In the spring of 536 a mysterious haze blotted out the sun over Europe, the Middle East, and Asia for a year and a half. Temperatures crashed, harvests failed, and within a few years a third to a half of the eastern Roman Empire was dead of plague. Scientists reading ice cores layer by layer have only recently begun to name what pulled the trigger — and why 536 may be the single worst year in recorded human history.
The whole catastrophe in one accessible overview: the dimmed sun, the failed harvests, the famine, and why historians increasingly single out 536 as the worst year in recorded human history.
The landmark reporting on Harvard historian Michael McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski, who read Alpine ice cores layer by layer to date the disaster to the month — and hunt for the volcano behind it.
The reference account: eyewitnesses from Constantinople to China describing a sun that shed 'no more light than the moon' for eighteen months, and snow falling in the middle of summer.
A vivid retelling of the 'dust veil' — Procopius, Cassiodorus, and the Irish annals recording blue-tinged sunlight, a moon without splendor, and a failure of bread from 536 to 539.
A full documentary on how ordinary people endured the volcanic winter and the years of famine that followed — and the archaeological traces of the communities that simply didn't make it.
As if the cold and hunger weren't enough: bubonic plague reached the Roman port of Pelusium and tore through the empire, killing perhaps a third to a half of its people in a single terrible wave.
536 opened the Late Antique Little Ice Age, more than 100 years of cooling that reshaped the fate of empires from Rome to the Eastern Steppe and helped tip late antiquity into a new world.
For the deep divers: a feature-length documentary weaving the eruption, the dust veil, the famine, and the plague into a single planet-spanning catastrophe.