The ninth plague of Egypt was complete darkness that lasted for three days. But in 536 AD, much of the world went dark for a full 18 months, as a mysterious fog rolled over Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia. The fog blocked the sun during the day, causing temperatures to drop, crops to fail and people to die. It was, you might say, the literal Dark Age.
536 AD seems to fall in the Fourth Era of the Church age, a time when the Holy Roman Church was in its ascendancy. From 313 AD, when Emperor Constantine established a religious hierarchy dividing the power between, Constantinople, Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria, the Church had grown in strength, power and influence, so much so that in 533 AD, the supremacy of the Roman Church in ecclesiastical affairs was acknowledged by Justinian. At that time, Pope John II became the 56th pope of Rome, and the first to adopt a regnal name upon elevation to the papacy.
Five years later, the last of the Barbarian tribes were removed from Rome, allowing the Bishop of Rome to exercise his full power over the Roman Empire. Describing this milestone, the Book refered to it as when "the Temple was trampled underfoot by the Gentiles". The church was now completely under the authority of Rome, and a spritual spiritual darkness began to descend on the christian world. No wonder this period in world history is known as the Dark Ages.
Three years into the reign of Pope John II, the world experienced what would be one of its darkest years. What John saw and wrote down in the Book of Revelation might well have been a snapshot of the world in 536: "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him." As if repulsed by the spiritual darkness that was now decending upon the earth, nature responded with a burst of physical hellfire of her own, the likes of which had never been seen before and might never be seen again.
Medieval historian Michael McCormick believes 536 was the worst year ever to be alive It was worse than 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. It was worse than 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. "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 the darkest hour of 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 - 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,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."
Ever since tree ring studies in the 1990s suggested the summers around the year 540 were unusually cold, researchers have hunted for the cause. Three years ago polar ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica yielded a clue. When a volcano erupts, it spews sulfur, bismuth, and other substances high into the atmosphere, where they form an aerosol veil that reflects the sun's light back into space, cooling the planet. By matching the ice record of these chemical traces with tree ring records of climate, a team led by Michael Sigl, now of the University of Bern, found that nearly every unusually cold summer over the past 2500 years was preceded by a volcanic eruption. A massive eruption, perhaps in North America, the team suggested, stood out in late 535 or early 536; another followed in 540. Sigl's team concluded that the double blow explained the prolonged dark and cold followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640.
Scientific information: Science: Archaeology
Design by W3layouts
