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00:01In 1348, an invisible killer haunted Europe.
00:06The Black Death was one of the most fatal pandemics in human history.
00:11It tore society apart, and its impact is still being felt.
00:16It was one of those really crazy events that almost killed the entire Eurasian population.
00:22Can you imagine having no understanding of germ theory, no science,
00:26no idea what was causing half of the people you know to die?
00:30For centuries, we have studied this catastrophe to try to ensure it can never strike again with such force.
00:36Plague, in common understanding, is a disease of the past,
00:40but the truth is that it's still an infection which is occurring today.
00:45It's very, very important to establish the origins of any disease.
00:50Now, a group of scientists believe an obscure collection of artefacts and graves,
00:56discovered far from Europe, may hold the key to identifying Black Death patient zero.
01:02The earliest known victim of the 14th century Black Death pandemic.
01:07The year is 1348.
01:23All across Europe, millions of people are falling prey to a mysterious, deadly disease.
01:29Its symptoms are unmistakable.
01:34Fever and chills, body aches and fatigue, and painful swellings in the lymph glands,
01:41in the armpits, neck and groin, known as buboes.
01:46In the final stages of the illness, the victim's fingers and toes turn black.
01:51It is this last symptom that gives the disease its grisly name.
01:58Black Death.
02:06As this sickness sweeps across the continent, piles of bodies line the streets,
02:11and once thriving cities are transformed into desolate ghost towns.
02:21One such city is Siena, in the heart of the Italian peninsula.
02:33Situated on a medieval highway for merchants and pilgrims,
02:36in the 14th century, it was one of Europe's economic powerhouses.
02:44There was some Roman activity on the site,
02:46but the first traces of a Christian city seem to date to the 6th century,
02:50and it grows up from there along with the pilgrimage to Rome.
02:57Even today, Siena remains a mecca for visitors,
03:00a world heritage site,
03:02beloved as an untouched jewel of 13th and 14th century architecture.
03:08But there is a dark story behind why Siena is a city frozen in time,
03:13and that story can be found in the pages of an unparalleled record
03:17of life in the city over the year the Black Death hit.
03:22A journal written by a man called Agnolo di Tura.
03:30Today, Agnolo di Tura's journal is kept at the state archives in the heart of Siena,
03:35overlooking its central square, the Piazza del Campo.
03:44It is looked after by archivist and historian Cinzia Cardenale.
03:49The journal is a collection of original writing by Agnolo,
03:54and documents as the legal books of the magistratura,
03:58are used in the study of the area.
04:00The journal is a collection of original writing by Agnolo,
04:04The journal is a collection of original writing by Agnolo and documents his life as a shoemaker
04:20and a father of five in mid-14th century Siena.
04:28The fact that Agnolo's journal is a personal account rather than an official one gives a
04:33unique insight into conditions in Siena during the Black Death.
04:37Agnolo records that the Black Death arrived in the city in May 1348 and was gone by September
04:43of the same year.
04:45Agnolo records that the Black Death arrived in the city in May 1348 and was gone by September
04:51of the same year.
04:53Over that short time it decimated not just the population of Siena but that of the entire
04:59surrounding area, thousands of men, women and children.
05:05Agnolo records that the Black Death arrived in the city in May 1348 and was gone by September
05:09of the same year.
05:11It decimated not just the population of Siena but that of the entire surrounding area,
05:17thousands of men, women and children.
05:21Agnolo records that the Black Death arrived in the city of Siena.
05:38Agnolo left behind a unique record of the Black Death's devastating impact on the lives of
05:43ordinary Sienese families which was mirrored all across Europe.
05:49It is found that at this time there died in Siena 36,000 persons 20 years of age or less.
05:57And the aged and the other people died to a total of 52,000 in all in Siena.
06:04And in the suburbs of Siena 28,000 persons died.
06:10And there remained in Siena less than 10,000 men.
06:31And those that survived were like persons distraught and almost without feeling.
06:38This deadly disease was carried into Agnolo's home like those of countless others by an almost invisible intruder.
06:50Its effect was catastrophic.
06:54For individual households and for entire cities like Siena.
06:59The Black Death will change things forever.
07:03The prosperity that Siena enjoyed in the 14th century stemmed principally from banking and thriving trade networks.
07:21Spices, silk and other luxury goods were imported from as far away as Asia via the ancient trade route known as the Silk Road.
07:37And Siena was also one of Italy's main stopping points for pilgrims travelling to and from Rome.
07:46Siena develops as an important city because it's on one of the really important routes throughout the Middle Ages.
07:59Perhaps the leading attraction for visiting pilgrims would have been the city's cathedral.
08:11Consecrated in the year 1215, it projected civic pride, wealth and power, drawing throngs of visitors then as now.
08:22The cathedral is not just a symbol of devotion that the faithful have to God and in particular the Virgin Mary,
08:33but it is a way for the city to showcase their economic status and power.
08:39Even today we can imagine how medieval pilgrims might have felt gazing upon the beauty of the cathedral's interior.
08:48The ornate roof is supported by marble columns striped in white and dark green to mirror the exterior.
09:00And it is decorated with works of art by great masters from all over the Italian peninsula.
09:07Also it's a showcase of the local artists because Siena really was an artistic centre in the 12 and 1300s, really on par with that of Florence.
09:17Pilgrims arriving in Siena during the years preceding the Black Death would also have marvelled at the magnificent altarpiece,
09:24a 13th century stained glass window designed by famed local artist Duccio di Buoninsegna,
09:32which is now preserved in the cathedral museum.
09:36Siena's cathedral sits on the pilgrim route known as the Via Francigena.
09:47It ran for 2,000 kilometres from Canterbury in the south of England through modern-day France and Switzerland all the way to Rome.
09:57If you stick to the Via Francigena, you can be pretty sure of a bed for the night because the towns along the way are sort of used to dealing with visitors.
10:07Modern pilgrims to Siena can still walk along streets almost unchanged since Agnolo's day.
10:15What do pilgrims need? You need a place to sleep, a place to eat, a place to drink, a place to pray, perhaps even a place to buy some souvenirs.
10:27And so all along the Via Francigena, which becomes the main thoroughway of Siena, you see Osterie, places to eat.
10:36An Osterie would have been a tavern down below with an inn up above.
10:40And of course, you'll see that in the names of many of the establishments that we have there still today.
10:44You would have had churches at which to pray along the way, certain saints to help you along your way to a safe passage to the Holy Land.
10:55In addition to hospitality, Siena provided another service to its many pilgrim and merchant visitors.
11:08The Tuscans evolved the first really effective international banking system.
11:14Siena discovers silver in their territories and that meant that when they went into banking, they could offer a sort of guarantee.
11:24You know, they actually had the sort of fiscal reserves to cover it if something went wrong.
11:31Sienese moneylenders and merchant bankers facilitated currency exchange, loans and deposits despite religious bans on usury.
11:41Family run banks issued credit and bills of exchange that enabled long distance trade.
11:47The grand headquarters of Siena's medieval banking industry dominates the city even today.
11:53Siena's appeal to merchants and traders and its prime position on the pilgrim trail is what made it prosperous.
12:12But in early 1348, it was that success that made Siena deeply vulnerable, as recorded by Agnolo da Tura in his journal.
12:24The mortality in Siena began in May. It was a cruel and horrible thing.
12:33It seemed that almost everyone became stupefied seeing the pain.
12:37It is impossible for the human tongue to recount the awful truth.
12:43One who did not see such horribleness can be called blessed.
12:47The victims died almost immediately.
12:49They would swell beneath the armpits and in the groin and fall over while talking.
12:54Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another.
13:00For this illness seemed to strike through breath and sight.
13:05And so they died.
13:11And nearby in the city of Florence, Siena's close neighbor and sworn enemy,
13:17another chronicle of the Black Death was being written.
13:20Not by a shoemaker this time, but by a great author and poet, Giovanni Boccaccio.
13:30At the Bodleian Library in Oxford, curator Matthew Holford
13:34is responsible for looking after one of the earliest surviving manuscripts
13:38of Boccaccio's most famous work, The Decameron.
13:43So what we have in front of us here is a manuscript of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron.
13:49It was written in 1467, so it's about 120 years after the date the Decameron itself was written.
14:04It is believed that Boccaccio began writing the Decameron in 1348,
14:09the same year that the Black Death ravaged Tuscan cities, including Florence and Siena.
14:15It is probable that both Boccaccio's stepmother and his father,
14:20who was Minister of Supply in the Florentine government, themselves succumbed to the plague.
14:27The work tells the story of ten people who meet in Florence's Santa Maria Novella cathedral,
14:34before heading for the hoped-for safety of a country villa.
14:41So what we can see here in the manuscript is the beginning of the first day of the Decameron,
14:46marked by this very fine initial.
14:48And just partway down the second column is where Boccaccio starts talking about the arrival of the Black Death into Florence in 1348.
14:59He talks about the different symptoms that it had.
15:03If any bladder to nose, it was a manifest sign of inevitable death.
15:14But in men and women alike, there appeared at the beginning of the illness certain swellings,
15:20either on the groin or under the armpits.
15:22Some were as big as a common apple, others like an egg, some more and some less, and these, the vulgar-named plague boils.
15:35But this terrible disease ravaging Florence and Siena was not entirely new.
15:50Boccaccio and Angelo's descriptions mirror those of at least one previous pandemic.
15:56The same symptoms, the buboes that appeared in the groin, on the neck and under the armpits,
16:02were still seared into the collective memory, tales of a plague from some 700 years earlier.
16:12In the sixth century AD, we see it for the first time emerging in a really abrupt kind of large-scale pandemic,
16:20the so-called first plague pandemic, the Justinianic plague.
16:26Named after the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I,
16:29the plague of Justinian killed millions across the Mediterranean.
16:36It spread all over the former Roman Empire, that's why we have historical sources telling us about it.
16:40It could well be it was there before, but we just don't have historical records.
16:45But what was this insidious disease?
16:47It wasn't until after another deadly outbreak, this time in China in 1894, that the pathogen responsible for causing black death was finally identified.
17:01The physician who isolated it was Alexandre Yersin, and the bacterium was named after him.
17:08Yersinia pestis.
17:11There are three main types of plague, all caused by the same Yersinia pestis bacterium.
17:19They are bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic.
17:25The most commonly found form of the disease is bubonic plague, which represents about 80% of all cases.
17:32Their bacteria transfer into their closest lymph nodes and start to replicate very rapidly.
17:40The individuals who are infected develop really swollen, painful lymph glands, so the glands in the neck and under the armpits and in the groin.
17:49These swellings are called buboes, hence the name bubonic plague.
17:55If left untreated, the results can be deadly.
17:59While anyone contracting bubonic plague still has up to a 40% chance of survival,
18:06if left untreated, the Yersinia pestis bacteria can spread from the lymph nodes directly into the bloodstream.
18:12This causes bubonic plague to develop into septicemic plague, a systemic infection which is much more deadly.
18:21This is when the bacteria enter the bloodstream directly, cause sepsis right away.
18:27It's extremely lethal, it can cause death in almost 100% of cases.
18:35Once a patient's bloodstream has been infected with Yersinia pestis,
18:41the blood can also carry the bacteria directly into the lungs, causing pneumonic plague.
18:54Like the septicemic variant, pneumonic plague has almost a 100% fatality rate if left untreated.
19:02But the thing that makes it even more deadly is the fact that it can be spread directly from person to person.
19:07Coughs and sneezes expel tiny aerosol droplets that carry the Yersinia pestis bacteria into the air.
19:17When someone inhales droplets from an infected person, they breathe in the bacteria that causes plague.
19:23The three different types of plague can occur at the same time, both in individuals and in the wider population.
19:33But it is when enough people develop pneumonic plague that the rate of infection soars.
19:38That is then a rapid fire spread of plague, and we think that's what happened in the 1340s when plague arrived in Europe.
19:47It spread rapidly between people.
19:50Once plague is present in the population, especially in a densely occupied trading city like Siena,
19:56the extremely contagious pneumonic version will spread like wildfire.
20:01It is believed the Black Death may have killed up to 200 million people across Europe and beyond,
20:08making it the deadliest pandemic in recorded history.
20:11But when it arrived, how prepared were cities like Siena to combat the contagion?
20:28By the 1340s, Siena was a hotbed of artistic and civic innovation, and it prided itself on good government.
20:36The government of the nine had been established in 1287 as a fair government, which was made up of nine members of the middle class.
20:47These nine members would hold office for two months at a time and spend their terms segregated in the Palazzo Publico to deter corruption.
20:57They bought up and demolished houses in this area until they had a large open space, and they bricked this over to make the Campo.
21:11The building of the piazza was a momentous event.
21:15Agnolo di Tura described its opening day in 1346.
21:19On December 30th, the paving of the Campo was completed, and with the beauty of the fountains and of the buildings round about,
21:29it is held to be one of the fairest squares in Italy, and even in Christendom.
21:33Siena saw its greatest economic, political power in the 14th century.
21:43Of course, it also saw its greatest architectural and artistic achievements as well.
21:48The government commissioned one of the foremost artists of the day, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, to paint a vast allegory of good and bad government in the Palazzo Publico.
22:01The good government is dressed in the white and black of the Balzana, or the city shield of Siena, and he is surrounded by virtues.
22:12The three theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity.
22:18In the good city, you have people going about their daily lives,
22:23and you have people looking down from their windows to the activities of the street down below.
22:32Conversely, the bad government is represented by a figure of the tyrant, of tyranny,
22:38and rather than being surrounded by virtues, they are surrounded by vices.
22:45The buildings are falling apart.
22:49The frescoes are literally crumbling.
22:53The allegory of good and bad government was completed in May 1339.
23:01At the time, Siena would have resembled the city run by good government.
23:05Within a few short years, the Black Death would arrive, taking the life of the painter and almost overnight plunging Siena into Lorenzetti's bad city vision of hell.
23:21In Florence, Boccaccio watched the social order break down and despaired of fellow citizens who...
23:27Carouse and make merry, and go about singing and frolicking, and satisfy the appetite in everything possible, and laugh and scoff at what so ever befell.
23:40As the death toll spiralled out of control, good government collapsed in Siena and across almost all of Europe.
23:47Can you imagine in 1347, 1348, having no understanding of germ theory, no science, no idea what was causing half of the people you know to die?
24:00If we think about plague in the context of the recent pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic, which most people are familiar with, that pandemic had a less than 1% mortality.
24:11It spread all over the world. It caused the most incredible economic disruption and the huge societal impact that it had from lockdowns and so on.
24:21At the point that the World Health Organization stopped collecting detailed data on the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2024, there had been just over 700 million recorded cases of the disease around the world.
24:37Of these, 7 million people had died.
24:42Today, scholars estimate that up to half of those infected during the Black Death lost their lives.
24:49So we have to imagine plague as an order of magnitude different, with perhaps 50% of the population dead, not less than 1%, and the impact that that must have had on society.
25:02A couple of key questions have plagued historians of the Black Death for hundreds of years.
25:09Where did this 14th century pandemic originate?
25:12And can we ever find its patient zero, the earliest known victim?
25:19One man has made it his life's work to find answers.
25:23Professor Philip Slavin.
25:25I thought to myself, wow, it was one of those really crazy events that almost killed the entire Eurasian population.
25:33And one of the questions that I've been really, really fascinated is the, where did it start? Where did it come from?
25:38Medieval Europe was overwhelmingly an agricultural world of serfs and peasants, working the lands of powerful church and nobility.
25:49But it was also a world of extremely long trade routes and cultural exchange.
25:54We know that in the 14th century long distance trade was really flourishing all over Eurasia, in different parts of Central Asia, Western Eurasia, the Middle East, Northern Africa, Iran.
26:09But where people can move freely, disease can just as easily follow.
26:13When we're talking about spread of any infectious disease, the most important factor is the movement of people and goods.
26:21The Italian peninsula was a major trade hub for goods and people from across the known world.
26:28Especially the thriving maritime republics of Tuscany and northern Italy.
26:33Merchants from Venice, Genoa and Pisa sailed as far afield as Crimea on the northern shore of the Black Sea.
26:39The Black Sea region was very, very important, the supplier of grain to Europe at that point.
26:49So Venetians and Genoese had commercial hubs all over Crimea.
26:53They were using those hubs in order to trade primarily in grain but also in slaves with local traders.
27:01But trade often resulted in conflict.
27:07In 1343 there was a clash between the Tatars and the Italians.
27:14The Italian republics established colonies over nearly half a century of trading in Crimea.
27:20But violence eventually erupted between the settlers and the Tatars.
27:23Local Italian populations had to flee for their lives and they ended up in the Venetian trade port of Kaffa.
27:33There is evidence to suggest that by 1345 plague was already circulating around Crimea.
27:40And it's possible that the Siege of Kaffa in the same year was the most likely first contact between Europeans and the strain of the plague that would, in a few short years, devastate the continent.
27:55There is one very, very dramatic description of one Italian chronicle called Gabriele de Musis who alleged that the Mongols and the Tatars failing to besiege Kaffa, they resorted to what can be interpreted as the early example of biological warfare.
28:19They started actually catapulting the infected bodies of the soldiers over the walls of the Kaffa fortress, hoping actually to infect those people.
28:32And they did the trick.
28:33In 1347, with the Siege of Kaffa over, Crimean grain was once again shipped into Italian ports, but the grain ships carried a stowaway as vicious as it was small.
28:56Rats carrying fleas nestled amongst the cargo, and some human passengers were already infected.
29:12In September 1347, they arrived in Messina in Sicily.
29:16That's the introduction of the Black Death into Europe.
29:20That was the other port of entry into Europe.
29:23One by one, Italian port towns and cities fell to the Black Death.
29:30By late 1347, the disease had been reported in Genoa and Venice, and all the way to the Middle East.
29:37By the following year, it spread up through southern Europe to Germany and France, and across to England.
29:44In the ravaged cities, even without an understanding of germ theory, observers recognised that the movement of people was connected to the spread of disease.
29:56Boccaccio was critical of those who left infected cities for the country, potentially carrying the plague with them.
30:03In this passage here, we can see Boccaccio talking about what he calls more cruel or more barbarous people who left the city.
30:15Fears and conceits were begotten in those who remained alive, who almost all came to a very barbarous conclusion.
30:30Namely, to shun and flee from the sick.
30:35And in so doing, thought to secure immunity for themselves.
30:39In Mediterranean Europe, authorities took the lead in implementing a policy to halt the spread of the plague.
30:53One that we still use today, and which revolved around the use of quarantine and isolation to try and immobilise the plague.
31:02Quarantine did emerge as a practice that was particularly associated with Mediterranean ports early on,
31:09which makes sense because these were really on the front line of the arrival of the plague from ships
31:15for the movement of people and goods and animals and so forth.
31:19And one place in particular is known to have pioneered the practice of isolating the infected from the healthy.
31:27Dubrovnik, known in this period as Ragusa.
31:32The Adriatic port was the earliest place that instituted quarantine measures
31:37and that established two different islands as places for people to go to
31:43if they were coming from a place that had seen infection,
31:47but also increasingly if there were cases within the city or the surrounding area,
31:52people were sent to these islands.
31:55But just like today, knowing whether these measures work or not can be difficult to determine.
32:02I think in terms of measuring the success of quarantine, the parallel of COVID-19 is really, really relevant,
32:10because that's what, I guess, what we were doing in Europe before the vaccine,
32:17and we could still see the pandemic raging around us.
32:23But there's a bigger question about how much worse the situation would have been
32:28if we hadn't all suddenly stayed at home.
32:30As the Black Death tore through Europe,
32:34people and physicians scrambled desperately to understand and combat the disease.
32:40even though they may not have known what was killing them,
32:48they were trying to explain the disease as best they could.
32:52Plague was believed to be transmitted through corrupt air or miasma.
32:57The best way to understand it is corrupt or poisoned air.
33:02This idea that illness is not just something that originates inside the body,
33:07but it is also something that happens through external factors,
33:11and air can become corrupt in its essence.
33:16For us, miasma may be best compared to our concept of contamination.
33:24So, air that smelt bad, or air that was visibly polluted by fumes or smoke.
33:31Water was central to medieval understanding of how plagues spread.
33:37And it was believed that a supply of fresh water
33:40was integral to preventing the spread of the disease.
33:45In a city like Siena, that was a potential problem.
33:49Siena's real problem is that it's about 1,000 feet above the nearest source of water,
33:55which is a lot.
33:57Siena is near the source of several rivers that become major rivers,
34:01but not while they're near Siena.
34:04But there was a solution.
34:06In the years leading up to the Black Death,
34:09the Sienese had completed a major project
34:12to bring fresh running water to its population.
34:16Engineers carved 25 kilometres of tunnels into the ground beneath Siena.
34:22This artificial underground river carried fresh water from nearby springs
34:27into the heart of the city,
34:30and gave the inhabitants of Siena some comfort, however misplaced,
34:34that their water would not bring them harm from the plague.
34:39But in other parts of Europe,
34:41communal water sources became the focus of dangerous conspiracy theories.
34:46In places like England and Germany,
34:49there were widespread accusations that the Black Death
34:52was deliberately spread by local Jewish communities,
34:55who, it was alleged, were poisoning wells.
34:59These lies fuelled anti-Semitic violence across the continent,
35:05and thousands of Jews were tragically murdered as a result.
35:09The fate of European Jews during the Black Death illustrates
35:16how misinformation about the origins of a pandemic
35:20can have a devastating social impact.
35:27Despite limitations in understanding the spread of disease,
35:30physicians across Europe did offer treatments
35:34to those who contracted the Black Death.
35:37So we have here a manuscript that dates from the 15th to 16th centuries.
35:43It was produced in northern and central France over an extended period.
35:52Although this book was written during later outbreaks,
35:55the treatments it details would have been handed down
35:58from the 14th century Black Death pandemic.
36:02The manuscript I have in front of me
36:07as an artefact that reveals how people lived with plague
36:11in the decades and centuries following the very first outbreak
36:14of the mid-14th century,
36:16and the manner in which it became part of people's everyday life,
36:19part of the culture of Europe.
36:21In many places, the plague returned every few years,
36:26making it a day-to-day concern,
36:28best compared to the coronavirus or the flu.
36:31So, having ways to prevent and treat the infection was paramount.
36:38Towards the end of the volume, we have large numbers of medical remedies,
36:46and specifically treatments against epidemic illness.
36:50So, the heading here in Latin is contra epidemium, against epidemic.
36:56And the treatments are written in both Latin and French.
37:00This treatment is a medicinal water based on rose water,
37:05vinegar and other ingredients.
37:09It is meant to be drunk by the patient,
37:12and it's a preventive treatment to prevent them from developing the plague.
37:17Here I have another recipe against epidemic illness.
37:24It's a list of ingredients and quantities,
37:26many, many different plant ingredients
37:28that are meant to be dried and made into a powder
37:32that can then be added to water
37:34and either drunk by the patient
37:36or applied to their body as a medicinal water
37:39that enters the body through the pores of the skin.
37:44These treatments may seem unlikely to be of much help,
37:48but they may not be as far removed from modern medicine as we think.
37:53There's a huge amount of overlap here with modern-day treatments,
37:56to the extent that modern-day scientific researchers
37:59are very interested in medieval remedies.
38:03But sometimes the treatment could be almost as bad as the illness itself.
38:09Bloodletting was a treatment.
38:12It was understood that bloodletting would expel the corruption of the plague from the body,
38:17meaning that there was a possibility that you might recover.
38:20But while some treatments may appear ineffectual and barbaric,
38:25medieval people did have some understanding of how to prevent disease spreading.
38:30There was a whole system of knowledge about medicine that was based on observation.
38:37So people would observe, for example, that a hospital ward that was dirty
38:43would be a space in which there was ready disease transmission.
38:48And so they would respond and they would keep that space clean.
38:51And so many aspects of medieval behaviour in relation to illness,
38:55and then specifically in relation to plague,
38:58actually aligns with things that we would do today.
39:01I think if we were to suggest that people just ignored cleanliness
39:06because they didn't have the scientific understanding that we have now,
39:10that simply wouldn't be true.
39:12Despite attempts to treat and prevent the spread of the Black Death,
39:18it continued to spread across Europe like wildfire.
39:22So rapid was the rate with which the infected died,
39:25that there wasn't time to give each victim an individual burial.
39:29Bodies lined the streets, and solutions to bury the dead needed to be found.
39:35In Siena, Agnolo di Tura described the consequences of the devastating speed
39:43with which people succumbed to the disease.
39:48In many places in Siena, great pits were dug,
39:51and piled deep with the multitude of dead.
39:54And they died by the hundreds, both day and night,
39:57and all were thrown in those ditches and covered with earth.
40:00And as soon as those ditches were filled, more were dug.
40:07By the time the Black Death pandemic waned,
40:10it is believed that over 200 million people
40:13had been killed by the plague.
40:16In the centuries that followed,
40:18the disease would periodically reemerge,
40:21infecting people in their thousands,
40:24before subsiding again.
40:27Even today, there are still regular outbreaks across the globe.
40:33Plague, I think, in common understanding,
40:36is a disease of the past.
40:37But the truth is that it's still an infection,
40:41which is occurring today in humans.
40:44And there were a large outbreak in Madagascar,
40:46just before 2019, about 2017.
40:50And we also see sporadic cases in various parts of Africa,
40:54in Russia, in China, and in the United States every year.
40:59For many years, it was known that the Black Death
41:02had first entered into Europe
41:04through the Sicilian port of Messina,
41:06and that it had likely travelled there on cargo ships,
41:09carrying infected rats and people,
41:12from the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea.
41:15But beyond that, the Black Death's true point of origin
41:20has remained a mystery.
41:22To help prevent any potential future pandemic outbreak,
41:26it's crucial to pinpoint
41:28where the deadliest outbreak of plague originated.
41:32To understand exactly how pandemics are initiated
41:36is really important for us to actually be better defended
41:39against future pandemics.
41:41Professor Philip Slavin has made it his quest
41:44to locate Black Death Patient Zero,
41:47the first known human victim
41:50of the catastrophic 14th-century outbreak.
41:53It's very, very important to establish
41:56the origins of any disease.
41:59Philip believes that he is close
42:01to tracing the Black Death beyond Crimea
42:04to discover where it may have first made the jump
42:07from rodents to humans.
42:09Patient Zero is the first human carrier
42:12of an infectious disease.
42:14The same person, he or she, would receive bacteria
42:19or viruses from the wildlife reservoir,
42:22in other words, from animals.
42:24And in such capacity, the same person,
42:27he or she would be responsible for transmitting
42:31the same bacteria or viruses
42:33to wider human population.
42:35In other words, we're talking about the missing link
42:37between the wildlife reservoir
42:39and wider human communities.
42:41Philip is combining his own historical detective work
42:45with that of a team of scientific experts.
42:48Together, they are tracking a collection of human remains
42:55and enigmatic artifacts across Britain, Europe, and beyond.
43:04In the hope of being the first to uncover Black Death Patient Zero.
43:10In the hope of being the first to uncover Black Death
43:14this is just one of the ones who are most of the top
43:18who are ΠΎΡΡΡing in the background.
43:19It is the only one of the people who are still in the background.
43:20In the hope of being the first to uncover Black Death
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