the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 12 Aug 2026
Wine, victuals and volcanoes – potential impacts of the 1640/1641 double volcanic eruption on climate and society in early modern Switzerland
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.
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Status: open (until 07 Oct 2026)
- RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2026-4370', Anonymous Referee #1, 10 Sep 2026 reply
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CC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2026-4370', Martin Skoglund, 12 Sep 2026
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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
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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
I hope this helps further improve the manuscript. I enjoyed reading this.