Recession

Geological / environmental event

The year 459.I would not have a summer. A volcanic cloud would ruin the year's food production in the Blue Sea, and the famine was followed by a 25 year-long financial depression.

Somewhere in the west, a volcano erupted, filling the air with an immense cloud of dust and gas. The winds were disturbed, and unusually blew from the west, bringing the dust over the whole of the Blue Sea, the bread basket of mankind. That year, there was no warm season, and harvest plummeted. There would be no food exported towards the southwest, and the famine would hit every human settlement. Even the Magissens would suffer from this catastrophe in their own lands.   But for mankind, the trouble was only just starting. Food shortage made them eat their heavers, then their pets, then the pests. In cities like Faarie and Sookva, where the famine was the worst, the most desperates would resort to cannibalism. And when the warm days came back a year after, there was not many heavers left to restart the fields, there was no grainweed ready to produce. Businesses stalled, peasants had been decimated, and the cities' treasuries were empty. It took 25 years, and a tremendous effort from ✝ Berneem's dwindling resources, to rebuild exchanges and businesses on a continental scale. In the long term, it allowed The Holy City to regain supremacy over the other regions.   The event, later known as the fifth century's recession, would recognized as a strong influence on the political, economical, and structural evolution during the first millenia of the common era, for better or worse.