the worst year ever!! explains a lot about history.

The world may feel like it’s in a terrible state now, but it doesn’t compare to the year the sun stopped shining

It may seem amid the maelstom that is 2018 that it’s a pretty bad time to be alive. There’s the terrible and accelerating effect of climate change, the rise of fascist and “alt-right” politics, violent conflict, millions of stateless refugees, a looming Brexit crisis and political turmoil in many other directions. But there have been many other awful moments in history – the Black Death; the first world war; famines in China, Russia, India and across the world; the year of the Spanish influenza epidemic; the period after the Nazi party came to power; the blitz.

While these may all be contenders for the worst year in history, there is one outright winner: 536. Studies have now confirmed it. And, let me tell you, as a denizen of that dark age – the researchers are correct. It was the worst of times. Here in Britain in 536, as we suddenly learned, things could always get worse. You could lose the sun.

One minute we sixth-century folk had normal weather – then suddenly the sun stopped shining. It could be seen in the sky but the world received very little heat or warmth, as if our primary source of energy had been replaced by the moon. Britain – always cold – was now completely freezing. Some said it was a terrible cloud of ash, others an act of God because the people had been wicked. At first the problem was that we were always cold and then we didn’t have enough light to see by, but before long the crops failed and we began to starve.

Over in the 21st century, scientists can be fairly sure that massive volcanic eruptions in late 535 and early 536 – possibly in Iceland – sent plumes of ash into the atmosphere, blanketing the sun and leading to a sudden drop in temperature. It has been suggested that another massive eruption in 540 not only lengthened the disaster, but also contributed to the decline of the Mayan civilisation.

Devastating as the eruptions and subsequent blanketing of the world were, they weren’t the only problem facing us in 536. The Roman empire had crumbled and war had been raging across Europe. The Angles invaded Britain and said we had to obey them – and so we exchanged one set of masters for another. Tribes fought around Britain and old hatreds resurfaced. The possibility of war has always been heightened by a lack of resources – and, for the first time in centuries, the shortages were spread across the known world.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, fairly soon the bubonic plague began to spread across the eastern Roman empire. Those few who remained of the native population of Britain were battle-weary, fighting over government, constantly diseased and starving. Life was terrible. And there still wasn’t any sun.

We thought the world was ending. After all, what else could it be? Nobody could truly understand the cause of this sudden crisis. All the average Briton wanted was to get rid of the Roman occupation – and then when we lost them, we got more war. The years after 536 continued to be grim in Britain – the weather got colder due to more eruptions, we continued to struggle to find food, we got diseases, we fought again. There were more invasions.

To quote Hobbes, plenty of our history has been nasty, brutish and short. But 536 stands out as a year that was devastating in itself, but that also had repercussions that affected people worldwide for years afterwards. The worst thing was that this climate change wasn’t made by humans. It was a freak natural event that threw ash across the sky. In 2018, humans know they have a direct role in creating global warming. But at that time we couldn’t blame ourselves – the volcanoes and the subsequent events weren’t our fault, and we couldn’t have done anything to stop them. Although we did think the gods were cursing us.

If in 2018, if you’re feeling things are pretty hard, I have a somewhat hopeful message: they can get better – it just may take 200 years or so. By 640 life was improving and through to 700 the world was looking quite rosy – although the bubonic plague did keep coming back.

It took almost two centuries for European civilisation to truly recover from the damage of the catastrophic eruptions in 536. There was an increase in industrial processes around the year 640, with ice cores and dendrology results suggesting that silver smelting, among other processes, increased – implying a growing need for coinage as well as general silver and marking a rise in prosperity. It took a while for the population of Britain and Europe to recover from the effects of starvation, plague and war – but it did recover. Perhaps there is some small comfort in that.

In late 2018, you’re unlikely to wake up one day and find that the sun is gone – yet the world around you can seem extremely fragile and under threat. But never forget: 536 truly was the worst in history.