What Was the Worst Year to Be Alive?

I could just imagine two dinosaurs looking at each other going you know it just don't get no better than this and one of those says yeah and then oh no giant meteorite strikes the earth goodbye dinosaur yes hi and welcome to what the fact the show that reveals the wildest true facts ever recorded and tells you the whole story behind them hi I'm Connor and I'm here to bring the charm and humor and maybe a British accent tool to your history lesson and I am Carter Roy I will be your guide through history what happened how it happened and why it happened like in subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode so today we have three years three very real stories and one question which one was actually the worst Carter has anything terrible ever happened in your life and then something unexpectedly good came of it yeah I think so you know actually the pandemic I had to be alone at home all the time and I ended up doing a lot of art because I had to kill time so like now I ended up being like a visual artist and I didn't even know I could really do that until the pandemic happened how about you me I actually started watching more shows to help pass the tie yeah and honestly it made me rethink the fantasy genre all together like like how some things that could have happened in the middle ages could happen in modern day yeah hidden you know totally so it made you rethink everything a little bit yeah very cool well that is actually the theme of everything we are covering catastrophe makes things so today we have three years for you three years from human history that you absolutely did not want to be alive for at the very end you and I will vote on which was actually the worst okay Connor first reaction how bad do you think this is about to get oh I think it's going to get pretty pretty pretty bad it isn't going to get pretty bad do you know which year of alcano cancelled summer caused a global famine and also gave us Frankenstein and the bicycle that year was 1816 also known as the year without a summer it's amazing it's fascinating like how something terrible can lead to something good in the end yeah and a year without a summer that just seems like seasons are such a part of life we expect it's crazy to think of just like a season not happening can you imagine life without a summer I can imagine how terrible it would be how miserable everyone would be oh my god people would be not happy okay so the year is 1816 Europe should be having one of the best years had in the generation Napoleon had just been defeated at Waterloo and the over 20 years of war finally yes yes all anyone wants to do is have a normal summer exactly what happens 1816 no summer no summer in New England it snows in June yeah yeah crazy that crazy enough to bury new crops and kill birds right where they sit that's so sad so sad imagine looking out to seeing dead frozen birds in July the hard frost turns the corn black the people who lived through it called 1816 1800 and froze the death they had some kind of sense a humor back then and trying to make the best out of a bad thing in Europe grain rotted from Switzerland Ireland bread prices doubled then doubled again there were food riots across France Belgium Switzerland people were eating bread cut with sawdust oh that doesn't sound appetizing I've got three things to say about that hard to bite difficult to chew and impossible to swallow you won't see me eating bread with sawdust no okay in Switzerland families were boiling weeds and eating the family cat oh that's disgusting I understand you get resourceful in a famine but no way would I ever eat my pet even if I was super hungry yeah that shows you just how bad it was and this was not just a European problem it was a planet problem in China the cold wreck the rice harvest the angsy valley flooded in Yunnan province famine lasted three full years in India the monsoon failed entirely so many historians believe a new strain of cholera emerged from that broken weather in the Bay of Bengal the first truly global pandemic tens of millions of people dead over the following century I thought this Pepsi oh was bad every bit of it traces back to one mountain okay before I tell you which one what's your guess crocodile maybe that's what I want to guess this is the one I know but no it was tambura it erupted in indonesia it's ash and smoke carried miles across the world miles it was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history true story I was actually in Sicily I saw a mount etna from a distance and I happened to learn from my brother that mount etna was used in filming star wars episode three revenge of the Sith that scene where Anakin and Obi-Wan were fighting on moose to far right where they were grappling there was a huge blast of lava that was mount etna erupting I make sure they have the real mount etna in the background and then they yeah made it yeah erupting well this is about as bad as it gets it was April 10th 1815 and as you said tambura in the island of simbaba what is now indonesia detonates the largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history and directly killed roughly 10,000 people and eventually 80 to 90,000 more the blast was heard 1600 miles away which I don't I can't even really comprehend that how far away do you think the loudest you could hear um probably about well if the explosion was loud enough maybe 10,000 miles or more or I mean I thought palm paced destruction by mount vasuvius was bad yeah this is bad okay so people 1600 miles away thought it was cannon fire like a battle just over the horizon and eruptions are measured on the vei scale the volcanic explosivity index talk about it on the nose name every step is roughly 10 times bigger than last so well yeah crazy crazy okay so mount saint helens in 1980 that's a vei five crack a toa 1883 a vei six tambura was a vei seven so be a hundred times uh bigger than mount saint helens and like I was alive when mount saint helens erupted I was a Montana and like it was like you know we had ash changed life you know it this is you're gonna find this fascinating Carter but did you know volcanic ash is actually good for plant growth I mean if it mixes with soil some pretty unique plants grow from it I know because I was I was actually in Hawaii once I saw exotic plants yeah stuff you would never see back here in the mainland and right all that volcanic ash makes it so fertile and yeah mountain helens when it is a kid I couldn't believe it was one of those things you like I didn't know this actually happened volcano exploding and I'm imagining it like the the timbura being that loud it'll most be like helms deep you know in the the uracay or coming there's that like oh yeah the five they were putting firepots into a drain at the base of the wall yes and then it went and you're like what like nobody'd ever seen anything like this before and that was zirker took his own life just to blow the wall remember like hit him hit him except for the arrow after arrow legalists shot and not one could bring down that urac no well that's basically what crack a toa was and then timbura was ten times that and hundred times Mount St. Helens possibly the loudest sound recorded in human history it was heard nearly three thousand miles away sailors had eardrums ruptured 40 miles away some people link the red skies it left behind to the sky and Edward Monks the scream now we know it might be because of volcanic skies there's so much ash thrown in the atmosphere it formed a thin grave veil around the entire earth bouncing sunlight back into space before it could reach the ground and here is the the most disturbing number in the segment all of it the famine on three continents the birds dying in june snow the family counts happened because the earth got colder by just one degree Fahrenheit one degree that was all it took right which doesn't seem like much at all one degree in the wrong year canceled summer across an entire hemisphere yeah the technical term for this is a volcanic winter it looks like snow falling from the sky when really it's soot and ash yeah scientists believe that one time when a volcanic winter happened all the dinosaurs were wiped out after a giant meteorite struck the earth this was known as the kt event right a meteorite the size of Mount Everest struck the earth changing the weather no animals larger than a cat could have survived but in the sea they say life could find a way is that what like sharks are still sort of prehistoric, because there are many living fossils today, fun fact for you. Sharks, skates, rays, sea locamps, turtles, and crocodiles are all like vestiges from that, by the way. - Living fossils. - Amazing. - I could just imagine two dinosaurs looking at each other going, "You know, it just don't get no better than this." And one of those says, "Yeah." And then, oh no. A giant meteorite strikes the earth, goodbye dinosaur. - Yes. - Okay, now the part you did not see coming, because 1816 is not only doom. That freezing, ruined summer, produced some of the most iconic creative work in history. And you have lived your entire life inside the things it made. Okay, picture a rented mansion on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, perpetual rain, lightning over the lake, (exhaling) counting till the thunder, candles at noon, a group of young writers trapped inside decides to make a game of it. How about a little competition? The poet, Lord Byron, challenges everyone to write a ghost story. One of his guests is 18 years old. Mary, Godwin, soon to be, Mary, Shirley. Author of one of the most famous horror novels ever written. I'm glad you bring that up, because a few nights in, between two or three in the morning, she has a waking nightmare, a pale student, kneeling over something he has built, watching its stir. She wrote later that she believed what terrified her, what terrified others the next morning, she started writing. Oh, that's, that sounds a lot like a familiar book. I don't know which one it would be. Let's see, a doctor who creates a monster, who rises, maybe with lightning, helping animate it, could it be Frankenstein? Frankenstein, written at 18. Very impressive. What many consider the first true science fiction novel? And contrary to popular belief carder, Frankenstein isn't the monster itself. Frankenstein's the name of the guy who creates the creature. Although, oh, I believe the creature, as it's more known as, or the wretch, Victor Frankenstein was trying to discover the secret of life, proved to his colleagues that death could be undone, reversed. But when his creature was created, he was terrified by its monstrous appearance. Yes. All that poor creature wanted to do was exist. He did nothing wrong, and everyone wanted him dead. Totally, right? You think of all the monsters that are like, ah, evil, bad, and yet Franken, well, the wretch. Right, wanted to be good, wanted to fit in, wanted to be loved. He wanted to belong, to not be alone. Yeah, which we can all relate to, obviously. Well, and in this case, the instigating force was this storm, this volcanic winter they're all inside. And in fact, not only was Frankenstein invented, but in that same house, that summer, Byron's physicians sketches out the vampire. Dracula's the first suave aristocratic vampire in English fiction, the direct ancestor of Dracula. So every brooding vampire you've ever encountered include Jude Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and interviews for vampire. And Antonio Banderas just forget him. How could I? And these are the three of the sexiest vampires in the history of the world. And it all goes back to that rainy week in Switzerland in 1816. Interesting thing, both Frankenstein and, well, Dracula as the vampire went on to inspire, would both become adopted by universal studios, along with the wolf man, the mummy, the invisible man, and the creature from the black lagoon. So I guess in some ways, the volcanic winter was the birth of universal studios. Traces all the way back to there. Everything we have now. What's your ranking of vampire movies? OK, let's see. Dracula untold with Luke Evans. I'd put that at around a five. Bram Stoker's Dracula. 10, who can go wrong with Gary Oldman? Oh, you cannot. If my sister's watching, sorry, Anna, but on the subject of twilight, don't get me wrong. I thought it was good, but overall, I give it a four and a half. OK, not quite a five. Yeah. And of course, it's cross-genre because it's got vampires and-- Werewolves. Yeah. I'm more of a werewolf guy anyway. Oh, yeah. Well, that's a whole other time. We're talking about great werewolf movies. Here's a look at it, you, Jack. So that summer, Byron also wrote a poem called "Darkness," imagining the sun going out in the human race dying and cold and black. He had no idea that he was describing something that had literally already happened. Really? OK, the last thing. In Germany, the cold killed the oat crop. So horses starved. And people were slaughtering animals. They could not feed. And a German inventor named Karl von Dresse asks, well, what if there was another way to get around, a two-wheeled machine you straddle and push with your feet? The great grandfather of the bicycle invented because Aevolcano killed the horses. Oh, yeah. Poor horses. Oh, that part's bad. So in memory of the horses of 1816, Frankenstein, the modern vampire, the bicycle, all out of one of the worst summers in history-- and remember, it's silver lining-- out of the worst things that ever happened, some of the best things were left behind. Your two starts with a catapult and a corpse. Oh, yes. I'm going to be right back. Do you know which year up to 60% of Europe died from a plague that started with a catapult spread through flea bites? And the best doctor in the room said, have you got a chicken? That year was 1348, also known as the year of the Black Death or Bubonic plague. That sounds as bad as it gets. So to understand in 1348, you have to understand Europe was already on its knees. The climate had been cooling for decades. A great famine, just one generation earlier, left a continent of survivors who were smaller, weaker, and hungrier than their parents. So when the ships came in, carrying one of the worst diseases in human history, Europe was not a healthy body fighting off a cold. It was dry, kindling, waiting for a spark. Ooh. That had to be some real tough breaks. Yes, it was a tough time, then. OK, Connor, do you know already about the Black Death? Oh, I know plenty. Some believe it all happened in China when a Mongolian catapult started firing corpses over city walls. And the corpses were infected terribly. And rats scurried all over the corpse. There's hungry rats. And they began contracting fleas. Those rats later, they stowed away in the cargo holds of ships bound for Europe. Wow. That's exactly right. And here's one of the darkest parts of how it started. The Black Death may have arrived, as you said, an act of war, a city called Kafa on the Black Sea in what is now Crimea. 1346, a booming trade colony where the Silk Road met the sea, under siege by a Mongol army. Yeah. Yeah, the plague breaks out. Soldiers dying by the thousands, the attackers load their own infected dead onto catapults and fling the corpses over the city walls. What barbarism? Completely. In fact, some say it is one of the first recorded uses of biological warfare, although to be fair, that story's debated, but still, there's a reason that it stays with us, corpses flying over walls. And maybe taller walls to make sure that you can't fling corpses in. Yeah. In fact, by the First World War, Germany was using anthrax as a weapon of biological warfare. Yeah, just kept evolving over time. Now, what would you think if you were in the city getting bombarded? Can you imagine what they'd be like to look up and see like corpses flying over the walls, landing in the streets? Oh, that would be strange and ultimately sickening, both literally and figuratively. That's right. Very literally, in this case. So the defenders fled by sea to Italy. October 1347, their ships tie up in Messina, Sicily. The men aboard are already dead or dying. Black swellings in the neck and growing fever, coughing blood. Locals tried to turn the ships away, but it was far too late. The rats were already ashore. From Sicily, it jumped to the mainland. gutted Florence reached Marseille in dead of winter, climbed the rivers into France through Avignon, where the Pope himself was. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's getting close to like the heart of Europe. And an interesting fact, the Pope protected himself by sitting between two fires of burning Rosemary, kind of ironic when you think about it. A holy man sitting between two fires. And then it went on toward Paris. 800 dead a day by the year's end, then it crosses the channel. It was a single ship. The plague was loose and Britain. And what it did to the body, the swellings, were called boobos, which is where boobonic plague comes from, definitely. It's alums in the armpit neck, growing, swelling to the size of an egg. Sometimes an apple, hard and black and agonizing. Yeah, can you imagine like dark splotches over the skin. fever vomiting Smell people were dead within three days. Yeah, so basically people went to bed well and didn't see the end of the week I understand I had flu B wants and man was it agonizing So to get a sense of the scale 30 to 60% of everyone in Europe dead in under five years Florence may have lost 60% of its population in a single year England dropped from five or six million to under three million within a generation Whole villages just vanished and this wasn't only Europe's catastrophe same plague tore through the Middle East North Africa And central Asia Egypt and Syria may have lost a third or more of their people too We tell it as a European story, but it was one of the first truly global pandemics Modern science would have been considered which craft if they if they did They would be like this is totally crazy, but what they were doing was pretty great And nobody of the time knows what's causing it. We know now it was a bacterium called Yersinia pestis and it rides in the guts of fleas Today a course of antibiotics clears it up in 1348 Well, the idea of germs was five centuries away. So people tried everything Bleeding the patient packing the boobos with poltices mercury potions that kill faster than the plague does vinegar rubs rosemary burning in the streets or next to the Pope and then there was the chicken The belief that chickens breathe Through their back sides So they'd pluck the feathers of life ridiculous But they thought I don't know why they thought that only chickens breathe through their butts But if they pluck the feathers off of alive chickens rear end strap it directly onto the patient's boobos And let the bird draw the sickness out then when the chicken gets sick Just try again interesting thing though the ancient Egyptians believed mercury was meant to Preserve the spirit That after someone died Well, now we know better that stuff will kill you after it makes you go crazy Right, if you get murky a poison don't you go a little Little nuts. Yeah, before you finally die So they were trying that obviously it didn't work and then finally somebody does the one thing that actually works Officials in Italy start holding arriving ships in the harbor before anyone comes ashore First they do 30 days then 40 the Italian for 40 days is Quantana Giorni See rava gratzi That is the word we still reach for every time the world faces a new disease Quarantine a word the black death left behind smart. Yeah, yeah, right They finally realized like oh, we can't stop it. Let's just make sure it doesn't come ashore now There are two things almost everyone gets wrong about 1348 first uh that creepy Beaky plague doctor costume with the long black coat the bird mask That was not 1348 a french physician named Charles de lorm designed it around 1619 more than 250 years later The beak was stuffed with herbs because doctors believe disease spread through bad smells the people 1348 face this with just vinegar and prayer You mean like this? I mean exactly like that although that one might be better designed than They had then you've got ergonomic straps and everything you have eye holes the lenses here on the eye holes were meant to Prevent the germs from entering through the eyes while the beak was used to store Herbs garlic anything that was capable of killing germs Specifically bacteria amazing, but the icy but that so that's 250 years later not from the black death even though it looks like it would be perfect If you were in a movie called the black death you'd think you'd be wearing that and the second thing is ring around the rosy It is not about the plague folklorists have basically debunked the whole connection The rhyme does not even appear in writing until the 19th century So I guess sometimes a nursery rhyme is just a nursery rhyme and a good thing too I mean nursery rhymes that come from dark things make people a little uneasy You want a creepy nursery rhyme? Watch a nightmare on Elm Street Whatever Freddy Krueger's nearby there these little jump roping kids That's that thing this terrifying rhyme interesting thing about a nightmare on Elm Street It was the first film to ever start famous actor Johnny Depp That's right he gets lie once boil it but don't go to bed And one last thing about 1348 the catastrophe that killed half of Europe also slowly remade it When half the workers die the survivors are suddenly worth twice as much For the first time in living memory a peasant could look a lord in the eye and say pay me or I walk Wages rose surfed him started to crack historians draw a line from those empty villages Straight toward the modern world to mobility to higher pay even to the Renaissance So again catastrophe makes things happen Yes the Renaissance one of my favorite periods in history A time of art, music, and poetry all of that emerged from the tragedy that was the Black Death And some of the greatest Renaissance masters There's lived during that era Leonardo Donatello Raphael and Michelangelo just to name a few And who knows might not have come to pass if not for the Black Deaths before it But if you thought those two years were bad Maybe I'll hear number three Two down and one to go I am describing this one without naming it The other two were each one catastrophe This one was two at the same time The sun went wrong first it was dim, bluish, no warmth, no shadow And it stayed like that Then just as people might have started to recover from that Something we've already covered tonight arrived on top of it Connor and you guess is what it might have been? I gotta say Carter You've got this history buff stung All right well we're about to destump you Because not only did the sun go out The crops failed The plague arrived and the Roman Empire never recovered And the only way we ever figured out why Was a grad student, a glacier, and a laser And the year is 536 CE Lasers in that time Well, the lasers come later And before everything goes wrong in 536 CE Things are actually looking pretty good The Western Roman Empire has fallen But in the east from Constantinople Modern day Istanbul was Constantinople Nobody's business but the anyway An emperor named Justinian rules what is left He wants the whole Roman world back Okay Connor, what's your take on Justinian? He was truly one of the earliest modern men Roman innovations indoor heating plumbing The aqueduct running water Have you ever seen a Roman urinal They're like these horse trough things full of running water All triumphs of this time Incredible he accomplished so much and Really advanced his civilization in so many ways So you'd think oh he's gonna do it This is gonna make the Roman Empire live for another thousand years Yeah But it does not work out like that And here's what gets overlooked He didn't do it alone In that palace was an empress named Theodora One of the most remarkable women in all of ancient history When riots nearly toppled Justinian And his advisors told him to flee Theodora refused She told him a throne was worth dying on So he stayed crushed it And that is the partnership running Constantinople When 536 arrives In fact both Theodora and Justinian Are actually recognized as saints In the Eastern Orthodox Church One of the rare husband and wife pairs That can be canonized together Truly remarkable Totally remarkable like they accomplished so much So this is the world in 536 Ambition power, a city of golden domes And then the sun goes out Not at night during the day Early in 536 a strange dry fog rolled in across Europe The Middle East and Asia And just stayed It's settled like the world had been sealed Under a frosted glass The sun would rise But it gave a weak blueish light With no warmth and no shadow Cassidorius tried to write it down And could barely find the words He said a winter with no storms A spring with no mildness A summer with no heat If the sun stopped working I'd probably be panicking I would probably try prayers I'd try I offer rings I'd probably stay indoors for a while I'm like try to write it out Watch a lot of TV Yeah I'd be like night all the time No need for some block 18 months The coldest stretch in over 2000 years In summer 536 It snowed in China Harvest ruined across the Northern hemisphere In Ireland The Chronicles record it in four words A failure of bread Wow In 536 is not the disaster It is only the beginning Around 540 the cold deepens The recovery that should have started Was not And then into a world already starving and terrified, in 541, the plague arrives. So we covered the sky, going dark, we covered a plague, now it is both at once. It comes ashore at Policium, a Roman port in Egypt, and it just spreads like wildfire. We call it the plague of Justinian, and this is the kicker. It is the first known appearance of the exact same disease that 800 years later comes back as the Black Death. Oh, so this is like Black Death 1.0, and the Black Death itself was like the sequel. And it guts the Eastern Roman Empire, between a third and a half of the population dead, 25 to 50 million people. It's like every era, there's like a huge plague. We recently recovered from COVID-19, and you realize like millions died in COVID-19, but like, oh, it could have been so much worse, like 25 to 50 million people dead, and there was so many fewer people in the world population back then, like half the people died. It's crazy. Yeah, it could have been a lot worse, yeah. And at the peak of the plague, in Constantinople, Procopius, who was there, claims that 10,000 were dying every single day. They ran out of graves, they started stacking the dead in the towers of the city walls. Wow, that sounds like the worst possible year to live in. Yeah, I think if you woke up and found it like half the people were dying and stacked up around you, and there was no sun out, I mean, you'd think the world was ending. And just ending himself catches the plague, survives, barely, but his dream does not. The armies hollow out the reconquest of Rome collapses, historians draw a line from these years to the final end of the ancient world itself. When Justinian built the plague named after him, tore down, and the plague closes one chapter, the ancient world, its descendant closes another, the Medieval era. So basically, Justinian's plague led to the Medieval era, and then the Black Death 2 leads to the Renaissance. Bingo. Yeah. Yeah. So it's sort of like, yeah, the world, whatever stasis the world is in, the Black Death wobbles at so much that a whole new world is born after it. And I think about it, when COVID-19 came, what emerged from the ashes AI has. If you've ever seen the movie Terminator, you would know, I don't trust AI. And for good reason, judgment day, judgment day, bat, and yeah, we do. We live in a much different world already. Who knows? Like a hundred years and now what they'll look back and say about this world now. So for almost 1500 years, nobody could prove what caused the sun going out. History's greatest cold case, comets, the wrath of God, the mystery just sat there until 2018, a team led by Harvard historian Michael McCormick pulled 72 meters of ice out of a glacier in the Swiss Alps, and packed into that ice layer by frozen layer is more than 2000 years of sky. Every storm, every dust cloud, every speck of pollution, frozen in order like pages in a book, they read it with a laser, fine enough to shave off a single week of ancient weather at a time. And in the layer from spring 536, a graduate student found two microscopic particles of volcanic glass, two specks, the width of a human hair, traced to a colossal eruption that most likely in Iceland at the very start of 536. So that was the fog. That was the sun going dark over the entire known world, 1500 years. And the answer was two specks of dust, waiting in the ice for someone to build a laser powerful enough to find them. Oh, and remember that Lord Byron poem, darkness written during that worst summer in centuries, imagining the sun going out in the human race, dying in cold and black. Yeah. I had no idea he was channeling something that had already happened. The worst year in history, echoing through a poet's nightmare 1200 years later. It kind of reminds me of like how in the history of House Targaryen, Danny's the dreamer, a daughter of Aryan Targaryen, forced saw the doom of Valyria in a dream, something that hadn't even happened yet at the time, yes, until 12 years after her dream. And in the Odyssey, Cersei tells Odysseus what's lying ahead and he tries to change what his men do. But sometimes even if you have the premonition, it doesn't matter. But that is another story for another time. Okay. We've got three terrible years, 1816, 1348, 536. It is time to settle it, which one is the worst. But before I tell you where the historians land, where do you land? Each of those three was actually the worst to be alive and why probably a 536 because not only were people dying around you, there was no light, no warmth, no hope. I mean, it's hard to argue since, right, it's like the double whammy, it's like the plague and the sun. The only thing that might make me think about 1816 is just that it's later in human history, there's so many more people, they feel like they're living in the modern world. So when the sun goes out, it's like right now we feel like, oh, we've got all these technological innovations so we could survive a catastrophe. But then if the sun did show up, it would really just like decimate your trust in society. Historians land exactly where you did the year 536. Any honorable mentions for worst years, horrible years that should have been on the list? There was, is 2019 to 2020, the year COVID-19 hit, September 11, 2001, 79 AD, Pompeii, Mount Vesuvius erupts and destroys an entire city. Yeah. Okay, what about you at home? Tell us on YouTube, drop your vote in the comments, which year was the worst or if we've missed one, tell us that. Thank you for joining us on what the fact. Like and subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode. Until then, the wildest stuff is real. And the real stuff is wilder than you think, that's a fact. Every week on what the fact, we take three of the wildest true things ever recorded and tell you the whole story behind them. The facts that sound made up, the stories that got buried, the moments that changed everything. Subscribe to what the fact pod on YouTube, new episodes drop every Wednesday. Welcome to the history class you wish you had in school.