According to historian Michael McCormick from Harvard, the worst year to live on Earth was AD 536.
McCormick chose the year 536 because most of the world was in “darkness” at that time. This marked the beginning of a series of events that made life miserable for those unfortunate enough to live through that period.
Europe, Asia, and the Middle East were hit by a mysterious fog, causing these regions to be in complete darkness for 18 months. In China, snow fell, leading to widespread famine as crops were destroyed, resulting in bread shortages for several years.
Summer temperatures dropped by 1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius, followed by the coldest decade in 2.300 years.
In Europe, the year 536, according to McCormick, was “the start of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” and there were no signs of improvement until 640 AD.
McCormick’s claim contrasts with other years such as 1349 when the “Black Death” ravaged Europe, or 1918, when the flu killed up to 100 million people.
The bubonic plague
The suffering of these years continued into 541 AD when the bubonic plague struck the Roman port in Egypt and spread, wiping out a third of the Roman Empire in the east. According to McCormick, this accelerated the fall of Rome.
According to new research, the mysterious fog was most likely caused by a volcanic eruption in Iceland. The eruption covered a large part of the Northern Hemisphere in ash, followed by two more major eruptions in 540 and 547, along with the plague.
Economic stagnation
This caused economic stagnation until 640 AD. Kyle Harper, a historian at the University of Oklahoma, said that the record of catastrophes and human pollution, discovered in glacier ice, “provided a new type of record for understanding the chain connection of human and natural causes leading to the fall of the Roman Empire and the earliest upheavals in the medieval economy.”
E.Dz.
