The string of empires falling in the early Middle Ages and the emergence of the Arab Caliphate and the first Slavic states may be associated with the strongest period of ice advancing and declining global temperatures in the last two thousand years, caused by the three largest volcanic eruptions.
A series of three volcanic eruptions in the 6th century AD and the associated era of glaciation caused the decline of Byzantium at the end of the first millennium and contributed to the creation of the first Arab Caliphate and their conquest of almost all the former possessions of the Romans, according to an article published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“This glacier advance has been associated with the most severe temperature drops in the northern hemisphere in the past two thousand years. Of course, given such a large number of unknown factors, one should not directly state that there is a direct connection between this phenomenon and its alleged political consequences, but their coincidence is immediately evident, said Ulf Buentgen of the Swiss Federal Research Institute in Birmensdorf …
Büntgen and his colleagues uncovered one of the possible reasons for the decline of the Byzantine Empire during the time of Justinian and potentially found one of the reasons for the outbreaks of plague at that time, reconstructing the climatic history of the Middle Ages from the rings of ancient trees that grew on the slopes of Altai and the Austrian Alps during the Dark Ages.
Trees and other types of vegetation are very sensitive to the slightest changes in climatic conditions - an increase or decrease in temperature, solar radiation energy and other factors. All these events are reflected in the shape and thickness of the annual rings - the layers of wood in the trunk that are formed during the growing season. It is believed that dark rings correspond to unfavorable environmental conditions, and light ones - to favorable ones.
In total, Büntgen's group, which included a number of Russian scientists from the Federal University of Siberia in Krasnoyarsk, managed to find over 150 aksakal trees that have survived from the peak of Byzantium to the present day, as well as more than 500 fragments of trees felled or died in past.
Having studied the structure of their rings, climatologists found that around the 6-7th centuries AD, the entire Earth experienced the strongest era of a sharp cooling of the climate and the onset of glaciers, which, according to dendrochronology, was associated with a series of volcanic eruptions that took place in 536, 540 and 547. ad. Scientists have called this period the "Little Ice Age of Late Antiquity," or LALIA.
Such dates attracted the attention of scientists - at about the same time, the famous "Plague of Justinian" broke out in Byzantium, brought from Egypt or the Middle East, the Arabs began to unite in the first tribal formations, the Sassanid empire in Persia was destroyed, China experienced another period of decline, and Slavs began to populate the Balkans, conflicting with the Byzantine Romans.
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All these things, according to the authors of the article, may be associated with LALIA - for example, the drop in temperatures caused a decrease in yields and forced Byzantium to import bread from the southern regions of the empire, which led to the spread of the plague. Similar things could cause the fall of the Sassanid empire, and also force the Slavs to migrate from the north to the southern Balkans, and the ancestors of the Turks towards China.
These changes were not negative everywhere - in the Arabian Peninsula, as climate models show, they led to an increase in rainfall, an increase in livestock and an increase in the availability of food, which increased the birth rate among the Arabs and ultimately led to the emergence of Islam and the ideology of building a “universal Caliphate.
As the scientists emphasize, they do not claim that such climatic changes were the only factor that drove all the "migration of peoples" and various geopolitical catastrophes of that time. Nevertheless, the role of climate, in their opinion, is still worth considering in the study of the mysteries of the history of the Earth.
