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, confident society of mid-14th-century Western Europe to its foundations.

This film 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 fascinating 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, but who left amazing, vivid accounts of what it feels like to live in a world that is falling apart.