Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  7. See García Acosta, Desastres agrícolas, I, 211, on the ‘tumultos’ in New Spain; ch. 10 above on the French popular rebellions of the 1690s and 1709; Ze'evi, An Ottoman century, 5, 60, 83–4, on urban revolts in the Ottoman empire. Subtelny, The domination, chs 4–5, notes that small groups of discontented nobles in Livonia, Poland, Ukraine, Moldavia and Hungary all rebelled in the first decade of the eighteenth century; but none secured a broad base of support. Although Subtelny provided an excellent account of each of the five revolts, and noted some common denominators, none rivalled the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s in scale or consequences.

  8. Mauch and Pfister, Natural disasters, 6–7 (Mauch's introduction). The term ‘Creative Destruction’ is often misused. In 1848 Marx and Engels noted that most human societies face a ‘crisis’ whenever ‘a famine [or] a widespread war of destruction cuts off every means of subsistence and destroys industry and trade’; and they argued that these setbacks stimulated both ‘the conquest of new markets’ and ‘the more thorough exploitation of the old ones’ (Communist manifesto, ch. 1). They did not use the term ‘Creative Destruction’, which first appeared a century later as the title of ch. 7 of Joseph Schumpeter's critique of Marxist theory, Capitalism, socialism and democracy. Schumpeter, however, expressly excluded ‘wars, revolutions and so on’ as the ‘prime movers’ of economic change. Instead, he meant by ‘Creative Destruction’ the internal process by which new economic markets, products and methods ‘incessantly revolutioniz[e] the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one’ (Capitalism, 82–3). Like most historians, I perversely use Schumpeter's convenient term to describe Marx's useful insight.

  Chapter 20 Escaping the Crisis

  1. Gordon, Diary, I, 259–60 (perhaps an inspiration for Kevin Costner in the opening sequence of the film Dances with Wolves?). See ibid., 228, 260, and elsewhere for other examples of Gordon's fatalism. See ch. 5 above on the ‘True record’. Mann, ‘Women in East Asia’, offers an excellent overview.

  2. AGRB SEG 43 records at least six soldiers discharged from the Spanish Army in 1643–4 on account of mal de corazón; SEG 37/148 records a man of 42 discharged from the army who ‘Por hallarse roto y con otros achaques está inhútil’.

  3. Bodleian Ms Ashmole 185, ‘Figures set upon horary questions by Mr William Lilly’, vol. III, Aug. 1646–May 1647 – random entries from almost 300 questions asked by women during these nine months.

  4. Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam, 36, 38, 40–1, 55, 73. Many ‘troubled patients’ of psychiatrists today have similar concerns, and the 6:4 male/female ratio is remarkably similar; but most are middle aged and virtually none are servants. For a similar distribution of suicide victims, see ch. 4 above. Napier had an enormous medical practice: his ‘troubled’ patients (1,286 female and 748 male) formed less than 5 per cent of the total he treated between 1597 and his death in 1634: see ODNB s.v. ‘Napier’.

  5. Trevor-Roper, Europe's physician, 8 (Cromwell) and 363–4 (Princess Elizabeth). Mayerne treated numerous patients for venereal disease, including the young Richelieu (ibid., 66). Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam, 150–64, discusses Napier's ‘melancholy’ and ‘mopish’ patients; Villari, Baroque personae, 29, also discusses ‘manic depressives’ of the day.

  6. Burton, Anatomy, 5 and 76 (‘Democritus to the Reader’) and second pagination 11 (Partition I, section I, subsection V: ‘Melancholy in disposition’); Aubrey, Brief lives, s.v. ‘Burton’, reports his suicide. Burton was just one of many English writers of his day on this subject, including John Donne (Devotions upon emergent occasions, 1624), John Milton (‘Il pensoroso’, 1645) and Sir Thomas Browne (Hydriotaphia; Urn burial, 1658). See Gowland, The worlds of Renaissance melancholy.

  7. ODNB, s.v. ‘Felton’ by Alastair Bellany, quoting from trial papers; CSPD 1628–1629, 343, examination of Elizabeth Josselyn, 3 Oct. 1628. Although executed as a traitor, England celebrated Felton's action with toasts, poems and pamphlets: see ch. 18 above.

  8. Goldish, Jewish questions, 131–3 (a ‘responsum’ first published in Venice in 1697). Avicenna (Ibn Sina) discussed melancholy in Part III of his treatise, dedicated to diseases of the brain.

  9. Pepys, Diary, VIII, 588, entry for 24 Dec. 1667 (Pepys felt some remorse – ‘God forgive me for it, it being in the chapel’ – but consoled himself that he had profaned a Catholic and not an Anglican service); ibid., VI, 132, 145, 310 (‘heavy petting’), 202 (the dexterous waterman's daughter); 162, 253, 294 (sex with his ‘Valentine’, whose first name he always omits, referring to her as ‘Bagwell's wife’); 189, 201 (his Valentine's daughter); and 191 (dream).

  10. Ibid., VI (1665), 240 (entry for 24 Sep. 1665) and 342 (verdict on the plague year).

  11. Haude, ‘Religion’, 545–6, quoting Maximilian's directive (Mandat) of 20 Sep. 1636; the pastor of Hersbruck near Nuremberg; and Pastor Davis Wagentrotz of Brandenburg. Asai quoted ch. 16 above. Other crises loosened sexual restraints. Boccaccio's Decameron, although fiction, suggests that plague in the fourteenth century had much the same effect on the libidos of Florentines; while at a German railway station during an air-raid in 1944 Louis-Ferdinand Céline observed that ‘Hunger and phosphorous make people rut and sperm and surrender without looking! … The whole waiting room and buffet exchanging lice, scabies, syphilis, and love!’ (Céline, Castle to castle, 184. My thanks to Mircea Platon and Leif Torkelsen for these Pepysian items.)

  12. Struve, ‘Dreaming’, 159–60, part of a study of Xue Cai (1598–1665, jinshi 1631), one of at least 160 prominent literati known to have entered a monastery. (A further 23 ‘entered the Dao’.) Peterson, Bitter Gourd, describes how another prominent intellectual, Fang Yizhi, became a monk in 1650, after the collapse of the Southern Ming cause, and remained devoutly in his convent until his death 21 years later.

  13. Fong, ‘Reclaiming subjectivity’, analyzes the copious autobiographical writings of Ye (b. 1589; jinshi 1625; retired 1630; d. 1648), and quotes Ye's Jiaxing rizhu (‘Daily records’) at p. 35. Brook, Praying for power, 114–16, notes that many Ming scholars used monasteries as ‘retreats’ where they prepared for their civil service exams or as public spaces for lectures and meetings – so they had already formed links with individual convents. At pp. 121–2 he notes that demoralized officials retired to monasteries in increasing numbers from the 1630s. The scale of monastic ‘conversions’ alarmed the Qing, who in 1653 tightened the rules on obtaining a licence to be a monk; but once the Ming cause foundered, this avenue of escape lost its appeal.

  14. Will, ‘Coming of age’, 33.

  15. Sieur Le Gendre [Robert Arnauld], La manière de cultiver les arbres fruitiers (1652). That same year Arnauld also published one of the most vicious Mazarinades: La vérité toute nue.

  16. Walton, The compleat angler (the first edition in 1653 took the form of a dialogue between two characters, but he expanded this to three in the 1655 and subsequent versions). On Eikon basilike, see chs 2 and 12 above, and 19 below.

  17. Van Beneden and de Poorter, Royalist refugees, shows how Newcastle and his wife, Margaret Cavendish, survived in exile at what is today the Rubenshuis in Antwerp. On Hobbes, see ch. 12 above; on Heberle, Schütz, Opitz and Kepler, see ch. 8 above. On the Masanielli and malvizzi, see ch. 14; on the Polish and Russian peasants, see ch. 6 above.

  18. Nicoară, Sentimentul de insecuritate, I, 189–92 (the ploy did not work: after his subjects overthrew him in 1653 he spent the rest of his life in a Turkish prison).

  19. ODNB, s.v. ‘Thomas Fairfax’; and Philip Major, ‘Jumping Josaphat’, Times Literary Supplement, 28 July 2006, p. 15. On other demoralized English victors (members of the Rump Parliament) see page 378 above.

  20. Di Cosmo, The diary, 46, 83, 87 (from 1682).

  21. Peters, Ein Söldnerleben, 42–3 (good living), 62 (‘mit Vermeldung, oh lutrian, begfutu, Madtza, Hundtzfudt, etc’), 226 (the ‘hübsches Mädelein’); Monro, Expedition, 218; Rushworth, Historical Collections, IV, part 1, 399; ODNB
s.v. Monro.

  22. Seaver, Wallington's world, 11; Pepys, Diary (see, for example, his annual entries on 26 March, the anniversary of a dangerous but successful operation to remove a kidney stone). On Newton, see Westfall, ‘Short-writing’, with the full text at http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/ALCH00069, accessed 12 Mar. 2012.

  23. Disney, Some remarkable passages, 143 (entry for 14 Dec. 1685), 137 (12 Oct. 1685) and 125, ‘Some few heads of advice’ for his wife to observe after his death. See others examples quoted in Von Greyerz, Versehungsglaube, ch. 3. In Scotland, Calvinists like Johnston of Wariston also used their diaries for ‘introspections’: see the chapter on Wariston in Stevenson, King or Covenant?

  24. Gallardo, Ensayo, II, cols 168–82, summarizes Caldera's Arancel politico. Defensa del honor y práctica se la vida de nuestro siglo (313 manuscript folios approved for publication but never printed); quotation from col. 174. Jover, 1635, 430–3, documents the rise of ‘catastrofismo’ in Spain.

  25. Sallmann, Naples et ses Saints, 345–6, calculated totals from the ‘Visitor's Book’ kept by the chapel that contained the bones of a local saint, Gaetano de Tiene; Guilielmo Gumppenberg, S.J., Atlas Marianus sive de imaginibus Deiparae per orbem christianum miraculosis, 2 vols (Ingolstadt, 1655), reprinted several times; expanded Latin and German editions in 1672.

  26. Brokaw, The ledgers, 3–4.

  27. Fong, ‘Reclaiming’, 28, quoting Yuan Huang Liming wen [Essay on determining fate] (1601), together with other ‘egodocuments’. Kenneth Pomeranz reminds me of the difference between the ‘introspections’ of Wallington and other Christians, who envisaged a single Judgement Day, whereas their Chinese contemporaries saw the deeds that would earn a reward or a punishment as a continuous scorecard.

  28. Courtwright, Forces of habit, 2, 59.

  29. Lockhart, Denmark, 55, quoting the earl of Leicester in 1632; Ladewig Petersen, ‘Conspicuous consumption’, 64–5, quoting the diary of Esge Brock. (The entry is reproduced in Parker, The Thirty Years War, plate 24).

  30. Pepys, Diary, X, 104–8 (‘Drink’), and 416–18 (‘Taverns’); Gallardo, Ensayo, II, col. 175. Clark, The English alehouse, 210–11, notes the impact of the black bottle on the consumption of beer.

  31. Thackston, Jahangirnama, 320, quoting Taleb Amuli, the emperor's Persian-born poet laureate.

  32. Ibid., 46 and 50; Balabanlilar, Imperial identity, 91.

  33. Rycaut, The present state, 114; Matthee, The pursuit of pleasure, 107, quoting Thomas Herbert; Babayan, Mystics, 444–5, quoting Jean Chardin and Rafael du Mans, and 446–7, on Qummi. Seventeenth-century Europeans also used opium, but primarily for medication: see Maehle, Drugs on trial, ch. 3.

  34. Pepys, Diary, I, 253, entry for 25 Sep. 1660; Massieu, Caffaeum (c. 1700). See also Thomas Fellon, SJ, Faba Arabica, vulgo caffetum, carmen (1696); and Pierre Petit, Thia Sinensis (1685), dedicated to a Jesuit. De Vries, The industrious revolution, 32–3 and 156–7, charts the slow spread of tea and coffee consumption.

  35. Haskell, Loyola's bees, 94, quoting Strozzi, De mentis potu, sive de cocolatis opificio libri tres (Naples, 1689). Haskell devotes most of ch. 2 of her fascinating book to Strozzi.

  36. Withington, ‘Intoxicants’, 631–8, discusses the anonymous pamphlet; Pepys, Diary, VI, 120 (7 June 1665), and VIII, 389–90 (18 Aug. 1667); Dikötter, ‘“Patient Zero”’, 7, quoting Yao Lü. Grehan, ‘Smoking’, 1,373, notes that ‘Middle Easterners still say today individuals “drink” their smoke.’

  37. All quotations from Brook, Vermeer's hat, ch. 5, ‘School for smoking’ (quotation from p. 143, with examples at pp. 143–6).

  38. Grehan, ‘Smoking’, 1,364–5 (quoting Katib Çelebi in 1653) and 1,355 (quoting ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi of Damascus in 1682). Ze'evi, An Ottoman century, 29, records widespread consumption of coffee, tobacco and hashish in seventeenth-century Jerusalem.

  39. Romaniello, ‘Through the filter of tobacco’. Mughal Emperor Jahangir banned smoking in 1617, but his son lifted the ban about a decade later. Shah Abbas of Iran took similar decisions at much the same time.

  40. Account of a meeting of the Zemskii Sobor in 1653 by Peter Loofeldt, a Swedish diplomat: quoted page 174 above. A generation later, by contrast, similar fears did help to prevent bloodshed in England in 1688: page 608 above.

  41. There was one exception. In 1689, after several decades of frontier warfare, China and Russia settled their differences by the treaty of Nerchinsk: the first of its kind in East Asia.

  42. Crucé, Nouveau Cynée, 13; Lind, Hæren, 193 and 426 note, Jørgen Rosenkrantz to his brother Otto, 1636 (citing Pindar, ‘Dulce bellum inexpertis’: ‘War is sweet to those who have never experienced it’).

  43. BL Addl. Ms 21,935/78v–79, 88–92 (Wallington); Anon., The victorious proceedings, 2; Parker, The manifold miseries, 1.

  44. Bennett, The Civil Wars, 95 and 133, quoting Samuel Woods and Rowland Watkins; Birch, The life, I, 55, letter to Lady Ranelagh, 30 Mar. 1646; Kuczynski, Geschichte, 117, quoting a family Bible from Swabia in 1647.

  45. One of these 1649 Humpen went on sale in 2012 for 40,000 euros. Full text reproduced at http://www.auctions-fischer.de/selling/highlights/glass-16th-19th-century.html?L=1&objekt=137&cHash=18f276ebbe, accessed 8 Feb. 2012. On Franck and other European military artists of the day, see the reproductions and discussions in van Maarseveen, Beelden, and Bussmann and Schilling, 1648, vol. II: Art and culture.

  46. Raynor, A social history of music, 115 and 203–4, quoting Burckhart Grossman and Heinrich Schütz.

  47. Schottelius, Neu erfundenes Freudens-Spiel genandt Friedens-Sieg (Wolfenbüttel, 1648): digitized version available at http://diglib.hab.de/wdb.php?distype=img&dir=drucke%2Flo6992. Image 36 is an engraving of the first performance, showing the august players and audience.

  48. Rabb, The struggle, 119, quoting Gerhardt; Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 2, lines 160–4, 335–40 (part of the Great Debate at Satan's court on whether or not another battle should ‘be hazarded for the recovery of heaven’). Rabb, The artist, 101–18, dates the ‘rise of a new, critical approach to war’ among Western artists to the 1630s. Burke, ‘The crisis’, 251–5, provides a useful list of mid-seventeenth-century paintings and writings condemning war and revolution.

  49. Grimmelshausen, Der abentheurliche Simplicissimus teutsch, first published 1668, soon reprinted, and the only German Baroque novel still widely read. The boy watches the sack of his family farm in Book I, ch. iv.

  50. Rabb, The struggle, 119, citing English and German texts in support; Brunt, Social conflicts, 152–4 (I thank Nathan Rosenstein for drawing this reference to my attention).

  51. Bod. Ms. Eng. Hist. c. 712 e.312 (The ‘Commonplace Book’ of Sir Roger Whitley for 1647–8), p. 47, ‘Innovations and novelties’; Hobbes quoted page 379 above. Skinner, ‘The ideological context’, notes how many other English writers made the same point at this time.

  52. AMAE (P) CPE 21/242–3v, Bishop Marca to Mazarin, Barcelona, 17 June 1644; Anon., Avertissements aux rois, 6. Also in 1644, in Beijing, Prince Dorgon proclaimed in June 1644 that the Mandate of Heaven had shifted to the Qing ‘because we now hold it’ (see ch. 18 above). In Japan, Suzuki Shōsan advanced much the same argument in his treatise Banmin Tokuyō (Right action for all) of 1652 (see ch. 16 above).

  53. Locke, Political essays, 7, from his ‘First tract on government’, written Sep.–Dec., 1660 but never published. On the Kongelov, see ch. 8 above.

  54. Crucé, Nouveau Cynée; Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis, libri tres (Paris, 1625); William Penn, An essay towards the present and future peace of Europe, by the establishment of an European Dyet, Parliament or Estates(London, 1693). Penn referred with approval to the ‘Grand Design’, proposed in the 1630s by Henry IV's former minister, the duke of Sully, for a European federation that would create a balance of power and thus promote peace. In 1671, in his Traité des moyens de conserver la paix avec les hommes, the French Jansenist Pierre Nicole argued that religious and moral restr
aint would reduce wars. Jacob, Peace projects, printed English versions of Grotius, Sully and Penn.

  55. Von Friedeberg, ‘The making’, 916, deposition before the Imperial Chamber Council in 1652; Zillhardt, Zeytregister, 267 (note the early use of the term ‘Thirty Years War’ to describe the recent conflict).

  56. Roberts, Sweden as a great power, 173–4, Gustav Bonde's Memorial to the Council of the Realm, 26 June 1661.

  57. Morrice, Entring book, IV, 335.

  58. Rohrschneider. Der gescheiterte Frieden, 81, ‘La experiencia ha mostrado quan poco de puede fiar de las palabras y fee pública de Franceses en los tratados’ (June 1643) and ‘L'expérience nous fait cognoistre que les Espagnolz ne gardent leur traités’ (Sep. 1643) – a stunning duplication of views, each composed in total secrecy.

  59. Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugensis, V, 52 (‘sola amicabilis compositio lites dirimat non attenta votorum pluralitate’); Heckel, ‘Itio in partes’, quoting a constitutional tract of 1722. On the tears, see Dickmann, Westfälische Frieden, 460.

  60. Tuck, Philosophy, 319, quoting Hobbes to the duke of Devonshire, July 1641; Locke, Political essays, 40–1, from his ‘First tract on government’, written Sep.–Dec. 1660. Sermons preached on the text ‘Curse ye Meroz’ (Judges 5: 23) are discussed in ch. 18 above.

  61. Butler, Hudibras, Part I, canto 1, 1–6 and 195–202; Pepys, Diary, III, 294 (26 Dec. 1662), and IV, 35 (6 Feb. 1663). Pepys first bought a copy in Dec. 1662, found it ‘silly’, and therefore sold it at a loss later that same day. Two months later he bought another copy to find out what he had missed (but was still underwhelmed). Other readers enjoyed Butler's satirical reuse of phrases associated with former Puritans like Pepys.

  62. Locke, A letter, 33; Schilling, ‘Confessional Europe’, 669; Benedict, ‘Religion and politics’, 133.