ABSTRACT
Almost twenty years ago, several colleagues and I were discussing Geoffrey Parker and Lesley Smith’s then recently published volume on the ‘SeventeenthCentury Crisis’, when a specialist in Byzantine history told us that in his opinion at least, Parker, Smith, and the others who had contributed to their jointly edited work had got it all wrong. The really important ‘general crisis’ in pre-modern times, he believed, had occurred not in the seventeenth century but, rather, in the fourteenth.1 As he went on to discuss the impact of climatic change, food shortages, epidemic disease, monetary fluctuations, and military operations on fourteenth-century Europe and the Middle East, I began to think about some of the great and terrible events that had occurred in East Asian history during that same century: the fall of the Kamakura Shogunate (1185-1330s) and the political turmoil of the Northern and Southern Dynasties (Nambokuchō) period (1336-92) in Japan; the economic and military disasters surrounding the fall of the Mongol Yüan dynasty (1279-1368) in China; and the food shortages, ‘Japanese pirate’ (wakō) raids, and civil wars that paved the way for the founding of the Yi dynasty (1392-1910) in Korea. In subsequent readings I added economic and political strife in fourteenth-century Southeast Asia, the decline of the Delhi Sultanate in India, the collapse of the Ilkhanate (1256-1335) in Persia, and the destructive rise of Timur (1336-1405) in Transoxania. Surely a case could be made, I came to think, for a ‘General Crisis of the Fourteenth Century’, one much broader in scope than even our Byzantine specialist had been considering.2
