An icy, unseasonably cold march wind cut through the villagers' worn woolen clothing.

Two dozen people stood clustered around the edge of an open pit dug out of the fertile

soil of the Tiber River Valley in central Italy.

The villagers bowed their heads in prayer as a priest read out a blessing.

The sound mixing with gentle sobbing and lamentation amid the howling wind.

The pit was a mass grave.

Inside were the remains of a dozen people who died in an outbreak of a terrible disease

in the last two weeks.

The bodies in the grave represented a full quarter of the village.

All around the pit, mounds of freshly turned soil marked the places where the disease's

first victims had been buried.

Now, there were just too many for individual plots.

The only way to handle the sheer magnitude of the disaster was with a mass grave.

The year was 543, and the bubonic plague had made its first appearance in Europe.

This plague of Justinian was just one of a series of catastrophes that marked the end of

the ancient world and the beginning of the medieval.

At the same time as plague was ravaging villages like this one, the climate was cooling.

Harvests failed.

People starved.

A terrible war between the invading Romans and the Austro-Goths was entering its seventh

year.

It would continue for another 11.

...