The Anatomy of Melancholy

Bodin tells of a Portuguese ambassador who, on coming from Lisbon to Danzig in Prussia, found greater heat there than he had ever experienced at home. Don García de Silva, envoy of Philip III, King of Spain, was staying at Isfahan in Persia in 1619. In his letter to the Marquis of Bedmar, he mentions greater cold at Isfahan, whose latitude is 31 degrees, than he had ever felt in Spain or any part of Europe.

Our predecessors thought the torrid zone uninhabitable, but modern travellers have found it exceptionally temperate, refreshed by frequent rains and moistening showers, with the trade wind and cooling breezes in some parts; as Acosta describes it, most pleasant and fertile. Arica in Chile is reportedly one of the sweetest places the sun ever shone on, an “Olympus on earth,” a heaven on earth. How extravagantly some praise Mexico in New Spain, Peru, Brazil, and so on! Yet elsewhere the land is hard, dry, sandy, barren—a veritable desert—and still at the same latitude.

We often find great differences of climate within the same country, owing to its position in relation to seas, hills, or valleys, lack of water, the nature of the soil, and so on. In Spain, for example, Aragon is “rugged and dry,” harsh and poorly inhabited. Extremadura is dry, sandy, and mostly barren, extremely hot because of its plains; Andalusia is another Paradise; Valencia has a most pleasant climate and is continually green. So it is around Granada: fertile plains on one side, while on the other snow can be seen continually on the hilltops all summer long.

Who does not know that their houses in the Alps are covered with snow for three quarters of the year? Or that Tenerife is so cold at the top and extremely hot at the bottom? Mount Atlas in Africa, Lebanon in Palestine, and many others are, as Tacitus calls them, “faithful to snow amid such great heats”; and Radziwiłł, in letter 2, folio 27, allows that it is far hotter there than in any part of Italy. True: but they rise high, near the middle region of the air, and are therefore cold, “because of the scant refraction of the sun’s rays,” as Serarius answers in his commentary on Joshua 3, question 5; Abulensis, question 37.

In the heat of summer, the air at the king’s palace of the Escorial is exceptionally temperate because of a cold blast from the nearby snowy mountains of the Sierra de Cadarma, while at Toledo it is very hot. The same is true in all other countries. The causes of these variations commonly lie, I say, in their nearness to the middle region. Yet the differences of climate between places equally situated, elevated, and distant from the pole are hard to account for, together with the differences in plants, birds, and animals so familiar to us. Among the peoples of the Indies, everywhere the sun is equally distant, the same stars stand overhead, the planets cast the same rays and have similar aspects; the nearness of the seas, the surface of the land, and the soil are the same, or not very different.