Scientists have found in the Byzantine chronicles for 536-540 AD mentions of the closure of the Sun by a "black cloud". This "blackout", according to the chronicler Procopius of Caesarea and other chroniclers, continued for several months. It was with this celestial phenomenon that other cataclysms of that time were associated, such as crop failures, famine, political unrest and the Justinian plague.
Death "black" and "red"
The so-called Justinian's plague was the first recorded plague pandemic in the world. It got its name, since it began during the reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I and covered almost the entire civilized world. However, separate plague epidemics broke out after that for centuries - from 541 to 750.
Researchers believe that the source of the plague appeared in Ethiopia or Egypt, from where rats and fleas infected with the infection "arrived" along with a cargo of grain to Constantinople through trade channels. From there, the epidemic spread throughout Byzantium, and then spread to neighboring countries … By the end of 654, it reached North Africa, covering all of Europe, Central and South Asia and Arabia.
In Byzantium, the pandemic reached its climax by 544. According to the chronicles, in Constantinople alone, up to 5 thousand people died from the plague every day, and sometimes the death rate reached 10 thousand people a day … 40 percent of the city's population was destroyed.
In the East, the plague killed about 100 million people, in Europe - about 25 million. Irish sources speak of crom conaill ("Red Death"), which became the cause of death of many saints and monarchs in the years 549-550. So, it was from her that the Welsh king Gwynedd Maelgun and Saint Finnian of Clonard died …
If desired, prophecy about these events can be found in the Bible. This is what is said in the ninth chapter of the Revelation of John the Theologian: “She opened the pit of the abyss, and smoke came out of the pit like smoke from a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by the smoke from the pit …
Promotional video:
So I saw in a vision horses and riders on them, who had on themselves armor of fire, hyacinth and sulfur; the heads of the horses are like the heads of lions, and fire, smoke and brimstone came out of their mouths … From these three ulcers, from fire, smoke and brimstone coming out of their mouths, a third of the people died …"
Volcanic Horror
What happened? Scientists believe that the cause of solar blackout was volcanic eruptions, traces of which were found in the ice of Greenland and Antarctica. “Each of these eruptions, which occurred in 536 and 540, should have greatly affected the life of civilizations at that time, and their effect was amplified by the fact that they occurred with an interval of only four years,” comments Kruger. "We do not yet know which volcanoes were responsible for this, but we have several candidates for this role in Central and North America, as well as Indonesia."
Presumably volcanoes have thrown large amounts of ash into the atmosphere, which caused the so-called "volcanic winter". Something similar, only on a local scale, happened in 1815 after the explosion of the Indonesian mountain Tambor.
Ice and sulfur
Krueger and her colleagues found confirmation of the "volcanic" hypothesis by analyzing the chronicles of the 6th century and examining samples of Greenland and Antarctic ice that formed during that era.
It turned out that these ice fragments contain sulfur and other compounds that are found in large quantities in volcanic gases and ash. Thus, scientists managed to build a climate model that made it possible to reconstruct the events of the late 530s.
It turned out that the consequences of the climatic cataclysm were much more serious than expected. The combined force of the eruptions of the two volcanoes was the highest in the last 1200 years.
As a result, the average temperature on Earth dropped by two degrees Celsius for several years, but the northern hemisphere was most affected by climate change. Scandinavia, the Mediterranean coast, the Middle East and North Africa were "affected".
The events described in the chronicles and the data of excavations in the north of Europe and Africa fit into this theory. According to researchers from the Kruger group, the "apocalypse" of the sixth century was "provoked" by volcanoes. And there are no guarantees that this will not happen again …
