Would You Survive the Worst Year in History? (536 AD and 9 More)

It's noon, it's summer, it's the year 536, and the sun looks wrong. Procopius, a historian who lived through it, wrote that "the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year." Another account says it shone for only about four hours a day, and weakly at that. Good news: no Monday meetings. Bad news: no sun.

Would you survive? Here are ten of the worst years a human could be alive, counting down from a summer that cancelled itself and ending right back here in 536. The ranking doesn't go by death toll alone. It goes by how bad the year was for you: how far it reached, your odds if you lived there, and how little anyone could do about it. Every death toll below is an estimate. When half your town is gone, nobody's keeping count.

1816, the Year Without a Summer: a blizzard for your barbecue

A cold summer sounds like a ruined holiday and nothing more. This one came from a volcano. In April 1815 Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia, one of the most powerful explosions in recorded history, and the ash and sulfur cooled the whole planet by about 0.4 to 0.7 °C.

That doesn't sound like much until it snows in Vermont in June. New England reported hard frosts through the summer months. Harvests failed across Europe and North America, and food ran short. You plan a barbecue and get a blizzard.

Good news: stuck indoors by the cold and rain, a bored Mary Shelley started writing Frankenstein. Bad news: she was writing because it was too miserable to go outside. It was a hard year, but most people got through it. Enjoy that while it lasts.

1177 BC, the Bronze Age Collapse: the whole group chat goes silent

You'd think empires that had traded with each other for centuries were too big to fail. The year 1177 BC is really a bookmark for a collapse that took decades, and historians still argue about what caused it. It looks like a mix of drought, a run of earthquakes, and invasions by mysterious groups the Egyptians called the "Sea Peoples."

Picture a group chat where the great kingdoms go quiet one at a time. The Hittites left the chat. Mycenae left the chat. The king of Ugarit wrote panicked letters on clay tablets about enemy ships turning up, and then his cities were burned.

These kingdoms depended on each other for tin and copper, the ingredients of bronze. Good news: you live in one of the most connected worlds in history. Bad news: when one kingdom fell, it dragged its neighbours down like dominoes. Afterwards the Mycenaean Greek writing system, Linear B, disappeared for centuries.

At least the people of 1177 BC had someone to blame. The next disaster had no enemy at all.

1315, the Great Famine: it rained, and rained, and rained

We expect famine to come from drought. From 1315 the weather across Northern Europe stayed wet for years, and the crops rotted in the fields. The price of wheat shot up. In the wettest regions it was hard to even make salt, so you couldn't preserve meat either.

Imagine you're a farmer watching your fields turn to mud, with nothing you can do about it. People ate the seed grain meant for next year's crop, and the animals they needed for ploughing. That's eating next year's breakfast and next year's tractor. Years of hunger and disease followed across much of the continent.

Good news: no drought. Bad news: it rains for years.

1877, the El Niño Famines: three continents starve at once

A famine sounds like a local problem. From 1876 to 1879, one of the strongest El Niño patterns ever recorded brought drought to several continents at the same time. India, China and Brazil all starved together.

In India, as millions starved, the policies of the British administration came under fire, the continued export of grain above all, and historians still debate and criticise them today. In Northern China alone, an estimated 9.5 to 13 million people died. A natural disaster struck, and human decisions made it far worse.

1943, World War II: the war turned, it didn't end

You hear that 1943 was the year the war "turned" and assume things got better. A war that's turning is still a war. The Axis was losing ground after the German surrender at Stalingrad and defeats in North Africa. That turning tide was made of tanks: the Battle of Kursk is often called the largest tank battle in history.

Leningrad was still under a horrific siege. In Warsaw, the Ghetto Uprising was a courageous last stand. Across Europe the Holocaust was underway, in which about six million Jewish people were murdered. And in Bengal a famine, made worse by wartime policies, killed up to three million people.

The weather was fine. The world was not.

1918, the War and the Flu: a new killer at the party

The Great War ends on 11 November and the party starts. A new killer was already there. An influenza pandemic began in early 1918 and raged into 1920. It infected about a third of the world's population and killed at least 50 million people, far more than the war.

It also didn't go mainly for the very old or very young. It was unusually deadly for healthy adults aged 20 to 40. It got the name "Spanish Flu" only because Spain was neutral and didn't censor its newspapers about the outbreak.

Philadelphia held a huge parade to support the war effort. In the weeks after, the city's flu deaths soared, and the parade is now seen as a tragic superspreader. Good news: the war is over. Bad news: your victory parade might be the last thing you ever go to. (If you want to see what the war itself was like, try a day in the WW1 trenches.)

1520, Smallpox Reaches Tenochtitlan: a killer nobody had met

You live in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, one of the biggest cities in the world. A Spanish expedition has brought something new to the continent, smallpox. In 1520 the Spanish were driven out of the city for a while, and in their absence an epidemic broke out among people with no immunity to it at all.

Nahua accounts describe people so covered in sores they couldn't walk or move. The disease burned through the city for months and killed an estimated 40% of its people, the new emperor among them. When the Spanish came back the next year to besiege the city, they found a population devastated by disease. The fall of the Aztec Empire is credited to steel and horses, but a virus had already done much of the damage.

541, the Plague of Justinian: the Black Death, 800 years early

Constantinople is the richest city on Earth, and the Roman Empire under Emperor Justinian is on a winning streak. You think plague belongs to the Middle Ages. Then the first recorded plague pandemic in history arrives, most likely on grain ships from Egypt. Ancient DNA has confirmed it was Yersinia pestis, the same bacterium as the Black Death.

The chronicler Procopius claimed 10,000 people died a day in the capital. The number may not be exact, but it shows the horror. Justinian caught it himself and survived. Good news: your emperor's a survivor. Bad news: the plague gets named after him. It came back in waves for the next two centuries.

1348, the Black Death: you know this one, sort of

You picture a plague doctor in a creepy beak mask. That mask is from the 1600s, three centuries too late. For Europe the nightmare began in 1347, when ships carrying the plague reached Sicily. It spread and killed between a third and over half of Europe's population. Some estimates for the worldwide toll run from 75 to 200 million. Cities like Florence may have lost more than half their people.

The medical faculty of the University of Paris blamed a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. Good news: Europe's top doctors have a theory. Bad news: the theory is that the planets did it.

Fear turned neighbours against each other. In Strasbourg in 1349, thousands of Jewish people were murdered after being falsely accused of poisoning wells. (We take a closer look at surviving the 14th century in another video.)

536, the year the sun went dark: you couldn't flee the sky

Back to the start: noon, summer, and a dim sun. The likely cause was a huge volcanic eruption, probably in Iceland, followed by two more in 540 and 547. It began the coldest decade in over two thousand years. Snow fell in China in summer. Irish chronicles record a "failure of bread." Archaeology suggests some Scandinavian populations may have collapsed, which might be where the Norse myth of Fimbulwinter comes from: the endless winter before the end of the world.

Then the last twist. The Plague of Justinian wasn't a separate disaster. It was the sequel, arriving five years later in a world that was already cold and hungry. If 1816 was the trailer, 536 was the feature film. Harvard historian Michael McCormick called it "the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year."

The Black Death killed more people, but in 1348 you could at least try to run from a city. In 536 there was no running from the sky.

The short version

• 536 tops the list because the sky itself failed: a dim sun for a year to a year and a half, the coldest decade in over 2,000 years, and then a plague.
• The worst disasters come stacked: plague on famine, flu on war, bad policy on drought.
• People's decisions made several of these years far worse, from grain exports in 1877 to the parade in Philadelphia in 1918.
• Every death toll is an estimate, and the ranges are wide because there was often nobody left to count.
• Some of these now have answers. Antibiotics treat plague, smallpox has been wiped out in the wild, and 1918 showed that hiding a disease doesn't stop it. It has to be fought in the open.
• Next gray Monday, look up. The sun showed up, so you're already winning.