Pandemics have always forced people to comprehend their own lives in a new way. The world after the plague of 1347-53 has changed unrecognizable. People faced a disease that spared neither women, nor men, nor old, nor young. The symbol of inevitability was the "Dance of Death" - images of processions drawn by dancing skeletons. But the "pestilence" was not the only thing that made a person hourly remember the frailty of life. The Plague Age began with the execution of the Knights Templar. And in parallel with the pandemic, the Hundred Years War between England and France raged. In Russia, the Grand Duke of Moscow Simeon the Proud died of "pestilence." But in the same years, Sergius of Radonezh creates his "revolutionary" monastic community. So, one of the darkest eras will turn into a spiritual triumph. This is the century of the battle on the Kulikovo field and the campaigns of the invincible Tamerlane, the battle on the Kosovo field, and the Great Schism in the Catholic Church. And each of these events has a "double bottom" or its own "skeleton in the closet." This book will introduce you to each of them. A modern person who survived the coronavirus will be able to compare his trials and feelings with those that fell to the lot of those who lived in one of the most dramatic centuries.