Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (43 page)

As already mentioned at the very beginning of this book, the Roman historian Procopius also described the apparently bizarre behavior of the sun at this exact time. He regarded it as a very bad omen indeed—a sentiment that was to prove only too correct. “And it came about during this year that a most dread portent took place,” he wrote. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness like the moon during this whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear, nor such as it is accustomed to shed,” said the historian—a top Palestinian-born government and military official.²

Another sixth-century writer, Zacharias of Mytilene, was the author of a chronicle containing a third account of the 535 and 536 “Dark Sun” event. “The sun began to be darkened by day and the moon by night,” he recorded.³

A fourth account was written by a Roman official and academic of Anatolian origin known as John the Lydian, who reported that “the sun became dim for nearly the whole year.”
⁴

All these reports were compiled by eyewitnesses in the Roman imperial capital, Constantinople. But in Italy, a very senior local civil servant also recorded the solar phenomenon. “The sun seems to have lost its wonted light, and appears of a bluish color. We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon, to feel the mighty vigor of the sun’s heat wasted into feebleness, and the phenomena which accompany a transitory eclipse prolonged through almost a whole year,” wrote Cassiodorus Senator in late summer 536. “The moon too, even when its orb is full, is empty of its natural splendor,” he added.
⁵

It wasn’t just the sun’s light that appeared to be reduced. Its heat seemed weakened as well. Unseasonable frosts disrupted agriculture. “We have had a spring without mildness and a summer without heat,” wrote Cassiodorus. “The months which should have been maturing the crops have been chilled by north winds. Rain is denied and the reaper fears new frosts.”

In normally warm Mesopotamia, the winter was “a severe one, so much so that from the large and unwonted quantity of snow, the birds perished,” and there was “distress among men,” says the chronicle written by Zacharias of Mytilene.

John of Ephesus (reported through Michael the Syrian) said that “the fruits did not ripen and the wine tasted like sour grapes,” while John the Lydian noted that “the fruits were killed at an unseasonable time.”

O
n the other side of the planet, the abnormal weather was also being recorded. As mentioned in Chapter 22, the Japanese great king is reported in the ancient chronicle of Japan (the
Nihon shoki
) to have issued an edict lamenting hunger and cold: “Food is the basis of the empire. Yellow gold and ten thousand strings of cash cannot cure hunger. What avails a thousand boxes of pearls to him who is starving of cold?” said the king.

*    *    *

I
n China, as already noted in Chapter 19, the disaster is chronicled in greater detail. In 535, there was a massive drought in the north of the country. The
Bei Shi
(the north Chinese chronicle) says, in an entry for late April/early May, that “because of drought, there was an imperial edict which ordered that in the capital [Chang’ An], in all provinces, commanderies and districts, one should bury the corpses.”

By the fifth month, the situation had deteriorated to such an extent that in the capital itself the government “was forced to provide water” for the population “at the city gates.”

Soon the drought had become so intense that hundreds of thousands of square miles of normally fertile or semifertile land became totally arid. The evidence suggests that huge dust storms began to rage.

Between 11 November and 9 December 535, the capital of south China, Nanjing, was deluged by dust falling from the sky. As already mentioned in Chapter 19, “yellow dust rained down like snow.” The time of year, the color, and the apparent quantity strongly suggests that this dust from the sky was, in fact, a yellow-colored fine sand called loess, which had been carried by the wind from the interior of China. In normal conditions, loess dust comes only from the Gobi Desert and other inland arid areas—and storms only affect areas hundreds of miles north and west of Nanjing. But in extreme drought conditions, when unusually large areas become arid, much wider areas can be inundated by the dust.

As the drought worsened in 536, the
Bei shi
says, in the central Chinese province of Xi’an, seven or eight out of every ten people died. Survivors were forced to eat the corpses of the dead.

As the months rolled on, the climate became increasingly bizarre. The
Bei shi
reports that in some areas of north China (Bian, Si, Zhuo, and Jian) hail fell in September 536—but there was still “a great famine.” Between 29 November and 27 December 536 and again in February 537, in the south Chinese capital Nanjing, even greater dust storms covered the city in a saffron-colored blanket: “Yellow dust rained down like snow. It could be scooped up in handfuls,” said the
Nan shi (History of the Southern
Dynasties).

In early 537 in nine provinces of north China, the drought continued but was increasingly interrupted by hail. Then finally, in 538, the drought ended, but the climatological chaos continued—there were now huge floods. In the summer of that year, the toads and frogs were said to be “croaking from the trees,” so torrential was the rain. The instability continued into the 540s with major droughts in 544, 548, 549, and 550.

*    *    *

I
n Korea, 535–542 had the worst climate recorded for the peninsula for any time in the ninety-year period 510–600, and 535–536 was the worst twenty-four months in that nine-decade time span.

A
s described in previous chapters, the mid-sixth-century climatic disaster also struck the Americas, the steppes of Russia, western Europe, and other regions. But many of those areas left no written records. It is a plethora of nonwritten sources that must, therefore, provide the evidence for the climatic situations in these regions.

The most accurate records of climate change are those hidden inside the trunks of trees. The growth rings of many species preserve an indelible annual record of climatic history. Tree-ring specialists (dendrochronologists) can attempt to reconstruct past climate by studying two telltale sets of data. One is the width of each annual growth ring, which reveals the exact amount of growth in a given year (indeed in a given growing season, usually spring and summer). A drought or unseasonable frost that restricts growth will therefore produce narrow rings. The second, the density of each ring in conifers in cool climates, yields information about temperature. The colder the weather the less dense was the timber growing at that time.

Continuous tree-ring chronologies, going back to the sixth century
A
.
D
. and beyond, now exist for Finland, Sweden, the British Isles, central Europe, the Aegean, Siberia, North America, Chile, Argentina, and Tasmania. In a substantial percentage of all the tree-ring chronologies covering the sixth century that have been constructed so far, the period 535–550 (and sometimes even till 560 or beyond) stands out as a time of unusually low tree-ring growth. In several key chronologies, that twenty-five-to-thirty-five-year period contains many of the narrowest ring sequences known for the past 2,000 years.

The narrow widths and low densities of rings for 536 found in Scots pines from northwest Sweden, for instance,
⁶
indicate the second-coldest summer for the past 1,500 years.

The tree rings for the year 539 found in bristlecone pines in California are among the five narrowest in the
A
.
D
. 400–600 period for that location.
⁷

Narrow foxtail pine rings from the Sierra Nevada mountains in California show that 535, 536, and 541 were the second, third, and fourth coldest years there in the past 2,000 years.
⁸

In southern South America, temperatures declined from 535 to 537, marginally recovered in 538, and then plummeted in 540 to the coldest summer temperatures experienced there in the past 1,600 years. The main tree-ring evidence for this is from
Fitzroya cupressoides
conifers from Chile
⁹
—but new evidence from Argentina
¹⁰
also suggests unusually low temperatures in 540.

In Tasmania, a tree-growth decline (huon pines) between 546 and 552 culminated in the coldest temperatures of that century.
¹¹

At Khatanga in the north-central Siberia region of Russia, a twenty-year decline in tree growth in the 530s and 540s was the most serious of the past 1,900 years!
¹²

And further west, in Poland, Germany, and the British Isles, oak growth massively slowed down in 539–542. Over the past 2,000 years, one of the European oak master chronology’s lowest growth years was 540.
¹³

A
n analysis of tree rings around the world yields clues as to the actual sequence of events that followed the initial major deterioration in the 530s. Many reveal that there was already a minor decline in tree growth occurring in 533 and 534. Then, as the sun became partially obscured in 535 and 536, tree-ring growth rates in parts of western North America, in Europe, Scandinavia, the Russian steppes, and Australia (Tasmania) plummeted. In some areas (e.g., western North America, western Europe, and Scandinavia), there was then a small temporary recovery for a year or two.

But from 538 or, in many places, 540, there was an almost universal massive decline lasting between two and eight years. Often this was followed by between ten and thirty years of recurrent low and/or cold growth episodes. This was particularly marked in the southern hemisphere where, in Chile
¹⁴
and Tasmania, for example, full recovery was not achieved until the 580s and the 570s respectively.

O
ther less chronologically refined evidence of a mid-sixth-century climatic disaster is provided by studies of river flood and lake levels–and by archaeology. One particularly dramatic set of data from the Lower San Jorge Basin of Colombia has revealed that over the past 3,500 years the lowest floodwater levels were in the mid–sixth century
A
.
D
.
¹⁵

And, as described in Chapter 23, human skeletal material from Teotihuacan in Mexico strongly suggests that a massive famine struck the city just prior to its demise in the mid– to late sixth century
A
.
D
.

In Peru, purely archaeological evidence also points to a sixth-century catastrophe with the Nasca desperately constructing their underground water-management system (see Chapter 26). Hydrological studies have revealed that these subterranean “canals” were built when underground water levels were at a virtual all-time low.

I
mportant glacial ice-core evidence comes from the mountain fastnesses of western South America. The 18,700-foot-high Quelccaya glacier—a vast “carpet” of ice on top of part of the central Andes—has provided scientists with data that suggest drought-induced dust storms were raging in Peru from around 540 to around 570. Scientists from Ohio State University climbed to the top of the glacier in 1983 and, using solar power, sank a drill deep into the ice. With this equipment they succeeded in extracting two roughly 530-foot-long ice cores, the water from which was then studied in detail under laboratory conditions. The raw data showed that the ice, between 563 and 594 (
+
/
−
twenty-five years), was riddled with drought-induced dust, suggesting a thirty-year-long drought—the most sudden and intense in Andean and possibly South American history. But glacial ice cores are often inaccurate in terms of chronology, especially at substantial time depth. Compression of the ice can lead to some layers (perhaps as much as one or two years per century) not being counted. Up to twenty-five years can potentially, therefore, be added to the date of the drought, thus pushing it back to 530 or 540.
¹⁶
Significantly, the abrupt cooling revealed by Chilean and Argentine tree rings
¹⁷
can be precisely dated to exactly 540. It is therefore possible that the Peruvian ice-core dust and the Chilean and Argentinian cooling are both manifestations of the same sixth-century climatic catastrophe.

W
hile drought was a common manifestation of the mid-sixth-century climatic disaster, the chaos often expressed itself in quite different ways.

In the Arabian Peninsula an inscription found by archaeologists in Yemen has revealed that a vast dam was destroyed by a massive flood in the 540s (see Chapter 8).

In Africa, too, there is evidence—albeit circumstantial—of climatic catastrophe. As described in Chapter 2, the plague almost certainly originated in east Africa in the 530s. Both drought and flood, or, most devastating of all, a combination of both, would almost certainly have been required to cause the disease to break out of its natural pool of immune wild rodents.