Of the millions of victims of the Black Death, one was a teenager named Joseph ben Meir Abulafia, who died of the plague in Toledo in 1349 alongside his new wife. His tombstone was inscribed as a conversation with the dead: "I am the man who has seen desolation and destruction, blood and pestilence. The days of my youth were cut short suddenly, in the prime of my life." His unnamed mother survived, left alone and childless, her days filled with "bitter weeping." That inscription is one of seventy-six medieval tombstones from Toledo's Jewish cemetery that preserve the most personal voices of history's deadliest pandemic, a catastrophe that killed an estimated 100 million people in six years and whose aftershocks lasted for centuries.

Today's guest is Thomas Asbridge, author of The Black Death: A Global History of Humanity's Most Devastating Pandemic. We discuss how a minor Venetian merchant's business papers, preserved by his widow in a convent, reveal that the medieval trade networks which kept cities fed were also purpose-built to spread epidemic disease across thousands of miles. We look at why the Byzantine emperor wrote about his fourteen-year-old son's death with clinical detachment, how a Franciscan intellectual who had questioned whether other worlds existed died carrying holy water through plague-ravaged Messina, and why the only European king killed by the Black Death was besieging Gibraltar with dreams of marching to Jerusalem when the plague found his camp. The pandemic's most devastating long-term consequences were felt not in Europe but in the Muslim world, where the once-invincible Mamluk Empire was broken by recurrent outbreaks and eventually conquered by the Ottomans, and that this forgotten collapse may have been the true hinge point that set the West on its path to global dominance.

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