The eruption of the Huaynaputina volcano in Spanish Peru (February 19, 1600) led to the accumulation of ash in the Earth’s atmosphere and caused a Little Ice Age, characterized by 10 weeks of torrential summer rains and early autumn frosts. As a result, in 1601 Russia suffered a severe crop failure and a famine began.
Because of the famine and crop failures, many landowners granted their peasants freedom (while many others, driving their peasants out so as not to feed them, did not grant them freedom—so that when the famine ended, they could take those peasants back). Crowds of kholops engaged in banditry and robbery on the roads. Many headed for Moscow, where Tsar Boris Godunov generously distributed money from the treasury. According to the testimony of Avraamy Palitsyn, in Moscow alone, directly or indirectly, at least 127,000 people died of hunger in just two years; diseases began, and a plague epidemic broke out. Cases of cannibalism were observed; the starving ate manure.