Reason to Resist In Europe (1550 – 1700)

Reason to Resist In Europe (1550 – 1700)
Europeans lived more precariously in the seventeenth century than in any period since the Black Death.

One benchmark of the crisis was population decline. In Mediterranean, Spanish population fell from 8.5 to 7 million and Italian population from 13 to 11 million. The ravages of the Thirty Year’s War most clearly felt in central Europe.

Population decline had many causes and rather remarkably, direct casualties from warfare were a very small component. The direct effect of war, the disruption of agriculture, and the spread of disease were far more devastating.

Spain alone lost a half million people at the turn of the century and another half million between 1647 and 1652. Severe outbreaks on 1625 and 1665 hit England, while France endured three consecutive years of epidemics from 1629 to 1631.

All sectors of the European economy from agriculture to trade stagnated or decline in early seventeenth century. Not surprisingly, peasants were hardest hit.

The entire period from 1647 to 1653 was the worst ever in parts of France. Five consecutive bad harvests decimated the countryside.

Predictably acute economic crisis led to rural revolt, as the French peasants reeled from visitations of plaque, frost and floods, the French state was raising the taille, the tax that fell most heavily upon the lower orders.

A series of French rural revolts in the late 1630s focused on opposition to tax increases.

These revolts began in the same way, with the murder of a local tax official, the organization of a peasant militia and the recruitment of local clergy and notables. The rebels forced temporarily concessions from local authorities, but they never achieved lasting reforms.

Each revolt ended with the re-imposition of order by the state. In England the largest rural protests, like the Midland revolts in 1607, centered upon opposition to the enclosure of grain fields and their conversion to pasture.

The most spectacular popular uprisings occurred in Spanish-occupied Italy. In the spring of 1647 the Sicilian city of Palermo exploded under the pressure of a disastrous harvest, rising food prices and relentless taxation. A city of 130,000 inhabitants, Palermo imported nearly all of its food stuff.

As grain prices rose, the city government subsidized the price of bread running up huge debts in the process. When the town government could no longer afford the subsidies they decided to reduce the size of the loaf rather than increase its price.

This did not fool the women of the city, who rioted when the first undersized loaves were placed on sale. Soon the entire city was in revolt. Commoners who were not part of the urban power structure led the revolt in Palermo. For a time they achieved the abolition of Spanish taxes on basic food stuff.

Their success provided the model for a similar uprising in Naples, the largest city in Europe.

The Neapolitan revolt began in 1647 after the Spanish placed new tax on fruit. A crowd gathered to protest the new imposition, burned the customs house, and murdered several local official. The protester were first led by a fisherman and then by a blacksmith, and again the rebels achieved the temporary suspension of Spanish taxation.
Reason to Resist In Europe (1550 – 1700)