People keep asking me for snips from the book I am working on. Well, nothing in there is in final form so it's hard to respond to this. However, I finished a section today (and that doesn't mean it is FINISHED) and I would like to share it with everyone because so much of it applies to the weird weather we are experiencing all over the planet. So, yes, you do get an eensy preview though I'm sure you'll be wondering what it has to do with Moses. Never you mind! It will all be clear in the end!
Gregory’s Tour de France
The second loose end I want to tie up is to present just a bit more about all the very strange things that were going on in Western Europe after the Fall of the Roman Empire. I’ve argued that there were cometary airburst explosions here and there throughout the period from at least the time of Constantine to some larger events during the time of Justinian which led to the complete collapse of the Empire. What is evident from the archaeology is the massive depopulation which could be due to not just explosively destructive events such as partial destruction of Rome itself and the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside, (the case of Baalbek, and Antioch), but also via comet borne plague – new viruses to which the population had no immunity.
Considering the Tunguska event gives us some idea of what a cometary/asteroidal airburst might do. That body has been estimated to have been something like 40 to 100 meters in diameter and it never reached the ground but exploded at an altitude of about 8 to 10 km with a force equivalent to about 15 megatons. The sound was heard a thousand miles away and the air-burst flattened more than 2000 square km of forest. It scorched trees below its passage, it caused earthquakes and an intense shockwave. The subsequent nights in north-west Europe were abnormally bright because of the matter deposited in the upper atmosphere by the explosion of the body. There was another, similar event in Brazil in 1930 and a third one in British Guyana in 1935, though these were a bit smaller. There were probably 8 or 9 others that exploded over the Earth’s oceans, the only effect that we might have noticed of these latter types might have been the arrival of large amounts of dust in the upper atmosphere.[1] What is clear from our experience with Tunguska and the South American events is that we literally have no way of really detecting traces as such since, after 50 years or so, the vegetation has re-grown and there is nothing on the ground to show what really happened. That is, ancient air-bursts are invisible to us.
But the question is, if you lived during those times, and if such things were going on in your environment, what would you actually have been witnessing? Other than the bits and pieces I have collected together thus far, before the sources dried up completely for most of the Empire, are there other witnesses who could tell us anything that will assist us in getting a real cognitive handle on this thing?
There is Gregory of Tours.
Gregory was born pretty much in the middle of all the proposed action in 539 and died in 594. His home town was Clermont, central France and was the son of a Gallo-Roman senator, Florentius. His mother was the niece of Nicetius, Bishop of Lyons and granddaughter of a Senator of Geneva. That is, Gregory had a number of close relatives who were notable bishops and/or saints! His father apparently died when Gregory was young and his mother took him to live in Burgundy. As an adult, he spent most of his entire career in Tours though he did travel as far as Paris.
Gregory lived on the border of the Gallo-Roman world of the already greatly changed Roman Empire, and the wild frontier of the Franks. Tours was the hub where five main Roman roads met as well as on the banks of the navigable Loire river, so he would have had access to a variety of information sources from travelers. He had personal relationships with four Frankish kings, Sigebert I, Chilperic I, Guntram and Childebert II. His History of the Franks is ten “books” and the first four are a “history of the world from the creation”, but then quickly move on to the Christianization of Gaul, the life of St. Martin of Tours, the conversion of the Franks, and the conquest of Gaul by the Franks, to the death of Sigebert in 575. Books V and VI end with Chilperic’s death in 584. Chilperic and Gregory had a problematical relationship and the king arrested Gregory, threatening his position and life. Gregory retaliated by including a very unflattering description of Chilperic at the end of Book VI. It was not the same kind of revelation that Procopius wrote about Justinian but rather, it was based mostly on Gregory’s over-developed sense of Christian mission vis a vis the king’s resentment of the church’s attempting to usurp his authority. Books VII through X take us to the year 591, and an epilogue was written in 594, the year he died.
The problems with reading Gregory as a historical source become evident fairly early on. He was a Catholic bishop, a member of the senatorial class that had adopted Christianity in lieu of a broad classical education, and the accompanying attitude of superiority of virtue through salvation. He was familiar with the works of Vergil, Orosius and Sallust, but had a low opinion of most of the pagan writers because they were, in his opinion, inspired by Satan. He certainly achieved mastery of the vulgate Bible as the ultimate arbiter of how to conduct one’s life. His views on pagans, Christianity, the Arianism of the Visigoths, and so on, were typical for a person in his position at the time. His lack of a thorough classical education shows in his writing which is vulgar and unpolished and would have made his ancestors of just a few generations back cringe with shame. His purpose in writing seems to have been mainly to destroy heresy wherever he found it so he definitely portrays anything that a pagan or heretic does or says in a negative light, even if they do good, and the evils committed by Christians of the “right persuasion” are either glossed over, given a redeeming twist, or ignored. Still, Gregory was rather likeable; he wasn’t disordered by nature, but rather heavily conditioned to his beliefs and attitudes by training and social and familial influence. He seems to have been a decent person who was convinced of his mission to labor in the fields of achieving hegemony of belief because he had been brought up to believe that was right, good and proper. In short, he was an Authoritarian Follower of a schizoidally deficient ideology.
Gregory’s work, with all the listed caveats, is still of incredible value in gaining some insight on the period in which he lived. What is sad about the whole thing is that, if Gregory’s literary output is a “testimony of the preservation of learning” during that period, as some “transitionalists” would declare, it is a pathetic work in respect of the history of persons, politics, philosophy and culture. Gregory himself tells us in his preface “there is not one man to be found who can write a book about what is happening today…” That suggests strongly that the alleged pockets of Gallo-Roman survival claimed by historians who advocate the “transition to late antiquity” model, were few and far between. Gregory freely mixes religion and politics, viewing all political events through a religious lens which often produced gross distortions. He also freely includes unverified hearsay, miracles and unlikely portents right along with personal observations and experiences that are certainly true.
Having said all that, what I am particularly interested in sharing are Gregory’s observations of environmental events of his time. Because, as background to the marching to-and-fro of armies, and kings and queens coming and going, there were great conflagrations, floods, famine and epidemics. I’ve gone through the books and think that the following excerpts will contribute some data to our topic. I can’t claim an exhaustive search, but what I have to hand is already extensive! I’m going to inset a couple of things from the previous chronology at the beginning just to cue us up to where Gregory fits in the events of the time.
539
Gregory was born three years after the extraordinary 18 month long dust veil event of 536 reported by Procopius and Cassiodorus.
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 in the process of a very rapid transition. 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. After Gregory, there was silence and darkness in Europe for over 200 years. (Though Irish historians continued to write.)
563
Gregory was ordained a deacon.
565
Justinian died. Gregory was twenty-six.
573
Gregory was elected bishop of Tours. Shortly after, the weight of responsibility 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. [2]
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 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.” The ancient Roman attitudes of superiority by virtue of class and education (including impeccable speech and writing) had been subsumed by the Church when the senatorial classes had found a place there when the barbarians took over the military and government administration. Within the church they were superior by virtue of religion, salvation, divine inspiration. That, alone, did tremendous damage to learning.
Gregory was as convinced of the Church’s right to govern the rulers as the Roman senators had been convinced of their right to influence and control the Empire and its Emperors. The barbarian kings with which he did business weren’t quite on the same page, but Gregory apparently saw it as part of his mission to establish this point. The Frankish kings, on their side, still felt some unease going directly against a prelate who had friends and influence. There was also some element of superstition and 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.
Gregory was a meticulous recorder of events, as far as he was able, though obviously extremely credulous about miracles. Nevertheless, 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.[3]
This barbarian lifestyle suited the methods of the Church itself, it seems and truly, what became the Roman Catholic Church was more Frankish Barbarian than Roman.
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 later Roman Catholic Church.
So, let’s take a look at some of what was going on in the center of Gaul during the life and times of Gregory of Tours.
576-577
…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.[4]
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. 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.[5] […]
…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.[6]
The cluster moved to the west and disappeared, possibly landing in the ocean or simply burning out in the atmosphere.
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 group came from the West. Further, there were weather perturbations in advance of the event which, based on all the reviewing of the history I have been doing, seem to be related to cemetery activity. The experts 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.
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.
That means it may have exploded over the province of Orleans or Berry.
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 earthquake and fire at Bordeaux, taken together, may suggest an air-burst event though Gregory may not have made the connection and the information he received may not have been clear enough to suggest it.
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.
The passage of the fireball and subsequent explosive sounds, coupled with the burning of the city of Orleans again suggests an air-burst event.
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 ti come to pass. Blessed be the name of the Lord, world without end.” [7]
At this point, it appears to that we have a sturdy case that we are dealing with the comet fragment 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.
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 becaome 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!
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.
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.
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 is another phenomenon that should be familiar to us today since it has happened numerous times in the past dozen years or so. 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.[8]
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.[9]
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.[10]
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. [11]
Another air-burst?
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.[12]
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.[13] […]
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 dided. This is what the ball of fire presaged, the one I described as emerging from a cloud.[14]
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.[15]
As the army marched in, Saint Maartin’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…[16]
Fires don’t usually burn up marble. Sounds like another air-burst.
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.[17]
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.[18] 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.
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.[19]
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.
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.[20]
This last description does sound very much like the aurora borealis but with interesting added elements that somehow don’t fit an auroral display.
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. The 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. [21]
Here, Gregory tells us that what he saw in the immediately preceding account that sounded a lot like an auroral display, occurred in the month of October and apparently, the destruction of these two islands also occurred then so that leans the observation more toward some sort of airburst event than the aurora. Still, it is an astonishing event.
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. 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. Flashes of light appeared in the northern sky. Some said that they had seen snakes drop from the clouds. 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. 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[22].
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.[23]
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.[24]
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.[25]
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. 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.[26]
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.[27]
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.[28]
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 was obviously accelerating in both frequency and severity.
What happened after Gregory, during that time of Darkness, we can only guess.
[1] Bailey, M.El, Markhan, D.J., Massai, S., Scriven, J.E. (1995) The 13 August 1930 Brazilian Tunguska Event, Observatory, 115, pp. 250-53
[2] Gregory of Tours: The History of the Franks (1974) Trans. And with introduction by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin books.
[3] Op. cit., Introduction, p. 15.
[4] V. 18
[5] Mike Baillie (2005) The Celtic Gods: Comets in Irish Mythology; Tempus.
[6] Baillie (2005) p. 75.
[7] V. 33, 34.
[8] Louis, G.; Kumar A.S. (2006). "The red rain phenomenon of Kerala and its possible extraterrestrial origin". Astrophysics and Space Science 302: 175.
[9] VI. 14
[10] VI. 15
[11] VI. 21
[12] VI. 25
[13] VI. 33
[14] VI. 34
[15] VI. 44
[16] VII. 10
[17] VII. 11
[18] See: http://www.diane-neisius.de/tunguska/index_E.html
[19] VIII. 8
[20] VIII. 17
[21] VIII. 23
[22] IX. 5
[23] IX. 17
[24] IX. 22
[25] IX. 44
[26] X. 23
[27] X. 25
[28] X. 30
