ABSTRACT
The eruption of the Samalas volcano (Lombok, Indonesia), long seen as a cataclysmic event, has recently been re-dimensioned, as the dates of the volcanic eruption did not correlate to societal events. This article argues that incomplete chronologies may have distorted our view of the astonishing synchronicities of impacts on Eurasian societies in the late 1250s, given that societal reactions to this extreme event are very specific, not solely negative, and far from understood. A re-evaluation of the evidence leads to a new understanding of pre-modern volcanic eruptions that reached the stratosphere: certainly, they were not the worldwide disasters imagined in the last decades, but neither are they the quantitatively negligible events for which recent research has argued. In the best case, these events – understood as global moments of pre-modern periods – offer a new perspective on global environmental history before 1500.
