Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World

by David Keys

  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.”

  On 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.

  * * *

  In 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.

  * * *

  In 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.

  As 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 Chile9—but new evidence from Argentina10 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

  An 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 Chile14 and Tasmania, for example, full recovery was not achieved until the 580s and the 570s respectively.

  Other 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.

  Imp
ortant 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 rings17 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.

  While 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.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1

  From the account written by the sixth-century cleric Evagrius, translated from the original Greek by the Oxford University scholar Peter Sarris, but unpublished. However, a new translation, by Michael Whitby, is being published in the year 2000.

  The “at least 50 percent” estimate was made by Cyril Mango on page 51 of his Le Développement Urbain de Constantinople (IV–VII Siècles), Paris, 1985.

  From the account of the plague in Constantinople by John of Ephesus, as preserved in the Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, part III, edited and translated by W. Wittakowski, Liverpool University Press, 1996, pages 74–98. Subsequent quotations from John of Ephesus are also from this source, unless otherwise stated.

  Particularly such scholars as P. Allen and Lawrence Conrad.

  This agricultural abandonment has already been referred to briefly on page 10–11. There I quoted an eyewitness of the epidemic catastrophe, John of Ephesus, as describing how he saw grain fields that had nobody to reap them, “cattle abandoned” and “flocks of sheep,” etc., who had “forgotten [life in] a cultivated land.” No doubt each major outbreak of the plague wrought similar havoc. Yet there are relatively few extant eyewitness historical accounts describing the rural wilderness that must so often have resulted from plague devastation. There is, however, a second type of evidence—but only for the most severe episodes of abandonment. It is provided by those ancient chroniclers and historians who included major outbreaks of locust infestation in their works. One of the worst periods of the plague pandemic (especially in terms of geographical spread) was in the late sixth century—in the 570s and 580s—and it is from precisely that period that we get the only known locust invasions of the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East prior to the 670s. According to Invasions des Acridiens Sauterelles en Algerie (2 volumes, by J. Kunckel d’Herculais, Alger-Mustapha, 1893–1905), locust swarms attacked Syria and Iraq (Mesopotamia) in A.D. 576. And in exactly the same period, Gregory of Tours (in book VI, 33, of The History of the Franks) says that locust swarms arrived (in 578) in Spain and devastated the area around the capital, Toledo. “Not a single tree remained, not a vine, not a patch of woodland,” he wrote. “There was no fruit of the earth, no green thing which these insects had not destroyed.” (From page 364 of The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours, translated by L. Thorpe, Penguin, London, 1974.) The devastation was almost certainly wider than that, but information was obviously easier to obtain from the capital than from more remote areas. Gregory (book VI, 44) says that the locust swarms ravaged the Toledo region for five years and then spread out along the line of a major road and “invaded” another province. He tells us that the swarm was 100 miles in length and 50 miles across. I believe that locust infestation in areas not normally affected seriously by them should be regarded as a marker for agricultural abandonment. This is because locust swarms are particularly attracted to large tracts of abandoned agricultural land. For the attraction to work, all the land has to have been abandoned at roughly the same time, as would occur during and after a severe epidemic. The locusts prefer land with an abnormally wide variety of plant species—and abandoned agricultural land provides exactly that phenomenon. Under cultivation, the number of species is obviously kept deliberately very low—and under normal long-term wild conditions, interspecies competitive pressures ensure that the level of diversity is also relatively low. However, after agricultural land has been abandoned, a huge variety of different wild plant species flourishes for around five years until the natural competitive pressures start to substantially decrease that number. That gives a massive window of opportunity to locusts. What’s more, if vast areas of land were in this recently abandoned (fallow) condition simultaneously, then overall locust numbers would increase dramatically because the additional nourishment would boost reproduction, thus making movement into new areas even more likely. Two other factors would also boost reproduction. First, locust egg pods survive better in fallow than in cultivated terrain, because plowing exposes the pods to sunlight, which kills them. Second, previously uninfested terrain is relatively free of those parasites that attach themselves to, and finally kill, locust eggs. A locust swarm such as that covering 5,000 square miles in Spain would have consisted of around 770 billion insects and would have devoured some 1.5 million tons of plant and tree cover per day.

  During the plague pandemic of the sixth and seventh centuries, large numbers of towns and villages must have become partially or fully depopulated. Even at the beginning of the pandemic, John of Ephesus wrote of “desolate” villages, and later in the sixth century, Evagrius wrote that some cities were “rendered empty of almost all their inhabitants.” Today, however, it is difficult for archaeology to determine exactly which towns and villages—or which parts of them—were abandoned specifically as a result of plague rather than war or general economic decline. However, by working out when particular cities or other settlements experienced particularly steep declines, it is possible to suggest which archaeological sites were abandoned or substantially abandoned as a result of the plague. Prime candidates for substantial abandonment include Anamur, Anavarza, Canbazli, Corycus, Dag Pazari, and Kamlidivane (all in southern Turkey); El Bara, Sinhar, Deir Sim’an, Sergilla, and Kfer (all in northern Syria); and Dion at the foot of Mount Olympus in Greece. Candidates for partial (and in some cases perhaps final) abandonment as a result of plague include a clutch of sites in Tunisia: Dougga, Sbeitla, Thuburbo Majus, and the northern part of Carthage itself. Depopulation evidence has also come from rural areas. Surveys carried out in the Tunisian countryside have revealed that population densities fell by 50 percent between 550 and 650 around Carthage and by 70 percent between 550 and c. 600 around Dougga.

  CHAPTER 2

  Rhapta was the name the Greek sailors gave to this city. It simply means “sewn boats” in ancient Greek and probably refers to the sewn boats presumably used by the inhabitants.

  Claudius Ptolemy, The Geography, translat
ed and edited by E. L. Stevenson, published by New York Public Library, 1932, and republished by Dover Publications, Mineola, New York, 1991, page 38.

  The Periplus Maris Erythraei, text with introduction, translation, and commentary by L. Casson, Princeton University Press, 1989, page 61.

  From Ptolemy.

  From The Periplus.

  More detail on this change to pastoralism is provided later in this chapter.

  The plague organism is called Yersinia pestis, formerly Pasteurella pestis.

  The sixth- to seventh-century plague was the world’s first firmly attested outbreak of this disease. However, there must surely have been earlier major pandemics that history has not recorded, or that modern historians have not definitively attributed to plague. The Dark Age pandemic came to an end in c. 750 and the known world was not afflicted again until the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Occasional plague epidemics struck various parts of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and also ravaged Britain, mainland Europe, and the Middle East in the second half of the seventeenth century. A third great pandemic broke out in the mid–nineteenth century, this time in China. Between 1894 and 1923 the disease spread from China throughout the world—especially India—and tens of millions of people died.