Medieval chroniclers recorded and described all kinds of historical events, such as the deeds of kings and popes, great battles, natural disasters and famines. The celestial phenomena likely to announce calamities were, for them, just as remarkable.
Having in mind the Apocalypse, this vision of the end of time which speaks of a blood-red Moon, the monks were particularly attentive to the coloring of the nocturnal star, especially during eclipses, UNIGE said on Wednesday. in a press release.
Of the 64 total lunar eclipses that occurred in Europe between 1100 and 1300, chroniclers have faithfully documented 51. In five of these cases, they reported that the Moon was unusually dark, suggesting that a A very large volcanic eruption threw dust into the stratosphere.
Five years of work
It took nearly five years to sift through hundreds of annals and chronicles from across Europe and the Middle East, looking for references to total lunar eclipses and their coloring. Researchers from the study also discovered that Japanese scribes took note of lunar eclipses.
“The darkest lunar eclipses have all occurred regarding a year following major volcanic eclipses. Knowing the exact days of the eclipses gave us the ability to use these observations to pinpoint when the eclipses must have occurred. happen”, explains Sébastien Guillet, scientific collaborator at the UNIGE Institute of Environmental Sciences, quoted in the press release.
One of the most active volcanic periods
The population might not then imagine that bad harvests or unusual lunar eclipses had a connection with volcanoes. The eruptions themselves were not documented. These results are all the more important since the period between 1100 and 1300 is known, according to ice cores, to be one of the most volcanically active.
Of the fifteen eruptions considered in the study, one, which occurred in the mid-13th century, rivals the famous Tambora eruption of 1815, which resulted in the “year without a summer” of 1816. The collective effect of medieval eruptions on Earth’s climate may have led to the Little Ice Age, sometime between the early 14th and late 19th centuries, the authors say.
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