The Black Death was an unprecedented human disaster of appalling magnitude. In three dreadful years over one third of Europe's population was wiped out.

Everyone believed it heralded the end of the world. To the chroniclers of Padua the plague was devastation deemed more final than Noah's flood. The plague shook the wealthy, relatively well-populated society of mid-14th-century Western Europe to its foundations. Black Death follows the spread of the plague and its implications for the Europe of the Middle Ages.

Looking at issues such as medicine, religion, superstition and society, and employing expert analysis from top historians, this is a look at one of the most chilling and terrible periods in all of human existence. Most of all, this is history told through contemporary voices of some of the key chroniclers of the time. Real people who contracted the disease and died from it left amazing, vivid accounts of what it feels like to live in a world that is falling apart.

Cast:
Gabriele de Musis - Simon Thorp
Giovanni Boccaccio - Vincent Carmichael
Gentile da Foligno - Philip Madoc
Louis Heyligen - Jonathan Firth
Robert of Avesbury - Patrick Toomey
Gui de Chauliac - Nicholas Rowe
Bailiff of the Court - Timothy Watson
Nicholas Deneys - Dorian Lough
Lady Rose de Saxham - Susan Engel
Brother John Clynn - Mark Tandy


Narrator Denis Lawson
Producer and Director Peter Nicholson