Welcome to the year 536, the worst year in history.

I write not to downplay the real problems of our world, but to put them into perspective. 2020, 2021, 2022… the last few years have all been bad.

But these were no worse years than, say, 1347, when the Black Death began its long march across Eurasia. Or 1816, the “year without a summer.” Or 1914, when the assassination of an obscure Habsburg archduke sparked not one but two global conflicts, one of which killed millions in humanity’s most horrific genocide.

There were many other bad years and decades. In the 1330s, a famine ravaged Yuan China. In the 1590s, a similar famine devastated Europe, and in the 1490s, smallpox and influenza began to spread among Native Americans (the same thing syphilis had done among the Old World).

Life was often “nasty, brutish, and short,” as the political philosopher and cynic Thomas Hobbes noted in his 1651 Leviathan. Yet historians even now sometimes point to a particular year as worse than previous ones.

Yes, perhaps there was a time in historical memory that really was the worst time to live.

536: The Worst Year in History?

The year 536 is the current consensus candidate for the worst year in human history, with the trigger apparently being a volcanic eruption, and possibly more, somewhere in the northern hemisphere.

Wherever it happened, the eruption triggered a “volcanic winter.” A decade-long period in which China suffered from summer snowfall and average temperatures in Europe dropped by 2.5°C. Harvests failed. People starved. And they turned on each other.

In 541, the bubonic plague came from Egypt and killed a third of the population of the Byzantine Empire.

Even in distant Peru, drought has affected the previously thriving Moche culture.

Rising ocean ice cover (a feedback effect of volcanic winter) and an intense solar minimum (a regular period of least activity in the 11-year solar cycle) in 600 AD caused global cooling that would last for more than a century.

Many societies living in 530 simply could not survive the chaos that erupted in the following decades.

The New ‘Science’ of Climate History

Historians are particularly interested in topics like these now because we can collaborate with scientists to reconstruct the past in new and surprising ways.

Only part of what we know, or think we know, about what happened during that turbulent period comes from traditional written sources. We have some for 536: the Byzantine historian Procopius wrote in that year that “a very terrible omen occurred,” and the Roman senator Cassiodorus observed in 538:

(…) the sun seems to have lost its usual light and has acquired a bluish hue. We are surprised that we do not see the shadows of our bodies at midday and feel that the powerful force of its heat has weakened.

However, real advances in historical understanding of this “worst year on record” are coming from the application of advanced techniques such as dendroclimatology and ice core analysis.

Dendroclimatologist Ulf Büntgen found evidence of a cluster of volcanic eruptions in 536, 540, and 547 in tree-ring growth patterns. Similarly, a highly accurate analysis of a Swiss glacier by archaeologist Michael McCormick and glaciologist Paul Majewski was key to understanding the severity of the climate change in 536.

This type of analysis is now considered an important, even essential, resource in the methodological toolkit of historians, especially for the analysis of periods for which few records have survived.

Some historians, such as Kyle Harper, Jared Diamond, and Geoffrey Parker, are using advances in this growing field to construct sweeping revisionist accounts of the rise and fall of individual societies. The conditions of our planet, they argue, matter far more to the unfolding of our history than we have ever imagined.

How to Cope with Adversity

But how did a climate-changing event like the one that began in 536 happen? That’s a question historians continue to consider as they review our sources.

Most of those alive in 536 probably didn’t know they had it so badly. As historians, we tend to rely too much on grim anecdotal fragments, like the quotes from Procopius and Cassiodorus.

However, as with the boiled frog syndrome, the average citizen of the time may have been only slowly realizing how bleak the conditions of their world were becoming. In fact, the worst moment did not come in 536, but some time later, when the effects of plague and drought, cold and famine were truly felt.