Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Five thousand miles to the west, Sir Robert Sibbald, a Scottish physician and geographer, lamented that

  The bad seasons these several years past hath made so much scarcity and so great a dearth, that for want, some die by the way-side, some drop down on the streets, the poor sucking babes are starving for want of milk, which the empty breasts of their mothers cannot furnish them. Every one may see death in the face of the poor that abound everywhere: the thinness of their visage, their ghostly looks, their feebleness, their agues and their fluxes threaten them with sudden death, if care be not taken of them. And it is not only common wandering beggars that are in this case, but many house-keepers who lived well by their labour and industrie are now by want forced to abandon their dwellings and they and their little ones must beg.56

  Famines afflicted ‘little ones’ with especial severity. Starvation killed many infants because their mothers had no milk to feed them; but, famished children, especially when they are also cold and exposed to disease, suffer ‘stunting’. Because simply staying alive and keeping warm absorbs so many calories, and a famine diet usually lacks adequate protein and vitamins, the long bones in the legs and arms of children cease to grow. Human remains from the Little Ice Age show unmistakable evidence of such ‘stunting’. When archaeologists excavated the skeletons of 50 workers buried in the permafrost at Smeerenburg (‘Blubber Town’), a whaling station maintained by the Dutch on Spitsbergen Island in the Arctic between 1615 and 1670 (when the intolerable cold forced them to withdraw), no fewer than 43 showed evidence of stunting and a corresponding reduction in height.57 Even more striking, French soldiers born in the second half of the seventeenth century were on average about an inch shorter than those born after 1700; and those born in famine years were notably shorter than the rest. Thus ‘stunting’ reduced the average height of those born in 1675, the ‘year without a summer’, or during the years of cold and famine in the early 1690s, to only 63 inches: the lowest ever recorded. Once warmer weather and better harvests returned in the eighteenth century, the average height of Frenchmen increased by almost 1.5 inches – an unparalleled surge – and the ‘bantam soldiers’ never reappeared (Fig. 3).

  ‘Stunting’ does not only adversely affect the long bones of children: because malnutrition often impairs the development of major organs as well as long bones, it makes children more vulnerable to both contagious and chronic diseases, which can in turn further diminish stature. Children living in the countryside might experience a catch-up growth spurt, which partially compensates for stunting, but those living in overcrowded and insanitary towns often stayed short (which probably explains why recruits for the French Army from Paris were always shorter than the rest). John Komlos, the demographer whose research revealed the reduced height of Louis XIV's soldiers, was surely correct that the seventeenth-century crisis ‘had an immense impact on the human organism itself’. His data provide perhaps the clearest – and saddest – evidence of the consequences of the Little Ice Age for the human population. The repeated famines not only killed: many of those who survived literally embodied Thomas Hobbes's assertion that ‘the life of man’ had indeed become ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.58

  An Overpopulated World?

  Although Hobbes and his contemporaries apparently stood somewhat shorter than their grandparents, they were far more numerous. A run of warm summers in the sixteenth century had allowed the human population in most parts of Europe and Asia to increase and in some areas to double – until by 1618 China boasted perhaps 150 million inhabitants, India 116 million and Europe 100 million. In some areas, the number of inhabitants had increased so fast that local resources no longer sufficed to feed them because of another cruel calculus: population increases geometrically while agricultural output grows only arithmetically. Just like ‘compound interest’, a sustained demographic increase of 1 per cent per year over a century causes a population not merely to double, but to triple; while a 2 per cent increase over a century produces a sevenfold growth. Since crop yields rarely increase at this pace, food shortages can occur very rapidly.

  3. Estimated heights of French males born between 1650 and 1770.

  John Komlos assembled 38,700 ‘observations’ from the personal records of French males who enlisted in the army between 1671 and 1786. Even though recruiting officers rejected the shortest volunteers, the ‘stunting’ effect of global cooling is evident, especially for those born in 1675, ‘the year without a summer’ (one of two experienced in the seventeenth century). The average height of Louis XIV's soldiers was 1,617 mm, or 5 foot 3 inches.

  Many people in the early seventeenth century realized that their part of the world possessed more mouths than could be fed, and feared the consequences. China's Lower Yangzi valley, known as Jiangnan, boasted a population of about 20 million by 1618, equivalent to almost 1,200 persons per square mile (by way of comparison, the overall population density of the modern Netherlands, the most densely settled part of Europe today, is 1,000 persons per square mile). According to Alvaro Semedo, a Portuguese Jesuit long resident in the region who wrote in the 1630s, 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, ‘settlement is almost continuous’. Indeed, he mused,

  This kingdom is 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,’ Semedo concluded, ‘there can be no capital sufficient for so many, or money enough to fill so many purses’.59

  Many of Semedo's contemporaries also considered Europe ‘overpopulated’. John Winthrop justified ‘the plantation of New England’ because England itself ‘groweth her inhabitants soe that man, the best of creatures, is held more base then the earth they tredd on'; while Sir Ferdinando Gorges also claimed that England's ‘peaceable time affords no means of employment to the multitude of people that daily do increase’, and he sent colonists to settle the coast of North America primarily 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. These and other measures enjoyed such success that by the 1630s thousands crossed the Atlantic each year, promoting England's stability because the 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’.60

  Scarcely had the ink dried on these words than the global population began to contract sharply. In China, the victorious Qing believed that in the mid-seventeenth-century crisis ‘over half of the population perished. In Sichuan, people lamented that they did not have a single offspring.’ In the 1650s, after a decade of sectarian violence and civil war in Ireland, according to one of the English victors ‘a man might travel twenty or thirty miles and not see a living creature’ except for ‘very aged men with women and children’ whose skin was ‘black like an oven because of the terrible famine'; and a generation later, another English eye-witness estimated that over 500,000 Irish men and women had died ‘by the sword and famine and other hardships’ in the troubles. Contemporaries elsewhere made similarly bleak assessments. In southern Germany, one eye-witness of the Thirty Years War believed that ‘there have been so many deaths that the like of it has never been heard in human history'; while a Lutheran minister wrote despondently in 1639 that of his 1,046 communicants a decade earlier, barely one-third remained: ‘Just in the last five years, 518 of them have been killed by various misfortunes. I have to weep for them,’ he continued forlornly, ‘because I remain he
re so impotent and alone. Out of my whole life scarcely fifteen people remain alive with whom I can claim some trace of friendship.’ Perhaps most striking of all, in France, ravaged between 1648 and 1653 by war, famine and disease, Abbess Angélique Arnauld of Port-Royal (just outside Paris) estimated that ‘a third of the world has died’.61

  Subsequent research has corroborated each of these striking claims. In China, ‘the cultivated area of land decreased by about one-third’ during the Ming-Qing transition, while ‘the demographic losses were nearly the same’. Sichuan suffered particularly badly, with perhaps a million killed. Ireland's population fell by at least one-fifth during the mid-seventeenth century. In Germany, ‘about 40 per cent of the rural population fell victim to the war and epidemics [while] in the cities, the losses may be estimated at about 33 per cent’ between 1618 and 1648. Many villages in the Île-de-France suffered their worst demographic crisis of the entire Ancien Régime in 1648–53.62 Census data from Poland, Russia and the Ottoman empire suggest a population fall in the mid-seventeenth century of at least one-third, sometimes more. These staggering losses were not caused by the Little Ice Age alone, however: it required the misguided policies pursued by religious and political leaders to turn the crisis caused by sudden climate change into catastrophe.

  2

  The ‘General Crisis’

  ‘The century of the soldiers’

  Most of those who lived through the seventeenth-century crisis identified war rather than climate as the principal cause of their misfortunes – and with good reason: more wars took place around the world than in any other era before the Second World War. The historical record reveals only one year entirely without war between the states of Europe in the first half of the century (1610) and only two in the second half (1670 and 1682) (Fig. 4). In 1641 the prevalence of conflicts led the Italian warrior and man of letters Fulvio Testi to claim that ‘This is the century of the soldiers'; while according to the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, ‘man's natural state’ was war. In Denmark, more than one-tenth of all texts printed between 1611 and 1669 concerned war, and publishing data from neighbouring countries would probably reveal a similar pattern. Beyond Europe, the Chinese and Mughal empires fought wars continuously for most of the seventeenth century, and the Ottoman empire enjoyed only ten years of peace.1

  The ‘Conflict Catalogue’ compiled by Peter Brecke, a sociologist, shows that, on average, wars around the world lasted longer in the seventeenth century than at any time since 1400 (when his survey begins); while, looking only at Europe, Jack S. Levy, a political scientist, considered the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ‘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 ‘index of war intensity’ proposed by Pitirim Sorokin, another sociologist, rose from 732 in the sixteenth century to 5,193 in the seventeenth – a rate of increase twice or three times greater than in any previous period.2

  In addition to these interstate conflicts, the mid-seventeenth century also witnessed more civil wars than any previous or subsequent period. For six decades, supporters of the Ming and Qing dynasties fought for control of China. The rebellion of large parts of the Stuart and the Spanish Monarchies unleashed internal conflicts that lasted over two decades in the former and almost three in the latter. The states of Germany, with powerful foreign support, fought each other for 30 years. France endured a civil war that lasted five years; the Mughal empire suffered a succession war that lasted two years. Several other countries (including Sweden, Denmark, the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation) experienced political upheavals that only just stopped short of civil war (see Fig. 1 above). War, rather than peace, had become the normal state of human society.

  4. Frequency of wars in Europe 1610–80.

  In the six decades between 1618 and 1678, Poland was at peace for only 27 years, the Dutch Republic for only 14, France for only 11, and Spain for only 3. Some states fought wars on several fronts at once. Virtually no European state avoided war during the 1640s.

  Although the business of the military in war has always been killing people and breaking things, many in the seventeenth century believed that the wars of their day were not only more frequent but also more harmful to both people and property. When, around 1700, Richard Gough researched the history of his village, Myddle (Shropshire, England), he found that 21 men (one-tenth of the community's adult males) had left to fight in the Civil War, of whom only seven returned. Of the other 14, six died in battle, one perished in a brawl over plunder, another was hanged for horse theft and the other six disappeared without trace. Some no doubt succumbed to war-related diseases (such as typhoid, revealingly known as ‘camp fever’) or suffered war-induced accidents (such as freezing to death on sentry duty); but whatever their fate, and wherever their unmarked grave, their families never saw them again – ‘and if so many died from Myddle,’ Gough speculated, ‘we may reasonably guess that many thousands died in England in that war’.3

  Gough was right – the catalogue of 645 ‘military incidents’ fought in England and Wales between 1642 and 1660 compiled by historian Charles Carlton reveals that at least 80,000 men died in action – but they formed only part of the trail of destruction caused by war. As Patrick Gordon, a Scottish veteran, noted in the 1650s: ‘One can scarse be a souldier without being an oppressor and comitting many crimes and enormityes’, because those who failed to take what they needed by violent means ‘were sure to be destroyed by vermine, or dy with hunger or cold’.4 Hans Heberle, a German shoemaker, recorded in his Journal how the failure of civilians to appreciate this dynamic could destroy lives and livelihoods. In 1634 the Protestant army of Bernard of Saxe-Weimar approached Heberle's village but, since they too were Protestants, he and his neighbours ‘did not regard him as our enemy’ and so took no precautions. Nevertheless Bernard's troops ‘plundered us completely of horses, cattle, bread, flour, salt, lard, cloth, linen, clothes and everything we possessed. They treated the inhabitants badly, shooting, stabbing and beating a number of people to death.’ As they left, ‘they set the village alight and burnt down five houses’. Heberle and his surviving neighbours had learned an important lesson: in the mid-seventeenth century, every soldier was an ‘enemy’. Henceforth, ‘we were hunted like wild beasts in the forest,’ he wrote bitterly in his journal, and whenever troops approached, the villagers fled with whatever they could carry to Ulm, the nearest fortified city. Their sufferings did not end there, because Ulm lacked the resources to sustain the sudden influx of thousands of refugees. On at least one occasion water became so scarce that ‘almost everybody drank their own urine, or the urine of their children … The thirst grew so intense that we did not care about being hungry.‘5

  To quote the lugubrious Thomas Hobbes again, ‘warre consisteth not in battell onely, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battell is sufficiently known’. War, Hobbes argued, was like the climate: just ‘as the nature of foule weather lyeth not in a showre or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of warre consisteth not in actuall fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.’ This led to widespread insecurity. When he returned to England from the continent in 1660, Charles II observed that the Civil War ‘had filled the hearts of the people with a terrible apprehension of insecurity’, and therefore worked hard on ‘extinguishing this fear, which keeps the hearts of men awake’. Three years later, in Germany, a comedy by Andreas Gryphius made the same point with a joke, beginning one of his plays with the boast of ‘Captain Daradiridatumtarides Farter of a Thousand Deaths’ that

  The Great Shah of Persia trembles when I walk on the earth.

  The Turkish emperor has several times sent ambassadors to offer me his crown.

  The world-famous Mughal (emperor) knows his fortress is vulnerable to m
e …

  The princes of Europe ever more courteously become my friends –

  But more through fear than through true affection.

  Looking back in 1683, ex-Queen Christina of Sweden wrote that ‘In the present century, the whole world is at arms. We threaten each other, we fear each other. Nobody does what they want, or what they could do. No one knows who has lost or who has won, but we know well enough that the whole world lives in fear.‘6

  In China war became so common that a special word emerged to describe military atrocities: binghuo, ‘soldier calamity’. According to the eminent sinologist Lynn Struve, ‘no locale in China escaped some sort of “soldier calamity”’ during the Ming-Qing transition.7 As in Europe, the worst atrocities occurred when soldiers took a town by storm. A seventeenth-century Chinese play, The Miraculous Reunion, compared the treatment of a captured town or city with ‘pounding fresh onion and garlic to pieces in a bowl'; while an eye-witness account noted that civilians who survived a successful storm ‘had scorched pates, pulpy foreheads, and broken or otherwise injured arms and legs. They had sword gashes all over their bodies, the blood from which had clotted in patches, and their faces were streaked with trickles of blood like tears from burning red candles.‘8

  This description came from a chronicle kept by a scholar, Wang Xiuchu, of the six-day sack of Yangzhou, a large city north of the river Yangzi, by Qing forces in 1645. According to Wang, at one point ‘through the compound wall I heard the voice of my youngest brother shrieking and the sound of a sabre hacking – three strikes and all was silent. After a short while I also heard my elder brother say pleadingly “I have silver at home in an underground vault. Let me get it and bring it to you.” One strike, and again silence.’ Somewhat later, a soldier caught another of Wang's brothers and ‘cut him with his sabre to make him talk'; he died of his wounds a week later. His sister-in-law, nephew and niece also perished, and both Wang and his wife were badly beaten. Before the soldiers stormed Yangzhou ‘there were eight of us,’ Wang wrote, but ‘now there are only three’. Another eye-witness claimed that 80,000 inhabitants perished in the sack; and because so much of the city lay in ruins, poets referred to it as the ‘Weed-covered city’. Its fate in 1645 is still familiar to every Chinese schoolchild.9 The European equivalent of the sack of Yangzhou was the sack of Magdeburg in 1631. Even in the nineteenth century, Protestant preachers still used its fate as a warning in their sermons and for a time it gave a new verb to the German language: Magdeburgisieren, to ‘make a Magdeburg’ of somewhere.10