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The colour of their skin differed from all mortals of our habitable world.

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For the whole surface of their skin was tinged with green.

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To the early medieval mind, the world could appear mysterious, even enchanted.

4
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What should you believe about the dog heads?

5
00:00:30,920 --> 00:00:33,560
Are they descended from Adam's stock?

6
00:00:33,560 --> 00:00:36,720
Or do they have the soul of animals?

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Behind the wonder was a faith that the world was divinely ordered.

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00:00:45,880 --> 00:00:51,360
Every creature in the world is a book or a mirror for us.

9
00:00:52,880 --> 00:00:58,800
But in time, that faith would be shaken by an extraordinary cultural revolution.

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A revolution in the way we think,

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in the way we analyse the physical world.

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And in our experience of other continents and cultures.

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The sum of European knowledge

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and the Christian belief it was based on,

15
00:01:21,600 --> 00:01:23,520
the way we understand the world,

16
00:01:23,520 --> 00:01:25,920
how it was made and when it came into being,

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was about to be transformed.

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The world between the 9th and 15th centuries.

19
00:01:51,560 --> 00:01:56,880
Supposedly a period of superstition and ignorance.

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Where ideas are stifled by the dead hand of religion.

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The intellectual landscape of the Middle Ages is certainly unfamiliar, even strange.

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From furious debates about arcane points of theology,

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to reported sightings of people with the heads of dogs.

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But behind all this strangeness lies a world of passionate enquiry.

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There's scholarship, science, intellectual exploration and sophisticated logic.

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The world experienced by medieval men and women was very different from our own.

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Events that might be called supernatural

28
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occur frequently in medieval records.

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At the end of the 12th century, Ralph, the respected abbot of the monastery of Coggeshall,

30
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recorded an extraordinary story involving the capture of a wild man who lived in the sea.

31
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It happened that the fishermen there, fishing out in the sea, caught

32
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a wild man in their nets. They brought him to the castle as a wonder.

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He was naked and presented a human appearance in every part of his body.

34
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When taken to church, he showed no signs of reverence or belief,

35
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however often he saw holy things.

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He did not wish to utter a word, even when hung by the feet and subject to dire and frequent torture.

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MOANING

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What's striking to us today about this strange and rather sad tale

39
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is that the abbot is less concerned to determine whether the story is true...

40
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than to work out exactly what category of creature this might be.

41
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Was he a mortal man, he asked, or some fish in human form?

42
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Or a wicked spirit lurking in the body of a drowned man?

43
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HOWLING

44
00:04:12,720 --> 00:04:16,880
The wild man eventually escaped back to the sea.

45
00:04:16,880 --> 00:04:19,880
His tormentors, and Ralph of Coggeshall,

46
00:04:19,880 --> 00:04:27,160
are left wondering what kind of creature this was, and were there others like him sharing their world?

47
00:04:29,920 --> 00:04:35,600
Medieval records are brimful of stories of sightings of strange creatures.

48
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She had come from an underground world where the inhabitants

49
00:04:45,880 --> 00:04:52,680
were as green as grass and never saw the sun, but were lit by a twilight glow.

50
00:04:59,200 --> 00:05:05,520
During the reign of Henry II, a servant called Richard from North Sunderland met with three young men

51
00:05:05,520 --> 00:05:10,560
dressed in green on green horses, who carried him off to a lofty mansion.

52
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Here they ate oaten bread and drank milk.

53
00:05:15,240 --> 00:05:19,440
These stories were not regarded as folklore,

54
00:05:19,440 --> 00:05:23,640
but as reported, substantiated facts.

55
00:05:23,640 --> 00:05:31,080
The chronicler, Gervase of Tilbury, in the 12th century, reported hundreds of such sightings.

56
00:05:31,080 --> 00:05:39,040
One concerned the congregation of a Norfolk church, who saw an anchor hanging from the sky.

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The anchor was caught on a tombstone.

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Attached to it, and leading up into the clouds, was a heavy chain.

59
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All of a sudden, a sailor appeared from the cloud

60
00:05:51,280 --> 00:05:56,040
climbing down the chain hand by hand, using the same technique as we do.

61
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He was seized by the churchgoers.

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The other world sailor suffocated by the moistness of our denser air and died in their grasp.

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00:06:07,000 --> 00:06:09,880
CROWD CHATTER

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00:06:11,960 --> 00:06:18,280
He was human enough to sail a ship, but could breathe only the air above the clouds.

65
00:06:18,280 --> 00:06:20,200
What kind of being was he?

66
00:06:26,520 --> 00:06:29,520
Confounded by the sheer number of such discoveries,

67
00:06:29,520 --> 00:06:33,600
medieval thinkers turned to the most authoritative guides they had -

68
00:06:33,600 --> 00:06:36,840
the Bible and the teachings of the Church.

69
00:06:39,440 --> 00:06:43,200
According to medieval thinking, all living things belonged

70
00:06:43,200 --> 00:06:49,600
to one of three categories - animals, humans and spirit beings.

71
00:06:49,600 --> 00:06:53,120
That is, angels and demons.

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00:06:53,120 --> 00:06:58,880
The creatures described by Gervase of Tilbury appear to defy all three categories.

73
00:07:08,240 --> 00:07:11,800
If the beings who appeared on our doorstep seemed strange,

74
00:07:11,800 --> 00:07:16,720
the world beyond the shores of Britain were stranger still.

75
00:07:16,720 --> 00:07:22,880
A sense of just how enchanted it was can be found amongst the treasures of Hereford Cathedral.

76
00:07:28,040 --> 00:07:32,280
This is the Hereford Mappa Mundi, which means map of the world.

77
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It was produced around about 1300 and it's one of the oldest, biggest and most elaborate depictions

78
00:07:37,320 --> 00:07:41,560
of the physical earth to have survived from the Middle Ages.

79
00:07:41,560 --> 00:07:45,120
It was made from the skin of a single calf.

80
00:07:45,120 --> 00:07:49,480
The head would have been here, the tail here, the forelegs.

81
00:07:49,480 --> 00:07:54,840
And what it shows is the three continents known to medieval geography.

82
00:07:54,840 --> 00:07:56,920
East was at the top.

83
00:07:56,920 --> 00:07:59,320
Here was Asia,

84
00:07:59,320 --> 00:08:01,480
Africa and Europe.

85
00:08:01,480 --> 00:08:06,800
And in the centre, symbolically, was the City of Jerusalem.

86
00:08:09,360 --> 00:08:15,240
Many towns and cities, rivers and seas are accurately marked.

87
00:08:17,960 --> 00:08:22,520
Here, the Red Sea has been given a very literal interpretation.

88
00:08:25,480 --> 00:08:31,120
But understanding the geography of the world was not the sole point of such maps.

89
00:08:36,080 --> 00:08:40,760
This map was certainly not designed to get you from A to B.

90
00:08:40,760 --> 00:08:44,240
But it does show how people at the time pictured the earth

91
00:08:44,240 --> 00:08:47,520
on the basis of the information available to them.

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00:08:47,520 --> 00:08:49,920
It's covered with drawings.

93
00:08:49,920 --> 00:08:52,520
Some of them rather familiar.

94
00:08:52,520 --> 00:08:56,400
Russia is represented by a bear.

95
00:08:56,400 --> 00:09:00,480
Norway by a man on skis.

96
00:09:00,480 --> 00:09:04,920
The map is labelled as a history, or story,

97
00:09:04,920 --> 00:09:08,640
and it does seem to depict time as well as space.

98
00:09:08,640 --> 00:09:13,160
Above Jerusalem, the crucifixion is taking place.

99
00:09:13,160 --> 00:09:17,680
Out here we have the Golden Fleece.

100
00:09:17,680 --> 00:09:20,640
And at the top Adam and Eve are being expelled

101
00:09:20,640 --> 00:09:22,320
from the Garden of Eden.

102
00:09:25,680 --> 00:09:28,240
Above them we see the future.

103
00:09:28,240 --> 00:09:30,320
The Last Judgment.

104
00:09:30,320 --> 00:09:34,160
The souls here are being received by God the Father.

105
00:09:34,160 --> 00:09:38,000
While the damned are being led off to the mouth of hell.

106
00:09:39,520 --> 00:09:43,600
The observable world and the world of divine revelation,

107
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the natural and the supernatural coexist quite comfortably.

108
00:09:51,600 --> 00:09:55,960
In Europe, many well-known cities are represented,

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including the most important - Rome, Paris, St Andrews.

110
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But as one moves further away from Europe, the world becomes stranger and there are stranger creatures.

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Mermaids.

112
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Unicorns.

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Men with their faces in their chests.

114
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The monopods - Creatures with one giant foot,

115
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that when they lay backwards, they could use as an umbrella.

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HOWLING

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The further away we get from the familiar world around us,

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the more exotic and fantastic creatures become.

119
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HOWLING

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This was not just some fanciful imagining by the map's creator.

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These creatures were known to have lived in far off lands.

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And they presented the medieval thinker with some really pressing questions.

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What kind of creature were they, and how should you deal with them?

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BLEATING

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Somewhere on the fringes of the world lived a race of dog-headed men.

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Such creatures appear quite frequently in medieval texts and illustrations.

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These beings appeared to be human in most respects, except that they had the heads of dogs.

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The question was, did they have the souls of humans?

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This was a practical concern for missionaries.

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If they encountered dog-heads, should they preach to them or not?

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After all, it made no sense to preach to animals, but it was every Christian's duty

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to convert human souls to Christ,

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however bizarre the body in which that human soul was encased.

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Just such a question puzzled a young missionary in the 9th century as he prepared for a trip to Scandinavia.

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He sought the advice of a leading scholar of the time, named Ratramnus.

136
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What should you believe about the dog-heads?

137
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Are they descended from Adam's stock, or do they have the soul of animals?

138
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Ratramnus's advice is very revealing.

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First he asserts that if the dog-heads are descended from Adam they are certainly human.

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Admittedly, the shape of their heads and their barking are against them.

141
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But nevertheless, they show many crucial human attributes.

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They lived in villages.

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They farmed the land and kept domesticated animals.

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Moreover, the fact that the dog-heads cover their genitalia

145
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is a sign of their decency,

146
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which in turn means they have the power of judging between the decent and the indecent.

147
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For the scholar Ratramnus, this is a powerful point.

148
00:13:12,800 --> 00:13:15,200
I do not see how this could be

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if they had an animal and not a rational soul.

150
00:13:19,080 --> 00:13:24,160
For no-one can blush at indecency unless they have a certain recognition of decency.

151
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A group of moral, rational beings living in a society bound by laws,

152
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this is humanity, not mere animality.

153
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Therefore, he concludes, dog-heads were in essence human beings.

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Some reportedly adopted Christianity.

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One even became a saint.

156
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According to some, St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers, was one such creature.

157
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There were of course no eyewitness accounts of these creatures and they were never seen in Britain.

158
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It is in fact the very nature of a dog-head always to be somewhere else.

159
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It's easy to poke fun at this earnest philosophising

160
00:14:14,200 --> 00:14:21,200
about such bizarre creatures as dog-heads and fish-men and people who come down from the sky.

161
00:14:21,200 --> 00:14:26,440
But such debates were pursued with keen logic and an impressive spirit of dedication.

162
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Logic and observation were the tools whereby things were made to find

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their place in a world view that was intensely religious.

164
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And the fit was not always a neat one.

165
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THUNDER CRACKS

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For much of the Middle Ages, people believed things that today might strike us as paradoxical.

167
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To the medieval mind, an event could be both natural AND supernatural.

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00:14:57,360 --> 00:15:00,560
The great Ecclesiastic, Hrabanus Maurus,

169
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recorded how people reacted to an eclipse in the 9th century.

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00:15:06,520 --> 00:15:10,120
I saw people shooting spears and arrows at the moon,

171
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or scattering the fires from their hearths into the air.

172
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I heard the bellowing of warlike horns.

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The moon, the people said, was being attacked by monsters,

174
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and unless they brought help, the monsters would devour her.

175
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But it wasn't only the ignorant who reacted in this way.

176
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Amongst scholars, too, it was widely believed that eclipses meant something.

177
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They signified divine intervention of some kind.

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00:15:40,240 --> 00:15:45,600
In fact, a common medieval term for an eclipse was "signum" - a sign.

179
00:15:51,840 --> 00:15:56,240
It would be wrong to regard the interpretation of eclipses as divine signs,

180
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as stemming from ignorance of their physical causes.

181
00:15:59,440 --> 00:16:04,600
Here is Isidore of Seville, the great encyclopaedist of the early Middle Ages.

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He knew exactly what was happening.

183
00:16:09,120 --> 00:16:11,720
The moon suffers an eclipse

184
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if the shadow of the earth comes between it and the sun.

185
00:16:19,200 --> 00:16:23,640
The sun suffers an eclipse when the new moon is in line with the sun

186
00:16:23,640 --> 00:16:25,840
and obstructs and obscures it.

187
00:16:27,920 --> 00:16:30,320
He was, of course, right.

188
00:16:34,040 --> 00:16:38,160
So were eclipses divine messages or natural phenomena?

189
00:16:38,160 --> 00:16:39,320
They were both.

190
00:16:39,320 --> 00:16:42,600
The two explanations could coexist.

191
00:16:42,600 --> 00:16:45,640
HORSES BRAY AND CARTS CLATTER

192
00:16:51,760 --> 00:16:56,840
In 1218, Oliver of Paderbon, a chronicler at the time, described

193
00:16:56,840 --> 00:17:01,400
how troops on the march saw a favourable sign in the night sky.

194
00:17:03,400 --> 00:17:09,160
Soon after we arrived, there was an almost total eclipse of the moon.

195
00:17:09,160 --> 00:17:14,320
This often happens from natural causes at the time of the full moon.

196
00:17:14,320 --> 00:17:19,240
Nevertheless, since the Lord says, there shall be signs in the sun

197
00:17:19,240 --> 00:17:24,520
and in the moon, we interpreted this eclipse as unfavourable to the enemy.

198
00:17:28,920 --> 00:17:32,520
The eclipse was interpreted as a sign from God,

199
00:17:32,520 --> 00:17:36,480
even though its natural cause was also recognised.

200
00:17:39,840 --> 00:17:44,960
The ability to understand perfectly well the physical processes of an event like an eclipse,

201
00:17:44,960 --> 00:17:50,720
while remaining convinced of its religious significance, is a classic feature of medieval thinking.

202
00:17:50,720 --> 00:17:55,560
What has been called "The Disenchantment of the World" was only just beginning.

203
00:17:55,560 --> 00:18:00,080
Physical laws and divine agency were yet to quarrel.

204
00:18:07,560 --> 00:18:09,600
In the medieval world view,

205
00:18:09,600 --> 00:18:13,920
the desire to understand burned with a moral intensity.

206
00:18:16,920 --> 00:18:21,360
In the early Middle Ages, the quest for knowledge was largely confined

207
00:18:21,360 --> 00:18:24,920
within the walls of the great monasteries and cathedrals.

208
00:18:27,360 --> 00:18:32,760
Learning stayed in the hands of monks and priests, quite literally.

209
00:18:37,520 --> 00:18:41,960
Medieval Europe was a manuscript culture, which means that for a text

210
00:18:41,960 --> 00:18:45,520
to exist at all, it had to be copied out by hand.

211
00:18:48,840 --> 00:18:54,440
And for it to exist in more than one copy, it had to be copied out again.

212
00:18:54,440 --> 00:18:56,640
And again.

213
00:19:00,680 --> 00:19:03,440
It was a slow and laborious business.

214
00:19:03,440 --> 00:19:08,840
Occasionally, a small voice of protest can be heard from the margins.

215
00:19:08,840 --> 00:19:12,640
Here ends the second part of the Summa Theologica.

216
00:19:12,640 --> 00:19:17,880
Very long, very verbose and very tedious to write out.

217
00:19:17,880 --> 00:19:22,800
Thank God. Thank God and again, thank God.

218
00:19:27,720 --> 00:19:33,200
Books were consequently extremely valuable and highly treasured.

219
00:19:33,200 --> 00:19:34,640
If they travelled at all,

220
00:19:34,640 --> 00:19:38,600
it was usually from one monastery to another. And if they got lost?

221
00:19:38,600 --> 00:19:44,680
Well, at least one medieval librarian was not going to be happy.

222
00:19:46,560 --> 00:19:51,560
For him that steals this book or borrows it and does not return it,

223
00:19:51,560 --> 00:19:55,520
let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him.

224
00:19:55,520 --> 00:19:59,640
Let him be struck with palsy and all his limbs blasted.

225
00:19:59,640 --> 00:20:04,320
Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy.

226
00:20:04,320 --> 00:20:08,000
And when at last he goes to his final punishment,

227
00:20:08,000 --> 00:20:11,360
let the flames of hell consume him for ever.

228
00:20:18,120 --> 00:20:20,480
Books were rare, precious.

229
00:20:20,480 --> 00:20:22,680
Available only to the few.

230
00:20:22,680 --> 00:20:27,880
At the beginning of the Middle Ages, learning was locked away in the hands of monks and priests.

231
00:20:27,880 --> 00:20:30,160
They were the interpreters of the world.

232
00:20:33,960 --> 00:20:39,240
Learning was not something to be disseminated, so much as jealously controlled.

233
00:20:39,240 --> 00:20:42,440
For knowledge existed not for its own sake,

234
00:20:42,440 --> 00:20:45,840
but as part of the search for religious truth.

235
00:20:48,120 --> 00:20:51,920
In the Library of Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge

236
00:20:51,920 --> 00:20:56,680
are medieval manuscripts which describe animals and nature.

237
00:20:59,800 --> 00:21:04,280
What we have here are medieval accounts of the natural world.

238
00:21:06,120 --> 00:21:09,960
A world of animals, a world of birds,

239
00:21:09,960 --> 00:21:12,600
a world of fish.

240
00:21:12,600 --> 00:21:14,560
Systematically arranged

241
00:21:14,560 --> 00:21:18,400
and often beautifully and lavishly illustrated.

242
00:21:18,400 --> 00:21:20,920
They're called bestiaries.

243
00:21:20,920 --> 00:21:26,120
And they give us an insight into how people in the Middle Ages responded to the natural world around them.

244
00:21:29,520 --> 00:21:32,920
Medieval thinkers cared less about what an animal looked like,

245
00:21:32,920 --> 00:21:36,960
or where it lived, than about what its nature and character

246
00:21:36,960 --> 00:21:39,960
could tell us about God's plan for mankind.

247
00:21:41,480 --> 00:21:43,080
Take the story of the beaver.

248
00:21:43,080 --> 00:21:47,800
The beaver, the bestiary tells us, is hunted for its testicles.

249
00:21:47,800 --> 00:21:51,520
It does indeed secrete valuable musk in that region.

250
00:21:51,520 --> 00:21:56,480
When the beaver sees the huntsmen coming, it cuts off its own testicles with its teeth,

251
00:21:56,480 --> 00:22:01,080
then waves its leg, showing the huntsman that it has nothing for him.

252
00:22:02,680 --> 00:22:07,520
In just this way, says the bestiary, we must cut away vice from ourselves,

253
00:22:07,520 --> 00:22:12,760
so that when the Devil comes after us, we can show him that we have nothing for him.

254
00:22:16,920 --> 00:22:23,160
The world had been created by God in the same way that a book is written by its author.

255
00:22:28,240 --> 00:22:33,400
The bestiary texts often begin with a large illustration

256
00:22:33,400 --> 00:22:36,680
of Adam giving names to the animals.

257
00:22:36,680 --> 00:22:41,120
They've assembled in a rather charming way to hear what they're going to be called.

258
00:22:41,120 --> 00:22:44,680
And it's very symbolic, because in the medieval period,

259
00:22:44,680 --> 00:22:49,440
the natural world was not viewed as something independent in its own right.

260
00:22:49,440 --> 00:22:52,800
It had been created for human beings.

261
00:22:56,760 --> 00:23:00,040
But whether the creatures are fabulous or realistic,

262
00:23:00,040 --> 00:23:02,720
whether the bird is a phoenix or a blackbird,

263
00:23:02,720 --> 00:23:07,880
the purpose of the bestiary was not really to act as a kind of field guide.

264
00:23:07,880 --> 00:23:12,120
Its purpose was to tell you what these creatures meant.

265
00:23:12,120 --> 00:23:17,440
They had a message for human beings, and the message was moral and spiritual.

266
00:23:20,360 --> 00:23:23,520
A similar warning against the wiles of the Devil

267
00:23:23,520 --> 00:23:26,160
can be found in the story of the whale,

268
00:23:26,160 --> 00:23:31,120
illustrated in this other bestiary in a rather spectacular drawing,

269
00:23:31,120 --> 00:23:34,720
in which we see the sailors

270
00:23:34,720 --> 00:23:38,560
that have come to what they think is an island in the sea.

271
00:23:38,560 --> 00:23:42,520
They land, they hammer in a stake to anchor their ship,

272
00:23:42,520 --> 00:23:43,920
they light a fire.

273
00:23:43,920 --> 00:23:45,800
What they haven't realised

274
00:23:45,800 --> 00:23:49,520
is that the island is in fact the hump of a giant whale,

275
00:23:49,520 --> 00:23:53,720
which is immediately to suck them down into the depths of the sea.

276
00:23:53,720 --> 00:24:00,560
That's a warning for us to be on our guard against the wiles of the Devil and his deceptions at all times.

277
00:24:05,760 --> 00:24:08,920
According to the philosopher Alan de Lille,

278
00:24:08,920 --> 00:24:13,600
every creature in the world is a book or a picture or a mirror for us.

279
00:24:19,320 --> 00:24:24,400
But this view of the earth as a sacred book was beginning to be undermined

280
00:24:24,400 --> 00:24:27,720
by changes taking place in the medieval world.

281
00:24:27,720 --> 00:24:31,120
The growth of towns all over Europe.

282
00:24:31,120 --> 00:24:33,920
The upheavals of war.

283
00:24:33,920 --> 00:24:37,440
The new horizons opened up by trade.

284
00:24:37,440 --> 00:24:41,200
The growing complexity of government and law.

285
00:24:44,080 --> 00:24:49,320
The bureaucracy required to run a medieval state was growing more sophisticated.

286
00:24:49,320 --> 00:24:52,400
Where were the lawyers and administrators to come from?

287
00:24:52,400 --> 00:24:57,440
A new class of man, educated in a different way, was needed.

288
00:25:02,360 --> 00:25:07,320
A background in biblical scholarship was no longer enough.

289
00:25:07,320 --> 00:25:12,480
Tutors began to congregate in Oxford in the mid-12th century.

290
00:25:12,480 --> 00:25:17,760
They offered teaching in law and other secular subjects in return for money,

291
00:25:17,760 --> 00:25:20,560
setting themselves up in rented rooms.

292
00:25:22,160 --> 00:25:24,040
This was a small revolution.

293
00:25:24,040 --> 00:25:29,080
You could now pursue a career in learning without being a monk or a priest.

294
00:25:31,240 --> 00:25:36,120
Young boys began to study, not necessarily to become closer to God,

295
00:25:36,120 --> 00:25:38,560
but to increase their chances in life.

296
00:25:40,360 --> 00:25:44,400
Hundreds of teenage boys living away from home in a strange place,

297
00:25:44,400 --> 00:25:49,000
renting rooms, buying food, going to the pub, interested in girls.

298
00:25:49,000 --> 00:25:51,920
In other words, a recipe for trouble.

299
00:25:56,440 --> 00:26:01,080
In 1209, the body of a local woman was discovered in Oxford.

300
00:26:01,080 --> 00:26:05,920
She was last seen drinking with a student in a nearby tavern.

301
00:26:15,480 --> 00:26:19,320
The suspect could not be found.

302
00:26:19,320 --> 00:26:22,760
In revenge, the student's three roommates

303
00:26:22,760 --> 00:26:27,560
were arrested by the town's authorities and were all hanged.

304
00:26:34,720 --> 00:26:41,080
Enraged by the injustice, almost the entire body of students and teachers upped and left.

305
00:26:41,080 --> 00:26:43,680
It was to be five years before they returned.

306
00:26:46,520 --> 00:26:51,600
In 1214, formal university regulations were drawn up.

307
00:26:51,600 --> 00:26:53,600
A Chancellor was appointed

308
00:26:53,600 --> 00:26:57,480
and a syllabus was introduced with exams at the end.

309
00:26:57,480 --> 00:27:02,520
The British university, as we know it today, was born.

310
00:27:02,520 --> 00:27:05,360
And as for the teachers who fled from Oxford?

311
00:27:09,600 --> 00:27:12,640
Many made their way to the City of Cambridge

312
00:27:12,640 --> 00:27:15,240
and established a rival university.

313
00:27:20,520 --> 00:27:25,240
The university is one of the great legacies of the medieval world.

314
00:27:25,240 --> 00:27:30,600
In time, rich patrons, even kings, endowed new colleges.

315
00:27:32,320 --> 00:27:36,960
The town of Cambridge was transformed from a crowded little river port

316
00:27:36,960 --> 00:27:39,360
into one of the wonders of the world.

317
00:27:42,800 --> 00:27:46,560
What was taught differed from the kind of learning

318
00:27:46,560 --> 00:27:50,200
that had been enclosed in the great monasteries of Europe.

319
00:27:50,200 --> 00:27:54,080
Science, philosophy, logic, mathematics...

320
00:27:58,160 --> 00:28:01,280
And with it, came a new kind of scholar.

321
00:28:01,280 --> 00:28:04,200
Men like Peter Abelard at the University of Paris,

322
00:28:04,200 --> 00:28:08,240
who saw himself as a warrior for truth.

323
00:28:11,200 --> 00:28:15,960
I preferred the weapons of logic to all the other teachings of philosophy

324
00:28:15,960 --> 00:28:17,440
and armed with these,

325
00:28:17,440 --> 00:28:22,120
I chose the conflicts of disputation instead of the trophies of war.

326
00:28:25,840 --> 00:28:30,560
His critical and analytical approach typifies the new intellectual style

327
00:28:30,560 --> 00:28:33,200
that arose in the 12th and 13th centuries.

328
00:28:33,200 --> 00:28:36,800
As he wrote, "By doubting we come to inquiring,

329
00:28:36,800 --> 00:28:39,560
"and by inquiring, we perceive the truth."

330
00:28:39,560 --> 00:28:45,560
This hunger for a different kind of understanding was to threaten the monastic monopoly of learning.

331
00:28:49,320 --> 00:28:54,920
Upheaval in the wider world accelerated this intellectual shift.

332
00:28:54,920 --> 00:28:57,760
Christian Europe was on the offensive.

333
00:28:57,760 --> 00:29:02,080
Its knights conquering lands all around the Mediterranean.

334
00:29:10,680 --> 00:29:12,680
In the 11th and 12th centuries,

335
00:29:12,680 --> 00:29:17,360
the Christians of Spain were pushing south, seizing Muslim territory.

336
00:29:17,360 --> 00:29:22,240
In 1085, they conquered the great City of Toledo.

337
00:29:24,600 --> 00:29:31,440
This fortified city had been a great cultural centre of Islamic arts and science.

338
00:29:31,440 --> 00:29:36,120
It was a major prize for the Christian armies.

339
00:29:36,120 --> 00:29:39,400
Within its walls were wonderful libraries.

340
00:29:43,200 --> 00:29:47,480
They contained ancient Greek texts translated into Arabic,

341
00:29:47,480 --> 00:29:51,320
including the scientific works of the great philosopher, Aristotle,

342
00:29:51,320 --> 00:29:54,000
which had been unknown in the West until that time.

343
00:30:01,080 --> 00:30:05,040
Word of these discoveries began to spread across Europe,

344
00:30:05,040 --> 00:30:09,080
even reaching the ears of ordinary clerics in Britain.

345
00:30:21,440 --> 00:30:24,640
In 1170 or so, a Norfolk priest, Daniel of Morley,

346
00:30:24,640 --> 00:30:29,520
heard stories about the manuscripts that had been discovered in the libraries of Spain.

347
00:30:29,520 --> 00:30:33,840
Frustrated by what he saw as the limited intellectual world around him,

348
00:30:33,840 --> 00:30:37,280
he prepared to make the long journey to southern Europe.

349
00:30:42,000 --> 00:30:45,720
Daniel was impatient with the traditional learning

350
00:30:45,720 --> 00:30:51,480
that seemed devoted to minute annotations of texts of Roman law.

351
00:30:51,480 --> 00:30:57,880
What excited him was the advanced study of mathematics, geometry and astronomy.

352
00:31:00,120 --> 00:31:04,480
Scientific subjects were celebrated especially in Toledo.

353
00:31:04,480 --> 00:31:08,400
I hasten there to learn from the world's wisest philosophers.

354
00:31:10,960 --> 00:31:14,240
In Toledo, he found what he was looking for.

355
00:31:15,840 --> 00:31:21,440
Never before had Christian scholars had access to such a flood of new information.

356
00:31:24,760 --> 00:31:30,800
Men like Daniel of Morley helped start an intellectual revolution.

357
00:31:33,160 --> 00:31:37,320
In Daniel's baggage on his way back from Spain were scientific works

358
00:31:37,320 --> 00:31:41,400
by non-Christian authors like the great Muslim scientist, Abu Ma'shar,

359
00:31:41,400 --> 00:31:44,000
and by pre-Christian authors like Aristotle.

360
00:31:44,000 --> 00:31:45,480
As Daniel himself said,

361
00:31:45,480 --> 00:31:49,320
he was "returning to England with a valuable load of books."

362
00:31:54,000 --> 00:31:58,560
The journey from Toledo to Norfolk was just the latest part

363
00:31:58,560 --> 00:32:02,040
of an extraordinary intellectual voyage.

364
00:32:02,040 --> 00:32:06,320
Ideas travelling over centuries and across continents.

365
00:32:09,520 --> 00:32:12,080
Aristotle's Metaphysics.

366
00:32:12,080 --> 00:32:13,960
Aristotle's Physics.

367
00:32:13,960 --> 00:32:17,280
Aristotle's book on animals.

368
00:32:17,280 --> 00:32:23,560
These texts had undergone an amazing journey before they became available to the scholars of medieval Europe.

369
00:32:23,560 --> 00:32:27,680
Written originally in the 4th century BC, in Ancient Greece,

370
00:32:27,680 --> 00:32:30,200
they'd spread throughout the Greek world.

371
00:32:30,200 --> 00:32:35,080
Then, many centuries later with the rise of Islam and the spread of the Arab Empire,

372
00:32:35,080 --> 00:32:40,000
they'd become familiar to Muslim scholars who had translated them in to Arabic.

373
00:32:40,000 --> 00:32:44,640
They then spread throughout the Islamic world, including Spain.

374
00:32:44,640 --> 00:32:49,920
And there, in the 12th century, in this multi-cultural, multi-lingual society,

375
00:32:49,920 --> 00:32:54,320
scholars came from England, from Paris, from Italy, to seek them out

376
00:32:54,320 --> 00:32:59,920
and to translate them into Latin - the universal language of education in western Europe.

377
00:32:59,920 --> 00:33:03,600
And then, at last, these texts, after 1,500 years,

378
00:33:03,600 --> 00:33:07,920
could spread into the intellectual centres of the West.

379
00:33:07,920 --> 00:33:10,480
They were to cause a shock wave.

380
00:33:15,960 --> 00:33:20,000
Up until now, the foundations of medieval philosophy had been built

381
00:33:20,000 --> 00:33:23,640
upon the Bible and a thousand years of Christian teaching.

382
00:33:23,640 --> 00:33:30,520
God had created the world in seven days and had power over all things in it.

383
00:33:30,520 --> 00:33:34,400
The Greek philosophers started from completely different assumptions.

384
00:33:36,840 --> 00:33:40,080
The ideas of the classical Greek thinkers, such as Aristotle,

385
00:33:40,080 --> 00:33:45,360
written four centuries before Christ, obviously took no account of the idea of the Christian God.

386
00:33:50,080 --> 00:33:54,440
They debated human psychology with no reference to Christianity

387
00:33:54,440 --> 00:33:59,480
and of course, there was no biblical revelation, no creation in seven days.

388
00:33:59,480 --> 00:34:05,200
Instead, they argued that the universe had always existed and would always exist.

389
00:34:07,880 --> 00:34:11,840
The works of Aristotle, along with the other Greek and Arabic thinkers,

390
00:34:11,840 --> 00:34:16,200
presented the Christian west with something entirely new.

391
00:34:16,200 --> 00:34:21,960
A rational, systematic analysis of the universe based on principles that were non-Christian.

392
00:34:21,960 --> 00:34:25,840
A picture of the world based on nature and reason alone.

393
00:34:25,840 --> 00:34:30,000
The response of the Church authorities could have been predicted.

394
00:34:32,480 --> 00:34:36,320
The books of Aristotle on natural philosophy

395
00:34:36,320 --> 00:34:41,120
and the commentaries on them, shall not be read at Paris,

396
00:34:41,120 --> 00:34:45,480
in public or in private, under pain of excommunication.

397
00:34:54,640 --> 00:34:57,480
MONKS CHANT

398
00:35:07,920 --> 00:35:11,920
Worse still, if there are natural laws that govern the universe,

399
00:35:11,920 --> 00:35:15,160
that would seem to imply that God is their prisoner.

400
00:35:15,160 --> 00:35:19,880
To some, such thinking seemed nothing short of heresy.

401
00:35:19,880 --> 00:35:22,400
CHANTING

402
00:35:25,520 --> 00:35:29,640
Religious belief seemed to be on a collision course

403
00:35:29,640 --> 00:35:32,760
with rational theories about the nature of the world.

404
00:35:35,040 --> 00:35:41,040
It would take a remarkable Dominican friar to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable.

405
00:35:48,160 --> 00:35:52,400
Thomas Aquinas came from an aristocratic family in southern Italy.

406
00:35:52,400 --> 00:35:57,440
He was a studious boy and his family seem to have had quite specific ambitions for him.

407
00:35:57,440 --> 00:36:01,080
They thought it would be rather fine if he became Abbot

408
00:36:01,080 --> 00:36:05,520
of the nearby and fabulously wealthy monastery of Monte Cassino.

409
00:36:05,520 --> 00:36:07,680
But Thomas had other ideas.

410
00:36:07,680 --> 00:36:11,360
He was attracted by the newly founded Dominican Order,

411
00:36:11,360 --> 00:36:14,640
which promised poverty, preaching and teaching.

412
00:36:14,640 --> 00:36:17,800
His family were outraged at this wayward behaviour.

413
00:36:17,800 --> 00:36:21,080
They tried everything they could do to break his resolve.

414
00:36:21,080 --> 00:36:25,280
They even locked him up and sent seductive young women to visit him.

415
00:36:27,760 --> 00:36:34,640
But he persevered and set off as a Dominican to Paris, the heart of the intellectual life of western Europe.

416
00:36:37,320 --> 00:36:41,280
There, Aquinas encountered the ideas of Aristotle.

417
00:36:41,280 --> 00:36:48,680
He realised that the Church had either to accommodate Aristotle, or be overwhelmed by him.

418
00:36:48,680 --> 00:36:53,120
Human reasoning, Aquinas argued, derives from God.

419
00:36:53,120 --> 00:36:57,280
Christian revelation also derives from God.

420
00:36:57,280 --> 00:37:00,120
If human reason was used correctly,

421
00:37:00,120 --> 00:37:04,040
it could not contradict what God had revealed in the Bible.

422
00:37:04,040 --> 00:37:09,640
Had the universe always existed, or did it have a beginning?

423
00:37:09,640 --> 00:37:15,280
Aquinas argued that this could neither be proved nor disproved by reason alone.

424
00:37:15,280 --> 00:37:18,920
Aristotle had gone as far as possible with reason.

425
00:37:18,920 --> 00:37:23,880
Only divine revelation could give us the truth here.

426
00:37:23,880 --> 00:37:27,120
In his huge work, the Summa Theological,

427
00:37:27,120 --> 00:37:33,240
Aquinas laid out every conceivable argument between the two ways of thinking.

428
00:37:33,240 --> 00:37:37,360
Aquinas had pulled off a Herculean task of scholarship.

429
00:37:37,360 --> 00:37:43,240
So intense was the experience, it took a heavy toll on both mind and body.

430
00:37:45,840 --> 00:37:48,800
Compared to the great glory of God,

431
00:37:48,800 --> 00:37:52,040
my writing is like straw.

432
00:37:54,120 --> 00:37:57,680
He died, leaving the Summa unfinished.

433
00:38:01,400 --> 00:38:03,760
But his ideas lived on.

434
00:38:03,760 --> 00:38:06,480
The use of reason, based on Aristotle,

435
00:38:06,480 --> 00:38:11,800
to strengthen Christian thinking, came to be known as Scholasticism.

436
00:38:11,800 --> 00:38:15,760
No question was too difficult, or too obscure.

437
00:38:19,800 --> 00:38:24,920
Indeed, the period was to become so celebrated, or notorious, for intense theological inquiry,

438
00:38:24,920 --> 00:38:29,840
that medieval thinkers are often said to have wrestled with the burning question,

439
00:38:29,840 --> 00:38:34,280
"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

440
00:38:36,680 --> 00:38:42,400
In fact, this isn't a genuine piece of medieval head scratching,

441
00:38:42,400 --> 00:38:45,240
but a Victorian pastiche of it.

442
00:38:45,240 --> 00:38:47,880
But it's not without a grain of truth.

443
00:38:47,880 --> 00:38:53,680
Tomas Aquinas did speculate whether angels, who of course have no bodies in the usual sense,

444
00:38:53,680 --> 00:39:00,160
could occupy more than one space at the same time, or whether many of them could be in the same space.

445
00:39:03,920 --> 00:39:08,200
It's the medieval equivalent of the kind of question asked today

446
00:39:08,200 --> 00:39:12,360
in quantum physics - can something be in two places at once?

447
00:39:18,160 --> 00:39:24,880
But the point is this, if you know that angels exist because religious revelation tells you so,

448
00:39:24,880 --> 00:39:29,920
it makes sense to use your intellect and reason to ask what they are like.

449
00:39:29,920 --> 00:39:32,480
Where they can go, what they can do.

450
00:39:32,480 --> 00:39:36,440
In that sense, it's a perfectly rational question.

451
00:39:40,280 --> 00:39:47,880
Early medieval thinkers had marvelled at eclipses, fish people and men from the sky.

452
00:39:47,880 --> 00:39:51,600
Their later successors were more sophisticated.

453
00:39:53,560 --> 00:39:57,440
Their mastery of rational debate provided them with the tools

454
00:39:57,440 --> 00:40:00,800
to understand a flood of new information and knowledge

455
00:40:00,800 --> 00:40:05,120
that poured into western Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries.

456
00:40:12,880 --> 00:40:18,360
Contact with the Arab world brought more than an introduction to Aristotle.

457
00:40:20,000 --> 00:40:23,720
What the Muslims excelled in was science,

458
00:40:23,720 --> 00:40:27,800
and medieval intellectuals were dazzled by their learning.

459
00:40:29,040 --> 00:40:33,720
Arabic words suddenly appeared in scientific language.

460
00:40:37,680 --> 00:40:42,520
Algebra, alchemy - the earliest form of chemistry.

461
00:40:42,520 --> 00:40:45,520
Alcohol, as a laboratory substance,

462
00:40:45,520 --> 00:40:49,320
and the star names like Aldebaran and Algol.

463
00:40:49,320 --> 00:40:53,960
And perhaps the most significant import of all, Arabic numerals.

464
00:40:53,960 --> 00:40:56,880
If you try doing calculations with Roman numerals,

465
00:40:56,880 --> 00:40:58,320
you'll understand why.

466
00:41:09,200 --> 00:41:13,680
Knowledge had advanced perhaps a thousand years in just a century.

467
00:41:13,680 --> 00:41:17,080
The stage was set for a man who has been called

468
00:41:17,080 --> 00:41:22,120
the father of modern science - The Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon.

469
00:41:26,480 --> 00:41:31,520
Inspired by Muslim philosophers, Bacon grasped the importance

470
00:41:31,520 --> 00:41:37,040
of testing accepted arguments with controlled experiments.

471
00:41:37,040 --> 00:41:43,880
The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience.

472
00:41:48,080 --> 00:41:53,080
"All things must be verified by the path of experience," Roger Bacon wrote.

473
00:41:53,080 --> 00:41:56,800
"Experiments on a large scale with instruments are required."

474
00:41:56,800 --> 00:42:01,120
"Experimental science teaches how wonderful instruments can be made."

475
00:42:05,520 --> 00:42:08,800
Bacon was especially fascinated by light.

476
00:42:08,800 --> 00:42:12,520
Indeed, he thought that the light emitted by objects

477
00:42:12,520 --> 00:42:15,600
was the key to understanding the universe.

478
00:42:17,120 --> 00:42:22,160
Everything that has actual existence in the world of the elements,

479
00:42:22,160 --> 00:42:24,520
sends out rays in every direction.

480
00:42:26,400 --> 00:42:30,560
He questioned why a candle appeared to be upside down

481
00:42:30,560 --> 00:42:32,280
when observed through water.

482
00:42:33,280 --> 00:42:37,920
He recognised that a rainbow was not a physical object,

483
00:42:37,920 --> 00:42:40,680
but an effect of light on the eye.

484
00:42:45,760 --> 00:42:51,120
There are as many rainbows as there are observers.

485
00:42:57,680 --> 00:43:00,400
He could even create a rainbow in his laboratory.

486
00:43:07,400 --> 00:43:09,440
He understood its geometry

487
00:43:09,440 --> 00:43:14,080
and calculated the maximum height it could appear in the sky.

488
00:43:15,600 --> 00:43:19,680
Slowly but surely, the world was being disenchanted,

489
00:43:19,680 --> 00:43:25,840
from a creation sustained by divine will, to one which followed its own natural laws.

490
00:43:30,000 --> 00:43:34,640
And human beings too, he thought, are governed by such laws.

491
00:43:42,720 --> 00:43:45,760
This was more than the Church was willing to accept.

492
00:43:45,760 --> 00:43:50,800
In 1277, his ideas were condemned as "suspect novelties"

493
00:43:50,800 --> 00:43:52,840
and he was imprisoned.

494
00:43:55,680 --> 00:44:01,360
Bacon dreamed of what would be possible in the modern world of science.

495
00:44:06,040 --> 00:44:10,640
Machines for navigation can be made without rowers.

496
00:44:10,640 --> 00:44:14,680
Carriages can be made that are moved without animals.

497
00:44:16,200 --> 00:44:19,000
Flying machines,

498
00:44:19,000 --> 00:44:23,520
and machines for walking in the sea - even to the bottom.

499
00:44:25,600 --> 00:44:29,560
Bacon's vision of a technological future clearly signals

500
00:44:29,560 --> 00:44:34,040
a radical shift that was to occur in our attitude to the physical world.

501
00:44:34,040 --> 00:44:37,760
From awed contemplation, to a sense of mastery.

502
00:44:37,760 --> 00:44:41,880
Slowly but surely, the world was being observed,

503
00:44:41,880 --> 00:44:43,960
analysed and measured.

504
00:44:51,640 --> 00:44:54,520
To measure events in the physical world

505
00:44:54,520 --> 00:44:58,360
called for a more sophisticated measurement of time itself.

506
00:44:59,880 --> 00:45:01,600
In the early Middle Ages,

507
00:45:01,600 --> 00:45:05,520
time was measured simply by irregular points in the day.

508
00:45:05,520 --> 00:45:09,920
Meals, church services, high and low tides.

509
00:45:11,440 --> 00:45:17,080
Accurate mechanical clocks were essential to standardise its measurement.

510
00:45:20,440 --> 00:45:24,800
Islamic technologies had demonstrated precision engineering.

511
00:45:24,800 --> 00:45:28,680
But as Robert the Englishman documented in 1271,

512
00:45:28,680 --> 00:45:34,360
in order to make a clock, an apparently insurmountable problem had to be resolved.

513
00:45:35,600 --> 00:45:38,240
Clockmakers are trying to make a wheel

514
00:45:38,240 --> 00:45:42,280
which will make one complete revolution in each day.

515
00:45:42,280 --> 00:45:45,160
But they cannot quite perfect their work.

516
00:45:50,840 --> 00:45:53,800
What prevented them perfecting their work

517
00:45:53,800 --> 00:45:58,840
was the absence of a device to allow the wheel to turn in precisely equal movements.

518
00:45:58,840 --> 00:46:01,120
In technical terms, an escapement.

519
00:46:06,160 --> 00:46:10,160
As the 13th century drew to a close, rich abbeys and cathedrals

520
00:46:10,160 --> 00:46:14,960
gave huge resources of money to the inventing of an accurate clock.

521
00:46:18,240 --> 00:46:21,640
This is the mechanism of the Wells Cathedral clock,

522
00:46:21,640 --> 00:46:24,080
now in the Science Museum in London.

523
00:46:24,080 --> 00:46:28,160
It's one of the oldest surviving mechanical clocks in the world.

524
00:46:28,160 --> 00:46:31,680
Although some parts of it are later, like the pendulum,

525
00:46:31,680 --> 00:46:37,440
added in the 17th century, the heart of it is over 700 years old.

526
00:46:37,440 --> 00:46:41,120
And it's a magnificent witness to the skill and ingenuity

527
00:46:41,120 --> 00:46:43,360
of the medieval clockmaker's art,

528
00:46:43,360 --> 00:46:47,360
solving all those problems outlined by Robert the Englishman.

529
00:46:52,640 --> 00:46:57,400
At first, mechanical clocks merely rang a bell every hour.

530
00:46:59,040 --> 00:47:02,960
But this clock, when in situ in Wells Cathedral,

531
00:47:02,960 --> 00:47:07,160
was given a face and some ingenious entertainment.

532
00:47:13,760 --> 00:47:19,080
Now hours, minutes, seconds, could be observed and standardised.

533
00:47:20,480 --> 00:47:25,920
Something as abstract as time itself could now be seen and measured.

534
00:47:25,920 --> 00:47:28,760
Clocks gave an entire new way of thinking.

535
00:47:28,760 --> 00:47:31,400
Things could go like clockwork.

536
00:47:35,920 --> 00:47:40,600
And in the long run, it meant that state bureaucracies could run more efficiently,

537
00:47:40,600 --> 00:47:45,080
and, in science, that rates of reactions could be measured.

538
00:47:54,280 --> 00:47:59,720
Medieval Europe was becoming a powerful centre of new science and technology.

539
00:47:59,720 --> 00:48:04,000
The great churches and cathedrals became more ambitious

540
00:48:04,000 --> 00:48:06,440
in their design and engineering,

541
00:48:06,440 --> 00:48:09,320
reaching higher and higher towards heaven.

542
00:48:10,480 --> 00:48:14,360
Warfare demanded deadlier, more advanced weaponry.

543
00:48:16,320 --> 00:48:23,680
And in Italy, the first semblance of a banking system was being set up to fund vigorous international trade.

544
00:48:34,440 --> 00:48:39,560
But there was a surprise in store for these sophisticated Europeans.

545
00:48:41,880 --> 00:48:47,640
An unimaginably advanced world was about to be opened up to them.

546
00:48:52,000 --> 00:48:55,000
Our understanding of the physical world in which we live,

547
00:48:55,000 --> 00:48:58,840
and also who we shared it with, was about to be radically transformed.

548
00:48:58,840 --> 00:49:03,640
And some of the most cherished notions of medieval knowledge would also be put to the test.

549
00:49:14,920 --> 00:49:19,520
The conquest of one third of the known world by Genghis Khan

550
00:49:19,520 --> 00:49:23,240
and his Mongol successors in the 13th century

551
00:49:23,240 --> 00:49:25,760
provided a unique opportunity.

552
00:49:30,440 --> 00:49:33,280
As the dust settled on the vast new empire,

553
00:49:33,280 --> 00:49:35,360
it provided a gateway to Asia.

554
00:49:35,360 --> 00:49:40,920
It was now possible to travel relatively securely from one end of Eurasia to the other,

555
00:49:40,920 --> 00:49:43,760
from western Europe to the heart of China.

556
00:49:47,560 --> 00:49:53,640
The great age of medieval world travel was about to begin.

557
00:49:53,640 --> 00:49:59,160
In 1253, a Franciscan friar, William of Rubruck, was amongst

558
00:49:59,160 --> 00:50:03,760
the first Europeans to reach the Mongol capital of Karakorum.

559
00:50:05,920 --> 00:50:07,640
We came among the Mongols

560
00:50:07,640 --> 00:50:11,720
and it truly seemed to me that I had entered another world.

561
00:50:13,880 --> 00:50:18,080
He hoped to meet the strange creatures described in the Hereford Mappa Mundi.

562
00:50:18,080 --> 00:50:20,960
The monopods and unicorns.

563
00:50:20,960 --> 00:50:23,720
But they were nowhere to be found.

564
00:50:26,960 --> 00:50:31,000
I asked about the monsters, or human monstrosities,

565
00:50:31,000 --> 00:50:33,160
of which the scholars speak.

566
00:50:33,160 --> 00:50:38,480
They told me they had never seen such, which astonished me greatly, if it be true.

567
00:50:48,360 --> 00:50:53,080
On the contrary, it appeared that the people of the East

568
00:50:53,080 --> 00:50:56,720
thought that dog-heads lived in the West.

569
00:50:56,720 --> 00:51:01,120
Wherever the travellers went asking for them, they encountered people who said,

570
00:51:01,120 --> 00:51:03,840
"What? We thought they lived where YOU came from."

571
00:51:05,360 --> 00:51:09,240
Other Europeans soon followed to continue the quest.

572
00:51:09,240 --> 00:51:12,400
John de Marignolis was sent by the Pope.

573
00:51:13,400 --> 00:51:17,440
I was hunting for the monstrous races described in the old literature.

574
00:51:17,440 --> 00:51:19,200
The one-eyed people.

575
00:51:19,200 --> 00:51:22,840
The hermaphrodites and the dog-heads.

576
00:51:27,800 --> 00:51:32,440
It was becoming clear that the monsters lived just over the horizon.

577
00:51:32,440 --> 00:51:37,320
As the horizon was pushed back, so the myths receded.

578
00:51:38,880 --> 00:51:42,240
A long-standing puzzle of whether or not to preach to dog-heads

579
00:51:42,240 --> 00:51:45,280
or monopods was solved by the absence of those creatures.

580
00:51:48,600 --> 00:51:52,400
So what was out there beyond Europe?

581
00:51:52,400 --> 00:51:54,640
A world more extraordinary

582
00:51:54,640 --> 00:51:57,560
than anything the medieval mind had imagined.

583
00:52:00,080 --> 00:52:04,680
In 1270, the 17-year-old son of an Italian merchant

584
00:52:04,680 --> 00:52:08,320
left his native city of Venice for China.

585
00:52:08,320 --> 00:52:12,080
Marco Polo was not to return for 25 years.

586
00:52:13,320 --> 00:52:18,160
His epic odyssey brought him fame, lasting even to this day.

587
00:52:19,160 --> 00:52:23,080
On his return to Europe, he wrote a book describing his journeys.

588
00:52:23,080 --> 00:52:25,600
The Travels Of Marco Polo.

589
00:52:25,600 --> 00:52:27,760
It caused a sensation.

590
00:52:32,000 --> 00:52:35,440
It contained reports of stunning civilisations,

591
00:52:35,440 --> 00:52:37,200
far in advance of our own.

592
00:52:42,480 --> 00:52:46,760
Wild and dangerous landscapes unlike anything in Europe

593
00:52:46,760 --> 00:52:50,120
and tales of survival that beggared belief.

594
00:52:52,120 --> 00:52:53,960
The desert is so long

595
00:52:53,960 --> 00:52:57,160
that it would take a year to go from end to end.

596
00:52:57,160 --> 00:53:01,600
It consists entirely of mountains and sand and valleys.

597
00:53:01,600 --> 00:53:03,720
There is nothing at all to eat.

598
00:53:04,840 --> 00:53:08,960
Marco Polo's account of the palaces of the East

599
00:53:08,960 --> 00:53:12,760
described unimaginable wealth and power.

600
00:53:13,600 --> 00:53:18,600
The walls of the halls and chambers are all covered in gold and silver.

601
00:53:18,600 --> 00:53:21,440
The hall alone is so vast and so wide

602
00:53:21,440 --> 00:53:26,160
that a meal might well be served for more than 6,000 men.

603
00:53:27,760 --> 00:53:31,680
When he was on his deathbed, Marco Polo's friends came to him and said,

604
00:53:31,680 --> 00:53:36,200
"Now is your last chance to correct all those falsehoods you put in the book."

605
00:53:36,200 --> 00:53:37,800
He looked up at them and said,

606
00:53:37,800 --> 00:53:41,040
"I haven't told half of what I actually saw."

607
00:53:45,000 --> 00:53:49,840
Merchants and missionaries streamed into China.

608
00:53:49,840 --> 00:53:53,440
The Silk Road took travellers from the Mediterranean

609
00:53:53,440 --> 00:53:59,240
to the East China Sea, allowing exchange of ideas, goods and technology.

610
00:54:05,440 --> 00:54:07,880
Then all this came to a sudden end.

611
00:54:07,880 --> 00:54:11,560
With the collapse of the Mongols in 1368,

612
00:54:11,560 --> 00:54:14,520
the route to the East was closed.

613
00:54:17,120 --> 00:54:21,200
But the West was hungry to renew contact with the East,

614
00:54:21,200 --> 00:54:25,880
drawn to the riches and exotic places it knew existed there.

615
00:54:27,520 --> 00:54:29,880
Another route had to be found.

616
00:54:31,440 --> 00:54:35,560
One Italian sailor became obsessed with Marco Polo's book.

617
00:54:35,560 --> 00:54:39,320
He carried it around with him and he made little marginal notes on it.

618
00:54:41,640 --> 00:54:44,720
His name was Christopher Columbus.

619
00:54:46,240 --> 00:54:49,600
Columbus had studied maps like the Hereford Mappa Mundi.

620
00:54:50,600 --> 00:54:52,680
He'd read the Bible carefully,

621
00:54:52,680 --> 00:54:55,720
for hints about the geography of the earth.

622
00:54:55,720 --> 00:54:58,000
But he had a more radical idea.

623
00:54:59,080 --> 00:55:04,160
He was determined to seek the fabulous East by sailing West.

624
00:55:10,880 --> 00:55:15,640
Columbus' accidental discovery of America shrank the world.

625
00:55:15,640 --> 00:55:20,040
It was a watershed in the history of medieval Europe.

626
00:55:20,040 --> 00:55:22,880
The moment when new horizons opened,

627
00:55:22,880 --> 00:55:27,440
and the start of a new era in the meeting of cultures.

628
00:55:32,120 --> 00:55:34,720
Columbus' voyage of 1492,

629
00:55:34,720 --> 00:55:38,280
marked the beginning of the process of globalisation

630
00:55:38,280 --> 00:55:43,120
and European colonisation that has created the world we live in today.

631
00:55:43,120 --> 00:55:48,240
But when Columbus sailed the ocean, he did so with a very medieval mind.

632
00:56:00,160 --> 00:56:05,600
He thought he had reached the fabulous East described by Marco Polo.

633
00:56:05,600 --> 00:56:10,240
Like other travellers, he believed he would meet strange races.

634
00:56:10,240 --> 00:56:13,840
Cannibals, amazons, dog-heads.

635
00:56:15,800 --> 00:56:17,360
And in South America,

636
00:56:17,360 --> 00:56:21,240
he believed he had found the biblical Garden of Eden.

637
00:56:23,120 --> 00:56:29,200
I am firmly convinced that the earthly paradise truly lies here.

638
00:56:33,960 --> 00:56:38,040
Columbus' voyage to America marks the end of the medieval age

639
00:56:38,040 --> 00:56:40,160
and the birth of the modern one.

640
00:56:45,000 --> 00:56:48,560
A new period of discovery and expansion

641
00:56:48,560 --> 00:56:51,480
and conquest was about to begin.

642
00:56:51,480 --> 00:56:55,280
The disenchantment of the world was nearly complete.

643
00:57:04,760 --> 00:57:09,800
Early medieval men and women saw the earth as divinely created and ordered.

644
00:57:09,800 --> 00:57:12,680
Its workings were beyond their control.

645
00:57:12,680 --> 00:57:16,760
For their modern successors, armed with new technologies,

646
00:57:16,760 --> 00:57:20,680
from the compass to improved sailing ships, to gunpowder,

647
00:57:20,680 --> 00:57:23,520
it was a place to be mastered, exploited.

648
00:57:23,520 --> 00:57:27,880
In more ways than one, it was the discovery of a new world.

649
00:57:54,960 --> 00:57:56,800
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

650
00:57:56,800 --> 00:57:59,360
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk