Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  ‘Times of acute disruption’ also increased suicides among males. Many scholar officials of the Ming killed themselves in accordance with the Confucian adage: ‘the commanders of the troops have to die when they are defeated; the administrators of the state have also to die when the state is in peril’. Many did just that, especially in the south. As the Manchu army approached Yangzhou one young scholar declared that ‘matters having reached this point, I will read the sage's books and, retaining my honour, I will die’: accordingly, with the Book of Changes open in his hand he jumped into a well and drowned. One colleague killed himself next to the image of Confucius, while others hanged themselves after writing appropriate poems. Others still drowned themselves in the Yangzi, the Grand Canal, or a local well, and a few hid and starved themselves to death.12

  A few protested that such sacrifices were needless – in his Credible record of 1644 the official Qian Xing argued (after shifting allegiance from Ming to Qing) that ‘if everyone dies at the time of national calamity, the whole country will be ruined; the monarch will be killed; and the whole world will be handed over on a silver platter’ – but suicide remained common. When in 1670 a new magistrate took up his post in Tancheng county, Shandong province, he noted that ‘many people held their lives to be of no value, for the area was so wasted and barren’ that ‘every day one would hear that someone had hanged himself from a beam and killed himself. Others, at intervals, cut their throats or threw themselves into the river.’ The practice remained common enough in 1688 to justify an imperial edict that forbade widows to ‘treat life lightly’ and kill themselves. Instead they must serve their parents-in-law and raise their children.13

  Suicides rose notably during the mid-seventeenth crisis in two other societies: Russia and India. In the former, the practice mainly involved males. From the 1630s onwards, a group of Orthodox Christians became convinced that the end of the world was imminent and immured themselves in hermitages and convents. Some of them, later known as ‘Old Believers’, concluded that the tsar was the Antichrist whose mistaken religious innovations brought the apocalypse ever nearer; and from the 1660s they defied him. When the government sent troops against them, they killed themselves rather than submit. According to one study, ‘the total number of suicides ran into tens of thousands’.14

  In India, by contrast, suicide normally involved women. Hindus believe that a virtuous woman has the power to preserve and prolong her husband's life; and although this brought her great status while married, it brought blame if her husband died. Respectable Hindu widows were expected to expiate their 'guilt’ by committing suttee (from sati, ‘a virtuous woman’), either by casting themselves onto their husband's funeral pyre or by being buried alive beside it. Conveniently for their in-laws, suicide resolved another issue. Hindu custom gave a widow the right both to a share of her late husband's goods and to support from his surviving family – and suttee irrevocably ended both obligations. Widows who refused suttee immediately became marginalized: they could not remarry, and many became either slaves or prostitutes (indeed in Marathi, ‘the word for widow and the word for prostitute were in some contexts interchangeable’). Although Muslim rulers (including the Mughals) tried to abolish suttee, many European visitors encountered it. Thus in 1630, in Gujarat, the Cornish world-traveller Peter Mundy watched in amazement as the beautiful widow of a Hindu trader climbed into a special structure atop the funeral pyre and took her husband's head on her lap before she herself set fire to the surrounding kindling.15 Although no official total of suttee survives, a Dutch merchant residing in the Mughal capital in the 1620s claimed that ‘in Agra this commonly occurs about two or three times a week’. It seems reasonable to suppose that the pressure on widows to commit suicide grew in response to both the higher mortality among males caused by war and the increased pressure on resources caused by famine.16

  Sick to Death

  Almost everywhere in the seventeenth-century world, the most lethal disease was smallpox. The smallpox virus spreads rapidly and directly between humans by inhalation, and before the introduction of preventive measures it killed around one-third of all those infected, and up to one-half of infected infants and pregnant women. In addition, according to an experienced French midwife, ‘almost all women with child that are attacked’ by smallpox ‘miscarry, and are in great danger of their lives’. Smallpox survivors, after several weeks in agony, often emerged with disfiguring scars, with deformed or stunted limbs, or with impaired sight. Smallpox spared no one: among the ruling dynasties of western Europe, it carried off Philip IV's brother the Cardinal-Infante in 1641 and his son and heir Balthasar Carlos in 1646; Prince William II of Orange in 1650; two siblings of Charles II of England in 1660 and his niece Queen Mary II in 1694; and Louis XIV's heir in 1711. The only ‘positive’ aspect of the disease is that those who survive it acquire a lifelong immunity.17

  Smallpox appears to have become both more deadly and more widespread in the seventeenth century. An English tract of 1665 about ‘the tyranny of diseases’ devoted a whole section to their apparent ‘alteration from their old state and condition'; in particular, it claimed that smallpox was ‘very gentle’ until ‘about forty years ago and less’ and far more lethal thereafter.18 Three considerations support this contention. First, given its highly infectious character, once smallpox entered a community it spread fast; therefore the proliferation of areas of dense settlement, such as cities and macro-regions, increased mass deaths from epidemics. Second, the transportation of African slaves to both western Europe and America introduced new and apparently more lethal strains of the disease from another continent. Third, communities rarely exposed to smallpox always suffer unusually high mortality at first contact and, as previously isolated areas entered the global economy in the seventeenth century, virtually all their inhabitants succumbed at the same time. In England, a single smallpox carrier in 1627 infected over 2,000 people on the Isle of Wight, normally shielded from outbreaks on the mainland, and most of those infected died. In East Asia, the Manchus, who had previously lived in small and relatively isolated communities on the steppe, likewise suffered heavily when they invaded China and encountered smallpox for the first time. In 1622, shortly after their first incursion into Chinese territory, the Manchu leaders established a ‘Smallpox Investigation Agency’ to identify and isolate suspect cases; and they later created ‘Shelters for keeping smallpox at bay’, to which those not infected by the disease could escape. To preserve the military effectiveness of their armies they only entrusted senior commands to smallpox survivors. Nevertheless in 1649 smallpox killed one of the emperor's uncles as he directed the conquest of south China, and 12 years later it killed the emperor himself.19

  In the early modern world, only one other disease killed as many people as smallpox: bubonic plague. Although epidemics were less frequent, they too spared no one: men and women, children and seniors, saints and sinners, rich and poor all perished in agony – many within 24 hours and most within 48 hours of infection. An epidemic could increase deaths in affected communities sixfold because, according to Geronimo Gatta, a doctor from Naples, whereas ‘in the countryside it is possible to keep a suitable distance between the infected and the healthy’, those living in towns had no escape. Gatta knew whereof he spoke: he had just survived a plague epidemic that in 1656 reduced the population of his native city from almost 300,000 to perhaps 150,000 in a matter of months. In the neighbouring town of Eboli, almost 1,000 families took Easter communion in 1656, but scarcely one-fifth knelt at their local altar unscathed one year later; the plague had totally eliminated over 80 families with one or two members, 27 families with three members, 15 families with four, and 14 more families with between five and seven.20 The same epidemic that devastated Naples and Eboli had already ravaged large parts of the Iberian Peninsula, creating what the eminent historian Antonio Domínguez Ortiz called ‘the worst demographic catastrophe to strike Spain in modern times'; and it went on to kill at least 39,000 people in Genoa. M
any other port cities, including Seville and Naples, lost half their population. Some did not recover their pre-plague levels until the nineteenth century (Fig. 11).21

  Many cities of northern Europe also suffered catastrophic losses from plague in the mid-seventeenth century. In 1654 an epidemic struck Moscow with particular ferocity. Although we lack totals for the entire city, within the walls of the Kremlin, 26 people at the Chudov monastery survived but 182 died, while in three convents of nuns 107 survived but 272 perished. In 1663–4 another epidemic afflicted Amsterdam (where it killed 50,000 people), and other Dutch cities, before crossing to London, where it killed well over 100,000 people in 1665 – perhaps 15,000 in the single week 12–19 September, ‘the grimmest week for burials in London's long history’ with ‘between one and two thousand bodies’ thrown into graves and anonymous ‘plague pits’ every night.22

  Plague and smallpox, together with typhus, measles and fever, belong to a cluster of deadly diseases that correlate closely with harvest yields: that is, the number of victims in each epidemic to some extent reflected the food supply. It is therefore not surprising to find that both the frequency and the intensity of these diseases increased amid the famines caused by the Little Ice Age. England's demographic records, which have survived better than those of other European countries, show eight years of high mortality between 1544 and 1666 caused by plague, of which half occurred after 1625; while a survey of mortality crises in Italy between 1575 and 1886 shows more episodes between 1620 and 1660 than at any other time.23

  Climatic adversity promoted sickness everywhere. In China, acute drought caused epidemics as well as famines: a study of County Gazetteers in Jiangnan revealed over 100 locations affected by disease in the famine year 1641. Meanwhile in Serrès, Macedonia, an Orthodox priest left a particularly vivid account of the same catastrophic combination. The trouble began with the constant rains of summer 1641, which turned into snow during the grape harvest, so that many labourers perished of cold in the fields. The weather turned unusually mild until more unseasonable snow fell in March and April 1642, and during this climatic anomaly the plague took hold in the region with unsurpassed severity: not only did it afflict virtually every family in town and country alike but ‘of a hundred who fell ill, only one recovered’.24

  11. The Mediterranean plague epidemic of 1648–56.

  After ravaging Andalucia, where it caused demographic losses that took two centuries to make good, the plague epidemic spread along Spain's eastern coast before crossing to Naples, and finally Genoa, where it killed half the city's population. Notably, Castile maintained an effective quarantine and escaped the epidemic.

  Climate, corruption, hoarding and war could all intensify the effects of epidemics. According to the English merchants in Gujarat, India, all these factors increased mortality from the disease in 1631. The Mughal emperor's campaigns prevented ‘the supplies of corne to these parts from those others of greatyr plenty; and the raynes hereabout having fallen superfluously; which, with bad government, is cause of the highest extreame of scarcity.’ And ‘to afflict the more,’ the merchants added, ‘not a family hath not been visited with agues, fevers and pestilentiall diseases’. In short, ‘Never in the memory of man [has] the like famine and mortality happened.‘25 Italy also experienced an unprecedented demographic catastrophe at this time – indeed, according to a recent study, ‘no other area of Europe came near to the overall losses suffered by the peninsula’. The crisis began in 1629 when torrential rains destroyed the harvest in northern and central Italy and so created serious overpopulation. Then large armies arrived from both Germany and France, where plague already raged, spreading the disease even as they consumed scarce resources and destroyed the fragile infrastructure. Cities and countryside were, it seems, equally affected, and of the six million people living in the north Italian plain in 1628, perhaps two million perished during the following two years.26 The Alpine passes that served as military corridors suffered worst. In 1630 the plague travelled through the Aosta valley between France and Italy so swiftly that when news reached the regional capital, the secretary of the council (then in session) dropped his pen in mid-sentence – ‘We further resolved to …’ – and fled. When he returned, of the valley's 90,000 inhabitants, no fewer than 70,000 had died.27

  Like smallpox, plague afflicted the young and pregnant women with especial severity. Thus in Barcelona, during the plague epidemic of 1651 a disproportionate number of infants died, because their mothers either perished or lacked milk to feed them, so they were left at the Foundlings’ Hospital ‘with a ribbon or tag around their arms or leg or neck with the names of their parents written on it’. Miquel Parets, the Barcelona tanner who recorded these details in his diary, observed that ‘hardly any’ of these foundlings survived, ‘because so many were sent there’ that it proved impossible to find wet nurses for them all. Parets also noted sadly that children who had once lacked for nothing now became orphans, ‘lost and wandering about the city begging … and in this fashion many children fell sick and never grew up'; while ‘of the poor women who were pregnant at this time … perhaps two among every hundred survived. If they were in the last days of their term all they could do was to commend themselves to God, as most of them simply gave birth and died and many of their babies died with them.’ Surviving parish records confirm this: far more women and children than men were buried in Barcelona in 1651 (Fig. 12).28 Parets himself watched his wife and three of his children die within a month (a fourth child contracted plague but recovered) and his strong religious faith began to waiver. ‘God knows why He does what He does,’ he wrote in his diary after recording these devastating losses; but worse was to come. Although the plague abated, Catalonia was afflicted by one of the longest droughts ever recorded (360 days: almost the entire year); and, in addition, the troops of Philip IV now arrived to besiege the city, in revolt since 1640. Many of those who had survived the plague died during the blockade, and by the time Barcelona surrendered in October 1652 half its population had died.29

  12. Mortality in Barcelona, 1650–4.

  Drought had destroyed the Catalan harvest in 1650 and drastically reduced the seed corn available for 1651, when plague broke out. Then the troops of Phillip IV besieged the city, and by the time it surrendered, half the population of Barcelona had perished. The monthly burial totals in the parish of Santa Maria del Pi show that more women than men died in the summer of 1651, and unusually high infant mortality.

  Climate change increased the lethality of other diseases, too. In the early eighteenth century, the Icelander Mathias Jochumssen sought to explain why the local population had declined over the previous century: although he acknowledged the importance of smallpox and plague epidemics brought by foreigners, he blamed primarily the ‘unusually poor standard of living, and rotten food’ caused by the adverse climate, which promoted deficiency diseases such as scurvy and reduced fecundity. A correlation of the variations in the weekly death totals recorded in London's ‘Bills of Mortality’ with the prevailing temperatures supports this interpretation. A fall of 1°C in winter temperatures coincided with a 2 per cent increase in mortality and with a 1 per cent fall in marital fertility. Medical research suggests some reasons: lower temperatures increase deaths through cardiovascular disease, while ‘the elderly, the very young, [and] persons with impaired mobility’ are ‘disproportionately affected because of their limited physiological capacity to adapt’. In addition, the smoke from coal fires (a serious urban problem in the seventeenth century: see chapter 3 above) carries fine particles that exacerbate cardiac or respiratory diseases such as asthma or bronchitis. Finally, mortality from other common diseases such as mumps, diphtheria, influenza and malaria – all of which kill many people every year – no doubt rose whenever extremes of weather weakened bodily defences or social disruption compromised hygiene.30

  The Killing Fields

  Only wars can eliminate human populations faster than disease, and the greater frequency of armed co
nflict in the mid-seventeenth century sharply increased mortality. Thus burials in the English county of Berkshire during the seventeenth century show that although the plague epidemic of 1624–5 killed many, the armies who fought there in 1643 killed far more (Fig. 13). Battles, in particular, ended thousands of lives in a matter of hours if not minutes. Thus at Rocroi, France, in 1643 at least 6,000 Spanish veterans died in an evening as they tried to withstand a French artillery bombardment; while the following year at Marston Moor, England, the victorious Parliamentary-Scottish army cut down some 4,000 defeated Royalists in a little over an hour. Also in 1644 at Freiburg, Germany, according to the victorious commander, ‘In the twenty-two years that I have been involved in the carnage of war, there has never been such a bloody encounter.’ Perhaps 10,000 men perished.31

  Naval combat also killed many men. During the ‘Four Days Battle’ between the Dutch and English fleets in June 1666, ‘the most terrible, obstinate and bloodiest battle that ever was fought on the seas’, the Royal Navy lost over 4,000 men killed, wounded or captured – more than a fifth of those engaged. Seafaring in the age of sail was a dangerous occupation at the best of times, and some officers ‘reckoned there were four deaths by illness or accident for every one killed in action'; but life for sailors ashore could also prove lethal, because neither the government nor the local population could adequately support the men aboard a fleet that stayed in port for long. Just before the 1667 fighting season began, the commissioner at an English naval base was ‘Sorry to see men really perish for want of wherewithal to get nourishment. One [sailor] yesterday came to me crying to get something to relieve him. I ordered him 10 shillings. He went and got hot drink and something to help him, and so drank it, and died within two hours’.32