The last couple of years, especially 2020 has been rough for people around the globe and many believe it to be the worst year in human history but to be honest, 2020 is a cakewalk compared to the true worst year in history.
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Humans living in 536 A.D had it, well, hard. What was it about these 12 months which after more than a millennium of bad years is still considered to be the worst? Well, read more to find out.
Why 536?
Human history is sadly full of tragedies from World Wars that killed millions and cost billions to plague after plague spreading in different regions. Despite all this though, no single year has ever been claimed to be universally bad, except for 536 A.D.
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Why? The sun stopped shining for the entire year. Crops died, sickness spread, volcanoes erupted and life was tougher, harsher and more challenging than ever. But what caused all this and could we have prevented all this? We find out.
Different Time
It is no surprise that nearly two millennia ago life was very different for the average human being. In Britain, King Egbert the first monarch wouldn’t be established for another three centuries!
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Across the Atlantic in the Americas, the ancient Maya civilization was at its peak. While around the Mediterranean Sea in Europe the Byzantine Empire was under the leadership of Emperor Justinian I who was tirelessly working to bring back the kingdom to its former glory.
No Idea
The political world was churning as usual, with Justinian capturing North Africa, Italy, France and Spain in the early days of 536 A.D – nature was planning a different sort of invasion.
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One which would set human beings back for 200 years and reveal a force of destruction which had never been seen before and hopefully, we will never see again. This was going to be the worst year ever.
No Sun
It all started when almost overnight, the sun disappeared. Yes, around the globe with no warning the world was plunged into darkness. This fact isn’t just backed up by scientific research but from authenticated recounts from the year.
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The Roman historian Procopius wrote “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed”
The Start
He continued ” And from the time when this thing happened men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death.” As you can imagine, this was a time where people relied on the sun upon 99% of their day-to-day activities and without it, life was forever changed.
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For starters, crops began to die. This caused a horrible chain reaction which resulted in animals dying from malnutrition, food costs began to rise across the globe and humans of all ages started getting weaker, sicker and poorer.
Why now?
The bleak world of 536 A.D had eluded scientists for quite some time. You would think the sun disappearing for 12 months would have never been forgotten but it was. It was only in the 1990s did the scientists make the startling discovery.
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While no physical proof remained of the event, the truth was hidden in the vegetation all along in Ireland. Scientists were studying the rings inside tree trunks and found a great anamoly found in their research.
Tree Rings
To learn more, they looked at historical records and found that the strange rings correlated with reports of abnormally low temperatures in the summer around the area. This was a strange finding for the area but things were about to get worst.
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Researchers discovered that this was a global event when they found reports of the same weather anomalies thousands of miles away from Rome and Ireland, in China. It was reported that snow started falling in the summer in the area!
Ice Core
It was getting more and more clearer that 536 A.D was a strange and rather terrible year, around the world but it wasn’t until a team of researchers released a paper in 2018 that the true extent of the disaster was revealed.
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The real truth was discovered buried deep beneath the ice in Switzerland’s mountains. It all started in 2013 when a team headed by University of Maine geologist Paul Mayewski began studying ice core samples extracted from the Colle Gnifetti glacier on the border between Italy and Switzerland.
A Vivid Look
Their mission was to understand human history through ice rings and their research led them to find an astonishing array of data covering the past two millennia. And as they began to isolate samples, a vivid look of 536 A.D began to form.
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Mayewski and his colleagues managed to identify events such as atmospheric pollution, volcanic activity and stormy weather with remarkable accuracy. This matched with the records of disastrous harvests around the globe started providing a full picture of the year.
Ash Cloud
In the ice samples, the team found evidence of large-scale volcanic activity that occurred in what’s now Iceland towards the beginning of 536. This was the cause of the sun’s disappearance.
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As the lava cooled, the heavy ash cloud spread out over the Northern Hemisphere, thick enough to cast a somewhat impenetrable veil over the Sun which lasted for one and half years over huge sections of the globe.
No Shadows
At the time, Cassiodorus wrote, “We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon… Strange has been the course of this year thus far” His observations directly confirms modern-day scientific theories.
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He continued ” We have had a winter without storms, a spring without mildness, and a summer without heat. Whence we can look for harvest since the months which should have been maturing the corn have been chilled by Boreas?”
No Exaggeration
But how much weight should we put into Cassiodorus’s words? well, Michael McCormick, who led the research team alongside Mayewski, think a lot. Everything Cassiodorus recounts can be linked bank through scientific evidence.
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peaking to the television network History, he explained, “It was a pretty drastic change; it happened overnight. The ancient witnesses were really onto something. They were not being hysterical or imagining the end of the world.”
Bleak Life
Bearing all this in mind, you can expect that life for the common man in 536 A.D was harder than usual. McCormick said, “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year.”
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The food shortages continued far after the year ended and a few years later, another volcanic eruption in 540 A.D ensured that any process that was based was obliterated. The already struggling society was plunged further into darkness.
Tragedy
If living without the sun, fighting starvation and inflation wasn’t bad enough, the following year a new deadly illness emerged: the bubonic plague. The disease spread like wildfire throughout the Byzantine Empire leaving carnage in its wake.
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By 549, the epidemic was dubbed the Plague of Justinian and had killed as much as 50 per cent of the empire’s populace. It also played a significant part in ensuring the demise of the empire.
Similar Events
To say that 536 A.D was a tough year to survive would be an understatement and while we haven’t had any similar problems in the modern-day, it doesn’t believe that they haven’t happened again.
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In fact, in 1815 the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora resulted in the same level of destruction where a thick cloud of ash slowly spread across the planet and blocked out the sun.
Year Without Summer
Crops were ruined, the weather went haywire, food became scarce. The consequences were so dire that 1816 was dubbed the Year Without a Summer. Mary Shelley, the famed English novelist was trapped inside this cataclysmic event and was inspired by them to create Frankenstein.
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And it was the same ill-fated period that saw her contemporary Lord Byron pen Darkness, a poem that recounts an eerie world without a sun. The weather didn’t just affect Europe but its dark tendrils reached as far as North America.
Importance
While humans have occupied the earth for only a short time, we have had a rich history and the ice core study has allowed us to finally get a deeper look back into the events which shaped the human race and society.
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Speaking to Science, University of Oklahoma historian Kyle Harper explained that the data “give[s] us a new kind of record for understanding the concatenation of human and natural causes that led to the fall of the Roman Empire – and the earliest stirrings of this new medieval economy.”
More Information
But this doesn’t mean that we have learned all that there is to find. New teams are being formed which will be tasked with studying Icelandic and European lakes to recover more evidence from the 536 eruptions.
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We might even be able to pinpoint the exact site of the volcano and try to establish the reasons for the disaster having such a cataclysmic effect. And in turn, helping us to avoid such events in the future.
Slow Recovery
As we mentioned above, it took nearly 100 years for the world to go back to normal and the same ice samples proved that. It was only in 640 A.D when the amount of lead in the atmosphere began to rise.
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Lead pollution is a great indicator of a healthy economy albeit a bit confusing one. Since the 6th century, metalworkers producing silver release lead into the atmosphere – so a higher number of lead pollution directly related to more silver being products and thus represents a growing economy. During 526 A.D lead pollution was almost zero and had sharply dropped from the previous year.
Only Good Thing
The events of 536 A.D also had some positive effects on our society, the sharp and sudden change in the weather created a new group of traders, merchants. Who didn’t rely solely on agriculture for their wealth but on goods.
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“It shows the rise of the merchant class for the first time,” Nottingham University archaeologist Christopher Loveluck told Science. But this all seems like a small silver lining, in a year that was otherwise the worst in human history.