Cold and hunger. How Russia survived the Little Ice Age. Climate in Europe during the Little Ice Age Famine 1601-1603 consequences
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May hurricanes and June snows make us talk a lot about the weather more than ever. Although the climate in Russia is intended, first of all, to destroy the enemy, this year it goes beyond all limits, and, moreover, in peacetime.
But this would not be so bad if the June frosts did not evoke in everyone who knows Russian history well an alarming feeling of déjà vu. It was with such summer frosts in 1601 that the terrible Russian Troubles began, which lasted more than a decade and brought untold disasters to the Russian people and state.
“A frost in the middle of summer and even a crop failure alone cannot push a society into a social catastrophe.”
There were torrential rains throughout the summer of 1601, destroying the harvest, and then in July " a great scum came and every living thing and every vegetable froze and there was a great famine", the Moscow River was covered with ice. In August it rained again, and in September snow fell and “ all the labor of human affairs perished, and in the fields and in the gardens and in the oak groves all the fruit of the earth».
A terrible three-year famine began; the poor ate cats, dogs, and mice. “Linden leaf, birch bark, wormwood and quinoa - peasant food” – spoke among the people. Soon, a terrible cholera epidemic was added to the famine, and, in total, they claimed 120 thousand lives in Moscow alone, and in total “ a third of the kingdom of Moscow died out».
Since 1603, the famine began to subside, but a situation arose repeatedly when “ In Moscow, in the middle of summer, great snow fell and there was frost, we rode in sleighs.”
The French mercenary in the Russian service, Jacques Margeret, painted such a terrifying picture in his notes about his years of service in Muscovy:
“In 1601 that great famine began, which lasted three years; a measure of grain, which previously sold for fifteen soles, was sold for three rubles, which is almost twenty livres.
During these three years, things were done so monstrous that they seem incredible, for it was quite common to see how a husband left his wife and children, a wife killed her husband, a mother killed her children in order to eat them.
I also witnessed how four women living in the neighborhood, abandoned by their husbands, agreed that one would go to the market to buy a cart of firewood, having done this, she would promise to pay the peasant in the house; but when, having unloaded the firewood, he entered the hut to receive payment, he was strangled by these women and placed there where he could be preserved in the cold, waiting until his horse was eaten by them first; when this was discovered, they admitted to what they had done and that the body of this peasant was the third.
In a word, it was such a great famine that, not counting those who died in other cities of Russia, more than one hundred and twenty thousand people died of hunger in the city of Moscow; they were buried in three designated places outside the city, which was taken care of by order and at the expense of the emperor, even the shrouds for burial...
This famine significantly reduced Russia’s strength and the emperor’s income.”
Humanity was dominated, in the words of the French historian Fernand Braudel, by the “biological old order.” Agricultural productivity was too low, people's dependence on nature was too high, and sanitary conditions were monstrous. As a result, climate change - cooling and rising humidity - created an initial background of instability, which was intensified by wars, rebellions and epidemics that devastated entire regions.
The climatic situation of the 14th–18th centuries in Europe is designated by scientists as the “Little Ice Age” (a particularly strong climate change occurred precisely at the end of the 16th–beginning of the 17th century).
The temperature dropped to the point that in winter the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits, connecting the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, froze. It was because of the onset of ice in the Atlantic that America, once discovered by the Vikings, “closed.” Hunger strikes and epidemics in this era are a widespread phenomenon.
Not understanding the nature of long-term climate fluctuations, people blamed other people for crop failures; the peak of the “witch hunt” occurred at the turn of the 16th–17th centuries. And one of the reactions to the terrible crop failures that hit primarily Central Europe was the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which lasted much longer than the Time of Troubles in Rus' and turned Germany into ruins.
However, was it really only the severe weather that was to blame for the social catastrophe and collapse of society?
One can doubt this. The study by S.I. Barash, “The History of Crop Failures and Bad Weather in Europe,” presents the climatic chronicle of Western and Eastern Europe for almost two millennia, up to 1600.
The data from this study provide no evidence to suggest that the cold of 1601 was the final blow of a long cycle of frost and bad weather comparable to the Little Ice Age. If in Western Europe the entire second half of the 16th century was indeed an alternation of extremely harsh winters and rainy, cold summers, then the East of Europe was characterized by an alternation of “ice” years (1562–1568) and periods when the enemy of the peasant was not frost and rain , and drought (1582–1598). Moreover, the year 1599 was exceptionally productive, although it was replaced by a cold, wet and unstable year 1600.
But such a short series of bad years in and of themselves could not, of course, lead to such a large-scale catastrophe. It was not a matter of climate, but of the social crisis of Russia in the second half of the 16th century, which S. A. Nefedov drew attention to in his “History of Russia”.
The components of this crisis were the unsuccessful Livonian War, the devastating Crimean Tatar invasion of 1571 and the burning of Moscow, the actual civil war into which the activities of the Oprichnina resulted - and the significant increase in taxes associated with these wars, which caused a general flight of peasants from the land of the landowners (some of the peasants were exported to the estates of the guardsmen, part went to the monastery lands).
This, in turn, prompted government measures to enslave those who did not escape and a sharp increase in economic pressure on them from the ruling classes.
Nefedov suggests that in the years 1567–1572 Russia was covered by an eco-social catastrophe - famine, pestilence, invasions, unrest, and scattering of the population. It was the consequences of this disaster that came back to haunt us at the beginning of the 17th century.
Let me suggest that on top of all these catastrophic factors there was another one - Russia, paradoxically, paid for its great achievements.The conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan, the establishment of abatis along the borders of the Steppe, led to the expansion of the habitat of the Russian people and uprooted a significant number of the population, who voluntarily moved to the newly acquired Volga outskirts and the border of the Wild Field.
The settlers stopped cultivating the land at their old address, so that in the Moscow district only 7% of the landowners' arable land was cultivated, in Kolomenskoye 25%. And at the new address, they were not yet included in the tax system, did not work for the landowners, but in significant numbers joined the ranks of the Cossacks and other categories of free people.
Running away from inflated taxes, the peasants weakened the noble militia, which was the main support of the government in the 15th–16th centuries, thereby preparing for the relative military weakness of the government center during the Time of Troubles.
Boris Godunov's attempt to cope with the economic and managerial crisis led to disaster. Tsar Boris not only abolished the right of peasants to leave the landowners, but also actually abandoned the clear fixation of peasant duties, giving the landowners the right to increase them at their discretion. Of course, this further increased the hardships of the peasants, for whom the only choice was between extreme poverty and flight.
By itself, the cold of 1601 would not have caused a general catastrophe, but in combination with poverty, lack of supplies and the weakening of the armed forces of the nobility, it unleashed the full mechanism of social anomie.
The crop failure was not universal. There was bread in the country. But rich and influential people decided to take advantage of the famine in order to fill their coffers with money. " Talking among themselves, for their own gain, although they were getting rich at the price of grain, they locked up all the grain and hid it, and for their own profits raised the price of grain to a great price“, says Boris Godunov’s letter to the authorities of Solya Vychegda.
The king, angry at the speculation, reports: “ We, the Great Sovereign Tsar and Grand Duke Boris Feodorovich of All Rus', Autocrat... with God's help and the Most Pure Mother of God, our Christian hopes through mercy and intercession, managing and maintaining our state lands for all people for peace and quiet, and benefits, and seeking for you all, everything useful to the people... they ordered in our reigning city of Moscow... and in all the cities of our royal support, grain buyers... to look for... and to see through firmly... so that from those buyers and not from any people alone, bread does not become more expensive.”
The Tsar orders the opening of state granaries, the governors to establish fixed grain prices and persecute speculators, allows peasants to move from landowner to landowner (in fact, he restores “St. George’s Day” - however, this measure was canceled due to the protest of the nobles), orders “ warm the poor and give bread in return" But…
God sent famine to our land,
The people howled, dying in agony;
I opened the granaries for them, I am gold
I scattered it for them, I found them jobs -
They were furious and cursed me!
And it cannot be said that these curses were completely groundless. Boris’s ill-conceived social policy, instead of alleviating the people’s suffering, only aggravated it, as Margeret mercilessly notes:
« The reason for such a large number of deaths in the city of Moscow is that Emperor Boris ordered that alms be distributed daily to all the poor, as many as there were, one Moscow coin to each, that is, about seven Turkish deniers, so that, having heard about the emperor’s generosity, everyone fled there, although some of them still had something to live on; and when they arrived in Moscow, they could not live on the said seven deniers, although on major holidays and on Sundays they received dening, that is, double, and, falling into even greater weakness, they died in the said city or on the roads, returning back.
In the end, Boris, having learned that everyone was fleeing to Moscow to die in Moscow, and that the country was little by little beginning to be depopulated, ordered nothing more to be given to them; from that time on, they began to be found on the roads dead and half-dead from the cold and hunger they had endured, which was an extraordinary sight.
The amount that Emperor Boris spent on the poor is incredible; not counting the expenses that he incurred in Moscow, there was not a city throughout Russia where he did not send more or less to feed the said beggars. I know that he sent twenty thousand rubles to Smolensk with one of my acquaintances. His good trait was that he usually gave alms generously and gave a lot of wealth to the clergy, who in turn were all for him.”
The popular reaction to the famine was sabotage, refusal to obey and outright riots. One of the Tatar princes, who received a village in Kashinsky district for their service, complained: “ In that village, the peasants don’t listen to him and don’t carry supplies to him to Moscow and don’t give him carts and don’t pay rent, and they plow little arable land of their own free will.».
However, a more terrible phenomenon than the peasant protest was the mass movement of robbers, primarily starving boyar slaves trained in military affairs.
The robbers blocked all roads to Moscow, effectively blocking the supply of bread, which, first of all, led to the death of 120 thousand Muscovites. And a large gang of Khlopok approached the capital itself in the fall of 1603 - they managed to defeat it only after a real battle, in which the governor Ivan Basmanov died (Soviet historians often praised this gang as a “popular uprising”, forgetting that its robberies struck, first of all, by people).
Finally, the most widespread reaction to the famine was, as usual in this period of Russian history, the departure of people from their homes, an attempt to move to where there was “warmth and apples.”
They quickly sold their house and things to their neighbors and set off on their journey to the southwest, – to the Chernihiv region and in the border area with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. And there were already Cossacks living there, dissatisfied with Boris Godunov’s attempts to limit their freedoms. In addition, Godunov, in order to somehow calm down the slave robberies, ordered all the slaves whom the masters did not want to feed to be released. They turned into free people and also moved to the South-West.
The southern borderland of Russia and Poland turned into a powder keg, where fugitives, free people, and the remnants of defeated robbers accumulated. It was only necessary to strike a spark for this flammable material to ignite.
The famine stopped in 1604, life began to improve, but then False Dmitry appeared in the southwestern lands - and the Troubles broke out, putting Russia on the brink of destruction.
At the initial moment of the Troubles of the 17th century, we see all the elements of social anomie.
The rich are trying to use hunger to their advantage, bleeding the grain market dry and starting speculation. The peasants refuse to sow arable land beyond what they need for food, and then go on the run. The gentlemen refuse to feed the slaves, the slaves begin to commit robbery, intercept carts with bread and thereby condemn those who are waiting for this bread to starvation.
Boris Godunov, who made great but unsuccessful efforts to stop the growth of anomie, essentially gives up - first he allows the peasants to leave their masters, weakening social ties, then he prohibits them again - further embittering the people. Dismisses hungry slaves, which only adds fuel to the fire. Finally, the tsar himself, who was both politically and mystically the central figure of the social order of Rus', breaks down morally and psychologically - he stops leaving the palace, accepting complaints and petitions, and when petitioners turn to him, they are driven away with sticks.
Instead of his former generosity and attempts to cope with hunger, Boris shows stinginess, personally checking every evening to see if the pantries are well locked. His mind begins to be entangled with fears, knowing for sure that Tsarevich Dimitri, whom the Pretender pretends to be, is dead, but still begins to doubt it. Already prone to superstitions, Boris begins to spend most of his time with healers, warlocks and witches, trying to find out the future and somehow deceive fate, since he is sure that for him “there is no bliss in the future life.” Godunov’s personal and historical drama is, among other things, a drama of self-destruction.
There were, of course, opposite examples, those who, with dedication and piety, saved human lives and preserved the integrity of the social fabric, like the landowner Juliania Osorina, glorified as the Holy Righteous Juliania Lazarevskaya. Her biography, compiled by her son Callistratus, is one of the most piercing texts in old Russian literature, giving a vivid picture of the struggle of a person striving to live according to God’s law against hunger.
“At the same time, there was a severe famine throughout the Russian Land - such that many, out of need, ate nasty animals and human flesh, and an innumerable number of people died out of hunger. And in the blessed house there was an extreme shortage of food and all supplies, for her all-natural life had not sprouted from the ground. Her horses and cattle perished.
She begged her children and servants not to encroach on anything that belonged to others and not to indulge in theft, but what cattle, clothes, and dishes were still left, she sold them all for bread and thus fed her servants and gave enough alms to those asking. Even in her poverty, she did not abandon the custom of giving alms, and she did not send a single beggar from those who came empty-handed on the road.
When she reached extreme poverty, so that not a single grain was left in her house, but even then she was not embarrassed, but placed all her trust in God...
And even greater poverty increased in her house. Then she called her servants and told them: “This famine is surrounding us, you see for yourself. So if any of you wants to stay with me, be patient, and whoever cannot, let him set free and not exhaust himself for my sake.” Some, judging kindly, promised to endure with her, while others left. She sent them away with thanksgiving and prayer, not having any anger towards them.
And she ordered the remaining servants to collect an herb called quinoa and tree bark and make bread from it. And that’s how she ate herself and fed her children and servants. And her bread was sweet through prayer. And no one in her house fainted from hunger. She fed the poor with this bread and, without feeding them, did not let the beggar leave the house. And at that time there were no number of beggars.
And her neighbors said to them: “Why are you entering Julian’s house? She herself is dying of hunger.” And the beggars answered them: “They went around many villages and accepted clean bread, but they didn’t get enough of the sweetness, like this widow’s bread is sweet.” Many didn’t even know her name. Her neighbors, rich in bread, sent her to her house to ask for bread, testing her, and also testified that her bread was very sweet. And they were surprised at this, saying among themselves: “Her servants are good at baking bread.” But they did not understand that through prayer her bread is sweet.
She could have prayed to God so that her house would not become poor, but she did not resist God’s providence, enduring gratefully, knowing that through patience the Kingdom of Heaven is gained. Having endured two years in such poverty, she was not sad, not embarrassed, did not grumble, and did not sin with her lips in madness against God, and was not exhausted from poverty, but was more cheerful than before.”
It is characteristic that this feat of Juliania Osorina took place in the Nizhny Novgorod land, that is, exactly where in the following years social forces would emerge that would crush the unrest.And this, of course, is not accidental either - if the Russian center and north became impoverished under the influence of the crisis and the dispersal of the population, the southwest turned into combustible material, then the Volga region, on the contrary, grew demographically and became stronger economically.
The effect of expanding Russian borders and resettlement gradually strengthened, and, as a result, people from the Volga had the strength and means to gather a militia and heal the Russian state tormented by the Time of Troubles.
What conclusion can be drawn from this story of cold and hunger?
Let's hope it's optimistic. By themselves, frost in the middle of summer and even crop failure cannot push a society into a social catastrophe. It took a long accumulation of unfavorable social and economic factors to deal a truly crushing blow to society.
In conditions of real stability and seemingly renewed economic growth, the social fabric is strong enough to withstand the “hypothermia.”
Although this may have an effect on the social psychology of the residents of the capitals caught in the cold spell, and indeed, not in the best way. People are exhausted and tired, and since the weather does not allow for proper rest, this will begin to lead to psychological breakdowns. Not so much now, however, but in the winter and spring of next year. And we should be prepared for this increased social nervousness.
As for the harvest, the “post-sanctions” agricultural recovery creates additional strength for our country in the field of food security. Now it seems clear to everyone how reasonable the introduction of counter-sanctions was, which led to a real food renaissance in Russia and freed us from dependence on food imports.
However, in order to be truly stable, old Russia systematically fought throughout the 17th-18th centuries for the Wild Field, gradually turning it into Novorossiya. Russia needed and still needs areas where farming is at least a little less risky. The fact that at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries these achievements were lost is not an illusory geopolitical catastrophe for our country.
Reading the article will take: 8 min.Summer is a period of vacations, midday heat, fruit abundance, ice cream and soft drinks. Time for T-shirts, shorts, miniskirts and beach bikinis. Only in the middle of the second decade of the 19th century there was no summer. Severe winters gave way to snowy springs and turned into snowy-cold “summer” months. Three years without summer, three years without harvest, three years without hope... Three years that changed humanity forever.
Irish families try to escape flooding
It all started in 1812 - two volcanoes, La Soufriere (Saint Vincent Island, Leeward Islands) and Awu (Sangir Island, Indonesia) “turned on”. The volcanic relay was continued in 1813 by Suwanosejima (Tokara Island, Japan) and in 1814 by Mayon (Luzon Island, Philippines). According to scientists, the activity of four volcanoes reduced the average annual temperature on the planet by 0.5-0.7 o C and caused serious, albeit local (in the region of their location) damage to the population. However, the final cause of the mini-version of the Ice Age of 1816-1818 was the Indonesian Tambora.
Eruption of Mount Tambora 1815
On April 10, 1815, the Tambora volcano began to erupt on the island of Sumbawa (Indonesia) - within a few hours, the island with an area of 15,448 km 2 was completely covered with a layer of volcanic ash one and a half meters thick. The volcano ejected at least 100 km 3 of ash into the Earth's atmosphere. Tambor's activity (7 points out of a maximum 8 on the volcanic explosiveness index) led to a decrease in the average annual temperature by another 1-1.5 o C - the ash rose into the upper layer of the atmosphere and began to reflect the sun's rays, acting like a thick gray curtain on a window in sunny day. Modern scientists call the eruption of the Indonesian stratovolcano Tambora the largest in the last 2000 years.
However, high volcanic activity is not everything. Our star, the Sun, added fuel to the fire. Years of intense saturation of the Earth's atmosphere with volcanic ash coincided with a period of minimal solar activity (the Dalton minimum), which began around 1796 and ended in 1820. At the beginning of the 19th century, our planet received less solar energy than before or later. The lack of solar heat reduced the average annual temperature on the Earth's surface by another 1-1.5 o C.
Average annual temperatures in 1816-1818 (based on materials from the website cru.uea.ac.uk)
Due to the small amount of thermal energy from the Sun, the waters of the seas and oceans cooled by about 2 o C, which completely changed the usual water cycle in nature and the wind rose on the continents of the Northern Hemisphere. Also, according to the testimony of English captains, many ice hummocks appeared off the east coast of Greenland, which had never happened before. The conclusion suggests itself - in 1816 (perhaps even earlier - in the middle of 1815) there was a deviation of the warm ocean current Gulf Stream, warming Europe.
Active volcanoes, a weakly active Sun, as well as cooling of ocean and sea waters reduced the temperature of every month, every day in 1816 by 2.5-3 o C. It would seem - nonsense, some three degrees. But in an unindustrialized human society, these three “cold” degrees caused a terrible catastrophe on a global scale.
Flood on the outskirts of Paris
Europe. In 1816 and the two following years, European countries, still recovering from the Napoleonic Wars, became the worst place on Earth - cold, hunger, epidemics and severe fuel shortages hit them. For two years there was no harvest at all. In England, Germany and France, feverishly buying grain all over the world (mainly from the Russian Empire), hunger riots took place one after another. Crowds of French, Germans and British broke into grain warehouses and carried out all supplies. Grain prices soared tenfold. Against the backdrop of constant riots, mass arson and looting, the Swiss authorities introduced a state of emergency and a curfew in the country.
Instead of warmth, the summer months brought hurricanes, endless rain and snowstorms. Large rivers in Austria and Germany overflowed their banks and flooded large areas. A typhus epidemic broke out. In three years without a summer, over 100 thousand people died in Ireland alone. The desire to survive was the only thing that motivated the population of Western Europe in the years 1816-1818. Tens of thousands of citizens of England, Ireland, Scotland, France and Holland sold property for next to nothing, abandoned everything that was not sold and fled across the ocean to the American continent.
Farmer in a field with dead corn in the US state of Vermont
North America. In March 1816, winter did not end, it was snowing and there were frosts. In April-May, America was covered with endless rains and hail, and in June-July - frosts. The corn harvest in the northern states of the United States was hopelessly lost, and attempts to grow at least some grain in Canada proved fruitless. Newspapers vying with each other promised famine, farmers slaughtered livestock en masse. Canadian authorities voluntarily opened grain warehouses to the population. Thousands of residents of the American northern lands moved south - for example, the state of Vermont was practically deserted.
China. The country's provinces, especially Yunnan, Heilongjiang, Anhui and Jiangxi, were hit by the powerful cyclone. It rained endlessly for weeks on end, and on summer nights the rice fields were frozen. For three years in a row, every summer in China was not summer at all - rain and frost, snow and hail. In the northern provinces, buffaloes died from hunger and cold. Unable to grow rice due to sudden harsh climate and floods in the Yangtze River valley, famine struck the country.
Famine in the provinces of the Chinese Qing Empire
India(at the beginning of the 19th century - a colony of Great Britain (East India Company)). The territory of the country, for which monsoons (winds blowing from the ocean) and heavy rains are common in summer, was under the influence of severe drought - there were no monsoons. For three years in a row, drought at the end of summer was replaced by weeks of rain. A sharp change in climate contributed to the mutation of Vibrio cholerae - a severe cholera epidemic began in Bengal, covering half of India and quickly moving to the north.
Russia(Russian empire). Three devastating and difficult years for the countries of Europe, North America and Asia on the territory of Russia passed surprisingly smoothly - neither the authorities nor the population of the country simply noticed anything. On the contrary, all three years - 1816, 1817 and 1818 - the summer in Russia went much better than in other years. Warm, moderately dry weather contributed to good grain harvests, which were vying with each other for the cash-strapped countries of Europe and North America. The cooling of European seas, along with a possible change in the direction of the Gulf Stream, has only improved climatic conditions in Russia.
Emperor Nicholas I stops the cholera riot in Moscow
However, the echo of the events of three years without a summer still affected Russia. In 1830-1831, two waves of cholera epidemic swept across the Russian Empire, a new type of which emerged in 1816 in Indian Bengal. Expeditionary troops returned to Russia, having participated in the Asian wars with the Persians and Turks for several years. Along with them came cholera, from which 197,069 citizens of the Russian Empire died in two years (official data), and a total of 466,457 people fell ill.
Three years without summer and the events that developed during this period influenced many generations of earthlings, including you, readers of the swagor.com blog. See for yourself.
Dracula and Frankenstein. A holiday on Lake Geneva (Switzerland) in May-June 1816 of a group of friends, including George Gordon, Lord Byron and Mary Shelley, was completely ruined by gloomy weather and constant rain. Due to bad weather, the friends were forced to spend their evenings in the fireplace room of the Villa Diodati, rented by Lord Byron during his vacation.
Adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
They amused themselves by reading aloud stories about ghosts (the book was called “Phantasmagorina or Stories about ghosts, phantoms, spirits, etc.”). Also discussed were the experiments of the poet Erasmus Darwin, who in the 18th century was rumored to have studied the effect of weak electric current on the organs of a dead human body. Byron invited everyone to write a short story on a supernatural theme - there was nothing to do anyway. It was then that Mary Shelley came up with the idea of a novel about Dr. Frankenstein - she later admitted that she dreamed of the plot after one of the evenings at Villa Diodati.
Lord Byron told a short "supernatural" story about Augustus Darwell, who fed on the blood of the women he loved. Doctor John Polidori, hired by the Baron to care for his health, carefully remembered the plot of the vampire story. Later, when Byron fired Polidori, he wrote a short story about Lord Ruthven, calling it "The Vampire". Polidori deceived English publishers - he stated that the vampire story was written by Byron and the lord himself asked him to bring the manuscript to England for publication. The publication of the story in 1819 became the subject of litigation between Byron, who denied the authorship of “The Vampire,” and Polidori, who argued the opposite. One way or another, it was the winter summer of 1816 that became the reason for all subsequent ones.
John Smith Jr.
Mormons. In 1816, John Smith Jr. was 11 years old. Due to summer frosts and the threat of famine, his family was forced to leave their farm in Vermont in 1817 and settled in the town of Palmyra, located in western New York. Since this region was extremely popular with various kinds of preachers (mild climate, abundance of flocks and donations), young John Smith completely immersed himself in the study of religion and near-religious rituals. Years later, at the age of 24, Smith published the Book of Mormon, later founding the Mormon religious sect in Illinois.
Superphosphate fertilizer. The Darmstadt pharmacist's son Justus von Liebig survived three hungry years without a summer when he was 13-16 years old. In his youth, he was interested in firecrackers and actively experimented with “fulminate” mercury (mercuric fulminate), and from 1831, remembering the harsh years of the “volcanic winter,” he began in-depth research in organic chemistry. Von Liebig developed superphosphate fertilizers that significantly increased grain yields. By the way, when Indian cholera came to Europe, it happened in the 50s of the 19th century, it was Justus von Liebig who developed the first effective cure for this disease (the name of the drug is Fleischinfusum).
English fleet attacks Chinese warships
Opium Wars. Three years without a summer has hit Chinese farmers in the country's southern provinces, who traditionally grow rice, hard. Threatened by famine, farmers in southern China decided to grow opium poppies because they were unpretentious and guaranteed to generate income. Although the emperors of the Qing dynasty categorically prohibited the cultivation of opium poppies, farmers ignored this ban (they bribed officials). By 1820, the number of opium addicts in China had risen from the previous two million to seven million, and Emperor Daoguang banned the import of opium into China, smuggled in exchange for silver from the colonies of Great Britain and the United States. In response, England, France and the United States started a war in China, the goal of which was the unlimited import of opium into the Qing Empire.
Bicycle trolley by Karl von Dres
Bike. Observing the difficult situation with oats for horses in 1816, the German inventor Karl von Dres decided to build a new type of transport. In 1817, he created the first prototype of modern bicycles and motorcycles - two wheels, a frame with a seat and a T-shaped handlebar. True, von Dres's bicycle did not have pedals - the rider was asked to push off from the ground and slow down when turning with his feet. Karl von Dres is best known as the inventor of the railway handcar, which is named after him.
Boldino autumn A.S. Pushkin. Alexander Sergeevich spent three autumn months of 1830 in the village of Boldino not of his own free will - because of the cholera quarantine established in Moscow by the authorities. It is to the cholera vibrio, which mutated during an unusual drought, which was abruptly replaced by continuous autumn rains and caused a flood of the Ganges River, and 14 years later brought into the Russian Empire, that descendants “owe” the appearance of Pushkin’s brightest works - “Eugene Onegin”, “The Tale of the Priest and His worker Balde”, etc.
This is the story of the three years without summer, which occurred in the early 19th century and were caused by a number of factors, including the eruption of the Tambora stratovolcano. It remains to remind you that the seven-point Tambora is far from the most significant volcanic problem for earthlings. Unfortunately, there are much more dangerous volcanic objects on Earth -.
In About the cold summer of 1601, which ended in Famine and Troubles and why we are not in danger of repeating it
In connection with the monstrous weather, the June snow and the complete absence of summer, I am not alone in remembering 1601, when summer frosts led to famine, which, in turn, caused the great Troubles. Will something like this happen now? It’s scary.
On this occasion, I wrote an outline of the events of that famine, showing that there was a specific combination of social circumstances, without which the cold summer would not have caused any famine.
Read it - there's a lot of interesting stuff there. Especially about my beloved Juliania Lazarevskaya.
Throughout the summer of 1601 there were torrential rains that destroyed the harvest, and then in July “a great frost came and every living thing and every vegetable froze and there was a great famine,” the Moscow River was covered with ice. In August the rains began again, and in September snow fell and “all the labor of human affairs and in the fields and in the gardens and in the oak forests every fruit of the earth perished.”
A terrible three-year famine began; the poor ate cats, dogs, and mice. “Linden leaf, birch bark, wormwood and quinoa are peasant food,” people said. Soon, a terrible cholera epidemic was added to the famine, and, in total, they claimed 120 thousand lives in Moscow alone, and in total “a third of the kingdom of Moscow died out.”
Since 1603, the famine began to decline, but a situation arose more than once when “in Moscow in the middle of the summer great snow fell and there was frost, we rode in sleighs”...
The climatic situation of the 14th–18th centuries in Europe is designated by scientists as the “Little Ice Age” (a particularly strong climate change occurred precisely at the end of the 16th–beginning of the 17th century).
The temperature dropped to the point that in winter the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits, connecting the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, froze. It was because of the onset of ice in the Atlantic that America, once discovered by the Vikings, “closed.” Hunger strikes and epidemics in this era are a widespread phenomenon...
However, was it really only the severe weather that was to blame for the social catastrophe and collapse of society?
One can doubt this. The study by S.I. Barash, “The History of Crop Failures and Bad Weather in Europe,” presents the climatic chronicle of Western and Eastern Europe for almost two millennia, up to 1600.
The data from this study provide no evidence to suggest that the cold of 1601 was the final blow of a long cycle of frost and bad weather comparable to the Little Ice Age. If in Western Europe the entire second half of the 16th century was indeed an alternation of extremely harsh winters and rainy, cold summers, then the East of Europe was characterized by an alternation of “ice” years (1562–1568) and periods when the enemy of the peasant was not frost and rain , and drought (1582–1598). Moreover, the year 1599 was exceptionally productive, although it was replaced by a cold, wet and unstable year 1600.
But such a short series of bad years in and of themselves could not, of course, lead to such a large-scale catastrophe. It was not a matter of climate, but of the social crisis of Russia in the second half of the 16th century, which S. A. Nefedov drew attention to in his “History of Russia”.
The components of this crisis were the unsuccessful Livonian War, the devastating Crimean Tatar invasion of 1571 and the burning of Moscow, the actual civil war into which the activities of the Oprichnina resulted - and the significant increase in taxes associated with these wars, which caused a general flight of peasants from the land of the landowners (some of the peasants were exported to the estates of the guardsmen, part went to the monastery lands).
This, in turn, prompted government measures to enslave those who did not escape and a sharp increase in economic pressure on them from the ruling classes.
Nefedov suggests that in 1567–1572 Russia was covered in an eco-social catastrophe - famine, pestilence, invasions, unrest, dispersal of the population. It was the consequences of this disaster that came back to haunt us at the beginning of the 17th century.
Let me suggest that on top of all these catastrophic factors there was another one - Russia, paradoxically, paid for its great achievements.
The conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan, the establishment of abatis along the borders of the Steppe, led to the expansion of the habitat of the Russian people and uprooted a significant number of the population, who voluntarily moved to the newly acquired Volga outskirts and the border of the Wild Field.
The settlers stopped cultivating the land at their old address, so that in the Moscow district only 7% of the landowners' arable land was cultivated, in Kolomenskoye 25%. And at the new address, they were not yet included in the tax system, did not work for the landowners, but in significant numbers joined the ranks of the Cossacks and other categories of free people.
Running away from inflated taxes, the peasants weakened the noble militia, which was the main support of the government in the 15th–16th centuries, thereby preparing for the relative military weakness of the government center during the Time of Troubles.
The Little Ice Age became a testing time for Europe and Russia. He showed that even a slight change in temperature can lead to irreversible consequences and radically change life.Why did it come?
Scientists are still arguing about the causes of the Little Ice Age. At one time it was believed that the Gulf Stream, the main “supplier of heat” to Europe, was to blame for everything. The slowdown of the current was indeed one of the reasons for the cooling, but only one of them.
According to a 1976 study published by John Eddy, there was reduced solar activity during the Little Ice Age. Also, scientists (in particular, Thomas Crowley) associate the sharp cooling that began in the 14th century with, on the contrary, increased volcanic activity. Massive eruptions release aerosols into the atmosphere, which scatter sunlight. This can lead to global dimming and cooling.
An important factor that turned the Little Ice Age into a cataclysm of global significance was that the processes that began with its beginning (decrease in agricultural activity, increase in forest area) led to the fact that carbon dioxide contained in the atmosphere began to be absorbed by the biosphere. This process also contributed to a decrease in temperature. In very simple terms, the larger the forest, the colder it is.
Consequences on a European scale
The Little Ice Age brought the most global changes to the life of Europe. From 1315 to 1317, the Great Famine in Europe caused almost a quarter of the population to die out. Between 1371 and 1791, there were 111 famine years in France alone.
The Little Ice Age changed the European market. England and Scotland could no longer compete with France in the wine market. Viticulture in northern Germany, England and Scotland ceased. Frosts even affected northern Italy, as both Dante and Petrarch wrote about.
The Little Ice Age also became a harbinger of the plague, which in Europe was dubbed the “Black Death.” This was due to the mass migration of rats, which, for the sake of survival, began to settle closer to people.
Hunger
The territory of modern Russia was also seriously affected by sudden climate change, although the Little Ice Age affected Russian lands somewhat later than Europe. The most difficult time was the 16th century.
Over the course of one century, grain prices in Russia have increased approximately eightfold - from three to four kopecks per quarter of rye to 27-29 kopecks.
The years 1548-1550, 1555-1556, 1558, 1560-1561, catastrophic and 1570-71 were difficult for Russia. The long period 1587-1591 was difficult. What is characteristic is that these same years are marked as the stages of the economic crisis of Russia in the 16th century, which caused the greatest demographic losses.
The consequences of the Little Ice Age are reflected in the chronicles. 1549 - “bread was expensive on the Dvina... and many people died of hunger, 200 and 300 people were put in one pit.” 1556 - Kholmogory “the bread did not arrive, in the fall they bought a quarter on the Dvina for 22 altyns,” “there was a famine on Ustyuz for 2 years, they ate fir and grass and bitch. And many people died." 1560/61 - “there was a great famine in Mozhaisk and Volok and in many other cities. Many, many people have dispersed from Mozhaisk and from Volok to Ryazan and Meshchera and to the lower cities of Nizhny Novgorod.”
Historians note that unfavorable changes began to come from the north. In the years 1500-1550, the population in the North-West decreased by 12-17%; in the 1550s, Novgorod Land suffered greatly. In the first half of the 1560s, desolation covered the western counties (Mozhaisk, Volokolamsk). By the 1570s, the crisis spread to the central and eastern regions.
The population decline according to payment records of the 1570-80s was 76.7% around Novgorod, 57.4% around Moscow. The figures of desolation in just two years of the catastrophic year reached 96% in Kolomna, 83% in Murom, in many places up to 80% of land was abandoned.
Plague
The severe harvest failure of 1570 was described by the foreign guardsman Heinrich Staden: “There was a great famine then; A man killed a man for a piece of bread. And in the courtyards of the Grand Duke in his basement villages, which provided maintenance for the palace, there were many thousands of stacks of unthreshed bread in sheaves. But he did not want to sell it to his subjects, and many thousands of people died in the country from hunger and were devoured by dogs.”
Following the harvest failure, a plague epidemic followed in 1571. The same Staden wrote: “In addition, Almighty God sent another great pestilence. A house or yard where the plague entered was immediately boarded up and anyone who died in it was buried in it; many died of starvation in their own homes or yards. And all the cities in the state, all the monasteries, towns and villages, all the country roads and high roads were occupied by outposts so that no one could pass to the other.
The plague was getting worse, and therefore large holes were dug in the fields around Moscow, and the corpses were dumped there without coffins, 200, 300, 400, 500 pieces in one pile. In the Moscow state, special churches were built along the main roads; They prayed daily that God would have mercy and turn the plague away from them.”
Population migration and growth of the Cossacks
In 1588, the English scientist Giles Fletcher visited Russia. In his book “Driving through Muscovy” he wrote: “So on the road to Moscow, between Vologda and Yaroslavl there are at least fifty villages, some half a mile long, others a whole mile long, completely abandoned, so that there is no not a single resident."
The Englishman explains this desolation by the oprichnina, but in relation to Vologda and Yaroslavl this explanation cannot be correct, since these were rich oprichnina regions. The conclusion suggests itself: the desolation of these lands was caused by crop failures.
Because of hunger and crop failures, people fled to the south and this migration was massive. It was during that period of time that the Crimean markets recorded a huge influx of Russian and “royal” slaves. Similar processes took place in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: there was an outflow of the population to the south and the growth of Cossack communities.
Also, the starving fled to the Trans-Volga region, to the Lower Volga, to the Yaik and Don - there the Cossack population began to grow rapidly after 1570
The outflow of population from the central regions caused more frequent raids of the Crimeans on Moscow. The troops of Devlet Gerey besieged Moscow several times, starting a severe fire in the city in 1571, which practically destroyed the city. Only the victory in 1572 at the Battle of Molodi saved Russia from enslavement.
The Great Famine, which began in 1601, was provoked by serious climatic deviations. The summer of 1601 was cold and damp, the rains did not stop for 10-12 weeks. The grain in the fields was not ripe. Due to need and hunger, the peasants began harvesting unripe grain, and frosts began in September. In some places, frosts were observed even earlier - at the end of July and mid-August. (Koretsky V.I. Formation of serfdom. P. 118--121.) With the onset of cold weather, the rains gave way to heavy snowfalls. Peasant fields and vegetable gardens were covered with deep snowdrifts. Since October, frosts and snowstorms have intensified. The Dnieper froze in the middle reaches and upper reaches, “and we drove along it like in the middle of winter.” In the cold, farmers made fires in the fields, raked snowdrifts and tried to save the remains of the crop. (PSRL. T. 32. P. 188.)
After a harsh winter, the warm spring of 1602 came. Winter crops sprouted where the fields were sown with old seeds. But in the middle of spring, as a chronicler from Southern Belarus wrote, a “great, terrible frost” struck and killed the grain and other plantings “in bloom.” (PSRL. T. 32. P. 188.) Having lost their winter crops, the villagers tried to re-sow the fields using “frozen rye” rescued from under the snow. However, new crops did not sprout - instead of rye, “the old crops were born: someone sowed a hundred measures of grain, and he gathered one measure...”. (Quoted from: Koretsky V.I. Formation of serfdom... P. 126)
In the spring of 1603, the greenery in the fields did not die. The summer was dry and hot. The year was favorable for agricultural work. But the peasants had long ago exhausted their grain reserves. They had no seeds, they had nothing to eat.
Judging by the records of eyewitnesses of that time, J. Marzharet and K. Bussov, who owned estates in the central counties and were knowledgeable about the grain trade, bread prices increased 25 times. (Marzharet Y. Notes. P. 188; Bussov K. Moscow Chronicle. P. 97.) Not only the poor, but also the middle strata of the population could not buy such expensive bread. Having exhausted food supplies, the starving people began to eat cats and dogs, and then began to eat grass and linden bark. Even cases of cannibalism were not uncommon. Starvation decimated the population throughout the country. Corpses littered the roads. In the cities they barely had time to take them out to the fields, where they were buried in large holes. (I. Massa “Brief news about Muscovy in the early 17th century.”, M., 1937.)
Some contemporaries tried to determine the total number of victims of the “great famine” in Russia. But even the government did not have accurate data on the number of deaths throughout the country. The “counting” of the dead was systematically carried out only within the capital. Specially assigned teams daily picked up corpses from the streets and buried them in huge mass graves. Tsar Boris ordered the dead to be dressed in government shrouds, and, apparently, the clerks kept count of the linen released from the treasury. “And in two summers and four months,” wrote Abraham Palitsyn, “who, by order of the Tsarev, counted 127,000 cellars in three poor women, only in one Moscow.” Yakov Marzharet also reports a similar figure - 120 thousand. (The Legend of Abraham Palitsyn. P. 106; PSRL. T. 14. P. 55; Marzharet Y. Notes. P. 188).
Tsar Boris Godunov tried to help overcome the famine by generously distributing money and bread to the poor, but this only aggravated the disaster, because, having learned about the mercy of the sovereign, crowds of people poured from all sides into Moscow; Those who could feed themselves locally also came here. The need in the capital increased even more, and Boris decided to stop this distribution. Speculation reigned in the country. Boris issued a strict order addressed to landowners to sell bread at half price. As Konrad Bussov wrote, Tsar Boris appealed to “princes, boyars and monasteries to take the people’s disaster to heart, put up their grain reserves and sell them somewhat cheaper than they were asking then...”. The royal messengers went to all parts of the country to write back to the treasury the old grain that was stored in stacks in the fields. Confiscated bread was sent to state granaries. To prevent the mass death of the poor, Godunov ordered “to open royal granaries in all cities and sell thousands of cades every day at half price.” (Petrey P. History of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. M., 1867. P. 193; Bussov K. Moscow Chronicle. P. 98.)
The long-awaited harvest (1604) put an end to the famine, but its consequences were extremely destructive for the entire nation. Famine hardened the population of cities and villages. Horrible robberies became commonplace. The robber gangs were composed mainly of slaves released by their masters during the famine. (Vladimir Boguslavsky "Slavic Encyclopedia. XVII century". M., OLMA-PRESS. 2004.) In such a situation in 1602-1603. Armed popular uprisings took place in Russia.