Volcanoes and the fate of civilization

Disaster down the ages

A huge volcano has erupted in Iceland and it looks fairly awesome, both in the traditional and American teenager senses of the word.

Many will remember their holidays being ruined 13 years ago by the explosion of another Icelandic volcano with the epic Norse name Eyjafjallajökull. While this one will apparently not be so disruptive, volcano eruptions are an under-appreciated factor in human history and their indirect consequences are often huge.

Around 75,000 years ago an eruption on Toba was so catastrophic as to reduce the global human population to just 4,000, with 500 women of childbearing age, according to Niall Ferguson. Kyle Harper put the number at 10,000, following an event that brought a ‘millennium of winter’ and a bottleneck in the human population.

In his brilliant but rather depressing The Fate of Rome, Harper looked at the role of volcanoes in hastening the end of antiquity, reflecting that ‘With good reason, the ancients revered the fearsome goddess Fortuna, out of a sense that the sovereign powers of this world were ultimately capricious’.

Rome’s peak coincided with a period of especially clement climatic conditions in the Mediterranean, in part because of the lack of volcanic activity. Of the 20 largest volcanic eruptions of the last 2,500 years, ‘none fall between the death of Julius Caesar and the year AD 169’, although the most famous, the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, did. (Even today it continues to reveal knowledge about the ancient world, including a potential treasure of information.)

However, the later years of Antiquity were marked by ‘a spasm’ of eruptions and as Harper wrote, ‘The AD 530s and 540s stand out against the entire late Holocene as a moment of unparalleled volcanic violence.’

In the Chinese chronicle Nan Shi (‘The History of the Southern Dynasties’) it was reported in February 535 that ‘there twice was the sound of thunder’ heard. Most likely this was a gigantic volcanic explosion in the faraway South Pacific, an event which had an immense impact around the world.

Vast numbers died following the volcanic winter that followed, with the year 536 the coldest of the last two millennia. Average summer temperature in Europe fell by 2.5 degrees, and the decade that followed was intensely cold, with the period of frigid weather lasting until the 680s.

The Byzantine historian Procopius wrote how ‘during the whole year the sun gave forth its light without brightness…. It seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.’ Statesman Flavius Cassiodorus wrote how: ‘We marvel to see now shadow on our bodies at noon, to feel the mighty vigour of the sun’s heat wasted into feebleness.’

A second great volcanic eruption followed in 540 and (perhaps) a third in 547. This led to famine in Europe and China, the possible destruction of a city in Central America, and the migration of Mongolian tribes west. Then, just to top off what was already turning out to be a bad decade, the bubonic plague arrived, hitting Constantinople in 542, spreading west and reaching Britain by 544. 

Combined with the Justinian Plague, the long winter hugely weakened the eastern Roman Empire, the combination of climatic disaster and plague leading to a spiritual and demographic crisis that paved the way for the rise of Islam. In the west the results were catastrophic, and urban centres vanished across the once heavily settled region of southern Gaul. Like in the Near East, the fall of civilisation opened the way for former barbarians to build anew, and ‘in the Frankish north, the seeds of a medieval order germinated. It was here that a new civilization started to grow, one not haunted by the incubus of plague.’

Between 1150-1300 there were five major volcanic events but an eruption in Indonesia in 1257 had especially significant consequences, temporarily cooling the earth by as much as two degrees centigrade and leading to crop failure across Europe. In London, several thousand starved to death, with rotting corpses lying in the gutters, the survivors too weak to bury them. 

This coincided with a period of declining relations between Henry III and the country’s leading barons, in particular his brother-in-law Simon de Montfort. At one point King Henry’s unpopular foreign queen was forced to flee London by boat, a half-starved mob pelting manure and shouting ‘down with the witch! Let’s drown her!’ 

The political crisis spurred by the famine led the barons to issue the Provisions of Oxford, which made a series of radical demands, among them that each county and city should send two knights to represent their interests. Although this dispute would erupt into a civil war in which de Montfort ended up having his testicles chopped off and hung around his nose, in a certain sense he won the argument and his demands were eventually implemented – and so the Parliament of England came into existence, indirectly because of the volcano. 

The miserable 14^th century also saw volcanic eruptions in Italy, during a period when Europe was getting cooler with the Little Ice Age, a product of reduced solar activity called the Spörer Minimum, but volcanic eruptions lowered the temperature even further.

In May 1453, while Constantinople was under siege from the Ottomans, its terrified inhabitants were shaken by the unusual storms and rain, hail, fog and snow, with strange, lurid sunsets and strange optical effects.

The most likely cause was an eruption of the volcanic island of Kuwae, 1,200 miles east of Australia, months earlier, producing ‘eight cubic miles of molten rock [that] were blasted into the stratosphere with a force two million times that of the Hiroshima bomb,’ in Roger Crowley’s words.

On May 26 the city’s Hagia Sophia cathedral was lit up by strange ribbons of fire. Some at first feared incendiaries launched by the Turks but most likely it was a red glow caused by ash in the atmosphere, a phenomenon recorded with more recent volcanoes. Three days later the city fell.

This latest eruption further intensified the Little Ice Age, blighting harvests across the Northern Hemisphere. South of the Yangtze River in southern China there was forty days of snow. Tree-ring records from England recall dismal summers and therefore poor harvests, just as King Henry VI was slipping into the madness that would lead to civil war. 

This has been a theme throughout history: in 1601-03 a famine following another volcanic eruption killed half a million in Russia, during a period known as the Time of Troubles. 

But perhaps the most famous historical events associated with volcanic activity are those of the Tambora eruption of 1815, which led to the famous Year Without Summer, with all sorts of indirect consequences.

On 18 June 1815, some 25 years of conflict in Europe finally ended at Waterloo with the victory of the Prussian and British forces. No one knew it, but the continent was about to enter a relative golden age of peace and, with the industrial revolution accelerating in the English Midlands and North, living standards would rocket within a generation. Yet the immediate few years would be difficult; Britain had amassed huge war debts and there were increasing numbers of impoverished and unemployed people. And already, further disaster had struck.

Just two months earlier, and thousands of miles away in the Dutch East Indies, the monstrous Mount Tambora had erupted, the largest since 535-536, and for hours the volcano spewed ash 20 miles into the air. This was followed by a second huge eruption, which left a crater four miles wide and could be heard 2,000 miles away - it would be as if people in Rome or Budapest could hear the volcano in Iceland right now. 

The Tambora eruption was linked to a number of historical developments, perhaps most of all in the US, where harvest failure in New England spurred the migration of Yankees into the Upper Midwest. Another those migrants were the family of eleven-year-old Joseph Smith from Norwich, Vermont, who moved to the ‘Burned-over district’ of New York state, noted for its religious activity - and so the year without summer also played a role in the rise of Mormonism.

Catastrophes often lead to religious movements. Indeed, Joseph Henrich noted that the ‘closer a region is to the core of an earthquake zone, active volcano, or storm center, the percentage of people affirming these supernatural beliefs increases by about 10 percentile points. Such effects can be found on every continent and in most major religions.’ Nothing affirms your belief in God like the proximity of a giant mountain of liquid anger.

The plagues of 3^rd century Rome resulted in the rapid advance of Christianity while the Black Death saw the flagellants and other strange or heretic movements. The disastrous spring of 1816 was followed by the bizarre Bologna Prophecy of 18 July, in which an anonymous Italian clairvoyant said that the world would end. The popular prophecy caused enough fear that one woman in Leicester hanged herself, although the British newspapers were largely dismissive of the whole thing, putting it down to excitable Catholics.

The eruption had a significant cultural legacy, including the paintings of JMW Turner, who was entranced by the strangely orange skies above him; most famously it led Mary Shelley to create the gothic-horror genre after an ill-fated holiday in the Alps with her lover Percy at the villa of fellow poet Lord Byron. Not only did her novel Frankenstein appear in 1818 after being conceived during that barren summer, but on the same holiday Byron’s doctor John William Polidori began his short story, The Vampyre, originating that genre of romantic fiction.

The Alpine region was the worst affected in Europe, and in many places there was not enough food for the horses; this led German inventor Karl Drais to begin working on a horse-less form of transport, and his ‘velocipede’ or hobby horse became the prototype of the bicycle, a revolutionary form of transport that had a big influence on female liberation.

Back in England the ‘sunless summer’ was causing unrest, and by the end of 1816 there were mass petitions calling for cheaper food. In March came the March of the Blanketeers in which protesters rather optimistically hoped to petition the Prince Regent, a character entirely devoid of sympathy for the poor. It was ruthlessly put down and the ringleaders imprisoned for several months. 

Later that year Nottinghamshire man Jeremiah Brandreth conceived of a rather hopeless conspiracy to overthrow the government, along with two friends, and ended up becoming the last man in England to be executed by beheading.

And the agitation continued with increasing numbers of mass meetings arranged until the ‘great assembly’ was organised in St Peter’s Field’s, Manchester – which became the infamous Peterloo massacre. 

Several non-conformist businessmen who had witnessed the events, and who had liberal sympathies, were afterwards inspired to establish a newspaper in order to promote their principles of religious and civil liberty. As with Frankenstein and vampire stories, the Year without Summer had unleashed horror on the world, in the form of the Manchester Guardian.

The volcano of 1815 had a huge legacy, but even deadlier was the Krakatoa eruption of 1883, although its effects on food supplies were less chaotic. It was, however, an inspiration for Edvard Munch’s The Scream, according to one theory.

Volcanologists assure us that this current eruption will not produce the sort of earth-shattering ash famine of previous events, although pessimists have good reason to see a year without summer as just the kind of thing the 2020s would bring us. Fortuna, after all, has been pretty fickle these past few years.

The UK edition of my book Saxons versus Vikings is now available to buy on Amazon.