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

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 History's Greatest Mysteries. 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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Carter sets the scene.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Connor brings the facts, the deep cuts and the occasional British accent.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  The wildest stuff is real and trust me, it is a wild ride.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  New episodes every Wednesday.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  This is Rewind.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  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,

• 1:21Speaker 01

  oh, no.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  A giant meteorite strikes the earth. Goodbye dinosaurs.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Connor and I am here to bring the charm and humor and maybe a British accent or two to your history lesson.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  And I am Carter Roy. I will be your guide through history. What happened? How it happened and why it happened.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  Follow wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review to help us build this community.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  So today we have three years, three very real stories and one question. Which one was actually the worst?

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Carter, has anything terrible ever happened in your life? And then something unexpectedly good came of it.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  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 pandemic happened. How about you?

• 2:39Speaker 00

  Me? I actually started watching more shows to help pass the tide. And honestly, it made me rethink the fantasy genre altogether. Like how some things that could have happened in the Middle Ages could happen in modern day.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  Hidden, you know?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Totally. So it made you rethink everything a little bit.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  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?

• 3:24Speaker 00

  Oh, I think it's going to get pretty, pretty, pretty bad.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  It is gonna get pretty bad.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Do you know which year a 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.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the 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?

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Oh, I can imagine how terrible it would be. How miserable everyone would be.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Finally.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes. All anyone wants to do is have a normal summer.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  But what happens?

• 4:29Speaker 00

  1816, no summer.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  No summer. In New England, it snows in June?

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  Crazy.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Crazy enough to bury new crops and kill birds right where they sit.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  That's so sad.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  So sad. Can you imagine looking out and just seeing dead frozen birds? In July, the hard frosts turns the corn black. The people who lived through it called 1816, 1800, and froze to death.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  Yes, they had some kind of sense of humor back then and trying to make the best out of a bad thing.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  In Europe, grain rotted from Switzerland to Ireland. Bread prices doubled, then doubled again. There were food riots across France, Belgium, Switzerland. People were eating bread cut with sawdust.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  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.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  You won't see me eating bread with sawdust, no. Okay. In Switzerland, families were boiling weeds and eating the family cat.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  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.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  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 Yangtze 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 weather in the Bay of Bengal. The first truly global pandemic. Tens of millions of people dead over the following century.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  I thought this Pepsi was bad.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Every bit of it traces back to one mountain. Okay, before I tell you which one, what's your guess?

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Krakatoa, maybe?

• 6:22Speaker 01

  That's what I would have guessed. That's the only one I know.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  But no, it was Tambora. 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 III, Revenge of the Sith. That scene where Anakin and Obi-Wan were fighting on Mustafar, right where they were grappling, there was a huge blast of lava. That was Mount Etna erupting.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  I mean, so they have the real Mount Etna in the background? And then they, yeah, made it look like it's erupting? Well, this is about as bad as it gets. It was April 10th, 1815. And as you said, Tambora in the island of Zimbabwe, 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?

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Um, probably about, well, if the explosion was loud enough, maybe 10,000 miles or more. Or I mean, I thought Pompeii's destruction by Mount Vesuvius was bad.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  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 last. So, whoa.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, crazy.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Crazy. Okay, so Mount St. Helens in 1980, that's a VEI V. Krakatoa, 1883, a VEI VI. Tambora was a VEI VII. So that'd be 100 times, uh, 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, changed life.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  You know, this is, you're gonna 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, I was actually in Hawaii once. I saw exotic plants.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  Stuff you would never see back here in the mainland.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  And right, all that volcanic ash makes it so fertile. And yeah, Mount St. Helens, when it, as a kid, I couldn't believe it. It's one of those things you're like, I didn't know this actually happened, volcanoes exploding. And I'm imagining it like, the Tambora being that loud, it'd almost be like Helm's Deep. You know, when the, the urukhai are coming and there's that like,

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, the fire. They were putting fire pots into a drain at the base of the wall.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yes, and then it went and you're like, what? Like, nobody'd ever seen anything like this before.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  And that berserker took his own life just to blow the wall.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Remember they're like, hit him, hit him. Except for the volcano.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Arrow after arrow Legolas shot and not one could bring down that uruk.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  No, well, that's basically what Krakatoa was. And then Tambora 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 Edvard Munch's The Scream.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  And now we know it might be 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.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  One degree? That was all it took?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Right, which doesn't seem like much at all. One degree in the wrong year canceled summer across an entire hemisphere.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  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.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Is that where like sharks are still sort of prehistoric because they survive.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  There are many living fossils today. Fun fact for you. Sharks, skates, rays, sea lechamps, turtles and crocodiles.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Are all like vestiges from that.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Living fossils.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  And then.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  A giant meteorite strikes the earth. Goodbye dinosaurs.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Okay, now the part you did not see coming because 1816 is not only doomed. 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 rented 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.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  How about a little competition?

• 12:12Speaker 01

  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 Shelley.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Author of one of the most famous horror novels ever written.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  Oh, that's sounds a lot like a familiar book. I wonder which one it would be.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Let's see, a doctor who creates a monster who rises, maybe with lightning, helping animate it. Could it be?

• 12:59Speaker 00

  Frankenstein.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Frankenstein, written at 18, very impressive. What many consider the first true science fiction novel.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  And contrary to popular belief, Carter, Frankenstein isn't the monster itself. Frankenstein's the name of the guy who creates the creature, although, oh, I believe the creature, as it's more known as, or the wretch, Victor Frankenstein was trying to discover the secret of life. Prove to his colleagues that that death could be undone, reversed. But when his creature was created, he was terrified by its monstrous appearance.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  All that poor creature wanted to do was exist. He did nothing wrong and everyone wanted him dead.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Totally, right? You think of all the monsters that are like, ah, evil, bad. And yet Frankenstein, well, the wretch, right, wanted to be good, wanted to fit in, wanted to be loved.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  He wanted to belong, to not be alone.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  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 physicians catches out the vampire. Dracula, the first suave aristocratic vampire in English fiction, the direct ancestor of Dracula. So every, every brooding vampire you've ever encountered includes you, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in interviews for vampire.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  And Antonio Banderas, don't forget him.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  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?

• 15:05Speaker 00

  Okay, let's see. Dracula Untold with Luke Evans, I'd put that at around a five. Bram Stoker's Dracula, 10. Who could go wrong with Gary Oldman?

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Oh, you cannot.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  If my sister's watching. Sorry, Anna, but on the subject of Twilight, don't get me wrong. I thought it was good, but overall I give it a, a four and a half.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Okay, not quite a five. Yeah. And of course it's cross genre because it's got vampires and.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  Werewolves.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  I'm more of a werewolf guy anyway.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, that's a whole other time. Well, talk 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 race dying and cold and black. He had no idea that he was describing something that had literally already happened.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Really?

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Okay, a last thing. In Germany, the cold killed the oat crop. So horses starved and people were slaughtering animals. They could not feed. And a German inventor named Carl von Dreyes asks, well, what if there was another way to get around? A, um, yeah, two wheeled machine you straddle and push with your feet? The great grandfather of the bicycle invented because a volcano killed the horses.

• 16:22Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Poor horses.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  No, 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 it's 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.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  Oh, yes.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  I'll be right back.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  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.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Oof, that had to be some real tough breaks.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Yes, it was tough times then. Okay, Connor, do you, uh, know already about the Black Death?

• 17:47Speaker 00

  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, hungry rats. And they began contracting fleas. Those rats later, they stowed away in the cargo holds of ships bound for Europe.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, the plague breaks out. Soldiers dying by the thousands, the attackers, load their own infected dead onto catapults and fling the corpses over the city walls.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  What barbarism.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. In fact, by the First World War, Germany was using an anthrax as a weapon of biological warfare.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, just kept evolving over time. Now, what would you think if you were in the city? Getting bombarded, can you imagine what it would be like to look up and see like corpses flying over the walls, landing in the streets?

• 19:28Speaker 00

  Oh, that, that would be strange and ultimately sickening, both literally and figuratively.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's getting close to like the heart of Europe.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  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.

• 20:29Speaker 01

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

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Definitely.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  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, uh, people were dead within three days. Yeah. So basically people went to bed well and didn't see the end of the week.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  I understand. I had flu B once and man, was it agonizing.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  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 five or six million to under three million within a generation.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  Modern science would have been considered witchcraft.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  If they, 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.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Today, a course of antibiotics clears it up in 1348. The idea of germs was five centuries away, so people tried everything. Bleeding the patient, packing the boobos 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, uh, chicken? The belief that chickens breathe through their backsides? So they'd pluck the feathers off live.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  That's ridiculous.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  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 gets sick, just try again.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  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.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Right? If you get mercury poisoning, don't you go a little, a little nuts?

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, before you finally die.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  So they were trying that, obviously 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?

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Si, brava.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Grazie. That is the word we still reach for every time the world faces a new disease. Quarantine, a word the Black Death left behind.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  Smart.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, right? They, they finally realized 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, uh, 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.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  You mean like this?

• 24:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  The lenses here and 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.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Amazing, but that I see, but that's, so that's 250 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. Folklorists have basically debunked 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.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  And a good thing, too. I mean, nursery rhymes that come from dark things make people a little uneasy. You want a creepy nursery rhyme? Watch A Nightmare on Elm Street. Whenever Freddy Krueger'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.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  That's right. Well, I won't spoil it, but don't go to bed. And, uh, 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.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  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 have lived during that era. Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo, just to name a few.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  And who knows, might not have come to pass if not for the Black Death before it.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  But if you thought those two years were bad, little year number three.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Two down and one to go. I am describing this one without naming it. The other two are 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?

• 27:29Speaker 00

  I gotta say, Carter, you've got this history buff stumped.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  And the only way we ever figured out why was a grad student, a glacier, and a laser. And the year is 536 CE.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  Lasers in that time?

• 27:58Speaker 01

  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, uh, take on Justinian?

• 28:23Speaker 00

  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 horse trough things full of running water, all triumphs of this time.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Incredible. He accomplished so much and really advanced his civilization in so many ways. So you'd think, oh, he's gonna do it. This is gonna make the Roman Empire live for another thousand years.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  But it does not work out like that.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  In fact, both Theodora 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.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Totally 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. Yeah. Early in 536, a strange dry fog rolled in across Europe, the 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. Cassadorius 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."

• 30:16Speaker 00

  If the sun stopped working, I'd probably be panicking. I would probably try prayers. I'd try, I offerings.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  I'd probably stay indoors for a while and like try to write it out, watch a lot of TV.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  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 Polysium, a Roman port in Egypt, and it just spreads like wildfire. Uh, 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.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  Oh, so this is like Black Death 1.0 and the Black Death itself is like the sequel.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  And it guts the Eastern Roman Empire. Between a third and a half of the population dead, 25 to 50 million people.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  It's like, it's like every era, there's like a, a huge plague. We recently recovered from COVID-19.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Could have been a lot worse.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  Wow. That sounds like the worst possible year to live in.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  So basically, Justinian's plague led to the medieval era.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  And then the Black Death 2.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  Led to the Renaissance.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Bingo. Yeah.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  So it's sort of like, yeah, the world, whatever stasis the world is in, the Black Death wobbles it so much that a whole new world is born after it.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Judgment Day.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Judgment Day, bad. And yeah, we do, we live in a much different world already. Who knows like 100 years from now what they'll look back and say about this world now. So for almost 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, uh, pages in a book.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  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, uh, remember that Lord Byron poem Darkness, written during that worst summer in centuries?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Imagining the sun going out and the human race dying in cold and black?

• 35:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  It kind of reminds me of like how in the history of House Targaryen, Daenerys the Dreamer, a daughter of Aeryn Targaryen, foresaw the doom of Valyria in a dream, something that hadn't even happened yet at the time.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Until 12 years after her dream.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  And in the Odyssey, Cersei 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.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  But that is another story for another time.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  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?

• 36:10Speaker 00

  Probably the 536 because not only were people dying around you, there was no light, no warmth, no hope.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  I mean, it's hard to argue since, right? It's like the double whammy. It's like.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  The plague and the sun. The only thing that.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  Double whammy.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Might make me think about 1816 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?

• 37:02Speaker 00

  There was, there's 2019 to 2020, the year COVID-19 hit. September 11th, 2001, 79 AD, Pompeii, Mount Vesuvius erupts and destroys an entire city.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  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?

• 37:33Speaker 00

  And follow wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review so we can keep building this community.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Until then, the wildest stuff is real.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  And the real stuff is wilder than you think. That's a fact.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Thanks for checking out What the Fact?

• 37:51Speaker 00

  For new episodes every Wednesday, follow What the Fact on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.