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Documentary, The Dark Ages (History Channel documentary)
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00:00:00after the fall of ancient Rome before the rebirth of the Renaissance centuries of history have been
00:00:11swept under the rug these are the dark ages this would have been a pretty rough time to be living
00:00:19in when the Roman Empire crumbled Europe was besieged by famine plague persecutions and a
00:00:27state of war so persistent it was only rarely interrupted by peace half of the people that you
00:00:34know today were dead tomorrow you couldn't even bury them all but beneath this cloak of darkness
00:00:42were scattered rays of light men and women who boldly tended the flame of progress while the
00:00:47world around them descended into hell ultimately these stars would illuminate the long dark night
00:00:55and propel Europe toward a new dawn brighter than any it had seen in a thousand years
00:01:10August 24th 410 AD the Empire Falls Rome a city so long in control of its own destiny and the world's
00:01:21is invaded by a band of dirty sweaty smelly thugs they are the Visigoths a terrifying assortment of
00:01:31heathens from Europe's northeastern frontier and they've come to declare the death of Roman domination
00:01:37for the first time in 800 years the eternal city is under siege Rome had not ever been conquered by a
00:01:50foreign enemy in the imperial period the psychological effect of the greatest city of the ancient world being conquered was absolutely crushing
00:02:03for three days the great capital of Caesar and Augustus is ravaged by its unwelcome guests stunning
00:02:13architectural marvels that have stood for centuries are burned to the ground
00:02:17Germanic slaves rise up to enslave their Roman masters
00:02:23and the city's streets run red with the blood of its own people the Roman citizens really are helpless all they know is that they've had to surrender that there's no one there to protect them that these Gothic warriors would have been terrifying at the head of the charge is Alaric a Visigothic warrior who had once fought on the Empire's behalf along its northern frontier
00:02:50frontier when he was passed over for a promotion within the ranks of the Roman legions Alaric turned
00:02:56from friend to foe and used what he had learned about Roman warfare to launch his own campaign of
00:03:03aggression he eventually decided that the only way he was going to advance was to really put the screws to
00:03:12Rome so the siege of Rome was to tell you the truth a profit-making career move for Alaric
00:03:19two years earlier in 408 AD Alaric and his rebel army had arrived on the doorstep of Rome itself
00:03:28looking for power plunder and most of all food anybody wants to look at why the Visigoths win it's because of
00:03:39desperation they need to win if they don't they starve to death and that's the bottom line
00:03:47in order to conquer the city Alaric would first have to strangle it from the outside
00:03:54he can't undermine the walls they're far too large they're far far too secure and they're
00:03:59far too well built so he relies on starvation
00:04:02Alaric's men surrounded Rome took full control of its supply lines and blocked all shipments of grain
00:04:11coming into the city gradually the city died from within and the pall of impending death began to
00:04:21permeate even its most hallowed traditions even in times of utter distress it was really important for
00:04:29Roman society to continue to have chariot races and killing of wild beasts gladiatorial convents execution
00:04:37of criminals the population was at the show but they were literally starving and when some condemned
00:04:45men or gladiators it's not clear were killed and they're lying there bleeding out on the sands of the
00:04:52arena the crowd started shouting let us buy that meat how much per pound do you want for that that's how
00:05:00hungry they were in Rome power and glory were rapidly being replaced by corpses and cannibalism after two
00:05:10years of suffering inside the sealed off city Roman pride had eroded enough to accept subjugation over starvation
00:05:22on the orders of a roman aristocrat the city gates were opened and the visigoths stormed in
00:05:32their shopping spree turned up tons of treasure but hardly any food so after three days aleric and his
00:05:39men moved on in search of greener pastures and left the heart of the roman empire on life support
00:05:44a contemporary puts it very well when he says the mother of the world has been killed um that's what
00:05:54people thought that the mother of the world had been brutally killed in a gothic sack
00:06:01while aleric's sacking of rome certainly hastened its demise the mother of the world had been terminally
00:06:07ill for quite some time as early as the third century ad the empire had fallen into the hands of a series of
00:06:17inept emperors whose obsession with personal gain threatened the public welfare and fostered civil war
00:06:25during a 50-year period in the third century nearly all of the two dozen emperors who seized power
00:06:31were brutally slain by rivals rebels and subjects while rome gradually imploded from within external
00:06:42threats both natural and man-made only aided its self-destruction diseases such as smallpox
00:06:49and measles entered the european population pool for the first time during the second and third
00:06:54centuries in this sense the roman empire paid the price for its success it had become so wealthy and
00:06:59had established contacts with other parts of the world to such an extent that now it was not only
00:07:06importing the very valuable wares of those regions it was also importing the diseases that came from those
00:07:12regions
00:07:18as rome's population began to dwindle so did its border guard
00:07:22leaving its emperors no choice but to hire barbarian fighters like alaric as mercenaries
00:07:29but as the romans became more and more dependent on foreign defenders they also became more openly
00:07:35hostile toward them when the goths first entered the empire they came really as refugees and they were
00:07:45forced into rebellion by the treatment that they received at the hands of roman officials
00:07:52famously the roman officials allowed slave traders to profit by selling dog meat to the goths in exchange
00:08:00for gothic children as slaves and so both the incompetence and the cruelty of roman officialdom drove
00:08:07the goths into rebellion
00:08:08aleric the leader and living symbol of that rebellion died of fever in 410 shortly after his historic sacking of rome
00:08:21he survived 1980 god
00:08:23while he wouldn't live to enjoy much of his success future generations of barbarians would
00:08:33throughout the 5th century wave after wave of invading tribes goths vandals franks britons
00:08:40Romans and Saxons flooded in and fought to stake their claim on the waning empire.
00:08:50Rome's once invincible domain shattered into a thousand pieces, each one held by a military
00:08:55strongman who wanted to collect them all.
00:08:59The glory of Rome was gone forever, and the Dark Ages had begun.
00:09:05The empire wasn't there, there was no longer an emperor, and as a result, the world was
00:09:12a smaller place.
00:09:14The next seven centuries, spanning from the fall of Rome to the First Crusade, would be
00:09:20an age of widespread violence, illiteracy, disease, and superstition, a time when urban populations
00:09:28throughout the continent declined, and city life withered.
00:09:34The amenities and the technology of life, and indeed the scale of life, just got smaller
00:09:42and worse.
00:09:43The sewage systems stop working so that people can't get rid of their garbage the way they
00:09:48used to before.
00:09:50Aqueducts break down, and you have wells instead of running water.
00:09:55And as a consequence, the houses get less and less impressive, and people start living in,
00:10:03I suppose, what we'd call shacks.
00:10:05Even the great monuments of Rome, engineering miracles that had defined an unprecedented age
00:10:13of innovation, were quarried for quick building materials.
00:10:17The people who came in afterwards settled next to the Roman ruins, not on top of the Roman
00:10:24ruins, but next to the Roman ruins.
00:10:27They could not sustain the structures that had been there at one time.
00:10:32They took all the stones to make their houses and their own buildings from the Roman ruins.
00:10:38Over time, even the Colosseum, once Rome's grandest showcase of power and prestige, succumbed to
00:10:48the decay of civilization.
00:10:51It became at various intervals a landfill, a shelter for the destitute, and a haven for
00:10:56packs of animals.
00:10:59All the while, its facade was gradually being picked apart by pilfering settlers, who unwittingly
00:11:05left behind a hollow symbol of society's downward spiral.
00:11:10In the early Middle Ages, people would have been confronted with the fact that there was
00:11:14this once glorious civilization that had preceded them, and that they could, in fact, still see
00:11:19around them.
00:11:20They could see in the road system that the Romans had built.
00:11:25They could see in the aqueducts that were still standing.
00:11:27They could see in the bridges that were still standing in many parts of Europe.
00:11:31And when they looked at those things, and they looked at the level of engineering that
00:11:34it took to build them, it must have led them to believe that they had regressed, that life
00:11:39had been better in the past than it was in the present.
00:11:43The flames that had illuminated life in ancient Rome, cutting-edge technology, open trade,
00:11:50ready access to education, employment, and medicine, were extinguished amidst the chaos of
00:11:55the succeeding centuries.
00:11:57But despite the undeniable downshift in society's progress, debate still rages about whether it's
00:12:05fair to call this era the Dark Ages.
00:12:08The term Dark Ages has been used by lots of people.
00:12:15The famous Italian scholar Petrarch, in a sense, invented it because he was comparing this period
00:12:22to the earlier classical period, which he saw as literally brilliant, full of light.
00:12:29And he said, hey, by comparison, the people of this period, they were in darkness, in gloom.
00:12:37You got up in the morning in this period, and if you were poor and if you were hungry, things
00:12:41probably did look pretty dark.
00:12:43But that wasn't the case across the board.
00:12:46So there's a lot more to this period than just the notion that people were living in gloom
00:12:51and were gloomy.
00:12:54In fact, in spite of its widespread chaos, anarchy, and upheaval, or perhaps because
00:13:00of it, this remote period of history would dramatically alter the course of Europe's future.
00:13:08For while the continent was fragmenting politically, a new form of unity was gradually emerging that
00:13:14couldn't be measured on a map.
00:13:16It was not the work of warriors and weapons, but of monks and missionaries.
00:13:23To the people of Dark Ages Europe, the new emperor was Jesus Christ.
00:13:37Christmas Day, 496 A.D., the Basilica at Rheims in northern France is bathed in the light
00:13:44of a thousand candles.
00:13:48The air inside the sanctuary is thick with incense, as the local bishop sends up a silent
00:13:53prayer of thanksgiving.
00:13:58This is a red-letter day for the Catholic Church.
00:14:03This morning, the king of Europe's newest barbarian superpower, the Franks, will renounce his pagan
00:14:09roots and become a Christian.
00:14:14As he kneels down in deference to his new savior, this king, Clovis, will cement not
00:14:19only his own spiritual allegiance, but that of an entire nation.
00:14:25In France, this is seen as the beginning of France becoming a Christian nation.
00:14:31It was a very strategic move.
00:14:33By choosing Catholicism, Clovis, in essence, united his people.
00:14:41After Rome's fall, Western Europe had splintered into countless small territories commanded by
00:14:47Germanic conquerors such as Clovis, who overthrew the last Roman governor of Gaul and claimed
00:14:52most of the province for himself.
00:14:56In the course of a single generation, the security and order that had so long stabilized life on
00:15:02the continent was history.
00:15:04The citizens of the 6th century faced a new world disorder that offered only uncertainty.
00:15:11They were often not given even that minimal level of security that was necessary for them
00:15:18to enjoy a basic existence.
00:15:23Warfare was endemic.
00:15:25Civil war was very common.
00:15:28Feuding was common.
00:15:29Vendettas were common.
00:15:32Any kind of political problem very quickly escalated into a military problem.
00:15:38And the people who were often caught in the middle were the people who were trying very
00:15:44peacefully to wrest a living from the land.
00:15:47And I think through much of history, that's been true.
00:15:50It's the non-combatants that one really has the sympathy for.
00:15:52It's the people who simply get caught up in the fighting, and yet they are often the ones
00:15:57who suffer as a result.
00:15:59Amidst the unrelenting political turbulence of the Dark Ages, in which loyalties and alliances
00:16:05shifted with the winds, Christianity was the only common threat.
00:16:11In the period after the fall of the empire, for the average countryman, or indeed the average
00:16:18citizen, life could be very, very difficult.
00:16:22And as a result, Christianity, which offered some sort of hope of eternal peace, was very
00:16:29attractive.
00:16:30Five centuries after his death, Christ's following had grown from a handful of Jewish converts
00:16:37into a flock of millions spread throughout the old Roman Empire.
00:16:43For the earliest Christians, the road to redemption was paved with persecution.
00:16:50But after 300 years as an outlaw minority, the movement suddenly gained steam when the Emperor
00:16:57Constantine legalized it in 313 A.D. after experiencing a divine intervention in the midst of war.
00:17:04He had a vision of a Christian symbol in the sky, and he heard the words, in this sign, you shall conquer.
00:17:13And when he did subsequently win the major battle that led him to become the Emperor, he attributed
00:17:19his success in battle to this sign and to the fact that the Christian God had decided to support him.
00:17:25Within a couple of generations after the conversion of Constantine, Christianity clearly had the
00:17:30upper hand within the Roman Empire.
00:17:33There was a flood of converts to Christianity, individuals who understood that it would now
00:17:38be to their advantage to be Christian rather than pagan.
00:17:42Clovis, the barbarian king of the Franks, was one of those individuals.
00:17:50As his pagan army extended its conquests deeper and deeper into Christian territories, it became
00:17:56clear that the way into the hearts and minds of his new subjects was through their souls.
00:18:03As his power spread in the old Roman provinces of Gaul, the really significant part of the population
00:18:14was Roman and often Roman churchmen, bishops.
00:18:18As a result, it made a great deal of sense for Clovis to convert.
00:18:23It gave him a new set of allies and helped him cement his power.
00:18:28After his baptism, Clovis would have trouble abiding by one of his new friends.
00:18:32faith's golden rules, thou shalt not kill.
00:18:37His conversion could do little to quench his thirst for blood.
00:18:42Instead, it only gave him a new justification for his military campaigns.
00:18:47Now, they were more than territorial plunders.
00:18:50They were holy wars, fought in the name of faith.
00:18:55But his meteoric rise from small-time tribal chieftain to master of Gaul really had less to
00:19:01do with religion than with ruthlessness.
00:19:05Clovis was never reluctant to employ murder as a tool.
00:19:11Everybody was well aware that it didn't bode well for you if you spoke up in Clovis' court.
00:19:17It was much better to keep your mouth shut.
00:19:21At the age of 15, Clovis had taken command of a section of the Rhine Delta in northern France.
00:19:27He had inherited a small number of soldiers from his father, which he immediately put to the test,
00:19:33plundering surrounding tribes for treasure and more troops.
00:19:37When he conquered a village, he didn't simply massacre everybody in the village or make them into serfs or something like this.
00:19:47He actually elevated them to the same status that his men were.
00:19:51So that his recruitment policy was to gather all the men that he had conquered and to make his new army.
00:19:57Those individuals created the invincible army that Clovis had.
00:20:05By the time he converted to Catholicism at the age of 30, Clovis had emerged as the supreme ruler over most of modern day France.
00:20:13And he had laid the foundation for a new dynasty called the Merovingians, famous today as the supposed protectors of Christ's bloodline in the Da Vinci Code.
00:20:23In reality, the last thing Clovis wanted to protect was his bloodline.
00:20:30It was customary among Frankish kings to divide their territories among their sons upon their death.
00:20:36So to make sure no one could surface to challenge his claim to sovereignty, Clovis had any relatives outside his immediate household systematically eliminated.
00:20:46A surviving report recalls an emotional speech the king delivered toward the end of his reign, lamenting the absence of any loyal kinsfolk.
00:20:55He didn't mean it.
00:20:57He only said that because he was trying to smoke out any other people who might hold up their hands and say,
00:21:02Oh, but wait, I'm still part of your family, I'll support you, so that Clovis could then murder them too.
00:21:11The only fate worse than being Clovis' relative was being his captive.
00:21:19In certain cases, the king endorsed a barbaric dark age practice known as the ordeal.
00:21:31In the ordeal of boiling water, a cauldron of boiling water with a small pebble at the bottom would be presented to the party who was on trial.
00:21:40And the person had to stick their hand in and get the pebble and get their hand out again.
00:21:46And the hand would be bandaged, and after two or three days, it would be examined by a priest to see if it was healing well or not.
00:21:54If it was healing well, you were innocent.
00:21:56If it was not healing, then that was evidence of your guilt.
00:22:02There's also the ordeal by water, where the person would be thrown in.
00:22:05If they float, that means the water's rejecting them, and they're guilty.
00:22:08If they sink, that means they're innocent.
00:22:10And of course, they would pull them back out. They didn't let them drown.
00:22:13Critical to the notion of the ordeal is the idea that God's justice is something which comes down to earth, if you know how to read it.
00:22:22And so while the ordeal might seem strange to us, I think within this world of the early Middle Ages, it very much made sense.
00:22:30God will be on the side of good.
00:22:34Clovis died of an unknown cause in 511 A.D.
00:22:38His brutality had been legendary, but it would not define his legacy.
00:22:42He had united the barbarian tribes of France into one emerging superpower, the Franks.
00:22:49And he had forged a crucial alliance with the increasingly influential Roman Catholic Church.
00:22:55In so doing, he had proven to be a stabilizing force at a time that can only be described as chaotic, dangerous and dark.
00:23:05For centuries after the fall of Rome, Western Europe would remain shrouded in a thick shadow of misery.
00:23:12But to the east, there was a light shining forth that pierced the night.
00:23:18There, the Roman Empire endured.
00:23:23And there, a new emperor was plotting to restore its former glory by launching a hostile takeover of the West.
00:23:30As his soldiers marched forth from Constantinople, he could never have guessed that his most dangerous enemy was invisible.
00:23:37And it was already in his midst.
00:23:44533 A.D.
00:23:47The Empire strikes back.
00:23:49More than a century after the sack of Rome, an army of self-proclaimed Romans marches forth from the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, intent on recapturing all the Western territories that have fallen into the hands of Dark Age despots like Clovis.
00:24:08By this time, former Roman strongholds like Italy, Spain, and even North Africa are ruled by so-called barbarians.
00:24:17But the light of the empire still burns brighter than ever to the east in places like Greece, Turkey, and Egypt.
00:24:29Those territories are still commanded by Roman emperors, protected by Roman troops, and reaping all the benefits of Roman technology and trade.
00:24:38In the sixth century, west and east are like night and day.
00:24:43For inhabitants of the western half of the Roman Empire, those who came from the east, the Greek speakers, were effeminate.
00:24:50They bathed too much.
00:24:52They didn't like a good fight.
00:24:54They were always preferring to play tricks on their enemies rather than meet them in pitched battle.
00:25:00Whereas people from the Greek east tended to regard those from the west as uncouth, backwards, too ready to resort to force instead of relying on diplomacy.
00:25:11The cultural divide between east and west first turned political late in the third century when the Roman Empire split into two halves, each to be governed by its own emperor.
00:25:24By having an emperor in the east and in the west, it would be easier to respond to crises very quickly.
00:25:30In the long run, however, splitting the empire into two and institutionalizing this divide between the Greek east and the Latin west left the Latin west at a grave disadvantage.
00:25:41It did not have the material resources that the eastern half of the Roman Empire had.
00:25:46Before the split, the wealth of the east could be used to prop up the west.
00:25:50But once there are now two halves to the empire, the west has to stand or fall on its own.
00:25:56And it fell.
00:25:58While the west floundered amidst the chaos of the barbarian invasions, in the eastern capital of Constantinople, it was business as usual.
00:26:08Water flowed from its fountains, trade goods flowed through its ports, and the cheers of boisterous sports fans echoed from its arenas during chariot races.
00:26:19There, the dream of Rome endured.
00:26:23When an ambitious emperor named Justinian came to power in 527, he resolved to export that dream back to the territories from which it originally came.
00:26:35Justinian was a smart, shrewd military man of humble roots, who harbored grandiose visions of a reunited empire.
00:26:44For Justinian to conceive of the idea that he could somehow reconstitute the geographical extent of the empire was a remarkable dream.
00:26:52And what is even more remarkable is that he had some measure of success in achieving it.
00:26:57In the empire's heyday, centuries earlier, the Mediterranean Sea had been called a Roman lake.
00:27:05Justinian resolved to resurrect that label.
00:27:08But it would take a massive army and a mountain of cash to buy that much waterfront property.
00:27:15Justinian relied on various forms of trickery to try and raise the funds that would be necessary to support his military campaigns.
00:27:27He was infamous for not paying his soldiers and then, when signing a peace treaty, telling his soldiers that they were going to give up all of their bad wages to him as thanks for his signing a peace treaty.
00:27:39He would forge wills that stated that the subjects had, out of their great love of Justinian, decided to bequeath all their property to him.
00:27:48In one especially notorious case, an individual who had been captured by the enemy had his mother collect the ransom to free him.
00:27:57And Justinian refused to allow the ransom to be paid to the enemy, saying that this was funding the enemy and it was against the interests of the Byzantine Empire.
00:28:05When the individual died in captivity, Justinian produced a letter, allegedly from the person in captivity, stating that he understood the reason why Justinian wouldn't let them be freed and instead he wanted the ransom money to be paid to Justinian himself.
00:28:20Greedy tactics like these sent Justinian's approval ratings plunging, and by the fifth year of his reign in 532, an undercurrent of popular unrest boiled over into outright revolt.
00:28:33At a chariot match between Constantinople's top two teams, fans of both sides gradually directed their catcalls away from each other and toward their emperor.
00:28:44Bellowing a unified chant of Nika, meaning conquer, a throng of thousands stormed the palace grounds and held Justinian under siege.
00:28:55It's as if Yankees and Mets fans decided to overthrow the mayor of New York. It was the worst possible situation.
00:29:02These people destroyed the city in their right. I mean, the chaos was extraordinary.
00:29:08Justinian was so terrified that he was literally on the dock ready to go into exile, take the ship and get out of town.
00:29:17At which point his wife, the formidable and beautiful Theodora says, I'm not going.
00:29:27There's an old saying that behind every powerful man lies an equally powerful woman.
00:29:33Empress Theodora is exhibit A. Born and raised in the lowest class of Byzantine society.
00:29:41She first caught Justinian's eye while working as a dancer in a burlesque theater.
00:29:48She was a courtesan, a performer who utilized sex both as a means of gaining power and also as a means of entertainment.
00:29:58Her act was so raunchy and so popular, the emperor Justinian fell in love with Theodora.
00:30:08And in fact, he changed the law of the empire so he could marry this woman. Why?
00:30:13She was beautiful. Even her enemies say she was oh so sexy, oh so beautiful.
00:30:18But she was also oh so smart.
00:30:21And that's clearly one of the reasons why Justinian fell so deeply in love with her and remained in love with her.
00:30:26From the beginning of his reign in 527, Justinian regarded Theodora as an equal shareholder in sovereignty.
00:30:38And as that sovereignty hung by a thread during the Nika riots,
00:30:43it was the empress who pulled herself and her husband together in time to save it.
00:30:48She says, I'm an empress. I'm not running away. Purple, that's the color of rule. Purple's a great color for a funeral. I'm staying.
00:31:06Justinian was so shocked, he didn't go. With Theodora's advice, he calls in the shock troops and slaughtered 30,000 fans whom they had lured to the horse racing stadium.
00:31:23She saved him from throwing away his empire.
00:31:29Having regained his footing, Justinian then ordered the execution of all of his prominent political enemies.
00:31:37Their opposition now all but extinct, the emperor and emperors celebrated their reversal of fortune and shifted their focus back to their ultimate goal.
00:31:47Sole possession of their own private lake.
00:31:51With the West sputtering deeper and deeper into darkness, it seemed like only an act of God could derail that dream.
00:32:01Justinian and Theodora could never have imagined that one was about to wipe out half of their population
00:32:07and leave 100 million lifeless bodies strewn across the civilized world.
00:32:16Early spring, 538 A.D., in Italy, a Byzantine army is blazing a trail of carnage from Rome to Milan.
00:32:27They are fighting on behalf of Justinian, the eastern emperor who harbors dreams of a reunited Roman Empire.
00:32:36While the glory days of Roman dominance in Western Europe have long since passed, Justinian is hell-bent on resurrecting them.
00:32:45Town after town, village after village falls to his formidable legions, just as they did in North Africa, Sicily and southern Italy.
00:32:56One bloody battle at a time, the emperor is reconquering the West and it looks like Rome will rise again.
00:33:04The Italian campaign was one of the nastiest wars of antiquity in terms of entire cities being depopulated, entire populations massacred and just the fact that the countryside was fought over for 20 years really destroyed Italy's productive capacity for a couple of centuries afterwards.
00:33:27While Italy bleeds, the emperor builds.
00:33:34A thousand miles away, in Constantinople, he is dedicating a new cathedral built over the ashes of his charred capital.
00:33:42While the kings of Northern Europe are building drafty wooden dwellings, Justinian is redefining the limits of ancient architecture.
00:33:50Justinian is able to use this chaos to build his empire and he builds his empire by building the greatest symbol of Christianity, the Hagia Sophia Church.
00:34:03All of the rest of the mosques in Constantinople, if you want to go to Venice, St. Mark's, if you want to go elsewhere, even to the Vatican, all of them are imitating Hagia Sophia.
00:34:16Justinian spared no expense, the best marble, the best gold leaf, the best artist, anything that he could do to increase the visual impact as one walked into the cathedral.
00:34:29It was meant to persuade contemporaries that he was a figure who ought to be thought of in biblical terms.
00:34:37With his conquests and construction projects proceeding according to plan, Justinian had every reason to feel a little cocky.
00:34:50By 542, his domain extended farther than any emperor in more than two centuries, encompassing Italy and North Africa, as well as Egypt, Turkey, Greece and Palestine.
00:35:03The Mediterranean was once again a Roman lake.
00:35:08But somewhere in that vast dominion, an invisible killer was making its way toward Constantinople with enough ammunition to wipe out not just the capital city, but the entire continent.
00:35:21That killer was bubonic plague.
00:35:25This one was truly terrifying.
00:35:28Twenty-five to fifty percent of the population, at least in urban areas like Constantinople, was killed.
00:35:36Ten people.
00:35:38Five of them are gone.
00:35:41Think of that, what that would mean in life, if half of the people that you know today were dead tomorrow.
00:35:49Symptoms would begin with a sudden fever, followed by chills, vomiting and an increased sensitivity to light.
00:35:59Within three days, an excruciating pain would follow in the groin, the armpits and behind the ears.
00:36:06Then, tumors would form all over the body, and violent muscle spasms would erupt.
00:36:13The luckier victims would fall into a coma before the disease stole their last breath.
00:36:19There was, of course, no treatment.
00:36:21And this turns out to have been one of the most virulent pandemics in history.
00:36:27The plague's place of origin is a mystery, but it arrived in Constantinople via a cargo ship.
00:36:34It was carried by infected fleas, which hid in the fur of rats that it hitchhiked in from parts unknown.
00:36:41In May of 542, the first victims fell ill in the city's waterfront district.
00:36:48Within four months, it had infected nearly half of the city, including the emperor himself.
00:36:55A small percentage of those infected managed to survive the plague.
00:37:00Justinian was among them.
00:37:03But as was the case with nearly all plague survivors, the disease permanently scarred both his body and his mind.
00:37:13We're told that he became increasingly tyrannical, increasingly paranoid.
00:37:17And there's a memorable story about him sort of never sleeping, but wandering the halls of the palace at night and plotting new ways in which to grind his subjects down.
00:37:28When all was said and done, up to half of the empire's population, perhaps 100 million people, were struck down by the plague of Justinian.
00:37:40It spread very rapidly in the course of a year or so, all the way as far as Britain and even Ireland.
00:37:51And the devastation was such that at least a third of the population in most cities was killed off, and sometimes much more than that.
00:37:58When you have that kind of devastating population loss, I mean, think of it.
00:38:05The United States has 300 million people.
00:38:07What if 150 million people died?
00:38:10You couldn't even bury them all.
00:38:12But worse than that, your economic productivity tumbles, your ability to defend yourself becomes truly crippled.
00:38:22And I think this is one of the long-term cascading effects.
00:38:26And it literally took hundreds of years for the population of Europe to be restored.
00:38:31If the future looked bleak for Europe before, now it looked pitch black.
00:38:37In 542, the autumn chill brought an end to the plague in Constantinople.
00:38:44But throughout the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries, new outbreaks would suddenly resurface to ravage various pockets of Europe
00:38:54and inflict repeated suffering on a defeated, dwindling populace.
00:38:59If you had gone to Europe in the 6th and 7th centuries, the thing that would have struck you most was how empty it was
00:39:09and how small the towns were if you could find towns.
00:39:12And you would have been struck by the towns in which only a small section was inhabited
00:39:18and the rest was now totally abandoned and overrun by animals.
00:39:22In 548 AD, the Empress Theodora died of cancer.
00:39:32Justinian outlived her by 17 years.
00:39:35Throughout his reign, his armies managed to hold on to his conquests in Western Europe.
00:39:41But his dream of a reunited Rome would die with him.
00:39:45As soon as Justinian dies, the Byzantine Empire decides that it cannot fund these overseas forces.
00:39:54And so they simply pull back.
00:39:56So while Justinian may have had this great influence, it was not a lasting influence.
00:40:01The Byzantine Empire could not financially sustain what had once been the original Roman Empire.
00:40:07As the last of the Romans retreated into history,
00:40:12the door of prosperity closed behind him.
00:40:16And with its final ties to the eastern coffers severed,
00:40:20Western Europe was about to get even darker.
00:40:23For most people, life in these times would be nasty, brutish,
00:40:28and for the luckiest among them, short.
00:40:33By the turn of the 7th century, Northwestern Europe had become a land shrouded in darkness.
00:40:44With the final withdrawal of Justinian's forces from the west,
00:40:48the last vestiges of Roman control had faded into history.
00:40:52And the continent was divided among barbarian warlords who were consumed with conquest at all costs.
00:40:59As disease and warfare claimed countless thousands,
00:41:04trade and industry shrank to a virtual standstill.
00:41:08And Europe's economy was once again dependent on agriculture and herding,
00:41:13as it had been before the rise of Rome, 1,000 years earlier.
00:41:18Roads had fallen into complete disrepair, so communication was difficult.
00:41:24And so I think it was roughest in these areas where you were isolated.
00:41:29You could have your local community, but you really couldn't tell what was going on in the wider world.
00:41:34You couldn't tell what threats might be coming at you through the forest.
00:41:38And there really wasn't a sufficient population for there to be that critical mass of ideas that eventually allows human beings to make life better for themselves.
00:41:54In the Dark Ages, the untamed wilderness was a source of endless fear and fascination.
00:42:01Wide-eyed villagers told tales of witches, wizards and warlocks lurking deep in the shadows,
00:42:07who possessed supernatural powers strong enough to cast spells,
00:42:11kill livestock and summon terrifying storms of lightning.
00:42:18The Catholic Church condemned such ghost stories as pagan nonsense.
00:42:23But for the average Dark Age villager, the realities of daily life were just as unnerving.
00:42:29It's a very regimented type of work that we do today where you work 50 weeks per year,
00:42:35where you work 9 to 5 if you're lucky, 5 days a week.
00:42:38That sort of work pattern was non-existent during the Dark Ages.
00:42:43You worked according to seasonal patterns in that there were long periods when you did nothing.
00:42:48During the winter months, you just sat around and drank.
00:42:51Those periods of doing nothing which could stretch for months on end
00:42:55alternated with periods of frantic activity during harvest time.
00:42:58When you were sowing the crops, when you would be working dawn to dusk,
00:43:03you and everyone in your family old enough to walk would be out there
00:43:06trying to produce the food you needed to survive.
00:43:09As Europe's masses struggled to scrape by,
00:43:13misery was one commodity that was never in short supply.
00:43:18Half of your children would have died before they reached adolescence.
00:43:23Probably a quarter of all newborns died within the first year of life.
00:43:27Another quarter of your children would have died by the time they were 10 or 12.
00:43:31And perhaps most children experienced loss of one or both parents before they reached adulthood.
00:43:37But there was light to be found in the darkness.
00:43:40And it most often shined from the local monastery.
00:43:46Monasteries became some of the most important institutions in Europe.
00:43:50Some of the most wealthy institutions.
00:43:52They were centers of commerce, centers of political authority.
00:43:55This is where the action was.
00:43:58Gero England, 730 A.D.
00:44:04On a dark and bitterly cold night, when the outside world is crusted over like a tomb,
00:44:10there are signs of life visible through a single monastery window.
00:44:14Inside, a Benedictine monk sits hunched over his desk, surrounded by books.
00:44:26His name is Bede, and he is writing his most important literary achievement,
00:44:31a five-volume history of England spanning from the time of Julius Caesar until his own.
00:44:37In an age when more books are being burned than being written,
00:44:41as kings and clerics everywhere condemn material that contradicts Catholicism,
00:44:46Bede's work is an essential link to the pre-Christian past.
00:44:51Pretty much all of the texts we have from the classical period came down to us,
00:44:56preserved in these manuscripts that were written by, copied by, Christian monks in the Middle Ages.
00:45:02And there's a real deep-seated ambivalence towards it.
00:45:05The monks, they read Virgil, they read the classics, they copied them down.
00:45:09At the same time, there's always a sense, you don't want to like them too much.
00:45:13What really matters is scripture.
00:45:16Bede amassed a collection of nearly 250 books.
00:45:20Though perhaps not impressive by today's standards,
00:45:23in the Dark Ages, this gave him one of the most extensive libraries in England.
00:45:28With such a rare wealth of knowledge at his disposal,
00:45:32Bede was possibly the most educated individual in Europe.
00:45:36But he wasn't the only man of the cloth who doubled as a man of letters.
00:45:40Monks were the de facto guardians of Europe's literary culture.
00:45:44In the violent and anarchic conditions of the period,
00:45:47it was increasingly difficult to have any kind of education.
00:45:51By the seventh century, there was virtually nobody outside of the ranks of the clergy who was still literate.
00:46:03A key figure in the development of the monastic lifestyle was Saint Benedict of Nursia,
00:46:09who lived two centuries before Bede.
00:46:12In 500 A.D., Benedict left his comfortable life among the nobility
00:46:17and began living as a hermit in the Italian countryside.
00:46:21But as word spread about his special powers of healing,
00:46:25he was forced to sacrifice his simple life of seclusion.
00:46:30His reputation for sanctity and for miracle working caused people to seek him out wherever he went.
00:46:37People would come to him for matters as mundane as fixing a tray that they had dropped
00:46:42and it had broken in two halves and they would give it to him and he would fuse the two ends together
00:46:46so now your tray was whole again.
00:46:49But they'd also come to him for extraordinary miracles,
00:46:52such as for telling the future, healing the sick and even raising the dead.
00:46:59Recognizing Benedict's rising star power,
00:47:01a group of local monks begged him to be the abbot of their monastery.
00:47:05Benedict heeded the call and the monks got their man.
00:47:09But his brand of discipline would prove too strict for his new subordinates
00:47:15and almost as quickly as they had elected him,
00:47:18they hatched a secret plot to eliminate him.
00:47:21Many of the people who are going into these monasteries,
00:47:24they came from wealthy families.
00:47:26These are not people who are used to being servants.
00:47:28There's a story of this one notable Roman family
00:47:32and their son was in the monastery
00:47:34and he's holding a lamp over Benedict while Benedict eats.
00:47:37And he's thinking to himself,
00:47:39who am I to be standing here holding this lamp while this guy's just sitting there eating?
00:47:44And I think in many cases, for a lot of people going into these monasteries,
00:47:48this idea of submitting to the authority of the abbot,
00:47:52they might have found that hard to bear at points.
00:47:55In blatant disregard of their own vows,
00:47:58the monks tried twice to poison Saint Benedict,
00:48:01but evidently he had God in his side.
00:48:05The first time they poisoned his drink,
00:48:08but as he prayed over the cup before taking a sip,
00:48:11it suddenly shattered.
00:48:13Then they poisoned his bread,
00:48:17but before he could take a bite,
00:48:19a raven swooped in and stole it away.
00:48:26Having twice defied death,
00:48:28Benedict left the wayward abbey
00:48:30and established his own chain of twelve new monasteries,
00:48:33nestled quietly in the Italian high country southeast of Rome.
00:48:37The monks living inside their walls were challenged to obey a rigorous code of ethics called the rule of Saint Benedict.
00:48:50The purpose of the rule of Saint Benedict is to allow individuals to obliterate their wills.
00:48:56The will was the source of sinfulness.
00:48:59The will was what caused you to do bad things.
00:49:02If you could eliminate the will, then you could eliminate those drives that caused you to sin.
00:49:08For example, monks are forbidden to speak except in dire necessity
00:49:13because to speak is to exercise your own will.
00:49:17Six hundred years after Christ's crucifixion,
00:49:20his church had become the dominant cultural force in Europe.
00:49:24But while his disciples were flocking to monasteries in search of solitude,
00:49:30further east, the followers of another prophet were taking up arms in search of conquest.
00:49:37On the dusty shores of North Africa and Arabia,
00:49:40mighty armies were waging war not in the name of Christ but of the Koran.
00:49:46Their religious movement would spread even farther and faster than Christianity
00:49:51and threaten to compete for the souls of Europe.
00:49:55The only thing standing in their way was one Christian king who had seen them coming.
00:50:04October 10th, 732 A.D.
00:50:10Tour France is on the front line in a holy war that will define Europe's spiritual and political future.
00:50:18The conflict pits the Christian Franks against the Muslim Moors,
00:50:23who had recently crossed into Spain from North Africa.
00:50:28The Moors want to expand their empire and import their faith in Mohammed,
00:50:32the prophet of Islam who lived a century earlier.
00:50:37The Christians want to keep them out at all costs.
00:50:40They saw it as an immediate and local threat to themselves.
00:50:45The Muslims believed that they were there to rule over the earth
00:50:50and bring about God's justice and institute God's order.
00:50:54And so in that sense there might have been what you could call a religious mission to the conquest.
00:50:59The Moors saw Europe as easy prey,
00:51:04a land defended by barbarians who were too busy fighting each other to fight anyone else.
00:51:13In 730, Moorish general Abdul Rahman Al-Ghafiqi crossed into France with an army of 50,000 men.
00:51:20At the head of the charge was an elite division of cavalry, unmatched in Europe.
00:51:29The Moorish armies in Gaul moved very, very fast
00:51:34and they were considerably more maneuverable than a Frankish army
00:51:37and they could hit and run in a way that a large Frankish host simply could not.
00:51:42The Moors tore through southern France with terrifying tenacity.
00:51:47Devastating the regions of Aquitaine and Gascony
00:51:52and leaving a legion of enemy dead behind at the battle of the river Garan.
00:52:00One Moorish fighter wrote that his army went through all places like a desolating storm.
00:52:07A Christian chronicler lamented that God alone knows the number of the slain.
00:52:11After relieving the local monasteries of all their riches,
00:52:18the Moors turned northward, confident they could conquer all of France.
00:52:26But there the commander of the Frankish army stood guard,
00:52:29waiting patiently for the enemy to strike.
00:52:32And when it did, he would be ready.
00:52:35Now, does he think he can win?
00:52:40Don't know.
00:52:41He has to win.
00:52:43Because there's no other answer.
00:52:45The Islamic forces will continue to attack
00:52:50and continue to fill France with Islam unless he defends.
00:52:56The general's name was Charles the Hammer Martel.
00:53:05As commander-in-chief of the Frankish army,
00:53:07Martel would anticipate the unique threat posed by the Moorish invasion
00:53:11and take proactive steps to confront it head-on.
00:53:16But to do so, he would first have to convince his own countrymen
00:53:19to trade their plowshares for swords.
00:53:24In Dark Ages Europe, most troops were farmers
00:53:27who were only available to fight between the spring planting
00:53:30and the fall harvest.
00:53:36But Charles Martel understood that the Moorish threat
00:53:39couldn't be met without a well-oiled group of professional,
00:53:42full-time soldiers at his disposal.
00:53:44He knew he was at a disadvantage.
00:53:49What's the basis of every successful army?
00:53:52Money.
00:53:54To get the money, he had to go to the church.
00:53:58This was not a popular move with the church,
00:54:00and Charles came very close to being excommunicated.
00:54:03That's to say, being damned to hell for eternity.
00:54:06But the church pulled back at just the last minute.
00:54:08Charles took land and property from the church
00:54:11and used it to finance the development of an army
00:54:14that could be trained to withstand this formidable force.
00:54:24While Charles the Hammer pounded courage into his core,
00:54:27Abdul Rahman maintained his march northward
00:54:30into the realm of an enemy he had severely underrated.
00:54:35The Franks dug in on a high wooded ridge
00:54:38that offered a critical strategic advantage.
00:54:41When the Moors arrived,
00:54:43they were stunned to find such a formidable force awaiting them.
00:54:48For six days, the two armies stood firm,
00:54:51waiting for the other to make the first move.
00:54:57But as the October cold set in,
00:54:59Moorish General Abdul Rahman knew he had to move quickly
00:55:02if he wanted to take tour before winter.
00:55:08So on the seventh day, he ordered attack.
00:55:11Charles Mortel's infantry is great, and they stand like a wall.
00:55:17That is what the sources on the Muslim side say.
00:55:20That is what the sources on the Christian side say.
00:55:21While his infantry kept the Moors occupied,
00:55:26Charles the Hammer,
00:55:28nailed down his victory with a covert mission behind enemy lines.
00:55:31Charles had sent some troops to the Muslim camp,
00:55:33that is to say the encampment behind the line of battle
00:55:37where this incredibly successful Muslim army
00:55:38had joined the army,
00:55:39and he had to be a great great,
00:55:40and they stand like a wall.
00:55:41That is what the sources on the Muslim side say.
00:55:42That is what the sources on the Christian side say.
00:55:43While his infantry kept the Moors occupied,
00:55:44Charles the Hammer nailed down his victory
00:55:46with a covert mission behind enemy lines.
00:55:47Charles had sent some troops to the Muslim camp.
00:55:50That is to say,
00:55:51the encampment behind the line of battle
00:55:53where this incredibly successful Muslim army
00:55:57had kept all of the plunder
00:55:59that they had obtained in their successful campaign.
00:56:02This was cutting off the head of the snake
00:56:06from the perspective of Charles and his troops.
00:56:09That encouraged people to retreat
00:56:13from the front lines to the tents,
00:56:16and it convinced a lot of people
00:56:18that a general retreat was being called.
00:56:21General Abdul Rahman tried to rally his fleeing forces,
00:56:26but as he screamed out orders to stand and fight,
00:56:29he was surrounded and struck down by enemy infantry.
00:56:35Overnight, the Moors withdrew
00:56:37and made a beeline south for Spain.
00:56:43It was his stunning victory at the Battle of Tours
00:56:46that earned Martel the nickname Charles the Hammer.
00:56:49At a time when many parts of the old Roman
00:56:53and Persian empires were falling under Muslim rule,
00:56:56Charles was credited as the savior of Christianity in Europe.
00:57:00He had some really good PR.
00:57:02Charles Martel was quick to stand up and basically say,
00:57:05look what I just did.
00:57:07I'm the defender of Christendom,
00:57:08and I helped turn back these forces that threatened us.
00:57:12Over the next seven decades,
00:57:16Martel's descendants would transform his Christian kingdom into an empire,
00:57:21and one of them would even become powerful enough
00:57:24to assume the title Emperor of Rome.
00:57:30That grandson of Charles the Hammer would be remembered as the father of Europe.
00:57:34His name was Charlemagne, and he was the greatest king of the Dark Ages.
00:57:41Christmas Day, 800 A.D.
00:57:53At St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, a new emperor is crowned,
00:57:57the first in more than three centuries.
00:58:00The Pope is on hand to do the crowning,
00:58:04and to announce the formation of a new Roman Empire.
00:58:11The new emperor, and the most powerful man in Europe since the days of ancient Rome,
00:58:16is Charlemagne, King of the Franks.
00:58:19Charlemagne would be remembered as one of the most illuminating figures of the Dark Ages.
00:58:25Everything you want to say about him is probably accurate.
00:58:31He never, ever lost a military conquest.
00:58:35He gives birth again to education.
00:58:38He reestablishes the economic importance of the empire.
00:58:42Any title that's given to him is too few.
00:58:47At its largest, Charlemagne's domain stretched from the North Sea to the Mediterranean,
00:58:52and encompassed modern France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, and most of Italy.
00:59:03Not since the fall of Rome had so much of the continent been under the command of one man.
00:59:10But the only thing Roman about this kingdom was its size.
00:59:14It isn't the same empire. There's nothing that is the same.
00:59:17The urban areas have fallen. Trade is non-existent.
00:59:21The economic structure, the transportation structure, engineering, has all faltered.
00:59:26Charlemagne does his best to build up education once more because that's destroyed.
00:59:30It's going to be a very, very long time before Europe gets back to the empire that it once had.
00:59:36Charlemagne was a renaissance man born seven centuries early.
00:59:42As the founder of the Holy Roman Empire, he would attempt to single-handedly pull Europe out of the trenches of darkness.
00:59:53When Charlemagne's father died in 768, the Frankish kingdom was split between him and his brother Carloman.
01:00:00Frankish property was always divided amongst the male heirs and in the case of royalty, it was the same thing.
01:00:12And as a result, Charlemagne, his brother, had to share power.
01:00:15They weren't too keen on this arrangement and weren't very fond of each other.
01:00:19For three years, the brothers ruled separate halves of their father's kingdom, corresponding coldly through their mother.
01:00:31Then suddenly, Carloman turned up dead.
01:00:34History says he dies. That's all.
01:00:37We want to believe that Charlemagne had something to do with it.
01:00:40Maybe he did. We will never know for sure.
01:00:44At the age of 24, Charlemagne suddenly found himself the sole shareholder of the largest single kingdom in Europe.
01:00:55But his ultimate goal was to command its only kingdom.
01:01:03Over the course of his 46-year reign, he would launch more than 50 military campaigns designed to expand his empire and save souls.
01:01:14As his armies seized countless new territories, they gave the conquered a simple choice.
01:01:21Embrace the Christian God or meet that God immediately.
01:01:25He thought he really was going to save them by making them Christian, even if he had to do it at the point of a sword.
01:01:33When Charlemagne conquered the Saxons of northern Germany in 782, he condemned 4,500 tribal leaders to die by the headsman's sword after they were caught worshipping false gods.
01:01:48For days afterward, the river Aller ran red with blood. The massacre became known as the bloody verdict of Verdun.
01:02:00This brutal execution. It really was part of a bigger picture.
01:02:07Charlemagne meant business. Anyone who's caught worshipping pagan gods or performing pagan rites, it's a death sentence.
01:02:14Anyone who cremates someone, a dead body, instead of burying them as a Christian, is executed.
01:02:20Anyone who disobeys the king is executed.
01:02:23As his Christian soldiers enforced God's will on new frontiers, Charlemagne sought to enforce his own within the borders of his kingdom.
01:02:35To tighten his grip on an increasingly vast dominion, he divided it into 350 counties and put each in the charge of a count who answered directly to him.
01:02:53Charlemagne made sure each one knew he was being closely watched.
01:03:00He traveled constantly. It was management by walking around, as they say today.
01:03:05He didn't shut himself up in the palace, isolated from what was going on.
01:03:09And he also had a vision of what it meant to be a king.
01:03:13Like the great kings of the period after Alexander the Great, he believed that he had to increase the social, the political and the intellectual organization of his society.
01:03:27And in putting all of these complicated aspects of rule together, he distinguished himself from every other ruler, you know, certainly for the 300 years before him.
01:03:42As Charlemagne traveled far and wide throughout his burgeoning territory, he resolved to rekindle the long lost culture of creativity that had been extinguished so many centuries before.
01:03:57Throughout his empire, he built a chain of royal schools that would ignite a new age of learning and provide children of all classes with access to an education.
01:04:09Even the king himself got in on the act.
01:04:12In an age when few rulers could even recite the alphabet, Charlemagne made a concerted effort to read and write.
01:04:20This was very unusual that a king would actually devote serious effort to trying to learn how to read and to write as a grown man.
01:04:28Reading and writing were the work of the monks. They were not the work of a warrior.
01:04:32They were not the work of somebody who was engaged in practical political rule that often involved making very difficult military decisions.
01:04:39It was a luxury that simply didn't seem necessary.
01:04:42Although it wasn't one of his job requirements, there were a few things Charlemagne was more passionate about than learning.
01:04:51One of those things was women.
01:04:53Over the course of his life, Charlemagne had five wives, five known mistresses and at least 20 children.
01:05:01In the period under Charlemagne, the whole idea of marriage as a sacrament hadn't even really been developed the way we think of it in this day and age.
01:05:09It's really not until much later that the church managed to enforce the notion that you should have only one marriage between a man and a woman and that it would be for life.
01:05:19And so the notion that Charlemagne had multiple wives and concubines, this would have been pretty standard really for someone of his background.
01:05:29By the year 800, Charlemagne was nearly 60 years old and had ruled for more than three decades.
01:05:40He already had a resume that would cement his celebrity status in Europe's history books.
01:05:51But on Christmas Day in St. Peter's Basilica, he added one final feather to his cap.
01:05:58One of Charlemagne's biographers claimed that when Charlemagne walked into the church on Christmas Day 800,
01:06:05he had no idea that the imperial coronation was going to take place and that he later regretted the fact that he had ever been crowned emperor.
01:06:15On the other hand, did Charlemagne really walk into that church not knowing what was about to happen?
01:06:24Charlemagne would rule as emperor of the West for 14 years.
01:06:29It was during these years, the twilight of his reign, that he would face his most daunting political challenge.
01:06:38That challenge would come not from the Byzantines, nor the Moors, nor any of Europe's traditional foes.
01:06:44Instead, it would descend on Europe like a cold northern wind and drag it village by village back into the darkness from which it had just begun to emerge.
01:06:59They literally were out of control.
01:07:02And they would kill everything in sight.
01:07:05June 8th, 793.
01:07:14The wrath of Satan is unleashed on a house of God in northern England.
01:07:20In Lindisfarne, a barbaric band of heathens is tearing apart the local monastery.
01:07:28They are on the hunt for treasure and they have no qualms about slaughtering anyone who stands in their way.
01:07:33The savage raid is the work of just a small group of men, but it will mark a giant setback for mankind.
01:07:43The Viking Age has begun.
01:07:47And the Dark Ages are about to get a whole lot darker.
01:07:51Nobody had anticipated being on the northern sea and being attacked from abroad.
01:07:56Pirates may have existed along the Channel, but nobody had ever seen them that far north.
01:08:01And suddenly these Vikings come in, they find no opposition, and they absolutely sack the place.
01:08:07And what do they get back? The greatest wealth of England.
01:08:10This was like putting up a sign in any Viking village, Uncle Olaf wants you.
01:08:17The raiders had sailed from Scandinavia, where overpopulation had begun forcing young drifters out onto the high seas in a hunt for new land and high adventure.
01:08:27And with each big score, like the one at Lindisfarne, the monasteries to the south looked more and more like banks waiting to be robbed.
01:08:37There were no walls. Monks had no weapons. There were no defending forces.
01:08:44Ultimately, it simply becomes an idea of survival.
01:08:48If you're going to be a raider, you're going to want to raid where you're least likely to die.
01:08:52They were perhaps the best pirates, the best raiders that the ancient and medieval world had ever seen.
01:09:02I think it was the unexpectedness of their arrival.
01:09:05You really couldn't tell where they might show up because their ships were both seaworthy for ocean voyages.
01:09:11But because of their shallow draft, they could sail right up the rivers to cities that were far inland and didn't expect to be subjected to waterborne raids.
01:09:20And so when they appeared totally unexpected and sent in their killing machines, the Vikings could seem unstoppable.
01:09:31In the early ninth century, during the last years of Charlemagne's reign as emperor,
01:09:37the Vikings began terrorizing any vulnerable villages within a stone's throw of water.
01:09:42And as the raiders became more and more brazen, they set their sights on the heart of the Holy Roman Empire.
01:09:52In an attempt to fend off the Vikings, Carolingians began to pay them protection money.
01:09:56And these payments were so enormous that there were years when the Empire had no currency anymore.
01:10:04There was no money to be had. It had all been shipped off to the Vikings and people had to barter for what they needed.
01:10:10This was a significant setback for the recovery of Europe.
01:10:13The Emperor Charlemagne died of natural causes at the age of 72 and 814, while the Viking raiders were still warming up.
01:10:27They would spend the next several decades honing their craft and perfecting the art of savagery.
01:10:33They left legends that were then copied down later, and they're wonderful at telling the stories of the Vikings.
01:10:41And for example, the story of Egil, who at six years of age gets defeated in a ball game by one of his friends.
01:10:48Egil goes home, grabs the axe, comes back and actually plants it in the guy's skull, killing him.
01:10:53His mother, instead of being rather upset, looks at Egil and says, he'll make a good Viking someday.
01:10:59One Viking is known as the Children's Man because of his refusal to kill children, which all the other Vikings saw was hilarious.
01:11:09And any time you're attacked by someone whose last name is Skullsplitter, you have to be concerned.
01:11:14The Vikings took their horror show on a whirlwind tour, terrorizing audiences as far and wide as Iceland, the Middle East, and even North America.
01:11:24But their favorite target was their first, Great Britain.
01:11:29Britain is very vulnerable to sea invasion.
01:11:33There is no place in the British Isles that is more than a couple of days' march from the sea.
01:11:39And for the Vikings, whose great strength was their expertise at sailing, an island was the perfect place for them to attack because they could appear anywhere within the British Isles with almost no forewarning at all.
01:11:51In 866, the Vikings took aim at the British Kingdom of Northumbria.
01:12:00But this time, they weren't just interested in loot, they wanted land, lots of it.
01:12:05So rather than sending a couple dozen men on a garden variety raid, they came ashore with several thousand warriors.
01:12:13It was the largest group of Vikings ever assembled and came to be known as the Great Heathen Army.
01:12:20The head heathen was a massive man oddly named Ivar the Boneless.
01:12:27Theories abound as to how he got that name.
01:12:29There are stories, oh, he had only cartilage in his legs, he had no bones.
01:12:35Well, this is probably a physical impossibility.
01:12:38Maybe he was impotent and this was referring to his lack of sexual prowess.
01:12:42I don't think we'll ever know.
01:12:43What we do know is that he had to be carried around on a shield because he was unable to walk.
01:12:50Whatever its cause, Ivar's abnormality didn't cripple his drive toward conquest.
01:12:57He had his sights set on Northern England's most precious prize, the city of York.
01:13:02Within its towering walls lived his arch enemy, a callous and corrupt king named Ayela.
01:13:11Ayela is supposed to have killed his father and this inspired Ivar to spend the rest of his life trying to figure out a way that he could get revenge.
01:13:21After a brutal and bloody battle, York fell to Ivar and his great heathen army.
01:13:27King Ayela managed to escape, but he couldn't stay away.
01:13:33Four months later, he tried to recapture his city.
01:13:38But instead, it was he who was captured.
01:13:41And the Vikings, never known for their mercy, were compelled to get creative in their torture tactics.
01:13:48They decided to punish him with what police referred to in the sources as the bloody eagle.
01:13:59What does that mean?
01:14:01To open up the torso, allow the ribs to be shown, and then pull the lungs past the ribs so that they actually form a couple of wings.
01:14:15And the physical image of the kingdom resembled an eagle.
01:14:25And this then, because of the bloodiness of it all and the fact that it would still be red, would be called the blood eagle.
01:14:32Yeah, pretty gooseless.
01:14:35With King Ayela off of his chest, Ivar turned his attention to conquering the rest of Britannia.
01:14:41But while fighting the Irish near Dublin in 873, the boneless barbarian breathed his last.
01:14:54His great army endured and returned to England, where it continued to carve up territories at will.
01:15:00But there was one kingdom in the deep south that refused to crumble.
01:15:09It was ruled by a resourceful and resilient warrior king whose name was Alfred the Great.
01:15:15He realized that the Vikings preferred raids and lightning campaigns and they didn't want to have to attack fortresses.
01:15:26So what did Alfred do?
01:15:28He built fortresses.
01:15:29And they were earth and wood fortifications that Alfred had constructed where the people would go and hide and take their goods and take their cattle and other things that the Vikings might want to remove from them.
01:15:45And once they got in there, the Vikings could not attack them.
01:15:48They simply did not have the siege technology or the willfulness to do so.
01:15:53And so by figuring out what would be the most effective defense against his enemies, Alfred was basically able to do, you know, what Muhammad Ali called his rope-a-dope strategy.
01:16:05He really let the enemy wear themselves out fighting against him and then mobilize his population in a way that could then counteract the strength of the attackers.
01:16:21It took 25 years of almost constant fighting for Alfred to bring down the great heathen army.
01:16:26By the time he died in 899, he had achieved lasting peace for his kingdom.
01:16:36But it would take another half century to expunge the Vikings from England once and for all.
01:16:43While some sailed off to plunder new frontiers across the Atlantic, others quietly settled down and assimilated into Europe's Christian culture.
01:16:52After spending more than a century on red alert, Viking victims throughout the continent crossed their fingers that the darkest days were finally over.
01:17:05But before the skies cleared completely, there would be one more series of catastrophic storms.
01:17:11By the middle of the 11th century, the people of Northwestern Europe had endured a seemingly endless barrage of bad fortune for more than 600 years.
01:17:26Those families not torn apart by the aggression of ruthless conquerors were confronted with severe economic depression, religious persecution, and the devastation of rampant disease.
01:17:39As the Viking threat finally abated, Europe's shell-shocked masses were desperate for a new dawn.
01:17:50But the end of the Viking Age didn't trigger the end of the Dark Ages.
01:17:55For although foreign raiders no longer threatened the coasts and riverbanks of Christendom, there was an equally menacing threat lying within.
01:18:03One concealed beneath thick plates of shining armor.
01:18:08Your typical medieval knight had much more in common with Tony Soprano than with Lancelot.
01:18:15They're thugs. They're muscle. They're violent individuals whose primary purpose is to beat people up.
01:18:17And the owner of a castle would unleash knights on the peasants of a neighboring territory.
01:18:33And they would enter the village, assaulting people, taking property, in an attempt to force these peasants to accept the lordship of the owner of the castle.
01:18:43In the decades after the last Viking attacks, Europe was teeming with unemployed soldiers.
01:19:01Trained killers who found it hard to hang up their swords.
01:19:04The Viking invasions had done a lot to militarize Europe. A lot more soldiers and so forth were put together into armies.
01:19:16Once the threat is over, what do you do with all these soldiers?
01:19:21With no immediate danger looming, the soldiers allied with local counts who were wealthy enough to hire their own private armies.
01:19:33Local lords who are ruling over these very small areas, they become the principal sources of authority.
01:19:42These are people who built castles, not necessarily to protect the countryside from outside raiders,
01:19:50but to subjugate the countryside, to enforce their will upon the local peasants to take from them what they needed.
01:19:56This period, particularly if you were a peasant, would have been a pretty rough time to be living in.
01:20:03In a desperate bid to stem the violence, the Catholic Church tried to place limits on when, where, and against whom the knights could strike.
01:20:14And to get the knights to pay attention, the clergy relied on the most powerful weapons in their arsenal.
01:20:22The clothes, blood, and bones of the saints.
01:20:31They would gather all the relics from a given area and collect them in one place, often in an open field.
01:20:37A giant pile. And then they would summon all the knights, and they would show them the pile of relics,
01:20:43and demand that they swear to obey the peace and truths of God.
01:20:48Otherwise, the saints associated with these relics would attack them and punish them.
01:20:54And so, when you're confronted with these relics, it often had a powerful psychological effect on knights.
01:20:59Sometimes they'd just collapse senseless on the ground at the thought of all of these collected saints punishing them.
01:21:09To reinforce the power of the relics, the church issued two proclamations detailing God's position on war.
01:21:16They were called the peace of God and the truce of God.
01:21:21The peace of God proclaimed that certain individuals, peasants, widows, priests, individuals who cannot defend themselves, should not be attacked by knights.
01:21:36The truce of God proclaimed that certain periods of time should be free of knightly violence entirely.
01:21:42That length or the Sundays, the period around Christmas, those should be periods when there was no warfare.
01:21:50The bishops were trying to essentially redirect the energies of the nobility, many of whom had access to armament, but didn't possess land.
01:22:01So they didn't have anything really to do with that energy and rechannel that energy in other directions.
01:22:06One direction everyone could endorse was the Middle East.
01:22:13Ever since non-Christian forces conquered the Holy Land four centuries earlier, murmurs of a military mission to liberate it had echoed across Christian Europe.
01:22:23Now, with the Viking threat a thing of the past and soldiers everywhere itching for a cause, the time seemed right to launch a crusade.
01:22:33The crusades were undertaken as a kind of vengeance on behalf of Jesus.
01:22:43And so in the kind of fantastical imagination, they had this really vivid picture of Jesus' home being defiled by this pagan alien presence.
01:22:51And it seemed to strike a chord.
01:22:58In 1095, Pope Urban II kicked off the first crusade by declaring Deus vult, Latin for God wills it.
01:23:06Over the next 200 years, a total of nine brutal crusades devastated the Holy Land and its Muslim inhabitants.
01:23:16In all, eight generations of fighters took part in the bloody, seesaw struggle for Jerusalem.
01:23:24Ultimately, the crusaders came away with no permanent conquests, but they returned with something even more valuable, knowledge.
01:23:32Europe, with the crusades, turned the corner from the dark ages.
01:23:39There's medical information and surgical information that's brought back.
01:23:44Books are brought back, languages are brought back, Aristotle's brought back, everything is brought back.
01:23:50So, the crusades really do change Europe in a way that we have not seen before.
01:23:57The crusades spawned a rebirth of trade and architecture unseen in Europe since the fall of Rome.
01:24:08Massive stone fortresses were built to replace the smaller wooden ones that had been a staple of dark age defense.
01:24:15Military supply lines opened up new markets for goods flowing in and out across the Mediterranean.
01:24:21Roads that had been neglected since Roman times were rebuilt to accommodate the flow of troops to and from battle.
01:24:31And tales of exotic lands to the east sparked a new boom in tourism.
01:24:37But the crusades and their consequences are just a few of countless factors that contributed to Europe's medieval awakening.
01:24:45It's thought that around the year 1000 that Europe became somewhat warmer, that it emerged from a period of what's known as a mini ice age.
01:24:56And this seems to have made it possible to cultivate lands that had formerly been considered quite marginal.
01:25:03So, starting around the year 1000, we see a growth in population in Western Europe.
01:25:12If you look at the archeology of a medieval town during the 11th and 12th centuries, the 13th century, it's the exact opposite of what happened during the last few centuries of their own empire.
01:25:21Town walls are rebuilt bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger to try and encompass this growing population.
01:25:30And that suggests that Europe had at long last turned the corner.
01:25:35Europe was on the verge of one of the most productive and creative periods of its entire history.
01:25:39Things like the great Gothic cathedrals, the universities, the law courts and legal systems, all of those were created in the 12th and 13th centuries.
01:25:50So, following this long period of darkness, there came a tremendous explosion of really brilliant cultural achievements.
01:25:56In the popular mind, the dark ages are an empty void between the glory of Rome and the triumph of the Renaissance.
01:26:07But a closer look reveals a period writhing with chaos, turbulence and humanity.
01:26:14A time when new life emerged from the scorched earth of post-Roman Europe, only to perish again amidst the perilous conditions of the age.
01:26:22If there was ever a time that tried men's souls, this was it.
01:26:29There was political chaos.
01:26:32There were injustices. It's certainly true.
01:26:36But what's most admirable and human about the people who lived during the era of the so-called dark ages,
01:26:44is the efforts they made, sometimes successful and sometimes not,
01:26:47to illuminate themselves in the way that mattered most to them before God.
01:26:53This was a time when you see the landscape of Europe as we think of it today.
01:26:58With the cities like Paris and London, these things all have their roots in the era that we call the dark ages.
01:27:04So, on that level, were they so dark?
01:27:07Perhaps we live in the dark age.
01:27:08I mean, look what just happened in the 20th century with everything from mustard gas to atom bombs.
01:27:12I mean, who's to say?
01:27:15The sunsets and sunrises of civilization are inevitably separated by intervals of isolating darkness.
01:27:23The night that followed the Roman sunset was long and uncertain, and the turmoil it wrought consumed countless men.
01:27:32But mankind itself did not yield.
01:27:39With its gaze fixed on a distant future, it persevered.
01:27:45Until the first rays of a new dawn, at long last, penetrated the horizon.
01:27:50The light penetrated the horizon.
01:27:51The light penetrated the horizon.
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