The World’s Most Notorious Fires: The History of the Most Destructive Blazes across the Globe

Among all the natural disasters that struck Rome, one of the most well-known is the Great Fire of Rome, in part due to the popular myth that Emperor Nero fiddled while the Eternal City burned, even though no fiddle existed in 1st century Rome. Suetonius and Cassius Dio, two of Nero’s ancient biographers, are adamant that it was he himself who set the fire (or ordered it set), and they are the originators of the myth that Nero played the lyre, danced around his palace and sang “The Sack of Troy” while Rome burned outside his windows.

The Great Fire of London was so bad that one author who studied the blaze described it as “the perfect fire,” referring to the convergence in the largest city in England of spark, wood and wind in such a way that no one could stop the fire or even fight it effectively. John Evelyn, who had warned of the potential for a devastating fire given the layout of the city, noted that people seemed so stunned by the scope of the fire that they didn’t know what to do. The fire lasted three days, and by the end of it, Londoners were shocked by the wide-scale destruction, which was so great that Samuel Pepys remarked, "It made me weep to see it."

It had taken about 40 years for Chicago to grow from a small settlement of about 300 people into a thriving metropolis with a population of 300,000, but in just two days in 1871, much of that progress was burned to the ground. In arguably the most famous fire in American history, a blaze in the southwestern section of Chicago began to burn out of control on the night of October 8, 1871.

Overshadowed by the much better covered and publicized Great Chicago Fire that occurred on the very same evening, the fire that started in the Wisconsin logging town of Peshtigo generated a firestorm unlike anything in American history. In addition to destroying a wide swath of land, it killed at least 1,500 people and possibly as many as 2,500.

© 2026 Charles River Editors (Lydbog): 9798240030338

Udgivelsesdato

Lydbog: 17. februar 2026