The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (24 page)

Average Europeans would have complained about the cold winters and
sudden heat waves of their day, especially if they were farmers at the
mercy of the capricious weather, but their sufferings paled beside the anxiety of those who lived in the shadow of the Alps.

The threat of advancing ice had been around for a long time. The superstitious shook their heads when Saint Petronella's chapel succumbed
to the ice. The cult of Saint Petronella was popular in the Alps as early as
the eleventh century, for she was believed to cure fever. Her chapel lay at
Grindelwald at the foot of the Eiger, in the shadow of a glacier, presided
over by a single monk as recently as 1520. A generation later, Hans Rebmann, prior of the monastery at Thun, wrote: "On the side of the mountain [the Eiger], at Sainte- Petronelle, there was once a chapel, a place of
pilgrimage. But a great glacier now hangs there and has entirely covered
the site."9 Local legend claimed that on a clear day one could even see the
chapel door through the ice.

Alpine glaciers, which had already advanced steadily between 1546 and
1590, moved aggressively forward again between 1600 and 1616. Villages
that had flourished since medieval times were in danger or already destroyed. Land values in the threatened areas fell. So did tithe receipts. During the long period of glacial retreat and relative quiet in earlier times, opportunistic farmers had cleared land within a kilometer of what seemed to
them to be stationary ice sheets. Now their descendants paid the price of
opportunism. Their villages and livelihoods were threatened.10

The glacial thrust continued inexorably. The Vernagt glacier in the
eastern Alps advanced vigorously in 1599 and 1600, forming a large lake
behind a huge ice barrier. When the dike burst on July 10, 1600, a tidal
wave of glacial melt inundated fields, bridges, and cart tracks, causing
20,000 florins worth of damage. The glacier continued to grow the following winter, again forming a lake. Fortunately the water seeped away
during the warm months.

Between 1627 and 1633, seven cold and wet summers led to aggressive
advances along ice fronts throughout the Alps, causing large rock falls and
floods, and destroying trees, farmsteads, and bridges. Between 1628 and
1630, Chamonix lost a third of its land through avalanches, snow, glaciers,
and flooding, and the remaining hectares were under constant threat. In
1642, the Des Bois glacier advanced "over a musket shot every day, even in
the month of August." The people at Rogationtide marched in solemn
procession to implore God's protection against the ice. In 1648, the inhabitants of the village begged the local tax collector to take account of the
"other losses, damage, and floods recently caused in the said parish." By
this time, people near the ice front were planting only oats and a little barley in fields that were under snow for most of the year. Their forefathers
had paid their tithes in wheat. Now they obtained but one harvest in
three, and even then the grain rotted after harvesting. "The people here are
so badly fed they are dark and wretched and seem only half

Inevitably, the scourge of advancing ice was seen as divine vengeance.
When the Des Bois glacier threatened to block the Arve River, the inhabitants of Chamonix sent community leaders to brief the Bishop of Geneva
on their plight. They told him of the constant threat posed by ice and
wondered whether they were being punished for their sins. In early June
1644, the bishop himself led a procession of about three hundred people
to the place where the "great and horrible glacier" threatened the village of
Les Bois. The prelate blessed the menacing ice sheet, then repeated the ritual at another glacier near the village of Largentiere, at one poised above
Le Tour, and at a fourth ice sheet at Les Bosson. The villages were literally
hemmed in by moving ice, which lies a good kilometer away today. Fortunately, the blessings worked. The glaciers slowly retreated until 1663, but
they left the land so scarred and barren that nothing would grow.

The Aletsch glaciers advanced somewhat later than those around Chamonix. In 1653, the alarmed villagers of Naterser sent a deputation to the
Jesuit community at Siders, asking for assistance, saying they were ready to
do penance and to undertake other "good Christian works." Fathers Charpentier and Thomas spent a week at Nater, preaching, then leading a procession to the glacier four hours' walk away. The people plodded along,
bareheaded in the rain, singing psalms and hymns every step of the way.
At the glacier front, the Jesuits celebrated mass and preached a sermon at the glacier: "The most important exorcisms were used." They sprinkled
the terminus with holy water and set up an effigy of Saint Ignatius nearby.
"It looked like an image of Jupiter, ordering an armistice not to his routed
troops, but to the hungry glacier itself" 12 The Jesuit disputation worked.
We are told that Saint Ignatius "caused the glacier to be still."

The glaciers seemed to retreat for a while, then advanced again, prompting renewed devotions and sermons at Chamonix and elsewhere. Ice
loomed on every side. In 1669, a visiting salt tax collector wrote in disappointment to a lady friend: "I see here three mountains which are just like
yourself... five mountains of pure ice from head to foot, whose coldness is
unchanging."13 The 1670s saw the maximum advance in the eastern Alps
in modern historical times, especially of the Vernagt glacier, sketched by a
Capuchin monk sent there to plead for divine mercy. After the advancing
glacier blocked the Rofenthal Valley, a vagrant suspected of practicing black
magic was arrested and burned at the stake by hysterical villagers. For five
summers in a row, the ice barrier burst, flooding the valley below. The glacier tongue did not retreat more than a few meters until 1712.

Disasters continued. In July 1680, the Mattmarksee lake, blocked by the
growing Allalin glacier, flooded huts in the surrounding mountain pastures.
The summer was very hot. In July, the lake broke through the weakened ice
barrier and ravaged the valley beneath. The people swore they would deflect
divine wrath by abstaining from banquets, festivities, balls, and card playing for forty years. The chronicler of Zurbruggen remarked that "people are
always very clever and provident after the event-after the disaster has happened, after the horse has bolted, after the glacier has broken its bounds."14

After 1680 the glaciers retreated somewhat. Bishop Jean d'Arenthon of
Geneva wrote of the gratitude of the people of Chamonix for his predecessor's visitation. They had invited him back at their expense in his old
age to witness how the threatening ice had withdrawn some eighty paces.
The old man duly visited the village and repeated his blessing. "I have a
sworn benediction.... The glaciers have withdrawn an eighth of a league
from where they were before and they have ceased to cause the havoc they
used to do." However, the retreat was a small one, in no way comparable
to that of the past century and a half. It was, as Le Roy Ladurie remarks,
"only an oscillation, a little local trough in the great secular high tide."15
This did not prevent the Chamoniards from petitioning their monarch, the King of Sardinia, for tax relief, their pleas accompanied by harrowing
descriptions of tumbling rocks, floods, and falling ice.

Even with this temporary retreat, the glaciers of the Alps were much
larger in the time of King Louis XIV than today. In 1691, Philibert
Amedee Arnod wrote an account of the passes and peaks of the Alps. A
talented judge as well as a military engineer and a skilled climber, he
spent much of his career inspecting mountain fortifications protecting
the state of Savoy. Blessed with strong curiosity, Arnod organized a climbing party of three hunters with "climbing irons on their feet and hooks
and axes in their hands" to verify a rumor that there was an ancient icefree pass over the Alps from Savoy to Chamonix. Despite the latest
mountaineering equipment, his party was forced to turn back when ice
blocked their way. In Arnod's day, glaciers flowed low into the Val Veni
and other alpine valleys where today only glacial moraines remain. The
ice has retreated deep into the mountains and the pass is clear.

By 1716, the inhabitants of Chamonix were again complaining of governmental neglect, of glacier-caused floods, and villages in great danger of
destruction. The Gurgler glacier in the Otzthal region entrapped a large
lake, which soon measured a thousand paces long and five hundred wide.
In 1718, the local villagers organized a solemn procession to the glacier
and celebrated mass on a rocky platform near the ice sheet. The mass had
no visible effect, but the lake never flooded the land downstream. The organizers of the procession had heard about the disaster that hit the village
of Le Pre-du-Bar in the Val d'Aosta the year before. On September 12,
the village had vanished under a glacier-caused landslide so sudden that it
was said that even birds perched in trees were immolated. In the same
year, the front of the Triolet glacier collapsed in a cataclysm of boulders,
water, and ice that rushed downstream with great force, covering "in the
depths all moveable chattels, one hundred and twenty oxen or cows,
cheeses, and men to the number of seven who perished instantly."16

The maximum came between 1740 and 1750, also the years when
wealthy tourists discovered the glaciers of the Alps. In 1741, English nobleman George Windham became the first foreign tourist to visit Chamonix. He entered the area with some trepidation, having been advised
that "we shall scarcely find any of the Necessities of Life in those Parts."
His party traveled with heavily laden horses and a tent, "which was of some use to us." Windham described how, from the village itself, the
glacier fronts "looked like white rocks or rather enormous blocks of
ice."17 His guides told him the glaciers "went on increasing every year."
Windham made his way cautiously to the ice front over loose rock and
dry, crumbling earth. A year later, French traveler Pierre Martel climbed
up to the source of the Arveyron stream at the foot of the Le Bois glacier.
"It issues from beneath the ice through two icy caves, like the crystal grottoes where fairies are supposed to live. . . . The irregularities of the roof,
over eighty feet high, make a marvellous sight.... You can walk underneath, but there is danger from the fragments of ice which sometimes fall
off."18 The Arveyron cave became a popular tourist attraction, a cavern
"carved by the hand of nature out of an enormous rock of ice." The
changing sunlight made the ice change from white and opaque to transparent and "green as aquamarine." The retreat of the Le Bois glacier over
the next century and a half caused the cave to vanish in about 1880.

Glaciers also swelled elsewhere. Between 1742 and 1745, Norwegian
glaciers were several kilometers in advance of their present positions, destroying farms and burying valuable summer pasture. Icelandic glaciers
also advanced, their movements complicated by volcanic eruptions, like
that at Oraefi in 1727, which caused the Skeidararjokull glacier to oscillate violently, "spouting from its foundations innumerable rivers, which
appeared and vanished again almost instantaneously." Spectators had to
take refuge on a sandbank and no one could travel in the vicinity for
months. 19

The glacial "high tide" in the Alps lasted from about 1590 to 1850, before the ebb began that continues to this day. These two and a half centuries at the climax of the Little Ice Age straddle momentous changes in
European society.

When the land is inclosed, so as to admit of sowing turnips,
clover, or other grass seeds, which have an improving and
meliorating tendency, the same soil will, in the course of a few
years, make nearby double the return it did before, to say
nothing of the wonderful improvements which sometimes
result from a loam or clay; which will, when well laid down,
often become twice the permanent value in pasture, that it
ever would as ploughed ground.

-Nathanial Kent, General View of the Agriculture

of the County of Norfolk, 1796

ondon has never forgotten the summer of 1666. By then, the sprawling metropolis had burst the bounds of the ancient medieval town. The
City of London itself was a densely populated maze, with no less than
109 parish churches and the magnificent halls of the livery companies
standing amidst narrow alleyways and squalid hovels. A place of extremes
of wealth and poverty, London was a busy and overcrowded seaport and
mercantile center where disease, crime, and violence were rampant. In
1665, bubonic plague had killed at least 57,000 people and left few families unscathed. The plague subsided during the cold winter of early 1666,
which gave way to an intensely hot, dry summer. By September, London's
wooden houses were tinder-dry. Diarist Samuel Pepys wrote: "After so
long a drought even the stones were ready to burst into flames." Every
Londoner was well aware of earlier fires that had swept through the city, but no one, least of all the authorities, was prepared for the firestorm that
broke out on Sunday, September 2, 1666.1