La moria grandissima began its terrible journey across the European and Asian continents in 1347, leaving unimaginable devastation in its wake. Five years later, twenty-five million people were dead, felled by the scourge that would come to be called the Black Death. The Great Mortality is the account of the worst natural disaster in European history -- a drama of courage, cowardice, misery, madness, and sacrifice that illuminates humankind's darkest days when an old world ended and a new world was born.