Year 536: All around BAD!
Probably not what you were expecting to be on our list of the worst years in history to be alive. But the century following 536 was a complete horror show, no matter where you happened to live. Volcanic eruptions in Iceland threw a giant ash cloud into the sky.
Global temperatures crashed, resulting in the coldest ten years on record in the past 2,300 years. Crops died everywhere, from Europe to Latin America. And with snow falling in the middle of summer, people couldn’t grow wheat or rice for many years.
To make matters worse, in 541, the Justinian Plague arrived in Pelusium, a Roman city in Egypt. There isn’t an exact record of how many people it killed. But between 541 and 549, over 5,000 people passed away in Constantinople daily.
The diseases and famines resulted in tremendous political changes. The fall of the Sassanid Empire, the decline of the Byzantine, and rebellions in China directly resulted in the deaths of an unidentified number of people.
1 thought on “4 Worst Years in History to Be Alive”
While 6 million Jews were killed in Hitler’s concentration camps, overall 11 million people were killed in them. My Italian father-in-law who headed the resistance in his hometown in Northern Italy managed to survive.