How the Black Death Accidentally Created the Modern World

In 1346, a Mongol army dying outside a Genoese trading port catapults its plague corpses over the walls, and six years later a third of Europe is dead. This documentary traces the Black Death from the steppes of Central Asia to the ports of Sicily, Italy, France, and England, showing how a bacterium carried by fleas unraveled feudalism, gutted the Church's authority, sparked peasant revolts, and cleared the ground for the Renaissance and the Reformation. Along the way: the siege of Caffa, the flagellant movement, the massacres that followed the plague's spread, the labor revolution that broke serfdom, and the six-hundred-year mystery of what Yersinia pestis actually was. Chapters cover medieval Europe before the plague, the Silk Road origins of the pandemic, its spread across the continent, the social and religious fallout, and the long-term transformation into the modern world. Subscribe for more deep-dive histories on how catastrophe reshapes civilization.