Mantra with Jemma Sbeg - Introducing WHAT THE FACT with Connor Tomlinson and Carter Roy, a new Rewind podcast!

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

Fun fact: Did you know Jaws almost never existed because the shark kept sinking while filming? That is Connor Tomlinson just getting started. If that sounds fascinating, you are going to love Rewind Studios’ new podcast out now called WHAT THE FACT hosted by Connor Tomlinson and Carter Roy. It’s produced by the same team that brings you Mantra. Connor and co-host Carter Roy pull three unbelievable true facts every week and tell you the full story behind each one. Nothing is off limits. Myths and monsters. Forgotten scandals. Accidental discoveries. Untold stories behind the songs everyone knows. Disasters that sound made up but absolutely happened. Carter sets the scene and Connor makes you fall in love with history. The wildest stuff is real, and the real stuff is wilder than you think. New episodes every Wednesday. What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson and Carter Roy is a Rewind Original, powered by PAVE Studios. Listen and Follow: https://pod.link/6811124906 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I have a question for you. Did you know the most feared pirate in the Atlantic, the man who terrorized an entire ocean, may never have actually killed anyone? Or that the most democratic society in the early 1700s was on a pirate ship? Hi, I'm Connor Tomlinson. You might know me from love on the spectrum.

History is my thing. Has been my whole life. And I'm Carter Roy. Every week on What the Fact, we take the most unbelievable true things in history and tell you the whole story behind them. The history lesson you wished you'd had in high school. Carter sets the scene.

Connor brings the facts, the deep cuts, and the occasional British accent. The wildest stuff is real, and trust me, it is a wild ride. New episodes every Wednesday. We have an episode to share with you now. If you love it, follow What The Fact on Apple Podcasts and Spotify,

or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod. This is Rewind. I could just imagine two dinosaurs looking at each other going, You know, it just don't get no better than this. And one other says, yeah. And then, Oh, no. A giant meteorite strikes the earth.

Goodbye dinosaurs. Yeah. Hi, and welcome to What the Fact, the show that reveals the wildest true facts ever recorded and tells you the whole story behind them. Hi, I'm Connor, and I'm here to bring the charm and humor and maybe a British accent or two to your history lesson. And I am Carter Roy. I will be your guide through history.

What happened, how it happened, and why it happened. Follow wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review to help us build this community. So today, we have three years. Three very real stories and one question. Which one was actually the worst? Carter, has anything terrible ever happened in your life? And then something unexpectedly good came of it? Yeah.

I think so. You know, actually the pandemic. I had to be alone at home all the time. And I ended up doing a lot of art because I had to kill time. So like now I ended up being like a visual artist. And I didn't even know I could really do that until the pan. pandemic happened. How about you? Me? I actually started watching more shows to help pass the tie. Yeah. And honestly, it made me rethink the fantasy genre altogether. Like, like, how some things that could

have happened in the Middle Ages could happen in modern day. Yeah. Hidden, you know? Totally. So it made you rethink everything a little bit. Yeah. Very cool. Well, that is actually the theme of everything we are covering. Catastrophe makes things. So today we have three years for you, three years from human history that you absolutely did not want to be alive for. At the very end, you and I will vote on which was actually the worst. Okay, Connor, first reaction, how bad do you think this is about to get? Oh, I think it's going to get pretty, pretty bad. It is going to get pretty bad. Spotify, it's Jay Shetty. Are you one of those media strategy people, scrolling through Spreadsheets searching for an audience that pays twice as much attention to your ads than they do on social?

Let me introduce you to fans. And they're here with me on Spotify. Trust me, I know fans. They don't skip, they stay for hours. They don't move on. They manifest. They're not a demographic group. They're fans. Spotify advertising. You're among fans. Do you know which year of Volcano canceled summer, caused a global famine and also gave us Frankenstein and the bicycle. That year was 1816, also known as the year without a summer. It's amazing. It's fascinating.

Like how something terrible can lead to something good in the end. Yeah. And a year without a summer. That just seems like seasons are such a part of life we expect. It's crazy to think of just like a season not happening. Can you imagine life without a summer? I can imagine how terrible it would be. How miserable everyone would be.

Oh my God, people would be not happy. Okay, so the year is 1816. Europe should be having the best year it's had in a generation. Napoleon had just been defeated at Waterloo, ending over 20 years of war. Finally! Yes. Yes. All anyone wants to do is have a normal summer.

Exactly. What happens? 1816. No summer. No summer. In New England, it snows in June? Yeah. Yeah, crazy.

Crazy enough to bury new crops and kill birds right where they sit. That's so sad. So sad. Can you imagine looking out and just seeing dead frozen birds? In July, the hard frost turns the corn black, the people who lived through it called 1816, 1800 and froze to death. I guess they had some kind of sense of humor back then and trying to make the best out of a bad thing. In Europe, grain rotted from Switzerland to Ireland.

Bread prices doubled and doubled again. there were food riots across France, Belgium, Switzerland. People were eating bread cut with sodust. Oh, that doesn't sound appetizing. I've got three things to say about that. Hard to bite, difficult to chew, and impossible to swallow. You won't see me eating bread with sodas, no. Okay.

In Switzerland, families were boiling weeds and eating the family cat. Oh, that's disgusting. I understand you get resourceful in a famine, but no way would I ever eat my pet, even if I was super hungry. Yeah, that shows you just how bad it was. And this was not just a European problem. It was a planet problem. In China, the cold wrecked the rice harvest. The Yanksy Valley flooded in Yunnan province.

Famine lasted three full years. In India, the monsoon failed entirely. So many historians believe a new strain of cholera emerged from that broken. and weather in the Bay of Bengal, the first truly global pandemic. Tens of millions of people dead over the following century. I thought dyspepsia was bad. Every bit of it traces back to one mountain. Okay, before I tell you which one, what's your guess?

Crocatoa, maybe? That's what I would have guessed. That's the only one I know. But no, it was Tambura. It erupted in Indonesia. Its ash and smoke carried miles across the world. Miles. It was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history.

True story. I was actually in Sicily. I saw Mount Etna from a distance. And I happened to learn from my brother that Mount Etna was used in filming Star Wars Episode 3, Revenge of the Sith. That scene where Anakin and Obi-Wan were fighting on Mustafa, right where they were grappling. There was a huge blast of lava. That was Mount Etna erupting. Amazah, did they have the real Mount...

Etton in the background and then they, yeah, made it look like it erupting. Well, this was about as bad as it gets. It was April 10th, 1815. And as you said, Tambora in the island of Simbauba, what is now Indonesia, detonates the largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history and directly killed roughly 10,000 people and eventually 80 to 90,000 more. The blast was heard 1,600 miles away, which I don't, I can't even really comprehend that. How far away do you think the loudest you could hear?

probably about, well, if the explosion was loud enough, maybe 10,000 miles or more. I mean, I thought Pompey's destruction by Mount Vesuvius was bad. Yeah, this is bad. Okay, so people 1,600 miles away thought it was cannon fire, like a battle just over the horizon. And eruptions are measured on the VEI scale, the volcanic explosivity index. Talk about an on-the-nose name. every step is roughly 10 times bigger than less. So, well, yeah, it's crazy.

Crazy. Okay, so Mount St. Helens in 1980, that's a VEI 5. Krakatoa, 1883, a VEI 6. Tambora was a VEI 7. So it'll be 100 times bigger than Mount St. Helens. And like, I was alive when Mount St. Helens erupted. I was in Montana and like, it was like, you know, we had ash and changed life. You know, this is, you're going to find this fascinating.

Carter, but did you know volcanic ash is actually good for plant growth? I mean, if it mixes with soil, some pretty unique plants grow from it. I know, because I was actually in Hawaii once. I saw exotic plants, stuff you would never see back here in the mainland. And right, all that volcanic ash makes it so fertile. And yeah, Mount St. Allen's when it, as a kid, I couldn't believe it was one of those things you're like, I didn't know this actually happened. Volcanoes exploding. And I'm imagining it like, the timbora being that loud, it almost be like, Helms deep, you know, when the Urukai are coming and there's that like, oh, yeah, the fight. They were putting firepots into a drain at the base of the wall. Yes, and then it went, you're like, what?

Like, nobody'd ever seen anything like this before. And that berserker took his own life just to blow the wall. I remember, they're like, hit him, hit him, except for the volcano. Arrow after arrow legolus shot and not one could bring down that Uruk. No. Well, that's basically what crack a toe was. And then Tambura was 10 times that. And 100 times Mount St. Helens, possibly the loudest sound recorded in human history. It was heard nearly 3,000 miles away. Sailors had eardrums ruptured 40 miles away. Some people link the red skies it left behind to the sky in Edward Munk's The Scream.

And now we know it might because of volcanic skies. There was so much ash thrown in the atmosphere. it formed a thin gray veil around the entire earth, bouncing sunlight back into space before it could reach the ground. And here is the most disturbing number in this segment, all of it. The famine on three continents, the birds dying in June snow, the family cats, happened because the earth got colder by just one degree Fahrenheit. One degree? That was all it took.

Right, which doesn't seem like much at all. One degree in the wrong year, canceled summer across an entire hemisphere. Yeah, the technical term for this is a volcanic winter. It looks like snow falling from the sky when really it's soot and ash. Yeah. Scientists believe that one time when a volcanic winter happened, all the dinosaurs were wiped out after a giant meteorite struck the earth. This was known as the KT event.

Right. A meteorite, the size of Mount Everest, struck the earth, changing the weather. No animals larger than a cat. could have survived, but in the sea, they say life could find a way. Is that way like sharks are still sort of prehistoric? There are many living fossils today. Fun fact for you.

Sharks, skates, rays, celacamps, turtles and crocodiles. Are all like vestiges from that. Bygone. Living fossils. Amazing. I could just imagine two dinosaurs looking at each other going, you know, it just don't get no better than this. And one of those says, yeah.

And then, oh no. A giant meteorite strikes the earth. Goodbye dinosaurs. Okay. Now, the part you did not see coming, because 1816 is not only doom. That freezing ruined summer produced

some of the most iconic creative work in history. And you have lived your entire life inside the things it made. Okay. Picture a rent. mansion on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Perpetual rain, lightning over the lake, counting till the thunder, candles at noon, a group of young writers trapped inside decides to make a game of it. How about a little competition? The poet Lord Byron challenges everyone to

write a ghost story. One of his guests is 18 years old, Mary Godwin, soon to be, Mary Shelly. Author of one of the most famous horror novels ever written. I'm glad you bring that up because a few nights in between two or three in the morning, she has a waking nightmare, a pale student kneeling over something he has built, watching it stir. She wrote later that she believed what terrified her would terrify others the next morning. She started writing. Oh, that sounds a lot like a familiar book. I wonder which one it would be. Let's see, a doctor who creates a monster who rises, maybe with lightning, helping animated? Could it be

Frankenstein? Written at 18. Very impressive. What many consider the first true science fiction novel? And contrary to popular belief, Carter, Frankenstein isn't the monster itself. Frankenstein's the name of the guy who creates the creature. Although,

I believe the creature as it's more known as, or the wretch, Victor Frankenstein was trying to discover the secret of life, proved to his colleagues that death could be undone, reversed. But when his creature was created, he was terrified by its monstrous appearance.

Yes. All that poor creature wanted to do was exist. He did nothing wrong and everyone wanted him dead. Totally, right? You think of all the monsters that are like, evil, bad, and yet Frank, well, the wretch, right, wanted to be good, wanted to fit in, wanted to be loved.

He wanted to belong. to not be alone. Yeah, which we can all relate to, obviously. Well, and in this case, the instigating force was this storm, this volcanic winter they're all inside, and in fact, not only was Frankenstein invented, but in that same house that summer, Byron's physician sketches out the vampire.

Dracula's the first suave aristocratic vampire in English fiction, the direct ancestor of Dracula. So every brooding vampire you've ever encountered, include you, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and interviews for vampire. And Antonio Banderas, don't forget him. How could I? And these are three of the sexiest vampires

in the history of the world. And it all goes back to that rainy week in Switzerland in 1816. Interesting thing, both Frankenstein and, well, Dracula, as the vampire went on to inspire, would both become adopted by Universal Studios, along with the Wolfman, the mummy, the invisible man,

and the creature from the Black Lagoon. So I guess in some ways, the volcanic winter was the birth of Universal Studios. Traces all the way back to there, everything we have now. What's your ranking of vampire movies? Okay, let's see. Dracula Untold with Luke Evans, I'd put that at around a five.

Bram Stoker's Dracula. Ten. Who could go wrong with Gary Oldman? Oh, you cannot. If my sister's watching, sorry, Anna, but on the subject of twice. Don't get me wrong. I thought it was good, but overall, I give it a four and a half. Okay, not quite a five, yeah. And of course, it's cross-genre, because it's got vampires and...

Werewolves. Yeah. I'm more of a werewolf guy anyway. Oh, yeah, well, that's a whole other time. We're talking about great werewolf movies. Here's looking at you, Jack. So that summer, Byron also wrote a poem called Darkness, imagining the sun going out and the human rays dying and cold and black. He had no idea that he was describing something that had literally already happened. Really? Mm-hmm. Okay, last thing. In Germany, the cold killed the oat crop.

So horses starved. When people were slaughtering animals, they could not feed. And a German inventor named Carl von Andreas asks, what if there was another way to get around? A two-wheeled machine you straddle and push with your feet, the great-grandfather of the bicycle, invented because a volcano killed the horses. Oh, yeah. Poor horses.

That part's sad. So, in memory of the horses of 1816, Frankenstein, the modern vampire, the bicycle, all out of one of the worst summers in history, and remember, silver lining, out of the worst things that ever happened, some of the best things were left behind. Year two starts with a catapult and a corpse. Oh, yes. I'll be right back. My name is Sia.

And I live in the most beautiful place on Earth. Seven months ago, I blew up my life. And a lot has shifted since then. Everyone is moving forward. I'm still working on that. And that's me. Welcome to Ice Cove. Where are the penguins?

That's Antarctica. We're the other one. North of North. Stream all episodes. Available on CBC Gem. And here, the Mona Lisa, gazed into more. Mona's eyes in perfect health with no undiagnosed problems and her optic nerve in excellent condition.

Anyone here got eyes like Mona? Mine are brownish. Not enough people know about their eye health. That's why OCT scans are included in every standard eye exam at Specsavers locations. Should have gone to Specsavers. Book an eye exam today. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. Contact your local Specsavers for details.

Do you know which year up to 60% of Europe died from a plague that started with a catapult, spread through flea bites, and the best doctor in the room said, have you got a chicken? That year was 1348, also known as the year of the Black Death or Bubonic plague. That sounds as bad as it gets. So to understand 1348, you have to understand Europe was already on its knees. The climate had been cooling for decades. A great famine, just one generation earlier, left a continent of survivors who were smaller, weaker, and hungrier than their parents. So when the ships came in carrying one of the worst diseases in human history, Europe was not a healthy body fighting off a cold.

It was dry kindling, waiting for a spark. Oof. That had to be some real tough briques. Yes, it was tough times then. Okay, Connor, do you know already about the Black Death? Oh, I know plenty. some believe it all happened in China when a Mongolian catapult started firing corpses over city walls and the corpses were infected terribly and rats scurried all over the corpses,

his hungry rats, and they began contracting fleas. Those rats later, they stowed away in the cargo holds of ships bound for Europe. Wow, that's exactly right. And here's one of the darkest parts of how it started. The Black Death may have arrived as, as you said, an act of war. A city called Kaffa on the Black Sea in what is now Crimea. 1346, a booming trade colony where the Silk Road met the sea. Under siege by a Mongol army.

Yeah. Yeah, the plague breaks out. Soldiers dying by the thousands, the attackers load their own infected dead onto catapults and fleeing the corpses over the. the city walls. What barbarism. Completely. In fact, some say it is one of the first recorded uses of biological warfare. Although, to be fair, that story is debated, but still, there's a reason that it stays with us. Corpses flying over walls. And maybe taller walls to make sure that you can't fling corpses in. Yeah. In fact, by the First World War, Germany was using

anthrax as a weapon of biological warfare. Yeah. Just. kept evolving over time. Now, what would you think if you were in the city getting bombarded? Can you imagine what they'd be like to look up and see like corpses flying over the walls, landing in the streets? Oh, that would be strange and ultimately sickening, both literally and figuratively. That's right. Very literally in this case. So the defenders fled by sea to Italy. October 1347, their ships tie up in Messina, Sicily. The men aboard are already dead or dying. Black swellings in the neck and groin, fever, coughing blood. Locals tried to turn the ships away, but it was far too late. The rats were already ashore. From Sicily, it jumped to the mainland.

Gutted Florence, reached Marseille in dead of winter, climbed the rivers into France through Avignon, where the Pope himself was. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's getting close to, like, the heart of Europe. And an interesting fact, the Pope protected himself by sitting between two fires of burning rosemary. Kind of ironic when you think about it. A holy man sitting between two fires.

And then it went on toward Paris. 800 dead a day by the year's end. Then it crosses the channel. There's a single ship. The plague was loose in Britain. and what it did to the body, the swellings were called boobos, which is where bubonic plague comes from.

Definitely. It's lumps in the armpit, neck, groin, swelling to the size of an egg, sometimes an apple, hard and black and agonizing. Yeah, can you imagine like dark splotches over the skin, fever, vomiting, smell, people were dead within three days.

Yeah, so basically people went to bed well and didn't see the end of the week. I understand. I had flu B once and man, was it agonizing? So to get a sense of the scale, 30 to 60% of everyone in Europe dead in under five years. Florence may have lost 60% of its population in a single year. England dropped from 5 or 6 million to under 3 million within a generation.

Whoa. Yeah, whole villages just vanished. And this wasn't only Europe's catastrophe. same plague tore through the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Egypt and Syria may have lost a third or more of their people, too. We tell it as a European story, but it was one of the first truly global pandemics. Modern science would have been considered witchcraft. If they did what they're doing now, they would be like, this is totally crazy.

But what they were doing was pretty crazy. And nobody at the time knows what's causing it. We know now it was a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, and it rides in the guts of fleas. Today, a course of antibiotics clears it up in 1348. Well, the idea of germs was five centuries away, so people tried everything. Bleeding the patient, packing the bubos with poultices, mercury potions that kill faster than the plague does, vinegar rubs, Rosemary burning in the streets or next to the Pope. And then there was the chicken,

the belief that chickens breathe through their back sides. So they'd pluck the feathers of live. That's ridiculous. It's totally ridiculous. But they thought, I don't know why they thought that only chickens breathe through their butts. But if they pluck the feathers off of a live chicken's rear end, strap it directly onto the patient's boobos

and let the bird draw the sickness out. Then when the chicken, get six, just try again. Interesting thing, though, the ancient Egyptians believed mercury was meant to preserve the spirit that after someone died, well, now we know better. That stuff will kill you after it makes you go crazy. Right? If you get mercury poison, don't you go a little, a little nuts? Yeah, before you finally die. So they were trying that. Obviously it didn't work. And then finally somebody does the one thing that actually works. Officials in Italy start holding arriving ships in the harbor before anyone comes ashore.

First, they do 30 days, then 40. The Italian for 40 days is Quarantana Giorni? Yes. Grava. That is the word we still reach for every time the world faces a new disease. Quarantine, a word the black death left behind. Smart. Yeah, right?

They finally realize, like, oh, we can't stop it. let's just make sure it doesn't come ashore. Now, there are two things almost everyone gets wrong about 1348. First, that creepy, beaky plague doctor costume with the long black coat, the bird mask. That was not 1348. A French physician named Charles DeLorme designed it around 1619, more than 250 years later. The beak was stuffed with herbs because doctors believed disease spread through bad smells. The people of 1348 faced this with.

just vinegar and prayer. You mean like this? I mean exactly like that. Although that one might be better designed than they had then. You've got ergonomic straps and everything. You have eye holes. The lenses here on the eye holes were meant to prevent the germs from entering through the eyes, while the beak was used to store herbs, garlic, anything that was capable of killing germs,

specifically bacteria. Amazing. But that, I see, but that's, so that's 200. 50 years later, not from the Black Death, even though it looks like it would be perfect if you were in a movie called The Black Death, you'd think you'd be wearing that. And the second thing is ring around the rosy. It is not about the plague. Folkloreists have basically debunk the whole connection. The rhyme does not even appear in writing until the 19th century. So I guess sometimes a nursery rhyme is just a nursery rhyme. And a good thing too. I mean, nursery rhymes that come from

dark things make people a little uneasy. say, you want a creepy nursery rhyme? Watch a nightmare on Elm Street. Whenever Freddy Kruger's nearby, there are these little jump roping kids. It's that thing, this terrifying rhyme. Interesting thing about a nightmare on Elm Street. It was the first film to ever star famous actor Johnny Depp. That's right.

Well, I want to spoil it, but don't go to bed. And one last thing about 1348. The catastrophe that killed half of Europe also. slowly remade it. When half the workers die, the survivors are suddenly worth twice as much. For the first time in living memory, a peasant could look a lord in the eye and say, pay me or I walk. Wages rose, serfdom started to crack. Historians draw a line from those empty villages straight toward the modern world to mobility, to higher pay, even to the Renaissance. So again, catastrophe makes things happen.

Oh, yes, the Renaissance. One of my favorite periods in history, a time of art, music, and poetry, all of that emerged from the tragedy that was the Black Death. And some of the greatest Renaissance masters lived during that era, Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo, just to name a few. And who knows? Might not have come to pass, if not for the Black Death before it. But if you thought those two years were bad, little year number three. Two down and one to go. I am describing this one without naming it.

The other two were each one catastrophe. This one was two at the same time. The sun went wrong first. It was dim, bluish, no warmth, no shadow, and it stayed like that. Then, just as people might have started to recover from that, something we've already covered tonight, arrived on top of it. Connor, any guesses what it might have been? I got to say, Carter, you've got this history buff stump.

All right. Well, we're about to de-stump you because not only did the sun go out, the crops failed, the plague arrived, and the Roman Empire never recovered. And the only way we ever figured out why was a grad student, a glacier, and a laser. And the year is 536 C.E. Lasers in that time? Well, the lasers come later. And before everything goes wrong in 536 CE, things are actually looking pretty good.

The Western Roman Empire has fallen, but in the east from Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul was Constantinople. Nobody's business, but anyway, an emperor named Justinian rules what is left. He wants the whole Roman world back. Okay. Connor, what's your take on Justinian? He was truly one of the earliest modern men. Roman innovations, indoor heating, plumbing, the aqueduct, running water.

Have you ever seen a Roman urinal? They're like these horsetroft things full of running water. All triumphs of this time. Incredible. He accomplished so much and really advanced his civilization in so many ways. So you'd think, oh, he's going to do it. This is going to make the Roman Empire live for another thousand years. Yeah.

But it does not work out like that. And here's what gets overlooked. He didn't do it alone. In that palace was an empress named Theodora, one of the most remarkable women in all of ancient history. When riots nearly toppled Justinian and his advisors told him to flee, Theodora refused. She told him a throne was worth dying on.

So he stayed, crushed it, and that is the partnership running Constantinople when 536 arrives. In fact, both Theodora and, and Justinian are actually recognized as saints in the Eastern Orthodox Church. One of the rare husband and wife pairs that can be canonized together. Truly remarkable. Like, they accomplished so much. So this is the world in 536, ambition, power, a city of golden domes, and then the sun goes out.

Not at night, during the day. Early in 536, a strange dry fog rolled in across Europe. Middle East and Asia and just stayed. It settled like the world had been sealed under frosted glass. The sun would rise, but it gave a weak, bluish light with no warmth and no shadow. Cacadourius tried to write it down and could barely find the words. He said, a winter with no storms, a spring with no mildness, a summer with no heat. If the sun stopped working, I'd probably be panicking.

I would probably try prayers. I'd try offerings. I'd probably stay indoors for a while and like try to write it out, watch a lot of TV. Yeah. It'd be like night all the time.

No need for sunblock. 18 months. The coldest stretch in over 2,000 years. In summer 536, it snowed in China. Harvests ruined across the northern hemisphere.

In Ireland, the Chronicles record it in four words. A failure of bread. Wow. Yeah. And 536 is not. the disaster. It is only the beginning. Around 540, the cold deepens. The recovery that should have

started does not. And then into a world already starving and terrified. In 541, the plague arrives. So we covered the sky going dark. We covered a plague. Now it is both at once. It comes ashore at Polycium, a Roman port in Egypt, and it just spreads like wildfire. We call it the plague of Justinian. And this is the kicker. It is the first known appearance of the exact same disease that 800 years later comes back as the Black Death. Oh, so this is like Black Death 1.0. And the Black Death itself is like the sequel. And it guts the Eastern Roman Empire between a third and a half of the population dead, 25 to 50 million people.

It's like every era there's like a huge plague. Like, we recently recovered from COVID-19. Yeah. And you realize, like, millions died in COVID-19, but like, oh, it could have been so much worse. Like, 25 to 50 million people dead. And there was so many fewer people in the world population back then. Like, half the people died. It's crazy.

Yeah. Could have been a lot worse. Yeah. And at the peak of the plague in Constantinople, Procopius, who was there, claims that 10,000 were dying every single day. They ran out of graves. They started stacking the dead in the towers of the city walls. Wow.

That sounds like the worst possible year to live in. Yeah, I think if you woke up and found that like half the people were dying and stacked up around you. And there was no sun out. I mean, you'd think the world was ending. And Justinian himself catches the plague, survives, barely. But his dream does not. The armies hollow out. The reconquest of Rome collapses.

historians draw a line from these years to the final end of the ancient world itself. Everything Justinian built, the plague named after him tore down. And the plague closes one chapter, the ancient world. Its descendant closes another, the medieval era. So basically, the Justinian's plague led to the medieval era. And then the Black Death 2 led to the Renaissance. Bingo. Yeah.

So it's sort of like, yeah, the world, whatever states, the world is in, the black death wobbles it so much that a whole new world is born after it. And think about it. When COVID-19 came, what emerged from the ashes? AI has. If you've ever seen the movie Terminator, you would know, I don't trust AI. And for good reason, judgment day. Judgment day. Bad. And yeah, we do. We live in a much different world already. Who knows like 100 years of now what they'll look back and say about this world now. So for almost 50s. 1,500 years, nobody could prove what caused the sun going out. History's greatest cold case.

Comets, the wrath of God, the mystery just sat there until 2018. A team led by Harvard historian Michael McCormick pulled 72 meters of ice out of a glacier in the Swiss Alps. And packed into that ice layer by frozen layer is more than 2,000 years of sky. Every storm, every dust cloud, every speck of pollution, frozen in order like pages in a book. They read it with a laser fine enough to shave off a single week of ancient weather at a time. And in the layer from Spring 536, a graduate student found two microscopic particles of volcanic glass. Two specks. The width of a human hair traced to a colossal eruption that most likely in Iceland

at the very start of 536. So that was the fog, that was the sun going dark over the entire known world, 1,500 years, and the answer was two specks of dust waiting in the ice for someone to build a laser powerful enough to find them. Oh, and remember that Lord Byron poem, Darkness, written during that worst summer in centuries,

imagining the sun going out in the human race dying in cold and black? Yeah. Yeah. Well, he had no idea. He was channeling something that had already happened. The worst year in history, echoing through a poet's nightmare, 1,200 years later. It kind of reminds me of like how in the history of House Targaryen, Danis the dreamer, a daughter of

Arrian Targaryen, foresaw the doom of Valeria in a dream, something that hadn't even happened yet at the time. Yes. Until 12 years after her dream. And in the Odyssey, Circe tells Odysseus what's lying ahead and he tries to change what his men do, but sometimes even if you have the premonition, it doesn't matter. But that is another story for another time. Okay, we've got three terrible years. 1816, 1348, 536. It is time to settle it, which one is the worst?

But before I tell you where the historians land, where do you land? Which of those three was actually the worst to be alive? And why? Probably a 530. because not only were people dying around you, there was no light, no warmth, no hope. I mean, it's hard to argue since, right,

it's like the double whammy. It's like the plague and the sun. The only thing that might make me think about 18, 16 is just that it's later in human history, so there's so many more people, they feel like they're living in the modern world. So when the sun goes out, it's like right now we feel like,

oh, we've got all these technological innovations so we could survive a catastrophe. But then if the sun did show up, it would really just, like, decimate your trust in society. Historians land exactly where you did the year 536. Any honorable mentions for worst years, horrible years that should have been on the list? There was, as 2019 to 2020,

the year COVID-19 hit, September 11th, 2001. 79 AD, Pompeii, Mount Vesuvius erupts and destroys an entire city. Yeah. Okay, what about you at home? Tell us on YouTube, drop your vote in the comments, which year was the worst, or if we've missed one, tell us that. Thank you for joining us on What the Fact. And follow wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review so we can keep building this community.

Until then, the wildest stuff. is real. And the real stuff is wilder than you think. That's a fact. Thanks for checking out What the Fact. For new episodes every Wednesday follow What The Fact on Apple

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