THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HAS MADE 2020 THE WORST YEAR IN GENERATIONS. BUT THE WORST YEAR EVER? THAT HONOUR COULD FALL TO 536 CE, A YEAR MARKED BY PLAGUE, WAR, GENOCIDE AND HUMAN MISERY.
536 CE had plague, natural disasters and a dying empire
Was 2020 the worst year ever? The National Post puts a silly question to a serious test by stacking 2020 up against other years of plague, war, genocide, and human misery, all to answer the unusually urgent question of what makes a bad year the worst.
If you Google “worst year ever,” most results point to 536 CE. This viral factoid traces to the opinion of a Harvard historian published widely two years ago.
Much has changed since then, sweet summer child. Humans in December 2020 know a little more about bad years than they did in jolly old 2018.
The year just past had everything 536 did: plague, declining empire, climatic disruption, natural disaster, and the general sense in the culture that, for postRoman Western Europeans in particular, Dark Ages are at hand.
This sense of shared historical hopelessness is as important to a bad year as any physical calamity, because bad years are not just bad events in aggregate that happen to occur in the same calendar year. They are coherently bad periods of time, and the mark of a truly bad year is that, by New Year's Eve, hopelessness seems correct.
Bad years infuse the mind with a sense of dread. Happiness does not vanish, but misery seems inevitable. Luck turns. Unfairness is the norm. Civil war seems predictable. There is rampant plague and random violence in the name of sinister ideologies. Societal divisions strain beyond any obvious hope of reconciliation. Old certainties crumble. From quarantine, newspaper writers start quoting The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats yet again.
It's just the worst.
So Google's suggested answer for the “worst year ever” is as good a pick as any, Eurocentric
as it may be. The year 536 of the Common Era was the pits, start to finish.
To imagine, we are well into the dying days of Rome. There is no more empire in the original West. The Eastern Byzantine empire is still Roman under Justinian, an emperor who feels his destiny is to make Rome great again from his seat in Constantinople, partly by rewriting imperial constitutions. History, however, will show this to be the fragile peak of his empire's influence.
Justinian's new legal code had come into force over the previous few years. “The imperial majesty should be armed with laws as well as glorified with arms,” he declared in Latin. Scholars set to work, and pagan legal writing going back in some cases to the second century were compiled, updated and integrated into Christianity. This was the origin of civil law, in contrast to common law, which arose centuries later out of English custom and royal writ.
So, 536 left a mark.
It also left a nasty sooty residue all over Europe from an Icelandic volcano. The discovery of this residue in ice cores drilled from a Swiss glacier in 2013 confirmed a report from the contemporary
Byzantine historian Procopius, who tells of the sun going cold and dim, no brighter than the moon.
Procopius also recounted the Plague of Justinian, the same disease that centuries later would be called the Black Death, which broke out in Egypt and spread throughout the Eastern empire in 541, according to one theory as a result of the climatic disruption of 536. So, by the time that ash cloud showed up to blot out the sun and ruin the crops, the makings of 536 as a truly bad year were all coming together: plague, volcanoes, lawyers.
Large scale meteorological and geological events like volcanoes or floods or hurricanes help to fix bad years precisely to the calendar because t h ey happen abruptly, and leave a measurable trace, even if they are not immediately recorded.
A bad year's cause can be singular, or it can have many causes, but they should be spectacular and unique in some way. The whole year should hold the sympathies of the whole world more than other misfortunate times. Until Boxing Day, for example, 2004 was a year whose most menacing novelty was Facebook. Then came the tsunami.
But generally, it takes more than one natural disaster to make a whole year bad. You cannot add misery like numbers, or quantify subjective suffering, but a truly bad year should rise to a diverse and widespread phenomenon.
For example, the worst year ever for many Nuu-chah-nulth people on Vancouver Island was 1700, which began with an earthquake in January that caused a tsunami so devastating it inspired lasting myths of dwarfs in the mountains whose dancing causes the earth to shake and the water to rise. The same tsunami also went westward and killed hundreds in Japan, where its timing was precisely recorded, allowing for rare scientific proof of an oral tradition, and the physical unification of two human calamities.
A truly bad year is like that. It involves a constellation of disasters that affect a lot of people in different places, even if the cause is the same, like a pandemic or a tsunami. The year 79 CE, for example, was an absolute horror show if you happened to live near the Gulf of Naples when Mount Vesuvius erupted, but that was a relatively local problem.
There is a stronger case to be made for 1883, when Krakatoa erupted, causing local devastation and serious global climatic disruption, and also famously intense red and orange sunsets.
A bad year's badness is temporary, obviously, but it should also somehow project forward through history. It should have a legacy that resonates in future bad years.
For the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, for example, the worst consequences of 1492 did not occur in 1492, but later, such as with smallpox in 1520.
Similarly, when the Black Death tore through medieval Europe, it also marked a historical watershed for anti-semitic myths because Christians, ignorant of the true epidemiology, looked for someone to blame.
A BAD YEAR'S CAUSE CAN BE SINGULAR, OR IT CAN HAVE MANY CAUSES, BUT THEY SHOULD BE SPECTACULAR AND UNIQUE IN SOME WAY.