Crisis and Catastrophe: The Global Crisis of the Seventeenth Century Reconsidered

The mid-seventeenth century saw more cases of simultaneous state breakdown around the globe than any previous or subsequent age: something historians have called “The General Crisis.” In the 1640s, Ming China, the most populous state in the world, collapsed; the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the largest state in Europe, disintegrated; much of the Spanish monarchy, the first global empire in history, seceded; and the entire Stuart monarchy rebelled—Scotland, Ireland, England, and its American colonies. In addition, just in the year 1648, a tide of urban rebellions began in Russia (the largest state in the world), and the Fronde Revolt paralyzed France (the most populous state in Europe); meanwhile, in Istanbul (Europe's largest city), irate subjects strangled Sultan Ibrahim, and in London, King Charles I went on trial for war crimes (the first head of state to do so). In the 1650s, Sweden and Denmark came close to revolution; Scotland and Ireland disappeared as autonomous states; the Dutch Republic radically changed its form of government; and the Mughal Empire, then the richest state in the world, experienced two years of civil war following the arrest, deposition, and imprisonment of its ruler.1

The frequency of popular revolts around the world also peaked during the mid-seventeenth century. In China, the number of major armed uprisings rose from under ten in the 1610s to more than seventy in the 1620s and more than eighty in the 1630s, affecting 160 counties and involving well over 1 million people.2 In Japan, some forty revolts (hōki) and two hundred lesser rural uprisings (hyakushō ikki) occurred between 1590 and 1642—a total unmatched for two centuries—and the largest uprising, at Shimabara on Kyushu Island in 1637–1638, involved some 25,000 insurgents.3 In Russia, a wave of rebellions in 1648–1649 shook the central government to its foundations; of the twenty-five major peasant revolts recorded in seventeenth-century Germany and Switzerland, more than half took place between 1626 and 1650; the total number of food riots in England rose from twelve between 1600 and 1620 to thirty-six between 1621 and 1631, with fourteen more in 1647–1649.4 In France, finally, popular revolts peaked both absolutely and relatively in the mid-seventeenth century. (See Table 1.)

Popular Revolts in France, 1590–1715

The mid-seventeenth century also saw a third major anomaly: more wars took place around the world than in any other era until the 1940s. In the six decades between 1618 and 1678, Poland was at peace for only twenty-seven years, the Dutch Republic for only fourteen, France for only eleven, and Spain for only three. Jack S. Levy, a political scientist, found the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe to be “the most warlike in terms of the proportion of years of war under way (95 per cent), the frequency of war (nearly one every three years), and the average yearly duration, extent, and magnitude of war.” The historical record reveals at least one war in progress between the states of Europe in every year between 1611 and 1669. Beyond Europe, over the same period, the Chinese and Mughal empires fought wars continuously, while the Ottoman Empire enjoyed only seven years of peace. The global “Conflict Catalogue” compiled by Peter Brecke, another political scientist, shows that, on average, wars around the world lasted longer in the seventeenth century than at any time since 1400 (when his survey begins). (See Figure 2.) War had become the norm for resolving both domestic and international problems.5

Finally, throughout the Northern Hemisphere, the mid-seventeenth century witnessed almost unprecedented human mortality. When China's Yongzheng emperor looked back in 1729 on the turbulent transition from Ming to Qing rule two generations before, he claimed that “over half of the population perished” in the violence. In Sichuan (once a densely populated province), “people lamented that they did not have a single offspring. The few who survived had lost hands or feet or had their ears and noses sliced off,” he continued. “Older people who had witnessed [the devastation] would weep as they described it.”6 In Germany in 1635, Hans Conrad Lang, a clothier living in Konstanz, believed that war and epidemics had caused “so many deaths that the like of it has never been heard in human history”; while Johann Valentin Andreä, a Lutheran minister in Württemberg, lamented that barely one-third of his parishioners remained alive: “Just in the last five years,” he wrote in 1638, “518 of them have been killed by various misfortunes.”7 Many more would die before the Thirty Years' War ended ten years later. In France, a royal minister believed that during the Fronde Revolt (1648–1653) “two-thirds of the inhabitants of the villages around Paris died of illness, want, and misery”; while at neighboring Port-Royal-des-Champs, Abbess Angélique Arnauld lamented that “the miseries of our France are such that there are now only few working men, since almost all those in the countryside, ravaged by the war, are dead, and the rest have enlisted and gone to the wars.” In all, she estimated, “a third of the world has died.”8

Disaster, disorder, and death on this scale demoralized even the most resilient survivors. In Leviathan, a treatise on political obedience published in 1651, Thomas Hobbes claimed that “There is [now] no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; … no arts; no letters; no society. And, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Many people in France, where Hobbes wrote these words, shared his apocalyptic vision. “If one ever had to believe in the Last Judgment,” wrote a Parisian judge in 1652, “I believe it is happening right now”; while in 1655, Abbess Arnauld feared that the general desolation “must signify the end of the world.”9 That same year, Louis XIV's uncle Gaston of Orléans declared that the French “Monarchy was finished: the kingdom could not survive in its present state. In all the monarchies that had collapsed, decline began with movements similar to the ones he discerned [now]; and he launched into a long list of comparisons to prove his statement from past examples.”10

Now, of course, the French monarchy was not “finished” by the Fronde—instead, Louis XIV became the most powerful king in its history—just as the world did not end in the 1650s; and history is full of people who sincerely believed that they battled misfortunes the like of which had “never been heard in human history.” Nevertheless, subsequent research has corroborated the apparently extravagant claims of those who lived through the mid-seventeenth-century crisis: they did indeed face adversity on a scale unparalleled in modern times. Thus in Württemberg, where Andreä lived, a government survey in 1638 (the year of his lament) revealed that only one-quarter of the prewar population remained in their homes; while another survey in 1655, seven years after the war's end, showed that the duchy's total population remained below one-half of its prewar level.11 Modern historians of Germany estimate that overall demographic loss during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) ranged from 20 to 45 percent and that recovery took at least half a century. (See Table 2.)

German Demographic Evolution, 1600–1750 (in millions)

In France, the surviving parish registers from the Île-de-France, where Abbess Arnauld lived, also show that the worst crisis of the entire ancien régime occurred during the Fronde: “In most of the parishes for which we have a total of burials for 1652,” according to Jean Jacquart's demographic research, “almost a quarter of the population vanished in a single year.” Likewise, the research of Pierre Goubert in the archives of the Beauvaisis, an area north of Paris, revealed “a crisis—economic, social, demographic, physiological and moral—of an intensity and duration hitherto unknown” at precisely this time. The “steep rise and heavy extension of poverty and mortality, and a sharp fall in births” associated with the Fronde reduced the population of the region by about one-fifth.12

In China, finally, government records show that the total amount of cultivated land in the empire fell from 191 million acres in 1602 to 67 million in 1645, the year after Qing forces occupied northern China, with a partial recovery to only 90 million in 1661 and 100 million in 1685.13 No statewide census exists to test the Yongzheng emperor's estimate that “over half of China's population perished,” but a wealth of local data supports his claim. Thus a modern demographic reconstruction for Tongcheng County in Anhui Province between 1631 and 1645 shows that some areas—especially those along the routes used by armies—suffered almost 60 percent losses. Farther north, the records of Dancheng County in Shandong Province reveal how a combination of natural and human elements reduced the number of able-bodied males from just over 40,000 in the 1630s to around 34,000 in 1641, to fewer than 10,000 in 1646, and to 9,000 in 1670. During the same period, the number of inhabited settlements in the county declined from 85 to 31. The late Frederic C. Wakeman suggested that the devastation caused by the Ming-Qing transition meant that in Sichuan (the area singled out by the Yongzheng emperor), “well over a million people must have been killed and the local gentry was virtually exterminated.”14

In part, these catastrophic losses occurred because the General Crisis took place at a time when population densities in the Northern Hemisphere had reached unprecedented and sometimes unsustainable levels. Thus Jiangnan, an area of roughly 17,000 square miles in China's Lower Yangzi Valley, boasted a population of about 20 million by 1620, an average of almost 1,200 persons per square mile. (In comparison, the Netherlands, the most populous part of Europe today, boasts 1,000 persons per square mile.) In some cities, the concentration of people was even higher: population and building densities within the medieval walls of London, for example, had in the 1630s reached levels probably not “witnessed in Britain either before or since.” In some parishes, each acre contained almost 400 people.15

In such areas, local resources no longer satisfied demand. According to Alvaro Semedo, a Portuguese Jesuit writing in 1637, Jiangnan “is so full of all sorts of people that not only the villages but even the cities can now be seen one from another, and in some areas, where the rivers are more common, settlement is almost continuous.” Indeed, he mused, China had become “so overpopulated [eccessivamente popolato] that after living there for twenty-two years, I remain almost as amazed at the end as I was at the beginning by the multitude of people. Certainly the truth is above any exaggeration: not only in the cities, towns and public places … but also on the roads there are normally as many people as would turn out in Europe [only] for some holiday or public festival.” Since “the number of people is infinite,” he continued, “there can be no capital sufficient for so many, or money sufficient to fill so many purses.”16

Many of Semedo's contemporaries considered parts of Europe “overpopulated,” too. In England, the colonizer Sir Ferdinando Gorges claimed that “this peaceable time affords no means of employment to the multitude of people that daily do increase,” and he therefore sent settlers to Maine largely in order to reduce population pressure at home. His rivals in the Virginia Company, fearing “the surcharge of necessitous people, the matter or fuel of dangerous insurrections,” likewise sought to remove them from England to their new colony on the Chesapeake. By the mid-1630s, Thomas Bowdler rejoiced that the thousands migrating across the Atlantic each year promoted England's stability because the American colonies “serve for drains to unload their populous state which else would overflow its own banks by continuance of peace and turn head upon itself, or make a body fit for any rebellion.”17

Nevertheless, only a few years after Semedo and Bowdler wrote, the population of China, the Stuart monarchy, and other states in the Northern Hemisphere did engage in “dangerous insurrections.” Why?

Many contemporaries attributed the revolutions, revolts, wars, and mortality that surrounded them to supernatural forces. To the Welsh historian James Howell, writing in 1649, the extent and suddenness of the catastrophe suggested that

God Almighty has a quarrel lately with all mankind, and given the reins to the ill spirit to compass the whole earth; for within these twelve years there have the strangest revolutions and horridest things happened, not only in Europe but all the world over, that have befallen mankind, I dare boldly say, since Adam fell, in so short a revolution of time … [Such] monstrous things have happened [that] it seems the whole world is off the hinges; and (which is the more wonderful) all these prodigious passages have fallen out in less than the compass of twelve years.18

Others saw the misfortunes that surrounded them as God's punishment for official toleration of activities of which they disapproved, ranging from sodomy to stage plays, and called on governments to persecute and prohibit them before the situation got worse. Such logic dominated the preamble to an act passed in 1642 by the English Parliament:

Whereas the distressed state of Ireland, steeped in her own blood, and the distracted state of England, threatened with a cloud of blood by a civil war, call for all possible means to appease and avert the wrath of God … [and whereas] public sports do not well agree with public calamities, nor public stage-plays with the seasons of humiliation … being spectacles of pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious mirth and levity … all public stage plays shall cease.19

Others still blamed the devil and his lieutenants on earth: the witches. In Scotland in 1649, after a decade of drought, war, and revolution, when “the prices of victual and corn of all sorts were higher than ever heretofore any[one] living could remember,” the Scots Parliament decided “that the sin of witchcraft daily increases in this land” and so, to avert further disasters, issued some five hundred commissions to try suspected witches, resulting in more executions for sorcery during the famine of 1649–1650 than at any other time in Scottish history.20

Many contemporaries linked the General Crisis with other extraterrestrial phenomena. A Spanish almanac published in 1640 reminded readers that “Whenever eclipses, comets and earthquakes and other similar prodigies have occurred, great miseries have usually followed” and predicted that the eclipse of the sun observed on June 1, 1639, would produce “great upsets in war, political upheavals, and damage to ordinary people” between March 1640 and March 1642. (The anonymous author also specified further dire consequences that would afflict future generations of readers down to the year 2400 a.d.)21 The appearance of a particularly brilliant comet during the winter of 1618–1619 likewise led to predictions in China, Russia, India, and the Ottoman Empire, as well as all across Europe, that “discord, irritations, deaths, upheavals, robberies, rape, tyranny, and the change of kingdoms” would follow.22 As late as 1649, a London newspaper still linked the comet of 1618 with the Thirty Years' War because “the Blazing Star, in the year the war began, appeared over Europe for thirty days and no more.”23 In China, a popular encyclopedia likewise noted that “when comets have dominated Heaven, there have been conflicts over the succession to the throne”; but it also blamed the stars. “Venus is a star associated with war. If one examines the patterns of Heaven through successive dynasties, [one finds that] when Venus has dominated Heaven, wars have arisen on a great scale.”24 Many Europeans agreed. Thus in 1648, Johann Adler Salvius, a Swedish diplomat, considered it “a great miracle that we hear of revolts by the people against their rulers everywhere in the world, for example in France, England, Germany, Poland, Muscovy, and the Ottoman Empire,” and wondered “whether this can be explained by some general configuration of the stars in the sky.”25 Three years later, Landgrave Hermann of Hesse suggested that the stars might influence human affairs through the weather in his Meteorological History: That is, twenty-four years of original and truthful observations and daily descriptions of the weather, chiefly to show if and how the weather each day is linked with the stars, and why this would happen (or not).26

Only a few of those who lived through the seventeenth-century crisis linked the catastrophes that surrounded them with climate change. In an essay titled “Of Seditions and Troubles,” the English statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon warned that “when any of the four pillars of government are mainly shaken or weakened (which are religion, justice, council and treasure), men had need to pray for fair weather.”27 As the century advanced and the “pillars of government” shook in state after state, prayers for “fair weather” multiplied. Thus in February 1647, Don Juan Chumacero (president of the Council of Castile, charged with maintaining domestic law and order) patiently explained the link between climate and catastrophe to his master, King Philip IV. “Torrential and persistent rain has made traffic impossible on the roads to Madrid,” he warned, and so, “since the bakers of the Court have never had the capacity, or the resources, to bake more than their normal annual quota, we have consumed almost all the flour in the city's granary.” As he wrote these words in the royal palace, in the neighboring parishes of Madrid births plunged and deaths soared.28 (See Figure 3.) A few months later, even in Andalusia, “it began to rain a lot, and the weather turned very cold, even worse than the coldest January day.” Freak frosts killed the ears of grain and produced the worst harvest of the century.29 Chumacero despaired: “God has chosen to wear out these realms with every calamity—war, famine and plague—each one of which normally suffices to raise great anguish and a sense of panic,” he told the king in October 1647. “The population [of Madrid] is very volatile and every day it becomes more insolent, which leads to fears of some violence … because hunger respects no one [la ambre a ninguno respecta] and so it is necessary to do all we can to help, and to avoid any decision which the people might regard as a burden, even if they have no cause … The people are so licentious that no day is safe [from the threat of violence].” He concluded wearily: “There is no shortage of people who blame Your Majesty, saying that he does nothing, and that the council is at fault—as if we had any control over the climate!”30

Before long, repeated examples of extreme weather, especially prolonged cold spells, led some to suspect global cooling. In July 1675, the learned Parisian Madame de Sévigné complained that, instead of the normal summer heat wave, “We suffer horribly from the cold and have the fires lit” and speculated that “the behavior of the sun and of the seasons has completely changed.” That same decade, according to an Ottoman traveler in Egypt, “No one here used to know about wearing furs. There was no winter. But now we have severe winters and we have started wearing furs because of the cold.”31 In China, the frequency of extreme climatic events led the Kangxi emperor, who studied regional weather reports closely, to conclude in 1717 that “The climate has changed.” His Majesty recalled that in the mid-seventeenth century, “when I was touring in Jiangnan, by the 18th day of the third month new wheat [from the winter wheat crop] was available to eat. Now, even by the middle of the fourth month, wheat has not been harvested … I have also heard that in Fujian, where it never used to snow, since the beginning of our dynasty [1636], it has.”32

A generation later, the French intellectual Voltaire made the first systematic attempt to see the rebellions, wars, and natural catastrophes of the preceding century as a global phenomenon arising in part from climate change. In the 1740s, he composed a lengthy Essay on the Customs and Character of Nations for his friend Madame du Châtelet, who was bored stiff by the past. Because the mid-seventeenth century presented his reluctant reader with special problems of ennui, Voltaire decided to render the apparent anarchy intelligible by setting individual episodes within a global framework: “a period of usurpations almost from one end of the world to the other” that included Oliver Cromwell in Europe, Aurangzeb in India, and Li Zicheng in China.33 No doubt fearing that his 800-page metanarrative might exhaust Mme. du Châtelet, Voltaire ended his Essay in telegraphic style: “Three things exercise a constant influence over the minds of men: climate, government, and religion.” Only this trinity, he asserted, could “explain the enigma of this world.”34

So far, all historians of the General Crisis have included “government and religion” in their analysis, but few have considered the impact of the climate. Even the pioneering 1967 study Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a historian of early modern Europe, concluded that “In the present state of our knowledge it still seems as if the long ‘crisis,’ hypothetical or real, of the seventeenth century had some other explanation” than climate change. For example, Le Roy Ladurie continued, “it would be quite absurd” to try and “‘explain’ the Fronde by the adverse meteorological conditions of the 1640s.” Accordingly, instead of writing a study of the impact of climatic fluctuations on European history, as he had intended, Le Roy Ladurie made “a modest attempt to establish an accurate chronology of those fluctuations.”35

In 1967, such pessimism was justified; but over the past forty years, an avalanche of new data has transformed our knowledge of early modern weather and thus the links between climate and catastrophe. The data fall into two distinct categories: a “human archive” and a “natural archive.” The former consists of four main types of records:

• Narrative information contained in written texts (chronicles and histories, letters and diaries, judicial and government records, newspapers and broadsheets) and oral traditions.

• Numerical information compiled from documentary proxy data (such as the changing date on which the harvesting of certain crops began each year, or the annual volume harvested) or, occasionally, from narrative reports (“Rain fell for the first time in 42 days”).

• Pictorial information contained in dated visual representations of natural phenomena (paintings that show the position of a glacier's tongue in a given year or that depict ice floes in a harbor during a winter of unusual severity).

• Epigraphic or archaeological information, such as inscriptions on structures that date flood levels, or excavations of settlements abandoned because of climate change.

The size of this “human archive” for the mid-seventeenth century is overwhelming. In Sicily, more than a dozen contemporaries recorded in detail the progress of the drought and famine that sparked revolt in most of the island's towns in 1647; while in Ireland, judges took sworn “depositions” from some 2,600 Protestant men and 600 women, filling almost 20,000 pages with the things seen, heard, and suffered in 1641 when, following three failed harvests, large numbers of Catholics raped, robbed, killed, and humiliated their Protestant neighbors. In China, a scholar who set out in the 1660s to reconstruct the misery of the recent transition from Ming to Qing in Jiangnan found almost seventy local histories to consult.36 No previous period boasts such a wealth of eyewitness evidence for historical investigation. But there is more: a “natural archive” provides abundant complementary material on long-term trends. Here, too, four types of record possess special relevance for the period before scientific instruments became available to track climate change:

• Ice cores: the annual deposits on ice caps and glaciers around the world, captured in deep boreholes, provide evidence of changing levels of volcanic emissions, precipitation, air temperature, and atmospheric composition.

• Glaciology: the alternating advance and retreat of glaciers, together with an analysis of the debris left behind, sheds light on both precipitation and ablation.

• Palynology: changes in pollen and spores deposited in lakes, bogs, and estuaries reflect the natural vegetation at the time of pollen deposit.

• Dendrochronology: the varying size of growth rings laid down by trees during each growing season reflects local conditions in spring and summer. A thick ring corresponds with a year favorable to growth, while a narrow ring indicates a year of adversity.37

Combining the two “archives” has enabled climatologists to re-create detailed weather maps for western Europe back to 1659 by month, and back to 1500 by season.38 In 1999, the journal Climatic Change devoted an entire issue to European weather during the sixteenth century, which was later published in book form.39 Since then, articles in the International Journal of Climatology and elsewhere have offered a detailed reconstruction of both the European climate between 1675 and 1715 and the entire global climate for certain decades of the early modern period.40

Unfortunately, no similar survey has yet appeared for the 1640s, the decade at the center of the General Crisis, but the natural and human “archives” are both abundant, and they reveal both extreme cold and prolonged drought around the globe. In America, New England's colonists experienced the second-coldest winter in a century in 1641–1642. John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, noted in his journal 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.” Sir Ferdinando Gorges's settlers on the coast of Maine likewise complained of the “most intolerable piercing winter,” adding, “it is incredible to relate the extremity of the weather.”41 East Asia also experienced abnormal cold. In Japan, when Enomoto Yazaemon (a merchant and minor official living just north of Tokyo) wrote his memoirs, he remembered the unique conditions on New Year's Day 1641, when “ice lay in the fields one foot deep. From that time, I observed seven snowfalls until the spring.” The following November, Tokyo was once again covered with snow: only two other years since then have seen snowfalls so early.42 A reconstruction of annual temperatures in China since 1370 likewise shows the lowest point ever in the mid-seventeenth century. (See Figure 4.) A chronicler in Shanghai, writing in April 1642, recorded that “since the New Year [January 31], it has been cold and it has rained frequently. The spring has almost come to an end, but the cold still persists.”43

Europe, too, experienced winters of extreme severity—from Scandinavia (which suffered the coldest winter ever recorded in 1641–1642) to Macedonia (where that same year “there was so much rain and snow that many workers died through the great cold”).44 In the Alps, fields, farmsteads, and even whole villages disappeared as glaciers advanced to their maximum extent between 1640 and 1644. Summers as well as winters were unusually cold in those years. In eastern France, cool summers delayed every grape harvest between 1640 and 1643 by a full month and reduced harvest yields.45 Hungary experienced a run of unusually wet and cold summers in the 1640s; while in Bohemia, frosts in late May and early September, and occasionally also in summer, ruined several harvests.46 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. On the road, three people did freeze to death: a cavalryman, a woman, and a boy.”47 In the Northern Hemisphere as a whole, 1641 was the third-coldest summer recorded over the past six centuries, 1643 was the tenth-coldest, and 1642 was the twenty-eighth-coldest—three landmark winters in a row. These extremes have led historians and climatologists alike to speak of the period as “the Little Ice Age.”48

The 1640s also saw prolonged drought in many areas. The western United States lacked rain in 1640–1644, which, combined with unusually low temperatures, significantly stunted the growth of plants. No rain fell in the Valley of Mexico between spring and mid-October 1641, and a shortage of rain the following summer raised the price of maize, the staple crop, to famine levels: in both years the clergy of Mexico City took the “Virgen de los Remedios” on procession to solicit God's intervention before everyone died.49 Across the Pacific, according to a 1642 pamphlet, the entire Philippines suffered from a “great drought that prevails—for there has been no rain for eight months, which occasions excessive heat; and the rice, the usual food in this country, cannot be sown, and a great famine is feared.” Between 1643 and 1671, the Indonesian archipelago experienced the longest drought recorded during the past four centuries.50 In 1640, northern China experienced the single-driest year recorded during the last five centuries; while in 1641, central China experienced its second-driest year in two centuries, with a drought so severe in Shandong Province that the Grand Canal dried up for the only time on record.51 In Egypt, the Nile fell to some of its lowest recorded levels between 1640 and 1643; much of West Africa suffered droughts of great intensity in 1639–1643; and prolonged drought reduced Lake Chad to the lowest level ever recorded.52 In Europe, finally, Catalonia experienced a drought in spring 1640 so intense that the authorities declared a special holiday so that the entire population could make a pilgrimage to a local shrine to pray for water—one of only four such occasions recorded in five centuries. One day in May 1641, in Madrid, the entire central government received an order to stop work and join the royal family in a procession that followed the body of the capital's patron saint, St. Isidro, around the streets to pray for rain.53

So we now know that the General Crisis coincided with a major anomaly in the world's climatic history; but what caused that anomaly? Responsibility rests with two natural phenomena that began in the mid-seventeenth century and persisted until the early eighteenth century, when the global climate changed again and became more benign. First, solar activity reached the lowest level in two millennia. Fewer sunspots—those dark, cooler patches on the solar surface surrounded by “flares” that make the sun shine with greater intensity—appeared between 1645 and 1715 than in a single year of the twentieth century. Whereas more than 100,000 sunspots now come and go in a sixty-year period, the last six decades of the seventeenth century saw scarcely 100.54 Other observations by astronomers of the time confirm a striking reduction in solar energy. The aurora borealis (the “northern lights,” caused when charged particles from the sun interact with the earth's magnetic field) became rare for two generations after 1640—so rare that when Edmond Halley, England's Astronomer Royal, saw an aurora in 1716, he wrote a learned paper describing the phenomenon because it was the first time he had seen one in almost fifty years of observation. Likewise, the brilliant corona nowadays visible during every total solar eclipse also disappeared: descriptions by astronomers between the 1640s and the 1700s mention only a pale ring of dull light, reddish and narrow, around the moon. The energy of the sun appears to have diminished, a condition normally associated with reduced surface temperatures and extreme climatic events on earth.55

Simultaneously, contemporaries regularly reported “dust veils” in the skies above the Northern Hemisphere that made the sun seem paler or redder than usual. During the first six months of 1651, a Barcelona shopkeeper lamented that “among our misfortunes, I think the greatest was that the sun did not shine once … and if it came out it was pale and yellow, or else much too red, which caused great fear.”56 Thousands of miles to the east, Korea's royal astronomers reported on numerous occasions in the seventeenth century that “the skies all around are darkened and grey as if some kind of dust had fallen.”57 Both the dust and the reddened skies stemmed from a spate of major volcanic eruptions, each hurling sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, where it deflected some of the sun's radiation back into space and thus significantly reduced temperatures in all areas of the earth beneath the dust clouds. In particular, twelve major volcanic eruptions occurred around the Pacific between 1638 and 1644—apparently an all-time record—and all of them occurred near the equator, so that their dust veils reduced the solar energy received by the most densely populated areas of the planet.58

Reduced solar energy received on earth—whether due to fewer sunspots, more volcanic activity, or both—not only lowers the global temperature; it also changes the climate. In normal summers, a column of rising heat over Central Asia attracts the monsoon system, which means that easterly winds blowing from equatorial America bring heavy rains to East and Southeast Asia. By contrast, reduced solar energy means that the snow lingers in Central Asia, reflecting the sun's heat instead of absorbing and radiating it as dark land surfaces do; without the column of rising heat, westerly winds blowing from equatorial Asia to America take the monsoon rains eastward, a phenomenon called El Niño (or, properly, ENSO: El Niño/Southern Oscillation). This shift dramatically affects the world's climate: whereas in normal years heavy rains nurture the harvests of South and East Asia, in El Niño years they bring floods to Central and South America instead and create drought in Asia and Australasia. The “global footprint” left by El Niño also includes three other regions: the Caribbean almost always suffers floods; Ethiopia and northwest India usually experience droughts; and Europe frequently experiences harsh winters.59 On average, these disruptive El Niño episodes occur only once every five years, but in the mid-seventeenth century they happened twice as often: in 1640, 1641, 1647, 1650, 1652, 1655, and 1661. Each time, the regions normally affected all experienced abnormal weather.60

Besides increasing the frequency of El Niño episodes, reduced solar energy affects the global climate in two other significant ways. First, mean temperatures decline far more in the Northern Hemisphere (home to the majority of humankind and the site of most mid-seventeenth-century revolts, wars, and mortality) than at the equator, in part because increased snow cover and sea ice reflect more of the sun's rays back into space. Thus any significant extension of the polar ice caps and glaciers (both of which occurred in the mid-seventeenth century) further reduces temperatures in northerly latitudes.61 Second, any fall in overall temperature triggers extreme climatic events. To pluck three notable mid-seventeenth-century examples: In the winter of 1620–1621, the Bosporus froze over so hard that people could cross on foot between Europe and Asia. In 1630, torrential rains in Arabia and western Asia (which an Ottoman chronicler compared with “the times of Noah”) caused floods so severe that they destroyed two walls of the Kaaba in Mecca (a place that normally sees little rain) and caused “the Tigris and Euphrates to overflow, and floods to cover the whole Baghdad plateau.” Finally, in the Baltic, where Sweden and Denmark were at war, an “extraordinary violent frost” early in 1658 “increased to such a degree, that the Little Belt which divides Jutland from the isle of Funen was so intensely frozen, as suggested to the Swedish king an enterprise (full of hazard, but not disagreeable to a fearless mind edged with ambition) of marching over the ice into Funen with horse, foot and cannon.” The astonished Danish defenders “made large cuts in the ice, which were soon congealed again” because of the extreme cold.62 Each of these extreme climatic events remains unparalleled; each occurred in the Little Ice Age.

How, precisely, can historians link the harsh winters, cool summers, droughts, and floods of the 1640s—to say nothing of the sunspot minimum, the volcanic maximum, and the more frequent El Niños—with individual cases of state breakdown such as the revolts of Scotland, Ireland, and England against Charles I, or the collapse of Ming rule in China? We must not paint bull's-eyes around bullet holes and argue that since climatic aberrations seem to be the only factor capable of causing simultaneous upheavals around the globe, therefore those aberrations “must” have caused the upheavals. In several cases, however, the human and natural climatic archives show exactly how extreme weather anomalies triggered or fatally exacerbated major political upheavals. Thus much of southern Portugal rebelled in 1637 when drought forced the price of bread to unprecedented heights; popular revolts spread throughout Catalonia in spring 1640 as prolonged drought threatened catastrophic harvest failure; and the first urban riots of the Tokugawa era occurred in 1642 when rice ran short in Osaka, the “kitchen of Japan.”63 Three disastrous harvests preceded the Irish Rebellion in 1641; the catastrophic harvests of 1647 and 1648 helped to precipitate major revolts in Sicily, central Italy, Poland, and Russia; while the harvest of 1650 was the worst of the century in Sweden, creating the backdrop for near-revolution when the Estates of the kingdom met in Stockholm.64

Scotland offers an excellent example of the role of climate in producing catastrophe. King Charles I made no secret of his desire to create “one uniform course of government in, and through, our whole monarchy” and to impose a single “form of public worship,” so that “as it has but one Lord and one faith, so it has but one heart and one mouth … in the churches that are under the protection of one sovereign prince.”65 In Scotland, this process gathered momentum in 1634, when Charles ordered the bishops to prepare a new Prayer Book based on the one used in England. Haggling over minor details between the king, his Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, and the Scottish bishops delayed production for three years, so that when in June 1637 the Scottish Privy Council decreed the compulsory and exclusive use of the new Prayer Book on pain of outlawry, the kingdom faced not only a “scarcity of victuals” and a “scarcity and want of monies” but also a plague epidemic.66 In addition, it faced a severe if not unprecedented drought. According to the Earl of Lothian, one of Scotland's worried landowners, “The earth has been iron in this land … and the heavens brass this summer, till now in the harvest there have been such inundations and floods and winds, as no man living remembers the like. This has shaken and rotted and carried away the little corn [that] came up.”67

His Lordship did not exaggerate. Scotland's “natural archive” reveals that 1637 was the driest year in two decades. Indeed, the kingdom experienced the worst recorded drought in a millennium from 1636 until 1649, when food of all sorts became so scarce that “the like had never been seen in the kingdom before heretofore, since it was a nation.”68 Small wonder, then, that Charles I's innovations, coming at a time of acute climate-induced adversity, should produce popular riots and lead landowners such as the Earl of Lothian to join the Covenanting Revolt and raise an army to secure guarantees that the king would respect their political and religious autonomy. Likewise, a decade of cold, wet summers, ruining one harvest after another, explains the eagerness of the Scots to appropriate England's resources throughout the 1640s—billeting as many of their troops as possible south of the border and extracting a huge ransom before they agreed to withdraw—despite the knowledge that their perceived rapacity discredited and alienated their English supporters. Many Covenanters felt that unless they exploited their assets in England to the hilt, Scotland would starve.69

The Scottish Revolution thus offers a perfect vindication of Voltaire's thesis that rebellions arose during the mid-seventeenth century through a fatal synergy between government, religion, and climate. Charles's insistence on creating “one uniform course of government in, and through, our whole monarchy,” especially in matters of religion, coupled with the Little Ice Age, led to state collapse. But climate cannot explain everything; we must not become “climatic determinists.” Three other factors, all of them related to human agency, also shaped the General Crisis in Scotland (and elsewhere): contingency, imitation, and intransigence.

The crucial role played by contingency is best illustrated by the rioting that attended the first use of Charles I's new Prayer Book in Edinburgh's St. Giles's Cathedral on July 23, 1637, thereby starting the Scottish Revolution. Despite the presence of the king's judges and the city magistrates, as soon as the dean began to read the new set prayers, a group of maidservants sitting at the front, “with clapping of their hands, cursings and outcries, raised such a barbarous hubbub in that sacred place that not any one could either hear or be heard.”70 One of them also hurled her small folding stool. None of this was coincidence. Rumors that Charles planned major religious innovations had circulated for several months, but the defenders of the traditional ways lacked irrefutable evidence until, in a classic case of Scottish parsimony, the government printer decided to sell the corrected proofs of the new liturgy as scrap paper, and individual sheets of it appeared in “the shops of Edinburgh to cover spice and tobacco.”71 Only this convinced a group of godly aristocrats that Charles did indeed plan to change the established form of worship, and they now laid plans for their maidservants to start a riot whenever the new Prayer Book was first used. These were the women who raised the “barbarous hubbub” in St. Giles's Cathedral on July 23, 1637, despite the presence of judges and magistrates.

The Scottish Revolution also exemplifies the important role of imitation in sparking rebellion. As early as 1638, an Anglican bishop in Ireland complained about the “desperate example the contumacious Nonconformists [sc. the Scottish Covenanters] have given both to England and to Ireland,” and lamented that “this contagion” had already begun to spread to Ulster. Shortly afterward, the Scots distributed thousands of copies of pamphlets that justified their actions to the English in what David Como has hailed as “among the most systematic and concerted campaigns hitherto attempted by a foreign power to bombard a separate kingdom with propaganda, thereby using the printed word to manipulate political opinion and fundamentally to alter the political process of another nation.”72 In 1645, as James Howell wondered “upon whom to lay the blame” for the outbreak of civil war in England, he singled out the rebellion of the Irish Catholics as “the womb of our miseries.” But, he added (wallowing in mixed metaphors), “They have administered fuel enough, and too much, to this fire, but it was first kindled in Scotland. The Puritans there were the womb of it; though I must tell you withall, the loins that begot this centaur were the Puritans here in England. If the flint and steel had not struck fire in England, the tinder had never took fire in Scotland, nor had the flame ever gone over into Ireland to increase the fire.”73

Many contemporaries less addicted to metaphor agreed that “the example of Scotland” had played a crucial role in the genesis of the Irish Rebellion. The Earl of Castlehaven recalled in his Memoirs how his Irish Catholic colleagues “saw the Scots, by pretending grievances and taking up arms to get them redressed, had not only gained divers privileges and immunities, but got £300,000 for their visit, beside £850 a day for several months together.” According to one of the leading conspirators, the Covenanters' success convinced the Irish malcontents that only military strength could end “the tyrannical government that was over them,” and they therefore resolved “to imitate Scotland, who got a privilege by that course.”74 “The Scots had their wills by force of arms,” another conspirator observed, and “so would they here in this kingdom.” “Why,” another of the insurgents asked his Protestant prisoner rhetorically, “may not we as well and better fight for religion, which is the substance, than the Scots did for ceremonies (which are but shadows)?” Most revealing of all, when another Protestant prisoner asked his Irish captor “What? [Have you] made a Covenant among you as the Scots did?” he received the crushing reply: “The Scots have taught us our A. B. C.”75

Finally, intransigence often provoked and prolonged the tension between rulers and ruled during the General Crisis. Thus in 1638, Charles I determined to use force against his critics in Scotland because “not only now my crown but my reputation for ever lies at stake”; and so he vowed that “I would rather die than yield to those impertinent and damnable demands.”76 Three weeks later, he exclaimed that “by the heavenly God, so long as this Covenant is in force … I have no more power in Scotland than as a Duke of Venice, which I will rather dye than suffer.”77 Charles adopted the same uncompromising attitude toward all groups of subjects whom he suspected of wanting to demote him to “Duke of Venice.” In 1642, he swore “that no extremity or misfortune shall make me yield” to rebels, “for I will either be a glorious king or a patient martyr.” Repeated military defeats failed to shake the king's conviction that “God will not suffer rebels and traitors to prosper, or [my] cause to be overthrown … A composition with them at this time is nothing else but a submission, which, by the grace of God, I am resolved against, whatever it cost me; for I know my obligation to be, both in conscience and honour, neither to abandon God's cause, injure my successors, or forsake my friends”—an intransigent attitude that would in 1649 turn him into a “patient martyr.”78

Despite the importance of these and other contingent factors, no convincing account of the General Crisis can now ignore the impact of the unique climatic conditions that prevailed. Indeed, the wealth of data in both the human and natural “archives” encouraged Le Roy Ladurie to write the Comparative Human History of Climate that he had abandoned in 1967 for lack of evidence. The first volume, which appeared in 2005, proclaimed that

The history of climate, which has made considerable progress since the publication of our History of the climate since the year 1000, has now won full legitimacy … The days are gone when modish historians disparaged this new discipline with taunts such as “bogus science.” The time for such irreverent barbs is past, and this book seeks to provide a human history of climate, dealing with the impact of climatic and meteorological fluctuations on societies, above all through the prism of famines and, in some cases, of epidemics.

In addition, the author boasted that he had produced “a comparative history: following in the footsteps of Marc Bloch, who wanted to compare what is comparable, we shall focus inter alia on the temperate zones of France: the north and centre. That will be at the foreground of our research,” accompanied by “constant—or, depending on the evidence, frequent—comparisons with England, Scotland, sometimes Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany (not only western); and when possible Bohemia and Poland, sometimes the three Scandinavian countries, Finland or even Iceland.”79 “Le PAG” [“petit âge glaciaire”: Little Ice Age] forms the backbone of Le Roy Ladurie's new book, with special attention devoted to what he calls “le Hyper-PAG” of the mid-seventeenth century. He even included a whole chapter on “L'énigme de la Fronde” that connected climatic anomalies with political upheavals in France and England between 1648 and 1650—precisely the link he dismissed in 1967 as “quite absurd.”

Despite the cachet conferred on climatic history by Le Roy Ladurie, one of the world's foremost living historians, his epiphany has as yet made little impression in North America. In July 2008, although fifty libraries in North America boasted a copy of volume 1, only one had a copy of volume 2 (published in September 2006 and containing the tables and graphs that underpin volume 1); neither amazon.com nor barnesandnoble.com offered copies for sale (although the former advertised more than one hundred of his works and the latter almost thirty); and no North American journal has yet published a review.

Does this indifference simply reflect the unwillingness of Anglophone American academics to tackle large books written in foreign languages? Or does it also reveal a residual resistance to admitting that climate can exercise a decisive influence on human history? After all, “denial” is currently the commonest human reaction to environmental catastrophe: we know with absolute certainty that natural disasters have happened in the past, and that they will continue to happen in the future, but we convince ourselves that they will not happen just yet—or, at least, not to us. The worsening droughts, desiccation, and desertification in equatorial Africa over the past forty years have caused massive migrations, famines, and wars that resemble those of the mid-seventeenth century; yet the rest of the world does virtually nothing. In the West, even isolated extreme climatic events such as the European heat wave of 2003 (which claimed the lives of at least 35,000 people) and Hurricane Katrina (which ruined or rendered uninhabitable 300,000 homes in the southeastern United States) found the richest and most powerful governments in human history completely unprepared and incapable of taking appropriate action in time.80 Yet even these tragedies remained local: how would those same governments—how would we—cope with a global catastrophe like that of the 1640s?

We have only two ways to anticipate the impact of a future catastrophic climate change, neither of them particularly precise or entirely reliable. Either we “fast-forward” the tape of history and predict what might happen on the basis of current trends; or we “rewind the tape” and learn from what happened during global catastrophes in the past. Although many experts (mainly climatologists, sociologists, and political scientists) have tried the former, few have systematically attempted the latter—perhaps because only one previous global cataclysm, the one in the mid-seventeenth century, has left sufficient records for detailed historical study.81 Taking advantage of the human and natural archives on climate to reopen the General Crisis debate not only sheds new light on an old problem but also offers a rare opportunity for historians to engage with scholars in other disciplines who are concerned with the fate of our planet. Studying causal mechanisms and coping strategies 350 years ago will not, of course, prevent the onset of further climatic catastrophes in the twenty-first century; but if historians can identify the structural, political, economic, and ideological characteristics in each afflicted society around the world that prevented (or facilitated) an appropriate response during the General Crisis, and consider how the outcomes could have been different, we may learn some valuable lessons for dealing with the climate challenges that undoubtedly await us and our children.