The worst year to be alive.
The worst year to be alive.
I think we all can agree that 2020 really sucked, but doing some research I found out it wasn't even close to the year 536, which is consideres the worst year to be alive.
First of all must give credit to Michael McCormick, a Harvard professor who has dedicated his life to research Europe's worst natural disasters and is the one responsible for the claim of year 536 being the worst one ever.
Okay so in the year 536 a mysterious black mist covered all of Europe, Middle East and some parts of Asia, due to said mist the son wasn't that bright, literally the days were dark and temperatures dropped around 2.5 degrees celcius. In some places in China it snowed and huge amount of crops were lost, leading a lot of people to starvation. This mist was responsible for the coldest season ever in the last 2,300 years.
You would think, well some mist can't be that bad, I thought the same, the thing is the mist lasted 18 months, 18 freaking months with the sun shinning at a lower capacity, 18 months with crops dying, 18 months with snow in places where it isn't supposed to be. But, what caused this mist?
Professor McCormick carried out some studies at a glacier and found the cause (it is amaizing what scientists can find doing research in old glaciers). The mist was caused by big volcanic eruptions in Iceland. But wait, on the following years 540 and 547 more volcanic eruptions happened leading to more dark days in Europe and to topped it all in 541 a bubonic plague hit hard, not as hard as it would hit years later, but hard enough to make it one of the worst moments to be alive.
It is impossible to know how many lives were claimed by the dark mist, but we do know that said events are considered the cause of a economic stagnation in Europe which lasted until the year 640. This is why this period in history is known as the "dark age". However, its name is not related to the dark mist mentioned above.
The Dark Age was named by Petrarch, an Italian historian which referred to it as dark because of the fall of the Roman Empire, contrasting it with the "light age" as the years of classical Rome.