Crisis and catastrophe: The global crisis of the seventeenth century reconsidered

American Historical Review

Volumn 113, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 1053-1079

  Parker, Geoffrey ^a,b  

^a OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Mershon Center

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 54449091406     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.113.4.1053     Document Type: Review

References (177)

1. Other eras have seen a spate of state breakdowns around the world - such as the collapse of many Bronze Age civilizations between 1200 and 800 B.C.E. and the crisis of Late Antiquity between 200 and 600 A.D. - but these took place over centuries, not two decades. Something analogous may have occurred in the mid-fourteenth century, in the wake of the Black Death in Europe and the Near East and the Yuan-Ming transition in East Asia, but the cause remains ambiguous.
2. See the figures and graphs in James W. Tong, Disorder under Heaven: Collective Violence in the Ming Dynasty (Stanford, Calif., 1991), 47-49.
3. John B. Parsons, The Peasant Rebellions of the Late Ming Dynasty (Tucson, Ariz., 1970), provides scatter diagrams of peasant rebellions year by year from 1628 to 1642, with two "cumulative maps" at 86-87.
4. Figures from Herbert P. Bix, Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590-1884 (New Haven, Conn., 1986), xxii.
5. On Shimabara, see Matthew E. Keith, "The Logistics of Power: Tokugawa Response to the Shimabara Rebellion and Power Projection in Seventeenth-Century Japan" (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 2006).
6. Totals from Peter Bierbrauer, "Bäuerliche Revolten im Alten Reich: Ein Forschungsbericht," in Peter Blickle et al., eds., Aufruhr und Empörung? Studien zum bäuerlichen Widerstand im Alten Reich (Munich, 1980), 66-67;
7. and John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006), 69-70.
8. Jack S. Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495-1975 (Lexington, Ky., 1983), 139-141;
9. Peter Brecke, "Violent Conflicts 1400 A.D. to the Present in Different Regions of the World" (paper prepared for the 1999 Meeting of the Peace Science Society International Conference, Ann Arbor, Mich.).
10. Qing shilu [Veritable Records of the Ming] 8 (Beijing, 1985), chap. 86, 149, edict of the Yongzheng emperor, November 2, 1729 (translated by Ying Bao).
11. Geoff Mortimer, Eye-witness Accounts of the Thirty Years War (London, 2002), 77-78,
12. quoting Lang; P. Antony and H. Christmann, eds., Johann Valentin Andreä: Ein schwäbisher Pfarrer im dreissigjährigen Krieg (Hildesheim, 1970), 128, quoting Andreä.
13. Jean Jacquart, "La Fronde des Princes dans la région parisienne et ses consequences matérielles," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 7 (1960): 257-290, at 279,
14. quoting André d'Ormesson; Lettres de la reverende mère Marie Angélique Arnauld, abbesse et réformatrice de Port-Royal, 2 vols. (Utrecht, 1742), 2: 432-433, to the queen of Poland, January 28, 1654.
15. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civill, ed. Richard Tuck (1651; repr., Cambridge, 1996), 89;
16. Hubert Carrier, Le labyrinthe de l'Etat: Essai sur le débat politique en France au temps de la Fronde (1648-1653) (Paris, 2004), 150, Renaud de Sévigné to Christine de France, July 19, 1652;
17. Lettres de la reverende mère Marie Angélique Arnauld, 2: 177, 182-183, to the queen of Poland, September 6 and 20, 1652.
18. Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1728), 2: 276, reporting the pessimistic comments made to her by Gaston, her father, at Easter 1655.
19. Since seventeenth-century Germany consisted of some 1,000 political units, all aggregations of data are approximate. See the mass of local statistics gathered by Günther Franz, Der dreissigjährige Krieg und das deutsche Volk, 4th ed. (Stuttgart, 1978).
20. John C. Theibault, "The Demography of the Thirty Years War Revisited: Günther Franz and His Critics," German History 15 (1997): 1-21, questions the value of any book written by a prominent (and unrepentant) Nazi such as Franz, but on p. 4 endorses his overall estimate.
21. Jacquart, "La Fronde," 283;
22. Pierre Goubert, "The French Peasantry of the Seventeenth Century: A Regional Example," in Trevor S. Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe, 1560-1660 (London, 1965), 141-165, at 162-163.
23. Ping-ti Ho, Studies in the Population History of China, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 102. Note, however, that Ho's 1602 figure of 1,161 million mou, at 0.1647 acres per mou, is 191.3 million acres, and not 176 million acres as he states.
24. Ted A. Telford, "Fertility and Population Growth in the Lineages of Tongcheng County, 1520-1661," in Stevan Harrell, ed., Chinese Historical Microdemography (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 48-93, at 70-73;
25. Hilary Beatty, Land and Lineage in China: A Study of T'ung-ch'eng County, Anhwei, in the Ming and Ch'ing Dynasties (Cambridge, 1979), 47, 133;
26. Jonathan D. Spence, The Death of Woman Wang: Rural Life in China in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1978), 4-9, 42 (quoting from the 1673 Dancheng County Gazetteer);
27. Frederic C. Wakeman, The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (Berkeley, Calif., 1985), 1109 n. 77.
28. Xue Yong, "Agrarian Urbanization: Social and Economic Changes in Late Imperial Jiangnan" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2006), 239-240;
29. and Derek Keene, "Growth, Modernization and Control: The Transformation of London's Landscape, c. 1500-c. 1760," in Peter Clark and Raymond Gillespie, eds., Two Capitals: London and Dublin, 1500-1840 (Oxford, 2001), 20-21.
30. Alvaro Semedo, S. J., Historica relatione del gran regno della Cina (Rome, 1653), 6-7, 13. Semedo arrived in southern China in 1613 and remained there, with some breaks, until 1637; he wrote his account almost immediately afterward (even though it remained unpublished for many years). He thus described the situation in Jiangnan on the eve of the Qing conquest.
31. Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, vol. 1: The Settlements (New Haven, Conn., 1934), 612-613, quoting Gorges (in 1611), the Virginia Company (in 1624), and many others;
32. Nicholas Canny, The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 20,
33. quoting Thomas Bowdler's "Common Place Book" for 1635-1636.
34. James Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae, 3 vols. (London, 1650), 3: 1-3, to Lord Dorset, January 20, 1646. This date is impossible, because Howell mentioned the "tumults" in Moscow and Istanbul in summer 1648.
35. In his pamphlet A Winter Dreame (London, 1649), 8, Howell used the same conceit: "it seems God Almighty has a quarrel of late years with all earthly potentates, for in so short a time there never happened such strange shocks and revolutions," and named the downfall of Ottoman, Ming, Muscovite, and European rulers. Presumably Howell wrote to Lord Dorset at much the same time, and so "these twelve years" began in 1637 with the Scottish Revolution.
36. Charles H. Firth and Robert S. Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660, 2 vols. (London, 1911), 1: 26-27,
37. "Order for Stage-Plays to Cease" (September 2, 1642, OS). For similar reasons, Parliament also banned public sports and many other "spectacles of pleasure." The Stuart monarchy, like Russia and much of Protestant Europe, used the Julian calendar ("Old Style," or OS), so that all dates fell ten days earlier than in Catholic Europe, which used the Gregorian calendar ("New Style," or NS): thus September 2 in Britain and Sweden was September 12 in Spain and France. All dates in this article given according to the Julian calendar are marked "OS"; all others follow the Gregorian calendar.
38. Sir James Balfour, The Historical Works of Sir James Balfour of Denmylne and Kinnaird, ed. James Haig, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1825), 3: 409 (prices), 436-437 (witches);
39. Christina J. Larner, Christopher H. Lee, and Hamish V. McLachlan, A Source Book of Scottish Witchcraft (Glasgow, 1977), sub annis 1649-1650;
40. and Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (London, 1981), 61, 74-75.
41. For the connection drawn by contemporaries in other areas between witchcraft and misfortunes, see Wolfgang Behringer, "Climatic Change and Witch-Hunting: The Impact of the Little Ice Age on Mentalities," Climatic Change 43 (1999): 335-351.
42. Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid [hereafter BNM], Ms. 2371/634, Prognosticon (an anonymous broadsheet of 1640).
43. Mendo Pacheco de Britto, Discurso em os dous phaenominos aereos do anno de 1618 (Lisbon, 1619), fols. A11-11v.
44. Tabitta van Nouhuys, The Age of Two-Faced Janus: The Comets of 1577 and 1618 and the Decline of the Aristotelian World View in the Netherlands (Leiden, 1998), 487-555, surveys the "significance" attached to the comet of 1618 in ten books and pamphlets published in the Low Countries.
45. On the fears occasioned by the 1618 comet in China and its neighbors, see Wakeman, The Great Enterprise, 57;
46. Gertraude Roth, "The Manchu-Chinese Relationship, 1618-1636," in Jonathan D. Spence and Jack E. Wills, eds., From Ming to Ch'ing: Conquest, Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century China (New Haven, Conn., 1979), 7-8 ;
47. and Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), 163-167.
48. For India, see Shireen Moosvi, "Science and Superstition under Akbar and Jahangir: The Observation of Astronomical Phenomena," in Irfan Habib, ed., Akbar and His India (Delhi, 1997), 115.
49. The Moderate Intelligencer [London], no. 202 (January 25-February 1, 1649).
50. Naturally such untenable beliefs persisted even longer in Massachusetts. A brilliant comet in 1683 prompted Increase Mather, preacher at the North Church in Boston and president of Harvard College, to write a comprehensive treatise that noted that the Thirty Years' War and the depopulation of the natives of New England had followed the comet of 1618, while the plague and fire that devastated London had followed that of 1664. He warned his readers that it was only because "we that live in America know but little of the great motions of Europe, much less in Africa and Asia, until a long time afterwards" that news of yet more catastrophes caused by comets had not reached Harvard: Mather, Kometographia; or, A Discourse concerning Comets, wherein the Nature of Blazing Stars is Enquired into, with an Historical Account of all Comets which have Appeared since the Beginning of the World (Boston, 1683), 118, 124, 107.
51. Xie Zhaozhe, Wu za zu (1608),
52. quoted in Mark Elvin, "The Man Who Saw Dragons: Science and Styles of Thinking in Xie Zhaozhe's Fivefold Miscellany," Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 25-26 (1993-1994): 34.
53. Boris F. Porshnev, "Les Rapports politiques de l'Europe occidentale et de l'Europe orientale à l'époque de la Guerre de Trente Ans," in Rapports du XIe Congrès des sciences historiques, 4 vols. (Stockholm, 1960), 4: 158, quoting Salvius.
54. A few years later, the influential history of Majolino Bisaccione, Historia delle guerre civili di questi ultimi tempi, cioê di Inghilterra, Catalogna, Portogallo, Palermo, Napoli, Fermo, Moldavia, Polonia, Svizzera, Francia, Turco, 4th ed., "ricorretta et in molte parti accresciuta" (Venice, 1655), 510, argued that only "the influence of the stars" could explain the apparently universal "wrath among the people against governments."
55. Landgrave Hermann IV of Hesse, Historia meteorologica, das ist, vier und zwantzig jährige eigentliche und trewfleissige Observation und tägliche Verzeichnüss des Gewitters, erstlich demonstriret wird, ob und wie des tägliche Gewitter mit dem Gestirn uberein troffen, und warumb solches Geschehen sey oder nicht? (Kassel, 1651).
56. Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Ciuill and Morall, of Francis Lo: Verulam (London, 1625), 79-80.
57. Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Madrid [hereafter AMAE], Ms. 42/7, Chumacero to Philip IV, February 6, 1647;
58. Charles Larquié, "Popular Uprisings in Mid-Seventeenth Century Spain," Renaissance and Medieval Studies 26 (1982): 90-107.
59. Francisco Morales Padrón, ed., Memorias de Sevilla (1600-78) (Córdoba, 1981), 123-124.
60. The graph of tithe yields for the archdiocese of Seville in Gonzalo Anes Álvarez, Las crisis agrarias en la España moderna, 2nd ed. (Madrid, 1974), graph 9, shows a dramatic fall in 1647.
61. AMAE, Ms. 42/15-16v, Chumacero to Philip IV, October 22, 1647.
62. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire humaine et comparée du climat, I: Canicules et glaciers (XIIIe-XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 2004), 462-463, quoting a letter from Mme. de Sévigné to her daughter, July 24, 1675 (a year noted by climatologists as one of the coldest on record);
63. Evliyā Çelebi, Seyahatname [Book of Travels], 15 vols. (Istanbul, 1969-1971), 10: 508 (reference and translation kindly provided by Jane Hathaway).
64. Robert B. Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (Cambridge, 1998), 195, quoting the Da Qing sheng zu (Kangxi) shi lu for 1717. Ironically, at the precise moment when the emperor reached this conclusion, the climate began to warm again.
65. François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations, 2 vols. (1756; repr., 2 vols., Paris, 1963), 2: 794 (see further examples at 2: 756-757).
66. Ibid., 2: 806: "le climat, le gouvernement, et la religion."
67. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000, rev. ed. (New York, 1988; orig. French ed. 1967), 293, 289, 5. With remarkable prescience, on p. 303 the author foresaw that computers would transform the historical study of climate.
68. Peter Burke, "Some Seventeenth-Century Anatomists of Revolution," Storia della storiografia 22 (1992): 23-35;
69. Aidan Clarke, "The 1641 Depositions," in Peter Fox, ed., Treasures of the Library, Trinity College Dublin (Dublin, 1986), 111-122;
70. Lynn A. Struve, The Ming-Qing Conflict, 1619-1683: A Historiography and Source Guide (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1998), 7-9, 33-34 (citing the histories of Ji Liuqi).
71. See the detailed discussion of these categories in Raymond S. Bradley, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, 2nd ed. (San Diego, Calif., 1999), 441-470;
72. Christian Pfister, Rudolf Brázdil, and Mariano Barriendos, "Reconstructing Past Climate and Natural Disasters in Europe Using Documentary Evidence," Pages News 10, no. 3 (2002): 6-8;
73. Christian Pfister, "Weeping in the Snow: The Second Period of Little Ice Age-Type Impacts, 1570-1630," in Wolfgang Behringer, Hartman Lehmann, and Christian Pfister, eds., Kulturelle Konsequenzer der "Kleinen Eiszeit" (Göttingen, 2005), 31-86;
74. and Rudolf Brázdil, Christian Pfister, Heinz Wanner, Hans Von Storch, and Jürg Luterbacher, "Historical Climatology in Europe - the State of the Art," Climatic Change 70 (2005): 363-430.
75. Jürg Luterbacher, Daniel Dietrich, Elena Xoplaki, Martin Grosjean, and Heinz Wanner, "European Seasonal and Annual Temperature Variability, Trends, and Extremes since 1500," Science 303, no. 5663 (March 5, 2004): 1499-1503.
76. The study of floods provides another excellent example of how historians of climate now combine surviving human and natural archives: see Historical Hydrology, special issue, Hydrological Sciences Journal 51, no. 5 (2006), edited by Rudolf Brázdil. Several of the fourteen papers present data concerning early modern Europe.
77. Christian Pfister, Rudolf Brázdil, and Rüdiger Glaser, eds., Climatic Variability in Sixteenth-Century Europe and Its Social Dimension (Dordrecht, 1999).
78. Jürg Luterbacher et al., "Monthly Mean Pressure Reconstruction for the Late Maunder Minimum Period (AD 1675-1715)," International Journal of Climatology 20 (2000): 1049-1066;
79. and Keith R. Briffa and Timothy J. Osborn, "Blowing Hot and Cold," Science 295, no. 5563 (March 22, 2002): 2227-2228. Briffa and Osborn reconstructed "annual mean temperatures from all land regions north of 20N," and although the 1640s do not stand out in the "50 year smoothed filter" diagram shown in the article, they feature prominently in the "unsmoothed time series" provided in the attached data file. The National Center of Competence in Research on Climate (NCCR) at the University of Bern, Switzerland, is assembling a database of serial records;
80. see EuroClimHist: A Data-Base on Past Weather and Climate in Europe and Its Human Dimension, created by Christian Pfister and Urs Dietrich-Felber, http://www.euroclimhist.com (accessed July 9, 2008),
81. and Urs Dietrich-Felber, "Using Java and XML in Interdisciplinary Research: A New Data-Gathering Tool for Historians Working with EuroClimHist," Historical Methods 37, no. 4 (2004): 174-185. As ECH's projects reach completion, they become available on the website of the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Paleoclimatology Project.
82. John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 368, 384, 387;
83. Karen O. Kupperman, "The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period," American Historical Review 87, no. 5 (December 1982): 1262-1289, at 1274, quoting Thomas Gorges, the nephew of Sir Ferdinando Gorges.
84. The intensity of the "intolerable piercing winter" of 1641-1642 appears in Harold C. Fritts, Reconstructing Large-Scale Climatic Patterns by Tree-Ring Data (Tucson, Ariz., 1991), 125-126, 139-149,
85. and the "natural archive" data published in Raymond S. Bradley and Philip D. Jones, eds., Climate since A. D. 1500 (London, 1992), 83 and Fig. 14.4.
86. Enomoto Yazaemon, Enomoto Yazaemon Oboegaki [Memoranda Written by Enomoto Yazaemon], ed. Ono Mizuo (Tokyo, 2001), 35;
87. H. Arakawa, "Dates of the First or Earliest Snow Covering for Tokyo since 1632," Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 82 (1956): 222-226 (a snow covering in November occurred only in 1641, 1699, and 1802).
88. Ye Shaoyuan's memoir quoted in William S. Atwell, "Volcanism and Short-Term Climatic Change in East Asian and World History, c. 1200-1699," Journal of World History 12 (2001): 29-98, at 67-68.
89. Takehiko Mikami, ed., Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Little Ice Age Climate (Tokyo, 1992), 6-9;
90. Paolo Oderico, ed., Conseils et mémoires de Synadinos, prêtre de Serrès en Macédoine (XVIIe siècle) (Paris, 1996), 163, 169.
91. Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire humaine, I, 298-303 (Alpine glaciers), 356-366 (the adverse French climate between 1640 and 1643).
92. Lájos Rácz, "Variations of Climate in Hungary (1540-1779)," in Burkhart Frenzel, ed., European Climate Reconstructed from Documentary Data: Methods and Results (Stuttgart, 1992), 125-135;
93. Rudolf Brázdil, Hubert Valášek, and Oldřich Kotyza, "Meteorological Records of Michel Stüeler of Krupka and Their Contribution to the Knowledge of the Climate of the Czech Lands in 1629-1649," in Dušan Drbohlav, Jan Kalvoda, and Vít Voženílek, eds., Czech Geography at the Dawn of the Millennium (Olomouc, 2004), 95-112.
94. Jan Peters, ed., Ein Söldnerleben im Dreissigjährigen Krieg: Eine Quelle zur Sozialgeschichte (Berlin, 1993), 166. (The diarist Peter Hagendorf made this entry in Neustadt-an-der-Saale on August 7, 1640. I thank David Parrott for this reference.)
95. Data concerning the extreme weather of 1640-1641 abound in Christian Pfister, Klimageschichte der Schweiz 1525-1860 und seiner Bedeutung in der Geschichte von Bevolkung und Landwirtschaft, 2 vols. (Bern, 1988), 1: 70-71;
96. Walter Lenke, Klimadaten von 1621-1650 nach Beobachtungen des Landgrafen Herman IV. von Hessen (Offenbach, 1960), 37-38 (annual tables for frost/snow 1640-1641);
97. Rüdiger Glaser, Klimarekonstruktion für Mainfranken, Bauland und Odenwald (Stuttgart, 1991), 111-112;
98. and Glaser, Klimageschichte Mitteleuropas: 1000 Jahre Wetter, Klima, Katastrophen (Darmstadt, 2001), 147-148.
99. Atwell, "Volcanism," 63.
100. For estimated temperatures, see Anders Moberg et al., "Highly Variable Northern Hemisphere Temperature Reconstructed from Low- and High-Resolution Proxy Data," Nature 333, no. 7026 (2005): 613-617, and the accompanying database.
101. For a recent discussion, see Brázdil et al., "Historical Climatology in Europe,"
102. and John A. Matthews and Keith R. Briffa, "The 'Little Ice Age': Re-evaluation of an Evolving Concept," Geografiska Annaler 87 A (2005): 17-36. Although the mid-seventeenth century experienced several notable climatic anomalies - 1619-1620, 1627, 1630-1631, 1640-1642, 1647-1649, 1657-1658, 1660-1661, 1664-1665, and 1675, many of them coinciding with episodes of major political upheaval - for reasons of space this article concentrates on just 1640-1642.
103. Southern and Midwestern USA Climate Reconstructions, dataset created by D. W. Stahle and M. K. Cleaveland, http://gcmd.nasa.gov/records/ GCMD_NOAA_NCDC_PALEO_94-024.html (accessed July 9, 2008);
104. International Tree-Ring Data Bank, maintained by the NOAA Paleoclimatology Program and World Data Center for Paleoclimatology, http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/treering.html (accessed July 9, 2008);
105. Enrique Florescano, Analisis histórico de las sequías en México (Mexico, 1972), 23;
106. Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule (Stanford, Calif., 1964), 313-315.
107. Emma H. Blair and James A. Robertson, eds., The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, 55 vols. (Cleveland, 1905-1910), 35: 123, from reports on events in 1640-1642 compiled by Franciscan friars;
108. Anthony R. Reid, "The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century in Southeast Asia," in Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith, eds., The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (London, 1997), 211-217.
109. Wang Shaowu, "Climate of the Little Ice Age in China," in Mikami, Proceedings, 120;
110. Sato Taketoshi, Chukogu saigaishi nenpyo [Chronology of Natural Disasters in China] (Tokyo, 1993), 243-244 (listing natural disasters recorded in the Mingshi, compiled from gazetteers, one of which recorded the drying up of the Grand Canal in Shandong in 1641);
111. and Song Zhenghai, Zhongguo gudai zhong da ziran zaihai he yichang nianbiao [A Comprehensive Chronology of Significant Natural Disasters and Unusual Occurrences in Ancient China] (Guangzhou, 1992), data for 1641 in categories 4-7/9.
112. Nasir Ahmad Ibrahim, Al-Azmat al-ijtima 'iyya fi misr fi al-qarn al-sabi' 'ashar [Social Crises in Egypt in the Seventeenth Century] (Cairo, 1998), 1 (drought), Appendixes 11 and 12 (the Nile reached only fifteen cubits in 1641, the lowest recorded);
113. Sharon E. Nicholson, "Saharan Climates in Historic Times," in Martin A. J. Williams and Hugues Faure, eds., The Sahara and the Nile: Quaternary Environments and Prehistoric Occupation in Northern Africa (Rotterdam, 1980), 177, 180 (graph);
114. Roderick J. McIntosh et al., eds., The Way the Wind Blows: Climate, History, and Human Action (New York, 2000), 131, 156;
115. and Joseph C. Miller, "The Significance of Drought, Disease and Famine in the Agriculturally Marginal Zones of West-Central Africa," Journal of African History 23 (1982): 17-61, especially the tabulated data at 43-46.
116. On Lake Chad, see Sharon E. Nicholson, "The Methodology of Historical Climate Reconstruction and Its Application to Africa," Journal of African History 20 (1979): 31-49;
117. and Climate Research Committee, National Research Council, Natural Climate Variability on Decade-to-Century Time Scales (Washington, D.C., 1995), 32-35.
118. Javier Martín-Vide and Mariano Barriendos Vallvé, "The Use of Rogation Ceremony Records in Climatic Reconstruction: A Case Study from Catalonia (Spain)," Climatic Change 30 (1995): 201-221, at 212 (the other years were 1529, 1566, and 1628);
119. BNM, Ms. 8177/141-145, "Relación" of May 16, 1641.
120. F. W. G. Spörer, "Über die Periodicität der Sonnenflecken seit dem Jahre 1618," Vierteljahrschrift der astronomischen Gesellschaft 22, pt. 4 (1887): 323-329;
121. E. W. Maunder, "The Prolonged Sunspot Minimum, 1645-1715," Journal of the British Astronomical Association 32 (1922): 140-145. The reconstructions of Luterbacher, "Monthly Mean Pressure Reconstruction, " 1050, show an exceptional decrease in solar activity in the second half of the seventeenth century.
122. John A. Eddy, "The 'Maunder Minimum': Sunspots and Climate in the Reign of Louis XIV," in Parker and Smith, The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 268.
123. R. K. Mukerjee, "Agricultural Cycles and Sunspots," Indian Journal of Sunspots 10, no. 2 (1939): 259-299, demonstrated that "when the relative sunspot numbers were below 15, a drought period occur[red]" in central India because the monsoon weakened by between 25 and 40 percent.
124. Miquel Parets, A Journal of the Plague Year: The Diary of the Barcelona Tanner Miquel Parets, 1651, trans. and ed. James S. Amelang (Oxford, 1991), 100, from the chronicle of Andrés de la Vega.
125. Atwell, "Volcanism," 41;
126. Yi Tae-Jin, "Meteor Fallings and Other Natural Phenomena between 1500-1750, as Recorded in the Annals of the Choson Dynasty (Korea)," Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy 69 (1998): 205-206, 217.
127. Recent analysis has demonstrated that at least three of the 1640-1641 eruptions were rich in sulfur. See the data and discussion in Atwell, "Volcanism," 32-36, 63-65.
128. The "global footprint" is admirably discussed in Richard H. Grove and John Chappell, eds., El Niño: History and Crisis (London, 2000), chap. 1,
129. and César Caviedes, El Niño in History: Storming across the Centuries (Gainesville, Fla., 2001), 198.
130. Two popular works by Brian Fagan - Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations (New York, 1999)
131. and The Little Ice Age (New York, 2001) - attempt to relate the rise and fall of states to climatic conditions but largely ignore the mid-seventeenth-century crisis.
132. Henry F. Diaz and Vera Markgraf, eds., El Niño: Historical and Paleoclimatic Aspects of the Southern Oscillation (Cambridge, 1993), 122-123, gives William H. Quinn's chronology of mid-seventeenth-century ENSO events (including 1618, 1619, 1621, 1624, 1630, 1635, 1640, 1641, 1647, 1650, 1652, 1655, 1661, 1671, and 1681).
133. McIntosh, The Way the Wind Blows, 58 table (c), displays proxy data for Pacific Ocean temperatures around the Galápagos Islands that show the 1640s as the greatest anomaly in the entire series 1600-2000.
134. Philip D. Jones, Raymond S. Bradley, and Jean Jouzel, eds., Climatic Variations and Forcing Mechanisms of the Last 2000 Years (Berlin, 1996), 388-389, shows a spectacular absence of coral formation in 1641 at Urvina Bay, in the Galápagos, which correlates with the unique double El Niño.
135. D. T. Shindell et al., "Solar Forcing of Regional Climate Change during the Maunder Minimum," Science 294 (December 7, 2001): 2149-2152, argue that solar cooling reduces temperatures at northerly latitudes by five to ten times more than at the equator. (I thank Martha Peach for bringing this reference to my attention.)
136. William F. Ruddiman, "The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago," Climatic Change 61 (2003): 261-293, argues that snow cover and sea ice "amplify global mean temperature changes by a factor of two to three" (285).
137. On the frozen Bosporus, see B. S. Baykal, ed., Peçevi Tarihi, 2 vols. (Ankara, 1982), 1: 385;
138. and Z. Yilmazer, ed., Topçular Kâtibi 'Abdülkādir (Kadrî) Efendi Tarihi (Ankara, 2003), 944-946, 985.
139. (I thank Günhan Börekçi for locating and translating these references.) Jane Hathaway drew my attention to the floods that partially destroyed the Kaaba in 1630 (a year in which Italy, India, Britain, and Spain also experienced a climatic catastrophe; see Parker, The Global Crisis, pt. 2, for details).
140. On the frozen Baltic, see Philip Meadows (an eyewitness), A Narrative of the Principal Actions Occurring in the Wars betwixt Sueden and Denmark Before and After the Roschild Treaty (London, 1677), 33-35;
141. and Arne Stade, Carl X Gustaf och Danmark (Stockholm, 1965).
142. On the two Iberian revolts, see the striking maps in (respectively) Jean-Frédéric Schaub, Le Portugal au temps du comte-duc d'Olivares (1621-1640): Le conflit de juridictions comme exercice de la politique (Madrid, 2002), 491,
143. and Antonio Simón i Tarrés, "Catalunya en el siglo XVII: La revuelta campesina y popular de 1640," Estudi general / Col·legi Universitari de Girona 1, no. 1 (1981): 145 and the source at 146 n. 87.
144. On the Osaka riots, see Dagregisters gehouden bij de Opperhoofden van het Nederlandsche Factorij in Japan, 9 vols. (Tokyo, 1974-1999), 6: 87, entry for July 15, 1642, reporting information received from the Japanese translators ("door de tolcken") attached to the Dutch factory at Nagasaki.
145. See details on all these examples in Parker, The Global Crisis, pt. 2.
146. Clarence S. Brigham, ed., British Royal Proclamations Relating to America, 1603-1783 (1911; repr., New York, 1964), 53, "A proclamation for settling the plantation of Virginia," May 13, 1625, OS;
147. "Charles R" [King Charles I], A Large Declaration Concerning the Late Tumults in Scotland (London, 1639), 16.
148. Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, 2nd ser., ed. David Masson and P. Hume Brown, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1899-1908), 6: 431-432, 438-439, 442-445, 454-456 (plague and scarcity of food) and 465 (coinage), acts dated June 3, 10, 8, 17, and 26, 1637. Ibid., 6: 448, act of June 13, 1637, which placed those who refused to use the new Prayer Book "under pain of rebellion."
149. On the tortuous negotiations over The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Parts of Divine Service for the Use of the Church of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1637),
150. see Gordon Donaldson, The Making of the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637 (Edinburgh, 1954).
151. Correspondence of Sir Robert Kerr, First Earl of Ancram, and His Son William, Third Earl of Lothian, ed. David Laing, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1875), 1: 93-98, Lothian to Ancram, October 19, 1637, OS, a letter full of complaints about the economic disasters caused by bad weather that summer.
152. Balfour, The Historical Works of Sir James Balfour, 3: 432-433;
153. NOAA Paleoclimatology Program and World Data Center for Paleoclimatology, Northwest Scotland Stalagmite and Climate Reconstruction Data, contributors: Andy Baker, Chris Proctor, and Bill Barnes, ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ paleo/speleothem/scotland/scotland_data.txt (accessed July 9, 2008) (calculations from the width of the annual luminescent band formed by precipitation each year on stalagmites in northwest Scotland, normally the wettest part of the country).
154. Parker, The Global Crisis, provides more details on these events and makes a similar argument for the Qing at the same time: global cooling and drought-reduced crop yields in their homeland convinced the Manchu leaders that unless they invaded China and exploited its superior resources, they would starve.
155. Charles I, A Large Declaration, 23.
156. John Leslie, Earl of Rothes, A Relation of Proceedings concerning the Affairs of the Kirk of Scotland, ed. J. Nairne (Edinburgh, 1830), 197, reported the careless use of proofs as wrapping paper.
157. See the perceptive reconstructions of these events in Walter Makey, The Church of the Covenant, 1637-1651 (Edinburgh, 1979), 18-19.
158. Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland of the Reign of Charles I, ed. R. P. Mahaffy, 4 vols. (London: H.M.S.O., 1900-1904), 3: 182,
159. Bishop Bramhall of Derry to Laud, February 23, 1638; David R. Como, "Secret Printing, the Crisis of 1640, and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism," Past & Present 196 (2007): 37-82, quotation at 57. Como also presented evidence of spirited anti-government pamphlets written and printed in England.
160. [James Howell,] A Discourse Discovering Some Mysteries of Our New State . . . Shewing the Rise and Progresse of England's Unhappinesse, ab anno illo infortunato 1641 (Oxford, 1645), 15.
161. James Tuchet, Earl of Castlehaven, Memoirs of the Irish Wars (London, 1684), 13 (with corroborating statements on 14-16);
162. John T. Gilbert, ed., A Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland from 1641 to 1652, 6 vols. (Dublin, 1879-1880), 1: 353, examination of Owen Connolly, October 22, 1641, OS.
163. Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580-1650 (Oxford, 2001), 536 (with more contemporary Scottish parallels quoted at 471, 489, 526, and 529);
164. Mary Hickson, Ireland in the Seventeenth Century; or, The Irish Massacres of 1641-2, Their Causes and Results, 2 vols. (London, 1884), 1: 329, deposition of Dr. Robert Maxwell, August 22, 1642, OS;
165. Gilbert, A Contemporary History, 1: 527, Richard Plunkett's claim according to Rev. George Creighton's Deposition, April 15, 1643, OS. Even some Protestants agreed: Sir James Turner observed the irony of sending an army of Scottish Covenanters led by the Earl of Leven "against the rebells in Ireland who (had they not shed so much blood) did no more against His Majestie than Leven himselfe had done"; ibid., 1: 573.
166. Gilbert Burnet, The Memoires of the Lives and Actions of James and William, Dukes of Hamilton (1677; repr., Oxford, 1852), 70-71, Charles to Hamilton, June 11, 1638, OS.
167. Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637-1642 (Oxford, 1991), 56, Charles to Hamilton, June 25, 1638.
168. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London, 2007), 194, observed that "Venice figures recurrently in Charles's thoughts" at this time.
169. Burnet, Memoires, 203, Charles to Hamilton, December 1642;
170. James O. Halliwell, Letters of the Kings of England, 2 vols. (London, 1846), 2: 383-384, Charles to Prince Rupert, July 31, 1645, OS.
171. Steve Hindle, "Dearth and the English Revolution: The Harvest Crisis of 1647-1650," Economic History Review, Special Issue, 61 (2008): 64-98, underlines the link between climate and catastrophe during these traumatic years that saw the trial and execution of Charles I.
172. Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire humaine, I, 7-8.
173. Volume 1, Canicules et glaciers (XIIIe-XVIIIe siècle), appeared in 2004 (740 pages);
174. volume 2, Disettes et révolutions (1740-1860), appeared in 2006 (611 pages). Histoire humaine seldom strays beyond France and its neighbors, however: despite the copious evidence available, its author seldom refers to southern Europe and largely omits Asia, America, and Africa.
175. See the elegant arguments of Richard A. Fortey, Earth: An Intimate History (New York, 2004).
176. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York, 2005), 434-436, stresses the role of "denial" in several past environmental catastrophes that have wiped out individual human communities, but he does not examine its role in a single catastrophe (such as the Little Ice Age) that affected the entire world.
177. Ragnhild Nordås and Nils Petter Gleditsch, "Climate Change and Conflict," Political Geography 26 (2007): 627-638, criticize the failure of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to undertake systematic analysis of historical evidence to show how climate change acts as a "threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world" (628, quoting National Security and the Threat of Climate Change: Report from a Panel of Retired Senior US Military Officers, published in 2007). Their article introduces a special issue of the journal that contains five articles on the subject. I thank Andreas Daum and Sharmistha Bachi-Sen of the University of Buffalo for this reference.