'The Sky in Place of the Nile’: Climate, Religious Unrest and Scapegoating in Post-Tridentine Apulia

Le Roy Ladurie’s classic study of the history of climate demonstrated that the major sixteenth-century famines were almost certainly triggered by extreme short-term fluctuations in climate, with the Alpine ice fields reaching their maximum extension by 1600. The crisis peaked in Italy in 1591–92, when the birth rate dropped to its lowest point. Acute crises in subsistence farming broke down the psychological reluctance to emigrate to towns and cities, but the authorities there regularly expelled ‘useless mouths’ – non-citizens, beggars, unemployed foreigners, students and even those with jobs but no special skills. The result of such expulsions was that outbreaks of contagious diseases, in all likelihood prompted by hunger-induced mobility, spread to the countryside as well. The increase in the death rate was undoubtedly a reflection of harvest failures and the exhaustion of resources, but also then stemmed from the failure of state- and community-run networks of assistance and solidarity. The situation was further compounded by spiralling violence, generated by mutual suspicion and envy; the presence of brigands and vagabonds on the fringes of communities, on the look out for a chance to steal meagre reserves; and the construction of threatening Others. After 1594, as the crisis eased, population growth picked up again and the demographic havoc wrought by starvation and disease was repaired surprisingly quickly, but the effects of the social and economic breakdown caused by the famine were more long-lasting. Violence, robbery, murder and malicious prosecution (not unlike the emotional and social ‘toxins’ produced by a pandemic, as discussed by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.) hampered the efforts of communities and authorities to offset the shortcomings in traditional solidarity and mutual aid networks, and to check a crisis clearly reflected in the steep rise in burials. This article sets out to investigate how extremely adverse climatic and weather conditions played a part in disrupting affective bonds and social promiscuity among groups and individuals with different confessions and beliefs, in what until then had been top-down sanctioned or tolerated multi-confessional communities. It will focus in particular on the dramatic fate of the Waldensian colonies in Calabria and Apulia, and the little-studied witchcraft panic that broke out in the town of Bitonto. Here, in 1593, two possessed women were forcibly made to claim that they had taken part in the witches’ Sabbath, and as a result of their admissions a number of supposed accomplices were arrested, tortured and subsequently died. As Alex Walsham has noted, impulses such as enmity and amity, prejudice and benevolence, coexisted for a long time in early modern society, forming a ‘cyclical rather than linear’ relationship. Periodic outbreaks of prejudice and violence enabled individuals to psychologically deflect and appease the guilt they felt about associating with people who wilfully affirmed a ‘false’ creed. While sensitive to geographical and historical specificities, and various social configurations of hate, the essay will explore common patterns of scapegoating, understood as a compensatory threat response either intended to minimise guilt about one’s own wrongdoing, or to restore a perceived sense of personal control by explaining a negative outcome in the environment that might otherwise seem incomprehensible or uncontrollable. In short, it will be an attempt to write a history of intolerance from the ‘inside out’.