The Great Dying

In October 1347, a fleet of Genoese galleys limped into the harbour of Messina with most of their crews already dead or dying. Within five years the disease they carried had swept across an entire continent, killing perhaps one person in two. Whole villages vanished. Cities ran out of ground to bury the dead. It was the deadliest catastrophe in recorded human history.

This is the full sweep of that astonishing story — where the plague came from (and the detective story, only cracked in 2022, of its true origin in the mountains of Central Asia); how it travelled the roads of the Mongol peace and the sea-lanes of the Mediterranean; how it killed, in three terrible forms; and how medieval men and women tried to survive it through prayer, flight, medicine, quarantine — and, at their worst, by hunting for someone to blame.

But the Black Death did not only destroy. It cracked open the medieval world and let the modern one begin: it shattered the grip of serfdom, drove up the wages of the survivors, shook the authority of the Church, and gave Europe a new and haunted imagination of death. Clear, vivid, and honest about what we know and what is only myth, this is popular history at its most gripping — the unforgettable account of the year the world ended, and of the world that rose from its graves.