The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 Read online

  The Black Death left a legacy of irregular epidemics, which descended about every decade, sometimes more frequently, especially in crowded towns. People were powerless to combat the epidemics, their only perceived recourse the centuries-old panacea of religious processions and prayer. In Germany, penitents stripped to the waist and beat their backs with weighted scourges, singing hymns in loud voices. "They sang very mournful songs about nativity and the passion of Our Lord. The object of this penance was to put a stop to the mortality, for in that time ... at least a third of all the people died."6 Not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did rational quarantine methods such as disinfection and isolation come into widespread use by armies, hospitals, and civil authorities.

  By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the depopulation of the countryside by famine, plague, and war had led to the abandonment of as many as 3,000 villages across France alone. Thousands of hectares of arable land lay vacant and did not come back into cultivation until the end of the century or even later. Again, war was a villain. Frightened peasants fled behind city walls and dared not venture out to cultivate fallow land nearby, thereby compounding food shortages caused by poor harvests and wet weather. In Scandinavia, sodden fields prevented farmers from planting. English visitors to a Danish royal wedding in 1406 remarked that they passed many fields, but saw no growing wheat. Farmhouses were abandoned by the score, as families now shared the same buildings.

  The recurrent plagues and regular famines kept population in check for generations. There were well-documented food crises around Paris and Rouen in 1421, 1432, 1433, and especially from 1437 to 1439, probably years when a high NAO index brought unusually heavy rainfall ashore in western Europe. The famines resulted in large part from poor harvests, mostly caused by excessively wet winters, springs, and summers, when waterlogged and flattened cereal crops spoiled in the fields. Bad harvests came about every ten years, at a time when food shortages were aggravated by constant war and brigandage. With the population much reduced, there should have been fewer food shortages, but famine scourged the land with distressing regularity, in large part because of the constant fighting associated with the Hundred Years War.

  The 1430s brought a run of exceptionally harsh winters, with at least seven years of prolonged frost and severe storms. French vineyards suffered much frost damage in 1431/32, when a persistent high pressure center over Scandinavia brought intense cold to Britain and much of western Europe. Dozens of ships were wrecked in Bay of Biscay storms with the loss of hundreds of lives. Far out in the Atlantic, a Venetian ship bound for the port of Bruges was blown far off course by a fierce, ten-day northeasterly gale. The crew abandoned the vessel far out in the Atlantic the day after Christmas 1431 and, in a remarkable feat of seamanship, reached the Norwegian coast safely in a small open boat on January 14.7 Tree rings from southern English oaks confirm a series of stressful years with many cold winters and springs, also some warm summers, between 1419 and 1459. A Europe-wide famine in 1433-38 almost rivaled the great hunger in its intensity. By 1440, wine growing had virtually disappeared in Britain. Only the vineyards at Ely in eastern England persisted until 1469, before they, too, ceased operation after years of producing sour, unripe juice.

  The first signs of recovery in France came with the end of the Hundred Years War in 1453, during a time of milder oceanic conditions. The next half-century saw spectacular gains in grain production as land that had been abandoned after the Black Death was again cultivated. Food shortages were unknown in many areas until at least 1504. Grain became so cheap that many producers turned to livestock and other more profitable foods. Cattle and sheep were excellent investments and good insurance for landowners against poor harvests, even if their tenant farmers and the poor went hungry in bad years. So were fish. Between 1460 and 1465, a chancellor of France built a large pond with a forty-meter dam near Lassay. The elaborate barrier had three outlets and formed a fifty-fourhectare, reed-lined lake with a depth of six meters, where thousands of fish flourished. Every three or four years, the outlets were opened, the water drained and thousands of fish gathered, to the delectation of local fish merchants. While the landowner counted his profits, his peasants plowed the wet land beneath the dam and planted oats or grazed cattle.s

  These benign conditions persisted into the early sixteenth century. The dates of the wine harvest hint at a long period of warm springs and summers between 1520 and 1560, surrounding three cold years with late harvests in 1527-29.9 The 1520s produced five exceptional English harvests in a row, when people adapted readily to greater plenty. A spike of sudden cold weather in 1527 brought immediate threats of social unrest. In that year, the mayor's register at Norwich in eastern England noted "there was so great scarceness of corne that aboute Christmas the comons of the cyttye were ready to rise upon the ryche men."10 Still, life in the countryside went on much as before. Crop diversification, self-sufficiency, and the realities of hunger and death changed little in rural England and France from year to year. Nor did the simple farming technology of the day make adapting to cycles of warm or cold an easy matter.

  Even relatively privileged landowners lived close to the edge, at risk from rain and drought, but like the peasants they have left few records of their prosaic lives. In the mid-1500s, a century after the end of the Hundred Years War, Gilles de Gouberville was a "quasi-peasant, lord of a small manor at Le Mesnil-en-Val, an hour's walk inland from Cherbourg in Normandy."I I He was typical of his time except that for more than two decades he kept a journal, which offers a fascinating portrait of life on a large estate at near-subsistence level. He and his "farm-boys" relied on the simplest of technologies-and ran up constant blacksmith's bills because their light plow shares kept breaking in the rocky soil. Gouberville was a fairly efficient farmer with a strong practical streak, who placed little reliance on the superstitions of the time. He did not, for example, sow his crops at full moon, as many farmers did. The teachings of the seer Nostradamus about timing his planting briefly captivated him in 1557, but gave him only average results in 1558. Nostradamus's book stayed on the shelf after that. Instead, Gouberville diversified away from cereals.

  Like everyone else, Gouberville rotated cereals, mixed fodder, and fallow in his fields, growing peas to regenerate his soil and produce more food. He tried all manner of fertilizers on his cultivated lands, but they failed to increase his crops, grown by the near-free labor of his villagers and mostly consumed by his family and his laborers-or by the rodents in his barns. Gouberville's profit came from livestock, especially cattle, horses, and pigs. His cattle roamed free in the nearby forests, the pigs fed on acorns from the forest. He also sold grazing rights in the forest to his villagers for large sums. Gouberville was no innovator, but he knew the wisdom of diversification and of drinking cider. "Cider restores the roots of humour and humidity," wrote a seventeenth-century academic, who praised its ability to keep the belly "soft and relaxed, by the benignity of its vapors."12 Apart from these medical powers, cider kept people in "modesty" and "moderation." Gouberville tended the fourteen apple varieties in his orchards with sedulous care, for cider, a relatively sterile liquid, was far less dangerous than the polluted water supplies of the countryside. Cider was an insurance against illness and death. As Gouberville well knew, when local cider became too expensive, the peasants turned to water and the death rate promptly rose.

  Gilles de Gouberville's archaic world was largely self-sufficient, his identity closely tied not to his noble ancestors but to the land he and his villagers inhabited. He cherished his ancestors for one reason alone: they bequeathed the privilege of tax exemption. Given the constant threat of sickness, hunger, and death, it is hardly surprising much of life revolved around strong food and drink. Round bellied, with a brick-red, coarse complexion, Gouberville and his gentleman contemporaries consumed enormous meals. His journal records a supper for three on September 18, 1544, which comprised two "larded" chickens, two partridges, a hare, and a venison pie. But most of his d
ay-laborers and plowmen were thrown into destitution and near-starvation when the harvest failed, for cereals were the basic sustenance of all de Gouberville's people. (There was only one disastrous harvest during the twenty years covered by his journal.)

  Gilles de Gouberville and his kind protected themselves and their people by diversifying their farming. Many European communities of the day, especially those cultivating marginal lands in places like the foothills of the Alps and Pyrenees, did not have that option. Like Icelandic and Norwegian glaciers, the European Alps are a barometer of constantly shifting climatic conditions. Their glaciers have always been on the move, waltzing in intricate patterns of advance and retreat decade to decade that defy the best efforts of glaciologists and historians to decipher. But we do know that the mountain ice sheets advanced far beyond their modern limits as significantly cooler temperatures and wetter summers descended on Europe after 1560.13 After the 1560s, more frequent low NAOs brought persistent anticyclones over the North Sea and Scandinavia.

  Life in the Alps was always harsh: there were a "lot of poor people, all rustic and ignorant." Strangers avoided a place where "ice and frost are common since the creation of the world." The occasional traveler who ventured to the mountains remarked on the poverty and suffering of those who lived on the marginal lands in the glaciers' shadow.

  On August 4, 1546, astronomer Sebastian Munster rode along the right bank of the Rhone River on his way to the Furka Pass in the Alps, where he wanted to explore the mountain crossing. All at once Munster found himself confronted by "an immense mass of ice. As far as I could judge it was about two or three pike lengths thick, and as wide as the range of a strong bow. Its length stretched indefinitely upwards, so that you would not see its end. To anyone looking it was a terrifying spectacle, its horror enhanced by one or two blocks the size of a house which had detached themselves from the main mass." The water flowing from the glacier was a frothy white, so filled with ice fragments that a horse could not ford the stream. Munster added: "This watercourse marks the beginning of the river Rhone." He crossed by a bridge that spanned the torrent just below the source.

  The Rhonegletscher (Rhone glacier) was a formidable mass of ice in 1546, with a front between ten and fifteen meters high and at least two hundred meters wide. Today, the tongue of the glacier is very thin, with a height and width far smaller than in Munster's day. The ice sheet is high up the mountain, the stream that becomes the Rhone now flowing through a narrow gorge and over several waterfalls. Munster rode up to the glacier front. Today, the ice is accessible only by foot and that after an arduous climb, and the landscape is entirely different from that of the sixteenth century. Yet, photographs from only a century ago reveal a glacier much larger than it is today, this despite a slow and constant retreat from earlier times. Between 1590 and 1850, during the height of the Little Ice Age, the Rhone glacier was an even more impressive mass, readily accessible on horseback, with a huge terminal tongue spread out over the plain.

  In the sixteenth century, Chamonix, now a fashionable resort in the Arve River valley in sight of Mount Blanc, was an obscure, poverty-stricken parish in "a poor country of barren mountains never free of glaciers and frosts ... half the year there is no sun ... the corn is gathered in the snow ... and is so moldy it has to be heated in the oven." Even animals were said to refuse bread made from Chamonix wheat. The community was so poor that "no attorneys or lawyers [were] to be had." Avalanches, caused by low temperatures and deep snowfall, were a constant hazard. In 1575/76 conditions were so bad that a visiting farm laborer described the village as "a place covered with glaciers ... often the fields are entirely swept away and the wheat blown into the woods and on to the glaciers." The ice flow was so close to the fields that it threatened crops and caused occasional floods. Today a barrier of rocks separates the same farmland from a much shrunken glacier. The high peaks and ice sheets were a magnificent sight. Traveler Barnard Combet, passing through Chamonix in 1580, wrote that the mountains "are white with lofty glaciers, which even spread almost to the ... plain in at least three places."

  On June 24, 1584, another traveler, Benigne Poissonet, was drinking wine chilled with ice in Besancon in the Jura. He was told that the ice came from a natural refrigerator nearby, a cave called the Froidiere de Chaux. "Burning with desire to see this place filled with ice in the height of the summer," Poissonet was led through the forest along a narrow path to a huge, dark cave opening. He drew his sword and advanced into its depths, "as long and wide as a big room, all paved with ice, and with crystal-clear water ... running in a number of small streams, and forming small clear fountains in which I washed and drank greedily." When he looked upward, he saw great ice stalactites hanging from the roof threatening to crush him at any moment. The cave was a busy place. Every night peasants arrived with carts to load with blocks of ice for Besan4on's wine cellars. Another summer visitor, a century later, reported a row of mule carts waiting to take ice to neighboring towns. As late as the nineteenth century, Froidiere de Chaux was still being exploited industrially. As many as 192 tons of ice are said to have been removed from it in 1901. But after an extensive flood in 1910, the ice never reformed, as warmer conditions caused the glacier to retreat. No ice stalactites hang from the roof of the cavern today.

  The glacial advance continued. In 1589 the Allalin glacier near Visp to the east descended so low that it blocked the Saas valley, forming a lake. The moraine broke a few months later, sending water cascading down the stream bed below the glacier, which had to be restored at great expense. Seven years later, in June 1595, the Gietroz glacier in the Pennine Alps pressed inexorably into the bed of the Dranse River. Seventy people died when floods submerged the town of Martigny. As recently as 1926, a beam in a house in nearby Bagnes bore an inscription: "Maurice Olliet had this house built in 1595, the year Bagnes was flooded by the Gietroz glacier."

  By 1594 to 1598, the Ruitor glacier on the Italian side of the Alps had advanced more than a kilometer beyond its late twentieth-century front. The glacier blocked the lake at its foot. In summer, a channel under the ice would release catastrophic floods over the valleys downstream. After four summer floods, the local people called in expert water engineers, who proposed risky strategies: either diverting the lake overflow away through a rock-cut tunnel or blocking the channel under the ice with wood and stone for a vast sum. Tenders were invited, but, hardly surprisingly, there were no takers.

  In 1599/1600, the Alpine glaciers pushed downslope more than ever before or since. In Chamonix alone, "the glaciers of the Arve and other rivers ruined and spoiled one hundred and ninety-five journaux of land in divers parts."14 Houses were destroyed by advancing ice in neighboring communities: "The village of Le Bois was left uninhabited because of the glaciers." If contemporary accounts are to be relied upon, the ice advanced daily.

  Near Le Bois, the Met de Glace glacier swept over small hills that protected nearby villages and hung over nearby slopes. The villages of Les Tines and Le Chatelard were under constant threat from glacial seracs (ice pinnacles) and were inundated with glacial meltwater summer after summer. Ten or fifteen years later, the government official Nicolas de Crans visited the village, "where there are still about six houses, all uninhabited save two, in which live some wretched women and children. ... Above and adjoining the village, there is a great and horrible glacier of great and incalculable volume which can promise nothing but the destruction of the houses and lands which still remain." Eventually, the village was abandoned.

  The advances continued. In 1616, de Crans inspected the hamlet of La Rosiere, threatened by a "great and grim glacier," which hurled huge boulders onto the fields below. "The great glacier of La Rosiere every now and then goes bounding and thrashing or descending. . . . There have been destroyed forty-three journaux [of land] with nothing but stones and little woods of small value, and eight houses, seven barns, and five little granges have been entirely ruined and destroyed." The Met de Glace and Argentiere glaciers, the latter adjace
nt to La Rosiere, were at least a kilometer longer in 1600 than they are today.

  Throughout Europe, the years from 1560 to 1600 were cooler and stormier, with late wine harvests and considerably stronger winds than those of the twentieth century. Climate change became a highly significant factor in fluctuating food prices. Wine production slumped in Switzerland, lower Hungary, and parts of Austria between 1580 and 1600. Austria's wines had such a low sugar content from the cold conditions and were so expensive that much of the population switched to beer drinking. The revenues of the Hapsburg economy suffered greatly as a result. Deliveries of mice and moles killed for money dropped sharply after 1560, not to rise again until the seventeenth century. The Reverend Daniel Schaller, pastor of Stendal in the Prussian Alps, wrote: "There is no real constant sunshine, neither a steady winter nor summer; the earth's crops and produce do not ripen, are no longer as healthy as they were in bygone years. The fruitfulness of all creatures and of the world as a whole is receding; fields and grounds have tired from bearing fruits and even become impoverished, thereby giving rise to the increase of prices and famine, as is heard in towns and villages from the whining and lamenting among the farmers."15

  As climatic conditions deteriorated, a lethal mix of misfortunes descended on a growing European population. Crops failed and cattle perished by diseases caused by abnormal weather. Famine followed famine bringing epidemics in their train, bread riots and general disorder brought fear and distrust. Witchcraft accusations soared, as people accused their neighbors of fabricating bad weather. Lutheran orthodoxy called the cold and deep snowfall on Leipzig in 1562 a sign of God's wrath at human sin, but the church's bulwark against accusations of witchcraft began to crumble when climatic shifts caused poor harvests, food dearths, and cattle diseases. Sixty-three women were burned to death as witches in the small town of Wisensteig in Germany in 1563 at a time of intense debate over the authority of God over the weather. Witch panics erupted periodically after the 1560s. Between 1580 and 1620, more than 1,000 people were burned to death for witchcraft in the Bern region alone. Witchcraft accusations reached a height in England and France in the severe weather years of 1587 and 1588. Almost invariably, a frenzy of prosecutions coincided with the coldest and most difficult years of the Little Ice Age, when people demanded the eradication of the witches they held responsible for their misfortunes. As scientists began to seek natural explanations for climatic phenomena, witchcraft receded slowly into the background. Only God or nature were responsible for the climate, and the former could be aroused to great wrath at human sins. Today, our ecological sins seem to have overtaken our spiritual transgressions as the cause of climatic change.16