|
by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
19 December 2007
from
Sott Website
Hell on Earth, the nightmare depicted by Flemish painter Pieter
Bruegel in his mid-16th-century
"The Triumph of Death" reflects the
social upheaval and terror that followed the plague that devastated
medieval Europe.
Was there a cosmic connection?
I just finished reading this one and all I can say is: Wow!
This was
an intense book! Not a long one, either - just 208 pages including
appendices. It's tight and economical with no wasted words or idle
rambling around. Every example and temporary diversion is crucial to
the central argument which is - brace yourself for this one - Mike
Baillie (yeah, a real scientist and not a crackpot), is saying that
the Black Death, one of the most deadly pandemics in human history,
said to have killed possibly two thirds of the entire population of
Europe, not to mention millions all over the planet, probably wasn't
Bubonic Plague but was rather Death By Comet(s)!
Oh yeah! That's far out, isn't it?
Maybe not. Baillie has the scientific evidence to support his theory
and his evidence actually supports - and is supported by - what the
people of the time were saying: earthquakes, comets, rains of death
and fire, corrupted atmosphere, and death on a scale that is almost
unimaginable. Most people nowadays are not really aware of what
happened just 660 years ago. (Hmmm... the inquiring mind immediately
wonders what might happen when we hit 666 years after?! That would
be 2012...)
Anyway, China, where the Black Death is said to have originated,
lost around half of its entire population (going from around 123
million to around 65 million).
Recent research into European death tolls also suggest a figure of
45% to 50% of the total European population dying during a four-year
period though the figure fluctuated from place to place (which is a
problem as we will see).
In Mediterranean Europe and Italy, the South of France and Spain,
where the plague ran for about four years consecutively, it was
probably closer to 70% to 75% of the total population. (In the USA
today, that would be equivalent to reducing the population from its
current 300 million total to 75 million in less than four years.
That would also amount to having to bury or dispose of around 225
million corpses!)
In Germany and England it was probably closer to 20%. Northeastern
Germany, Bohemia, Poland and Hungary are believed to have suffered
less for some reason (and there are a few theories which are not
entirely satisfactory).
There are no estimates available for Russia or the Balkans so it
seems that they may have suffered little, if at all. Africa lost
approximately 1/8th of its population (from around 80 million to 70
million). (These figures actually highlight one of the problems that
Baillie brings up: the variability of death rates according to
location.)
Whatever the death rate in any given location, the bottom line is
that the Black Death produced the largest death toll from any known
pandemic in recorded history and, as Baillie points out, nobody
really knows what it was! Oh, of course, for a very long time
everybody just "knew" it was Bubonic plague, so how is it that
Baillie questions this well-established fact? He's not the only one.
In 1984, Graham Twigg published The Black Death: A Biological
Reappraisal, where he argued that the climate and ecology of Europe
and particularly England made it nearly impossible for rats and
fleas to have transmitted bubonic plague and that it would have been
nearly impossible for
Yersinia pestis to have been the causative
agent of the plague, let alone its explosive spread across Europe
during the 14th century.
Twigg also demolishes the common theory of
entirely pneumonic spread. He proposes, based on his examination of
the evidence and symptoms, that the Black Death may actually have
been an epidemic of pulmonary anthrax caused by
Bacillus anthracis.
Another unhappy camper in the standard model is Gunnar Karlsson who,
in 2000, pointed out that the Black Death killed between half and
two-thirds of the population of Iceland, although there were no rats
in Iceland at this time. (The History of Iceland by Gunnar Karlsson)
Baillie sums up the problem as follows:
The Black Death of 1347 was believed to be the third great outbreak
of bubonic plague; a plague that is traditionally spread by rats and
fleas. The previous instances were the Plague of Athens in 430 BC
and the plague at the time of Justinian which arrived into
Constantinople in AD 542. The Plague of Athens was described by
Thucydides, while the Justinian plague was described by Procopius,
among others. [...]
The plague is supposed to have originated in Central Asia, or
somewhere in Africa, where plague is endemic in some rodent
populations. It is assumed that some environmental stimulus caused
infected rodents to leave their normal habitats and infect rat
populations, and ultimately human populations, in areas where there
was no natural immunity.
The mechanism of transfer is believed to
have been infected fleas leaving the bodies of dead rats and moving
to human hosts who were in turn infected by the feeding fleas. It is
believed that trade routes brought the disease to the Black Sea
region and from there to the central Mediterranean by late 1347.
It
was then introduced into Europe through northern Italy and southern
France. It immediately started killing people in large numbers
spreading overland at about 1.5 km per day. Between January and the
summer to autumn of 1348 it had spread as far as the British Isles,
and by 1350 to Scandinavia and eventually even Iceland. The spread
seems to have curled up through France, across Belgium into Germany
and on into central southern Europe. This first wave burned itself
out by 1351, though there was a second wave in 1361.
It is generally believed that the plague hit an already weakened
population in Europe. [...]
At its most basic, the problem is with those rats and fleas. For the
conventional wisdom to work there have to be hosts of infected rats
and they have to be moving at alarming speed - you would almost have
to imagine infected rats scuttling every onward (mostly northward)
delivering, as they died, loads of infected fleas.
The snags with
this scenario are legion. For example, there are no descriptions of
dead rats lying everywhere (this is explained by suggesting that
either the rats were indoors, or people were so used to dead rats
that they were not worth mentioning; though if they were indoors how
did they travel so fast?) It did not seem to matter whether you were
a rural shepherd or cleric or a town dweller, both were infected.
Yet strangely with this very infectious disease some cities across
Europe were spared.
Moreover, these rats must have been happy to
move to cool northern areas even though bubonic plague is a disease
that requires relatively warm temperatures. Then, when there are
water barriers, these rats board ships to keep the momentum going.
(Baillie)
Benedictow, an advocate of the rats and fleas scenarios quoted by
Baillie, tells us about these amazing critters:
The Black Death's strategic genius made also another masterstroke
that greatly increased the pace of its conquest of the Iberian
peninsula.
Shortly after its multiple invasions of important urban
centers along the coast of the Kingdom of Aragon, it performed a
remarkable metastatic leap and arrived triumphantly in the town of
Santiago de Compostela in the very opposite, north-westernmost
corner of the Iberian Peninsula.
(Benedictow, O. J. 2004 The Black
Death 1346-1353: The Complete History. The Boydell press,
Woodbridge.)
In 2001, epidemiologists Susan Scott and
Christopher Duncan from
Liverpool University proposed the theory that the Black Death might
have been caused by an Ebola-like virus, not a bacterium.
Their
research and findings are thoroughly documented in Biology of
Plagues. More recently the researchers have published computer
modeling demonstrating how the Black Death has made around 10% of
Europeans resistant to HIV. (Return of the Black Death: The World's
Greatest Serial Killer by Susan Scott, Christopher Duncan and
Biology of Plagues: Evidence from Historical Populations by Susan
Scott, Christopher J. Duncan)
In a similar vein, historian Norman F. Cantor, in his 2001 book In
the Wake of the Plague, suggests the Black Death might have been a
combination of pandemics including a form of anthrax and a cattle
murrain. He cites many forms of evidence including: reported disease
symptoms not in keeping with the known effects of either bubonic or
pneumonic plague, the discovery of anthrax spores in a plague pit in
Scotland, and the fact that meat from infected cattle was known to
have been sold in many rural English areas prior to the onset of the
plague.
Samuel K. Cohn, quoted extensively by Baillie also rebutted the
theory (and that's really all it is, and a weak theory at that!)
that the Black Death was bubonic plague.
In the Encyclopedia of
Population, he points to five major weaknesses in this theory:
-
very different transmission speeds - the Black Death was reported
to have spread 385 km in 91 days in 664, compared to 12-15 km a year
for the modern Bubonic Plague, which has the assistance of trains
and cars
-
difficulties with the attempt to explain the rapid spread of the
Black Death by arguing that it was spread by the rare pneumonic form
of the disease - in fact this form killed less than 0.3% of the
infected population in its worst outbreak in Manchuria in 1911
-
different seasonality - the modern plague can only be sustained at
temperatures between 50 and 78 °F (10 and 26 °C) and requires high
humidity, while the Black Death occurred even in Norway in the
middle of the winter and in the Mediterranean in the middle of hot
dry summers
-
very different death rates - in several places (including Florence
in 1348) over 75% of the population appears to have died; in
contrast the highest mortality for the modern Bubonic Plague was 3%
in Mumbai in 1903
-
the cycles and trends of infection were very different between the
diseases - humans did not develop resistance to the modern disease,
but resistance to the Black Death rose sharply, so that eventually
it became mainly a childhood disease
Cohn also points out that while the identification of the disease as
having buboes relies on the account of Boccaccio and others, they
described buboes, abscesses, rashes and carbuncles occurring all
over the body, while the modern disease rarely has more than one
bubo, most commonly in the groin, and is not characterized by
abscesses, rashes and carbuncles which is what Boccaccio described!
The gist of Cohn's argument is that whatever caused the Black Death,
it was not bubonic plague. (See also: Samuel K. Cohn 2002, "The
Black Death: End of the Paradigm." and The Black Death and the
Transformation of the West (European History Series) by David
Herlihy and Samuel K., Jr. Cohn)
When one begins to dig into the subject, we find that there was one
study that claimed that tooth pulp tissue from a fourteenth-century
plague cemetery in Montpellier tested positive for molecules
associated with Y. pestis (bubonic plague). Similar findings were
reported in a 2007 study, but other studies have not supported these
results.
In fact, in September of 2003, a team of researchers from
Oxford University tested 121 teeth from sixty-six skeletons found in
fourteenth-century mass graves. The remains showed no genetic trace
of Y. pestis, and the researchers suspect that the Montpellier study
was flawed.
What these studies do not address is the problem that the apparent
means of infection or transmission varied widely, from
human-to-human contact as in Iceland (rare for plague and cutaneous
Bacillus anthracis) to infection in the absence of living or
recently-dead humans, as in Sicily (which speaks against most
viruses).
To all the problems with the Bubonic Plague theory cited above, we
have to add what the contemporary writers recorded. Philip Ziegler
collected many of these items in his book The Black Death, though he
dismisses them as "metaphor". We'll be looking at some of them in
just a moment.
Mike Baillie didn't start out to write a book about cometary impacts
being implicated in the great Pandemics of the past; he had just
noticed some strange tree ring patterns that happened to coincide
with this historical catastrophe and thought that, perhaps, there
was some sort of environmental downturn that weakened the human
population, making humanity susceptible to bacterial or viral death
on a large scale.
But, what he found was a dangling thread that,
once he began to pull on it, unraveled the "accepted wisdom" about
the Black Death and sent him off on a search that led to completely
astonishing conclusions.
As mentioned, the first clue was tree rings - that's natural since
Baillie is a dendrochronologist. He compared these tree rings to
dated ice-core samples that had been analyzed and discovered a very
strange thing: ammonium. There are, as it happens, four occasions in
the last 1500 years where scientists can confidently link dated
layers of ammonium in Greenland ice to high-energy atmospheric
interactions with objects coming from space: 539, 626, 1014, and
1908 - the Tunguska event. In short, there is a connection between
ammonium in the ice cores and extra-terrestrial bombardment of the
surface of the earth.
Now notice that the above statement is that there are four events
that can be definitively linked with high-energy interactions;
Baillie presents the research in this book showing that the exact
same signature is present at the time of the Black Death in both the
tree rings and in the ice cores, AND at other times of so-called
"plague and pandemic".
As it happens, the ammonium signal in the ice-cores is directly
connected to an earthquake that occurred on January 25th, 1348 - and
Baillie discovers that there was a 14th century writer who wrote
that the plague was a "corruption of the atmosphere" that came from
this earthquake!
How could a plague come from an earthquake, you ask?
Baillie points out that we don't always know if earthquakes are
caused by tectonic movements; they could be cause by cometary
explosions in the atmosphere or even impacts on the surface of the
earth.
In Rain of Iron and Ice by John Lewis, Professor of Planetary
Sciences at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Co-director of the
NASA/University of Arizona Space Engineering Research Center, and
Commissioner of the Arizona State Space Commission, tells us that
the earth is regularly hit by extraterrestrial objects and many of
the impacting bodies explode in the atmosphere as happened in
Tunguska, leaving no craters or long-lasting visible evidence of a
body from space.
But just because there is no long-lasting evidence doesn't mean
there is no significant effect on the planet and/or its inhabitants!
These impacts or atmospheric explosions may produce earthquakes or
tsunamis without any witnesses being aware of the cause. After all,
the earth is 75% water and any eye-witness to such an event would
very likely be fried and never tell about it, so we really have no
way of knowing if all the earthquakes on our planet are tectonic in
nature or not.
Lewis points out:
In an average year there is one atmospheric explosion with a yield
of 100 kilotons or more. The large majority occur in such remote
areas, or so high in the atmosphere, that they are not observed.
Even if observed, the witnesses may see only a flash of light in the
distance, or hear the 'rumble of distant thunder' coming from the
open oceans. Thus even those that are observed are often not
recognized.
(Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice)
As Baillie points out, Lewis is talking about a "typical" year and
it is obvious, from other studies, that not all years are equal -
some are less typical than others!
Baillie writes:
As Lewis pointed out, we know from many strands of evidence broadly
what the impact rate should be over time. The fact that impacts are
not in the historical record [or not admitted or discussed by
historians or archaeologists] is not because none happened.
After
all, there are those well-attested crater fields that were formed in
the last few millennia in Estonia, Poland, Germany and Italy - which
were not recorded historically; their existence was deduced from
holes in the ground. So we know the recording mechanism is flawed!
What needs to be added ... is one key piece of intuitive thinking.
Here is a quote from Lewis' Scenario D:
(In this scenario) In 1946 a 25,000-metric-ton achondritic fireball
explodes at 4:00 AM local time at a height of 11km above Fergana,
Uzbekistan. The 1-megaton blast damages buildings over an area
several kilometers in diameter, searing the area with intense heat
and setting thousands of fires.
The fires burn out of control,
killing 4,146. Over 20,000 residents are awakened by the brilliant
flash of light and heat to find their city in flames. An
'earthquake' is reported by the survivors.
Several metric tons of
meteorite fragments are mixed in with the debris of 2000 burned-out
and collapsed buildings, where they are indistinguishable from
scorched and blackened fragments of structural brick and rock.
(Lewis quoted by Baillie)
The point of this is that there is almost no way to monitor whether
or not any given disaster/catastrophe is definitively an impact as
opposed to a violent earthquake.
The result is that centuries could
be passing, with numerous cometary impacts happening all the time,
and no one suspecting the true hazards from space! As Baillie points
out: there are many earthquakes recorded in history, but NO impacts!
And yet, there is the evidence that the impacts HAVE happened - on
the ground, and in the ice cores. And there is
Tunguska.
Reports of the Tunguska event tell us that the ground shook around
the impact/explosion zone for a radius of about 900km. At the time
of any larger impact event, the earthquake would be proportionally
more severe. Any survivors of such an event who are far enough away
to survive, would only have seen a flash, felt a tremor, and heard a
loud rumbling noise. If they were too far away to see the flash, or
were indoors, they would only report an earthquake.
In short, what the work of Lewis brings to the table is the idea
that some well-known historical earthquakes could very well have
been impact events.
Baillie mentions that one obvious prospect is
the great Antioch earthquake of AD 526 which was described by John Malalas:
...those caught in the earth beneath the buildings were incinerated
and sparks of fire appeared out of the air and burned everyone they
struck like lightning.
The surface of the earth boiled and
foundations of buildings were struck by thunderbolts thrown up by
the earthquakes and were burned to ashes by fire... it was a
tremendous and incredible marvel with fire belching out rain, rain
falling from tremendous furnaces, flames dissolving into showers ...
as a result Antioch became desolate ... in this terror up to 250,000
people perished.
(Jeffreys, E., Jeffreys, M. and Scott, R. 1986, The
Chronicle of John Malalas, Byzantina Australiensia, Australian
Assoc. Byzantine Studies 4, Melbourne.)
Black Death
A medieval painting dated 1456 AD, depicting a pass of Halley's
Comet.
Baillie also points out that a series of such impacts/overhead
explosions, would more adequately explain the longstanding problem
of the end of the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean in the
12th century BC.
At that time, many - uncountable - major sites were
destroyed and totally burned and it has all been blamed on those
supernatural "Sea Peoples." If that was the case, if it was invasion
and conquest, there ought to at least be some evidence for that,
like dead warriors or signs of warfare... but for the most part,
that is not the case. There were almost no bodies found, and no
precious objects except those that were hidden away as though
someone expected to return for them, or didn't have time to retrieve
them.
The people who fled (extra-terrestrial events often have
precursor activities and warnings because a comet can be observed
approaching for some time) were probably also killed in the act of
fleeing and the result was total abandonment and total destruction
of the cities in question.
And the onset of Dark Ages.
So, the possibility that many destructions of the past could have
been related to impact events has never been taken seriously or
tested and this could be a perilous error.
The question that Baillie asks, but never really answers is: What
was it that so successfully stopped people asking why there is a
traditional and deeply ingrained fear of comets in the psyche of
humanity? He points out that, yes, there are people outside of
mainstream academia who ask these questions. But why, against all
good common sense is this subject so widely and systematically
ignored, marginalized and ridiculed?
The odd thing is that, even though Baillie points out that many
high-level scientists and government agencies are taking these
things seriously (Lewis, for example), it is still ignored,
marginalized and ridiculed to the general public via the mainstream
media!
Baillie writes:
In case readers think this is simply rhetoric, this is as good a
place as any to mention a forthcoming event. On 13 April 2029 an
asteroid named Apophis will pass by the earth at a distance of less
than 50,000km. If you're alive at the time, and it is not cloudy,
you'll be able to see it pass with the naked eye. Apophis is more
than 300m in diameter.
If, as it passed the earth, it just happens
to pass through a certain narrow window in space, then, in 2036 it
will return and hit the earth (this narrow window is a point where
the earth's gravity would deflect the orbit of Apophis just enough
to ensure an impact in 2036). If Apophis hits the earth the impact
will be in the 3000-megaton class.
It is entirely reasonable to
state that such an impact, taking place anywhere on the planet,
would collapse our current civilization and return the survivors,
metaphorically speaking, to the Dark Ages (it is believed that in
such an event globalised institutions, such as the financial and
insurance markets would collapse, bringing down the entire
interconnected monetary, trade and transport systems).
Impacts from
space are not fiction, and it seems highly likely that quite a
number have taken place in the last few millennia (over and above
the small crater-forming examples already mentioned). It is just
that, for some reason, most people who study the past have chosen to
avoid, or ignore, the issue.
(Baillie)
Along with the science, Baillie cites contemporary evidence - some
of this evidence has been relegated to "myth" - from around the
globe that indicate that the earth was, indeed, subjected to
bombardment from space during the 14th century and that this may
very well have been not only the cause of the 25 January 1348
earthquake, but also the cause of the Black Death.
Baillie quotes a
great selection of material from contemporary accounts including the
work of Ziegler cited above:
Droughts, floods, earthquakes, locusts, subterranean thunder,
unheard of tempests, lightning, sheets of fire, hail stones of
marvelous size, fire from heaven, stinking smoke, corrupted
atmosphere, a vast rain of fire, masses of smoke.
(Ziegler)
Ziegler discounts entirely reports of a black comet seen before the
arrival of the epidemic but records: heavy mists and clouds, falling
stars, blasts of hot wind, a column of fire, a ball of fire, a
violent earth tremor, in Italy a crescendo of calamity involving
earthquakes, following which, the plague arrived. (Baillie)
As it happens, in the 1340s there was a veritable rash of
earthquakes.
In Rosemary Horrox's book, The Black Death, quoted by
Baillie, we find that a contemporary writer in Padua reported that
not only was there a great earthquake on 25 January 1348, but it was
at the twenty-third hour.
In the thirty-first year of Emperoro Lewis, around the feast of the
Conversion of St. Paul (25 January) there was an earthquake
throughout Carinthia and Carniola which was so severe that everyone
feared for their lives.
There were repeated shocks, and on one night
the earth shook 20 times. Sixteen cities were destroyed and their
inhabitants killed... Thirty-six mountain fortresses and their in
habitants were destroyed and it was calculated that more than 40,000
men were swallowed up or overwhelmed.
(The author goes on to say that he received information from "a
letter of the house of Friesach to the provincial prior of Germany):
It says in the same letter that in this year [1348] fire falling
from heaven consumed the land of the Turks for 16 days; that for a
few days it rained toads and snakes, by which many men were killed:
that a pestilence has gathered strength in many parts of the world.
(Horrox)
From Samuel Cohn's book:
...a dragon at Jerusalem like that of Saint George that devoured
all that crossed its path .... A city of 40,000 ... totally
demolished by the fall from heaven of a great quantity of worms, big
as a fist with eight legs, which killed all by their stench and
poisonous vapors.
(Cohn)
A story by the Dominican friar Bartolomeo:
...massive rains of worms and serpents in parts of China, which
devoured large numbers of people. Also in those parts fire rained
from Heaven in the form of snow (ash), which burnt mountains, the
land, and men. And from this fire arose a pestilential smoke that
killed all who smelt it within twelve hours, as well as those who
only saw the poison of that pestilential smoke.
(Cohn)
Cohn writes:
Nor were such stories merely the introductory grist of naïve
merchants and possibly crazed friars ... [even] ... Petrarch's
closes friend, Louis Sanctus, before embarking on his careful
reporting of the plague... claimed that in September floods of frogs
and serpents throughout India had presaged the coming to Europe in
January of the three pestilential Genoese galleys... [even] ... the
English chronicler Henry Knighton ... [reported how] ... at Naples
the whole city was destroyed by earthquake and tempest. Numerous
chroniclers reported earthquakes around the world, which prefigured
the unprecedented plague. Most narrowed the event to Vespers, 25
January 1348. [...]
Of these earthquakes that "destroyed many cities, towns, churches,
monasteries, towers, along with their people and beasts of burden,
the worst hit was Villach in southern Austria. Chroniclers in Italy,
Germany, Austria, Slavonia, and Poland said it was totally submerged
by the quake with one in 10 surviving.
(Cohn)
A continental text dated Sunday 27 April 1348 states:
They say that in the three months from 25 January [1348] to the
present day, a total of 62,000 bodies were buried in Avignon.
(Horrox)
A German treatise unearthed by Horrox says:
Insofar as the mortality arose from natural causes its immediate
cause was a corrupt and poisonous earthy exhalation, which infected
the air in various parts of the world... I say it was the vapor and
corrupted air which has been vented - or so to speak purged - in the
earthquake that occurred on St. Paul's day [1348], along with the
corrupted air vented in other earthquakes and eruptions, which has
infected the air above the earth and killed people in various parts
of the world.
(Horrox)
As Baillie notes, if this oft-cited earthquake was, in reality, the
result of cometary impacts then the corrupted air could be from one
or two causes: high-energy chemical transformations in the
atmosphere or outgassings from the earth itself.
The German Historian, Hecker, informs us:
On the island of Cyprus, the plague from the East had already broken
out; when an earthquake shook the foundations of the island, and was
accompanied by so frightful a hurricane, that the inhabitants...
fled in dismay... The sea overflowed...
Before the earthquake, a
pestiferous wind spread so poisonous an odor that many, being
overpowered by it, fell down suddenly and expired in dreadful
agonies. ... and as at that time natural occurrences were
transformed into miracles, it was reported that a fiery meteor,
which descended on the earth far in the East, had destroyed
everything within a circumference of more than a hundred leagues,
infecting the air far and wide.
(Cohn)
Jon Arrizabalaga compiled a selection of writings in an attempt to
understand what educated people were saying about the Black Death
while it was happening.
Regarding the terms used by doctors and
other medical people in 1348 to describe the plague, he writes:
One... Jacme d'Agramaont, discussed it in terms of an "epidemic or
pestilence and mortalities of people" which threatened Lerida from
"some parts and regions neighboring to us" ... Agramont said
nothing concerning the term epidemia, but he extensively developed
what he meant by pestilencia.
He gave this latter term a very
peculiar etymology, in accordance with a from of knowledge
established by Isidore of Seville (570=636) in his Etymologiae,
which came to be widely accepted throughout Europe during the Middle
Ages.
He split the term pestilencia up into three syllables, each
having a particular meaning: pes = tempesta: 'storm, tempest'; te =
'temps, time', lencia = clardat: 'brightness, light'; hence, he
concluded, the pestilencia was 'the time of tempest caused by light
from the stars.'
As it happens, Isidore of Seville lived not long after another
period of cometary bombardment over Europe which is also evident in
the tree ring and ice core studies.
On August 17, 1999, the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau published an article by
Robert S. Boyd
entitled: Comets may have caused Earth's great empires to fall which
included the following:
Analysis of tree rings shows that at in 540 AD in different parts of
the world the climate changed. Temperatures dropped enough to hinder
the growth of trees as widely dispersed as northern Europe, Siberia,
western North America, and southern South America.
A search of historical records and mythical stories pointed to a
disastrous visitation from the sky during the same period, it is
claimed. There was one reference to a "comet in Gaul so vast that
the whole sky seemed on fire" in 540-41.
According to legend, King Arthur died around this time, and Celtic
myths associated with Arthur hinted at bright sky Gods and bolts of
fire.
In the 530s, an unusual meteor shower was recorded by both
Mediterranean and Chinese observers. Meteors are caused by the fine
dust from comets burning up in the atmosphere. Furthermore, a team
of astronomers from Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland published
research in 1990 which said the Earth would have been at risk from
cometary bombardment between the years 400 and 600 AD. [...]
Famine followed the crop failures, and hard on its heels bubonic
plague that swept across Europe in the mid-6th century. [...]
At this time, the Roman emperor Justinian was attempting to
regenerate the decaying Roman empire. But the plan failed in 540 and
was followed by the Dark Ages and the rise of Islam.
There is a large body of material from that period which
consistently points to a "corrupted atmosphere," breathe the air and
you die", and somehow, the ocean was involved as well as earthquakes
and comets and fireballs in the sky.
A report of the Medical Faculty
of Paris prepared in October 1348 says:
Another possible cause of corruption, which needs to be borne in
mind, is the escape of the rottenness trapped in the center of the
earth as a result of earthquakes - something that has indeed
recently occurred.
(quoted by Baillie)
In short, the French were aware of a series of earthquakes at the
time that may have been caused by cometary impacts. One report of
that period says that an earthquake lasted for six days and another
claimed the period was ten days. Such events could also produce
outgassing of all sorts of unpleasant chemicals which could kill.
Consider the following:
The Lake NYOS Gas Explosion, Cameroon 1986
[...]
Although a sudden outgassing of CO2 had occurred at Lake Monoun in
1984, killing 37 local residents, a similar threat from Lake Nyos
was not anticipated. However, on August 21, 1986, a limnic eruption
occurred at Lake Nyos which triggered the sudden release of about
1.6 million tonnes of CO2.
The gas rushed down two nearby valleys,
displacing all the air and suffocating up to 1,800 people within 20
km of the lake, mostly rural villagers, as well as 3,500 livestock.
About 4,000 inhabitants fled the area, and many of these developed
respiratory problems, burns, and paralysis as a result of the gases.
It is not known what triggered the catastrophic outgassing. Most
geologists suspect a landslide, but some believe that a small
volcanic eruption may have occurred on the bed of the lake. [...]
It is believed that up to a cubic kilometer of gas was released.
Because CO2 is denser than air, the gas flowed off the mountainous
flank in which Lake Nyos rests and down two adjoining valleys in a
layer tens of meters deep, displacing the air and suffocating all
the people and animals before it could dissipate.
The normally blue
waters of the lake turned a deep red after the outgassing, due to
iron-rich water from the deep rising to the surface and being
oxidized by the air. The level of the lake dropped by about a
meter,
representing the volume of gas released. The outgassing probably
also caused an overflow of the waters of the lake.
Trees near the
lake were knocked down.
Hmmm... one wonders if similar events could be triggered by cometary
impacts and if outgassing from oceans could be as dangerous and
deadly? One also wonders, considering the fact that trees were
"knocked down," if this outgassing might not have been an impact
event?
Baillie takes us through the science with hard numbers and graphs
and shows us how these things were spoken about plainly by those who
experienced the Black Death but, for some reason, modern historians
all think these remarks about rains of fire and death and air that
could kill were all just metaphors for a horrible disease.
In the
end, it is the science that must win on this one because totally
independent workers studying comets, tsunami, carbon dioxide, ice
cores and tree rings all observe in their data something very
strange happening globally around the time that the Black Death
decimated the human population of the Earth.
Baillie notes in his closing remarks, worth repeating here:
It is increasingly evident that intellectually the world is divided
into two.
There are those who study the past, in the fields of
history and archaeology, and see no evidence for any human
populations ever having been affected by impacts from space. In
diametric opposition to this stance there are those who study the
objects that come close to, and sometimes collide with, this planet.
Some serious members of this latter group have no doubt whatsoever
that there must have been numerous devastating impacts in the last
five millennia; the period of human civilization.
And yet, nobody talks about it.
There really is quite sufficient data presented in Baillie's book to
support the theory that the Black Death was due to an impact by
Comet Debris - similar to the impacts on Jupiter by the fragments of
Comet Shoemaker-Levy back in 1994.
As to exactly how these deaths
occurred, there are a number of possibilities:
earthquakes, floods
(tsunami), rains of fire, chemicals released by the high-energy
explosions in the atmosphere, including ammonium and hydrogen
cyanide, and possibly even comet born disease pathogens.
If it has happened as often as Baillie suggests, it can happen
again.
And if, as we suspect, the Earth is slated for a bombardment
in the not too distant future, it seems that there are more ways to
die in such an event than just getting hit by a comet fragment.
The Black Death
The Legends of Fire Breathing Dragons may have
originated from Cometary disasters
New Light on the Black Death: The Cosmic Connection by dendrochronologist
Mike Baillie of Queen's University, Belfast,
Ireland, published by Tempus, 2006.
Dr Mike Baillie is a Professor Emeritus of Palaeoecology in the
School of Archaeology and Palaeoecology at Queen's University of
Belfast in Northern Ireland.
Baillie is a leading expert in dendrochronology, or dating by means
of tree-rings. In the 1980s, he was instrumental in building a
year-by-year chronology of tree-ring growth reaching 7,400 years
into the past.
Back to Contents
|
