Fascinating. A comparative study of the impact of the Little Ice Age on the major political entities/regions would be good to have. Why did the LIA put the Ottoman Empire on a downward course, but preceded the dominance of the Western European powers?
That would indeed be a great project. Maybe something is out there which I am not aware of. It’s not exactly my period of expertise (I focus on the late Ottoman Empire) but it is a topic definitely worth digging into.
The lack of a colonization push to the Americas probably didn’t help. Neither Venice nor the Ottoman Empire took advantage of that. The geography probably didn’t help.
Not only Ottoman Empire suffered from Little Ice Age. In Russia Time of troubles in the beginning of 17th century started after several years of famine.
Exactly. White points out that the Little Ice Age was a global phenomenon, negatively impacting a vast geography. He zoomed in on the Ottoman case to understand why the Ottoman Empire took much longer to recover from its effects than other places.
By the way, if you know of any literature on the Little Ice Age’s impact on Russia and if you could share it, I would be grateful.
And in English, there's a chapter on Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in Geoffrey Parker's 'Global Crisis'. It's followed by a chapter on what he calls 'The "Ottoman tragedy", 1616-83'
Embarrassingly, I’ve never read Parker’s book, which I know is really good. Probably because I focus on the 19th century. I say embarrassingly because he taught at Ohio State, where I did my Phd.
Sounds like an interesting book. The demographic developments of the Ottoman Empire seemed very, very similar to what was happening in Castille in roughly the same time period.
I was really impressed by it when I first read it as a Phd student. I still think it’s a great book, making a lot of important interventions in different aspects of Ottoman historiography. It was also a pioneering book, bringing environment and climate as analytical tools into Ottoman history writing.
I’m curious about the demographic developments in Castille. Could you elaborate on it?
The thing about late medieval Spain was that it was Castille, and the central regions of the Iberian peninsula, rather than the coastal peripheries, where the bulk of the population lived up until the second half of the 16th century, but for whatever reason (a combination of over taxation of the peasant class, overpopulation and plagues are the most likely culprits) Castille went through a demographic decline from the late 16th century on, perhaps losing as much as much 1/5 to 1/4 of its population by the late 17th.
Exact numbers are of course hard to give, but I have seen estimates suggesting that it declined from over 6 million to roughly around 4,5.
At the same time, royal power also declined as the Habsburg were unable to finance their countless wars and began to sell lands, titles and offices to the highest bidder, so that's another parallel with the Ottomans.
Thank you very much for this, I appreciate it. I believe all this was part of the "Seventeenth-Century General Crisis" that the world went through at the time.
Not to my knowledge. If anything, I think the migrations may even have eased the pressure on the population as with them gone, there were fewer mouths to feed.
Thank you; makes me want to read the book.
No worries! It’s a really good book.
Fascinating. A comparative study of the impact of the Little Ice Age on the major political entities/regions would be good to have. Why did the LIA put the Ottoman Empire on a downward course, but preceded the dominance of the Western European powers?
That would indeed be a great project. Maybe something is out there which I am not aware of. It’s not exactly my period of expertise (I focus on the late Ottoman Empire) but it is a topic definitely worth digging into.
The lack of a colonization push to the Americas probably didn’t help. Neither Venice nor the Ottoman Empire took advantage of that. The geography probably didn’t help.
Not only Ottoman Empire suffered from Little Ice Age. In Russia Time of troubles in the beginning of 17th century started after several years of famine.
Exactly. White points out that the Little Ice Age was a global phenomenon, negatively impacting a vast geography. He zoomed in on the Ottoman case to understand why the Ottoman Empire took much longer to recover from its effects than other places.
By the way, if you know of any literature on the Little Ice Age’s impact on Russia and if you could share it, I would be grateful.
Here are couple of articles in russian about environmental factors as triggers of Time of Troubles (Smutnoe vremia).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353265924_Idealnyj_storm_socialno-ekologiceskij_krizis_v_Russkom_gosudarstve_vo_2-j_pol_60-h_-_nac_70-h_gg_XVI_v_-_vzglad_cerez_prizmu_ekologiceskoj_istorii
https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/velikiy-golod-i-smutnoe-vremya-k-voprosu-o-vliyanii-prirodno-klimaticheskogo-faktora-na-sotsialno-politicheskiy-krizis-rossii-vtoroy
Thank you very much, I appreciate it.
And in English, there's a chapter on Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in Geoffrey Parker's 'Global Crisis'. It's followed by a chapter on what he calls 'The "Ottoman tragedy", 1616-83'
Embarrassingly, I’ve never read Parker’s book, which I know is really good. Probably because I focus on the 19th century. I say embarrassingly because he taught at Ohio State, where I did my Phd.
Sounds like an interesting book. The demographic developments of the Ottoman Empire seemed very, very similar to what was happening in Castille in roughly the same time period.
I was really impressed by it when I first read it as a Phd student. I still think it’s a great book, making a lot of important interventions in different aspects of Ottoman historiography. It was also a pioneering book, bringing environment and climate as analytical tools into Ottoman history writing.
I’m curious about the demographic developments in Castille. Could you elaborate on it?
The thing about late medieval Spain was that it was Castille, and the central regions of the Iberian peninsula, rather than the coastal peripheries, where the bulk of the population lived up until the second half of the 16th century, but for whatever reason (a combination of over taxation of the peasant class, overpopulation and plagues are the most likely culprits) Castille went through a demographic decline from the late 16th century on, perhaps losing as much as much 1/5 to 1/4 of its population by the late 17th.
Exact numbers are of course hard to give, but I have seen estimates suggesting that it declined from over 6 million to roughly around 4,5.
At the same time, royal power also declined as the Habsburg were unable to finance their countless wars and began to sell lands, titles and offices to the highest bidder, so that's another parallel with the Ottomans.
Thank you very much for this, I appreciate it. I believe all this was part of the "Seventeenth-Century General Crisis" that the world went through at the time.
Was some of this a result of the lesser nobility and those below that migrating to the New World during this time?
Not to my knowledge. If anything, I think the migrations may even have eased the pressure on the population as with them gone, there were fewer mouths to feed.