Re: Historical Events Database
As I was reading through my text that I wrote mostly in 2012 before I cut out the first part of it to make "Comets and the Horns of Moses" (it is a REALLY long text that will become several books), I thought that I would do some checking on this Paul the Deacon business in comparison to what I already had on Gregory of Tours (which you can read in the above attached doc).
Anyway, from the footnotes of "History of the Langobard", we learn that the first pestilence even is dated to 566 AD and the Flying Dragons and Flood is dated to 589 AD, almost 23 years later.
Gregory was born in 539, allegedly, in the vicinity of the year of the "dust veil event" reported by Cassiodorus and others dated to 536.
So, here's the chronology. My words from the text are in italics, current comments in blue, quoted segments of Gregory and PtD in regular font (with some bolding), and quotes from some other texts in quote boxes:
536 - Dust Veil Event
539 - GoT born.
545
The plague moved into southern Gaul. Gregory was six years old. It is commonly said that up to 40% of the population was taken out by this first pass of the epidemic, but it may actually have been more. So the world that Gregory lived in as a child was not just in the process of a very rapid transition, it was in ruins. This may have been the reason that his education was so lacking: the deaths of all of those who could have provided a good, classical education.
557
Constantinople fell to a destructive earthquake. Gregory was eighteen. Justinian’s dreams of re-creating the Imperial unity of Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East had already gone down in flames, but the Eastern Empire picked itself up and stumbled on for much longer than the West.
{Constantinople recovered somewhat, but we can't forget that it had been devastated by the plague beginning in 542, and then this massive earthquake. As I've noted before, the populace was probably pretty hostile toward Christianity and this needed to be written out of the history. So if there were elite churchmen who survived in enclaves/monasteries, they were busy doing this. Also, I should note that the growing popularity of hermit trend may have been a reaction to the plague.}
558-1, i.e. 557
The previous year much of the city of Tours had been burnt down and man of its churches had been left desolate.
563
Two swarms of locusts appeared at this time. They passed through Auvergne and the Limousin and are said to have penetrated as far as the plain of Romagnat. There they fought a great battle and many were killed.
A great prodigy appeared in Gaul at the fortress of Tauredunum, which was situated on high ground above the River Rhône. Here
a curious bellowing sound was heard for more than sixty days: then the whole hillside was split open and separated from the mountain nearest to it, and it fell into the river, carrying with it men, churches, property and houses. The banks of the river were blocked and the water flowed backwards. This place was shut in by mountains on both sides, for the stream flows there through narrow defiles. The water then flooded the higher reaches and submerged and carried away everything which was on its banks.
A second time the inhabitants were taken unawares, and as the accumulated water forced its way through again it drowned those who lived there, just as it had done higher up, destroying their houses, killing their cattle, and carrying away and overwhelming with its violent and unexpected inundation everything which stood on its banks as far as the city of Geneva.
Many people maintained that the volume of water was so great that it flowed right over the walls of Geneva: and this is doubtless possible, for, as I have told you, at this spot the Rhône runs through mountainous defiles and, once its course was blocked, there was nowhere for it to turn on either side. It burst through the mountain which had fallen into it and washed everything away.
When all this had happened,
thirty monks made their way to the spot where the fortress had collapsed, dug into the earth beneath where the landslide had occurred and found there bronze and iron. While they were busy at their task, they once more heard the
bellowing of the mountain. So strong was their lust for gain that they took no notice: and a part of the hillside which had not previously collapsed now fell on top of them. It buried them completely and their dead bodies were never recovered.
{The above has elements that we recognize from the story of the flood in Italy by Paul the Deacon. Is the above actually derived from events in Italy, transposed to Gaul by "Gregory"? Notice that the date of this event is assumed to be 563 while the "pestilence event" of Paul the Deacon which we think MUST be part of the 589 Flood event, was dated to 566.}
The similarity of this event to the one accounted in respect of the Euphrates river, dated to 529, in the ZUQNIN CHRONICLE is striking. What is also striking is the story of the greedy monks and its similarity to John of Ephesus’ description of the tsunami associated with the Beirut earthquake of 551. Not to worry: we are going to discuss these problems when we finish with our chronology from Gregory.
{Here comes the History of the Langobards event though the text I got it from had a different date assigned to it, not 566, but 564. I leave it with my comments written at the time, 2012, that is.}
564
In the times of this man [Narses] a very great pestilence broke out, particularly in the province of Liguria. For suddenly there appeared certain marks among the dwellings, doors, utensils and clothes, which (marks), if anyone wanted to wash away, became more and more apparent. [This appears to be the fall of atmospheric dust]
After the lapse of a year indeed there began to appear in the groins of men and in other rather delicate places a swelling of the glands, after the manner of a nut or a date, presently followed by an unbearable fever, so that upon the third day the man died. But if anyone should pass over the third day, he had a hope of living.
Everywhere there was grief, and everywhere tears. For as common report had it that those who fled would avoid the plague, the dwellings were left deserted by their inhabitants, and the dogs only kept house. The flocks remained alone in the pastures with no shepherd at hand. You might see villas or fortified places lately filled with crowds of men, and on the next day all had departed and everything was in utter silence.
Sons fled, leaving the corpses of their parents unburied; parents forgetful of their duty abandoned their children in raging fever. If by chance long standing affection constrained anyone to bury his near relative, he himself remained unburied, as while he was performing the funeral rites he perished: while he offered obsequies to the dead, his own corpse remained without obsequies.
You might see the world brought back to its ancient silence: no voice in the field; no whistling of shepherds; no lying in wait of wild beasts among the cattle; no harm to domestic fowls. The crops, outliving the time of the harvest, awaited the reaper untouched; the vineyard with its fallen leaves and its shinning grapes remained undisturbed while winter came on.
A trumpet as of warriors resounded through the hours of the day and night: something like the murmur of an army was heard by many. There were not footsteps of passers by, no murderer was seen, yet the corpses of the dead were more than the eye could discern. Pastoral places had been turned into sepulchres for men, while the dwellings of men had become places of refuge for wild beasts.
Paul the Deacon adds that the plague only affected the Romans and those in Italy up to its northern borders: as was seen before, the germanic tribes to the north do not seem to have been immediately affected by an outbreak of the plague. It may have been due to their high meat diet.
565
Justinian died. Gregory was twenty-six.
571
This account follows the passage dated to 563, above, about the Rhône River being blocked. Thorpe dates this to 571 though he does not indicate why.
Before the great plague which ravaged
Auvergne prodigies terrified the people of that region in the same way. On a number of occasions
three or four great shining lights appeared round the sun, and these the country folk also called suns. ‘Look!’ they shouted. ‘There are now three or four suns in the sky!’
{Thanks to photos taken in the past few years, we are now familiar with this phenomenon due to changes in the atmosphere, comet dust loading, ice crystals, etc.}
Once,
on the first day of October, the sun was in eclipse, so that
less than a quarter of it continued to shine, and the rest was so dark and discoloured that you would have said that it was made of sackcloth. Then
a star, which some call a comet, appeared over the region for a whole year, with a tail like a sword, and the whole sky seemed to burn and many other portents were seen. In one of the churches of
Clermont-Ferrand, while early-morning matins were being celebrated on some feast-day or other, a bird called a crested lark flew in, spread its wings over all the lamps which were shining and put them out so quickly that you would have thought that someone had seized hold of them all at once and dropped them into a pool of water. It then flew into the sacristy, under the curtain, and tried to extinguish the candle there, but the vergers managed to catch it and they killed it. In the same way another bird put out the lamps lighted in Saint Andrew’s church.
{Notice how Gregory is locating these events in Gaul and also notice the arbitrary re-dating of the event by Thorpe, referenced above. Gregory has this event right after the "flood" that we recognize as being similar to the flood of Verona and Rome along with the portents in the skies, trumpet sounds, flaming swords (comets) etc. However, there are other events further on that could be associated with the Verona/Rome flood. Keep in mind one thing: there was 27 feet of mud piled up in Rome, so we have a pretty secure idea that it WAS ROME that was destroyed by some event, along with the whole Western part of the Empire.}
As E. P. Grondine has noted, this passage may indicate plague-infected birds as it is immediately followed by the plague.
{At this point, I'd be more inclined to think that the activity of the birds was more in the way of panic of animals induced by EM waves of some sort! Notice also that Gregory immediately segues into the plague story so that supports the idea that the plague followed the flood just as PtD says about the Verona/Rome floods.}
When the plague finally began to rage, so many people were killed off throughout the whole region and the dead bodies were so numerous that it was not even possible to count them. There was such a shortage of coffins and tombstones that ten or more bodies were buried in the same grave. In Saint Peter’s church alone on a single Sunday three hundred dead bodies were counted. Death came very quickly.
An open sore like a snake’s bite appeared in the groin or the armpit, and the man who had it soon died of its poison, breathing his last on the second or third day. The virulence of the poison made the victim unconscious. …
573
Gregory was elected bishop of Tours. Shortly after, the weight of responsibility (as he describes it) impelled him to chronicle the events of the past and his own time. He wrote in his introduction:
A great many things keep happening, some of the good, some of them bad.
The inhabitants of different countries keep quarrelling fiercely with each other and kings go on losing their temper in the most furious way. … However, no writer has come to the fore who has been sufficiently skilled in setting things down in an orderly fashion to be able to describe these events in prose or in verse.
In fact in the towns of Gaul the writing of literature had declined to the point where it has virtually disappeared altogether. Many people have complained about this, not once but time and time again. “What a poor period this is!” they have been heard to say. “if among all our people there is not one man to be found who can write a book about what is happening today, the pursuit of letters really is dead in us!”
I have often thought about these complaints and others like them. I have written this work to keep alive the memory of those dead and gone, and to bring them to the notice of future generations.
As mentioned above, the world in which Gregory wrote was not the Roman Empire of his illustrious ancestors. There had been massive depopulation and hardships already for many years. The carriers of the old culture were obviously dead and gone. Notice this remark of Gregory’s: “… in the towns of Gaul the writing of literature had declined to the point where it has virtually disappeared altogether.” Considering that upper class Romans understood their status mainly in terms of their abilities with rhetoric and letters, this is a shocking revelation. The ancient Roman attitudes of superiority by virtue of class and education (including impeccable speech and writing) had been warped by the Church when the senatorial classes had found refuge there after losing their government authority to the barbarians. After conversion, they were superior by virtue of religion, salvation, divine inspiration and education was no longer of any value. That, alone, did tremendous damage to learning.
The knowledge of the Pagan historians was denigrated by the church, an attitude Gregory inhaled in the air he breathed as he grew up, and thus, for the Western Empire, knowledge of the classical past seems to have been taking its last ragged breaths at the time Gregory was writing. After him, it ceased entirely for a very long time. Fortunately, it was preserved in Byzantium but it seems that there was less and less communication between the Churches in the East and West. After Gregory, even more terrible things than he chronicled, as we will see, must have happened to bring on the darkness so completely. And it was in that darkness that the miscegenation of Barbarianism and Christianism brought forth the what we know as the Roman Catholic Church.
Gregory was right there on every occasion possible, utilizing that tendency to manipulate, shame, or harass the rulers with his Christian interpretations of their actions. There is no way to avoid looking at the Barbarian environment. As the translator of his work writes:
The History of the Franks is spattered with the blood and festering pus, it re-echoes with the animal screams of men and women being tortured unto death: yet Gregory never once questions this effective method of exacting confession, implicating confederates, or simply satisfying the blood-lust of Queens and Kings.
Gregory’s idea of how a king could be a good Christian was to give lots of loot to the Church. In all other respects, this barbarian lifestyle suited the methods of the Church itself, it seems and truly, what became the Roman Catholic Church in the end was more Frankish Barbarian than Roman.
577
…While we were still hanging about in Paris portents appeared in the sky.
Twenty rays of light appeared in the north, starting in the east, and then moving round to the west. One of them was longer than the others and shone high above them: it reached right up into the sky and then disappeared, and the others faded away, too. In my opinion they were a presage of Merovech’s death.
My first thought about this was “aurora borealis”. However, the description doesn’t quite fit that. It seems that Gregory and his friends may have seen the ion tails of a close comet that was fragmenting or a cluster of fragments. Mike Baillie writes in THE CELTIC GODS: COMETS IN IRISH MYTHOLOGY:
Because of their friable nature, comets have a tendency to break apart when they are subjected to the tidal forces of a planet. When this happens, each fragment can then become a comet in its own right. […]
…Comets have a dust tail and an ion tail. The dust tail is generally curved following the elliptical path of the comet and can be interpreted as hair, or a beard or column. The ion tail is made of gas that has been excited by the solar wind to emit light; we could think of this as an extremely long fluorescent tube in the sky. The ion tails stream away in a straight shaft of fluorescent light from the comet, in contrast to the curved tail of ejected dust and gas. Comets can have one or more ion tails.
The cluster moved to the west and disappeared, possibly landing in the ocean or simply burning out in the atmosphere. That whatever it was passed very close to the earth is evidenced by the rapidity of movement.
Three years later, it seems that another large chunk came along only this time, it didn’t burn out in the atmosphere or just pass over and out to sea. Further, it seems that this one came from the West. Further, there were weather perturbations in advance of the event which, based on all the history I have reviewed, seems to be related to cometary activity. The experts, Baillie, Clube, Napier, Bailey, and others, suggest that this is due to the comet dust loading of the atmosphere during periods when the earth is moving into such streams. This means that we can identify such periods by unusual or extreme weather even if there are no obvious impact/air-burst events. However, in our own day, we are having the weather anomalies and plenty of fireballs and smaller impact events; we just haven’t had a big one… yet.
{There's another possible interpretation to all these "rays" things that Gregory recorded: plasma phenomena.}
When I was celebrating Mass on Saint Martin’s Eve, which is 11 November, a remarkable portent was seen in the middle of the night.
A bright star was seen shining in the very centre of the moon, and other stars appeared close to the moon, above it and below. Round the moon stretched the circle which is usually a sign of rain. I have no idea what all this meant. This same year
the moon often appeared in eclipse and there were
loud claps of thunder just before Christmas.
The meteors which country folk call suns and which were seen before the plague in Clermont-Ferrand, as I have told you in an earlier book, also appeared round the sun. I was told that
the sea rose higher than usual, and there were
many other signs and wonders.
580
In the fifth year of King Childebert’s reign,
great floods devastated parts of Auvergne. The rain continued for twelve days and the Limagne was under such a depth of water that all sowing had to cease. The River Loire, the River Allier (which used to be called the Flavaris) and the mountain-streams which run into this latter were so swollen that they rose higher above the flood-level than ever before. Many cattle were drowned, the crops were ruined and buildings inundated.
The river Rhone, at the spot where it meets the Saone, overflowed its banks and brought heavy loss to the inhabitants,
undermining parts of the city walls of Lyons. When the rains stopped, the trees came out in leaf once more, although by now it was September.
In Touraine this same year, one morning before the day had dawned,
a bright light was seen to traverse the sky and then disappear in the East. A sound as of trees crashing to the ground was heard throughout the whole region, but it can hardly have been a tree for it was audible over fifty miles and more.
In this same year again the city of
Bordeaux was sadly shaken by an earthquake.
The city walls were in great danger of collapsing. The entire populace was filled with the fear of death, for they imagined that they would be swallowed up with their city unless they fled. Many of them escaped to neighboring townships. This terrible disaster followed them to the places where they had sought refuge and extended even into Spain, but there it was less serious.
Huge rocks came cascading down from the mountain-peaks of the Pyrenees, crushing in their wake the local inhabitants and their cattle.
Villages around Bordeaux were burned by a fire sent from heaven: it took so swift a hold that homesteads and threshing-floors with the grain still spread out on them were reduced to ashes. There was no other apparent cause of this fire, and it must have come from God.
The city of Orleans blazed with a great conflagration. Even the richer citizens lost their all, and if anyone managed to salvage anything from the flames it was immediately snatched away by the thieves who crowded around. Somewhere near Chartres blood poured forth when a loaf of bread was broken in two. At the same time the city of
Bourges was scourged by a hailstorm.
A most serious epidemic followed these prodigies. While the kings were quarrelling with each other,
dysentery spread throughout the whole of Gaul. Those who caught it had a high temperature, with vomiting and severe pains in the small of the back: their heads ached and so did their necks. The matter they vomited up was yellow or even green. Many people maintained that some secret poison must be the cause of this. The country-folk imagined that they had boils inside their bodies; and actually this is not as silly as it sounds, for as soon as cupping-glasses were applied to their shoulders or legs, great tumors formed and when these burst and discharged their pus they were cured. Many recovered their health by drinking herbs which are known to be antidotes to poisons.
The epidemic began in the month of August. It attacked young children first of all and to them it was fatal: and so we lost our little ones, who were so dear to us and sweet, whom we had cherished in our bosoms and dandled in our arms, whom we had fed and nurtured with such loving care. As I write I wipe away my tears and I repeat once more the words of Job the blessed: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away, as it hath pleased the Lord, so is it come to pass. Blessed be the name of the Lord, world without end.”
At this point, it appears to me that we are already making a good case that for the comet impact phenomenon where some of them explode overhead, some of them may strike the ground in clusters, setting fires everywhere, and some may actually cause earthquakes associated with fires as Prof. John Lewis has proposed. The prodromal weather stresses and the following epidemic is all part of the pattern.
The last passage of the above quote from Gregory is one of the most poignant in the entire work. It suggests that the death toll was very, very high, and that he lost loved ones himself. The epidemic was so widespread that even the Frankish royals were dropping like flies though Gregory was sure to emphasize that this was an opportunity to induce them to convert to his brand of Christianity. King Chilperic fell ill, but recovered. Immediately after, his two sons came down with the disease and there is a long speech put in the mouth of Queen Fredegund where she tries to persuade the king to burn all his tax-demands in the fire so as to appease God and avoid the loss of her children. Both of them died anyway, but according to Gregory, Chilperic was now a changed man because he believed he had been punished by God for his greed. So, of course, he became a lavish donor to the church which is what “Christian charity” was all about back then. Torture and kill all you want, just give money to the church.
Meanwhile, Queen Austrechild of Burgundy died of the same epidemic. She was the wife of the “good king Guntram” though Gregory didn’t have any kind words for her even in describing her death. It’s worth reading. Then, Nantinus, the Count of Angouleme also contracted the disease and died. He was another evil man in Gregory’s eyes. His death became another moral lesson for the good Christian! Finally, Martin, Bishop of Braga and Galicia, died in the slaughter caused by the epidemic. Gregory didn’t say much about that except that he was a very holy and learned man and was mourned by all. Nothing at all was said about how death from the plague was a punishment from God as it was on so many others!
In any event, the point is, Gregory was born at a time when the population was already decimated by at least 40%, and here, as well as further on, he continues to describe epidemic after epidemic that paralleled the ongoing deaths from starvation and violence. What we are reading here is a description of the final death agonies of the Western Roman empire.
581
At this time
a wolf came out of the woods and made its way through one of the gates into the city of
Poitiers. Thereupon all the gates were closed, and the wolf was cornered inside the city walls and killed. Some said that they
saw the heavens aflame. At the point where the waters of the River Cher mingle with it, the River Loire was even higher than the previous year.
A wind from the south raged with such great violence that it knocked down the forest-trees, destroyed houses, carried off fences and blew men off their feet and killed them. This wind devastated an area some mile or more across, but no one ever discovered how far the damage continued. On a number of occasions, too, the cocks crowed at the beginning of the night. The moon was darkened and
a comet appeared in the sky. A serious
epidemic followed among the common people.
A wind that does the things Gregory describes above and leaves a track about a mile wide, that goes on for some distance, could be a giant tornado which is unusual enough. He doesn’t mention which direction the burning sky is seen, but all taken together, it could have been an airburst causing the sky to appear “in flames” and generating a tornado or a concentrated blast wave.
582
In the seventh year of King Childebert’s reign… there were torrential downpours in the month of January, with flashes of lightning and heavy claps of thunder. The trees suddenly burst into flower.
The star which I have described as a comet appeared again, and the sky seemed particularly black where it passed across the heavens. It shone through the darkness as if it were at the bottom of a hole, gleaming so bright and spreading wide its tail. From it there issued an enormous beam of light, which from a distance looked like the great pall of smoke over a conflagration. It appeared in the western sky during the first hour of darkness.
Here Gregory is describing both the dust tail and the ion tail of a comet. It also sounds as though he is describing a comet that is heading directly toward earth, though still at some distance. I’ve made a search for any record of events in the year 582 AD (or some approximation thereof) that might reveal the possibility that this comet Gregory saw did more than just “fly by”. I didn’t find anything. But that doesn’t mean that nothing happened since the problem we are dealing with is the dearth of records. Additionally, Baillie notes:
From the scientific viewpoint, [the comet that was mythicized as] Lugh ‘coming up in the West’ may supply some real information. … The sun is essentially stationary and the reason it appears to rise in the east each day is because the earth is rotating. We are also used to the sun, and the stars, setting in the west. … Now for something to rise in the west, it must be close enough to the earth to overcome the earth’s rotation. … it has to be rising faster than the earth’s rotation… for a comet to actually appear to be rising in the west, it requires the comet to be both fast and close to the earth. …for the comet to rise in the west it must be closer than 650,000 km from earth.
Back to Gregory:
In the city of
Soissons on Easter Sunday
the whole sky seemed to catch fire. There appeared to be two centers of light, one of which was bigger than the other: but after an hour or two, they joined together to become one single enormous beacon, and then they disappeared.
{Again, sounds like plasma effects.}
In the Paris region real
blood rained from a cloud, falling on the clothes of quite a number of people and so staining them with gore that they stripped them off in horror. This portent was observed in three different places in that city. In the Senlis area a man woke up one morning to find
the whole of the inside of his house spattered with blood.
{This reminds us of the marks on buildings and clothes that Paul the Deacon describes as preceding the pestilence. It also reminds us of many phenomena cited by Charles Fort, and often enough, analyses show that it really is blood or flesh or critters that come down from the sky. Hyperdimensional?}
This is another phenomenon that should be familiar to us today since it has happened recently in Kerala, India. There was, apparently, a loud sound of an explosion and a flash of light which preceded the rain. Physicists in India theorize that the red rain phenomenon of Kerala is possibly extraterrestrial and the microorganisms have extraordinary characteristics including the ability to grow optimally at 300 C and the capacity to metabolize a wide range or organic and inorganic materials.
Back to Gregory:
This year the people suffered from a terrible epidemic; and great numbers of them were carried off by a whole series of malignant diseases, the main symptoms of which were
boils and tumors. Quite a few of those who took precautions managed to escape. We learned that
a disease of the groin was very prevalent in Narbonne this same year, and that, once a man was attacked by it, it was all up with him.
Felix, Bishop of the city of Nantes, contracted this disease and became gravely ill. … Bishop Felix seemed to be recovering somewhat from his illness. His fever abated, but as the result of his low state of health his legs were covered with tumors. … His legs festered and so he died … seventy years old.
{Like the pope, Pelagius, in Italy.}
The portents appeared again [a second time] this year.
The moon was in eclipse. …The
walls of the city of Soissons collapsed. There was an
earthquake in Angers. Wolves found their way inside the walls of the town of
Bordeaux and ate the dogs, showing no fear whatsoever of human beings.
A great light was seen to move across the sky. The city of
Bazas was burned down by a great conflagration, the church and the church-houses being destroyed.
Another air-burst or fall of flaming fragments?
{Notice the wolves thing. There does seem to be an increase of reports of wolves approaching human habitations in our own day.}
583
In the city of
Tours on 31 January in the eighth year of the reign of King Childebert, this day being Sunday, the bell had just rung for matins. The people had got up and were on their way to church. The sky was overcast and it was raining.
Suddenly a great ball of fire fell from the sky and moved some considerable distance through the air, shining so brightly that visibility was as clear as at high noon. Then it disappeared once more behind a cloud and darkness fell again. The rivers rose much higher than usual. In the Paris region the River Seine and the River Marne were so flooded that many boats were wrecked between the city and Saint Lawrence’s church.
584
In the ninth year of King Childebert’s reign … [his] ambassadors returned home from Spain and announced that Carpitania the district round Toledo, [the capital of the Visigoths] had been ravaged by locusts so that not a single tree remained, not a vine, not a patch of woodland: there was no fruit of the earth, no green thing, which these insects had not destroyed. …
The plague was decimating a number of districts, but it raged most fiercely in the city of Narbonne [also Visigothic]. Some three years had passed since it first gained a hold, and then it seemed to die out. The populace which had fled now came back, but they were wiped out once more by disease. The city of
Albi was suffering very greatly from this same epidemic.
At this time there appeared at midnight in the northern sky a multitude of rays which shone with extreme brilliance. They came together and then separated again, vanishing in all directions. The sky towards the north was so bright that you might have thought that day was about to dawn. […]
{Plasma...}
King Chilperic then left home and travelled some way towards Soissons, but on the journey he suffered yet another bereavement. His son, who had been baptized only the year before, fell ill with dysentery and died. This is what the ball of fire presaged, the one I described as emerging from a cloud.
The locusts which had ravaged the district round Toledo for five long years now moved forward along the public highway and invaded another near-by province. The swarm covered an area fifty miles long and a hundred miles broad.
In this same year many strange portents appeared in Gaul and the sufferings endured by the population were very harsh. Roses flowered in January.
A great circle of many colours appeared round the sun, rather like what one sees in a rainbow when the rain pours down. Frost nipped the vineyards, doing serious damage: then came a terrible storm which battered down the vines and the crops. What was left after this hailstorm was destroyed by a fierce drought. A few grapes remained on some vines, on others none at all. Men were so furious with God that they left the gates of their vineyards wide open and drove in their cattle and horses. In their misery they called down ruination upon themselves and were heard to shout: “We don’t care if these vines never bear shoots again until the end of time!” Trees which had borne apples in July had a second crop in September.
One epidemic after another killed off the flocks, until hardly any remained alive.
{Really sounding like our own times with various epidemics affecting cattle, etc., heat, cold, floods, drought...}
As the army marched in, Saint Martin’s church in
Brives-la-Gaillarde was burnt down by a terrible conflagration. The heat was so great that the altar and even the pillars, constructed of different kinds of marble, were destroyed in the fire…
Fires don’t usually burn up marble. Sounds like another air-burst or a plasma strike.
All this happened in the tenth month of the year. New shoots appeared on the vine-stocks, misshapen grapes formed and the trees blossomed a second time.
A great beacon traversed the heavens, lighting up the land far and wide some time before the day dawned. Rays of light shone in the sky, and in the north a column of fire was seen to hang from on high for a space of two hours, with an immense star perched on top of it. There was an earthquake in the district of Angers and many other portents appeared. In my opinion all this announced the coming death of Gundovald.
Obviously, something big and deadly was happening somewhere. The column of fire with the “immense star” at the top of it could very well be a description of a very large airburst explosion at a great distance that probably somewhat resembled a mushroom cloud. Diane Neisius has done simulations on the Tunguska impactor with images that explain this visual almost completely. The artistic rendering at left is based on her simulation and represents the Tunguska explosion some minutes after detonation. The cloud ascended to an estimated height of 60 km until it dissolved.
{See the doc for image.}
585
Portents appeared.
Rays of light were seen in the northern sky, although, indeed, this happens often. A flash of lightning was observed to cross the heavens. Flowers blossomed on the trees. It was the fifth month of the year.
Gregory’s casual remark that “rays of light were seen in the northern sky…often” is interesting. Either he lived in a period when the aurora borealis was commonly seen at his latitude almost year round, or something remarkable was going on.
{Like plasma exchanges between the earth and comets.}
While I was staying in Carignan, I twice during the night saw portents in the sky. These were
rays of light towards the north, shining so brightly that I had never seen anything like them before: the clouds were blood-red on both sides, to the east and to the west. On a third night these
rays appeared again, at about seven or eight o’clock. As I gazed in wonder at them others like them began to shine from all four quarters of the earth, so that as I watched they filled the entire sky. A cloud gleamed bright in the middle of the heavens, and these rays were all focused on it, as if it were a pavilion the colored stripes of which were broad at the bottom but became narrower as they rose, meeting in a hood at the top. In between the rays of light there were other clouds flashing vividly as if they were being struck by lightning. This extraordinary phenomenon filled me with foreboding, for it was clear that some disaster was about to be sent from heaven.
{This now sounds like a really crazy plasma display, however, keep reading because Gregory later connects this to another horrifying event.}
This last description sounds like one of the morphing comets described by Baillie. A comet, very close to the earth, might display a number of features that we, in our present day when such comets have not been seen for awhile, are unaware of. Of course, Gregory and others of his time were unaware of such things as well because Aristotle had made it clear that comet and stars stayed in their own “sphere”. The details of the comet that could be seen would include erupting jets of gas that might revolve with the nucleus. The nucleus itself might even be visible. Baillie tells us:
Although there were some nineteenth-century drawings of the changes in the shape and configuration of comets and their tails, it wasn’t until the widespread use of photography in the twentieth century that a detailed record of changes in comets through time really became available. … tails can break (or hiccup), new jets can appear, and orientations can alter. It is now known that comets can change their appearance from day to day. So, again, if a comet were close to earth all of these possible changes would be very apparent.
Ironically, because of the lack of close, naked-eye comets in recent times, in the twentieth century the public have become used to the ‘standard’ comet with its single, curved dust tail and straight ion or plasma tail. {…} Lugh was red through the night, and was described so, because he was a red-coloured comet.
586
There was heavy rain this year and the rivers were so swollen with water that many boats were wrecked. They overflowed their banks, covered the nearby-by crops and meadows, and did much damage. The Spring and Summer months were so wet that it seemed more like Winter than Summer.
This same year two islands in the sea were consumed by fire which fell from the sky. They burned for seven whole days, so that they were completely destroyed, together with the inhabitants and their flocks. Those who sought refuge in the sea and hurled themselves headlong into the deep died an even worse death in the water into which they had thrown themselves, while those on land who did not die immediately were consumed by fire.
All were reduced to ash and the sea covered everything. Many maintained that all
the portents which I have said earlier that I saw in the month of October, when the sky seemed to be on fire, were really the reflection of this conflagration.
Here, Gregory tells us that what he saw in the immediately preceding account, occurred in the month of October and apparently, the destruction of these two islands also occurred then so he was putting the two together. It definitely ends up sounding like some sort of airburst event.
{First, notice that it took some time for Gregory to receive the report of this event. I would say further that this may be part of the description of what happened at the time of the Noachian deluge of Italy with the flying dragons descending into the sea. It didn't happen in some islands off of Gaul, i.e. in the Atlantic, but rather was transposed to Gaul. Also, the date of the event in Paul the Deacon is 589 and here it is 586, 3 years earlier.
There is another possibility that occurs to me: that much of what Gregory recorded actually did happen in Gaul AND Italy and the reason for the truncating of the Eastern chronicles was to hide the fact that they were aware of all this destruction via messengers or people who had escaped, and they needed to continue to write history about the barbarian invasions so it was necessary to remove what was really known from the records. Also, the Eastern Empire was hit pretty hard too. And for all we know, the collapses were almost simultaneous and we only have the illusion of one following the other because of the manipulation of the history.
Because, certainly, if we imagine that Gaul was totally devastated and hardly anyone survived, what Gregory has described (or whoever it was writing it), fits the bill. In that case, it would not be necessary to find someone who knew Greek and who could have removed the records of the Eastern chronicles and plopped them into Gregory's history. His history may very well have been a plain account of disasters that was LATER expanded into an ecclesiastical history. It would be interesting if the text of the disasters could be isolated and examined and compared to the rest of the text.
We know, of course, that Paul the Deacon was NOT an eye-witness to anything as Gregory may have been (it may not have even been anyone named Gregory), but he obviously had some texts describing similar events to work from.
We can't exclude the fact that, with what was going on, there were many similar events in numerous places.}
Many portents appeared at this time. In the homes of a number of people
vessels were discovered inscribed with the unknown characters which could not be erased or scraped off however hard they tried. This phenomenon began in the neighborhood of Chartres, spread to Orleans and then reached the Bordeaux area, leaving out no township on the way.
{Notice the above and how it relates to the account of Paul the Deacon about the marks that would not wash off that preceded the pestilence. Also how similar it is to the fall of blood that was everywhere that Gregory reported above.}
In the month of October new shoots were seen on the vines after the wine-harvest was over, and there were misshapen grapes. On other trees new fruits were seen, together with new leaves.
{Paul the Deacon assigned the 589 event to October as well.}
Flashes of light appeared in the northern sky. Some said that they had seen
snakes drop from the clouds.
{That would be fireballs and meteorites.} Others maintained that
an entire village had been destroyed and had vanished into thin air, taking the houses and the men who lived in them.
{Destroyed by an airburst event?} Many other signs appeared of the kind which usually announce a king’s death or the destruction of a whole region. That year the wine-harvest was poor,
water lay about everywhere, there was torrential rain, and the rivers were greatly swollen .
The “unknown characters” appearing on vessels sounds like some sort of fungus.
587
This year it rained heavily throughout the Spring, and then, when the trees and the vines were already in leaf, a fall of snow buried everything. There followed such a frost that the vine-shoots were withered, together with any fruit which was already showing.
The weather was so bitter that even the swallows, birds which fly to us from foreign parts, were killed by the extreme cold. A curious feature of all this was that the frost destroyed everything in places where it usually did no harm, and yet it did not reach the spots where it usually caused most damage.
{We can certainly recognize from our own day that description of bitter cold in places where it is not usual, and warm in places where it is usually bitter cold.}
588
At this time it was reported that Marseilles was suffering from a severe epidemic of swelling in the groin and that this disease had quickly spread…to near Lyons. (IX. 20)
I want to tell you exactly how this came about. …a ship from Spain put into port with the usual kind of cargo, unfortunately also bringing with it the source of this infection. Quite a few of the townsfolk purchased objects from the cargo and in less than no time a house in which eight people lived was left completely deserted, all the inhabitants having caught the disease. The infection did not spread through the residential quarter immediately. Some time passed and then, like a cornfield set alight, the entire town was suddenly ablaze with the pestilence. … At the end of two months the plague burned itself out. The population returned to Marseilles, thinking themselves safe. Then the disease started again and all who had come back died.
{This same sequence is described in reference to another town above. That might be evidence of a later redactor meddling with the text.}
589
Just after Easter this year it rained and hailed very heavily. Within the space of two or three hours great rivers began to flow along even the smallest windings of the valleys. The fruit-trees flowered a second time in Autumn and gave a second crop as heavy as the first. Roses bloomed in November. The rivers ran unusually high. They broke their banks and flooded areas which they had never reached before, doing great damage to the sown fields.
590
In the same year so bright a light illumined a wide spread of lands in the middle of the night that you would have thought that it was high noon. On a number of occasions fiery globes were also seen traversing the sky in the night-time, so that they seemed to light up the whole earth. …
There was
a great earthquake very early in the morning on Wednesday, 14 June, just as the day began to dawn. There was
an eclipse of the sun in the middle of October. The sun’s rays were so diminished that it gave no more light than the horned moon when five days old.
{Sounds like the eclipse already described above.} It rained in torrents, there were violent thunder-storms in Autumn and the river-waters rose very high. There was a serious outbreak of plague in the towns of Viviers and Avignon.
In Gaul,
the plague which I have so often had occasion to mention
attacked Marseilles. A terrible
famine afflicted Angers, Nantes and Le Mans. These were the beginnings of sorrows, as our Lord said in the Gospels: “And there shall be famines, and pestilences and earthquakes in divers places. For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders in the sky to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect.” That is exactly what happened at this time.
591
In the April of this year
a terrible epidemic killed off the people in Tours and in Nantes. Each person who caught the disease was first troubled with a slight headache and then died. …
In the town of Limoges a number of people were consumed by fire from heaven… Some people were also burnt by this fire in Tours…
There was a terrible drought which destroyed all the green pasture. As a result there were
great losses of flocks and herds, which left few animals for breeding purposes. … This epidemic
not only afflicted the domestic cattle, but it also decimated the various kinds of wild animals. Throughout the forest glades
a great number of stags and other beasts were found lying dead in places difficult of access. The hay was destroyed by incessant rain and by the rivers which overflowed, there was a poor grain harvest, but the vines yielded abundantly. Acorns grew, but they never ripened.
{In recent times, these mass deaths of animals are increasing and there was even a report of a whole herd of elk found dead in a forest.}
This is pretty much the end of Gregory’s account since he closed his book in 591 and died in 594. And then, Western Europe descended into almost complete darkness for over 200 years. I guess we ought not to be surprised considering the pace of events that Gregory was describing; the cometary phenomena were accelerating in both frequency and severity while the steady decimation of the population by epidemics and plague proceeded relentlessly.
