{"id":142852,"date":"2022-07-25T22:25:49","date_gmt":"2022-07-26T03:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/why-536-was-the-worst-year-to-be-alive"},"modified":"2022-07-25T22:25:49","modified_gmt":"2022-07-26T03:25:49","slug":"why-536-was-the-worst-year-to-be-alive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/why-536-was-the-worst-year-to-be-alive","title":{"rendered":"Why 536 was \u2018the worst year to be alive\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/why-536-was-the-worst-year-to-be-alive3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he\u2019s got an answer: \u201c536.\u201d Not 1,349, 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, \u201cIt was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,\u201d says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the <i>Science<\/i> of the Human Past.<\/p>\n<p>A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night\u2014for 18 months. \u201cFor the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,\u201d wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5\u00b0C to 2.5\u00b0C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2,300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record \u201ca failure of bread from the years 536\u2013539.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2014a spike in airborne lead\u2014marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he\u2019s got an answer: \u201c536.\u201d Not 1,349, 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, \u201cIt was the beginning of one [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,39,1506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-economics","category-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142852\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}