Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Nevertheless, even the most enraged European crowds rarely killed promiscuously. In Portugal, the conspirators who took over Lisbon on 1 December 1640 murdered Miguel de Vasconcelos, the hated agent of the central government, and hurled him from a palace window into the square below where ‘a workman cut off a finger to get the ring that he wore’. Then, with women and adolescents playing a prominent part, the crowd stripped his corpse, ‘tore out his teeth, pulled out his moustache and beard and stabbed him repeatedly. They then cut off both his ears, which later the crowd displayed and offered for auction.’ But Vasconcelos died alone: no other servant of Philip IV perished in the ‘Restoration’. The rioting in Istanbul that ended the life of Sultan Ibrahim that same year involved the death of relatively few other than the ruler himself and his Grand Vizier. Admittedly, like Miguel de Vasconcelos, the vizier met a spectacularly barbarous end – ‘strangled and minced into mammock-pieces [shreds], one pulling out an eye, another cutting off an ear, a third a finger’ – but he perished alone. In Moscow in 1648, although rioters burned scores of noble and merchant residences, they first compiled a list of houses belonging to their perceived oppressors and then systematically worked their way through. In the revolution of Naples in 1647–8, several noblemen were butchered and their mutilated, naked bodies exposed on a special monument erected outside the rebel headquarters, but these men had attempted to slay Masaniello and kill his followers. More typical was the rebels’ protocol in burning houses, in accordance with a written list of 60 targets, most of them belonging to those involved in either imposing or collecting taxes (Plate 21).42

  In China, too, popular protests often displayed restraint. Many began with ritual wailing at local Confucian temples, and public lamentations by aggrieved subjects who carried placards through the streets that stated their petitions and grievances. In southern China, distressed villages also formed a covenant (known as a gang, or net) in which all participants recorded their names in a register, made sacrifices to their ancestors, swore that none of them would pay rent and visited the houses of the rich to beg for food. If such methods failed, crowds started to burn houses; but, as in Europe, they not only worked from a list of residences belonging to tax collectors but also notified the residents of adjacent houses in advance so that they could take steps to prevent the fire from spreading. In addition, they strictly forbade theft and often beat looters to death.43

  Popular protests arising from non-material grievances also often possessed a distinctive etiquette and involved public displays. Thus in England in 1641, opponents of the ecclesiastical innovations of the preceding decade made sure that everyone could see their contempt for items like the surplice worn by ministers and the Book of Common Prayer. Surplices were not simply discarded, but ostentatiously shredded (often by women using knives and scissors) and put to a variety of profane uses: a bandage, a handkerchief, a shirt and (most eloquently) a sanitary towel; while in London, four horsemen rode through the streets ‘in great pomp and triumph’ wearing a surplice and ‘with the Book of Common Prayer in their hand, singing in derision thereof, and tearing it leaf by leaf, and putting every leaf to their posterior’. Ironically, that same year Irish Catholics publicly and gleefully desecrated the religious objects venerated by the Protestants. They smashed and set fire to pulpits and other items of church furniture, and burnt or defaced liturgical texts; but they reserved special treatment for the Bible. One man watched as his captors took his Bible and, ‘laying the open side in a puddle of water, lept and stamped on it, saying “A plague on't. This booke has bred all this quarrel”’; a Protestant minister saw a friar take ‘the poor men's Bibles that he found in a boat, and cut them in pieces and cast them into the fire with these words, that he would “deal in like manner with all Protestant and Puritan Bibles”’; while an outraged settler reported that a Catholic, ‘Opening the sacred bible, pist upon the same, saying “If I could doe worse with it I would”’.44

  Place and Time

  Popular resistance seems to have occurred most frequently in two completely different zones: in regions where a reservoir of discontent developed most rapidly (cities and ‘macroregions’: see chapter 3 above), and in communities previously insulated in some way from the attentions of the government. Among the latter, in times of hardship, areas protected by natural barriers such as marshes, forests or heaths often became ‘oases of insurrection’. In the Riez marshes along Brittany's eastern border a group of villages maintained a permanent tax-strike between 1636 and 1660. Each community occupied an ‘island’ amid the marshes, normally accessible only by water and, since only the inhabitants knew the channels through the bogs, every government attempt to send in troops to collect taxes failed. Moreover, the success of the marsh-dwellers encouraged defiance in neighbouring communities, which rebelled six times between 1633 and 1658 rather than pay their taxes, secure in the knowledge that, if necessary, they could flee to Riez.45 Turenne, the largest fief in Aquitaine, with around 100,000 inhabitants in almost 100 parishes, formed another oasis of insurrection by virtue of its legal status: its lord claimed to be an independent prince who owed the French king only homage. The men of Turenne paid an annual tax to their lord, and supplied him with troops when required, but not only did they vigorously resist any intervention by the crown (such as allowing royal troops to march across their territory) but they helped their neighbours to resist too. Throughout the seventeenth century, ‘in all the revolts of Aquitaine, [Turenne] served as an assembly point and a provocative example’.46

  Similar oases of insurrection existed elsewhere. Within Europe, the Austrian estates of the Schaunberg family, which could claim exemption from outside jurisdiction, lay at the heart of peasant revolts in 1620, 1626, 1632–3 and 1648, just as they had done in those of previous centuries. Likewise, men from St Keverne's, a remote Cornish-speaking parish in England's deep southwest, led a major revolt in 1648, just as they had done in 1497, 1537 and 1548. Certain areas also seem to have sustained an intellectual tradition of resistance: Kingston, commanding a strategic bridge across the Thames, sheltered the most outspoken critics of Queen Elizabeth and openly rejoiced over the murder of Charles I's ‘Favourite’, Buckingham, in 1628, just as they would later shelter both the Diggers (a group that cultivated common land and advocated sharing all things) and the Quakers.47

  Frontier societies boasted even larger oases of insurrection. The southern borderlands of Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where forest turned into steppe, offered a constant refuge to the oppressed and discontented, who periodically staged rebellions against the states to the north (most memorably in Ukraine after 1648 when Bohdan Khmelnytsky led a Cossack rebellion against its Polish overlords, and in 1670 when Stenka Razin defied Moscow: see chapter 6 above). In the Americas, ‘Maroons’ – black slaves who escaped from European settlements – created fortified camps in several parts of Brazil, central America and the Caribbean islands where jungle, canyons or swamps offered a measure of protection. From these refuges, often under the command of those who had been rulers before their abduction from Africa, they made common cause with Native Americans and welcomed any fugitive European servants and outlaws. Together they posed a constant threat to the colonies (especially by burning down plantations of sugar cane – a conveniently combustible crop).48 In China, finally, in the 1620s and 1630s rebels like Li Zicheng found refuge in the deep forests between Shanxi and Henan provinces, just as Mao Zedong would do three centuries later; while in the 1640s the marshes around Liangshan mountain in Shandong province sheltered large bandit groups, just like those in Water Margin, the popular novel of the day set in the twelfth century.49 As in Europe, the mere proximity of an oasis of insurrection could encourage resistance. In Russia and the Polish Commonwealth, the abundance of fertile ‘free’ lands on the southern frontier made the threat of flight a powerful bargaining tool for peasants who wanted a better deal from their lords. As a group of Bengalis pointed out to their rulers, flight was always an option when one
had ‘A thousand countries to go to’.50

  The calendar also influenced popular resistance. Revolts often began in spring, as grain from the previous harvest ran out, on market days and (in Catholic Europe) on religious holidays: Normandy erupted into violence on a festival in honour of the Virgin Mary in 1639; Barcelona on Corpus Christi, 1640; Palermo on Assumption Day, 1647. The explanation is simple: because the Church prohibited work on holidays, people thronged the street and the taverns, talking and drinking, so that an insurrection could quickly gather momentum. In June 1647 the viceroy of Sicily ordered that the Festival of the Holy Sacrament be celebrated by the clergy alone, without the participation of confraternities, guilds and other lay associations, lest ‘because of the great multitude of people, a brawl might occur and turn into a more serious disturbance’. The following month, the same fear led the archbishop of Naples to cancel a festival in honour of the Virgin.51 Market days also offered opportunities to rioters. Thus, in 1641 the leading Irish conspirators planned to take Dublin Castle on a market day because large numbers of people would (like them) be entering the city the night before and so they would attract less suspicion. Finally, revolutionary anniversaries could provoke repetition: Fermo in 1648 and Messina in 1674 both rebelled on the anniversary of Masaniello's revolt, 7 July; while in 1647 Antonino la Pelosa planned an uprising in Palermo on the same day as the Corpus de Sang in Barcelona, seven years before.52

  The calendar also influenced popular resistance in Muslim countries. In the Ottoman empire, the garrison of Istanbul became restless at the end of the month of Ramadan, when tradition demanded that they receive a bonus pay: if the treasury could not meet this obligation, or met it only in part, the troops might mutiny.53 Moreover, throughout the Muslim world religious holidays that involved public processions, like Muharram, could easily give rise to riots – particularly in areas like Mesopotamia that boasted both Sunni and Shi'ite populations, where supporters of one creed might disrupt the devotions of the other (a practice that continues to this day).

  Weapons, Cadres and Emblems

  A final common denominator of popular revolts was the transformative role of groups already used to acting in unison, especially if they were familiar with weapons. In a society that lacked an effective police force, owning a weapon, especially a firearm, offered a measure of security against perceived threats: bandits, ‘insolent’ beggars, personal enemies and, in the countryside, natural predators (above all, wolves). In some frontier zones of Europe and in Anglo-America, possession of firearms was seen as essential to survival. In France, the government itself supplied arms to the coastguards of Normandy and Brittany, and the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 guaranteed the right of every inhabitant of Roussillon to bear arms; while two decades later a French Intendant near the Spanish frontier regretted that ‘It would be difficult to prevent the Basques from bearing arms, because they have been able to do so for so long’.54 In India, seventeenth-century government records and visitors’ accounts alike noted the abundance of ‘labourers with their guns, swords and bucklers lying by them while they ploughed the ground’, and the Mughals designated some areas mawas (rebellious lands) or zor-talab (‘requiring coercion’) because the villagers there were armed and refused to part with their wealth, whether to the government or to bandits, ‘without at least one fight’. ‘In order to defend themselves, these villagers hide in the thorny scrub or retire behind the slight walls surrounding their villages,’ wrote Niccolò Manucci in the 1650s, and fought with bows, lances and firearms ‘until they were no longer able to continue’.55 In the 1640s the English ‘Clubmen’ often managed to protect their communities from billeting and plundering by the main armies during the Civil War, even when only ‘armed with clubs, swords, bills, pitchforks and other several weapons’; while in Virginia in 1676, the year of Bacon's rebellion, Governor Berkeley lamented that his opponents were ‘poor, indebted, discontented and armed’.56

  Weapons became far more effective when in the hands of those familiar with their use, such as army veterans and outlaws. Whenever rioters forced open the gates of the local gaols they released into the crowd hundreds of men with experience of defying government, as well as links with other discontented groups still at large. Although some of the freed inmates immediately fled the country in search of safety, others seized the opportunity to inflict destruction on their oppressors. When rioters opened the prisons of Palermo in 1647, Antonino la Pelosa, a miller, set about organizing neighbouring farmers to murder all the nobles of Palermo; while Giuseppe d'Alesi, who had fled to Naples on his release from gaol, returned to his native city once he heard of the viceroy's general pardon and organized a more radical rebellion. Meanwhile, in Naples, Giulio Genoino and Francesco Arpaja emerged after a quarter-century in various royal prisons to direct the revolution against their former gaolers.

  The participation of veterans also had a transformative effect on revolts, because they possessed not only familiarity with weapons but also discipline under fire and the ability to coordinate manoeuvres. In France, one contemporary claimed that the 8,000 armed peasant insurgents (‘Croquants’) who mobilized in Périgord in 1637 were ‘mostly veterans from the most warlike provinces of the kingdom’, serving under captains with extensive military experience, ‘the best that one could find’. The Croquants certainly behaved like regular troops: not only posting sentries and issuing formal summons for towns in their path to surrender on pain of being ‘ruined, razed and burnt to ashes’, but also destroying the farms, killing the cattle and burning the crops of all who refused to join them.57 The presence of a cadre of 40 or 50 ‘coquins’ (rascals) and of many former soldiers and perhaps some officers among the Norman rebels in 1639 enabled the lord of Ponthébert (‘General Nu Pieds’) and his ‘Army of Suffering’ to withstand repeated assaults by regular troops in pitched battle.58 Likewise, in Naples, Masaniello's regular drilling of his ragazzi – the ‘boys’ whom he had trained for a mock battle in the Piazza del Mercato – explains both the cohesion of his followers and his ‘skill in digging trenches and keeping watch with sentries’ (something that all commentators noted with surprise); while the city militia – originally created to fend off a possible Turkish attack, regularly trained and led by experienced army officers – managed to defeat every assault by forces loyal to the crown. Familiarity with artillery could also provide a critical advantage. In 1647 the ability of Gennaro Annese, an armourer by trade, to direct an effective bombardment of the Spanish fleet, saved Naples; whereas the inability of the Seville rebels to do the same five years later, even though they had captured several big guns, doomed them to defeat. In Peru, Pedro Borhorques alarmed the government in part because of his vaunted ability to cast as well as fire light artillery. Finally, neither the Scots in 1639–40 nor the Irish in 1641–2 could have prevailed without the return of large numbers of veterans of continental armies with their equipment and expertise.59

  In Asia, too, many revolts gained at least initial success thanks to the participation of veterans. At Shimabara (Japan) in 1638, 200 former samurai taught the rest of the rebels how to use firearms to defend Hara Castle against over 100,000 government troops. In China, deserters from the regular army strengthened the ‘roving bandits’ in the 1620s and 1630s: Zhang Xianzhong, the ‘Great King of the West’ in Sichuan, was one of them. After 1640, the influx of deserters from the Ming Army probably explains Li Zicheng's sudden ability to capture fortified towns. By 1644, Li's troops had reached such a high level of military effectiveness that they came close to defeating the elite Ming troops of Wu Sangui at the Shanhai pass, and only the intervention of fresh Manchu forces turned the tide.60

  Besides weapons and discipline, emblems and insignia could enhance the effectiveness of resistance to government. In America, the magistrates of Mexico City gradually replaced the Habsburg coat of arms with the ancient Aztec symbol of an eagle poised on a cactus devouring a serpent until 1642, when the viceroy, suspicious of any hint of insurgency in the wake of the revo
lt of Portugal and Brazil, forbade it. Governor John Endicott of Massachusetts had more success when in 1634 he decided to create a new flag for the colony by cutting the red cross out of the royal ensign, on the grounds that it was a symbol of popery: the colony retained its insignia almost until the end of the century. Meanwhile, in Japan, the Catholic rebels at Shimabara in 1638 placed ‘many small flags with red crosses’ around their parapets; and the following year the Chinese insurgents in the Philippines also waved distinctive banners in defiance at the Spaniards, while rebellious groups on the Chinese mainland flew red banners (although this may merely have reflected the fact that in China red was the colour of felicity).61

  In several parts of Europe, red also became the colour of revolution. In 1647, in Naples, the rebels ‘unfurled the red flag (lo stendado rosso)’ at their headquarters ‘as a sign of war’, and soon insurgents throughout the city displayed red flags. The following month in Palermo, insurgents also waved red flags as a sign of defiance; while six years later, the Swiss insurgents followed the red ‘Entlebuch banner’. In 1647 Masaniello wore a red bonnet while the soldiers of the New Model Army in England tied a red ribbon around their left arms to show ‘that we will defend the equity of our [cause] with our blood’. In France, the Ormée rebels of Bordeaux (1651–3) wore a ‘chapeau rouge’, while the ‘red bonnets’ of the Breton rebels in 1675 gave their name to the province's rebellion against Louis XIV.62

  Likenesses of many revolutionary leaders also circulated, to inspire their followers. Images of both Sabbatai Zvi and Nathan of Gaza not only appeared in books but were also paraded around the streets of Poland in 1666; while most leaders of the English Revolution – John Pym, Sir Thomas Fairfax and, above all, Oliver Cromwell – were frequently portrayed by both supporters and detractors in paintings, engravings, sculptures, medals and even artefacts. None, however, rivalled the posthumous fame of Masaniello of Naples. Although his ‘reign’ lasted only nine days, the humble fisherman achieved an iconic status that anticipated that of Che Guevara in the twentieth century: artists captured his likeness in paintings, medals and wax statuettes (some for export); intellectuals composed epigrams extolling his achievements; plays about him were later published in England, Germany and the Dutch Republic. The Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza hung in his rooms a picture of himself dressed to resemble Masaniello. Before long, tour guides for foreign travellers to Naples included his haunts in their itineraries.63