"Even though 536 is not the worst year, it is the beginning of one of the worst times!" What really happened in 536 and why is it worse than Covid, World War II and the Black Death?
The coronavirus lasted for three years, infected 750 million people, killed 6.8 million people, and deprived the global economy of 10 years of development gains.
World War I and World War II involved more than 2 billion people in the war, more than 100 million people died, and economic losses amounted to more than $180 billion.
In 1918, the Spanish flu pandemic killed between 50 million and 100 million people, mostly young people.
However, historians do not consider these famous disasters in history to be the worst period for mankind, but instead set 536 as the worst year, so is it really so terrible?
The person who said this was Harvard historian and archaeologist McCormick, who is also chairman of the Science of Human History Program. To be able to make him think that 536 is the worst year in human history, then it must have dealt a huge blow to the development of the entire human race.
The first to discover the anomaly in the world was the Byzantine historian Procopius, who wrote in his book that "the sun, like the moon, emits a dim light all year round." At the same time, Chinese also discovered anomalies, and a yellow mysterious fog shrouded the world for a whole year, and people were all afraid.
Since this year, the world's climate has changed dramatically, the average temperature in the summer of 536 dropped to 1.5-2.5 °C, and China's summer also fell heavily snowed, and opened the coldest 10 years in the last 2300 years, which was later called the "Dark Ages".
The sudden drop in temperature has led to widespread crop deaths, crop failures, and famine. Emperor Justinian, the most powerful Byzantine (Eastern Roman Empire) in the world at the time, was ambitiously preparing to revive the Roman Empire to its glory. Under a long dark sky, he began a 20-year war with the Ostrogothic kingdom.
However, to Justinian's surprise, low temperatures and famine caused the rats of the northeast to migrate all the way north to Egypt on the Mediterranean coast.
These fleas then followed armies and merchants from North Africa to Syria to Constantinople, sucking blood hungry along the Mediterranean coast. As the economic, trade and cultural center of Europe at that time, the epidemic in the Mediterranean eventually parasitized most Europeans through a convenient transportation network, and the first large-scale plague outbreak in history occurred.
The plague caused more than 10,000 deaths a day in Constantinople, killing 40% of its citizens, and the population of the Byzantine Empire plummeted from 40 million to 26 million.
In the following 70 years, the plague continued to stop, and it continued to impact the empire's taxes and troops, making the decline of the Roman Empire an unstoppable torrent of history.
At this time, China was also in the turbulent period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the situation was turbulent, the emperor was desolate, and the emperor and warlords were still on conquest and conquest when natural disasters came. Although there was no European plague, the famine brought by extreme weather also caused the human tragedy of "great famine in Weiguanzhong with cannibalism, and the dead in seven or eight".
According to later historians, the catastrophe directly or indirectly caused by this fog in 536 caused the economic regression of various countries in the world for one century, and many people did not know how such a natural disaster was formed.
Until modern times, McCormick and a glaciologist investigated Alpine glaciers and removed a 72-meter-long ice core to determine when it formed. At the same time, he carried out archaeological excavations across Europe and analyzed the characteristics of climate change for more than 2,000 years before finally reaching a conclusion.
It turned out that in 535 and 536, the Icelandic volcano in Europe and the Krakatou volcano in Indonesia erupted one after another, spewing hundreds of billions of tons of volcanic ash, which led to this terrible disaster in Eurasia.
Today's scientists are still thinking about the question, if the catastrophe of 536 AD breaks out today, with the current level of science and technology and productivity, how little can the damage be reduced, and will mankind break out in war again?
#所见所得, very scientific ## 536 BC ##第一次鼠疫 #
