Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Others escaped by fleeing abroad to avoid violence or vengeance. Thomas Hobbes left England for Paris in 1641, just before the Civil War, and did not return until it became clear that Parliament had won (and he had provided, in his Leviathan, a rationale for its rule that secured him a state pension); three years later, the marquis of Newcastle joined him, following the annihilation of his army at Marston Moor; and many other English royalists followed. Most of them remained in Europe until the Restoration in 1660 – when several of the leading British Republicans took their place. ‘Bloodthirsty Mars’ forced far more men and women to flee from central Europe. Some were intellectuals at the height of their powers (like the musician Heinrich Schütz, the poet Martin Opitz, the mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler); others were country folk who could not protect their families, like the village shoemaker Hans Heberle, who had to flee with his family to Ulm 30 times during the Thirty Years War. Some went into exile alone, like Hugo Grotius after the execution of Oldenbarnevelt; others moved as a group, like the thousands of ‘Masanielli’, the unsuccessful Neapolitan rebels against Philip IV, who in 1648 took refuge in Rome, and the malvizzi from Messina 30 years later, hundreds of whom left for France on the fleet that evacuated the city's garrison.17

  Escape was even more common in eastern Europe, where peasants could flee misery at home by joining the Cossacks or the Tartars to the south, or (in the case of Russian peasants) by crossing the Urals into Siberia. In addition, several Polish, Transylvanian and Austrian nobles took out ‘dual citizenship’ as a safeguard against potential catastrophe. Even Vasile Lupu (Basil the Wolf), prince of Moldavia, gained ‘Polish citizenship’ when his daughter married the son of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, explicitly with the intention of creating a safe haven in case his subjects should expel him.18 In China, many vanquished supporters of the Ming also fled to escape situations that disheartened them: thousands of intellectuals who refused to serve the Qing, yet stopped short of open defiance, either took refuge in remote areas or moved from the household of one sympathetic colleague to another; some 60,000 Ming loyalists in 1661 followed their leader Coxinga to Taiwan, where they held out against the Qing for over two decades.

  The violence of the mid-century also disheartened some of the victors. Sir Thomas Fairfax, for example, received £19,000 in salary as well as a cash gratuity of £10,000 and lands worth £4,000 per annum for his five years of service as Lord General of the New Model Army, and his name had appeared on the title page of some 700 pamphlets when in 1650, aged 38, he resigned his commission rather than lead his troops in a pre-emptive strike against Scotland. Instead he retired to his estate in Yorkshire where he composed melancholy verse (The recreation of my solitude) and filled 204 folio pages with his holograph translation of a Christianized Indian epic entitled Barlaam and Josaphat, whose highlight comes just after Josaphat, a general, ‘renounced all his temporal grandure and glory’. At this point his ruler taunts him: ‘Thou wast the first of my kingdom, and commander of all my forces’ – Fairfax's translation deviated from the original so that it matched his own position – ‘but hath mad thy selfe soe vile and contemptable as the very children mock att thee’. Fairfax remained in secluded retirement until his death in 1671.19

  Similar sentiments afflicted Manchu Bannerman Dzengšeo, when he witnessed a ‘friendly fire’ incident on his way home after a tough but ultimately victorious campaign against the Three Feudatories (see chapter 5 above), mostly fought in mountains and jungle, often in torrential rain. The death of comrades profoundly upset him, and that night he recorded in his diary: ‘In my heart I was frightened and, to keep myself safe, I pondered: “I have served on a military campaign for ten years, and have not lost my life in battle.”’ One month later, after a victory parade before the emperor, Dzengšeo at last rejoined his family in Beijing – but still he felt unhappy, confiding to his journal: ‘When I met my children and younger brothers I could not recognize them. Looking at them, the houses and the heated beds of the capital appeared even more odd, and suddenly it was like a confused, hazy dream. The more I thought about it, the more I marvelled at what seemed like being born again’ (once again, a classic ‘post-traumatic stress’ response). Dzengšeo was a senior officer, perhaps equivalent to a lieutenant colonel, normally attended by seven or eight servants, whose family had acquired a prestigious mansion in the Chinese capital – yet neither wealth nor victory brought him mental peace after the horrors he had seen.20

  Only the last part of Dzengšeo's campaign diary has survived, so perhaps the lost portions noted moments of intense satisfaction amid the general gloom, like those experienced by Peter Hagendorf, a Catholic foot soldier during the Thirty Years War. He, too, filled most of his diary with complaints about endless marches (he marched over 12,000 miles in under thirty years); family deaths (he buried one wife and eight children); and moments of danger (he concluded his account of Nördlingen with a series of curses: ‘idiot, ass, fool, bitch etc’) – but he also noted times when he and his comrades ‘lay in quarters, guzzling and boozing. It was great’. Best of all (for him), twice after the successful storm of a town, ‘I got a pretty girl as my booty’. He only released them when his regiment moved on. One of Hagendorf's opponents, the Calvinist Scot Robert Monro, recalled with equal fondness the autumn of 1631, when he led his regiment through Germany:

  This march being profitable as it was pleasant to the eye. [So] we see that soldiers have not always so hard a life, as the common opinion is; for sometimes as they have abundance, so they have variety of pleasure in marching softly, without fear or danger, through fertile soils and pleasant countries, their marches being more like to a kingly progress than to wars, being in a fat land, as this was, abounding in all things except peace.

  But later Monro's fortunes changed. He watched many of his comrades die; his regiment was disbanded; and in 1646, when commanding the Scottish Army in Ulster, his Catholic opponents routed him – leading him to conclude that ‘the Lord of Hosts had a controversie with us to rub shame on our faces’. Two years later, like many other Scots he agreed to fight for the imprisoned Charles I against Parliament but was ignominiously captured in ‘bed with his ladye’ and imprisoned in the Tower of London for five years. Upon his release, like Sir Thomas Fairfax, Monro retired to his estates and remained there in seclusion until he died.21

  Keeping Score

  Such extreme swings of fortune led many seventeenth-century people to keep an intimate record of their actions. The radical Protestant Hugh Peter, a noted preacher in both England and New England, instructed his congregations that every day they should keep a journal and ‘write down your sins on one side, and on the other side God's little mercies’. Nehemiah Wallington, a London craftsman who heard (and recorded) this exhortation, rejoiced that ‘by God's mercy I practice it already’, and between 1637 and 1654 he filled eight volumes with his nightly ‘introspections’ on the public and private events that, he believed, reflected ‘God's little mercies’ towards him and those who shared his faith. In 1660 Samuel Pepys began his celebrated Diary as a spiritual journal and balance sheet, while at Whitsunday 1662, Isaac Newton (then a 19-year-old student at Cambridge) compiled a list of the 49 sins he could remember committing to that date – most of them involved disrespecting the Sabbath in some way, and beating people. (Interestingly, both Pepys and Newton compiled his record in shorthand, no doubt ‘to conceal thoughts that he wished to set down for his own edification alone’.)22 A generation later, the Reverend Gervase Disney saw no need for concealment, noting in his diary in longhand the ‘mercies’ and misfortunes of each day. For example, he ‘took notice of the mercy shew'd my Wife, in delivering her from most acute Pains in the Tooth-Ache’, and at the close of one day he proudly wrote, ‘No actual Sin that I know of’. He urged his wife to follow his example. She must ‘Spend thy week-days well, in the discharge of duties publick and private; keep an exact Diary of any sinful miscarriages, and be humbled every evening for them’, and ‘take notice of God's
Mercies every day’ and ‘pen down God's Dealings with thee’.23

  Devout Catholic contemporaries of Wallington, Pepys, Newton and Disney adopted similar strategies. In France, encouraged by Jansenist ‘spiritual directors’, some kept a record of their good and bad deeds remarkably like those enjoined by Puritan preachers across the Channel; while in Spain, a spirit of ‘catastrofismo’ (impending doom) led many to compose personal manuals for survival. Thus Dr Gaspar Caldera de Heredía, a gentleman of Seville, kept a journal entitled Political tariff (subtitled ‘A guide to life in our time’), full of reflections on where his own life had gone wrong because of ‘the general corruption of morals that normally characterize a great empire’.24 Another common reaction to the crisis among seventeenth-century Catholics was to seek the intercession of saints – and the more, the better. The various communities of the kingdom of Naples ‘elected’ new patron saints, led by the capital city, which had seven patron saints in 1600 but over 200 a century later. There were already so many by 1624 that a special guide appeared, Napoli sacra, listing each shrine and its relics, together with its reputed powers. During the revolution of Naples in 1647–8 thousands of troubled men and women, conscious that those who made the wrong choice faced arrest and execution, flocked to their preferred chapel to beg for inspiration and protection. Anxious Catholics also founded, re-founded or expanded pilgrimage centres dedicated to the Virgin Mary, until in 1655 their number prompted the publication of a comprehensive guide, the Atlas Marianus, with an expanded edition in 1672 describing the location and ‘powers’ of 1,200 Marian pilgrimage centres (300 of them in Germany, almost all founded in the seventeenth century).25

  In late Ming China, too, many worried individuals turned to introspection and self-criticism in the hope of averting disaster. Pre-printed Ledgers of merit and demerit (Gongguoge: gong, meaning ‘merits’; guo meaning ‘faults’) provided a calendar where its owner could record good and bad deeds, suggesting the appropriate ‘points’ for each action. It also left a space to enter a running tally. Thus someone who gave money to the poor, and gained (say) five merits, but also spread a slander about someone, receiving 30 demerits, would have to enter a net score of ‘minus 25’. In this way, as Cynthia Brokaw has noted, each person's ‘monthly balance helps him measure his moral progress, and at year's end his total score indicates whether he can expect good or bad fortune from the gods in the years ahead’.26 Other educated Chinese kept a spiritual autobiography (in prose for men, often in verse for women), or introspective ‘travel records’ (youji), wherein the authors recorded and reviewed their daily deeds and thoughts. In the words of one prominent intellectual: ‘Everyday know your errors, everyday correct your faults.’ As one would expect, all three genres of ‘self-writing’ – ledgers, autobiographies and travelogues – proliferated in precisely those areas of China that experienced the greatest economic and social upheaval in the seventeenth century: Jiangnan, Fujian and Guangdong.27

  The Psychoactive Revolution

  David Courtwright has argued that the prevailing ‘melancholy’ of the seventeenth century caused the rapid spread of six substances that either stimulated or numbed the human senses, a phenomenon he called ‘the psychoactive revolution’. Consumption of two (alcohol and opium) was already widespread, but the rest (coffee, tea, chocolate and tobacco) were new – and several seem to have been more potent then than they are now. Courtwright argued that consumption of these commodities rose rapidly because they helped contemporaries to ‘cope with lives lived on the verge of the unliveable’ – people, in short, ‘who could use a smoke and a drink’.28

  And drink they did. In 1632 an English envoy to King Christian IV, then aged 55, primly remarked: ‘Such is the life of that king: to drink all day and to lie with a whore every night.’ Some years earlier, one of Christian's councillors recorded the court's drinking in his diary, grading the level of intoxication with one, two or three crosses. On one memorable night, the diary has four crosses, followed by the prayer ‘Libera nos domine’ (‘God spare us’). Christian and his court seem to have spent the equivalent of one month of each year dead drunk.29 Across the North Sea, the English consumed over six million barrels of beer every year – more than a pint a day for every man, woman and child – as well as two gallons of wine per person per year. Samuel Pepys recorded in his Diary visits to well over 100 taverns in London in the 1660s where he drank both local ale and, thanks to the invention by English glassmakers of stronger bottle glass, more potent beers brewed in different parts of England. Pepys and his contemporaries also relaxed in ‘strong water houses’ (another seventeenth-century invention) to consume Dutch gin, French brandy, Scots and Irish whisky and English rum. Some continental Catholics also often drank heavily in the seventeenth century. In the aphorism of Dr Caldera's Political tariff, ‘wine has shipwrecked more boats than water’.30

  The Mughal court in India also contained hard drinkers. Alcohol abuse claimed one of Emperor Jahangir's uncles, both of his brothers and a nephew; and the future emperor was himself imprisoned at one point by his father in an effort to dry him out. Jahangir nevertheless celebrated the first New Year after his accession by decreeing that ‘everyone could drink whatever intoxicants or exhilarants he wanted without prohibition or impediment’, and his memoirs refer to regular Thursday night parties at which he and his courtiers drank prodigiously in order to enjoy ‘here on earth the future joys of paradise’. A court poet composed a witty couplet in honour of his bibulous master: ‘I have two pairs of lips, one devoted to wine and the other apologizing for drunkenness.’31 Jahangir also indulged in drugs – indeed, he employed one steward for his wine and another for his opium. According to a revealing entry in the emperor's Autobiography, while in hot pursuit of a rebellious son, ‘When it was noon and the heat was at its hottest, I stopped for a moment in the shade of a tree and said to [an attendant] “Inasmuch as I, my composure notwithstanding, have not yet had the regular dose of opium I should have had at the beginning of the day, and no one has reminded me of it, imagine what state that wretch [my son] must be in.”’ As Lisa Balabanlilar has noted, ‘Unapologetic drug use, and only slightly embarrassed alcoholism, received regular references in Jahangir's writings’; and even at the end of his life, when he was too ill to take opium ‘of which he had been fond for forty years’, he still enjoyed a few sips of wine.32

  Visitors to other Muslim states likewise commented on the prodigious consumption of both opium and alcohol in the seventeenth century. Paul Rycaut, long time resident in the Ottoman empire, reported that it was normal for the sultan's subjects ‘to be drunk, or intoxicate themselves with Aqua Vitae, opium, or any stupefying drugs’; while in Iran, although Shah Abbas II twice banned alcohol consumption and closed all taverns, at other times he and his courtiers indulged in prolonged and heavy drinking. In 1666, the year of the shah's death, his court consumed 145,000 litres of Shiraz wine. In addition, according to an English traveller, ‘Opium (the juice of the poppy) is of great use’ in Iran. It was, he opined, ‘Good, if taken moderately; bad, nay mortal, if beyond measure; by practice they make that familiar which would kill us, so that their medicine is our poison. They chew it much, for it helps catarrhs, cowardice, and the epilepsy, strengthens (as they say) Venus.’ He noted its ‘use’ by soldiers about to fight, messengers required to travel long distances at speed, and ordinary people trying to stave off fatigue, boredom and stress. Some ingested it as pills, others as a cordial, and a few adventurous addicts inserted it as a suppository. One French visitor claimed that only one Persian in ten did not use opium, and that, thanks to the prevailing drug culture, it was not uncommon ‘to come across individuals hallucinating in the streets – speaking with or laughing at angels’. It would be easy to write off such extreme descriptions as Western bias, but in the 1660s the Iranian mullah Qummi claimed that the Sufis ‘eat hashish so as to quicken’ the process of attaining God, and they dispensed it freely to their disciples. Qummi also argued that the drugs associated with
the Sufi lifestyle attracted many who lacked a true vocation, so that ‘when one asks them what sainthood means, they say it means being a bachelor and homeless’ (apparently an early formulation of Dr Timothy Leary's call to ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’).33

  The consumption of coffee, tea, chocolate and tobacco also increased dramatically during the seventeenth century. In the Muslim world, coffee had long served two purposes: a stimulus to sustain religious zealots, such as Sufis and dervishes, as they sang, danced and chanted; and a social lubricant consumed in coffee houses where men gathered to talk. For precisely those reasons, the Ottoman, Mughal and Safavid governments periodically persecuted and even executed consumers – although evidently without stemming demand (see chapters 6 and 13 above). Coffee houses spread to Christian Europe somewhat later – Venice from 1645; Oxford and London from 1652; Paris from 1672 – but then proliferated rapidly. London had over 80 by 1665, and in one of them Samuel Pepys drank tea for the first time – ‘I did send for a cupp of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before’ – but found that it cost twenty times more by the pound than coffee. Consumption of both beverages remained modest in northwest Europe until the custom of taking them with sugar gained ground after the 1680s, prompting a cohort of Jesuit poets to extol their qualities in dithyrambic verses. Coffee drinkers, according to Guillaume Massieu, should consider themselves ‘blessed’ because ‘thanks to this wonderful drink, you leap from your beds and hurry to do your duties, wishing the sun might rise earlier’. In particular, Massieu opined, preachers ‘need to drink coffee because the liquid fortifies the weakened body, spreads a new vigour, a new life, in all actions, and gives the voice more strength’.34

  Chocolate was believed to have similar properties. Samuel Pepys occasionally enjoyed a ‘morning draft’ in London in the 1660s; and in 1689, in Naples, Tommaso Strozzi (another Jesuit) filled three volumes with Latin verses in its honour: On the mind's beverage; or, the manufacture of chocolate, described the origins of cacao in the Americas, the proper way to prepare a draught, and its therapeutic powers, which (he claimed) range from curing diarrhoea (or constipation, depending on the dose), through reducing fevers, to stimulating the sexual appetite. At one point, Strozzi brought these attributes together in a notable anecdote about the recently canonized Santa Rosa of Lima, to whom an angel appeared one day bearing a drink of chocolate to cure her fever. She ‘hungrily immerses her mouth and whole soul with the wounds of her crucified betrothed and, drawing deep, sucks in the delights and vital spirit from the Divinity’.35 Drinking chocolate spread from Spain to France in the 1640s, and to England a decade later. One of London's many ‘chocolate houses’, where men gathered to discuss the issues of the day over a hot beverage, survives today: White's Chocolate House, opened in 1693 by an Italian immigrant, Francesco Bianco, is today White's, a Gentlemen's Club. It remains open to men only but it serves no chocolate beverages.