Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World Read online

  CATASTROPHE

  A N I N V E S T I G A T I O N I N T O

  T H E O R I G I N S O F T H E

  M O D E R N W O R L D

  DAVID KEYS

  BALLANTINE BOOKS · NEW YORK

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1999 by David Keys

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/BB/

  Keys, David.

  Catastrophe / David Keys.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN 0-345-44436-1

  1. Climatic changes—History. 2. Human beings—Effect of environment on—History.

  3. Natural disasters—History. 4. Weather—Effect of volcanic eruptions on.

  5. Asteroids—Collisions with Earth. I. Title.

  QC981.8.C5K45 1999

  551.6‘09‘02—dc21 99-14357

  CIP

  First Edition: February 2000

  This book is also available in print as ISBN 0-345-40876-4.

  CONTENTS

  Aims and Caveats

  Acknowledgments

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  PART ONE THE PLAGUE

  1 The Winepress of the Wrath of God

  2 The Origins of the Plague

  PART TWO THE BARBARIAN TIDE

  3 Disaster on the Steppes

  4 The Avar Dimension

  PART THREE DESTABLIZING THE EMPIRE

  5 Revolution

  6 “The Cup of Bitterness”

  7 Changing the Empire: The Cumulative Impact of the Plague and the Avars

  PART FOUR THE SWORD OF ISLAM

  8 The Origins of Islam

  9 Islamic Conquests

  10 Behind the Roman Collapse

  PART FIVE THE TURKIC DIMENSION

  11 The Turkish Time Bomb

  12 The Jewish Empire

  PART SIX WESTERN EUROPE

  13 Disaster in Britain

  14 The Waste Land

  15 The Birth of England

  16 Irish Conception

  17 French Genesis

  18 The Making of Spain

  PART SEVEN DISASTER IN THE ORIENT

  19 Chinese Catastrophe

  20 The Rebirth of Unity

  21 Korean Dawn

  22 “Ten Thousand Strings of Cash Cannot Cure Hunger”

  PART EIGHT CHANGING THE AMERICAS

  23 Collapse of the Pyramid Empire

  24 The Darts of Venus

  25 North American Mystery

  26 From Art to Oblivion

  27 The Mud of Hades

  28 Birth of an Empire

  29 Glory at the Heart of the Cosmos

  PART NINE THE REASONS WHY

  30 In Search of a Culprit

  31 The Big Bang

  32 Reconstructing the Eruption

  33 The Endgame

  PART TEN THE FUTURE

  34 Beyond Tomorrow

  Appendix

  Notes

  Recommended Further Reading

  Index

  C A T A S T R O P H E

  T O G R A Ç A, M I C H A E L,

  A N D C A M I L E

  AIMS AND CAVEATS

  The aim of this book is to help change people’s view of the past—and of the future. Although human inventions, achievements, and actions are obviously key factors in determining the course of human history, the forces of nature and other mechanisms beyond the control of individual human beings, or even states, play an even greater role, both directly and indirectly, by conditioning the circumstances that induce, produce, or permit individual or collective human actions.

  Determinist views of history have been out of favor now for several decades, and this book should rightly be seen as an attempt to reinstate respect for the basic concept of determinism—though not for the often simplistic nature of much past deterministic thinking.

  In this book I will attempt to describe a process that could perhaps be labeled “evolved determinism.” My research does suggest that a force of nature ultimately lay behind much of the change experienced by the world in the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. But it also shows that key aspects of change, while ultimately triggered by a force of nature, were finally delivered through a plethora of consequent ecological, political, epidemiological, economic, religious, demographic, and other mechanisms that interacted with each other for up to a hundred event-filled years before producing final, irreversible change.

  Moreover, toward the end of this book I suggest what triggered the sixth-century climatic catastrophe. I am reasonably sure of my conclusions as to the type of event that set all the climatological and historical dominoes falling. But, as you will see, I have also chanced my arm at pinpointing the event geographically. That is a more difficult task—and only future geological and ice-core research will reveal whether all the circumstantial evidence I have gathered was indeed pointing toward the right culprit.

  Although the main title of this book is Catastrophe, that chiefly refers to the natural trigger mechanism that set off the collapse of so many dominoes and, through the medium of those dominoes, effected permanent historical change. This book does not attempt to deny in any way the range of other factors which, over many centuries, helped in the downfall of the ancient world. But I do believe that the final decisive factor in its demise was the mid-sixth-century natural catastrophe described in this book. And I do believe that that catastrophe was the only worldwide common element involved in that demise. It is because of that fact that I believe one can talk of semi-integrated world history even in the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. The political repercussions of commonly caused events in places as far apart as Mongolia and East Africa did interact with each other to shape history: and civilizations in both the Old World and the New were changed forever by a common catastrophe.

  In many areas, these changes laid the geopolitical foundations of our modern world. That’s why I prefer—in geopolitical terms (not economic or even cultural ones)—to use the term protomodern rather than early-medieval when describing the sixth- and seventh-century emergence of the post-ancient world. Moreover, I believe the evidence in, and the perspective argued for within, this book suggests that one can talk of a sixth/seventh-century protomodern geopolitical genesis in many different parts of the world—not just in Europe and the Middle East.

  In order to help change people’s view of history, I have tried to write this book in as accessible a manner as possible. I have tried hard to make sure that the data and other information on which I have based my arguments are as accurate and up-to-date as possible. Indeed, to ensure this, I sought the help and advice of more than fifty academic specialists and authorities in more than twenty different disciplines in a dozen countries.

  I believe that the case for a mid-sixth-century worldwide climatic catastrophe is incontrovertible. And I think that, without doubt, the catastrophe was the major worldwide factor in finally bringing the ancient world to a close, and helping to lay the geopolitical foundations of our modern one. The mechanisms are clearest in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. In Mesoamerica, where archaeology rather than history has to provide the bulk of the evidence, the argument is strong, but has by definition to be more circumstantial. And in South America, where there is no sixth/seventh-century written history at all, one is reliant on the relati
vely inexact dating and often hotly debated interpretation of purely archaeological evidence. Nevertheless I believe that even there, the evidence for a climatic catastrophe is incontrovertible and it is only the suggested mechanisms of change that remain reasonable proposals rather than totally proven theses.

  Lastly, I believe that my book is not simply about the past and its influence on the present, but also, hopefully, illuminates the whole question of the influence of the natural environment in human history. This is particularly relevant now, as global warming threatens to destabilize our climate to an extent that has not occurred since the climatic crisis of the sixth century. Three-quarters of this book is about the repercussions of that Dark Age disaster—and it should serve to alert us to the sheer scale of the geopolitical and other changes that can flow from climatic catastrophe. History is usually seen predominantly as a discipline of the humanities. This book will help demonstrate that it also belongs to the realms of the natural and social sciences.

  ACCENT NOTE

  Accents have not been used in words that have been transliterated from non-Latin scripts.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It took four years to research and write this book. Because it covers so many different disciplines—everything from epidemiology and astrophysics to volcanology and archaeology—I sought the often-detailed advice of dozens of academic specialists.

  I am grateful to all of them for their depth of knowledge—and for their patience. I thank them for all the advice they gave me, most of which I accepted, and ask them to forgive me for the small number of instances in which, bemused by contrasting strands of counsel, I occasionally opted for one interpretation rather than another.

  I am particularly indebted to Byzantinists Michael Whitby, Peter Llewellyn, Peter Sarris, Anna Leone, and Stephen Hill; Islamicists Hugh Kennedy and Patricia Crone; Yemen specialists Christian Robin, Ueli Brunner, and Iwona Gajda; Turkic specialist Peter Golden; Jewish history specialist Norman Golb; African archaeology specialist Mark Horton; Far East and/or Southeast Asia specialists Andreas Janousch, Scott Pearce, Richard Stephenson, Simon Kaner, Stanley Weinstein, Joan Piggott, Jonathan Best, Nancy Florida, Willem van der Molen, Roy E. Jordaan, and Eric Zürcher; Indian specialist Michael Mitchiner; historians, archaeologists, and others specializing in western Europe and/or the British Isles, Ian Wood, David King, John Hines, Barbara Yorke, Roger White, Ewan Campbell, Charles Thomas, Heinrich Härke, Daniel McCarthy, and Donnchadh O’Corrain; Arthurian literature specialist Elspeth Kennedy; Pre-Columbianists David Browne, Frank Meddens, Claude Chapdelaine, Bill Isbell, Alan Kolata, Paul Goldstein, John Topic, Steve Bourget, Linda Manzanilla, Michael Spence, George Cowgill, Esther Pasztory, Izumi Shimada, Simon Martin, Michael Moseley, AnnCorinne Fretter, Bob Birmingham, and Rebecca Storey; Dendrochronologists Mike Baillie, Keith Briffa, Jeffrey Dean, Pepe Boninsegna, and Ricardo Villalba; lake sediment specialists Alex Chepstow-Lusty and Mark Brenner; volcanologists Ken Wohletz, Alain Gourgaud, Clive Oppenheimer, Tom Simkin, and Jerry Sukhyar; epidemiologists Ken Gage and Susan Young; ice-core specialists Claus Hammer, Henrik Clausen, and Lonnie Thompson; astronomer Alan Fitzsimmons; locust experts Nick Jago and Jane Rosenberg; geneticist David Goldstein; zoologist Frank Wheeler; grazing ecologist John Milne; late Roman ivory experts Tony Cutler and David Whitehouse; and low-frequency atmospheric sound transmission specialist Rod Whitaker.

  I apologize to anyone I have inadvertently left off this list; and I must also point out that the responsibility for the views expressed in this book is of course mine alone.

  I would also like to acknowledge the four academics who first realized that there had been a climatic disaster in the mid-sixth century—Richard Stothers and Michael Rampino, who published some of the Roman historical evidence in a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research 88 in 1983; Kevin Pang, whose work on the Chinese records of the catastrophe was reported in Science News 127 in 1985; and Mike Baillie, who first noticed the tree ring evidence for the disaster and published it in Nature 332 in March 1988, and—together with the Roman and Chinese historical evidence—in Archaeology Ireland in summer 1988. Indeed I first heard about the climatic events of the mid–sixth century at a lecture given by Mike Baillie at an archaeology conference in Bradford in April 1994.

  I want also to give special thanks to my agent Bill Hamilton; to Barbara Basham, who did so much of the typing; Julian Saul, who drew most of the diagrams and maps; meteorological library assistant Barbara deCrausaz; Kate Brundrett, who did additional work on many of the graphics; Andrew Rafferty, who took the photograph used to produce the cover; my publisher, Mark Booth; my managing editor, Liz Rowlinson; my copy editor, Roderick Brown; the cover designer, Arvin Budhu; the proofreader, Jane Selley; the indexer, Ann Hall; the typesetter, Peter Brealey; copyright clearance assistant Paul Rodger; and my wife, Graça, for doing the massive quantity of administrative work generated by the writing and researching of the book and for helping to research and produce many of the maps. But above all I want to thank Graça and our two children, Michael and Camile, for their unbounded patience and tolerance over these past four years—and my late parents and grandmother, whose influence over the decades helped me develop and sustain an appreciation of our world and its story.

  Last but not least, I would like to thank a rural Victorian whom I never met but who first created my interest in human history—the anonymous man, woman, or child who, a century or so ago, in a field west of London, dropped a humble penny—a coin that I found when I was a child and which triggered my fascination with the vanished past and how it has created the present and will help create the future.

  David Keys

  March 1999

  L I S T O F I L L U S T R A T I O N S

  The Dark Age Plague: A Chronology

  The Origins and Spread of the Plague

  From Gerbil to Disaster

  The Earliest Islamic Conquests

  The Consequences of A.D. 535: Islam, Avars, Plague, and The Roman Empire

  The Mediterranean and Middle Eastern World, A.D. 562

  The Mediterranean and Middle Eastern World, A.D. 720

  The Consequences of A.D. 535 for the Turkic World

  The Khazar Empire at Its Peak

  Britain and Ireland

  British Climate in the Sixth Century

  Anglo-Saxon Expansion

  China and Korea

  Major Climatic Events in Sixth-Century China

  The Consequences of A.D. 535 for China

  Korean Climate in the Sixth Century

  Korea and Japan

  The Consequences of A.D. 535 for Japan and Korea

  Archaeological Sites in Mesoamerica

  The Consequences of A.D. 535 for Mesoamerica

  The Andean Region

  The Consequences of A.D. 535 for South America

  Major Volcanic Eruptions Recorded in Ice Cores

  The Initial Suspects

  Sixth-Century Geopolitical Discontinuity in Southeast Asia

  Southeast Asia Before and After A.D. 535

  The Probable Culprit

  Sources of Climatic Data

  Inferred Summer Temperature Graph for Western Siberia and Northern Scandinavia, A.D. 1–1997

  Temperature Graph for Khatanga, North-Central Siberia, A.D. 100–1998

  Pine Tree Growth in Northern Finland, Sixth Century A.D.

  European Oak Growth, Sixth Century A.D.

  Temperature Graph for Southern Chile, Sixth Century A.D.

  Sedge Growth at Lake Marcacocha, Peru, 2200 B.C.–A.D. 600

  Western American Foxtail and Bristlecone Pine Growth, Sixth Century A.D.

  CATASTROPHE

  INTRODUCTION: FIFTEEN CENTURIES AGO, SOMETHING HAPPENED

  In A.D. 535–536 mankind was hit by one of the greatest natural disasters ever to occur. It blotted out much of the light and heat of the sun for eighteen months, and the climate of the entire planet began to spin out of control. The result, direct or indirect, was climatic chaos, famine
, migration, war, and massive political change on virtually every continent.