Wine, victuals and volcanoes &ndash; potential impacts of the 1640/1641 double volcanic eruption on climate and society in early modern Switzerland

Bartlome, Niklaus Emanuel

doi:10.5194/egusphere-2026-4370

Preprints

https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-4370

Preprints

12 Aug 2026

| 12 Aug 2026

Wine, victuals and volcanoes – potential impacts of the 1640/1641 double volcanic eruption on climate and society in early modern Switzerland

Niklaus Emanuel Bartlome

Abstract. This study examines how three municipal hospitals on the Swiss Plateau – in Fribourg, Bern and St. Gallen – coped with climate anomalies in the early 1640s that coincided with the Komagatake/Parker double volcanic eruption. The eruption led to catastrophic consequences in regions such as China, Japan and northern Europe. Unlike these regions, Switzerland did not experience a comparable famine. Rather than focusing on a narrative of disaster, the study analyses how local authorities coped with climate anomalies. The focus is on the cities of Fribourg, Bern and St. Gallen and their respective municipal hospitals (care institutions), whose economies and agrarian sectors (viticulture, husbandry, dairy production and crop cultivation) are analysed. Between 1639 and 1643, the study region experienced cold springs and summers, likely resulting from a combination of internal stochastic variability and volcanic forcing from the double eruption. All sectors of the hospitals’ agricultural production were affected simultaneously, due to their interconnectedness. The hospitals’ greatest vulnerability was the extent of their involvement in direct cultivation. Staple food shortages and high prices caused by multi-annual climate anomalies and the impacts of the neighbouring war between France and the Franche-Comté led to a subsistence crisis across the Swiss Plateau. Coping strategies were implemented on two levels. Hospitals adopted internal measures, such as switching from exporting to importing foodstuffs or reducing unnecessary expenditure, to increase the availability of staple food products. They also benefited from external measures ordered by the city authorities, who issued mandates to ensure food security for their populations. Although the available hospital records do not show an obvious increase in recorded deaths among residents and the authorities’ economic policy coincided with a peasant revolt in Bern in 1641, the subsistence crisis nonetheless placed the hospitals under considerable pressure. While the study primarily focuses on urban populations, further research on rural populations would be useful to examine how they coped with the subsistence crisis.

Received: 21 Jul 2026 – Discussion started: 12 Aug 2026

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Niklaus Emanuel Bartlome

Status: final response (author comments only)

RC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2026-4370', Anonymous Referee #1, 10 Sep 2026
This is an interesting and potentially valuable paper that brings together climate reconstruction, unusually rich institutional records and economic evidence to examine societal responses to the climatic anomalies surrounding the 1640/1641 Komagatake/Parker eruptions. The comparative use of three municipal hospitals is a particular strength. I am broadly supportive of publication, but I think the manuscript requires moderate revisions, principally to strengthen the analytical methods and to reconsider the division between Results, Discussion and Conclusions. At present, parts of the analysis are insufficiently documented to be reproducible, while much of the current Discussion presents new empirical results rather than interpreting the results already presented. I suggest the following

Provide additional details from the appendix in the methods section, how the data is analysed and any statistical methods used and baseline selection.

The discussion is comparative institutional/political response and to my mind would be more formally results.

Rework the discussion to place in context of wider literature, distill more strongly the key contributions and discuss further the limitations of the work.

Shorten the conclusion to really drive home the insights gained

I hope this helps further improve the manuscript. I enjoyed reading this.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-4370-RC1
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Niklaus Emanuel Bartlome, 08 Nov 2026
  
  Dear Anonymous Referee #1,
  Thank you very much for your careful reading and your helpful suggestions. I am responding to your review below; each response follows the comment which it answers. Each response is marked with a running number (-- #1 -- to -- #5 --).
  Niklaus Bartlome
  "This is an interesting and potentially valuable paper that brings together climate reconstruction, unusually rich institutional records and economic evidence to examine societal responses to the climatic anomalies surrounding the 1640/1641 Komagatake/Parker eruptions. The comparative use of three municipal hospitals is a particular strength. I am broadly supportive of publication, but I think the manuscript requires moderate revisions, principally to strengthen the analytical methods and to reconsider the division between Results, Discussion and Conclusions. At present, parts of the analysis are insufficiently documented to be reproducible, while much of the current Discussion presents new empirical results rather than interpreting the results already presented. I suggest the following"
  -- #1 -- Thank you for this encouraging assessment. I agree with both main points: the analysis needs to be documented in a way that is reproducible. The Discussion should interpret the results rather than present new ones. I will restructure the manuscript accordingly, as described in RC1 #2–#5.
  "1. Provide additional details from the appendix in the methods section, how the data is analysed and any statistical methods used and baseline selection."
  -- #2 -- I agree. The processing steps currently described in Appendix B will be moved into a new subsection on data processing in the methods (Sect. 4). It will describe how the annual series were derived from the accounts, how the crisis and reference periods were defined and how the percentage changes were calculated and it will justify the choice of the reference period. I will also state explicitly that the analysis is descriptive and that no statistical tests are applied. Detailed conversion factors will remain in Appendix B. The annual data underlying the analysis are available in the BORIS repository.
  "2. The discussion is comparative institutional/political response and to my mind would be more formally results."
  -- #3 -- I agree. The comparison of the institutional and political responses will become a new results section (“Institutional and political responses”) following the analysis of the hospital economy. It will present the measures taken by the hospitals, the market regulations issued by the city authorities for each foodstuff, the treatment of war refugees and foreign beggars and the Thun affair (Thuner Handel). The Discussion will then interpret these results instead of presenting them.
  "3. Rework the discussion to place in context of wider literature, distill more strongly the key contributions and discuss further the limitations of the work."
  -- #4 -- I agree. The Discussion will be rewritten as continuous text around four themes: the climate anomalies before and after the eruptions and the difficulty of attributing them to volcanic forcing; reflections on why the anomalies did not escalate into famine in the three towns; which groups might have borne the costs of the crisis; and the limitations of the study. These themes will be placed in the context of recent work on societal responses to climate and volcanic forcing (e.g. Stoffel et al., 2022; Büntgen et al., 2026; Degroot et al., 2021) and the key contributions will be stated explicitly.
  "4. Shorten the conclusion to really drive home the insights gained"
  -- #5 -- I agree. The Conclusion will be shortened and limited to the main insights, without repeating the results.
  "I hope this helps further improve the manuscript. I enjoyed reading this."
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-4370-AC1
CC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2026-4370', Martin Skoglund, 12 Sep 2026

This study is a detailed case study of the potential impacts of a double large-scale volcanic eruption in 1640/1641 on climate and society in Switzerland. The study relies on an exceptionally rich documentary material for the period, showing agricultural production output and estate accounts, including sales of agricultural products, from three municipal hospitals in Switzerland with considerable estates. These hospital records are analysed in tandem with the state-of-the-art ModE-RA climate reanalysis data. The case study is well justified. The 1640s have frequently been identified as a period of widespread, partly climate-related, crisis affecting regions from East Asia to Europe (Parker, 2013), and the unusually detailed source material investigated here offers an opportunity to disentangle political effects, such as those associated with the Thirty Years’ War and the Ten Years’ War, from environmental effects, including climatic cooling following the double eruption, within the volcano-climate-society (VCS) nexus.
Overall, I find this to be a promising and valuable manuscript. The exceptionally rich documentary evidence, combined with high-resolution climate reconstruction data, gives the study considerable potential to make an important contribution to research on the VCS nexus in early modern Europe. My comments below are intended primarily to help clarify a few methodological points and to further strengthen the interpretation of the climatic influences on agricultural production.
Fiscal years
The author states that:
“When reconstructing harvest and production quantities of the three hospitals, the fact that the fiscal year began at different days of the year in each hospital (see below) was not important for this study, as thanks to the detailed accounting records of all three hospitals, the income could be correctly allocated to the corresponding harvest years (For the processing, normalization and homogenization of the used historical sources see appendix B).”
However, the handling of differences in fiscal years does not appear to be explained in Appendix B or anywhere elsewhere in the manuscript. This point deserves clarification because the timing of the accounting year could potentially affect the assignment of agricultural production to individual years. For example, the Bern Hospital change accounting period on 4 August (25 July in the Julian Calendar style). Winter grains were commonly beginning to be harvested around this time (Wetter & Pfister 2011), and it was not uncommon that part of the crop was threshed directly after the harvest (likely to be used as seed, see Hartermann et al. 2026). If a fiscal year of, for example, 1637/1638 is given, was such grain recorded then only the harvest of 1637 (given that the new accounting period begins on 4 August)? Or is it even the harvest of 1638 that this refers to (which seems unlikely if the new accounting period begins on August 4)? Furthermore, milking was presumably conducted throughout most of the summer, possibly starting even in spring: if the fiscal year changes on 24 June as in Fribourg, in what year is the butter made from that milk recorded? Was production divided across two accounting years, and if so, how was it subsequently reassigned to a single production year? Clarifying the actual production year is particularly important because some of the climatic interpretations discussed later in the manuscript depend on accurately linking annual production values to climatic conditions in a specific growing or production season. A suggestion here would be to clarify to the reader, for example in one of the appendices, how actual production years were established, and then use actual production years in the graphs. If it is not possible to distinguish actual production years, then that should be clearly stated.
Grain and fodder production
Viticulture is given somewhat more focus than animal husbandry and grain production in the study. This is evident partly by the choice of the April–July seasonal window, which is central for wine yields–but less so for other branches of agricultural production where shorter seasonal windows are usually more important (see Ljungqvist et al., 2023 and Calanca et al., 2022). The study would benefit from somewhat greater engagement with previous research on climatic influences on grain and fodder production that is directly relevant to the interpretation of the climatic impacts and related social vulnerabilities. Spring grains, such as oats, and winter grains such as spelt, can be assumed to exhibit different climatic sensitivities, with the former being more sensitive to summer heat and drought (Skoglund & Ljungqvist 2026; Ljungqvist et al. 2023; Pribyl and Cornes, 2020).
Ljungqvist et al. (2023) specifically examine long-term climate–harvest relationships in Sweden, Spain, and Switzerland, including the Canton of Bern, over a period overlapping that studied in the present manuscript. They find that grain harvests, including winter rye and spelt, in several parts of Switzerland were particularly sensitive to warm and wet winters and cold springs, while also showing a tendency toward negative associations with summer temperatures. The manuscript currently places considerable emphasis on spring and summer cooling following the volcanic eruptions. Given the established importance of temperature and precipitation variability in winter for Swiss cereal production, I suggest that the author also consider whether cold-season anomalies may have contributed to the observed harvest variations. Furthermore, oats were more linked to the livestock economy whereas spelt was chiefly directed towards human consumption. If the underlying data permit it, the manuscript would therefore benefit from separating crop yields by grain type rather than aggregating all cereals.
Other climate hazards besides cold
The manuscript does a good job of discussing non-climatic factors, including the Ten Years’ War, alongside the possible negative effects of cold, and to some extent, wet, springs and summers. However, other meteorological hazards receive less attention. There appear to be at least three very warm and dry growing seasons in the studied period. In both 1637 and 1638, conditions were warm and dry. Warm conditions appear to have substantially benefited viticulture, which was an important source of revenue for the hospitals. However, warm and dry conditions could have contributed to reduced fodder availability (including oat and barley yields) and hence to the observed downturn in butter production, alongside the livestock epidemic discussed by the author. Summer drought is an important driver of year-to-year variation in fodder production across large parts of Europe (Skoglund, 2024; Pribyl and Cornes, 2020), including Switzerland where a recent study found summer drought to explain an exceptionally large proportion of grassland fodder yields (Calanca et al., 2022). A further downturn in butter and cheese production appears to follow another very warm and dry growing season in 1645. The precise interpretation depends of course on how the fiscal-year observations have been assigned to production year, but nonetheless these warm and dry years at least deserve further mention. Combinations of weather extremes are also important to consider. If a cold early spring was followed by a severe summer drought, this combination could have been particularly unfavourable for fodder production (Calanca et al., 2022; Pfister, 2006).
Even if, for example, livestock production was mainly oriented towards consumption within the hospitals, the livestock and cereal production impacts identified in this study potentially carry a broader relevance for those Alpine and surrounding central European farming populations that were not involved in viticulture.
The Hospital account data
The main source material employed in the study is very impressive in both its detail and coverage. It would be useful if the manuscript could provide somewhat more information on the temporal extent and broader potential of these records. In particular, is the period studied here unusual in terms of source availability, or do the hospital accounts extend substantially further backward and/or forward in time? At lines 244–245 and 292 the author suggests that the temporal coverage is quite substantial. For example, are there only records for viticulture covering 175 years? If comparable longer series are available for crop yields, prices, or livestock products, could a longer reference period be used to place the deviations associated with the 1640/1641 event in a broader historical context? Furthermore, the stocks of wine are mentioned at several places in the manuscript (e.g., lines 373–374, and 638). Is it also possible to derive information on the stocks of grain and fodder? This would be very valuable information as such historical records are very rare, but central to understanding the capacity of pre-industrial agriculture to withstand production shocks (see Brunt & Cannon, 2026).
Minor comments
Table 2 lists “Crop yields from hospital owned pastures.” The term “pastures” seems inappropriate if the variable refers to cereal or other crop production. A more suitable formulation would be “crop yields from hospital-owned arable land.”
Table 1 might be moved to an appendix.
Line 44: It says “June–July, JJA” but should be “June–August, JJA”?
Lines 58–59: “Specifically, cold temperatures during the growing season severely affect crop cultivation.” This is not at all a given. Even in northern Europe (Scandinavia) a cold growing season is far from uniformly bad (Skoglund & Ljungqvist, 2026). See also Ljungqvist et al. (2023) on climate–harvest relationships in Switzerland during the study period.
Lines 59–60: “A substantial temperature deficit in the spring months can have a
devastating impact on grain price development.” This causal formulation seems too direct. Surely the grain price is determined by the actual harvest, and not whether the spring was cold or not (even if a cold spring could potentially affect the harvest).
Lines 70–72: “The example of eastern Switzerland illustrates how closely the individual agricultural sectors were linked and how specific regions specialised in one sector of agriculture (Sonderegger, 2019).” This is a bit unclear, does it refer to the European mixed farming system where different components (e.g., livestock husbandry and cereal cultivation) were dependent on each other, or the importance of regional specialization and trade?
Lines 81–82: I am unsure about the usefulness of this definition. I find it hard to come up with a single extreme climate event in Europe during the early modern period that on its own led to “major structural changes”, so in that case all of Europe was resilient during the early modern period?
Line 87. Remove the extra period.
Lines 90–91. I would say that a period of low sun spots is a type of solar forcing, so I don’t know if it is correct to say that the solar forcing was weak.
Lines 226–227. Is the purpose of this study really to assess the volcanic impacts on climate? Even though the author does attempt to partly do just that (e.g., section 5.1), I believe it is rather to assess the climatic impacts on society, as the former would is a more demanding tasks that likely would require a study of its own.
Page 14–15. A lot of text on these pages would be better placed in the discussion section, for example lines 312–333 and possibly lines 334–340.
At many points in the manuscript the term “husbandry” is used, but it would be more appropriate to use “animal husbandry”.
References
Brunt, L., and Cannon, E. (2026). Estimating grain storage with probate inventories: Kent and Cornwall, 1600–1750. Explorations in Economic History, 102, 101784. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2026.101784
Calanca, P., Wüst-Galley, C., Giuliani, S., and Erdin, D. (2022). Auswirkungen der Trockenheit auf die Produktivität des Schweizer Grünlands. Agrarforschung Schweiz, 13, 135–144. https://doi.org/10.34776/afs13-135
Hartermann M., Pfister U., Scholten-Buschhoff F. (2026). The slow emergence of the rational investor: Grain markets and grain storage of rural estates in western Germany, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Economic History Review, 79, 1235–1264. https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.70060
Ljungqvist, F. C., Christiansen, B., Esper, J., Huhtamaa, H., Leijonhufvud, L., Pfister, C., Seim, A., Skoglund, M. K., and Thejll, P. (2023). Climatic signatures in early modern European grain harvest yields. Climate of the Past, 19, 2463–2491. https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-19-2463-2023
Pfister, C. (2006). Little Ice Age-type Impacts and the Mitigation of Social Vulnerability to Climate in the Swiss Canton of Bern prior to 1800. In Costanza et al. (eds.). Sustainability or Collapse?: An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (pp. 197–212).
Pfister, C. and Brázdil, R. (2006). Social vulnerability to climate in the "Little Ice Age": an example from Central Europe in the early 1770s, Clim. Past, 2, 115–129, https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2-115-2006
Pribyl, K., and Cornes, R. C. (2020). Droughts in medieval and early modern England, part 2: Impacts. Weather, 75, 196–198. https://doi.org/10.1002/wea.3529
Skoglund, M. K. (2024). The impact of drought on northern European pre-industrial agriculture. Holocene, 34, 120–135. https://doi.org/10.1177/09596836231200431
Skoglund, M. K., and Ljungqvist, F. C. (2026). Climatic effects on grain harvest variations across Sweden c. 1665–1810. Geografiska Annaler: Series A, Physical Geography, 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353676.2026.2666716
Wetter, O., and Pfister, C. (2011). Spring-summer temperatures reconstructed for northern Switzerland and southwestern Germany from winter rye harvest dates, 1454–1970. Climate of the Past, 7, 1307–1326. https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-7-1307-2011

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-4370-CC1
- AC2: 'Reply on CC1', Niklaus Emanuel Bartlome, 08 Nov 2026
  
  Dear Martin Skoglund,
  Thank you very much for your detailed and constructive comment. I am responding to your comment below; each response follows the comment which it answers. Each response is marked with a running number (-- #6 -- to -- #26 --, continuing from my reply to Referee #1).
  Niklaus Bartlome
  "This study is a detailed case study of the potential impacts of a double large-scale volcanic eruption in 1640/1641 on climate and society in Switzerland. The study relies on an exceptionally rich documentary material for the period, showing agricultural production output and estate accounts, including sales of agricultural products, from three municipal hospitals in Switzerland with considerable estates. These hospital records are analysed in tandem with the state-of-the-art ModE-RA climate reanalysis data. The case study is well justified. The 1640s have frequently been identified as a period of widespread, partly climate-related, crisis affecting regions from East Asia to Europe (Parker, 2013), and the unusually detailed source material investigated here offers an opportunity to disentangle political effects, such as those associated with the Thirty Years’ War and the Ten Years’ War, from environmental effects, including climatic cooling following the double eruption, within the volcano-climate-society (VCS) nexus."
  "Overall, I find this to be a promising and valuable manuscript. The exceptionally rich documentary evidence, combined with high-resolution climate reconstruction data, gives the study considerable potential to make an important contribution to research on the VCS nexus in early modern Europe. My comments below are intended primarily to help clarify a few methodological points and to further strengthen the interpretation of the climatic influences on agricultural production."
  -- #6 -- Thank you for this kind assessment. Your comments on the fiscal years and on the climatic sensitivity of grain and fodder production are very helpful and will improve the manuscript.
  "Fiscal years"
  "The author states that:"
  "“When reconstructing harvest and production quantities of the three hospitals, the fact that the fiscal year began at different days of the year in each hospital (see below) was not important for this study, as thanks to the detailed accounting records of all three hospitals, the income could be correctly allocated to the corresponding harvest years (For the processing, normalization and homogenization of the used historical sources see appendix B).”"
  "However, the handling of differences in fiscal years does not appear to be explained in Appendix B or anywhere elsewhere in the manuscript. This point deserves clarification because the timing of the accounting year could potentially affect the assignment of agricultural production to individual years. For example, the Bern Hospital change accounting period on 4 August (25 July in the Julian Calendar style). Winter grains were commonly beginning to be harvested around this time (Wetter & Pfister 2011), and it was not uncommon that part of the crop was threshed directly after the harvest (likely to be used as seed, see Hartermann et al. 2026). If a fiscal year of, for example, 1637/1638 is given, was such grain recorded then only the harvest of 1637 (given that the new accounting period begins on 4 August)? Or is it even the harvest of 1638 that this refers to (which seems unlikely if the new accounting period begins on August 4)? Furthermore, milking was presumably conducted throughout most of the summer, possibly starting even in spring: if the fiscal year changes on 24 June as in Fribourg, in what year is the butter made from that milk recorded? Was production divided across two accounting years, and if so, how was it subsequently reassigned to a single production year? Clarifying the actual production year is particularly important because some of the climatic interpretations discussed later in the manuscript depend on accurately linking annual production values to climatic conditions in a specific growing or production season. A suggestion here would be to clarify to the reader, for example in one of the appendices, how actual production years were established, and then use actual production years in the graphs. If it is not possible to distinguish actual production years, then that should be clearly stated."
  -- #7 -- Thank you; you are right that the manuscript does not explain this. For all three hospital accounts, the account for the year X/X+1 records the production of the year X for all products used in this study. In Fribourg, the dairy accounts are organised by grazing season, so production is not divided between two accounts. This will be documented in a table in Appendix B and briefly in the methods section and all production series will be labelled by production year.
  "Grain and fodder production"
  "Viticulture is given somewhat more focus than animal husbandry and grain production in the study. This is evident partly by the choice of the April–July seasonal window, which is central for wine yields–but less so for other branches of agricultural production where shorter seasonal windows are usually more important (see Ljungqvist et al., 2023 and Calanca et al., 2022). The study would benefit from somewhat greater engagement with previous research on climatic influences on grain and fodder production that is directly relevant to the interpretation of the climatic impacts and related social vulnerabilities. Spring grains, such as oats, and winter grains such as spelt, can be assumed to exhibit different climatic sensitivities, with the former being more sensitive to summer heat and drought (Skoglund & Ljungqvist 2026; Ljungqvist et al. 2023; Pribyl and Cornes, 2020)."
  -- #8 -- I agree that the April–July window reflects the importance of these months for viticulture (Pfister et al., 2024). In the revised manuscript I will justify this choice explicitly and state its limits for grain and fodder. I will also engage more with research on climatic influences on grain and fodder production, in particular Ljungqvist et al. (2023), Skoglund (2023) and Skoglund and Ljungqvist (2026).
  "Ljungqvist et al. (2023) specifically examine long-term climate–harvest relationships in Sweden, Spain, and Switzerland, including the Canton of Bern, over a period overlapping that studied in the present manuscript. They find that grain harvests, including winter rye and spelt, in several parts of Switzerland were particularly sensitive to warm and wet winters and cold springs, while also showing a tendency toward negative associations with summer temperatures. The manuscript currently places considerable emphasis on spring and summer cooling following the volcanic eruptions. Given the established importance of temperature and precipitation variability in winter for Swiss cereal production, I suggest that the author also consider whether cold-season anomalies may have contributed to the observed harvest variations."
  -- #9 -- Thank you, this is an important point. The findings of Ljungqvist et al. (2023) qualify the emphasis on summer cooling and I will revise the relevant passages (see also CC1 #18 and #19). The hospital sources, however, describe cold years but name wetness as one of the main problems, for example persistent rain that left part of the 1640 grain harvest rotting in the fields (cf. Pfister, 2006; Pfister and Brázdil, 2006). Cold-season conditions will be named as a possible factor in the limitations.
  "Furthermore, oats were more linked to the livestock economy whereas spelt was chiefly directed towards human consumption. If the underlying data permit it, the manuscript would therefore benefit from separating crop yields by grain type rather than aggregating all cereals."
  -- #10 -- I agree that such a separation would be valuable. However, in Bern and St. Gallen most of the grain income came from rents and tithes rather than from the hospitals’ own fields; the series therefore reflect the hospitals’ grain supply rather than the yields of particular crops. A separation by grain type would require a substantial new analysis beyond the scope of this paper; I will mention it in the limitations. I agree that oats were mainly used as fodder. In times of scarcity, however, they also served as food: during the crisis, the St. Gallen hospital sold large quantities of oats to the burghers as porridge meal (HS9), which I will make explicit.
  "Other climate hazards besides cold"
  "The manuscript does a good job of discussing non-climatic factors, including the Ten Years’ War, alongside the possible negative effects of cold, and to some extent, wet, springs and summers. However, other meteorological hazards receive less attention. There appear to be at least three very warm and dry growing seasons in the studied period. In both 1637 and 1638, conditions were warm and dry. Warm conditions appear to have substantially benefited viticulture, which was an important source of revenue for the hospitals. However, warm and dry conditions could have contributed to reduced fodder availability (including oat and barley yields) and hence to the observed downturn in butter production, alongside the livestock epidemic discussed by the author. Summer drought is an important driver of year-to-year variation in fodder production across large parts of Europe (Skoglund, 2024; Pribyl and Cornes, 2020), including Switzerland where a recent study found summer drought to explain an exceptionally large proportion of grassland fodder yields (Calanca et al., 2022). A further downturn in butter and cheese production appears to follow another very warm and dry growing season in 1645. The precise interpretation depends of course on how the fiscal-year observations have been assigned to production year, but nonetheless these warm and dry years at least deserve further mention. Combinations of weather extremes are also important to consider. If a cold early spring was followed by a severe summer drought, this combination could have been particularly unfavourable for fodder production (Calanca et al., 2022; Pfister, 2006)."
  -- #11 -- Thank you for this point. I will mention the warm and dry seasons of 1637/38 and 1645 in the sections on animal husbandry and caseiculture as a possible additional cause of reduced fodder availability, alongside the cattle plague and add a sentence on compound events such as a cold spring followed by summer drought.
  "Even if, for example, livestock production was mainly oriented towards consumption within the hospitals, the livestock and cereal production impacts identified in this study potentially carry a broader relevance for those Alpine and surrounding central European farming populations that were not involved in viticulture."
  -- #12 -- I agree and will add this point to the Discussion.
  "The Hospital account data"
  "The main source material employed in the study is very impressive in both its detail and coverage. It would be useful if the manuscript could provide somewhat more information on the temporal extent and broader potential of these records. In particular, is the period studied here unusual in terms of source availability, or do the hospital accounts extend substantially further backward and/or forward in time? At lines 244–245 and 292 the author suggests that the temporal coverage is quite substantial. For example, are there only records for viticulture covering 175 years? If comparable longer series are available for crop yields, prices, or livestock products, could a longer reference period be used to place the deviations associated with the 1640/1641 event in a broader historical context?"
  -- #13 -- Thank you. The accounts of all three hospitals cover a much longer period; this will be stated in Sect. 3. A longer reference period would be possible in principle. However, this paper focuses on the crisis of the early 1640s and the responses to it and a short reference period keeps the institutional conditions comparable.
  "Furthermore, the stocks of wine are mentioned at several places in the manuscript (e.g., lines 373–374, and 638). Is it also possible to derive information on the stocks of grain and fodder? This would be very valuable information as such historical records are very rare, but central to understanding the capacity of pre-industrial agriculture to withstand production shocks (see Brunt & Cannon, 2026)."
  -- #14 -- Yes. Besides wine, the accounts of all three hospitals record grain stocks, which differed considerably between the hospitals. I will add a short paragraph on grain stocks to the section on crop cultivation, parallel to the wine stocks.
  "Minor comments"
  "Table 2 lists “Crop yields from hospital owned pastures.” The term “pastures” seems inappropriate if the variable refers to cereal or other crop production. A more suitable formulation would be “crop yields from hospital-owned arable land.”"
  -- #15 -- Thank you; this will be corrected as suggested.
  "Table 1 might be moved to an appendix."
  -- #16 -- Thank you; Table 1 will be moved to Appendix C, together with the other sources and referred to in the text.
  "Line 44: It says “June–July, JJA” but should be “June–August, JJA”?"
  -- #17 -- Yes; this will be corrected.
  "Lines 58–59: “Specifically, cold temperatures during the growing season severely affect crop cultivation.” This is not at all a given. Even in northern Europe (Scandinavia) a cold growing season is far from uniformly bad (Skoglund & Ljungqvist, 2026). See also Ljungqvist et al. (2023) on climate–harvest relationships in Switzerland during the study period."
  -- #18 -- Thank you. I will adjust the sentence to make it more precise. For the Swiss Plateau, cold springs combined with wet midsummers have been identified as the conditions most harmful to grain crops (Pfister, 2006; Pfister and Brázdil, 2006) and Ljungqvist et al. (2023, Sect. 4.2) note that most severe harvest failures occurred in years with cold springs and summers and with excessive precipitation right before or during harvest. The revised sentence will refer to these specific conditions.
  "Lines 59–60: “A substantial temperature deficit in the spring months can have a devastating impact on grain price development.” This causal formulation seems too direct. Surely the grain price is determined by the actual harvest, and not whether the spring was cold or not (even if a cold spring could potentially affect the harvest)."
  -- #19 -- I agree that grain prices depend on the harvest and on the markets. At the same time, cold springs combined with wet midsummers coincided with peaks of grain prices in the region (Pfister, 2006). The sentence will be rephrased to make the link via the harvest explicit.
  "Lines 70–72: “The example of eastern Switzerland illustrates how closely the individual agricultural sectors were linked and how specific regions specialised in one sector of agriculture (Sonderegger, 2019).” This is a bit unclear, does it refer to the European mixed farming system where different components (e.g., livestock husbandry and cereal cultivation) were dependent on each other, or the importance of regional specialization and trade?"
  -- #20 -- It refers to regional specialisation and interregional trade (Sonderegger, 2019). The sentence will be clarified.
  "Lines 81–82: I am unsure about the usefulness of this definition. I find it hard to come up with a single extreme climate event in Europe during the early modern period that on its own led to “major structural changes”, so in that case all of Europe was resilient during the early modern period?"
  -- #21 -- I agree. With this definition, only collapse would count as evidence of vulnerability – a problem that Soens (2018) himself points out. In the revised manuscript I will follow his comparative understanding of resilience: how well a society limits the exposure of people to suffering and disruption, asking who suffers and why. This fits the comparison of the three hospitals and of the groups affected by the crisis.
  "Line 87. Remove the extra period."
  -- #22 -- This will be corrected.
  "Lines 90–91. I would say that a period of low sun spots is a type of solar forcing, so I don’t know if it is correct to say that the solar forcing was weak."
  -- #23 -- I agree. The sentence will be rephrased to refer to low solar activity and the dates of the Maunder Minimum will be corrected (1645–1715).
  "Lines 226–227. Is the purpose of this study really to assess the volcanic impacts on climate? Even though the author does attempt to partly do just that (e.g., section 5.1), I believe it is rather to assess the climatic impacts on society, as the former would is a more demanding tasks that likely would require a study of its own."
  -- #24 -- I agree. The aim will be stated as assessing the impacts of climate anomalies on society; the climate analysis provides the context (see also RC2 #29).
  "Page 14–15. A lot of text on these pages would be better placed in the discussion section, for example lines 312–333 and possibly lines 334–340."
  -- #25 -- I agree. Lines 312–340 will be moved to the Discussion; Sect. 5.1 will only describe the climate anomalies.
  "At many points in the manuscript the term “husbandry” is used, but it would be more appropriate to use “animal husbandry”."
  -- #26 -- This will be changed throughout the manuscript.
  "References"
  "Brunt, L., and Cannon, E. (2026). Estimating grain storage with probate inventories: Kent and Cornwall, 1600–1750. Explorations in Economic History, 102, 101784. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2026.101784"
  "Calanca, P., Wüst-Galley, C., Giuliani, S., and Erdin, D. (2022). Auswirkungen der Trockenheit auf die Produktivität des Schweizer Grünlands. Agrarforschung Schweiz, 13, 135–144. https://doi.org/10.34776/afs13-135"
  "Hartermann M., Pfister U., Scholten-Buschhoff F. (2026). The slow emergence of the rational investor: Grain markets and grain storage of rural estates in western Germany, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Economic History Review, 79, 1235–1264. https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.70060"
  "Ljungqvist, F. C., Christiansen, B., Esper, J., Huhtamaa, H., Leijonhufvud, L., Pfister, C., Seim, A., Skoglund, M. K., and Thejll, P. (2023). Climatic signatures in early modern European grain harvest yields. Climate of the Past, 19, 2463–2491. https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-19-2463-2023"
  "Pfister, C. (2006). Little Ice Age-type Impacts and the Mitigation of Social Vulnerability to Climate in the Swiss Canton of Bern prior to 1800. In Costanza et al. (eds.). Sustainability or Collapse?: An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (pp. 197–212)."
  "Pfister, C. and Brázdil, R. (2006). Social vulnerability to climate in the "Little Ice Age": an example from Central Europe in the early 1770s, Clim. Past, 2, 115–129, https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2-115-2006"
  "Pribyl, K., and Cornes, R. C. (2020). Droughts in medieval and early modern England, part 2: Impacts. Weather, 75, 196–198. https://doi.org/10.1002/wea.3529"
  "Skoglund, M. K. (2024). The impact of drought on northern European pre-industrial agriculture. Holocene, 34, 120–135. https://doi.org/10.1177/09596836231200431"
  "Skoglund, M. K., and Ljungqvist, F. C. (2026). Climatic effects on grain harvest variations across Sweden c. 1665–1810. Geografiska Annaler: Series A, Physical Geography, 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353676.2026.2666716"
  "Wetter, O., and Pfister, C. (2011). Spring-summer temperatures reconstructed for northern Switzerland and southwestern Germany from winter rye harvest dates, 1454–1970. Climate of the Past, 7, 1307–1326. https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-7-1307-2011"
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-4370-AC2
RC2:
'Comment on egusphere-2026-4370', Anonymous Referee #2, 14 Oct 2026

It was a quite pleasant experience to read this paper; it is clearly written, informative, and very smooth. Being saying so, the format and style of the paper needs to be substantively improved to strengthen its scientific quality and clarity. Below I provided some opinions and suggestions which I hope to help the author sharpen his thread of thinking and writing.
1) The abstract is too lengthy and lacks focus. The present content is very descriptive with unnecessary details and background context while more important information is missing such as what is your fundamental research argument and research question? what is the research method and so on. Abstract needs to be strategically structured and concise in delivering key information about the research.

2) The argument of the study needs to be further clarified. I appreciate the author to display all information on the climatic, agricultural (victuals), and financial aspects of the three hospitals in response to the climatic anomalies following 1640/1641 eruptions. However to the end, all of these became too mixed-up; everything is too interconnected with other elements inside and outside the climatic and social systems. For example, temperature dropped already in 1639, interpreted as internal variability aside from eruptions, and explanations to the decline and fluctuation of caseiculture and viticulture were again associated with pre-existing cattle plague starting 1637 and the preceding wars, not to mention the differences in the institutional design and organization among the three hospitals. All of those make sense as a narrative for what has happened in the history. However, as a scientific research, I lost the track of what the most important subject/argument it is in this study: whether it is a focus on volcanic impacts on climatic and social systems, or on the social mechanism that help build resilience when facing climatic shocks or extremes? A clarity is needed here, and a diagram to show your conceptual framework can be helpful in sorting out the complexity in the context.

3) A profile of data processing and computation process needs to be added. Table 1 and 2 are good but are very simplified. For example, what was the normalization method to be used, how did you aggregate, and what was the source of uncertainty and the range of it? Some of those have been briefly addressed in the text but a more detailed delineation is necessary especially considering the complexity and diversity in the study material.
4) Finally, if it is possible, Figure 1 needs to be largely improved. Now the map only shows the three cities and the sites (little square) of the three hospitals and their property areas (colored circles). But those circles does not carry any meaning at their present form and the place names which were frequently mentioned in the text are missing. If a map is made to be shown, it would be nice to label important place names or facilities on the map, including a map scale.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-4370-RC2
- AC3: 'Reply on RC2', Niklaus Emanuel Bartlome, 08 Nov 2026
  
  Dear Anonymous Referee #2,
  Thank you very much for your constructive review and your kind words. I am responding to your review below; each response follows the comment which it answers. Each response is marked with a running number (-- #27 -- to -- #31 --, continuing from my replies to Referee #1 and to CC1).
  Niklaus Bartlome
  "It was a quite pleasant experience to read this paper; it is clearly written, informative, and very smooth. Being saying so, the format and style of the paper needs to be substantively improved to strengthen its scientific quality and clarity. Below I provided some opinions and suggestions which I hope to help the author sharpen his thread of thinking and writing."
  -- #27 -- Thank you. I agree that the structure of the paper needs to make the argument clearer. The manuscript will be reorganised as described in RC2 #28–#31.
  "1) The abstract is too lengthy and lacks focus. The present content is very descriptive with unnecessary details and background context while more important information is missing such as what is your fundamental research argument and research question? what is the research method and so on. Abstract needs to be strategically structured and concise in delivering key information about the research."
  -- #28 -- I agree. The abstract will be shortened substantially and restructured: research question, approach (comparison of three urban hospitals combined with climate reanalysis data), main findings and contribution. Background information will be reduced to a minimum.
  "2) The argument of the study needs to be further clarified. I appreciate the author to display all information on the climatic, agricultural (victuals), and financial aspects of the three hospitals in response to the climatic anomalies following 1640/1641 eruptions. However to the end, all of these became too mixed-up; everything is too interconnected with other elements inside and outside the climatic and social systems. For example, temperature dropped already in 1639, interpreted as internal variability aside from eruptions, and explanations to the decline and fluctuation of caseiculture and viticulture were again associated with pre-existing cattle plague starting 1637 and the preceding wars, not to mention the differences in the institutional design and organization among the three hospitals. All of those make sense as a narrative for what has happened in the history. However, as a scientific research, I lost the track of what the most important subject/argument it is in this study: whether it is a focus on volcanic impacts on climatic and social systems, or on the social mechanism that help build resilience when facing climatic shocks or extremes? A clarity is needed here, and a diagram to show your conceptual framework can be helpful in sorting out the complexity in the context."
  -- #29 -- Thank you for this important comment, which helped me to sharpen the argument. The focus of the study is the second option you mention: the societal mechanisms that limited the impacts of the climate anomalies. The eruptions and the climate anomalies form the context; the core of the paper is what happened to the three hospitals and how they and the urban authorities coped with the consequences. To make this clear, I will:
  - state the research question once, early in the introduction: “How did the climate anomalies around the 1640/41 double eruption impact the Swiss Plateau and how did local authorities and urban hospitals cope with their consequences?”;
  - add a new figure presenting the conceptual framework, adapted from the order-of-impact model (Pfister and Wanner, 2021), including the cold anomalies from 1639, before the eruptions, the non-climatic stressors (cattle plague, war refugees) and the institutional responses;
  - frame resilience in a comparative sense (Soens, 2018), asking who might have suffered and why;
  - present the differences in the institutional design of the three hospitals together in Sect. 3;
  - streamline the climate sections and move the interpretation of the climate anomalies to the Discussion.
  "3) A profile of data processing and computation process needs to be added. Table 1 and 2 are good but are very simplified. For example, what was the normalization method to be used, how did you aggregate, and what was the source of uncertainty and the range of it? Some of those have been briefly addressed in the text but a more detailed delineation is necessary especially considering the complexity and diversity in the study material."
  -- #30 -- I agree. The new subsection on data processing (see RC1 #2) will describe the processing step by step, including normalisation, aggregation and the treatment of gaps, as well as the main sources of uncertainty and, where they can be quantified, their ranges (e.g. the conversion of historical measures and currencies, or the vineyard area of the St. Gallen hospital). Table 2 will be revised accordingly.
  "4) Finally, if it is possible, Figure 1 needs to be largely improved. Now the map only shows the three cities and the sites (little square) of the three hospitals and their property areas (colored circles). But those circles does not carry any meaning at their present form and the place names which were frequently mentioned in the text are missing. If a map is made to be shown, it would be nice to label important place names or facilities on the map, including a map scale."
  -- #31 -- Thank you for this suggestion. Figure 1 will be revised: the place names mentioned in the text will be labelled; the coloured areas will show what was produced where (wine, grain, Alpine pastures) in the colours of the respective hospital; and a legend and a scale bar will be added.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-4370-AC3

Niklaus Emanuel Bartlome

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Short summary

This paper examines the potential impacts of the 1640/41 Komagatake/Parker double eruption on climate, agriculture, and society in early modern Switzerland. Using novel archival material and climate reanalysis data, it analyses three municipal hospitals on the Swiss Plateau to investigate how their economies were affected and how local authorities responded to the ensuing subsistence crisis. Unlike other affected regions, Switzerland did not experience a comparable famine.


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