Think you're having a bad year? Well, you can at least find solace in the fact that
some people have had it far, far worse. Thanks to a litany of volcanic eruptions, asteroids,
pandemics, wars, and more, these are the worst years in human history.
It's said that Ptolemy I Soter founded the Royal Library of Alexandria in Egypt around
the year 283 BC. The library held an estimated half a million documents from all over the
known world, and also contained gardens, a zoo, and space for more than 100 scholars
to live, write, and research.
Just what happened to the library is still hotly-debated, but the blame usually lands
on Julius Caesar. In 48 BC, it's said that Caesar ordered the harbor and all the ships
inside to be set on fire. Inevitably, that fire spread to the library. This claim has
never been fully substantiated, however, which is probably why there are conflicting stories
about the library's destruction.
One is said to have taken place in 391 AD, when then-ruler Theophilus converted the nearby
Temple of Serapis into a Christian Church. In doing so, he would have willingly burned
many of the contents.
Finally, 640 gets a shout-out as the year Alexandria was conquered by Muslim invaders,
who supposedly burned the texts to heat the bathhouses. So which is true? No one's really
certain, but one thing is for sure: the year all that knowledge was lost was one of mankind's
very worst.
According to a research team from the University of Nottingham and the Climate Change Institute
of the University of Maine, the very worst year in human history was 536 AD.
536 saw the first in a long line of devastating natural disasters, beginning with a massive
volcanic eruption that spewed so much ash into the air that the resulting temperature
change led to crop failures and widespread starvation around the world. It got worse,
too: Another research team traced a subsequent volcanic eruption to 539 or 540, blaming El
Salvador's now-inactive Ilopango volcano for piling on the misery in the years that followed.
By 542 AD, people were struggling, for sure… and unfortunately for them, this happened
to be the year that the plague struck Europe for the first time, killing an untold number
of people. This then led to a mass collapse of the world's economic systems, which itself
had devastating consequences for the global populace.
Life was never really easy in medieval Europe, but things really started going wrong in 1314.
It rained almost constantly throughout the summer and autumn of that year, with the ensuing
floods ruining crops across western and northern Europe. While food rotted in the fields, livestock
starved or drowned in the floods. As food stores emptied and prices skyrocketed, a famine
set in, and even basics like wheat and salt became impossible to obtain. Meanwhile, the
flooding itself was so bad that rising seas swallowed entire coastal communities.
Worse still, the rain continued throughout 1315. By the winter of 1315, farmers were
forced to eat their seed stocks to make it through the cold months, and without seeds
to plant, it's kinda tough to grow crops. Stories of cannibalism became widespread by
1316; some, in fact, inspired the tale of Hansel and Gretel, hundreds of years later.
The famine peaked and then declined in 1317, although the food supply didn't return to
pre-famine levels until 1322.
By all accounts, the 14th century in general was pretty rough, but 1348 may have been the
worst year of all. Two years earlier, a particularly virulent strain of plague bacteria had emerged
in Mongolia — which the Mongols used to deadly effect during the siege of Caffa.
"They decided to catapult their dead corpses, the dead bodies of their victims, into the
town, in order to, quote, 'extinguish everyone inside.'"
By 1347, the plague had killed off around 90 percent of the population of Constantinople.
That same year, the plague arrived in Europe, and the situation worsened in 1348, when a
second strain arrived on the continent.
Known as the Black Death, the plague spread fast, and those who caught it usually died
a truly horrible death, involving skin sores, vomiting, fever, and chills. In addition to
the widespread death and destruction wrought by the disease, 1348 also saw a huge rise
in antisemitism, as a baseless conspiracy theory began to spread amongst the people.
Many falsely claimed that Jewish people had been poisoning wells and spreading the disease,
leading to the total destruction of Jewish communities by rampaging, violent mobs. By
the time it was all over, almost one-half of Europe's population had died — which
equates to somewhere between 25 and 50 million people.
Everyone knows that in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue — but what's not so well-known
is that he followed it up by setting the New World on fire.
The most immediate consequence of Columbus' journey to the New World is known as the Columbian
Exchange. This is the idea that Columbus's voyage opened up a grim sort of trade between
the New World and the Old. While Europeans benefited from all kinds of new foods and
crops, the New World was given a shocking array of diseases in return.
Columbus and his men brought measles, influenza, smallpox, cholera, typhus, chickenpox, scarlet
fever, Lyme disease, and whooping cough to the Americas — and that's just a partial
list. Unsurprisingly, this was unspeakably devastating for the indigenous peoples of
the continent. In Hispaniola alone, those diseases killed 236,000 people — or about
95 percent of the population.
There were a few major events that made 1520 pretty terrible, with the first being the
near-total annihilation of the Aztecs. Hernán Cortés left Cuba in 1519 and headed to Mexico,
hoping to explore and colonize the land of the Aztecs. Cortés and his 500 men landed
and found a vast, powerful empire of around 16 million people. So how'd that colonization
go? Well, with the help of a smallpox epidemic that they brought with them, Cortés had pretty
much taken over by 1521.
Around 40 percent of the entire population of Tenochtitlan died during 1520. The eyewitness
accounts were as grim as you might expect, too, with one Franciscan monk recording:
"As it was impossible to bury the great number of dead, they pulled down the houses over
them, so that their homes became their tombs."
While that was going on in the New World, something else was going on in the Old: Martin
Luther was busy breaking Christianity. In 1517, Luther had published his Ninety-Five
Theses against Indulgences, which was essentially a condemnation of the church's habit of making
money by selling forgiveness to laypeople. Luther wasn't excommunicated for his views
until 1520, however — at which point the Reformation kicked off in earnest. This event
led to a permanent split within Christendom; one which, over the coming centuries, would
lead to many violent conflicts.
June 1783 saw the eruption of Iceland's Laki volcano. The eruption lasted for a shocking
eight months, and while the world was experiencing a surprisingly warm summer at the time, the
eruption of Laki changed everything.
The volcano also unleashed a staggering amount of poisonous gas into the air. For most of
1783, the air throughout the Northern Hemisphere was filled with "a sulfuric aerosol cloud,"
which basically meant the world smelled like rotten eggs. Breathing it in also put you
at risk of contracting a respiratory infection. That, as well as the immense acid rainfall
that followed, meant that more than half of Iceland's livestock was dead within a year
— along with 20 percent of the population.
Around the rest of the world, the effects were far-reaching and long-lasting. Deaths
due to respiratory failure skyrocketed. Ships were stuck in ports, trade stopped, crops
died in the fields, and meat spoiled as soon as it was slaughtered. That hot summer gave
way to an ultra-cold winter, and starvation became widespread. In fact, the famine that
resulted was so devastating that it has been linked to the beginning of the French Revolution
in 1789.
You might be forgiven for thinking that 1919 was a good year: after all, World War I ended
on November 11th, 1918, and it ought to have smooth sailing from there on out, right?
Well, not quite. Let's start with the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919. Intended to
bring a final end to the Great War, this so-called treaty wasn't as well-thought-out as they'd
hoped. By putting a massive burden on Germany, the treaty laid the groundwork for German
resentment against Europe — which would ultimately lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler.
Discussions were dominated by the US, Britain, France, and Italy — essentially, the winners
— and at the end of the day, the world found itself bound by a contract that no one was
happy with.
1919 also saw the arrival of the third wave of the Spanish flu, a pandemic that had already
killed millions, left countless children orphaned, and devastated entire towns. This was also
the same year that Prohibition was ratified in the United States — and that didn't exactly
work out, either, since organized crime ended up flourishing as a result.
But that's not all. In the United States, the summer of 1919 was known as the Red Summer,
because of the wave of racially-motivated violence that swept across the country. The
violence flared up in large part because black soldiers who had fought for their country
came home to find friends and family being harassed, falsely accused, and even lynched.
All in all, 1919 wasn't so much a year of healing after a tough decade as it was a grim
omen of the terrible things to come.
You could make a decent argument that every year during World War II was one of the worst
years in history, but 1943 stands out in particular. For one, Hitler's Final Solution had stepped
up a gear, and the work of the Nazi death camps was in full swing. At the same time,
military action had spread to pretty much every corner of the globe.
Winston Churchill was becoming the figurehead of the righteous Allied advance, however,
he was also committing unspeakable crimes in India. Churchill's policies of exporting
food from India to the warfront — and to Britain in particular — resulted in large-scale
famine, and the subsequent deaths of around 3 million people.
"The British government killed us by starving us."
Back on the homefront, the US saw an outbreak of race rioting. During the summer of '43,
white workers in Detroit halted production to protest the fact that their black coworkers
had received promotions, and the ensuing violence was retaliated against by 6,000 army troops.
1943 also saw the peak of another kind of homegrown racism: during this period, America
was busy confining Japanese citizens into internment camps; a decision that many have
called one of the biggest violations of civil rights in the country's history.
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