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Late summer, 1498, Milan.
Leonardo da Vinci had just put
the finishing touches
to a defining image
of the High Renaissance.
This wasn't just a decisive time
in the history of art,
but also for the world's
competing civilisations.
After centuries
of relative dullness,
Europe was now home
to the most dynamic culture of all.
Why?
The answers are a little unexpected.
The story of Europe's rise
from what used to be called
the Dark Ages
is often presented as
a purely European story.
Somehow the glories
of the Classical Age
are rediscovered,
and then the sculptures
and the paintings just get better,
and the churches get flashier,
and the kings get mightier.
Go, those Europeans!
Not quite.
Europe had been outclassed
and outshone by the Chinese
and Muslim civilisations.
And it was only by learning,
and then profiting from
the misfortune of others,
that Europe rose and shone.
YELLING AND CLASH OF BLADES
Europe's emergence would involve
explosive brutality far way
EXPLOSIONS AND SCREAMING
..other cultures
Europeans barely new
..Oriental inventions
..titanic sieges.
YELLING
Few cultures just keep going
all by themselves.
They steal rivals' ideas.
They flow into the gaps
that others leave behind.
Civilisations aren't just shaped
at the centre
but also at the margins,
on the edges,
in the empty spaces where one day
something unexpected arrives.
BIRDSONG
After the fall of Rome
in the 5th century AD,
Europe huddled, her optimism froze.
Strange migrants poured in
from the east.
Towns shrunk.
Learning was forgotten.
The vitality came not from
the old centres but from the edges.
And no people were more vital,
more unexpected
than the Vikings.
Crossing the seas and oceans
by flat-bottomed boat,
the Vikings had already terrorised
and begun to colonise the
British Isles, Iceland and France.
They'd even reached Greenland
and North America.
Now they were heading deep into
the heartlands of eastern Europe.
BIRD CALLS
When it comes to civilisation,
the Vikings from Norway,
Sweden and Denmark haven't had
a very good press.
Europeans tended to see them
as ravening marauders,
pagans without mercy.
They prayed to God, "Preserve us
from the fury of the Norsemen."
And raid they did,
quite a bit of ravening.
But the reason
the Vikings really matter
is because their greatest talent
was for settling down.
And one morning in the year 882,
a group of Slavs in the small
trading settlement of Kiev
were about to be confronted
by this strange talent
of the men from the north.
We know what happened next,
astonishingly enough,
through written records.
Though only from the point of view
of the Vikings,
or the Rus', as they were known.
Below the ancient Monastery
of the Caves in the Ukrainian
capital of Kiev
is a labyrinth of cells
and underground churches -
the last resting place
of mummified monks.
And here, in the early 10th century,
some of the monks wrote what became
known as The Russian Primary
Chronicle.
The great thing about
The Primary Chronicle
is that it is the Vikings speaking.
It's quite clearly
the Viking world view still.
And the story it tells is that
the local Slav tribes had no law
and rose up against one another.
And so they went to the Rus'
and they said,
"Our land is vast and rich,
but it has no order in it.
"Come in and rule over us."
Is it likely that the invitation
was quite so polite?
No. But come the Vikings did.
At the head of their expedition
was Oleg, a Viking prince
and leader of the Rus'.
He now staked his claim to Kiev.
SPEAKS NORSE
YELLS
SCREAMS
YELLS IN TRIUMPH
Victorious, Oleg declared himself
the new prince of Kiev.
And Kiev grew into the royal capital
of a region that became known
as the land of the Rus'.
Or as we'd say today
Russia.
Kiev still celebrates Oleg's victory
as its real founding moment.
And quite rightly,
because what Oleg achieved
was he united all the tribes around
and forced them to pay tribute.
He and the Vikings
now had a stranglehold
on all the trade
running from north to south.
Many great civilisations
have begun on river banks.
And here on the Dnieper,
furs, wax and slaves went south,
while silver -
mined in Afghanistan
by the powerful, new civilisations
of Islam - went north.
At the mouth of the Dnieper
was the Black Sea -
gateway to the largest
and wealthiest city in Europe,
Miklagard,
the Viking name for Constantinople.
A source of trade and ideas,
it was also home to
the Greek Orthodox Christian Church.
BIRD CALLS
A century after its birth,
Kiev was still as pagan
as its Viking founders.
Its ruler at the time,
Vladimir the Great,
wasn't an obviously religious man.
One chronicler described him
as "Fornicator immensus".
But Vladimir decided
that an up-and-coming city
needed one of these fashionable,
new-fangled religions.
And he came up with his own
unusual way of choosing which one.
It's said that he asked
representatives
of Roman Catholicism,
Greek Orthodox Christianity,
Judaism and Islam
to come here and persuade him.
"Go on, argue. Convert me."
The old Viking warrior
was quite interested in Islam
until he heard that it would
involve giving up alcohol,
at which point he said,
in effect, "OK, you're out."
In the end, he chose
Greek Orthodox Christianity
and began to build
the first stone church in Kiev.
It was a momentous choice
because so much of what we think of
as the look of old Russia,
those onion domes, the priests
and the monasteries and the icons,
all goes back to
Vladimir's decision.
What had started with trade -
furs and silver -
had flowered into culture,
architecture and religion.
By the 10th century,
Europe had an eastern Christian
border, drawn by the Vikings
and lasting to the present day.
Inside that border, Christian Europe
still seemed unsophisticated,
a bit ploddy.
Particularly compared
to the vibrant, intellectual
culture developing
across huge areas
of the world under Islam.
The year 827.
A team of astronomers
and mathematicians was at work
in the Sinjar Desert,
in north-western Iraq.
They were led by Muhammad
ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi,
an Uzbek scholar
from the House of Wisdom,
the great centre
of Islamic learning in Baghdad,
itself the heart
of the new Muslim civilisation.
Al-Khwarizmi was struggling with
one of the biggest scientific
puzzles of the time -
trying to accurately measure
the circumference of the Earth.
This trek across the desert was only
the first stage in a project
which had been commanded
by the Caliph of Baghdad, Al-Ma'mun,
who wanted him to use
his great scientific understanding
to produce an accurate map
of the world
which would show the huge extent
of the Islamic empire.
Islam already dominated an area
bigger than the Roman Empire.
By the ninth century, Muslim rulers
had more than 30 million subjects,
stretching from today's Pakistan
in the East to Spain in the West.
This is the age of vigorous,
young, inquisitive Islam,
bringing together ancient texts
from all around the world,
trying to understand them, pushing
forward in science and maths.
This is Islam's golden age.
Al-Khwarizmi's idea was to measure
the Sun's angle to the Earth
until it changed by one degree.
He worked out that his men
had walked 64.5 miles
before the angle changed.
Using just sticks
and a simple brass instrument,
he calculated the circumference
of the Earth to be 23,200 miles -
a figure that, remarkably,
is very close to
the accurate calculation.
Al-Khwarizmi went on
to create a series of charts,
listing more than 2,000 cities
and geographical features
right across the Islamic empire.
Al-Khwarizmi was taking
breakthroughs in trigonometry
and arithmetic
and putting them together
and explaining them.
His books were still being used
hundreds of years later,
and his real speciality
was algorithms.
In fact, the word comes from
the Latin version of his name,
Al-Khwarithmi.
And of course algorithms
are essential in modern
computer programming,
so every time you pick up
your mobile phone,
remember, there is an old
Uzbek Muslim hidden inside it.
At this time, the Islamic world
had Christian Europe surrounded.
The Spanish city of Cordoba
was a glittering western outpost
of the Muslim world, and the
second-largest city on the planet,
after Baghdad.
It was a sparkling rebuke
to the more meagre, muddy
Christian kingdoms
of northern Europe.
At its centre
stands the Great Mosque.
In its praying hall
shimmer 850 pillars
of marble, onyx and jasper,
an imaginative mingling
of Roman columns
and the memory of palm trees
in some distant oasis.
Fusion architecture.
Cordoba's Royal Library
was said to hold 400,000 books,
at a time when the largest Christian
libraries contained a few hundred.
And where East met West,
ideas were shared.
Places like Cordoba were wonderful
at taking the news from one part
of humanity and passing it on,
so, ancient Greek learning,
Jewish philosophy,
Hindu mathematics,
Muslim astronomy and engineering
were passed to the Christian world.
Eventually, the Christians would
destroy the kingdom of Al-Andalus,
but not before one enemy
had passed on the torch
of learning to the next,
so that what we call the Dark Ages
was lit up by Muslim Spain.
At this point,
you might have assumed
the Islamic world would
just keep advancing,
that the future
was scientific and Muslim.
The answer to why it wasn't
can be found in another story
from the margins,
from a world of remote grassland
and forests.
There's a very simple way
of telling the human story.
First, hunter-gatherers
and then farmers,
and then towns and cities
and all the rest of it.
But there's one group of people who
stand completely outside this story,
and they are the nomads,
living on grassland
which is too thin for farming
but is wonderful
for sheep and yak and goats,
and so they move with the seasons.
In many ways, the nomads are
the people who tread most lightly
on the surface of the Earth
and leave least behind.
But there is always
an exception to the rule.
In the 12th century,
the Mongolian Steppe
was home to hundreds
of rival nomadic tribes.
Into this world of feuding
and violence, a boy was born.
His name was Temujin.
SPEAKS IN MONGOLIAN
When Temujin was nine, his father
was poisoned by a rival tribe.
SPEAKS IN MONGOLIAN
Cast out with his mother
and brothers, the young
Mongol stayed alive
by foraging and hunting.
THEY SPEAK IN MONGOLIAN
Temujin would never forget
a lesson his mother taught him.
"Brothers who work separately,
"like a single arrow shaft,
can be easily broken.
"But brothers who stand together
against a world, like
a bundle of arrows,
"cannot be broken."
From unity came strength.
This single piece of learned wisdom
would be the basis of everything
that Temujin would achieve.
As he got older, Temujin fought and
manoeuvred his way to lead his clan.
But his ambition
was much greater than that.
Temujin's greatest achievement was
to unite the tribes of the Steppes.
When he defeated them, instead
of offering them exile and disgrace,
he would offer them brotherhood
and a share in the spoils
of future wars.
And quite soon,
the rival tribes were being
melded together into one people,
one army, riding
and fighting together.
In 1206, Temujin took the title
"universal ruler",
or Genghis Khan.
And he began to expand his empire
beyond Mongolia.
In just six years,
his army swept across northern China
and in 1215, ransacked Beijing,
giving the Mongols
weapons they'd never seen before.
Defeating the Chinese
gave Genghis Khan access
to awesome new military technology -
battering rams, scaling ladders,
monster-sized crossbows,
and catapults that could fire
firebombs.
With China now absorbed
into his growing empire,
Genghis turned his army west
and marched into Central Asia
to confront
the greatest adversary of all -
the forces of Islam.
In the spring of 1220,
the Mongols reached the magnificent
Eastern outpost of
the Islamic empire,
Bukhara.
Bukhara, like Merv, Baghdad,
and Samarkand,
was where the rich, optimistic heart
of the Islamic world could be found.
SHOUTS ORDERS
But Bukhara had never experienced
anything like the Mongols.
The combination
of Chinese technology
and Genghis Khan's disciplined,
fearsome army of nomad horsemen
produced a new kind of army,
a new kind of threat.
The siege of Bukhara
raged for 15 days,
until the city was finally
scorched into submission.
When Genghis entered Bukhara,
his army showed no mercy.
And Genghis himself was honoured,
as always,
with the first pick
of the captured women.
Bukhara was only the start.
One by one, the other great Muslim
treasure-house cities
were annihilated.
By 1223, Genghis Khan's destruction
of the Muslim empire in Central Asia
was complete.
Within 20 years, the Mongol empire
stretched from Beijing in the East
right through the land of the Rus',
into eastern Europe,
almost to the gates of Vienna.
Genghis Khan's belief
in strength through unity
had resulted in the largest
land empire in history.
In his homeland today,
the great warrior emperor
is revered as a national hero
and immortalised by this 40m-high
steel monument.
But it seems as if Genghis Khan,
a man of many concubines
and conquests,
may have achieved immortality
of a different kind.
In 2003, scientists discovered
a specific genetic marker
in men in Europe and Asia,
which originated
a little less than 1,000 years ago,
in an area suspiciously close
to that of the Mongol empire.
And they concluded that probably
really did spring from
the loins of Genghis Khan.
By wiping out the heart
of the original Muslim civilisation,
Genghis Khan left the way clear
for another part of the world
to begin to grow.
Christian Europe.
Trade flourished between
East and West in the century
after Genghis died,
an era of peace
known as the Pax Mongolica.
Flashy fabrics and pungent spices
had travelled along the Silk Road
to Europe from ancient times,
but the lands they came from -
China, indeed all of the Far East -
remained a mystery in the West.
After the victories of Genghis Khan,
the Silk Road was opened
to outsiders.
And soon, it would set
the imagination of Europe aflame.
Genoa, 1298.
Two political prisoners
share a prison cell.
One man is Rustichello of Pisa,
a writer of popular tales.
The otheris a gabby Venetian
with a fabulous story to tell.
E dopo tre giorni di cammino
sulle montagne
And in Rustichello, Marco Polo
had found his perfect ghost writer.
Marco Polo was a new and adventurous
kind of European merchant.
And Venice was becoming
the essential hub
for trade between Europe
and the rest of the world.
Its prosperity was built
on ruthless commercial attitudes
and a navy mass-produced at its
world-famous shipyard, the Arsenale.
But the Venetians
were less interested
in conquering than doing deals.
And in a world that craved
foreign tastes, you got
the best deals by looking east.
The Venetian fleets were tightly
tied into a huge trade network
dominated by the Muslim world,
and dealing not just in slaves
but in timber,
fur, salt
and the incredibly valuable spices.
The young Marco Polo's world
was already flavoured
and scented with cinnamon,
nutmeg and cloves and pepper.
This was literally
the smell and taste of the East.
And he dreamed from an early age
of following the ancient Silk Road
which led to China.
In 1271, aged just 17,
he was offered
a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
with his father and his uncle.
He set out east from Venice, bearing
greetings from the most powerful man
in Western Europe, Pope Gregory X.
Most Europeans barely
moved more than a few miles
from their birthplace.
Heading out so far into the unknown
must have felt like
launching yourself at the moon.
The trek took them
more than three years
through the deserts
and the mountains of Asia.
Finally, in 1275,
they reached their destination.
The court of Kublai Khan in Shangdu,
better known as Xanadu.
Xanadu seemed an earthly paradise.
Kublai Khan was entranced
by the civilisation he now ruled.
He was a Mongol becoming Chinese.
His court celebrated
the flow of ideas.
This was a land of safe roads,
broad canals and manufactured goods.
Still, he was fascinated
by his visitors from Italy
and their message from the Pope.
He briefly considered
turning Christian himself
briefly.
Pleased with their tales
of distant lands,
he invited them to be part
of his inner circle
of diplomats and advisers.
Marco Polo told Rustichello
he travelled to distant
corners of China
on diplomatic missions
for his patron.
Later, he'd tell of astonishing
things never seen in Europe,
such as money made of paper,
the burning of pieces
of black stone for fuel,
and the practice of eating
snakes and dogs.
Though other things
you'd think he'd notice,
such as chopsticks
or the Great Wall of China,
were missing from his tales
when he finally got home.
Around some men,
stories gather like flies.
It's said that when Marco Polo
returned to Venice
after 24 years travelling in China
and the Far East,
dressed in greasy furs
and filthy silks,
he simply slit open
the seams of his clothes,
and a cascade of rubies and emeralds
poured out.
It's a good story,
but take it with a pinch of salt,
because even in his lifetime,
Marco Polo was known
as Marco Il Milione -
Marco Millions.
Not because of his wealth
but because of his exaggerations.
Millions of this, millions of miles,
millions of that.
At this point, Marco Polo
might have disappeared
from the pages of history.
Instead, he dictated himself
into them.
..arrive su un alto
During their imprisonment,
Rustichello of Pisa
noted down his cellmate's stories.
..trovi un fiume bellissimo!
And in 1298,
copies of the manuscript
began circulating around Europe,
as Marco Polo's
Description Of The World.
And Europe was gripped.
Marco Polo's message
was simple and seductive.
There was a fabulous world of wealth
and opportunity beyond Europe.
But as Europeans would soon learn,
there was also a dark side
to this new international network.
Seven years after
Marco Polo's death,
a strange epidemic in China started
killing people in huge numbers.
Very soon, the Black Death,
carried on ships, probably by rats,
spread into the Mediterranean region
and then beyond.
The same exchange of goods and
people that had made Venice so rich
was now taking a terrible revenge.
Across Europe, bustling markets
became ghost towns,
villages emptied,
literacy retreated,
authority tottered.
Marco Polo had issued a great,
optimistic rallying call,
but Europe was simply
too weak to respond.
The old core of the Islamic empire
had been destroyed by Genghis Khan.
But the decimation of
Christian Europe by the Black Death
meant that the stand-off between
these two great religions
would go on.
Yet trade between them
always continued, too,
especially between Venice
and the fabulously wealthy
Muslim city of Cairo.
And in July 1324,
something appeared on the horizon
that would have a startling effect
on Cairo's economy.
A train of up to 60,000 soldiers,
and 500 slaves carrying
sceptres of gold.
Leading this astonishing procession
was an African king, Mansa Musa,
on a pilgrimage
to Islam's holy city, Mecca.
They had spent a year marching
more than 2,000 miles
across the vast desert
that separated most of Africa
from the Mediterranean world.
Mansa Musa was king of the greatest
of the African empires
south of the Sahara.
Mali was a Muslim society where
lots of people could read and write.
It was a rich land
based on farmers and fishermen,
and on trading towns like Timbuktu
and Djenne on the River Niger.
The Niger was the lifeline
of Mansa Musa's vast empire
..carrying good throughout
his kingdom, which occupied
nearly half a million square miles.
But the most significant source
of Mansa Musa's prosperity
was a commodity craved by rulers
all over the world
..gold.
Mali was an African El Dorado,
and most of the world
knew nothing about it.
Until now.
When Mansa Musa's glittering caravan
stopped off in Cairo,
on its way to Mecca,
he was an immediate sensation.
He and his entourage
spent three months
in the city as guests
of the Egyptian ruler,
freely handing out gold
to its astonished residents.
Cairo at the time
was the world's largest gold market.
But he threw around so much
of the stuff that the price
of gold plummeted.
Indeed, merely because
of Mansa Musa's tips,
the economy of Cairo, it is said,
took ten years to recover.
The sudden appearance of Mansa Musa
and his gold was a revelation.
The world had just got
bigger and richer.
By the end of the 14th century,
two-thirds of the gold in Europe
came from Mali.
It's thanks to
the Muslim trading world
that Mali was able
to touch hands with Europe.
And it's thanks to the Muslim
travellers and writers
we know so much about it.
But Mali was not alone.
There were plenty of other
African civilisations at this time.
There was Zimbabwe,
with its great stone-city dwellers.
There was Benin,
with its amazing metalworkers,
who could rival anything
in Italy or Germany at the time.
But it was gold and glittering Mali
that had caught
the European imagination.
And in 1375, when map-makers in
Spain produced a series of charts,
known as the Catalan Atlas,
Mansa Musa was shown
sitting at the centre of Mali.
Mansa Musa had quite literally
put Africa on the European map.
Wherever European Christians
reached outwards in the Middle Ages,
they found Islam.
These two great religions of the
Book had been at war for centuries.
The Christian Crusades to gain
control of the Holy Land
and the city of Jerusalem
had inspired Europe,
but then the tide turned,
and Muslim Turks, the Ottomans,
pushed deep into
once-Christian lands.
But all that time, religious
propaganda cast a discreet veil
over a flourishing web of trade
and ideas passed between the rivals,
and that is true even of
the most epic moment in the story -
the Siege of Constantinople.
May, 1453.
The Ottoman leader Mehmet II had
dreamed of possessing Constantinople
since he was a small boy.
It was a vital trading crossroads
at the edge of Christian Europe,
protected by massive Roman walls.
For more than 1,000 years,
these were the most awesome defences
in the Western world.
They kept out rebels and renegades,
and Islamic armies too.
If a massive Arab siege
in the early 700s had succeeded
in breaking these walls,
then there's no reason why
the armies of Islam wouldn't
have reached the North Sea.
We've heard of
the Great Wall of China -
well, these were
the great walls of Europe.
Established by the Romans
on seven hills,
Constantinople had always seen
itself as the new Rome,
and its people Roman.
They were fiercely proud
of its imperial past
and its magnificent churches.
Including the greatest one
in Christendom, Hagia Sophia.
The city was still a storehouse
of classical learning
and ancient ritual.
It was still hypnotic.
But now, it faced
its fiercest threat yet.
SCREAMING
In Mehmet, the Ottomans had
a cool and calculating leader.
SPEAKS IN TURKISH
He was a pious Muslim,
though there were plenty
of Christians among his army
of up to 400,000 soldiers.
By contrast, Constantinople
was seriously undermanned.
The army defending the city
numbered fewer than 5,000 people.
Most of Christian Europe
was far too busy making money
to bother to come to its aid.
Among the few who did was
Giovanni Giustiniani Longo,
a mercenary from Genoa
and an expert at siege warfare.
As the weeks passed,
the city was slowly throttled.
For the people of Constantinople,
the days before the final attack
were days of bad omens.
WOMAN SHOUTS
The priests carried
a huge icon of the *** Mary
through the streets,
praying for her to intercede.
But the icon seemed strangely heavy,
and they slipped
and almost dropped it.
Bad omen.
Then, there was a terrible
rainstorm, turning the streets
into rivers,
worse than anyone
could ever remember.
Bad omen.
And finally, there was an unearthly,
eerie, red glow in the sky
which seemed to bathe
the dome of St Sophia
with a colour rather like that
of human blood.
You don't get many omens
worse than that.
It seemed to the people of what
had once been called the city of God
that perhaps God was deserting them.
BELL CHIMES
At 1.30am on the night of
the 29th of May, the city
came under all-out assault.
EXPLOSIONS
Giustiniani rallied every
able-bodied defender to the walls.
Facing him was, well,
Christian technology.
Awesome siege guns made for Mehmet
by Hungarian and German technicians.
Constantinople managed to hold off
the remorseless attackers
for five hours.
But then,
Giustiniani was mortally wounded.
Panic quickly spread
amongst his exhausted men.
SHOUTING
Wave upon wave of Ottoman soldiers
now smashed their way into the city.
On that final morning,
Hagia Sophia was crammed
with the last of the Romans.
Terrified people, old men
and children, nuns and noblemen,
crammed in here for a final mass.
Up there on the altar, the priest
would be chanting and praying,
and yet above their voices
was the sound of the great oak doors
splintering under Ottoman axes.
And as the screaming inside
the church got louder,
and the chanting by the priests
got louder,
so did the sound of the axes,
until finallythe doors gave way.
So the most coveted city
in the world was taken.
And soon the great Christian
cathedral of Hagia Sophia
resounded to Islamic prayers.
It's been a mosque ever since.
Later that day, a triumphant Mehmet
rode through the city.
Even he was shocked
by the scale of the slaughter.
And so an empire which had lasted
for more than 1,100 years gave way
to the Ottomans.
Christianity was replaced by Islam.
The news of the fall
of Constantinople arrived
in the rest of Europe
like a thunderclap,
and it spread like wildfire.
But no sooner was the blood dry
on the corpses of the defenders,
including many heroic
Genoese and Venetians,
than boats were setting sail again
from Genoa
and from Venice
back to Ottoman Istanbul,
seeking terms of trade
with the Sultan.
Almost as soon as the gunpowder
smell had faded,
it was back to business as usual.
Business never rests.
The capture of Constantinople was
the Ottomans' greatest victory.
But it also marked
the end of an era.
This was the last
great medieval siege.
And what Mehmet
could not have realised
is that the most advanced,
pushy part of the world
had already moved on.
The great new cultural clash
was between the rising and fiercely
competitive city states of Italy.
Now brimming with wealth from trade
and new ideas from around the world,
Christian scholars who had fled
from Constantinople found
these buzzing towns
to be citadels of knowledge,
and from within their walls,
Europe would be reborn.
The Renaissance.
Europe's rebirth.
Well, it was a long
and painful birth -
it went on for about 200 years.
We're told that the Renaissance
was all about
the rediscovery of classical
learning, and it's absolutely true
that in this period
the great Latin and Greek writers
begin to bubble back
into Europe's consciousness.
But, really,
the Renaissance is about the new.
New ways of building,
new ways of painting and making,
new money and new confidence.
Not coming from empires
or nation-states
but from the great
city-states of Europe
and, in particular, the great
city-states of northern Italy.
Genoa.
Pisa.
Florence. Venice.
And Milan.
For 13 years, Leonardo da Vinci
had been employed at
the court of the Duke of Milan,
Ludovico Sforza.
Every week, he bombarded the duke
with new ideas and schemes
for portable bridges,
fighting machines
deep-sea diving suits?
His talents were prodigious.
A prolific inventor, he was also a
musician, an engineer and an artist,
and he had found the perfect place
to fulfil his talents.
Milan in the late 15th century
was the wealthiest city in Italy.
With its ambitious duke,
it offered a fertile environment
for new thinking, risk-taking.
The duke's family, the Sforzas,
were part of a new political class
who had grown rich
from Europe's
ever-expanding trade networks.
Like present-day oligarchs,
they dealt in money and power,
but what they craved
was respectability.
Ludovico wasn't exactly aristocracy.
His father had been a mercenary
warlord who kept changing sides.
Fight for absolutely anybody.
And he'd ended up
effectively grabbing Milan.
The Sforzas didn't exactly need
bling, but they needed some class.
They needed some artistic
bedazzlement
to try to make the people out there
forget where they'd come from.
Leonardo was paid to provide this.
But he wasn't a day-job kind of man.
He filled notebooks with sketches
and scribbled thoughts,
digging into the underlying
structures and curious parallels
he found all around him in nature.
In Leonardo's time, there is no
division between art and science.
The artist studies
the laws of perspective,
works out how colours change,
looks very closely at the underlying
structure of things.
The artist learns how to grind
lenses to look more closely,
learns how to cast metal
to create a statue.
Science is just knowledge,
and learning
the practical skills which allow
other things, including art,
to be made.
And now the Duke gave Leonardo
a chance to pull together
his studies of geometry and
perspective and human anatomy
for one spectacular painting.
Sforza commissioned Leonardo
to paint Christ's last supper
with his 12 disciples
on the wall of
the monks' dining room
in the monastery
of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
It was a traditional scene, one that
had been painted many times before.
Io voglio un grande
va bene?
Above all, the Duke wanted his Last
Supper to be big and impressive.
But Leonardo realised
this was an opportunity
to do something genuinely new.
Leonardo was obsessed
by the now and the future.
He was a compulsive experimenter.
Like modern scientists,
he was fascinated by finding
the hidden patterns
underneath reality.
He wasn't about looking back.
He was about looking better,
looking more intently,
looking around him
and looking ahead.
Leonardo decided to freeze
one dramatic moment in time.
The climax of the story, when Christ
revealed to his disciples
that one of them would betray him.
And every posture, every gesture,
every facial expression
in the painting would be taken
from real life.
Leonardo ransacked the streets
of Milan looking for faces
for the disciples.
The really difficult one was Judas.
And, apparently,
he spent nearly a year
looking for somebody
with the right mix of
cruelty and evil to play Judas.
Leonardo drew on a series
of his own anatomical sketches
to capture the essence
of human expression.
Slowly, the painting and its
characters began to emerge.
Finally, after three years
of painstaking work,
The Last Supper was finished.
Boungiorno signore. Per favore.
Posso
Aspetta.
Art and science had come together
in miraculous harmony.
Leonardo had humanised the disciples
by allowing them to
show raw emotions.
Shock.
Grief.
Anger.
Building on Islamic scholarship
of optics and perspective,
he draws our eye to Christ
at the centre of the table.
Everything radiates from him.
For the people who first saw it,
this would have been
almost like a hallucination.
Sitting and eating in this room,
they would have been drawn
towards Christ
almost as if they were sitting
and eating with Christ in person.
In its day, this was
the shock of the new.
Leonardo remains a standard-bearer
for the new confidence
of Christian Europe,
but its journey to Renaissance
was far more than simply
a European story.
That muddy backwater had absorbed
wealth and ideas from
all around the world.
Some of that mud
was now paved with marble,
and the backwater now thronged
with merchants' ships, adventurers.
Europe was ready
to spread her sails.
In the next programme
EXPLOSION
..the age of plunder.
Exploration, conquest
..and the birth of capitalism.
If you'd like to know a little bit
more about how the past is revealed,
you can order a free booklet called
How Do They Know That?
Just call:
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to the Open University.