Wartime earthquakes in borderlands

Abstract

The amount of traces that an earthquake may leave in historical records depends on many variables: its size, the relevance (political, economic, and cultural) of the area affected by it, the historical period in which it occurred, the space/time concomitance of other major geopolitical events that may overshadow the earthquake and hinder the production and circulation of information on its effects. If an earthquake is less than destructive and affects a marginal or border area, the likeliness that its memory will be quickly effaced is particularly high in wartime. Such an earthquake occurred during the French phase of the Thirty Years' War (first half of the 17th century) in the Duchy of Savoy, an Alpine region and the main Italian theatre of war. It left only vague traces in a few seismological and historical compilations (Italian and European), none of the European parametric catalogues picked it up. The chance discovery of a short description of its effects in a diplomatic dispatch recently led us to undertake its study. It was no easy feat, given the complexity of the socio-political context of the time, characterized by war events affecting all the territories where this earthquake could have been felt, but the effort was worthwhile because this earthquake currently turns out to be the most significant one in the seismic history of a major industrial city of northern Italy.