This happened on October 10, 1465, on the day of the long-awaited wedding of King Alfonso II of Naples. He married Hippoliti Maria Sforza, a noblewoman from Naples. When she arrived in town, the crowd gasped. A strange and beautiful view opened in front of the people, such as they had never seen before. And it wasn't about the bride - they were looking up at the sky. Although it was noon, the sun turned deep blue, plunging the city into total eerie darkness.
This was just the beginning. In the following months, European weather deteriorated significantly. It rained so hard in Germany that corpses surfaced in cemeteries. In the town of Torne in Poland, residents rode boats through the streets. Rains flooded the basements of the castle of the Teutonic knights, and entire villages were washed away.
Four years later, Europe was hit by the mini-ice age. The fish froze in the ponds. The trees did not bloom, the grass did not grow. In Bologna, Italy, snow drove residents out of their homes, and they traveled with horses and carriages along the frozen rivers.
The reason for this was the eruption of a giant volcano in the tropics. A cloud of ash enveloped the Earth and led to the coldest decade in centuries. The volcanic explosion itself was heard from 2 thousand kilometers. The tsunami that followed the eruption swept hundreds of thousands of kilometers. But scientists still cannot find the volcano that exploded so catastrophically!
There was an eruption, and this is indisputable. As in most mega-eruptions, huge amounts of sulfur were released into the air, which fell at the poles in the form of sulfuric acid and remained there in the ice.
In the 1950s. archaeologists have decided that the culprit of the grandiose eruption was the Kuae volcano. But after it turned out that the volcano erupted in 1453 - too early to interfere with Alfonso's wedding. However, the explosion of Kuae also did not go without consequences. In Sweden, the harvest died and the grain storage facilities were empty. Trees stopped growing all over Europe. In China, tens of thousands of people froze to death. For several months it was snowing near the Yangtze River, and the Yellow Sea was frozen 20 kilometers from the coast. On the other side of the world, the Aztecs faced extreme hunger.
But if the eruption did not take place on Kuae, then where? The mystery of the "missing" volcano has not yet been solved.
The volcanic explosion probably occurred in the tropics. There, rising air can push the volcanic cloud higher into the atmosphere, where it remains for many years. The ash plume is likely to spread over a wider area as winds push the air from the equator towards the poles.
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Other scientists suggest paying attention to archipelagos, including remote parts of Indonesia, Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia. The volcano was probably huge and needed a lot of space.