HOW HAPPY THEY ALL SEEM—moving across the ice with the greatest of ease. They are either gliding on skates or luxuriously ensconced in horse-drawn sleighs sailing across the river’s polished parquet. Some huddle together in groups, talking among themselves; others are playing games. Wealthy gentlemen have their coats slung elegantly across their shoulders, and the ladies are wearing lace caps or wigs, or both. The simple folk are moving about in short jackets. There is no fire to warm their freezing limbs, but on this perfect winter day, no one appears to feel the cold.
The swarming, antlike image of life amid the frost seduces the eye; the landscape dissolves into a panorama of individual scenes. The villagers appear in all kinds of situations—from the two lovers in the haystack (are they both men?) to the naked behind poking out of a broken boat and a second bottom whose owner is half hidden by a willow tree; from the mother with her child in the foreground to the men playing golf, the reed cutter with his enormous load, and the young couple gliding hand in hand across the hard surface. A woman drinking from a beaker is one of the few figures whose face is revealed. Most of the villagers are moving away on their wooden skates with thin steel blades—toward the horizon, into a future that is little more than a sketch.
Slightly to the right of center stands an important-looking group in elegant, gold-embroidered garb—ladies with hoop skirts and tall wigs, gentlemen with precious ostrich feathers adorning their hats. A gray beggar attempts to stir their pity, but they show no interest. What are they doing on the ice in some godforsaken village—without a coach, without servants? How did they get here? And what exactly are all these people doing? They are not celebrating any special event or feast day, not Christmas and not Carnival. It is not even Sunday—the church looming in the background is eerily dark.
The longer one examines this panorama, the less plausible it becomes. The initial impression of realism grows into an understanding of allegory. A whole society is on the same ice here—rich and poor, men and women, children and the elderly, masters and servants—all equalized by frost and cold but seemingly untouched by it. Only the animal cadaver in the left corner hints that death will leave its mark on this idyll; the bird trap made from an old door is ready to snap shut and crush its next victim, reminding the viewer that earthly pleasures are transient—Carpe diem (Seize the day). An empty beehive stirs latent memories of lazy summer afternoons with blazing, colorful blossoms. Soaring above this busy miniature world, exactly in the middle of the sky, a large bird seems to fly higher and higher. Is it an ordinary bird or the last memory of the presence of the Holy Ghost?
The creator of this landscape, Hendrick Avercamp (1589–1634), specialized in winter scenes. He painted them year-round in his workshops in Amsterdam and later in Kampen, in the Netherlands. Depicting bustling crowds socializing while apparently not feeling the cold may have been an expression of his own longing to be part of a greater world. He was born deaf and mute, lived quietly with his mother, and followed her into the grave within a few months of her death. The happy scenes he painted were always the lives of others.
Like all painters of his time, Avercamp created his compositions not from direct observation but from sketches and memory. Artists worked in their studios with paints that were freshly prepared, and it would have been a major technical challenge to transfer an entire studio outside. According to the ideas of the time, it would have seemed meaningless simply to paint what happened to be there. Not nature itself, but its symbolic meaning was of greater interest to artists and their patrons. A landscape was a skillful composition of disparate elements, not merely the documentation of reality. Avercamp’s sketches were assembled into a whole, an image of the social world in a deceptively natural setting—another reason why his landscapes consist of many individual scenes.
Detail, birds fly overhead.
Avercamp and his colleagues composed and constructed communities on the ice, creating an underlying sense that we must all share the same resources, we are all exposed to the same circumstances—a message characteristic of the Netherlands, where collective and cooperative work had been long established among farmers for maintaining dykes, draining marshes, and managing fishing. The aristocracy had never been strong here, and the convictions that everyone shared the same stretch of land and that people swim or sink together had deep roots in cultural practices and attitudes.
The people on the ice were assembled there by Avercamp’s imagination. The evocation of the season, however, was entirely realistic. Winter landscapes had only recently become a fashionable subject for artists, who sold their paintings mainly to wealthy urbanites. Avercamp created his little masterwork in 1608, a year that had suffered particularly severe frosts. Half a century earlier, winter landscapes had been almost unknown in European painting. Since then, however, winters had been unusually long and grim, snow fell more abundantly than before, rivers and seaports remained frozen until the spring. Word had it that in Eastern Europe, birds dropped out of the sky, frozen to death.
The winter of 1607–8 was one of the severest in recorded history—and not only in the Netherlands, where the rivers and canals had become icy panoramas on which painters could imagine entire societies. In London, the Thames was frozen so solid that a Frost Fair was erected on it, a semipermanent setup consisting of kiosks and wooden huts with taverns and even brothels. Henri IV of France awoke one morning to find his beard iced over; wine froze solid in its barrels, and deep snow covered parts of Spain. Europe was a frosted world.
The fierce cold spells had begun in the 1560s and 1570s, and artists responded quickly to what must have been a dramatic change in nature. Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, painted in 1565 after a particularly severe winter, is a vivid evocation of the inhospitable harshness of the season. This magnificent work also marks a change in painting style. The Hunters was painted as part of a cycle of the seasons, an artistic convention that reached back into the Middle Ages. There are little winter landscapes in the famous Très riches heures du duc de Berry (1412–1416), but always as part of a seasonal cycle, indicating that spring would always arrive after the bitter cold of the dark winter. Now, however, winter landscapes established themselves as a genre in their own right, and this even invaded other themes. Still following the medieval tradition of painting biblical stories in familiar surroundings, the Adoration of the Magi and the Massacre of the Innocents—both episodes from the New Testament—were now set in deep snow.
Avercamp’s landscapes describe this frigid world and hint at the new social order that would emerge from it. Everyone on the ice is sharing the same cold. On the wide expanse of the frozen canal, they even resemble each other. They all have to step carefully, or they will fall. The elegant gentlemen and the poor eel fisherman with his long trident, the sleigh with its proud white horse and the gaggle of peasants—they are all challenged to find ways of coping in this unfamiliar and inhospitable environment.
Almost a century later, in 1691, the English composer Henry Purcell would distill the European experience of a hundred years of cold into the famous, frozen, halting lament of the “Cold Genius”:
What power art thou, who from below
Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow
From beds of everlasting snow?
See’st thou not how stiff and wondrous old
Far unfit to bear the bitter cold,
I can scarcely move or draw my breath?
Let me, let me freeze again to death.1
A SIMPLE QUESTION appears at the beginning of this book, a question with an undeniably contemporary dimension: Do societies change when the climate changes? And if so, how? Which immediate and secondary effects flow from a change in the natural framework of societies, of cultures and mental horizons? The long, wintry seventeenth century serves as a test case for investigating this question and mapping the effects of climate change on all aspects of life, from agriculture to philosophy.
Even in a historical context, it is true that the science of climate change is clouded by controversy. When did the Little Ice Age begin? What caused it? How violent were its effects, and what long-term consequences did it have? Some climate historians argue that its beginnings were in the Middle Ages and that it lasted until the early nineteenth century; others concentrate on the period of greatest deviation from the statistical mean, lasting roughly from 1570 to the 1680s. I will concentrate on this second interpretation, because it raises other interesting issues.
The period of particularly disturbed climatic patterns and events that stretches from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century also was an age of tremendous social, economic, and philosophical upheaval in Europe. At its beginning, we see a feudal world centered on castles and churches; at its end, we encounter a world of cities and markets, of nascent capitalism and the vigorous early stirrings of the Enlightenment. Can we assume that these natural and cultural transformations could be related? If so, how?
The Little Ice Age was a global phenomenon that led to a reduction of average temperatures by about two degrees Celsius, though with radically different effects on local levels. Ocean currents and the salinity of seawater were affected, oceanic condensation patterns changed, polar ice caps and glaciers grew rapidly, climatic systems were disturbed. All this led to a succession of brutal and extreme weather events—severe storms, weeks of rain, and even years of summer drought, as well as unrelenting frosts. There were reports of population collapse due to famine in Ming-period China, as well as murderous winters in North America and paltry harvests in India, while the Ottoman Empire experienced some of the most devastating winters its historians had ever recorded.
Three reasons lead me to limit my focus to Europe. First, the Little Ice Age has been particularly well researched for Europe, and there is a great wealth of scientific and documentary source material yielding a very detailed picture of how people experienced the changes and how they adapted to them. Second, I lack the expertise and language skills to delve into the cultural histories of Japan, China, India, Malaysia, and the Aztec Empire and to relate cultural practices and their changes to climatic and other factors. I would be entirely dependent on translations and interpretations of others. Third, the period of the Little Ice Age in Europe marked particularly momentous changes in its societies. Thus, while it is important to stress the global dimension of climate change in the seventeenth century, I will focus on the European experience.
THE CULTURAL HISTORY of climate has, of course, its own long trajectory. Aristotle and Hippocrates already had written about the connections between climate and culture, and during the seventeenth century, the historian Montesquieu formulated thoughts on the interrelationship between natural environments and the societies in them. During the twentieth century, climate also made its most spectacular appearance front and center in the French Annales school, whose expanded view of social history incorporated living conditions and their changes.
Most influential for Western philosophy, however, was the comprehensive philosophical geography penned by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher who left his native country only once, for a short spell as a private tutor in Bern, Switzerland. Hegel argued that the spirit of a culture resembles the landscape and the climate in which it grows, which is why he felt so confident that only the German landscape with its forests and its temperate climate was suited to being “the true scene of world history,” because it created true spiritual depth. He also insisted that indigenous Americans and Africans were unable to build a great culture because “cold and heat are here too powerful to allow a mind to construct a world for itself.”
At the turn of the twentieth century, pseudoscientific racial thinking in the West was comfortable with the idea that other, less-developed cultures had emerged from their natural circumstances, while the colonial powers themselves had transcended the bounds of nature and reached a higher plane of civilization. It was not until after World War II that historians began to look at the idea of climate (though not yet climate change) as a determining factor for all civilizations. Fernand Braudel, with his studies of societies and trading connections in the Mediterranean, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who reconstructed life in medieval southwestern France, made clear that instead of speculating about the effects of climate on culture, as Hegel had done, a much more fruitful method was to use historical data to create finely grained analyses of local circumstances.
Today, historians such as Geoffrey Parker, Jared Diamond, and Christian Pfister have greatly added to our knowledge and understanding of this issue. They argue that climatic factors were instrumental in the rise and fall of entire civilizations. The perspective on the meteorological past of the planet and all its varied cultures has widened and deepened, despite the fact that most research to date has focused narrowly on climate change as a meteorological phenomenon, with less emphasis on its cultural consequences.
Mass migrations and the decline of great civilizations, in particular, have aroused a good deal of scientific interest: The end of the Roman Empire is frequently linked to a period of unusually cool temperatures in the mid-fourth century CE, which was caused by a volcanic eruption whose ash created a global winter for some years, affecting not only ancient Rome but also far-distant cultures from China to Peru. But these incidents occurred far in the past; documentation is rudimentary, especially with regard to understanding the effects of climatic changes on the societies of the day. The Little Ice Age, on the other hand, with its vast range of sources, documents, and data, provides an ideal case study of the subtle interactions between climate change and cultural change.
SCIENTISTS ARE NOT yet able to agree on the causes of the global cooling that manifested itself in the brutal winters and cold summers of the 1560s onward. Although there is abundant evidence of what went on, there is very little understanding of exactly why it occurred. For the purposes of this book, which concentrates not on the causes but on the consequences of the Little Ice Age, a brief summary of the current state of research may suffice.
The earth is a vast archive recording its own history. Climate historians and climate scientists can come to a very precise, highly localized understanding of what happened year by year via several methods: analyzing cores drilled out of the polar ice shelves or out of glaciers; measuring the distance between tree rings as an indication of stressful or easy growing seasons; and identifying plant residues such as pollen, spores, and leaves in layers of mud or other sediments to find out what characteristic flora and fauna existed in a particular period. In this way, scientists have created detailed climate maps for different eras and areas.
In addition to the availability of these scientific data, Europe also offers a surprising wealth of human data and historical documents. Diaries and letters, weather observations and sermons, literary works, wine-harvest dates, the packing lists and logbooks of merchant seamen, paintings and account ledgers show not only the immediate effects of climate change on the natural world but also what transformations they may have caused or accelerated in social and cultural contexts.
This mosaic can be assembled into a portrait, though that portrait may vary according to which interpretation of the data one chooses to follow. From around 1400 (and for reasons not yet clearly understood), global temperatures were depressed by around one degree Celsius, but the decline was more severe from the second half of the sixteenth century onward. Temperatures in Eurasia and particularly the Atlantic region dropped more sharply, by around two degrees Celsius.
This change was accompanied by extreme weather events. There was increased seismic activity, with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions intensifying, possibly because the growing polar ice shelves made seawater more saline, thus changing the temperature and speed of deep-sea currents, which in turn exerted different patterns of pressure on continental shelves and their oceanic borders. This, however, is merely a hypothesis. That multiple large volcanic eruptions hurled vast amounts of dust into the atmosphere and added to the harshness of winters by blocking out sunlight, however, is a fact.
This very condensed account raises many questions, first and foremost that of causality. Why did this global cooling occur? No one knows. The most promising candidate is a change in solar activity, but the evidence of this change (a decreased number of sunspots recorded by early observers) dates only from decades after the beginning of the Little Ice Age. Was human activity to blame? Not this time. One theory posits that the European invasion of South America caused the local populations to collapse due to imported viruses such as smallpox (the native South Americans reciprocated by giving Europeans syphilis) and therefore caused agriculture to retreat, allowing rain forests to reclaim once-farmed areas and thus increase the absorption of CO2. But this effect would account for only a very small amount of the dramatic temperature drop—no more than one-tenth of a degree—especially since at the same time European forests were being leveled dramatically, evening out the global balance.
While causalities and contributing factors remain unclear, the effects of this change are richly documented. The first wave of bitter winters, rainy summers, and violent hail and late frosts hit Europe during the second half of the sixteenth century, and this was particularly catastrophic for agriculture, devastating harvests everywhere. A two-degree drop in annual mean temperature translates into almost three weeks of lost growing time, meaning that crops were very much slower to ripen, and sometimes failed to ripen at all.
In the first instance, this caused a long-term, continent-wide agricultural crisis. Failed harvests, wheat rotting in the field or being destroyed by hail, and long periods of drought in other European areas meant that, after 1570, the amount of wheat harvested would not reach pre-1570 levels for 180 years, until 1750.
In our very different world, removed as most of us are from agricultural processes, it requires effort to appreciate what this meant for people at the time. Sixteenth-century Europe relied primarily not on trade and industry but on local agriculture, particularly cereals—wheat, barley, rye, and oats—as well as wine or beer (more grain), and, in Mediterranean regions, olives. Fresh fruits and vegetables were available only in season or if they had been preserved; maritime fish (with the notable exception of pickled herring) were available only in coastal regions. Meat was too expensive for most Europeans to eat regularly, and the hunting of wild game was a privilege jealously guarded by the aristocracy.
Thus, for their daily diet and ultimately their survival, most people were dependent mainly on grain—in bread, soups, porridge, or dry biscuits—with the occasional addition of animal proteins and some fresh or preserved fruits and vegetables, depending on the season. Any disruption in grain production had potentially devastating consequences. Hunger would be widespread, leaving people more vulnerable to epidemics and sometimes causing them to riot, or, if they could, simply to pack up and move away. Marginal agricultural regions such as Northern and Eastern Europe—where, even in normal climatic conditions, temperatures had barely been high enough to grow staple crops—were hit particularly harshly.
The relatively sudden cooling of temperatures tore into a social and economic system that had been working relatively well for almost a millennium—a system centered on feudal landownership and on close cooperation between Crown and Church. Peasants (and serfs in many European regions) toiled just as generations had done before them. Many had no metal plows, and their wooden tools would barely scratch the surface of the soil. Only the wealthier farmers had oxen to pull their plows, since it was costly to keep animals fed through the winter. Many peasants simply had to do their own work, putting themselves or other family members to the harness. Most areas operated on the principle of rotational cultivation, allowing one of every four fields to lie fallow for a year, so the soil could recover. This was particularly necessary since much of European agriculture was effectively a near-monoculture, thus draining the soil of important elements and over time leaving fields less productive. Yields were low: One grain sown would result in only about four grains harvested, a fraction of what would be achieved in later eras.
A well-deserved rest: Harvest was the pivotal point of the agricultural year.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European agriculture would diversify. Columbus’s expeditions to America had already brought such plants as maize, potatoes, and tomatoes back to the “old continent,” but they mainly graced botanical gardens and private collections. Potatoes, for instance, were popular with botanists because their blossoms were beautiful, but it took a long time for rural folk to accept these filling tubers as food. The vast majority of European agriculture still consisted of grain production, and most of it was consumed locally.
The all-important harvest would be split into three parts: one for the family and the farm animals, one for seed to be kept for sowing in the spring, and one (often the rest of what remained) for the lord, as tax. This part would be determined by the size of the harvest: In good years, the peasants had to pay much more in tax, which also meant that they had no incentive to be productive. Any increase in bushels harvested or sacks of grain filled was simply destined to vanish into the lord’s own granaries, from which much might then be sold on to the towns and cities.
As harvest failures became more frequent, this ancient system began to falter. Peasants watched helplessly as their crops failed to ripen, or were destroyed by rain, frost, thunderstorms, or hail. This meant, of course, that the peasants went hungry, but it also meant that they could no longer pay their taxes. For the aristocracy, relying for their income almost totally on their lands, this meant potential ruin. Typically barred from working in the trades or the professions, the aristocrats’ primary economic duty was to provide resources for warfare: not only food stocks but also horses, munitions, manpower, or simply cash. In addition, aristocrats needed to maintain impressive living standards and demonstrate generosity to their followers, if they were to retain their social standing and their power in the land. Aristocrats always needed money. A hungry, rebellious population, unable or unwilling to pay their taxes, might be dealt with on a sporadic basis, but when occasional shortages became an ongoing crisis, the entire social order was threatened.
While the peasants (who formed the greater part of the European population) lived in the countryside, and the aristocracy typically lived alongside them, those in the towns and cities were also threatened by failing harvests. The single most important commodity in any city was grain, and flour prices (and hence bread prices) served as something of a gold standard at the time. Controlling and manipulating grain prices was one of the very few policy tools available to a late medieval ruler or city council. The price of bread could mean the difference between hunger and plenty, between social peace and rampant crime, between public calm and rioting in the streets. As more harvests remained below expectations and less grain was available, bread prices rose rapidly, at times doubling or trebling within a year, taking the daily bread, as it were, from the mouths of increasing numbers of city dwellers.
In the countryside, traditional structures existed for coping with poverty and maintaining relatively stable rural communities. In England, France, Germany, and throughout Central Europe, for instance, village communities usually had access to a common—a piece of land on which everyone, even the landless poor, could graze a goat or a few chickens and harvest animal feed for the winter. Life in the countryside remained very different from life in the city. Most villagers and most peasants operated at subsistence level and would have only occasionally come into contact with actual money. They could make or barter for most things they needed, and their few other necessities could be purchased on market days, which occurred at regular intervals, often around religious feast days. These provided opportunities to sell a ham and a few eggs, to buy a length of cloth or a handful of nails, and even to look for a wife, or simply to have a good time.
Even in the cities, the social and economic life was unlike what we would recognize today. There was a developing world of trade, but the amount of wares reaching all of Europe from Asia and from other continents within any given year would have fitted into a single modern containership. Long-distance trade was concerned almost exclusively with luxuries such as spices, porcelain, silk, and tobacco.
The typical city dweller’s outlook on life and business would also be unfamiliar to modern eyes. Not only were bread prices tightly controlled, but so were the prices for other commodities. Crafts and manufacturing (such as it was) were in the hands of guilds, which could determine not only the standards to which a master had to work and train his apprentices, but also how many masters could have shops of their own, what they could produce and how, and what they could charge for their goods.
This controlled urban world valued social capital—class and family standing, trustworthiness, cooperation—but it did not encourage anyone to reach beyond his station. A tailor who did well for himself might think of buying another house, donating a new window for his church, supplying a new ornament for the guildhall, or even subsidizing the pay for a dozen soldiers—and he would make his donation known more or less discreetly among the people of the town. He was unlikely, however, to deposit money in a bank to accrue interest, or to think of opening branches of his shop in other cities, thus increasing production and pursuing the goal of rising through the social ranks. You were born a tailor or had been apprenticed to one, and that meant that your highest ambition in life would most likely be to be a good tailor, respected among your townspeople, accruing civic honor, if you could, rather than pots of gold.
If this sounds idyllic, it is mostly so only in hindsight. Most European societies were encased on all levels in an ironclad economic protectionism and corporatism, with each person expected to remain in his allotted station, and with an idea of human inequality deeply rooted in social perceptions and social practice. This stifled most private initiative, enterprise, and innovation, and it clearly divided the vast majority of people into different strata. Though the Church provided mobility to a handful of the brightest village boys, if you were born a peasant, it was overwhelmingly likely that you would die a peasant, and so would your children.
This inflexible social world was nonetheless not completely stable, buffeted as it was not only by famine and epidemics but also by warfare, with armies plundering crops or even simply destroying them as they passed through. The consequent loss of life was frequently appalling, and those who remained alive in a devastated region often had no recourse but to migrate. By the end of the sixteenth century, for instance, in France, the Netherlands, Flanders, Germany, Central Europe, Hungary, and Italy, religious wars lasting three whole generations had left hundreds of thousands dead, maimed, or orphaned. The succession of severe winters and sunless summers that began around 1570 was one more bitter turn of the screw for the continent’s already hard-pressed populations.
What happened next, during the long seventeenth century, seems almost something ordained by the callous, testing god of Job, or by some extraterrestrial scientist conducting an experiment with an entire biological system, including the varied populations and societies of Homo sapiens. What happens if one changes a system’s parameters—the temperature, the weather, the climate? What will collapse and what will endure? Who will live and who will die? Will those creatures whose very existence is threatened find some way to escape? Will they then find some way, despite all that has changed, to establish themselves again, and to flourish?
This idea of a distant demiurge suggests the bird’s-eye perspective imagined by the Dutchman Hendrick Avercamp and his painter colleagues, who in the early seventeenth century produced exquisite winter landscapes peopled by countless tiny, bustling figures. There is value, as well as danger, in this perspective. It reveals patterns that cannot be seen from the ground, but it also invites generalizations where they are not necessarily legitimate. It represents the temptation to tell a grand story at the expense of providing the details. Perhaps the details are interesting, but they complicate things with a more accurate portrayal of the often-contradictory nature of lived reality.
Any history of transformative processes must acknowledge their fundamentally untidy and frequently paradoxical nature. The Little Ice Age, too, has a complex texture of developments and countercurrents, of asynchrony between societies and cultures, and between urban and rural areas; different stages of social or economic development can coexist. The city folk of the seventeenth century lived in a world that was, from our perspective, a good century ahead of the agrarian realm of some of their kin.
There were also broader geographical divisions, so that similar developments sometimes occurred centuries apart. Italy, for example, was ahead of the rest of Europe not only in its exceptional cultural flowering in the fourteenth century but also in developing sophisticated banking and financial services that would not be introduced in Russia until five hundred years later. But the Little Ice Age also saw a dramatic decline in Italy’s leading role, leaving others to take the lead politically as well as culturally. Mighty Habsburg Spain, on whose global empire the sun never set, was also subject to serious reversals and a loss of power and influence, while the Netherlands—until then home to herring fishermen, farmers, and a handful of town merchants—suddenly surged and became the greatest naval power of its day, as well as a center for economic, artistic, and even philosophical renewal.
This story, then, does not describe one unified march in a single direction, but rather many meandering routes at a time of serious and unpredictable change. Faced with new factors of climate, some societies reacted and others did not; some reacted wisely and others foolishly. Medieval and comparatively modern ways of thinking and living existed simultaneously in this period of contradictions and asynchronicities. Modern and antiquated weapons were used by the same armies and in the same wars; the first stirrings of scientific theory coexisted with religious mysticism; new ideas lived alongside, and sometimes confronted, old beliefs.
Unlike the simulations we are accustomed to when we speak of climate change today, this real-life experiment was not conducted under laboratory conditions. Outcomes were partly determined by preexisting cultural and economic factors, beyond conscious control. Other outcomes were forced or hastened by the innovative, the daring, and the ruthless: Luther and Leonardo, Columbus and Gutenberg. Great movements, springing from many sources, transformed Europe profoundly: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the discoveries of other continents and other creatures (significantly, not mentioned in the Judeo-Christian Bible). As with other cultural innovations, their influence was much stronger in the cities than in the countryside. The Renaissance remained largely an elite cultural—and to some extent political—phenomenon; the religious Reformation transformed some areas of Europe while leaving others relatively untouched; printed broadsides, pamphlets, and books were interesting only to those who could read, although stories about strange happenings in faraway places were, as they had always been, part of everyday folklore. Climate change, however, affected everyone. There was no escaping the weather.
The agricultural crisis caused by the Little Ice Age served as a catalyst for change everywhere, facilitating some ideas and practices—social, cultural, and political—while making others more difficult, or even, in the long run, impossible. Existing feudal structures groaned and cracked and sometimes split apart entirely.
In this book, we will follow the different paths people took in their search for a way out of this agricultural impasse—some paths unsuccessful, some succeeding spectacularly. Beginning with a late-sixteenth-century world where theologians had the last word, where science and medicine followed the allegorical models of antiquity, and politics focused on the church and the fortress as mental and physical landmarks, where everyone was dependent on local grain production and the local powers-that-be, where the Earth was held to be the center of the universe and the sun was believed to revolve around it. After a thousand years of stasis, quite suddenly, within only four generations, this world gave way to one in which we today, centuries later, can readily recognize ourselves—where people began to talk of markets, empirical knowledge, and human rights, and where reason and pragmatism moved increasingly to the forefront of European cultural, social, and political life.
We must be on our guard, all the same, with this linear understanding of history, for it can also obscure an important truth: Though most of these changes occurred in reaction to a particular set of circumstances, they usually occurred without deliberate planning, and all of them occurred without any certain foreknowledge of outcomes. They were born from immediate needs, from experiment, from intuition, and also from fear and greed. Those that failed have left little trace; others, inconclusive, are no more than footnotes to history. Those changes that did establish themselves, however, continue to an often surprising extent to provide the framework for our lives today, and to what we can imagine.
The first part of this book depicts the beginning of the Little Ice Age in Europe around 1570; it sketches the immediate human consequences of this crisis and reveals how witnesses saw and explained it. How did they react to the cold spells and the storms? What did they say about them, and what did they do? What did they think was causing them?
It was clear to many observers around the beginning of the seventeenth century that their societies had entered a time of crisis, even if they were not yet certain what role nature played in it and what role belonged to God. Though the crisis may have begun in agriculture, its wide ramifications required a much broader response than simply addressing agricultural concerns. Consequently, the second part of this book examines the economic, social, scientific, military, and cultural developments that occurred during this period, and their mosaic-like correlations with environmental change.
The third part of this book goes a step farther and follows the changes that were triggered by the Little Ice Age and its agricultural crisis on European thinking. Climatic upheavals in the seventeenth century encouraged the empirical observation of natural processes, helping to develop broader mental horizons and bolder attitudes that would bring, chainlike, ever more change to societies not just in Europe but around the globe. We usually call this way of thinking the Enlightenment.
An epilogue gathers the book’s thematic strands and links them with the climatic, political, and cultural changes occurring in the present day. We have inherited so much more from the seventeenth century than may be obvious at first glance. One idea in particular, formulated for the first time in Europe around 1600, was to allow the continent to gain a position of spectacular global dominance: The medieval acceptance of human economic life as cyclical and stable was rejected in favor of the idea of continuing economic growth based on exploitation. This was to prove the generator of European wealth, built on relentless imperial and industrial expansion. It is this same idea of growth based on exploitation that now poses so clear a threat to the well-being of our species.
DURING THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, a small army of Flemish and Netherlandish painters produced canvas after canvas depicting idyllic winter landscapes of frozen rivers, little villages, bare forests, and great expanses of white—the ideal stage for a social panorama of people living and laughing in the cold. These paintings sold for handsome sums, mainly to comfortable burghers inhabiting the proud houses of Antwerp, Bruges, and Amsterdam. These represented a new class of patrons, interested not in great displays of power and prestige but in simpler yet subtler dramatizations of Christian virtues, set in a world they knew and understood. The little figures careening across the icy width of these canvases seem not to have a care in the world. But they are fictions. Their real-life counterparts lived in fear and increasing uncertainty.
The hunters’ return: As the cold was closing in, artists responded by creating a new genre, the winter landscape.