Today brings news that there is evidence from Iceland and Greenland of increased volcanic activity around the time of the plague of Justinian, that might have helped push the successor polities in the west over the edge and also bring to an end Byzantine attempts to reconquer Italy and parts of Spain and North Africa. (The original Southampton University press release is available online if you want to follow up further.)
Basically the idea is that the increased dust in the atmosphere - a sort of quasi nuclear winter - would have caused crop failures as it did in 1816. This, combined with a population debilitated by disease would have left the various city states and other polities that emerged out of the end of the western empire dangerously weak.
Of course, this would not be the whole story - Roman civil administration had effectively collapsed over much of western Europe by the 450 as a result of the invasions of Germanic speaking peoples, but in a lot of cases there had been a melding in which the daughters of Roman administrators married the sons of Germanic warlords (and vice versa) to form a new governing class resulting in various kingdoms, such as in the case of the Merovingians in Gaul or the Gothic kingdoms in Italy.
However, as I blogged back in 2010, there's also a hypothesis that the global dimming event was not caused by volcanic activity alone but by meteorites hitting the Gulf of Carpentaria and an unidentified location to the north of Norway.
Of course, both theories may be true - the meteorite strike may have triggered volcanic activity, especially as both impact sites are not that distant from areas of high volcanic activity (Iceland and Indonesia).
However, it's an intriguing idea, be it simply through volcanic activity, or something more dramatic like a large scale meteor strike...
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