ABSTRACT
Most people in seventeenth-century Europe were uncertain whether, in the following year, they would be short of food. It depended most obviously on the weather; and behind its erratic fluctuations the weather was on the whole getting worse. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth century the continent and the Atlantic Ocean had been warmer than in most earlier ages. Since then average temperatures had been falling to levels lower than any since the last Ice Age. Winters were colder; summers were wetter; devastating storms were more frequent. Evidence for this is necessarily indirect. It includes the dates of harvests, the growth of trees (‘dendrochronology’), and the advance of alpine glaciers into the valleys. Reports of the freezing of the Thames and the Baltic Sound seem to confirm the unprecedented cold, though the state of rivers could be altered by other factors, such as the bridges that limit the inflow of salt tides. Exactly how the weather affected agriculture is a complex problem: grain harvests depend less on averages than on rain and sun at the right times. What is certain is that crop-failures hit large parts of the continent simultaneously. There was one around 1649, another in 1660 and 1661, and the worst of all in the 1690s. Local failures were frequent, such as those in Russia in 1601–03, France in 1629–30, and Spain in 1677. In most places two successive seasons of exceptionally bad weather were enough to make the difference between a small surplus and a frightening dearth. What caused climatic fluctuation is still a largely unanswered question. One suggestion is that the worst weather coincided with periods of minimum sunspot activity – which was observed well enough for detailed comparisons. (Historians have not yet been expected to explain what affected the sunspots.) Whatever the natural causes of scarcity, it was human failures that shaped their effects. European agriculture was feeding more people than ever before; but by the standards even of the next century it was wasting the resources of the land.
