Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  An English pamphlet about intoxicants reflected the rapid spread of the most popular and powerful stimulant: tobacco. The first edition, published in 1629, bore the title Wine, beere and ale, together by the eares; but a second edition the following year was retitled Wine, beere, ale and tobacco, contending for superiority. The reputation of tobacco as a prophylactic against plague led Pepys ‘to buy some roll-tobacco to smell and chew’ during the London plague: but his most remarkable encounter with smoking came two years later, when one of the horses pulling his coach became convulsed by shaking and seemed about to ‘drop down dead’ – until the coachman ‘blew some tobacco [smoke] in his nose; upon which the horse sneezed, and by and by grows well and draws us the rest of our way’. When Pepys expressed surprise, the coachman observed phlegmatically: ‘It's usual.’ Seventeenth-century tobacco evidently contained far more powerful analgesic and psychotropic properties than any blend available today, because it not only resurrected half-dead horses but also eased pain, induced trances, suppressed hunger and staved off cold among humans. It also induced intoxication. In China in the 1620s the writer Yao Lü described how ‘it can make one tipsy’, and, three decades later, the German poet Jakob Balde entitled his satire on the abuse of tobacco: ‘Dry drunkenness’ (Die truckene Trunckenheit) (Plate 22).36

  These qualities made tobacco a perfect refuge for the clinically depressed, which is no doubt why consumption soared despite the fact that in many countries consumers faced official discouragement and, sometimes, draconian punishments. In England, neither a minatory ode entitled A counterblaste to tobacco, composed by King James I, nor heavy taxes on those who persisted, reduced consumption: instead, annual imports of tobacco from England's American colonies rose from about 30 tons in the early 1620s to almost 1,000 tons in the late 1630s, and to over 5,000 tons by the end of the century. In China, the Chongzhen emperor tried different strategies. In 1639 he forbade tobacco cultivation, perhaps hoping to make his subjects economize, and decreed that anyone caught selling it in Beijing would be executed. He confirmed the death sentence for the first offender the following year; but, shortly afterwards, he revoked his decision in response to claims by military commanders that tobacco enabled their soldiers to withstand cold, damp and hunger. An essayist living in Shandong noted how rapidly tobacco smoking spread during the chaos of the 1640s and, as Timothy Brook has noted, ‘Hundreds of poems on the subject of tobacco survive from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’. The elite of Qing China felt no shame about becoming ‘tobacco's bondservant’ because (as one writer put it) it allowed the smoker to escape reality; indeed, claimed another, a true gentleman ‘cannot do without it, however briefly, and to the end of their lives never tire of it’.37

  In the Ottoman empire religious purists tried to eliminate tobacco precisely because it was a stimulant, and therefore prohibited by the Qu'ran. Nevertheless it grew in popularity, as did the mixture of tobacco and opium known as barsh, widely smoked in coffee houses and marketplaces. Periodic smoking bans had little effect until in 1633 Sultan Murad IV not only outlawed the production, sale and consumption of tobacco, but also had offenders summarily executed (see chapter 7 above). Nevertheless, as in China, soldiers broke the taboo: according to Katib Çelebi, who served as a clerk on Murad's campaigns in Iraq, hungry and tired soldiers smoked in the latrines to avoid detection until the ban lapsed. In 1691, despite continuing clerical opposition, the sultan started to tax the habit that he could not break.38 In Russia, finally, seventeenth-century smokers ran grave personal risks. Russia could neither produce the crop domestically (like India, Iran and China) nor import it cheaply from a colony (like Britain): every pound had to be purchased abroad. This practice not only worried the government, because of the outflow of wealth, but also incurred the wrath of the Orthodox Church which condemned everything ‘Western’. As in the Ottoman empire, buying and selling tobacco became a capital offence in 1633 (the following year the traveller Adam Olearius saw eight men and a woman flogged for selling tobacco); while the law code of 1649 (the Ulozhenie) contained 11 articles against tobacco, including one that reaffirmed the death penalty for possession and trading. Nevertheless, in Russia as elsewhere irrepressible demand led to rising consumption as the century advanced.39

  Peace Breaks Out

  Each of these individual ‘coping strategies’ to overcome the ‘melancholy’ induced by the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century emerged independently of – and often in spite of – the state. The same was true of several collective ‘coping strategies’. All of them depended on the restoration of peace and a climate of security, sometimes after decades of war; and, as the nobility of Russia reminded their tsar in 1653, when he invited their views on attacking the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: ‘It is indeed easy to pull the sword from the scabbard, but not so easy to put it back when you want.’ Their plea failed. A few months later, the tsar began a war that would last for 13 years.40

  Except in Europe, seventeenth-century wars normally ended when one protagonist prevailed over its rivals by force of arms. Thus Japan's ‘Warring States Era’ ended when the armies of the Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated the forces of his remaining enemies in a series of battles around Osaka Castle, which they burnt down, and forced all the opposing leaders to commit suicide. Ieyasu then ordered the emperor to declare a new imperial era, Genna, and proclaimed his victory to be ‘the Genna armistice’ (Genna enbu). Likewise the ‘Great Enterprise’ of the Qing ended only when they had executed the last Ming Pretender and compelled the last Ming loyalists to submit and shave their foreheads; while the civil war among the four sons of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan ended only when Aurangzeb had defeated and executed virtually all his male relatives.41 In the Americas, both wars between the Europeans and the native inhabitants, and wars between different groups of native inhabitants, normally ended with the death of almost all the vanquished males and the enslavement of their families.

  In Europe, by contrast, between 1648 and 1661 several wars that had ravaged the continent for a generation came to an end thanks to a series of delicate negotiated compromises born of exhaustion and popular anti-war sentiment. Western literature has always contained a strong anti-war component. In the 1620s a French writer observed that ‘for every two soldiers enriched by war you will find fifty who received only injuries or incurable diseases’; and a decade later, a Danish nobleman quoted Pindar, a Greek poet of the fifth century BC, when he instructed his younger brother, about to go to war:

  Consider carefully what you are seeking when you call yourself a soldier. Take care that a vain and worldly desire to carry this name does not rule you, and that being among those who shout dulce bellum, dulce bellum [sweet war, sweet war], does not cause you to shout it along with them. Let it not be a joy for you to see blood.42

  Such sentiments multiplied as the wars dragged on, ruining people and property. At the head of each double-page spread of his ‘Historical notes and meditations’ that dealt with the campaigns of Charles I, the London craftsman Nehemiah Wallington wrote ‘Of the bitternesse of warre and the miseries that war brings’. One English pamphlet of 1642 warned that ‘None knowes the misery of warre but those that see it’; while another reminded readers of the ‘manifold miseries’ that civil war would bring, to judge ‘by the examples of Germany, France, Ireland and other places’.43 Four years later, some Welsh royalists noted that those who, back in 1642, had ‘violently bed [bayed] for war’, now ‘prefer by far/An unjust peace before the justest war’. As he travelled through southern England that year, the young Robert Boyle was appalled by the general insecurity: ‘Good God!’, he wrote to his sister: ‘That reasonable creatures, that call themselves Christians too, should delight in such an unnatural thing as war, where cruelty at least becomes necessity’. The following year, in Germany, a desperate entry in a peasant family's diary reads: ‘We live like animals, eating bark and grass. No one could imagine that anything like this could happen to us. Many people say there is no God.’44


  Anti-war sentiments also multiplied in art and literature, especially after 1630. Many painters and engravers emphasized the arbitrary and catastrophic nature of war, seeking not only to document but also to deter. The stark engravings of Jacques Callot's ‘Grandes Misères de la Guerre’ (‘Miseries of War’), each one with a caption condemning the barbarity of the soldiers, do not stand alone. In Germany, Hans Ulrich Franck produced a series of 24 engravings known as ‘The theatre of war’ with a title page on which curtains reveal a stage where an officer brandishes his weapon while trying to keep his balance upon Fortune's globe. The motto reads: ‘O hark! Attend to the present; observe the future; and do not forget the end.’ Even the enormous glass beakers known as Humpen, made to commemorate the end of the Thirty Years War, showed ‘God the Father leaning down out of heaven’ to bless the emperor, the king of France and the queen of Sweden, with an extremely long didactic legend that began: ‘Thy peace, thy peace, thy divine peace: never take it from us again. Let the same be handed down to our children; Let it remain on the earth for our descendants; Let the destroyed churches and schools be rebuilt; Let …’45 Musicians, too, hated war. As early as 1623, one composer lamented that the war had placed a spear in the hand of princes with which to kill musicians, just as the Devil had given Saul a spear to kill the harpist David: ‘Saul's spear is … in the hands of court finance ministers who lock their doors when they hear musicians approach’. Heinrich Schütz, court musician of Electoral Saxony and the finest composer of his day, was compelled to arrange short choral pieces of religious music for only ‘one, two, three or four voices with two violins, 'cello and organ’, because the war left him neither choirs nor orchestras for anything grander. ‘The times neither demand nor allow music on a big scale,’ he complained. ‘It is now impossible to perform music on a large scale or with many choirs’. In the preface to his Small spiritual concerti of 1636, he claimed that he published not so that his works could be performed, because few places boasted sufficient musicians, but so that he would not forget how to compose.46 Of Schütz's 70 surviving works, 30 were lamentations.

  Writers of both verse and prose cried out for peace with mounting stridency as the wars continued. In 1642, at the first performance of his play Friedens Sieg (‘The Victory of Peace’), written by Justus Georg Schottel, tutor to the duke of Brunswick's children, his charges acted the leading parts while their parents and the Elector of Brandenburg watched.47 One of the moving hymns written by Lutheran Pastor Paul Gerhardt began: ‘Oh come on! Wake up, wake up you hard world: open your eyes before terror comes upon you in swift sudden surprise’; while in Book II of Paradise Lost, probably written in 1660, John Milton offered a powerful denunciation of the long-term as well as the short-term evils caused by war:

  Say they who counsel warr, we are decreed,

  Reserv'd and destin'd to Eternal woe;

  Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,

  What can we suffer worse?

  … And what peace can we return,

  But to our power hostility and hate,

  Untam'd reluctance, and revenge though slow,

  Yet ever plotting how the Conqueror least

  May reap his conquest, and may least rejoyce

  In doing what we most in suffering feel?48

  In 1668, in Germany, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen published The adventures of a German simpleton expressly to remind ‘posterity about the terrible crimes that were committed in our German war’. It begins when the author, a farm boy aged ten (and thus a ‘simpleton’ about the wider world), watches a group of ‘iron men’ (whom he later learns are cavalry troopers) torture the men and rape the women on his farm, and then take away all they can carry and burn the rest. Simplicissimus only survives to narrate later outrages because he feigns death when one of the ‘iron men’ shoots at him before riding away. The book proved an immediate best-seller.49

  As Theodore K. Rabb observed in his landmark study, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe: ‘The shock of unbridled chaos, of a myriad of competing claims battling each other to extinction, made thoughtful men realize that these reckless assertions of private will were the surest route to disaster.’ Since Classical history formed an integral part of the educational curriculum in most parts of Europe, many members of the elite no doubt drew parallels with the political resignation that prevailed among the ruling elite after civil wars destroyed the Roman Republic. Freedom ‘was indeed lost, but most of the old nobility who best understood it and prized it most highly perished in the wars and proscriptions; their few survivors were ready to pay the price for security.’50 Similar conformist arguments gained ground in Europe in the mid-seventeenth century.

  In 1647 a Welsh royalist confided to his journal that ‘All innovation and change in government is very bad and dangerous. That form is always best which is in being, [because] the difficulties of alteration are so many and dangerous’. Four years later, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan enjoined obedience to the new English Republic, regardless of its dubious legitimacy, because ‘If a monarch subdued by war render himself subject to the victor’ (Hobbes hardly needed to remind his readers that Charles I had just done this), then ‘his subjects are delivered from their former obligation, and become obliged to the victor’. Many other English publications at the time, some sponsored by the Republican regime, advanced the same argument (albeit in a less comprehensive and memorable way).51 In Catalonia, a French agent reported in 1644 that the local clergy ‘say that since the obedience promised to France has no other foundation than the protection it promised, they are freed from their oath by the lack of such protection’; while five years later a Paris pamphleteer reminded his fellow subjects that monarchs ‘owe us their protection just as we owe them our obedience’.52

  A decade later John Locke welcomed the Restoration of King Charles II, not least because ‘I no sooner perceived myself in the world but I found myself in a storm, which hath lasted almost hitherto’. Now, he felt obliged ‘to endeavour [the] continuance’ of the new regime ‘by disposing men's minds to obedience to that government which brought with it quiet and settlement which our own giddy folly had put beyond the reach, not only of our contrivance, but hopes’. The ‘storm’ in England also appalled some foreign visitors. Peder Schumacher, from Denmark, spent three years studying at Queen's College, Oxford, where he may have read the political works of Thomas Hobbes. He certainly witnessed the decline and fall of the English Republic in 1658–60 before he went to Paris and observed Louis XIV's measures to consolidate his personal power. On his return to Denmark, Schumacher applied these experiences to draft the ‘Royal Law’ (Kongelov): the constitution of 1665 that conferred ‘supreme power and authority’ on the king.53

  No More Wars

  Other survivors of Europe's wars proposed mechanisms to avoid future wars entirely. Some wrote treatises advocating ‘universal peace’. In 1623 the French monk Emeric Crucé proposed the creation of a permanent international assembly of ambassadors, to whom sovereigns would present their differences for adjudication, solemnly swearing to accept the majority decision (although, if they failed, states should enforce a settlement through economic and even military sanctions). It was to be a truly international body, and although Crucé proposed Venice as its ideal location, he felt confident that ‘navigation can overcome [the] difficulty’ that delegates from Persia, China and the Americas would face in getting there. Two years later, the Dutch polymath Hugo Grotius published a book entitled The law of War and Peace, proposing conventions to avoid needless wars, and also needless brutality in the wars that nevertheless occurred. In 1693 the Quaker colonizer William Penn published An essay towards the present and future peace of Europe, by the establishment of an European Diet, which suggested an international tribunal, very similar to Crucé's, to resolve international disputes peacefully, albeit only in Europe, and if any nation refuse to accept arbitration (or took up arms unilaterally) ‘all other soveraignties, united as one strength, shall
compel [its] submission’.54

  These and other seventeenth-century writers who proposed universal solutions to what they perceived as a universal problem all wrote in wartime. Those who wrote just after a war, by contrast, tended to adopt a more limited and more pragmatic approach. In 1648 and again in 1652 the Estates of Hessen-Kassel submitted a formal petition asking the Supreme Court of the Holy Roman Empire to protect them with constitutional guarantees to safeguard them from ‘being deprived of their liberties and from being led into one bloody massacre after another like innocent lambs’. When Hans Heberle, the long-suffering village shoemaker near Ulm, heard in 1667 that France had declared war on Spain again, he confided to his diary ‘we beg God Almighty from the bottom of our hearts that he protect and shield our Germany and the whole Holy Roman Empire’ from another incursion of ‘foreign troops because we experienced and suffered enough in the Thirty Years War’.55 Perhaps the most striking expression of such ‘never again’ sentiments came in 1661, when Sweden's regency government discussed whether or not to continue the wars inherited from the late King Charles X. Gustav Bonde, the treasurer, reminded his colleagues that