What Was the Worst Year in Human History to Be Alive?

Jul 27

There are years that shake you to your very marrow.
Not just bad years, not just the kind that leave you tired and muttering, but the ones that split history open and leave it bleeding.

Some years stamp scars into the ground itself.
They hang in the air as smoke, as ash, as silence where there used to be music.

War years.
Famine years.
The years when plague walks through the streets like it owns the place.

But even among all that ruin, one year looms heavier than the rest.

Not Hiroshima.
Not 1347, when the Black Death curled its way through Europe.
Not even 2020 (though we still tell ourselves nothing could possibly top it).

But no, if you ask historians, if you ask the scientists who study the bones of the earth itself, they’ll point you back further. Way back. Further than you thought.

To a year when the sun dimmed, the crops failed, and the world felt like it was being punished.

The worst year to be alive wasn’t recent at all.
It was 536 AD.

The Year the Sun Forgot to Rise

What had happened was not a single storm or a passing eclipse.
It was something stranger, a gaping dramatic wound cut into the sky itself.

Scientists now believe a massive volcanic eruption tore open somewhere in Iceland (maybe more than one, in fact).
Ash and sulfur burst upward, riding the winds until they spread like a veil across half the planet.
The result was a high, invisible curtain that dulled the sun for more than a year.

Temperatures dropped, and harvests collapsed.
So many people starved.

It wasn’t just one bad season. It was the beginning of what some historians call the Late Antique Little Ice Age, a cold snap that would ripple through decades.
Imagine living in a world where the sun itself seems sick, where noon feels like twilight, where summer delivers frost and hunger instead of warmth.
Procopius, a Byzantine historian, wrote:

"The sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon…and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse."

In China, records describe famine, frost, and a sky that “no longer followed the seasons.”
In Ireland, the Annals speak of “a failure of bread” across the land.

The Collapse of Empires

Darkness didn’t just swallow the light, it tugged at everything people thought was stable.

Coins lost their value when there was no grain to buy.
Ships stayed docked, their sails useless without goods to carry.
In the silence of empty markets, the great empires of the world began to cough and fracture.

The Byzantine Empire, already staggering, stumbled deeper into crisis. The Sasanian state (once formidable) found its edges fraying.
Even the Gupta in India, keepers of golden age brilliance, saw their empire dissolve like frost under a weak sun.

And where power slipped, desperation took root.
Cities thinned, villages disappeared from maps, and hungry crowds turned to riots.
Some left their homes chasing promises of food elsewhere; others stayed and watched their neighbors fade away.

It wasn’t only famine. It was the unspooling of order itself, as though the dimmed sun had reached down, pulled at the loose threads, and the tapestry of civilization began to come apart in their hands.

When the Grain Died, the People Did Too

The earth remembers in ways people couldn’t.

Tree rings shrink, skinny little lines that show summers never showed up.
Ice traps the ash like evidence in a trial no one survived to testify at.
Bones tell the story too: brittle, hollowed by hunger.

The scraps of writing we do have all circle the same words: hunger, frost, bread that never came.

And it wasn’t just one unlucky valley, not just one bad harvest. Whole stretches of land gave up at the same time. Whole continents bent under the same dim sky.

Historians later give it a name, because that’s what we like to do: “The Late Antique Little Ice Age.”
But the people living through it had no neat title.
Just growling stomachs, dead fields, and a sun that seemed to be giving up on them.

A Plague Follows the Cold

Darkness doesn’t walk alone. It drags company with it.

By 541, the world wasn’t just starving. It was coughing, bleeding, and dying.
The Plague of Justinian had arrived.

The same bacterium that would centuries later give us the Black Death started its first great tour.
It ripped through the Eastern Roman Empire like fire through dry grass.
Bodies stacked as cities thinned. Some say fifty million dead…a quarter of everyone breathing at the time.

And the cruel part?

The plague didn’t come out of nowhere.
People were already broken, malnourished, weakened by years of bad harvests and sky that wouldn’t give.
Their defenses were gone longer before the rats and fleas ever showed up.

This wasn’t a new disaster. It was the next verse of the same song.
A harvest of grief, planted back in 536 when the sun went dark.

Why We Know This Now

For a long time, 536 was just a ghost story in the margins of old books.
A strange year everyone agreed was terrible, but no one could say why.

Only lately has the earth itself given up its deep dark secrets.
Ice pulled from Greenland and Antarctica carries tiny shards of volcanic glass: fingerprints of eruptions we never saw.
Tree rings, thin and stunted, show summers that never came.
Even the dirt holds hints of sulfur that rained down long before anyone thought to measure it.

Turns out it wasn’t just one eruption. It was three: in 536, again in 540, and once more in 547.
A hammer strike, then another, then another.
A trilogy of violence that dimmed the sky and shoved the world into what scientists now call the Late Antique Little Ice Age.

It lasted more than a century.
A hundred years of hunger…a hundred years of populations shrinking, moving, vanishing.

The world didn’t just get colder. It got quieter.

A Lost Century, a Forgotten Winter

Why didn’t we remember this year?
Because trauma leaves blanks.
Because the people living it weren’t writing memoirs, they were just trying to eat.
No printing presses, no satellites. No time to sit and explain the darkness swallowing them.

And what scraps they did write…most of them burned.
Lost in the libraries that didn’t survive either.

But memory has other keepers.

The bones remember.
The ice remembers.
The forests remember.

And now, finally, so do we.

What It Means to Live Through the Worst

To call 536 the worst year isn’t saying other times weren’t brutal.
1914 bled. 1945 burned. 2020 went quiet. Each carried its own graves, its own grief.

But 536 was different. It came slow, cold, wide.
It smothered.

It didn’t just take lives. It stole time itself.

Generations lived and died under a bruised sky, never sure if the sun was coming back.

The Poetics of a Sunless Sky

There’s something bone-deep terrifying about the sky changing.
Rain? We hide.
Storms? We wait them out.
But when the sky dims and stays dim…when daylight comes without confidence…it shakes everything loose.

Are we being punished?
Are the gods furious?
Is this how it ends, not with fire, but with a long, gray sigh of ash?

In 536, the sun rose…and didn’t.

Birds circled, lost.
Fields withered in silence.
And even the stories that survived grew darker.

The Legacy in Our DNA

Did you know the genes of many modern Europeans and Asians bear traces of population bottlenecks from this period?

Your ancestors may have survived that dim decade.
They might have clung to warmth in a hut while snow fell in July.
They might have buried their children with frost-bitten fingers.
And still, they lived long enough to pass something down.

You carry it with you.

Could It Happen Again?

Yes.

The earth still has volcanoes big enough to dim the sun. Tambora did it in 1815. Yellowstone, Campi Flegrei, others, they’re still out there, sleeping.

We’re not safe from another 536. The only real change is that now we’d have satellites and data telling us what was happening.

But prevent it? No.
All we can do is brace for it.
And hope it passes.

In the Glow of Modern Light

We live in brightness now.
Electric, neon, always on (if you live with my husband anyway).

But in 536 there was only shadow. Just waiting.

So the next time your lights flicker.
The next time the sky feels wrong, the next time summer comes cold, remember: the worst year to be alive already happened. And people survived it.

Not everyone.
But enough.
Enough to tell the story. Enough to keep lighting candles in the dark.

The world wasn’t the same after 536.

Empires cracked, populations thinned. But some things held on.

Not the empires. Not the elites.
It was the ones closest to the ground that made it through.

Nomads moving with the seasons. Small villages that leaned on each other.
Spiritual threads that gave people a reason to keep going.

They survived not because they were the toughest, but because they could bend without breaking.
It wasn’t survival of the strongest, it was survival of the softest.
The ones who yielded, who adapted.

And maybe that’s the most human thing of all, that even when the sun forgets us, we still remember how to start again.

Michele Gargiulo http://michelegargiulo.com