There are many myths about the Middle Ages. Most of them began life in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which is when the conception of a ‘middle age’ first took root. Christendom was not one of them. On the contrary, it was a myth which the Middle Ages had created about itself. It described the project (and accompanying intellectual and institutional apparatus) which united western Christianity. The period following the Protestant Reformation witnessed the progressive and eventually comprehensive disintegration of that project, and the myth which lay behind it. By 1650, Christendom lay devastated and drained, broken in pieces. There was nothing left beyond the yearning for a vanished unity, a ‘Paradise lost’. ‘Europe’, which is increasingly how what had once been Christendom was now conceived, was not a project but a geographical projection, a map on which its divisions could be represented, a way of delineating its political, economic and social fragmentation.
With more fluid and pluralist forms of information diffusion in different media by the mid-seventeenth century, contemporaries assembled these various fragmentations into a chronology of enveloping crisis. Gallus Zembroth, a wine-grower and notable from Allensbach (a village near Konstanz), looked back to the ‘indisputable omens’ of 1618 (a reference to the great comet of that year), ‘assuredly a harbinger of the thirty-year war which followed’, according to the later Strasbourg chronicler Johann Walther. Hans Herberle, a cobbler from Neenstetten (a village north of Ulm), writing in about 1630, tried his best to encapsulate what had happened since 1618: ‘. . . war, rebellion, and much spilling of Christian blood . . . in Bohemia . . . in Brunswick, Mecklenburg, Lüneburg, Friesland, Brandenburg . . . and indeed almost the whole of Germany’. But then his abilities to make sense of things gave up: ‘I cannot relate and describe all this.’ From being a ‘15-Years’ War’ (in 1633) it became a ‘20-Years’ War’ (in 1638) until, by the time Sebastian Wendell, another wine-grower, looked forward in his diary in 1647 to the negotiations at Münster and Osnabrück, it became a ‘thirty years war’. Wendell did not live to see the peace, but Jeremias Ullmann, a chronicler from Silesia, did. He noted: ‘On 24 October – God be thanked for it – (after the war has lasted full 30 years and carried off hundreds of thousands of souls, swallowed up hundreds of millions of Gulden, and produced nothing but afflicted people and desolate towns and villages) the noble, golden, and long-desired peace has been concluded.’ Only gradually did the notion of the Thirty Years War consolidate as a way of understanding that part of the paroxysm, and how it had disrupted people’s lives.
Europe’s channels of communication acted like an echo-chamber in which, as events unfolded, they reverberated to an ambient anxiety. Contemporaries put together in their minds explanations for the disordered world around. In 1635, Hans Conrad Lang, a clothier from Konstanz, thought that what was occurring was such that ‘has never been heard in human history’. ‘The world is in complete revolt,’ wrote a Catalan in 1640. In a sermon for a day of fast during the Long Parliament on 23 January 1643, the English preacher Jeremiah Whitaker declared (reflecting his biblical text): ‘these days are shaking, and the shaking is universal: the Palatinate, Bohemia, Germania, Catalonia, Portugal, Ireland, England’. A year or so later, the Swedish diplomat at the Peace of Westphalia, Johan Salvius, reported: ‘we hear of revolts by the people against their rulers everywhere in the world’. He made sense of it as some kind of ‘great miracle’, wondering whether ‘this can be explained by some general configuration of the stars in the sky’.
When the Landgrave of Hesse published his Meteorological History in 1652, he suggested that the disordered weather over the previous twenty-four years might be explained by the planets. In 1645, the Welsh clergyman James Howell drew on his belief in a Providentialist universe to explain the congruence of general disorder: ‘God Almighty has a quarrel lately with all mankind, and given the reins to the ill spirit to compass the whole earth; for within these twelve years the strangest revolutions and horridest things have happened, not only in Europe but all the world over, that have befallen mankind, I dare boldly say, since Adam fell, in so short a revolution of time.’ In Scotland, a pamphlet describing the monstrous birth of conjoined twins, a boy and girl, in September 1647, interpreted the event within the Protestant parameters of God’s warning to the world: ‘nature seemed to be disquieted and troubled; in so much that the heavens proclaimed its entrance into the world with a loud peal of thunder’. As the storm reached its climax, the monster announced with a ‘hoarse but loud voice . . . I am thus deformed for the sins of my parents’. That same year, John Taylor’s The World Turn’d upside down was republished (it had first appeared in 1642), offering a ‘brief description . . . of these distracted times’, a prelude (he thought) to a coming Millennium. A Paris magistrate, writing in 1652 as the troops of the prince of Condé massacred citizens in a public meeting, mused: ‘If one ever had to believe in the Last Judgment, I believe it is happening right now.’
Historians have been inclined to link together these anxieties, and the various revolts and disorders of the period of the later Thirty Years War, into a ‘general crisis’ – the first in what was now widely perceived of as ‘Europe’. Perhaps contemporaries were correct to interpret it as a global crisis as well. There is certainly evidence to suggest that meteorological disturbances had a disruptive impact on settled civilizations across the planet towards the middle of the seventeenth century. It is possible – probable, even – that this, in turn, jolted the emerging patterns of world commerce, affecting (notably) the flows of precious metals to Europe. The various economic regions of the globalized world were like, says one economic historian, ponds of different depths, connected one to another by channels. Those channels easily dried up, or became blocked by war and other disruptions. Those whose livelihoods depended on the economic activity from one region to another were left to complain about the destructive impact of the failure of their markets, and (in particular) their inability to sell goods.
That inability was directly related to interruptions to the flows of silver and other commodities. Those flows were, as the London merchant Thomas Mun outlined in his England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade (written around 1630), the ‘rule of our Treasure’. That treasure seemed increasingly to be dividing Europe as well. ‘My grandmother used to say’ (reported Sancho Panza, Cervantes’s stoical squire in Don Quixote) ‘that there are only two families in the world: the haves and the have-nots.’ The ‘have-nots’ were much more precarious by 1650, risking death from malnutrition, cold and disease. They were especially at risk in the extraordinary meteorological and associated economic conditions of the mid-century. There is no doubt that Europe’s weakening social and cultural cohesion, the growing divisions between its urban and rural worlds, greater economic divergences between north and south, not to mention the weakening intellectual consensus, contributed to the intensity of contemporary perceptions of anxiety. But it was the proximity and scale of war, and the way in which revolt and disorder invited participation from those outside the political élites which lay at the heart of contemporary experiences of a world turning upside down.
When examined in closer detail, the various revolts and uprisings of the later 1640s become more contingent, symptomatic of Europe’s fundamental divisions, less evidently based around a common set of grievances or capable of being interpreted within an overall schema. That said, they shared three commonalities which help to make sense of the profound changes which had taken place in Europe over the previous century and a half. The first is that they occurred on a regional and national scale which indicated that the nature of Europe’s localism was reconfigured into something broader, mobilized by media and social forces which were new. The second was that they were mostly led by conservative figures, moved to preserve what they regarded as vernacular senses of law, tradition and sometimes religion, against forces which they saw as alien (the state), ungodly or simply untrustworthy. They disliked being ‘cajoled’ (the word was a new importation into the political vocabulary of the period). But they understood that they could as easily be discomforted by populist forces (which they distrusted and resented) as by ‘innovators’ in Church and state. So there were limits to the degree to which they were willing to countenance political change. Thirdly, profound anxiety created paralysis, but also dynamic creativity and change, hyperactivity as well as passivity. These elements were all in play in Europe in the late 1640s among the shapers of the new age.
To regard the mid-seventeenth century as a general crisis implies that the history of what came after it was a resolution of that crisis through transition to a world that was very different from what had gone before. That was not, however, the case. Europe did not fundamentally change. Even in the British Isles, where there was a revolution, it did not last. Poland-Lithuania, overwhelmed for a time, survived. There was no new international order. Instead, European states confronted the uncomfortable reality of French hegemony. And, in answer to mid-century revolts and disorder, rulers arrived at social compacts – implicit understandings with their élites to make sure that the latter shared in the benefits of rule in return for their support. Those compacts were secured with varying degrees of ease and complicity. Religion, however, retained its capacity to disturb and divide European polities and international relations through to the end of the century. The impact of the Protestant Reformation did not suddenly cease in 1650. Europe’s social cohesion also remained fractured. It was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century that something resembling an intellectual consensus would emerge. Global cooling, too, was reversed only in the next century. ‘Paroxysm’ (a violent spasm in an organism) is a better analogy than ‘crisis’ since its prognosis is a return to the status quo.
The disintegration of Christendom did not mean the collapse of Christianity. On the contrary, Europe’s paroxysm was accompanied in religion by the same mixtures of passivity and activity that characterized its political sphere. Enormous energies were still deployed towards establishing a global Catholic Christianity. Protestant and Catholic Churches intensified their enforcement of orthodoxies based around people subscribing to beliefs encompassed in creeds. Committed clerics and well-meaning notables still sought to build godly commonwealths around patterns of social behaviour and conformity. A small English nonconformist congregation which moved to Leiden in the 1600s to escape the intrusive demands of the Church in England negotiated a land patent from the London Virginia Company in 1619 to settle in ‘New England’ – the Pilgrim Fathers. Among their motives were the ‘hard life’ which they had in the Netherlands and the vulnerability of their congregation, but also the opportunity that a new life elsewhere gave them for their children not to be ‘drawn away by evil examples’ and ‘the great hope for the propagating and advancing of the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world’. For others, dreams of a new life away from Europe’s divisions remained unrealized. Among Samuel Hartlib’s correspondents seeking to escape the Thirty Years War were those who wanted to establish utopian Christian communities (that of ‘Antilia’ was planned for an island in the Baltic). The duke of Rohan investigated the possibility of purchasing Cyprus in the 1630s and turning it into a model Protestant godly commonwealth.
Alongside such activist Christian responses in the face of a divided, hostile and alien Europe lay others which were more inward-looking. The philosopher and pansophic visionary Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius) experienced the paroxysm at first hand. Exiled from Bohemia in 1621 with the loss of his property and manuscripts, he spent his life in restless wanderings which took him to England on the eve of the Civil War, Sweden at the end of the Thirty Years War and Transylvania. In 1670, a work emanating from his collection of curious millennial dreams was published as A Generall Table of Europe. Its preface laid out the continent’s political and religious divisions in a world context before summarizing the ‘late grand Revolutions’ as the essential context for interpreting the dreams. In one of his earliest works (The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, composed c. 1623), Comenius imagined a pilgrim being taking to the top of a mountain in order to look over the ‘labyrinth’ of the city beneath him. He took in all its divisions, and especially its intellectual and religious contentions. It was like being shown a map of Europe. In the end the pilgrim realized that true unity (a harmony of God-given wisdom) lay only in the panacea of the soul within.
At 10.30 p.m. on Monday 23 November 1654, the French philosopher and dévot Blaise Pascal had a moment of spiritual ecstasy that marked him for the rest of his life. He could not properly describe it but on the piece of parchment which was found sewn into his waistcoat after his death, he evoked it in staccato phrases: ‘Certainty, certainty, heartfelt joy, peace . . . Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy’. He found his paradise of the heart in a ‘hidden God’ (Deus absconditus: Isaiah 45:15) who lets those who seek find him. Christendom was dissolved, but conscientious Christianity had found its voice.