Bubonic Plague

COVID-19 exposes some of Western culture’s deepest prejudices around death and human remains, ingrained by hundreds of years of past mass death events

2020 has been grim, but there have been worse years. Here, experts from science, history and literature take us through just some of the other terrible times

A terrible onslaught of bubonic plague in the sixth century abruptly ended Emperor Justinian’s dream of reunifying the Roman empire and caused massive geopolitical upheaval