The General Crisis of the seventeenth century
War, revolt, famine and collapse across Eurasia within a few decades.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 62 years
- Known to
- ± 10 years
- Era
- Early Modern, Holocene
The mid-seventeenth century sees the Thirty Years' War, the English Civil War, the Fronde in France, revolts in Catalonia, Portugal and Naples, the fall of the Ming, and severe famines from Ireland to Japan. Geoffrey Parker and others have argued these are connected by climate — the coldest phase of the Little Ice Age producing simultaneous harvest failure across the northern hemisphere. Global mortality may have run into the tens of millions.