Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (2 page)

Lastly, I believe that my book is not simply about the past and its influence on the present, but also, hopefully, illuminates the whole question of the influence of the natural environment in human history. This is particularly relevant now, as global warming threatens to destabilize our climate to an extent that has not occurred since the climatic crisis of the sixth century. Three-quarters of this book is about the repercussions of that Dark Age disaster—and it should serve to alert us to the sheer scale of the geopolitical and other changes that can flow from climatic catastrophe. History is usually seen predominantly as a discipline of the humanities. This book will help demonstrate that it also belongs to the realms of the natural and social sciences.

ACCENT NOTE

Accents have not been used in words that have been transliterated from non
-
Latin scripts.

It took four years to research and write this book. Because it covers so many different disciplines—everything from epidemiology and astrophysics to volcanology and archaeology—I sought the often-detailed advice of dozens of academic specialists.

I am grateful to all of them for their depth of knowledge—and for their patience. I thank them for all the advice they gave me, most of which I accepted, and ask them to forgive me for the small number of instances in which, bemused by contrasting strands of counsel, I occasionally opted for one interpretation rather than another.

I am particularly indebted to Byzantinists Michael Whitby, Peter Llewellyn, Peter Sarris, Anna Leone, and Stephen Hill; Islamicists Hugh Kennedy and Patricia Crone; Yemen specialists Christian Robin, Ueli Brunner, and Iwona Gajda; Turkic specialist Peter Golden; Jewish history specialist Norman Golb; African archaeology specialist Mark Horton; Far East and/or Southeast Asia specialists Andreas Janousch, Scott Pearce, Richard Stephenson, Simon Kaner, Stanley Weinstein, Joan Piggott, Jonathan Best, Nancy Florida, Willem van der Molen, Roy E. Jordaan, and Eric Zürcher; Indian specialist Michael Mitchiner; historians, archaeologists, and others specializing in western Europe and/or the British Isles, Ian Wood, David King, John Hines, Barbara Yorke, Roger White, Ewan Campbell, Charles Thomas, Heinrich Härke, Daniel McCarthy, and Donnchadh O’Corrain; Arthurian literature specialist Elspeth Kennedy; Pre-Columbianists David Browne, Frank Meddens, Claude Chapdelaine, Bill Isbell, Alan Kolata, Paul Goldstein, John Topic, Steve Bourget, Linda Manzanilla, Michael Spence, George Cowgill, Esther Pasztory, Izumi Shimada, Simon Martin, Michael Moseley, AnnCorinne Fretter, Bob Birmingham, and Rebecca Storey; Dendrochronologists Mike Baillie, Keith Briffa, Jeffrey Dean, Pepe Boninsegna, and Ricardo Villalba; lake sediment specialists Alex Chepstow-Lusty and Mark Brenner; volcanologists Ken Wohletz, Alain Gourgaud, Clive Oppenheimer, Tom Simkin, and Jerry Sukhyar; epidemiologists Ken Gage and Susan Young; ice-core specialists Claus Hammer, Henrik Clausen, and Lonnie Thompson; astronomer Alan Fitzsimmons; locust experts Nick Jago and Jane Rosenberg; geneticist David Goldstein; zoologist Frank Wheeler; grazing ecologist John Milne; late Roman ivory experts Tony Cutler and David Whitehouse; and low-frequency atmospheric sound transmission specialist Rod Whitaker.

I apologize to anyone I have inadvertently left off this list; and I must also point out that the responsibility for the views expressed in this book is of course mine alone.

I would also like to acknowledge the four academics who first realized that there had been a climatic disaster in the mid-sixth century—Richard Stothers and Michael Rampino, who published some of the Roman historical evidence in a paper in the
Journal of Geophysical Research
88 in 1983; Kevin Pang, whose work on the Chinese records of the catastrophe was reported in
Science News
127 in 1985; and Mike Baillie, who first noticed the tree ring evidence for the disaster and published it in
Nature
332 in March 1988, and—together with the Roman and Chinese historical evidence—in
Archaeology Ireland
in summer 1988. Indeed I first heard about the climatic events of the mid–sixth century at a lecture given by Mike Baillie at an archaeology conference in Bradford in April 1994.

I want also to give special thanks to my agent Bill Hamilton; to Barbara Basham, who did so much of the typing; Julian Saul, who drew most of the diagrams and maps; meteorological library assistant Barbara deCrausaz; Kate Brundrett, who did additional work on many of the graphics; Andrew Rafferty, who took the photograph used to produce the cover; my publisher, Mark Booth; my managing editor, Liz Rowlinson; my copy editor, Roderick Brown; the cover designer, Arvin Budhu; the proofreader, Jane Selley; the indexer, Ann Hall; the typesetter, Peter Brealey; copyright clearance assistant Paul Rodger; and my wife, Graça, for doing the massive quantity of administrative work generated by the writing and researching of the book and for helping to research and produce many of the maps. But above all I want to thank Graça and our two children, Michael and Camile, for their unbounded patience and tolerance over these past four years—and my late parents and grandmother, whose influence over the decades helped me develop and sustain an appreciation of our world and its story.

Last but not least, I would like to thank a rural Victorian whom I never met but who first created my interest in human history—the anonymous man, woman, or child who, a century or so ago, in a field west of London, dropped a humble penny—a coin that I found when I was a child and which triggered my fascination with the vanished past and how it has created the present and will help create the future.

David Keys
March 1999

The Dark Age Plague: A Chronology

The Origins and Spread of the Plague

From Gerbil to Disaster

The Earliest Islamic Conquests

The Consequences of
A
.
D
. 535: Islam, Avars, Plague, and The Roman Empire

The Mediterranean and Middle Eastern World,
A
.
D
. 562

The Mediterranean and Middle Eastern World,
A
.
D
. 720

The Consequences of
A
.
D
. 535 for the Turkic World

The Khazar Empire at Its Peak

Britain and Ireland

British Climate in the Sixth Century

Anglo-Saxon Expansion

China and Korea

Major Climatic Events in Sixth-Century China

The Consequences of
A
.
D
. 535 for China

Korean Climate in the Sixth Century

Korea and Japan

The Consequences of
A
.
D
. 535 for Japan and Korea

Archaeological Sites in Mesoamerica

The Consequences of
A
.
D
. 535 for Mesoamerica

The Andean Region

The Consequences of
A
.
D
. 535 for South America

Major Volcanic Eruptions Recorded in Ice Cores

The Initial Suspects

Sixth-Century Geopolitical Discontinuity in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia Before and After
A
.
D
. 535

The Probable Culprit

Sources of Climatic Data

Inferred Summer Temperature Graph for Western Siberia and Northern Scandinavia,
A
.
D
. 1–1997

Temperature Graph for Khatanga, North-Central Siberia,
A
.
D
. 100–1998

Pine Tree Growth in Northern Finland, Sixth Century
A
.
D
.

European Oak Growth, Sixth Century
A
.
D
.

Temperature Graph for Southern Chile, Sixth Century
A
.
D
.

Sedge Growth at Lake Marcacocha, Peru, 2200
B
.
C
.–
A
.
D
. 600

Western American Foxtail and Bristlecone Pine Growth, Sixth Century
A
.
D
.

I
n
A.D.
535–536 mankind was hit by one of the greatest natural disasters ever to occur. It blotted out much of the light and heat of the sun for eighteen months, and the climate of the entire planet began to spin out of control. The result, direct or indirect, was climatic chaos, famine, migration, war, and massive political change on virtually every continent.

As the engine for extraordinary intraregional change in four great areas of the world—Afro-Eurasia (from Mongolia to Britain, from Scandinavia to southern Africa), the Far East (China, Korea, Japan), Mesoamerica (Mexico/Central America), and South America—the disaster altered world history dramatically and permanently.

The hundred-year period after it occurred is the heart of history’s so-called Dark Ages, which formed the painful and often violent interface between the ancient and protomodern worlds. That period witnessed the final end of the supercities of the ancient world; the end of ancient Persia; the transmutation of the Roman Empire into the Byzantine Empire; the end of ancient South Arabian civilization; the end of Catholicism’s greatest rival, Arian Christianity; the collapse of the greatest ancient civilization in the New World, the metropolis state of Teotihuacan; the fall from power of the great Maya city of Tikal; and the fall of the enigmatic Nasca civilization of South America.

But it was also the hundred-year period that witnessed the birth, or in some cases the conception, of Islam, France, Spain, England, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, and the power of the Turks. It also produced a united China and the first great South American empires, the forerunners of the Incas.

Until now, these geographically widely dispersed tragedies and new beginnings—occurring well before the Old and New Worlds knew of each other—have been viewed by historians as largely separate events. Now, for the first time—as a result of the research done for this book—the origins of our modern world can be seen as an integrated whole, linked by a common causal factor.

This climatic disaster half destroyed the Roman Empire, unleashing hordes of central Asian barbarians against the empire’s northern borders, triggering geopolitical processes that created Arab pressures on its southern flank, and causing a series of killer epidemics that drastically reduced its population.

In Arabia and the Mediterranean world as a whole, an apocalyptic zeitgeist, which at base was the result of the shift in climate, led to the emergence of Islam.

In western Europe, the climatic catastrophe and its epidemiological aftereffects destabilized the demographic and political status quo and led to the birth of at least four major nations.

In western Asia, the disaster triggered the rise of the Turks—a process that eventually led to an expansion of Turkic influence everywhere from India to eastern Europe and ultimately to the emergence of the Ottoman Empire.

The same worldwide climatic chaos also destabilized economies and political systems in many areas of the Far East, opening up the way for the reunification of China, the birth of a united Korea, and the emergence of Japan as an embryonic nation-state.

In the New World, a popular revolution was triggered that destroyed the greatest of all ancient American civilizations, the Mexican empire of Teotihuacan. That collapse freed up the Mesoamerican world and led to the rapid growth, and consequent collapse, of much of Maya civilization. In Peru, power shifted from the arid lowlands to the wetter, mountainous Andes, which paved the way, centuries later, for the rise of pre-Columbian America’s largest empire.

T
he mystery climatic disaster of 535–536 resynchronized world history.

The contemporary Roman historian Procopius wrote of the climate changes as “a most dread portent.” In describing the climate in that year, Procopius wrote that “the sun gave forth its light without brightness like the moon during this whole year.” Other accounts of the event say that the sun became “dim” or “dark” for up to eighteen months. Its light shone “like a feeble shadow,” and people were terrified that the sun would never shine properly again. In some parts of the empire, there were agricultural failures and famines.