Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive'

[jpak]

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive

Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year," wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record "a failure of bread from the years 536–539." Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.

To Kyle Harper, provost and a medieval and Roman historian at The University of Oklahoma in Norman, the detailed log of natural disasters and human pollution frozen into the ice "give 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."

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[Cirque du So-What]

1. I think it's safe to say...

...that nobody refers to 536 A.D. as 'the good old days.'

[Lochloosa]

7. Ever met a republican?

[Hortensis]

17. Lol. Lovers of romances set in the past virtually always

imagine themselves as gentry or aristocrats. I realized a long time ago that those are of course the only lives we can identify with. As it is, we live lives of much greater luxury even than those.

Imagine wearing one dress of coarse cloth until it could no longer serve because even that cloth was so precious, living as if death was always near, because it was and many lives very short, spending much of your life stunted and hungry, sleeping every winter huddled up in misery like and with farm animals for warmth, everyone you know missing teeth but...of course?, being the reason Europe never needed to import slaves from other lands.

[TeamPooka]

19. except trump. That's his target date for us.

[eleny]

2. concatenation

"a series of interconnected things or events ... the action of linking things together in a series"

https://www.google.com/search?q=concatenation&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1

[Bradshaw3]

5. Thanks for saving me the trouble of looking it up

That was a new one for me.

[Turbineguy]

3. Trump can beat that.

[malaise]

4. Fascinating

Every day I discover that I have a lot too learn
Rec

[Bradshaw3]

6. The fact that on evolcanic eruption can have that much of an effect shows how fragile our world is

And why we have to take better care of it.

[Stuart G]

8. So much to learn and understand...in so many areas...k and r.

[BigmanPigman]

9. I don't understand

how airborne lead and silver mining are connected?

"...when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining..."

[TexasBushwhacker]

10. Because silver is extracted from ores that also contain lead

Lead melts at a much lower temp than silver, so some of it vaporizes during the heat extraction process.

[elmac]

11. Not an expert but I'm thinking the lead is a byproduct of the silver smelting process

and an airborne contaminate from that process.

[Kaleva]

13. The smelters probably didn't have a very good health care plan.

[Celerity]

12. Silver is often found in galena ore, and galena is also easy to smelt

Galena is lead sulfide, main ore source of lead and used since ancient times.

[Aristus]

14. 536 a.d.

"give 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."

That's a misunderstanding of the timeline of Ancient Rome.

The Western Roman Empire fell in 476 a.d. with the forced abdication of Emperor Romulus Augustulus.

Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire, wouldn't fall for another thousand years.

[ffr]

15. To only be surpassed in the next decade or two or three when billions die

Due to starvation, lack of fresh potable water or wars.

Earth's natural resources have been maxed out for decades already. Now with depleted water tables and climate change about to wreak havoc on the necessities of life, it'll make Black Friday shopping madness look like child's play.

[former9thward]

18. That has been a constant prediction since Malthus in the early 1800s.

Never came true. Paul Ehrlich predicted massive starvation and death in the 1970s. The first sentence of The Population Bomb : "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate "

Never happened.

[Persondem]

16. Cool article (heh, heh). Thank you for posting it. K & R nt

[TeamPooka]

20. Historians: 536 was the worst year in history. Trump: Hold my beer.