This week we begin a five-part series on a catastrophe that remains one of the most destructive things to ever happen to humanity — the Black Death AKA the Great Mortality AKA the Big Death. For part one, we examine the conditions that led to the worst pandemic in history. Spoiler alert: it involves an ungodly amount of human shit.

Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0