In January 1709, Spain was devastated by the War of Succession (1701-1715), when an even worse calamity suddenly struck. From Iceland came a wave of polar cold that settled in the Mediterranean, and from Siberia, an anticyclone that did the same from the countries of Eastern Europe to Cádiz.
The frost, as the English clergyman of the time William Derham – one of those fans of measuring temperature, who have been so useful for the history of the climate – said, was “the greatest – if not more universal – than any other. that there has been in the memory of man.” He was not wrong, as today he still holds the record for the coldest winter in the last five hundred years.
In Climatic Changes: The Little Ice Age in Spain (2014), an already reference essay on the impact of the climate in Spain in the Modern Age, the professor of Modern History Armando Alberola Romá tells how the storm was felt in our country. In the first days, the worst off were the thousands of soldiers who were on the front. The English defenders of Alicante, the last Austraist bastion of the kingdom of Valencia, had to take turns on the wall to avoid hypothermia.
In his Commentaries on the Spanish War (1725), Vicente Bacallar y Sanna, who fought on the Felipista side, explained it like this: “Mortals had no memory of such excess cold as this year; Many rivers so close to the sea froze that the ice formed a margin; The trees withered because of its intensity. (…) The water did not flow liquid, not even that which was carried in the hands to drink. (…) The sentinels died in the sentries and human industry found almost no protection against such irregular inclemency, the crops made no progress, and hunger was introduced in the coldest countries.”
Many rivers froze, including the Ebro near Tortosa, an unusual spectacle. The city is almost at sea level and it is the largest river in Spain, which means that the thermometer had to be below negative fifteen degrees for several consecutive days.
There was hardly any winter grain, something that, added to the poor harvest of 1708 and the presence of thousands of foreign soldiers in the peninsula, who competed with the population for food, caused an impossible increase in the price of products and a true subsistence crisis. .
In Seville and Granada, less accustomed to those temperatures, in February a plague of unknown what exactly broke out (it couldn’t have been a plague, because it only thrives in conditions of relative heat and humidity). They were the only two Spanish cities affected by this pandemic that devastated Europe in 1709 and that has caused so much talk among epidemiologists.
Fever, cough, chills, fatigue…, the symptomatological picture seems viral; If so, it would be the first flu pandemic, prior to that of 1918. But, even today it is difficult to distinguish the flu from other ailments, even more so in the era when the existence of viruses was unknown. Be that as it may, in Seville alone, hunger, possible influenza and exanthematous typhus (a recurring guest in war years) killed nearly fourteen thousand people.
As is usual in the peninsular climate, whose main characteristic is instability, this unusually cold winter was followed by an unusually rainy spring, which caused serious flooding – mainly in Andalusia and Galicia – and aggravated the terrible food situation. Hunger intensified in all regions, especially in Murcia, Extremadura, La Mancha and Galicia, with a bloody riot in Santiago de Compostela. As the Hispanist John Lynch said in The Spain of the 18th Century (2009), people literally died of hunger in the streets.
And in the rest of Europe, more of the same, a succession of phenomena as extraordinary as they are catastrophic. The Mediterranean froze off the coasts of Genoa and Marseille, and also in the Venetian lagoon, which became a recreational area. In Scandinavia the same thing happened with the Baltic Sea, which would be normal if it were not for the fact that it remained that way until April. In Switzerland, for its part, mortality among wildlife caused wolves to run out of prey and venture into towns.
More than the cold, the problem was its persistence. In the United Kingdom the thermometer was below -12 ° C for several weeks, freezing almost all rivers – including the Thames, which was passable for two months – and killing both crops and native trees theoretically prepared for low temperatures. like oaks and ashes. In an article for the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, one of the first scientific journals in history, Derham echoed the death of “millions” of small birds, a curious fact that was repeated on the continent.
The chronicles from France are even worse. In Paris, on January 14, temperatures dropped to -15°C and did not rise for eleven days, with peaks of -18°C. A canon from Beaune (Burgundy) describes the situation for the entire country: “Travellers died in the field, cattle in the stables, wild animals in the forest; almost all the birds died. The wine was frozen in the barrels and public fires were lit to warm the poor.”
From the palace of Versailles, Isabel Charlotte of the Palatinate, sister-in-law of Louis so that I could sit with a piece of sable skin around my neck and my feet in a bearskin bag; and yet I am shivering with cold and can barely hold the pen. “I have never seen a winter like this in my life.”
In France the famine was more brutal than in any other kingdom, killing a million people before the end of 1709. To avoid this extreme, a desperate solution was to make loaves of bread from ground ferns, adding nettles and thistles to give volume. to the “mass”. Others, according to contemporary testimony collected by journalist Stephanie Pain in New Scientist magazine, simply “ate grass as if they were sheep.”
As always happens in these cases, the cities suffered the most, with the aggravating factor that the accumulated snow blocked the roads for weeks, preventing what little there was from reaching the markets. In Paris, fearing an uprising, the authorities forced the wealthiest to distribute soup for free.
It was not the case, but this winter could have changed the outcome of the War of Succession. Overwhelmed by the humanitarian debacle in his country, Louis XIV was on the verge of withdrawing military support from his grandson, Philip V; If he did not do so, it was because the conditions that the allies imposed on him to leave the scene were unaffordable.
For Charles XII of Sweden, however, the cold did disrupt his plans in the midst of his campaign to become the dominant power in the Baltic. After defeating Poland and Denmark, in January 1708 he had crossed the borders of the Russian Empire with forty thousand men, who a year later were waiting in the warmest Ukraine with the intention of assaulting Moscow in the spring, since anyone knew that it was impossible before. .
And it would seem that the cold was really on the side of the Russians, since it showed up where Carlos did not expect it, killing half of his men (on one night in the open field, two thousand died of hypothermia) and forcing him to carry out a humiliating retreat southwards, to the territory of the Ottoman Empire.
But what caused the “Great Winter”? We have already referred to the unusual waves of polar origin, but, if we expand the scale, the phenomenon is part of the so-called Little Ice Age (PEH), a period between the beginning of the 14th century and the mid-19th century in which the Earth He cooled”. In turn, the PEH had an interval of extreme cold, between 1645 and 1715; It is the so-called “Maunder minimum”, within which this disastrous winter took place.
It is named after the English astronomer Edward Maunder, who in 1893 began searching through the archives and discovered that between 1645 and 1715 hardly any sunspots had been sighted. These are areas of the Sun that darken, a phenomenon observable with the naked eye – in cloudy conditions and only during sunrise and sunset – and that occurs when the sun has intense magnetic activity; That is, when there are spots, he is emitting more energy.
The normal thing is that these appear and disappear in cycles of eleven years, so that, although they are not sure, scientists sense a relationship between the anomalous lack of spots (therefore, solar activity) during those seventy years and the cold that characterized them.
The causes will be difficult to explain, but there is no doubt that the climate on Earth changes constantly (we leave aside here the role of man in current global warming). Since the last ice age, approximately 11,700 years ago, it has done so alternating warm and cold cycles. The PEH, precisely, took over from a hot period, the “medieval climatic optimum”, which lasted from the 10th to the 14th century.
And if the latter brought favorable conditions, which allowed for an increase in population and crops and the rebirth of cities, the PEH caused the opposite. Once the worst part of this “mini-glaciation” had passed, at the end of the 18th century, Europe had changed feudalism for capitalism, the axis of power had moved from the Mediterranean (Spain) to the Atlantic (United Kingdom), and the Enlightenment had emerged. And in all this, the weather had something to do with it.
