Looking back to 1815

The year 1815 is commonly known in the Western world as the year in which the Congress* danced its way through the whole night and to the end of the 20 years of "Napoleonic" wars.

Practically every sovereign state of Europe sent a delegation to Vienna. More than 200 states and princely houses were represented. There were representatives of cities, corporations, abbeys, bishoprics and special interest groups. There even was a delegation representing German publishers, demanding the creation of copyright law and more freedom of the press.

The Congress, its conferences, balls, soirées and coffee invitations also drew a host of courtiers, secretaries, civil servants and ladies to enjoy the magnificent social life of the Austrian court. Its lavish entertainment did not escape the attention of the emerging European press and other observers.

According to a famous joke of an attendee (Austrian Feldmarschall Charles-Joseph de Ligne), it danced a lot but did not move forward ("Le Congrès ne marche pas, il danse."). Of course all these events created many possibilities for informal gathering and may, as some seem to think, have helped to ensure the success of the Congress, a success which some adore and others despise.

Eruption

But 1815 was also the year in which the volcano Tambora on the small Indonesian island of Sumbawa erupted from the 10^th to the of 15^th April.

The eruption reached an intensity of 7 (of 8) on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. It the largest volcanic eruption since the eruption of Taupō in New Zealand about 25,000 years ago. Massive fall of ash reached as far as Borneo, Sulawesi, Java and the Moluccas.

The eruption killed at least 71,000 people on Sumbawa and Lombok, of whom 11,000 to 12,000 died directly from the eruption. The material ejected by the eruption caused global climate changes and had especially great effects on the North American and European weather.

The explosion could be heard several hundred kilometers away and was often mistaken for the thunder of cannons. Troops were assembled in Makassar and Jogykarte for a counterattack. The island, which mainly produced agrarian goods for export, was largely deforested and a tidal wave disrupted the entire rice harvest in the coastal plains.

The mountain itself was reduced from a height of 4200 meters to 2800 meters. There was no medical care for the seriously injured survivors. The island had become practically uninhabitable and completely dependent on external supplies.

It took months for the Dutch colonial authorities to get an idea of ​​the extent of the disaster. The neighboring islands of Bali and Lombok were covered by a layer of ash more than 20 cm thick. Here too, the entire, already ripe, rice harvest was lost.

Agriculture in Bali was severely affected for 6 years. However, more than 10 years after the event, Bali's agriculture benefited greatly from the fertilizing effect of volcanic rainfall, experienced a major boom and became an even stronger agricultural exporter than before.

The last great famine in Switzerland

In many parts of Europe and North America, 1815 was the coldest year since scientific weather records began. New England and western Canada were the hardest hit, but Switzerland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, England and Ireland also experienced abnormal cold, rain and poor harvests.

The consequences of the cold, wet weather in 1815 and 1816 were devastating for Switzerland. In its eastern regions there was a famine and people ate grass. At the time, no one suspected that these weather condition were due to the volcanic eruption in Indonesia. It was not until a hundred years later that climate research discovered this connection.

Less dramatic, but interesting from a cultural history perspective: the summer of 1816 was very cold and rainy in western Switzerland too. The gloomy season also greatly affected the mood of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Lord Byron, who spent the summer on Lake Geneva with their respective lovers, Percy Shelley, whom Godwin later married to become Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont, Godwin's stepsister, who had arranged the meeting and in whom Byron allegedly had already lost interest allthough or because she carried his child.

The four of them passed the time reading and writing, and this is when and how Shelley's Frankenstein and Byron's poem Darkness were created.

1816 went down in history as the year without a summer. Temperatures in large parts of Europe remained well below the long-term average for several years. Nowhere did the crisis hit harder than in the winter of 1816/17 in the southern Rhineland and Switzerland. Basic grain supplies collapsed because early frosts and harsh conditions in the Baltic Sea greatly delayed the import of grain from practically all Baltic ports.

The whole mechanism of food shortages, rising prices and the resulting collapse in demand for non-food products was set in motion. People fled from the crisis areas to the Russian Empire, to the eastern part of the Danube Monarchy and, above all, via Amsterdam and Antwerp, to the brave New World.

However, quite a few ship captains refused to transport destitute refugees (now called economic refugees). Many who were unable to make the ship passage had to return home as beggars.

The Central European agricultural crisis of 1815-1817 is considered by many historians to be one of the last crises "of the old type". Some even believe that this crisis as a whole destabilized the newly established European congressional system of government in the long term and created the preconditions for the revolutions of 1830 and 1848.

* (of Vienna)