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Great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead,

and there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city.

These wars were written by Agnolo Dittura, a Tuscan chronicler who himself had buried his five children due to the scourge of the bubonic plague, the Black Death.

Crude record keeping means precise totals are unknown, but the plague killed tens of millions of Europeans between 1346 and 1353.

Low restimates meaning one-third of the continent's population was extinguished, higher estimates putting the death rate at 6 and 10.

The brutal pandemic was the apex of the misery of the Middle Ages, also known as the medieval period, which went from the 5th to the 15th centuries in Europe,

roughly from the fall of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Renaissance.

For 1000 years, Europe seemed to slide backward, a downward spiral of savagery exacerbated by rampant anti-intellectualism and superstition,

where the great masses lived in rags and filth and died in holy wars and childbirth, while the ruling classes horted resources and lived in opulence.

But as time passed, the era became idealized, the pageantry and ceremony of royalty celebrated, the nobility viewed, indeed as noble,

images of the era dominated by princesses on white horses and knights in shining armor. King Arthur is history.

It was this sanitized version of a decidedly unsanitary age that inspired Jose Montenegro, himself a relative of the count of Perilada,

to convert his barbecue restaurant in the resort town of New Yorka, Spain into a dinner theater where knights competed in jousts and games.

The concept was a hit with tourist, and so it was brought to the colonies in 1983 with its first US outpost in Kissimmee, Florida,

just a short drive from Disney World.

The company opened its second American castle near Anaheim's Disneyland in 1986, then seven more across North America,

the brand perhaps, peaking in relevance in a sequence from the 1996 Ben Stiller Jim Carey film, The Cable Guy.

The dining experience is hardly authentic. Aside from glaring in acronyisms like Pepsi, Frozen Margaritas, and Moist Toulettes,

there's subtler inaccuracies, like the inclusion of corn, potatoes, and tomatoes, which weren't present in Europe before the discovery of the new world.

And the chain faced a near black death of its own at the end of the 20th century, when Shuddy Bookkeeping settled it with a crushing tax bill,

forcing its ownership to file for bankruptcy protection.

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