Hi, we're your host's Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling.

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Marseilles, France, early 1348. The plague has come. It moves like an unseen beast through the city,

devouring flesh, shattering families, leaving silence in its wake.

Bodies lie where they fall, some abandoned in doorways, the stench of death of sickness and pungent medicines pollutes the whole of the atmosphere.

It is a time when husbands abandon wives, parents, their children.

Often no one dares to enter the house of someone who is dying,

not servants to collect their wages, not priests, to save their dying parishioners' souls.

So the sufferers are left to fight the black death in a private world of pain.

And yet, even in the midst of such horror, there are those who find opportunity.

We're inside a merchant's house.

Four hooded figures are standing over the recently deceased body of the Black Death's latest victim.

The rest of the house is empty.

Bubos on the dead person's neck bulge like putrid apples.

The smell of death is in the air.

Yet these four figures are cool, calm.

With steady hands they strip the body of its rings, its coin purse, anything of value they take.

A thin trickle of pus leaks from a slit bubo, releasing

a sickly sweet odor. One of the thieves curses and presses a cloth tighter over his mouth and

...