Hell on Earth 1258: Volcanic Eruptions, Famine and the Medieval Year Without Summer

The Babad Lombok is an 800 year old chronicle written on palm leaves by the indigenous peoples of the Indonesian island of Lombok.

Today the island of Lombok is home to over three million people.  Lombok’s prime tropical location makes the remote volcanic island one of Indonesia’s most popular tourist destinations.

However, nearly eight centuries ago, in the year 1257, the tropical paradise of Lombok was the site of one of the most powerful and destructive volcanic eruptions in recorded history--the eruption of Mount Samalas.

The Babad Lombok 

Scientists believe that the Samalas eruption may have registered as a 7 on the modern day Volcanic Explosivity Index, or VEI, which would make Samalas the most powerful eruption in the past 12 millenia.

In an instant, sometime most probably in the autumn of 1257, ten square miles of the top of Mount Samalas literally exploded and shot as high as twenty-five miles into the sky. 

Ash from the 1257 eruption of the Samalas volcano rained down from the heavens on the distant island of Java more than 300 miles away from Lombok itself.  Eruption columns, large plumes of black smoke and debris from the Samalas eruption, reached dozens of miles skyward into the earth’s atmosphere.

The after-effects of the eruption would be felt worldwide for decades to come, and what happened in faraway Indonesia in 1257, would cause chroniclers in medieval Europe on the other side of the globe to label 1258 as the Year Without Summer.

Local witnesses recorded in the Babad Lombok, “Mount Samalas collapsed.  All houses were destroyed and swept away, floating on the seas, and many people died.  For seven days big earthquakes shook the earth.”

In the immediate aftermath of the eruption the city of Pamatan, the ancient capital of Lombok Island, literally ceased to exist and remains, to this day, buried under hundreds of feet of volcanic ash.  The ancient site of the once thriving royal Indonesian city of Pamatan is now buried and overgrown by jungle vegetation and waiting still to be rediscovered by some future generation.

Site of the 1257 Mount Samalas Eruption

And unfortunately for medieval Europe the calamitous effects of the Mount Samalas eruption were by no means limited to Lombok Island and faraway Indonesia.

Though Europeans at the time had no way of knowing that it was a volcanic eruption in the south Pacific which so dramatically affected their world, medieval chroniclers definitely knew that something drastic had happened and made 1258 Hell on earth.

In France and England observers reported that a dry and dusty fog had settled over all the land that year and obscured the sun for months on end destroying crops and leading to devastating famine.  English and French monks describe having to perpetually walk through smoke for an entire year.   It was said that upwards of 20,000 people died from starvation in London and Paris alone during the year 1258.

Noted Benedictine monk Matthew Paris, an erudite historian, author and artist born around the year 1200 recorded odd changes in weather patterns and the effects of famine in England that came about as a result of the Samalas eruption.

“Swollen and rotting in groups of five or six the dead lay abandoned in pigsties, on dunghills, and in the muddy streets,”  recorded Matthew Paris chronicler of St. Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire, England.

Paris reported that in August of 1258 the weather was unseasonably cold with temperatures dropping below freezing and sleet and ice storms befalling the beleaguered people of his parish.  Thousands froze to death or died from exposure in August and September of 1258.  Paris goes on to say that it rained for weeks on end. 

It is believed by many historians that Paris himself, who died in 1259 at around the age of sixty, may have fallen victim to the very famine that he recorded in his illuminated manuscripts.

Matthew Parris as Depicted in 13th Century Manuscript

In an effort to stave off imminent starvation Lords and the aristocracy in England and France began to import grain from Germany and as far away as Poland, but the price of basic foodstuffs became so inflated due to low crop yields across Europe, with temperatures even in Italy rarely rising above freezing for all of 1258, that mass famine quickly set in across the continent and brought death to serfs and royalty alike.

In 1991 Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted and the fallout from the eruption of Pinatubo that year decreased the amount of sunlight that reached the earth in 1991 by about 10% when compared to year over year data and caused the average worldwide temperature to drop 0.7 degrees.  It is believed that the eruption of Samalas in late 1257 may have been as much as six times more powerful than the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991.  If this is the case, as the evidence of medieval chroniclers across Europe would suggest, then the average temperature on earth in 1258 would have fallen nearly 4 full degrees Fahrenheit and the amount of overall sunlight reaching the earth that year would have decreased by more than half!

Eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991

Europe in 1258 was suddenly plunged into dark and perpetual winter, causing famine for decades to come, driving up inflation and ensuring that European society moved backwards into a static state of perpetual serfdom and indentured servitude just at a time when improvements in labor and agriculture were moving western society forward into the economic and intellectual renaissance of the high Middle Ages.

Oddly enough, though historians who study medieval chronicles had known for centuries that 1258 was considered the “Year Without Summer” as recorded in the contemporary sources, it wasn’t until as recently as 2013 that either scientists, or historians, had any real idea of why such anomalous weather events had occurred in specifically that year.

Archaeologists at the beginning of the 21st century found several mass graves on the outskirts of London dating from around the mid thirteenth century.  All of the bones discovered in these mass graves showed evidence of starvation and death by exposure consistent with medieval reports of famine and extremely frigid temperatures for the year 1258.

Though researchers throughout history guessed that their had been some sort of volcanic eruption in the mid thirteenth century that caused the anomalous events of 1258 it was not until a study published by a team of scientists in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) in September of 2013 entitled “Source of the Great A.D. 1257 Mystery Eruption Unveiled, Samalas Volcano, Rinjani Volcanic Complex, Indonesia” that researchers could finally after nearly 800 years of speculation confirm that the eruption of Mount Samalas definitively caused the medieval European year without summer in 1258.

Researchers using a combination of data from ice core samples, petrified tree ring data and firsthand records from medieval chroniclers and primary sources such as the Babad Lombok were able to say with certainty that Mount Samalas erupted sometime during the second half of 1257 and turned the world’s climate upside down for all of 1258.

Medieval Farming 

The climatological changes wrought by the eruption of Mount Samalas would go on to plague Europe, and the world, with continued famine, disease and decreased temperatures for decades to come.  The eruption of Mount Samalas was definitely a large contributing factor for what climatologists and historians have dubbed “The Little Ice Age” a period of time lasting roughly from the end of the twelfth century to the start of the nineteenth century that saw a decrease in overall temperature and an increase in rainy weather and severe storms across all of Europe and North America.

Over five-hundred years after the eruption of Mount Samalas, another eruption, this one also in Indonesia, on Mount Tambora would plunge Europe and America into another “Year Without Summer” in 1816.  And once again, within only a few generations, Mount Krakatoa on Java would erupt in 1883 and cause great upheaval around the world by blotting out the sun for weeks on end.

1258 may have been a year that was truly Hell on earth and the source of that Hell, the eruption of Mount Samalas in Indonesia may have remained shrouded in scientific and historical mystery for nearly 800 years, but with our modern knowledge of history, it is definitely only a matter of time before another massive volcano erupts somewhere, anywhere, in the remote south Pacific and plunges us all, yet again, into a Year Without Summer.