A volcanic eruption that blocked out the sun. A rampage that wiped out half a kingdom.
A plague that killed 50 million people. You think life today is tough?
Think again. Keep watching for the very worst of the Dark Ages.
"Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead."
The term 'Bubonic Plague' is likely to conjure up images of plague doctors wandering the streets of
17th century Europe, but those later outbreaks were actually linked to one that kicked off
in the 6th century. It was known as the Plague of Justinian — after Justinian I,
who was the Byzantine emperor when death and disease came to Constantinople in 542.
Entire generations were born and died in a world tainted by this pandemic,
which didn't end until almost 200 years later, in 750 A.D.
The plague spread so quickly thanks to a perfect storm of conditions,
including a cold spell that made food scarce and forced people to travel elsewhere for work.
Trade boomed as a result, and plague-infested fleas hitched rides on rats that, in turn,
hitched their rides on the boats and carts of trade caravans. By the time the plague
had disappeared, it had devastated the population of the known world. The death toll is uncertain,
but it's estimated that between 30 and 50 million people lost their lives.
The symptoms of the Plague of Justinian will be familiar to anyone who knows
about the Black Death, and there's a good reason for that. In 2014,
a team of researchers discovered that the strains of bacteria that caused
these outbreaks weren't just equally deadly, but genetically related, too.
"What have the Romans ever done for us?"
"Brought peace?"
"Oh, peace? Shut up!"
There's a saying that Rome wasn't built in a day, and it didn't fall in a day, either.
As the once-mighty empire began to crumble, people who had lived under the protection of Rome for
centuries were suddenly left to figure things out for themselves. By 410, the empire was in dire
straits thanks to a combination of internal strife and attacks from outside forces such as the Goths,
Saxons, and Picts. Even when the empire's citizens were able to oust pretenders and
would-be emperors, their appeals to Rome for help against these advancing tribes went unanswered.
Take Britain, for example. The Romans initially hired a force of Saxon mercenaries
from the European continent to defend the empire against the advancing Picts.
Before long, however, these same mercenaries had decided that they too liked the look
of Britain. What happened next is a matter of some contention among historians; while
certain literary sources suggest that the Germanic tribes essentially wiped out the British natives,
the archaeological record is less certain when it comes to the amount of bloodshed that took place.
Still, while the destruction may not have been epic in scale,
there was almost certainly some tension between the natives and the incoming Saxons — and,
of course, you still had to worry about those barbarian hordes knocking at the gates.
William the Conqueror's invasion of Britain came at the very end of the Dark Ages,
and it turned out to be a pretty terrible way to wrap up a terrible few centuries. At the time,
William held the title of Duke of Normandy, and he believed that the Anglo-Saxon king,
Edward the Confessor, had promised to name him as heir to England. When Edward died in 1066,
however, his brother-in-law, Harold Godwinson, took the throne instead.
This sequence of events swiftly led to the Norman invasion of England,
in which Harold was killed at the Battle of Hastings and William subsequently declared king.
Unfortunately for England's population, William didn't seem too concerned with
the lives of those he had conquered — especially when they put up resistance.
The northern regions of England continued to fight back against William's new regime,
so William led a new campaign, known to historians as the Harrying of the North.
William decided to basically destroy the entirety of the north of England,
and he did so with such efficiency that famine and cannibalism soon became commonplace.
One historian, Symeon of Durham, wrote that, before long, there was simply no one left in
most of the region's small villages. It would be nine years before people started moving back,
and the Domesday Book of 1086 described about a third of the north as an uninhabitable wasteland.
During the Dark and Middle Ages, every bite of bread could be deadly. For centuries, Europe had
been the site of a devastating plague that became known as St. Anthony's fire. It was named for the
monks of St. Anthony of Egypt, an order that was founded in 1093 primarily to care for the
afflicted. Reportedly, the feeling of burning in the extremities would escalate into hallucinations
and seizures, and the victim's limbs would soon turn necrotic and fall off at the joints.
It wasn't until centuries later that scientists figured out the cause of St. Anthony's fire: the
fungus known as ergot, which frequently infected rye bread. This fungus would produce a compound
that interrupts the blood supply to the limbs, leading to the onset of the plague's symptoms.
"These compounds are very dangerous. They can cause
hallucinations, they can cause people to have dry gangrene, lose their fingers, lose their limbs."
The disease affected cows as well as humans, too, and a small handful
of tainted grain was capable of destroying entire communities.
In the grand scheme of things, the Catholic Church was still figuring out its whole deal
in the Dark Ages. The 7th century, for example, saw the development of the Rule of St. Benedict,
which were guidelines for those living in religious communities. And the church
was pretty hardcore right from the beginning when it came to people disagreeing on dogma.
Any Christians who weren't on board with any elements of the church's teachings were likely
to find themselves on the receiving end of a good flogging — or even execution.
Before the Dark Ages, there were a variety of different ways in which the Christian faith could
be interpreted. The first Council of Nicaea in 325 was called to unify the Church, but that didn't
stop people from believing what they believed. After the Council determined what was right,
however, the Catholic Church became relentless in its persecution of so-called "heretics."
Take the Paulicians, for example: a sect established by Constantine-Silvanus in the
7th century that believed no priest was needed to commune with God. He was stoned to death in 684,
while his followers were burned at the stake. Those that survived founded the Bogomils,
who later became the target of some of the bloodiest Christian Crusades. In this era,
the idea that you could decide the particulars of your faith could easily get you killed.
It's difficult to know just how extensive antisemitism was during the Dark and Middle Ages,
but many records that suggest it wasn't a great time to be Jewish — particularly after the Papacy
of Gregory I. Gregory used economic policies to strong-arm Europe's Jewish population into
converting to Christianity, and, after his papacy ended in 604, events took a turn for the worse.
That's when the church got together with Europe's monarchies to expel Jewish residents.
Others were given the choice between converting to Christianity or becoming a slave,
and anything that happened to those who chose slavery was seen as divine justice.
Historians have even pinpointed groups of Jews who were specifically targeted by Europe's rulers.
For example, beginning in 586, Sisebuto of Spain enacted severe laws against the Jews,
and the punishment for breaking those laws was death by stoning or burning.
By the time another king took over in 621, that doctrine had escalated: Any Jew found in the
region would be "punished with a hundred blows," then exiled and stripped of their property.
No discussion about the dangers of the Dark Ages would be complete without mentioning the Vikings.
But here's the thing: There's a huge schism between schools of thought
when it comes to figuring out just how bloodthirsty they really were.
The Viking Age began with the sacking of the monastery at Lindisfarne on June 8th,
793 A.D. For the next 300 years, the Vikings would sail and pillage from Newfoundland to
France to what's now Ukraine, apparently killing pretty much everyone who got in their way.
"Because we are Vikings."
But could these be little more than stories? Well, maybe — or maybe not. Independent journalist
Patrick Cockburn has gone as far as suggesting that the Vikings committed "atrocities" on a
scale not unlike those carried out by the SS in Poland during World War II. Others,
however, have suggested that the viciousness of the Vikings has been hugely exaggerated.
Either way, it's certainly true that the Vikings were violent to some degree — and
surprisingly enough, that violence could sometimes go the other way.
On November 13th, 1002, the Anglo-Saxon king Aethelred the Unready ordered everyone in his
kingdom to kill any Danish man they could find. By this point, Norse migration to England had
been going on for generations, and the country had a significant Scandinavian population.
It's uncertain just how many people were slaughtered during the St. Brice's Day Massacre,
but mass burial sites connected to the Aethelred's order have since been uncovered and excavated.
The idea of a pilgrimage was to visit some sacred location in Christendom,
and ideally get a little closer to God in the process. The practice was widely popular
as early as the 4th century, and throughout the Dark and Middle Ages, Europe's faithful
were encouraged to undertake the journey to places as far away as Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
It was also incredibly dangerous, however, and while the Knights Templar were formed
in the 12th century to protect pilgrims on their journeys to the Holy Land,
before that, everyone was on their own.
Most pilgrimages would take a year or more,
and on the way, pilgrims would face obstacles such as bandits, shipwrecks, natural disasters,
and disease. That last point is particularly significant, as, for two whole centuries,
pilgrims would have been journeying through plague-infested cities and villages.
And getting there was just half the battle, too, as the return trip would be just as perilous.
Bloodletting had been around for a long time by the time the Dark Ages rolled around.
This practice began in ancient Egypt and spread to ancient Greece, so by the time physicians in
the medieval era were doing it, it had a fairly respectable history in the field of medicine.
In the Dark Ages, though, people got a little carried away. Bloodletting was used in the
treatment of a shockingly wide array of illnesses, from epilepsy and gout to the plague. Special
tools were used to puncture arteries, and if that sounds incredibly dangerous, that's because it is:
Many historians now believe that the practice killed more people than it cured.
Most of the time, the amount of blood was measured by how long it took for the patient to pass
out — that's when they generally stopped. Death happened for a number of reasons, as not only was
hemorrhagic shock and death from blood loss a very real possibility, but infections were common, too.
At a time before antibiotics, a wound becoming infected was more or less a death sentence.
Much research has been done on the worst time in history for a European to have been alive,
and the mid-6th century is a strong contender for the title.
You've got the Justinian Plague, of course, which was really getting into the swing of
things at this point in time. There were also a series of volcanic eruptions that began in 536.
The first was so huge that it filled the earth's atmosphere with dust, sulfur, ash,
and so much debris that it blocked out the sun for an incredible18 months. The result was a
global drop in temperatures, leading to widespread crop failure and famine. Layer the plague on top
of that and you've got a scenario best described by the Byzantine historian Procopius, who wrote:
"Men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death."
Strangely enough, it was believed for a long time that the environmental effects of these eruptions
had been exaggerated by contemporaries. It wasn't until the 1990s that data from tree rings
confirmed that the stories were absolutely true, and that the world had been plunged into what's
now known as the Late Antique Little Ice Age. As Harvard Professor Michael McCormick sums it up:
"It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive."
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus,
even more Grunge videos about your favorite stuff are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.