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

  As the engine for extraordinary intraregional change in four great areas of the world—Afro-Eurasia (from Mongolia to Britain, from Scandinavia to southern Africa), the Far East (China, Korea, Japan), Mesoamerica (Mexico/Central America), and South America—the disaster altered world history dramatically and permanently.

  The hundred-year period after it occurred is the heart of history’s so-called Dark Ages, which formed the painful and often violent interface between the ancient and protomodern worlds. That period witnessed the final end of the supercities of the ancient world; the end of ancient Persia; the transmutation of the Roman Empire into the Byzantine Empire; the end of ancient South Arabian civilization; the end of Catholicism’s greatest rival, Arian Christianity; the collapse of the greatest ancient civilization in the New World, the metropolis state of Teotihuacan; the fall from power of the great Maya city of Tikal; and the fall of the enigmatic Nasca civilization of South America.

  But it was also the hundred-year period that witnessed the birth, or in some cases the conception, of Islam, France, Spain, England, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, and the power of the Turks. It also produced a united China and the first great South American empires, the forerunners of the Incas.

  Until now, these geographically widely dispersed tragedies and new beginnings—occurring well before the Old and New Worlds knew of each other—have been viewed by historians as largely separate events. Now, for the first time—as a result of the research done for this book—the origins of our modern world can be seen as an integrated whole, linked by a common causal factor.

  This climatic disaster half destroyed the Roman Empire, unleashing hordes of central Asian barbarians against the empire’s northern borders, triggering geopolitical processes that created Arab pressures on its southern flank, and causing a series of killer epidemics that drastically reduced its population.

  In Arabia and the Mediterranean world as a whole, an apocalyptic zeitgeist, which at base was the result of the shift in climate, led to the emergence of Islam.

  In western Europe, the climatic catastrophe and its epidemiological aftereffects destabilized the demographic and political status quo and led to the birth of at least four major nations.

  In western Asia, the disaster triggered the rise of the Turks—a process that eventually led to an expansion of Turkic influence everywhere from India to eastern Europe and ultimately to the emergence of the Ottoman Empire.

  The same worldwide climatic chaos also destabilized economies and political systems in many areas of the Far East, opening up the way for the reunification of China, the birth of a united Korea, and the emergence of Japan as an embryonic nation-state.

  In the New World, a popular revolution was triggered that destroyed the greatest of all ancient American civilizations, the Mexican empire of Teotihuacan. That collapse freed up the Mesoamerican world and led to the rapid growth, and consequent collapse, of much of Maya civilization. In Peru, power shifted from the arid lowlands to the wetter, mountainous Andes, which paved the way, centuries later, for the rise of pre-Columbian America’s largest empire.

  The mystery climatic disaster of 535–536 resynchronized world history.

  The contemporary Roman historian Procopius wrote of the climate changes as “a most dread portent.” In describing the climate in that year, Procopius wrote that “the sun gave forth its light without brightness like the moon during this whole year.” Other accounts of the event say that the sun became “dim” or “dark” for up to eighteen months. Its light shone “like a feeble shadow,” and people were terrified that the sun would never shine properly again. In some parts of the empire, there were agricultural failures and famines.

  In Britain, the period 535–555 saw the worst weather that century. In Mesopotamia there were heavy falls of snow and “distress among men.” In Arabia there was famine followed by flooding.

  In China in 536 there was drought and famine, and “yellow dust rained down like snow.” The following year, the crops were ruined again—this time by snow in the middle of August. In Japan, the emperor issued an unprecedented edict, saying that “yellow gold and ten thousand strings of cash [money] cannot cure hunger” and that wealth was of no use if a man was “starving of cold.” In Korea, 535 and 536 were the worst years of that century in climatic terms, with massive storms and flooding followed by drought.

  In the Americas, the pattern was similar. Starting in the 530s, a horrific thirty-two-year-long drought devastated parts of South America. In North America, an analysis of ancient tree-ring evidence from what is now the western region of the United States has shown that some trees there virtually stopped growing in the years 536 and 542–543, and that things did not return to normal until some twenty-three years later, in 559. Similar tree-ring evidence from Scandinavia and western Europe also reveals a huge reduction in tree growth in the years 536–542, not recovering fully until the 550s.

  Up until now, there has been no explanation for such extraordinary climatic deterioration. Certainly the dimming of the sun (without doubt caused by some sort of atmospheric pollution) and the sudden worldwide nature of this deterioration point toward a massive explosion in which millions of tons of dust and naturally occurring chemicals were hurled into the atmosphere.

  But what was the nature of that explosion?

  I believe that I have discovered what happened so many centuries ago—and, toward the end of this book, I make my case for proving exactly what this staggering disaster was. Before you reach that portion of the book, however, you will see, in substantial detail, the effect that event had on the entire world that existed then—and how an ancient tragedy shaped the world in which we live today.

  In doing the research for this book, I have developed a greatly increased respect for the forces of nature and their power to change history. That respect, as well as the new perspective it engenders, has changed my view of the very nature of history, which must be understood in holistic terms and which really functions as an integrated, planetwide phenomenon.

  If I have done my job well, what you are about to read is an analysis of the mechanisms and repercussions of catastrophe, a hitherto unknown explanation of our history, and a chilling warning for the future.

  PART ONE

  THE PLAGUE

  1

  T H E W I N E P R E S S O F

  T H E W R A T H O F G O D

  “With some people it began in the head, made the eyes bloody and the face swollen, descended to the throat and then removed them from Mankind. With others, there was a flowing of the bowels. Some came out in buboes [pus-filled swellings] which gave rise to great fevers, and they would die two or three days later with their minds in the same state as those who had suffered nothing and with their bodies still robust. Others lost their senses before dying. Malignant pustules erupted and did away with them. Sometimes people were afflicted once or twice and then recovered, only to fall victim a third time and then succumb.”¹

  Thus wrote the sixth-century church historian Evagrius, describing the gruesome symptoms of the bubonic plague, which devastated the Roman Empire and much of the wider world between the middle of the sixth century and the latter part of the seventh.

  The first area of the empire to be hit by plague was Egypt. The town where it first appeared was the Mediterranean port of Pelusium—traditionally the point of entry for Egypt’s enemies for over a thousand years. Persians, Syrians, Romans, and Greeks—even Alexander the Great himself—had invaded Egypt through it. But this time the enemy was not proudly clad in armor. It was invisible, carried ashore on the backs of scuttling rats. It had arrived in Pelusium from the south via the Red Sea and the Roman equivalent of the Suez Canal—a waterway built by the emperor Trajan more than four centuries earlier to help link the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean.

  After devastating Pelusium, the disease quickly spread to Alexandria, then on to Constantinople and the empire as a whole. Up to a third of the empire’s population died in the firs
t massive outbreak, and in the capital, more than 50 percent of the inhabitants are thought to have perished.²

  “God’s wrath turned into, as it were, a wine-press and pitilessly trampled and squeezed the inhabitants [of many cities] like fine grapes,” wrote another eyewitness of the catastrophe, the hagiographer and historian John of Ephesus, in a moving and vivid account of the horror unleashed by the epidemic.

  There were “homes, large and small, beautiful and desirable, which suddenly became tombs for the inhabitants and in which servants and masters at the same time suddenly fell [dead], mingling their rottenness together in their bedrooms.”³

  Everywhere one looked were “corpses which split open and rotted on the streets with nobody to bury [them].” There were those “who perished falling in the streets to become a terrible and shocking spectacle for those who saw them, as their bellies were swollen and their mouths wide open, throwing up pus like torrents, their eyes inflamed and their hands stretched out upward, and [over] the corpses, rotting and lying in corners and streets and in the porches of courtyards and in the churches.” There were “ships in the midst of the sea whose sailors were suddenly attacked by [God’s] wrath and [the ships] became tombs adrift on the waves.”

  John tried to flee from the plague, but no matter where he went, the epidemic caught up with him. In the end, there was nowhere else to run to. On his journeys, after trying in vain to find a safe haven, he witnessed the ferocity with which the plague devastated the countryside just as much as the cities.

  “Day by day, we too—like everybody—knocked at the gate of the tomb [literally, “on death’s door”]. If it was evening, we thought that death would come upon us in the night, and again if morning had broken, our face was turned the whole day towards the tomb [i.e., “toward thoughts of death”].”

  On the journey “we saw desolate and groaning villages and corpses spread out on the earth; staging posts on the roads full of darkness and solitude filling with fright everyone who happened to enter and leave them.” And “cattle abandoned and roaming scattered over the mountains with nobody to gather them.”

  He saw fields “abundant in grain which was becoming white and stood erect” yet had no one “to reap or gather it in.” And he observed “flocks of sheep, goats, oxen and pigs which had become like wild animals, having forgotten [life in] a cultivated land and the human voice which used to lead them.”

  In Constantinople, John recorded in considerable detail the scale of the catastrophe. “When this scourge weighed heavy upon this city, first it eagerly began [to assault] the class of the poor, who lay in the streets.

  “It happened that 5,000 and 7,000, or even 12,000 and as many as 16,000 of them departed [this world] in a single day. Since thus far it was [only] the beginning, men [i.e., government officials] were standing by the harbours, at the cross-roads and at the [city] gates counting the dead.

  “Thus the [people of Constantinople] reached the point of disappearing, only a few remaining, whereas [of] those only who had died on the streets—if anybody wants us to name their number, for in fact they were counted—over 300,000 were taken off the streets. Those [officials] who counted having reached [the number of] 230,000 and seeing that [the dead] were innumerable, gave up [reckoning] and from then on [the corpses] were brought out without being counted.”

  The authorities quickly ran out of burial places. “The city stank with corpses as there were neither litters nor diggers, and corpses were heaped up in the streets.” Some victims would take days to die. Others became ill and died within minutes.

  “In some cases, as people were looking on each other and talking, they [began to] totter and fell either in the streets or at home. It might happen that a person was sitting at work on his craft, holding his tools in his hands and working and he would totter to the side and his soul would escape.

  “It might happen that [a person] went out to market to buy necessities and while he was standing and talking or counting his change, suddenly the end would overcome the buyer here and the seller there, the merchandise remaining in the middle with the payment for it, without there being either buyer or seller to pick it up.

  “And in all ways, everything was brought to nought, was destroyed and turned into sorrow alone and funeral lamentations. The entire city then came to a standstill as if it had perished, so that its food supply stopped.”

  At first, when burial space ran out, the dead were buried at sea. Vast numbers of corpses were taken to the seashore. “There, boats were filled with them and during each sailing, they were thrown overboard and the ships returned to take other [corpses].

  “Standing on the seashore one could see litters colliding with each other and coming back to carry and to throw upon the earth two or three [corpses] to go back again and to bring [further corpses]. Others carried [the corpses] on boards and carrying-poles, bringing and piling [them] up one upon another. For other corpses, since they had rotted and putrefied, matting was sewn together. People bore them on carrying-poles and coming [to the shore] threw them [down] with pus running out of them.”

  Thousands of corpses “piled up on the entire seashore, like flotsam on great rivers, and the pus flowed, discharging itself down into the sea.” Even with the ships busy dumping their macabre cargoes at sea, it was proving impossible to clear the backlog of dead bodies.

  The emperor, Justinian, therefore decided on a new corpse-disposal strategy—the creation of giant mass graves, each capable of accommodating seventy thousand individuals. The high official who was given the gruesome task of organizing the scheme was one of the emperor’s referendarii (top civil servants), a man by the name of Theodore. The emperor “gave him instructions to take and spend as much gold as should be necessary.”

  Theodore arranged for the mass graves to be dug on a hill, immediately north of the city, on the other side of the Golden Horn waterway. “He took along many people, [and] gave them much gold” to dig the pits and start burying the dead. “He placed there [some] men who brought down and turned over [the corpses], piled them up and pressed the layers one upon another as a man might heap up hay in a stack.

  “Also [Theodore] placed by the pits men holding gold and encouraging the workmen and the common people with gifts to carry and to bring up [corpses], giving five, six and even seven and ten dinars for each load. While men stood below [in the pits], deep as in an abyss, and others above, the latter dragged and threw down [the corpses], like stones being thrown from a sling, and the former grabbed and threw them one on top of another, arranging the rows in alternate directions.

  “Because of scarcity [of room] both men and women were trodden upon, young people and children were pressed together, trodden upon by feet and trampled like spoiled grapes. Then again from above [other corpses] were thrown head downwards and went down and split asunder beneath, noble men and women, old men and women, youths and virgins, young girls and babies.

  “Whole peoples and kingdoms, territories and regions and powerful cities were seized [by the plague]. Thus, when I [John of Ephesus], a wretch, wanted to include these matters in a record of history, my thoughts were seized many times by stupor, and for many reasons I planned to omit it, firstly because all mouths and tongues are insufficient to relate it, and moreover, because even if there could be found such that would record [at least] a little from among the multitude [of matters], what use would it be, when the entire world was tottering and reaching its dissolution and the length of generations was cut short? And for whom would he who wrote be writing?

  “[But] then I thought that it was right that, through our writings, we should inform our successors and transmit to them [at least] a little from among the multitude [of matters] concerning [God’s] chastisement [of us]. Perhaps [during] the remainder of world [history] which will come after us, they will fear and shake because of the terrible scourge with which we were lashed through our transgressions and become wiser through the chastisement of us wretches and be saved from [God’s] wrath here [in t
his world] and from future torment.”

  John was describing the epidemic of 541–543—the first visitation of the plague. But the full social and political impact of the disease lay in its remorseless habit of returning to claim the lives of those it had previously spared.

  The church historian Evagrius lived through four great plague epidemics and lost most of his family to them. In the year 593, at the age of fifty-eight, he wrote down his memories in a very personal lamentation.

  “I believe no part of the human race to have been unafflicted by the disease,” for it occurred in some cities “to such an extent that they were rendered empty of almost all their inhabitants.” Evagrius regarded it as his responsibility to describe these events, as he was present at the beginning of the spread of the bubonic plague, and was struck by it while still a schoolboy.

  “And during the course of the various visitations, I lost to the disease many of my children and my wife and much of the rest of my kin … For now, as I write this, I am 58 years old and it is not quite two years since the fourth outbreak of plague struck Antioch and I lost my daughter and the son born to her in addition to those [I lost] earlier.