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posted by martyb on Monday December 03 2018, @10:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the answer-"cloudy"-try-again-later dept.

Why 536 was 'the worst year to 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.

[...] At a workshop at Harvard this week, [a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono] 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.

Alpine ice-core evidence for the transformation of the European monetary system, AD 640–670 (open, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2018.110) (DX)


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  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Monday December 03 2018, @10:57PM

    by Arik (4543) on Monday December 03 2018, @10:57PM (#769328) Journal
    This is very true. I remember watching that episode and laughing at it as a kid. A kid who had made his own gunpowder already, probably. But the raw materials were in obvious need of refinement, the result would have no power if it fired at all, and that was actually a good thing because that 'barrel' would have went off more like a pipe bomb with real powder.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
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