.

PART I

THE PLACENTA OF THE CRISIS

THE FRENCH PHILOSOPHER AND AUTHOR VOLTAIRE WAS THE FIRST to write about a Global Crisis in the seventeenth century. His Essay on the customs and character of nations, and on the principal facts of history from Charlemagne to Louis XIII, composed in the 1740s for his friend, the Marquise du Châtelet (who, although an eminent mathematician, found history boring), set the wars and rebellions a century earlier within a global framework. Thus, after describing the murder of an Ottoman sultan in 1648, Voltaire immediately noted:

This unfortunate time for Ibrahim was unfortunate for all monarchs. The Holy Roman Empire was unsettled by the famous Thirty Years’ War. Civil war devastated France and forced the mother of Louis XIV to flee with her children from her capital. In London, Charles I was condemned to death by his own subjects. Philip IV, king of Spain, having lost almost all his possessions in Asia, also lost Portugal.

Voltaire went on to consider the careers of Cromwell in England, Li Zicheng in China, Aurangzeb in India, and others who had seized power by force, concluding that the mid-seventeenth century had been ‘a period of usurpations almost from one end of the world to the other’.¹

Voltaire's Essay repeatedly stressed the global dimension of the crisis: ‘In the flood of revolutions which we have seen from one end of the universe to the other, a fatal sequence of events seems to have dragged people into them, just as winds move the sand and the waves. The developments in Japan offer another example …’. Eventually, fearing that the marquise might still find his 174 chapters and 800 pages of ‘examples’ boring, he delivered his analysis in a single sentence: ‘Three things exercise a constant influence over the minds of men: climate, government and religion.’ Taken together, Voltaire proclaimed, they offer ‘the only way to explain the enigma of this world’. Two decades later, Voltaire re-read his Essay and added a number of Remarks, including a fourth ‘thing’ that, he now believed, could ‘reconcile what was irreconcilable and explain what is inexplicable’ in human history: changes in population size.²

Voltaire's global vision has attracted few imitators. Although many subsequent historians have provided accounts filled with facts on ‘government and religion’ in the seventeenth century, until very recently few noted population trends and virtually none considered the influence of the climate. Nevertheless, recent work by demographers and climatologists suggests that around 1618, when the human population of the northern hemisphere was larger than ever before, the average global temperature started to fall, producing extreme climate events, disastrous harvest failures and frequent disease epidemics. Human demographic systems can seldom adapt swiftly enough to such adverse events, yet instead of seeking ways to mitigate the natural disasters and save lives, most governments around the globe exacerbated the situation by continuing their existing policies, above all their wars. These various natural and human factors constituted a ‘placenta’ capable of nourishing a global catastrophe. Even though they did not constitute the catastrophe itself, an examination of the placenta explains why the catastrophe lasted for two generations, why it killed up to one-third of the human population, and why it transformed the world inhabited by the survivors.³

1

The Little Ice Age¹

‘A strange and wondrous succession of changes in the weather’

IN 1614 RENWARD CYSAT, BOTANIST, ARCHIVIST AND TOWN HISTORIAN OF Luzern, Switzerland, began a new section of his chronicle entitled ‘The Seasons of the Year’, because ‘the past few years have seen such a strange and wondrous succession of changes in the weather’. He decided to

Record the same as a service and a favour to future generations because, unfortunately, on account of our sins, for some time now the years have shown themselves to be more rigorous and severe in the recent past, and we have seen deterioration amongst living things, not only among mankind and the animal world but also in the earth's crops and produce.²

Cysat was correct: ‘a strange and wondrous succession of changes in the weather’ had begun around the globe – and it would continue for almost a century. In west Africa, records reveal a prolonged drought from 1614 until 1619 both for Angola and for the Sahel (the semi-arid belt of savannah south of the Sahara that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea). In Europe, Catalonia suffered ‘the year of the flood’ in 1617: after over a month of continuous rain, a final four-day downpour washed away bridges, mills, drainage works, houses and even town walls. All Europe experienced an unusually cold winter in 1620–1: many rivers froze so hard that for three months they could bear the weight of loaded carts and, most spectacularly, the Bosporus froze over so that people could walk across the ice between Europe and Asia (apparently a unique climatic anomaly).³

Other parts of the northern hemisphere also experienced abnormal weather. Japan endured its coldest spring of the seventeenth century in 1616; while Chinese Gazetteers recorded heavy snowfall in 1618 in subtropical Fujian (almost as rare as the Bosporus freezing over). Four provinces reported a severe winter in 1620, as did four more in 1621. In the Americas, drought afflicted the valley of Mexico for five years out of six between 1616 and 1621, and reduced the crops in the Chesapeake basin so severely that the new Virginia colony almost failed. After six better harvests, the summer of 1627 was the wettest recorded in Europe during the past 500 years, while 1628 was a ‘year without a summer’, with temperatures so low that many crops never ripened. Between 1629 and 1632, much of Europe suffered excessive rains followed by drought. Conversely northern India suffered a ‘perfect drought’ in 1630–1 followed by catastrophic floods in 1632. All of these regions experienced dramatic falls in population.⁴

Some better weather followed in the 1630s, but then came three of the coldest summers ever recorded in the northern hemisphere. Drought and cold significantly stunted the growth of trees throughout the western United States between 1640 and 1644, while the Canadian Rockies experienced severe and prolonged drought from 1641 until 1653. Since virtually no rain fell in the valley of Mexico in 1640, 1641 and 1642, the clergy of Mexico City organized processions with the ‘Virgen de los Remedios’, an image believed to possess special efficacy in bringing rain, to beg God's intervention before everyone starved to death (the first time the image had ever been used in consecutive years). Early in 1642, John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, noted that

The frost was so great and continual this winter that all the Bay was frozen over, so much and so long, as the like, by the Indians’ relation, had not been so these forty years … To the southward also the frost was as great and the snow as deep, and at Virginia itself the great [Chesapeake] bay was much of it frozen over, and all of their great rivers.

To the north, English settlers on the coast of Maine complained of the ‘most intolerable piercing winter’ and found it ‘incredible to relate the extremity of the weather’.⁵

Abnormal droughts also prevailed on the other side of the Pacific. The Indonesian rice harvest failed in both 1641 and 1642; and between 1643 and 1671 Java experienced the longest drought recorded during the past four centuries. In Japan the first winter snow of 1641 fell on Edo (as Tokyo was then known) on 28 November, almost the earliest date on record (the average date is 5 January), and both that year and the next saw unusually late springs. According to a 1642 pamphlet published in the Philippines, because of the ‘great drought’ throughout the archipelago ‘a great famine is feared'; and two years later, a resident of Manila recorded that once again ‘there has been much famine among the Indians [Filipinos] because the rice harvest was a poor one on account of the drought’. In North China, numerous Gazetteers reported drought in 1640 and the following year the Grand Canal, which brought food to Beijing, dried up for lack of rain (another unparalleled event); while in the lower Yangzi valley chroniclers recorded abnormal rain and cold throughout the spring of 1642.⁶

The lands around the Mediterranean also experienced extreme weather at this time. In March 1640 a messenger approaching Istanbul, ‘with snow up to the horses’ knees’, experienced ‘such a frost that I caught two frozen birds on the way simply with my own hand’. Catalonia endured a drought in spring 1640 so intense that the authorities declared a special holiday to enable the entire population to make a pilgrimage to a local shrine to pray for water – one of only four such occasions in the past five centuries. In 1641 the Nile fell to the lowest level ever recorded while the narrow growth rings laid down by trees in Anatolia reveal a disastrous drought. In Istanbul, by contrast, a chronicler recorded that rain flooded areas near Hagia Sophia so that ‘the shops were under water and destroyed'; while in Macedonia, the autumn saw ‘so much rain and snow that many workers died through the great cold’. Early in 1642 the Guadalquivir broke its banks and flooded Seville, and the years 1640–3 were the wettest on record throughout Andalusia.⁷

Further north, English men and women noted ‘the extraordinary distemperature of the season in August 1640, when the land seemed to be threatened with the extraordinary violence of the winds and unaccustomed abundance of wet'; while in Ireland, frost and snow in October 1641 began what contemporaries considered ‘a more bitter winter than was of some years before or since seen in Ireland’.⁸ Hungary experienced uncommonly wet and cold weather between 1638 and 1641, while summer frosts repeatedly devastated crops in Bohemia. In the Alps, unusually narrow tree rings reflect poor growing seasons throughout the 1640s, while estate papers record the disappearance of fields, farmsteads and even whole villages as glaciers advanced up to 1.2 miles beyond their current positions (their furthest extent in historical times). In eastern France, each grape harvest between 1640 and 1643 began a full month later than usual and grain prices surged, indicating poor cereal harvests. In the Low Countries, all along the river Maas (or Meuse), floods caused by snowmelt early in 1643 created ‘the greatest desolation that one could imagine: the houses all broken open and overturned, and people and animals dead in the hedgerows. Even the branches of the highest trees contained a number of cows, sheep and chicken.’ In Iceland, the unusual cold and constant rain ruined the hay, and in 1640 farmers resorted to dried fish as fodder for their cattle. Perhaps most striking of all, a soldier serving in central Germany recorded in his diary in August 1640 that ‘at this time there was such a great cold that we almost froze to death in our quarters and, on the road, three people did freeze to death: a cavalryman, a woman and a boy'; while 1641 remains the coldest year ever recorded in Scandinavia.⁹

Data from the southern hemisphere reveal a similar climatic aberration. In Chile, drought in the 1630s led the chief inquisitor to apologize to his superiors that he could not send them any proceeds from fines and confiscations because ‘for the past three years we have not collected a penny on account of the drought'; while glaciers, tree rings and carbon-14 deposits all show significantly cooler weather in Patagonia in the 1640s.¹⁰ In Sub-Saharan Africa, a severe drought afflicted both Senegambia and the Upper Niger between 1640 and 1644; while Angolan records show a unique concentration of droughts, locust infestations and epidemics throughout the second quarter of the seventeenth century, with a major drought and famine in 1639–45.

The decade ended with another bout of extreme weather around the globe. In 1648, on the Isle of Wight in southern England, a local landowner lamented that ‘from Mayday till the 15th of September, we had scarce three dry days together’, and when a visitor asked him ‘whether that weather was usual in our island? I told him that in this forty years I never knew the like before’. Meanwhile, in Scotland, ‘The long great rains for many weeks did prognosticate famine’, and produced 'so great a dearth of corn as Ireland has not seen in our memory, and so cruel a famine, which has already killed thousands of the poorer sort’.¹¹ The following winter, the river Thames froze over as far as London Bridge and the barge arrying the corpse of Charles I to its final resting place after his execution on 30 January 1649 avoided ice floes in the river only with difficulty. Other parts of northwest Europe also experienced unusual precipitation that year – 226 days of rain or snow according to a meticulous set of records from Fulda in Germany (compared with an upper limit of 180 days in the twentieth century) – followed by ‘a winter that lasted six months’. In France, appalling weather delayed the grape harvest into October in 1648, 1649 and 1650, and drove bread prices to the highest levels in almost a century, while floods covered central Paris for much of spring 1649. In China, the winter of 1649–50 seems to have been the coldest on record.¹²

The 1650s brought no respite. In the Dutch Republic, so much snow fell early in 1651 that the state funeral of Stadholder William II had to be postponed because mourners could not reach The Hague, and then the combination of snowmelt and a storm tide caused the worst flooding for 80 years in coastal regions. Catastrophic floods caused by snowmelt also occurred along the Vistula and the Seine. Conversely, 1651 saw the longest recorded drought in Languedoc and Roussillon, the Mediterranean borderlands between France and Spain: 360 days, or almost an entire year. In the Balkans, in spring 1654 ‘it snowed abundantly, [and] the snow covered the ground until Easter. I have never before seen such snowstorms and frost, moisture and cold.’ Even ...