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
00:00:10have been swept under the rug.
00:00:13These are the Dark Ages.
00:00:17This would have been a pretty rough time to be living in.
00:00:21When the Roman Empire crumbled, Europe was besieged by famine, plague, persecutions and
00:00:27a state of war so persistent it was only rarely interrupted by peace.
00:00:33Half of the people that you know today were dead tomorrow.
00:00:37You couldn't even bury them all.
00:00:40But beneath this cloak of darkness were scattered rays of light, men and women who boldly tended
00:00:45the flame of progress while the world around them descended into hell.
00:00:51Ultimately, these stars would illuminate the long dark night and propel Europe toward a
00:00:57new dawn brighter than any it had seen in a thousand years.
00:01:11August 24th, 410 A.D., the Empire falls.
00:01:15Rome, a city so long in control of its own destiny and the world's, is invaded by a band
00:01:23of dirty, sweaty, smelly thugs.
00:01:27They are the Visigoths, a terrifying assortment of heathens from Europe's northeastern frontier.
00:01:33And they've come to declare the death of Roman domination.
00:01:39For the first time in 800 years, the eternal city is under siege.
00:01:46Rome had not ever been conquered by a foreign enemy in the imperial period.
00:01:54The psychological effect of the greatest city of the ancient world being conquered was absolutely
00:02:03crushing.
00:02:04For three days, the great capital of Caesar and Augustus is ravaged by its unwelcome guests.
00:02:13Stunning architectural marvels that have stood for centuries are burned to the ground.
00:02:19Germanic slaves rise up to enslave their Roman masters.
00:02:26And the city's streets run red with the blood of its own people.
00:02:31The Roman citizens really are helpless.
00:02:34All they know is that they've had to surrender, that there's no one there to protect them,
00:02:39that these Gothic warriors would have been terrifying.
00:02:44At the head of the charge is Alaric, a Visigothic warrior who had once fought on the empire's
00:02:49behalf along its northern frontier.
00:02:51When he was passed over for a promotion within the ranks of the Roman legions, Alaric turned
00:02:57from friend to foe and used what he had learned about Roman warfare to launch his own campaign
00:03:03of aggression.
00:03:05He eventually decided that the only way he was going to advance was to really put the
00:03:12screws to Rome.
00:03:13So the siege of Rome was, to tell you the truth, a profit-making career move for Alaric.
00:03:20Two years earlier, in 408 A.D., Alaric and his rebel army had arrived on the doorstep
00:03:27of Rome itself, looking for power, plunder, and most of all, food.
00:03:35Anybody who wants to look at why the Visigoths win, it's because of desperation.
00:03:41They need to win.
00:03:42If 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 too secure, and they're
00:03:59far too well built.
00:04:00So he relies on starvation.
00:04:05Alaric's men surrounded Rome, took full control of its supply lines, and blocked all shipments
00:04:11of grain coming into the city.
00:04:14Gradually, the city died from within, and the pall of impending death began to permeate
00:04:22even its most hallowed traditions.
00:04:26Even in times of utter distress, it was really important for Roman society to continue to
00:04:31have chariot races and killing of wild beasts, gladiatorial convents, execution of criminals.
00:04:38The 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 are lying there, bleeding out on the sands
00:04:52of the arena, the crowd started shouting, let us buy that meat, how much per pound do
00:04:58you want for that?
00:05:00That's how hungry they were.
00:05:03In Rome, power and glory were rapidly being replaced by corpses and cannibalism.
00:05:10After two years of suffering inside the sealed-off city, Roman pride had eroded enough to accept
00:05:17subjugation over starvation.
00:05:20On 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.
00:05:37So after three days, Alaric and his men moved on in search of greener pastures and left
00:05:42the heart of the Roman Empire on life support.
00:05:47A contemporary puts it very well when he says the mother of the world has been killed.
00:05:53That's what people thought, that the mother of the world had been brutally killed in a
00:05:58Gothic sack.
00:06:00While Alaric's sacking of Rome certainly hastened its demise, the mother of the world had been
00:06:07terminally ill for quite some time.
00:06:11As early as the 3rd century AD, the empire had fallen into the hands of a series of inept
00:06:17emperors, whose obsession with personal gain threatened the public welfare and fostered
00:06:23civil war.
00:06:25During a 50-year period in the 3rd century, nearly all of the two dozen emperors who seized
00:06:31power were brutally slain by rivals, rebels, and subjects.
00:06:38While Rome gradually imploded from within, external threats, both natural and man-made,
00:06:44only aided its self-destruction.
00:06:48Diseases such as smallpox and measles entered the European population pool for the first
00:06:53time during the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
00:06:55In this sense, the Roman Empire paid the price for its success.
00:06:58It had become so wealthy and had established contacts with other parts of the world to
00:07:03such an extent that now it was not only importing the very valuable wares of those regions,
00:07:09it was also importing the diseases that came from those regions.
00:07:18As Rome's population began to dwindle, so did its border guard, leaving its emperors
00:07:23no choice but to hire barbarian fighters, like Alaric, as mercenaries.
00:07:30But as the Romans became more and more dependent on foreign defenders, they also became more
00:07:35openly hostile toward them.
00:07:38When the Goths first entered the empire, they came really as refugees, and they were forced
00:07:46into 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
00:07:59Goths in exchange for Gothic children as slaves.
00:08:02And so, both the incompetence and the cruelty of Roman officialdom drove the Goths into
00:08:08rebellion.
00:08:11Alaric, the leader and living symbol of that rebellion, died of fever in 410, shortly after
00:08:20his historic sacking of Rome.
00:08:24While he wouldn't live to enjoy much of his success, future generations of barbarians
00:08:29would.
00:08:34Throughout the 5th century, wave after wave of invading tribes, Goths, Vandals, Franks,
00:08:40Britons 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.
00:09:06The empire wasn't there.
00:09:07There was no longer an emperor.
00:09:10And as a result, the world was a smaller place.
00:09:13The 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.
00:09:26A time when urban populations throughout the continent declined, and city life withered.
00:09:35The amenities and the technology of life, and indeed the scale of life, just got smaller
00:09:42and worse.
00:09:43The sewage systems stopped working, so that people can't get rid of their garbage the
00:09:47way they used 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
00:10:02in, I suppose, what we'd call shacks.
00:10:08Even the great monuments of Rome, engineering miracles that had defined an unprecedented
00:10:13age of innovation, were quarried for quick building materials.
00:10:18The people who came in afterwards settled next to the Roman ruins, not on top of the
00:10:24Roman ruins, 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.
00:10:41Over time, even the Colosseum, once Rome's grandest showcase of power and prestige, succumbed
00:10:48to the decay of civilization.
00:10:52It became at various intervals a landfill, a shelter for the destitute, and a haven for
00:10:57packs 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.
00:11:21They 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
00:11:55of the succeeding centuries.
00:11:59But despite the undeniable downshift in society's progress, debate still rages about whether
00:12:05it's fair to call this era the Dark Ages.
00:12:09The 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
00:12:21this period to the earlier Classical period, which he saw as literally brilliant, full
00:12:27of light.
00:12:28And he said, hey, by comparison, the people of this period, they were in darkness, in
00:12:35gloom.
00:12:36You got up in the morning in this period, and if you were poor and if you were hungry,
00:12:41things probably did look pretty dark, but 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
00:12:51gloom and 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
00:13:05future.
00:13:08For while the continent was fragmenting politically, a new form of unity was gradually emerging
00:13:13that couldn'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.
00:13:41The basilica at Reims in northern France is bathed in the light of a thousand candles.
00:13:48The air inside the sanctuary is thick with incense, as the local bishop sends up a silent
00:13:54prayer 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
00:14:08his pagan roots 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.
00:14:26In 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.
00:14:42After Rome's fall, Western Europe had splintered into countless small territories commanded
00:14:47by Germanic conquerors such as Clovis, who overthrew the last Roman governor of Gaul
00:14:52and claimed most of the province for himself.
00:14:56In the course of a single generation, the security and order that had so long stabilized
00:15:01life on the continent was history.
00:15:05And the citizens of the 6th century faced a new world disorder that offered only uncertainty.
00:15:13They 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.
00:15:27Feuding 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.
00:15:53It's the people who simply get caught up in the fighting.
00:15:56And yet they're often the ones who suffer as a result.
00:16:00Amidst the unrelenting political turbulence of the Dark Ages, in which loyalties and alliances
00:16:06shifted with the winds, Christianity was the only common thread.
00:16:11In the period after the fall of the empire, for the average countryman, or indeed the
00:16:17average citizen, 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.
00:16:32Five 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
00:16:56Emperor Constantine legalized it in 313 AD, after experiencing a divine intervention in
00:17:03the midst of war.
00:17:06He had a vision of a Christian symbol in the sky, and he heard the words, in this sign,
00:17:12you shall conquer.
00:17:14And when he did subsequently win the major battle that led him to become the emperor,
00:17:19he attributed his success in battle to this sign, and to the fact that the Christian God
00:17:24had decided to support him.
00:17:27Within a couple of generations after the conversion of Constantine, Christianity clearly had the
00:17:31upper hand within the Roman Empire.
00:17:33There was a flood of converts to Christianity, individuals who understood that it would now
00:17:39be to their advantage to be Christian rather than pagan.
00:17:45Clovis, the barbarian king of the Franks, was one of those individuals.
00:17:51As his pagan army extended its conquests deeper and deeper into Christian territories, it
00:17:57became clear that the way into the hearts and minds of his new subjects was through
00:18:02their souls.
00:18:06As his power spread in the old Roman provinces of Gaul, the really significant part of the
00:18:14population was Roman, and often Roman churchmen, bishops.
00:18:19As 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.
00:18:30After his baptism, Clovis would have trouble abiding by one of his new faith's golden rules,
00:18:35thou shalt not kill.
00:18:39His conversion could do little to quench his thirst for blood.
00:18:43Instead, it only gave him a new justification for his military campaigns.
00:18:48Now, they were more than territorial plunders.
00:18:51They were holy wars fought in the name of faith.
00:18:56But his meteoric rise from small-time tribal chieftain to master of Gaul really had less
00:19:02to do with religion than with ruthlessness.
00:19:06Clovis was never reluctant to employ murder as a tool.
00:19:12Everybody was well aware that it didn't bode well for you if you spoke up in Clovis's court.
00:19:18It was much better to keep your mouth shut.
00:19:22At the age of 15, Clovis had taken command of a section of the Rhine Delta in northern France.
00:19:29He had inherited a small number of soldiers from his father, which he immediately put
00:19:34to the test, plundering surrounding tribes for treasure and more troops.
00:19:40When he conquered a village, he didn't simply massacre everybody in the village
00:19:45or make them into serfs or something like this.
00:19:48He actually elevated them to the same status that his men were, so that his recruitment
00:19:53policy was to gather all the men that he had conquered and to make his new army.
00:19:58Those individuals created the invincible army that Clovis had.
00:20:03By the time he converted to Catholicism at the age of 30, Clovis had emerged as the supreme
00:20:09ruler over most of modern-day France, and he had laid the foundation for a new dynasty
00:20:15called the Merovingians, famous today as the supposed protectors of Christ's bloodline
00:20:20in the Da Vinci Code.
00:20:24In reality, the last thing Clovis wanted to protect was his bloodline.
00:20:29It was customary among Frankish kings to divide their territories among their sons
00:20:33upon their death, so to make sure no one could surface to challenge his claim to sovereignty,
00:20:39Clovis had any relatives outside his immediate household systematically eliminated.
00:20:45A surviving report recalls an emotional speech the king delivered toward the end of his reign,
00:20:50lamenting the absence of any loyal kinsfolk.
00:20:53He didn't mean it.
00:20:55He only said that because he was trying to smoke out any other people who might hold up their hands
00:20:59and say, oh, but wait, I'm still part of your family, I'll support you,
00:21:03so that Clovis could then murder them, too.
00:21:08The only fate worse than being Clovis's relative was being his captive.
00:21:17In certain cases, the king endorsed a barbaric dark age practice known as the
00:21:23ordeal.
00:21:31In the ordeal of boiling water, a cauldron of boiling water with a small pebble at the bottom
00:21:37would be presented to the party who was on trial, and the person had to stick their hand in
00:21:42and get the pebble and get their hand out again.
00:21:48And the hand would be bandaged, and after two or three days, it would be examined by a priest
00:21:52to see if it was healing well or not.
00:21:55If it was healing well, you were innocent.
00:21:57If it was not healing, then that was evidence of your guilt.
00:22:03There's also the ordeal by water, where the person would be thrown in.
00:22:06If they float, that means the water's rejecting them, and they're guilty.
00:22:09If they sink, that means they're innocent.
00:22:11And of course, they would pull them back out. They didn't let them drown.
00:22:14Critical to the notion of the ordeal is the idea that God's justice is something
00:22:19which 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,
00:22:28it very much made sense.
00:22:30God will be on the side of good.
00:22:35Clovis died of an unknown cause in 511 A.D.
00:22:38His brutality had been legendary, but it would not define his legacy.
00:22:43He had united the barbarian tribes of France into one emerging superpower, the Franks.
00:22:50And he had forged a crucial alliance with the increasingly influential Roman Catholic Church.
00:22:57In so doing, he had proven to be a stabilizing force
00:23:01at a time that can only be described as chaotic, dangerous, and dark.
00:23:07Four centuries after the fall of Rome,
00:23:10Western Europe would remain shrouded in a thick shadow of misery.
00:23:15But to the east, there was a light shining forth that pierced the night.
00:23:20There, the Roman Empire endured.
00:23:23And there, a new emperor was plotting to restore its former glory
00:23:27by launching a hostile takeover of the West.
00:23:31As his soldiers marched forth from Constantinople,
00:23:34he could never have guessed that his most dangerous enemy was invisible.
00:23:38And it was already in his midst.
00:23:45533 A.D., the Empire strikes back.
00:23:50More than a century after the sack of Rome,
00:23:53an army of self-proclaimed Romans marches forth from the Byzantine capital of Constantinople,
00:23:58intent on recapturing all the Western territories
00:24:01that have fallen into the hands of Dark Age despots like Clovis.
00:24:09By this time, former Roman strongholds like Italy, Spain, and even North Africa
00:24:15are ruled by so-called barbarians.
00:24:18But the light of the Empire still burns brighter than ever to the east
00:24:22in places like Greece, Turkey, and Egypt.
00:24:29Those territories are still commanded by Roman emperors,
00:24:33protected by Roman troops, and reaping all the benefits of Roman technology and trade.
00:24:39In the 6th century, west and east are like night and day.
00:24:44For inhabitants of the western half of the Roman Empire,
00:24:47those who came from the east, the Greek speakers, were effeminate,
00:24:51they bathed too much, they didn't like a good fight,
00:24:55they were always preferring to play tricks on their enemies
00:24:58rather than meet them in pitched battle.
00:25:01Whereas people from the Greek east tended to regard those from the west
00:25:05as uncouth, backwards, too ready to resort to force instead of relying on diplomacy.
00:25:14The cultural divide between east and west first turned political late in the 3rd century,
00:25:20when the Roman Empire split into two halves, each to be governed by its own emperor.
00:25:26By having an emperor in the east and in the west,
00:25:28it would be easier to respond to crises very quickly.
00:25:31In the long run, however, splitting the empire into two
00:25:35and institutionalizing this divide between the Greek east and the Latin west
00:25:39left the Latin west at a grave disadvantage.
00:25:42It did not have the material resources that the eastern half of the Roman Empire had.
00:25:47Before the split, the wealth of the east could be used to prop up the west,
00:25:51but once there are now two halves to the empire,
00:25:54the west has to stand or fall on its own, and it fell.
00:26:00While the west floundered amidst the chaos of the barbarian invasions,
00:26:04in the eastern capital of Constantinople, it was business as usual.
00:26:10Water flowed from its fountains, trade goods flowed through its ports,
00:26:14and the cheers of boisterous sports fans echoed from its arenas during chariot races.
00:26:20There, the dream of Rome endured.
00:26:25When an ambitious emperor named Justinian came to power in 527,
00:26:29he resolved to export that dream back to the territories from which it originally came.
00:26:36Justinian was a smart, shrewd military man of humble roots
00:26:40who harbored grandiose visions of a reunited empire.
00:26:44For Justinian to conceive of the idea that he could somehow reconstitute
00:26:49the geographical extent of the empire was a remarkable dream.
00:26:53And what is even more remarkable is that he had some measure of success in achieving it.
00:27:00In the empire's heyday, centuries earlier, the Mediterranean Sea had been called a Roman lake.
00:27:06Justinian resolved to resurrect that label.
00:27:10But it would take a massive army and a mountain of cash to buy that much waterfront property.
00:27:19Justinian relied on various forms of trickery to try and raise the funds
00:27:24that would be necessary to support his military campaigns.
00:27:28He was infamous for not paying his soldiers, and then when signing a peace treaty,
00:27:32telling his soldiers that they were going to give up all of their back wages to him
00:27:36as thanks for his signing a peace treaty,
00:27:40he would forge wills that stated that the subjects had, out of their great love of Justinian,
00:27:46decided to bequeath all their property to him.
00:27:49In one especially notorious case, an individual who had been captured by the enemy
00:27:55had his mother collect a ransom to free him,
00:27:58and Justinian refused to allow the ransom to be paid to the enemy,
00:28:01saying that this was funding the enemy and was against the interests of the Byzantine Empire.
00:28:06When the individual died in captivity, Justinian produced a letter,
00:28:10allegedly from the person in captivity, stating that he understood the reason why Justinian
00:28:15wouldn't let him be freed, and instead he wanted the ransom money to be paid to Justinian himself.
00:28:21Greedy tactics like these sent Justinian's approval ratings plunging,
00:28:25and by the fifth year of his reign, in 532,
00:28:28an undercurrent of popular unrest boiled over into outright revolt.
00:28:34At a chariot match between Constantinople's top two teams,
00:28:38fans of both sides gradually directed their catcalls away from each other and toward their emperor.
00:28:46Bellowing a unified chant of Nika, meaning conquer,
00:28:50a throng of thousands stormed the palace grounds and held Justinian under siege.
00:28:56It's as if Yankees and Mets fans decided to overthrow the mayor of New York.
00:29:00It was the worst possible situation.
00:29:03These people destroyed the city, and they're right. I mean, the chaos was extraordinary.
00:29:09Justinian was so terrified that he was literally on the dock, ready to go into exile.
00:29:16Take the ship and get out of town.
00:29:18At which point his wife, the formidable and beautiful Theodora, says,
00:29:23I'm not going.
00:29:29There's an old saying that behind every powerful man lies an equally powerful woman.
00:29:35Empress Theodora is Exhibit A.
00:29:39Born and raised in the lowest class of Byzantine society,
00:29:42she 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
00:29:56and also as a means of entertainment.
00:30:01Her act was so raunchy and so popular,
00:30:05the 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.
00:30:12Why? She was beautiful.
00:30:15She was beautiful.
00:30:16Even her enemies say she was oh so sexy, oh so beautiful.
00:30:20But she was also oh so smart.
00:30:22And that's clearly one of the reasons why Justinian fell so deeply in love with her
00:30:26and remained in love with her.
00:30:32From the beginning of his reign in 527,
00:30:35Justinian regarded Theodora as an equal shareholder in sovereignty.
00:30:40And as that sovereignty hung by a thread during the Nica riots,
00:30:44it was the empress who pulled herself and her husband together in time to save it.
00:30:53She says, I'm an empress, I'm not running away.
00:30:58Purple, that's the color of rule.
00:31:01Purple's a great color for a funeral.
00:31:04I'm staying.
00:31:05I'm staying.
00:31:07Justinian was so shocked he didn't go.
00:31:11With Theodora's advice, he calls in the shock troops
00:31:15and slaughtered 30,000 fans whom they had lured to the horse racing stadium.
00:31:24She saved him from throwing away his empire.
00:31:29Having regained his footing,
00:31:31Justinian then ordered the execution of all of his prominent political enemies.
00:31:38Their opposition now all but extinct,
00:31:40the emperor and empress celebrated their reversal of fortune
00:31:44and shifted their focus back to their ultimate goal,
00:31:48sole possession of their own private lake.
00:31:52With the West sputtering deeper and deeper into darkness,
00:31:55it seemed like only an act of God could derail that dream.
00:32:02Justinian and Theodora could never have imagined
00:32:04that one was about to wipe out half of their population
00:32:08and leave 100 million lifeless bodies strewn across the civilized world.
00:32:19Early spring, 538 A.D.,
00:32:21in Italy, a Byzantine army is blazing a trail of carnage from Rome to Milan.
00:32:28They are fighting on behalf of Justinian.
00:32:30The eastern emperor who harbors dreams of a reunited Roman Empire.
00:32:37While the glory days of Roman dominance in Western Europe have long since passed,
00:32:41Justinian is hell-bent on resurrecting them.
00:32:46Town after town, village after village, falls to his formidable legions.
00:32:52Just as they did in North Africa, Sicily and Southern Italy.
00:32:57One bloody battle at a time, the emperor is reconquering the West
00:33:01and it looks like Rome will rise again.
00:33:06The Italian campaign was one of the nastiest wars of antiquity
00:33:12in terms of entire cities being depopulated, entire populations massacred
00:33:18and just the fact that the countryside was fought over for 20 years
00:33:23really destroyed Italy's productive capacity for a couple of centuries afterwards.
00:33:31While Italy bleeds, the emperor builds.
00:33:34A thousand miles away, in Constantinople,
00:33:37he is dedicating a new cathedral built over the ashes of his charred capital.
00:33:44While the kings of Northern Europe are building drafty wooden dwellings,
00:33:48Justinian is redefining the limits of ancient architecture.
00:33:54Justinian is able to use this chaos to build his empire
00:33:58and he builds his empire by building the greatest symbol of Christianity,
00:34:03the Hagia Sophia Church.
00:34:05All of the rest of the mosques in Constantinople,
00:34:09if you want to go to Venice, St. Mark's, if you want to go elsewhere,
00:34:13even to the Vatican, all of them are imitating Hagia Sophia.
00:34:18Justinian spared no expense.
00:34:20He was the best marble, the best gold leaf, the best artist,
00:34:24anything that he could do to increase the visual impact as one walked into the cathedral.
00:34:31It was meant to persuade contemporaries that he was a figure
00:34:35who ought to be thought of in biblical terms.
00:34:40With his conquests and construction projects proceeding according to plan,
00:34:44Justinian had every reason to feel a little cocky.
00:34:51By 542, his domain extended farther than any emperor in more than two centuries,
00:34:57encompassing Italy and North Africa as well as Egypt, Turkey, Greece and Palestine.
00:35:04The Mediterranean was once again a Roman lake.
00:35:09But somewhere in that vast dominion,
00:35:12an invisible killer was making its way toward Constantinople
00:35:16with enough ammunition to wipe out not just the capital city,
00:35:19but the entire continent.
00:35:22That killer was bubonic plague.
00:35:26This one was truly terrifying.
00:35:29Twenty-five to fifty percent of the population,
00:35:32at least in urban areas like Constantinople, was killed.
00:35:37Ten people.
00:35:40Five of them are gone.
00:35:42Think of that, what that would mean in life
00:35:45if half of the people that you know today were dead tomorrow.
00:35:52Symptoms would begin with a sudden fever,
00:35:55followed by chills, vomiting and an increased sensitivity to light.
00:36:00Within three days, an excruciating pain would follow in the groin,
00:36:04the armpits and behind the ears.
00:36:07Then, tumors would form all over the body
00:36:10and violent muscle spasms would erupt.
00:36:14The luckier victims would fall into a coma
00:36:17before the disease stole their last breath.
00:36:20There was, of course, no treatment,
00:36:23and this turns out to have been one of the most virulent pandemics in history.
00:36:29The plague's place of origin is a mystery,
00:36:32but it arrived in Constantinople via cargo ship.
00:36:35It was carried by infected fleas,
00:36:38which hid in the fur of rats that it hitchhiked in from parts unknown.
00:36:43In May of 542, the first victims fell ill in the city's waterfront district.
00:36:49Within four months, it had infected nearly half of the city,
00:36:53including the emperor himself.
00:36:57A small percentage of those infected managed to survive the plague.
00:37:01Justinian was among them.
00:37:04But as was the case with nearly all plague survivors,
00:37:07the disease permanently scarred both his body and his mind.
00:37:14We're told that he became increasingly tyrannical, increasingly paranoid,
00:37:18and there's a memorable story about him sort of never sleeping,
00:37:22but wandering the halls of the palace at night
00:37:25and plotting new ways in which to grind his subjects down.
00:37:32When all was said and done, up to half of the empire's population,
00:37:36perhaps 100 million people,
00:37:39were struck down by the plague of Justinian.
00:37:44It spread very rapidly in the course of a year or so,
00:37:49all the way as far as Britain and even Ireland.
00:37:52And the devastation was such that at least a third of the population
00:37:56in most cities was killed off, and sometimes much more than that.
00:38:02When you have that kind of devastating population loss,
00:38:05I mean, think of it, the United States has 300 million people.
00:38:08What if 150 million people died?
00:38:11You couldn't even bury them all.
00:38:14But worse than that, your economic productivity tumbles,
00:38:18your ability to defend yourself becomes truly crippled,
00:38:23and I think this is one of the long-term cascading effects.
00:38:27And it literally took hundreds of years for the population of Europe to be restored.
00:38:33If the future looked bleak for Europe before, now it looked pitch black.
00:38:39In 542, the autumn chill brought an end to the plague in Constantinople.
00:38:47But throughout the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries,
00:38:50new outbreaks would suddenly resurface to ravage various pockets of Europe
00:38:55and inflict repeated suffering on a defeated, dwindling populace.
00:39:03If you had gone to Europe in the 6th and 7th centuries,
00:39:06the thing that would have struck you most was how empty it was
00:39:10and how small the towns were, if you could find towns.
00:39:14You would have been struck by the towns in which only a small section was inhabited
00:39:19and the rest was now totally abandoned and overrun by animals.
00:39:28In 548 A.D., the Empress Theodora died of cancer.
00:39:33Justinian outlived her by 17 years.
00:39:37Throughout his reign, his armies managed to hold on to his conquests in Western Europe,
00:39:42but his dream of a reunited Rome would die with him.
00:39:49As soon as Justinian dies, the Byzantine Empire decides that it cannot fund these overseas forces,
00:39:55and so they simply pull back.
00:39:57So while Justinian may have had this great influence, it was not a lasting influence.
00:40:02The Byzantine Empire could not financially sustain what had once been the original Roman Empire.
00:40:11As the last of the Romans retreated into history, the door of prosperity closed behind him.
00:40:17And with its final ties to the Eastern coffers severed, Western Europe was about to get even darker.
00:40:24For most people, life in these times would be nasty, brutish,
00:40:29and for the luckiest among them, short.
00:40:38By the turn of the 7th century, Northwestern Europe had become a land shrouded in darkness.
00:40:45With the final withdrawal of Justinian's forces from the West,
00:40:49the last vestiges of Roman control had faded into history,
00:40:53and the continent was divided among barbarian warlords who were consumed with conquest at all costs.
00:41:02As disease and warfare claimed countless thousands, trade and industry shrank to a virtual standstill,
00:41:09and Europe's economy was once again dependent on agriculture and herding,
00:41:14as it had been before the rise of Rome, 1,000 years earlier.
00:41:19Roads 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.
00:41:30You could have your local community, but you really couldn't tell what was going on in the wider world.
00:41:35You couldn't tell what threats might be coming at you through the forest,
00:41:39and there really wasn't a sufficient population for there to be that critical mass of ideas
00:41:48that eventually allows human beings to make life better for themselves.
00:41:55In the Dark Ages, the untamed wilderness was a source of endless fear and fascination.
00:42:02Wide-eyed villagers told tales of witches, wizards, and warlocks lurking deep in the shadows,
00:42:08who possessed supernatural powers strong enough to cast spells, kill livestock, and summon terrifying storms of lightning.
00:42:19The Catholic Church condemned such ghost stories as pagan nonsense,
00:42:24but for the average Dark Age villager, the realities of daily life were just as unnerving.
00:42:30The very regimented type of work that we do today, where you work 50 weeks per year,
00:42:36where you work nine to five if you're lucky, five days a week,
00:42:39that sort of work pattern was non-existent during the Dark Ages.
00:42:44You worked according to seasonal patterns, in that there were long periods when you did nothing.
00:42:49During the winter months, you just sat around and drank.
00:42:52Those periods of doing nothing, which could stretch for months on end,
00:42:55alternated with periods of frantic activity during harvest time, when you were sowing the crops.
00:43:02When you would be working dawn to dusk, you and everyone in your family old enough to walk
00:43:06would be out there trying to produce the food you needed to survive.
00:43:11As Europe's masses struggled to scrape by, misery was one commodity that was never in short supply.
00:43:19Half of your children would have died before they reached adolescence.
00:43:24Probably a quarter of all newborns died within the first year of life.
00:43:28Another quarter of your children would have died by the time they were 10 or 12.
00:43:32And perhaps most children experienced loss of one or both parents before they reached adulthood.
00:43:39But there was light to be found in the darkness.
00:43:42And it most often shined from the local monastery.
00:43:47Monasteries became some of the most important institutions in Europe.
00:43:51Some of the most wealthy institutions.
00:43:53They were centers of commerce, centers of political authority.
00:43:57This is where the action was.
00:44:03Jarrow, England, 730 A.D.
00:44:06On a dark and bitterly cold night, when the outside world is crusted over like a tomb,
00:44:12there are signs of life visible through a single monastery window.
00:44:21Inside, a Benedictine monk sits hunched over his desk, surrounded by books.
00:44:27His name is Bede, and he is writing his most important literary achievement.
00:44:32A five-volume history of England, spanning from the time of Julius Caesar until his own.
00:44:38In an age when more books are being burned than being written,
00:44:42as kings and clerics everywhere condemn material that contradicts Catholicism,
00:44:47Bede's work is an essential link to the pre-Christian past.
00:44:52Pretty much all of the texts we have from the classical period came down to us,
00:44:57preserved in these manuscripts that were written by, copied by, Christian monks in the Middle Ages.
00:45:03And there's a real deep-seated ambivalence towards it.
00:45:06The monks, they read Virgil, they read the classics, they copied them down.
00:45:11At the same time, there's always a sense, you don't want to like them too much.
00:45:14Because what really matters is scripture.
00:45:18Bede amassed a collection of nearly 250 books,
00:45:21though perhaps not impressive by today's standards.
00:45:24In the Dark Ages, this gave him one of the most extensive libraries in England.
00:45:30With such a rare wealth of knowledge at his disposal,
00:45:33Bede was possibly the most educated individual in Europe.
00:45:37But he wasn't the only man of the cloth who doubled as a man of letters.
00:45:41Monks were the de facto guardians of Europe's literary culture.
00:45:45In the violent and anarchic conditions of the period,
00:45:48it was increasingly difficult to have any kind of education.
00:45:54By the 7th century, there was virtually nobody outside of the ranks of the clergy who was still literate.
00:46:04A key figure in the development of the monastic lifestyle was Saint Benedict of Nursia,
00:46:09who lived two centuries before Bede.
00:46:13In 500 AD, Benedict left his comfortable life among the nobility
00:46:18and began living as a hermit in the Italian countryside.
00:46:22But as word spread about his special powers of healing,
00:46:26he was forced to sacrifice his simple life of seclusion.
00:46:31His reputation for sanctity and for miracle working
00:46:35caused people to seek him out wherever he went.
00:46:38People would come to him for matters as mundane as fixing a tray
00:46:42that they had dropped and it had broken in two halves and they would give it to him
00:46:45and he would fuse the two ends together so now your tray was whole again.
00:46:49But they would also come to him for extraordinary miracles,
00:46:53such as for telling the future, healing the sick and even raising the dead.
00:46:59Recognizing Benedict's rising star power,
00:47:02a group of local monks begged him to be the abbot of their monastery.
00:47:06Benedict heeded the call and the monks got their man.
00:47:12But his brand of discipline would prove too strict for his new subordinates
00:47:16and almost as quickly as they had elected him,
00:47:19they hatched a secret plot to eliminate him.
00:47:23Many of the people who are going into these monasteries,
00:47:25they came from wealthy families.
00:47:27These are not people who are used to being servants.
00:47:29There's a story of this one notable Roman family
00:47:33and their son was in the monastery and he's holding a lamp over Benedict
00:47:37while Benedict eats and he's thinking to himself,
00:47:40who am I to be standing here holding this lamp
00:47:43while this guy is just sitting there eating?
00:47:45And I think in many cases, for a lot of people going to these monasteries,
00:47:49this idea of submitting to the authority of the abbot,
00:47:53they might have found that hard to bear at points.
00:47:56In blatant disregard of their own vows,
00:47:59the monks tried twice to poison Saint Benedict.
00:48:02But evidently he had God on his side.
00:48:07The first time they poisoned his drink,
00:48:09but as he prayed over the cup before taking a sip,
00:48:12it suddenly shattered.
00:48:15Then, they poisoned his bread.
00:48:18But before he could take a bite,
00:48:20a raven swooped in and stole it away.
00:48:27Having twice defied death,
00:48:29Benedict left the wayward abbey
00:48:31and established his own chain of 12 new monasteries,
00:48:35nestled quietly in the Italian high country southeast of Rome.
00:48:41The monks living inside their walls
00:48:43were challenged to obey a rigorous code of ethics
00:48:46called the Rule of Saint Benedict.
00:48:50The purpose of the Rule of Saint Benedict
00:48:52is 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,
00:49:04then you could eliminate those drives that caused you to sin.
00:49:08For example, monks are forbidden to speak
00:49:11except in dire necessity
00:49:14because to speak is to exercise your own will.
00:49:18600 years after Christ's crucifixion,
00:49:21his church had become the dominant cultural force in Europe.
00:49:25But while his disciples were flocking to monasteries
00:49:28in search of solitude,
00:49:31further east, the followers of another prophet
00:49:34were taking up arms in search of conquest.
00:49:38On the dusty shores of North Africa and Arabia,
00:49:41mighty armies were waging war,
00:49:43not in the name of Christ, but of the Koran.
00:49:47Their religious movement would spread
00:49:49even farther and faster than Christianity
00:49:52and threatened to compete for the souls of Europe.
00:49:56The only thing standing in their way
00:49:59was one Christian king who had seen them coming.
00:50:08October 10th, 732 A.D.
00:50:12Tour France is on the front line in a holy war
00:50:15that will define Europe's spiritual and political future.
00:50:20The conflict pits the Christian Franks against the Muslim Moors
00:50:24who had recently crossed into Spain from North Africa.
00:50:29The Moors want to expand their empire
00:50:31and import their faith in Mohammed,
00:50:33the prophet of Islam who lived a century earlier.
00:50:38The Christians want to keep them out at all costs.
00:50:43They saw it as an immediate and local threat to themselves.
00:50:46The Muslims believed that they were there
00:50:49to rule over the earth and bring about God's justice
00:50:53and institute God's order.
00:50:55And so in that sense, there might have been
00:50:57what you could call a religious mission to the conquest.
00:51:02The Moors saw Europe as easy prey,
00:51:05a land defended by barbarians
00:51:07who were too busy fighting each other to fight anyone else.
00:51:14In 730, Moorish general Abdul Rahman al-Ghafiqi
00:51:17crossed into France with an army of 50,000 men.
00:51:23At the head of the charge was an elite division of cavalry,
00:51:26unmatched 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
00:51:39that a large Frankish host simply could not.
00:51:43The Moors tore through southern France with terrifying tenacity,
00:51:48devastating the regions of Aquitaine and Gascony
00:51:51and leaving a legion of enemy dead behind
00:51:54at the Battle of the River Garonne.
00:51:57One Moorish fighter wrote that his army
00:51:59went through all places like a desolating storm.
00:52:04A Christian chronicler lamented
00:52:06that God alone knows the number of the slain.
00:52:12After relieving the local monasteries of all their riches,
00:52:16the Moors turned northward,
00:52:18confident they could conquer all of France.
00:52:21But there the commander of the Frankish army stood guard,
00:52:25waiting patiently for the enemy to strike,
00:52:28and when it did, he would be ready.
00:52:32Now, does he think he can win?
00:52:35Don't know.
00:52:37He has to win, because there's no other answer.
00:52:41The Islamic forces will continue to attack
00:52:48and continue to fill France with Islam unless he defends.
00:52:55The general's name was Charles the Hammer Martel.
00:53:01As commander-in-chief of the Frankish army,
00:53:04Martel would anticipate the unique threat
00:53:06posed by the Moorish invasion
00:53:08and take proactive steps to confront it head-on.
00:53:11But to do so, he would first have to convince his own countrymen
00:53:14to trade their plowshares for swords.
00:53:19In dark ages Europe, most troops were farmers
00:53:22who were only available to fight
00:53:24between the spring planting and the fall harvest.
00:53:31But Charles Martel understood that the Moorish threat
00:53:34couldn't be met with a single battle.
00:53:37But Charles Martel understood that the Moorish threat
00:53:40couldn't be met without a well-oiled group of professional,
00:53:43full-time soldiers at his disposal.
00:53:48He knew he was at a disadvantage.
00:53:51What's the basis of every successful army?
00:53:54Money.
00:53:55To get the money, he had to go to the church.
00:53:59This was not a popular move with the church,
00:54:01and Charles came very close to being excommunicated,
00:54:04that is to say, being damned to hell for eternity.
00:54:07The church pulled back at just the last minute.
00:54:09Charles took land and property from the church
00:54:12and used it to finance the development of an army
00:54:15that could be trained to withstand this formidable force.
00:54:24While Charles the Hammer pounded courage into his core,
00:54:28Abdu'l-Rahman maintained his march northward
00:54:31into the realm of an enemy he had severely underrated.
00:54:36The Franks dug in on a high wooded ridge
00:54:38that offered a critical strategic advantage.
00:54:42When the Moors arrived, they were stunned to find
00:54:45such a formidable force awaiting them.
00:54:49For six days, the two armies stood firm,
00:54:52waiting for the other to make the first move.
00:54:58But as the October cold set in,
00:55:00Moorish General Abdu'l-Rahman knew he had to move quickly
00:55:03if he wanted to take tour before winter.
00:55:09So on the seventh day, he ordered attack.
00:55:27Charles Martel's infantry is great,
00:55:29and they stand like a wall.
00:55:32That is what the sources on the Muslim side say,
00:55:34that is what the sources on the Christian side say.
00:55:37While his infantry kept the Moors occupied,
00:55:40Charles the Hammer nailed down his victory
00:55:43with a covert mission behind enemy lines.
00:55:47Charles had sent some troops to the Muslim camp,
00:55:51that is to say, the encampment behind the line of battle
00:55:55where this incredibly successful Muslim army
00:55:58had kept all of the plunder that they had obtained
00:56:01in their successful campaign.
00:56:04This was cutting off the head of the snake
00:56:07from the perspective of Charles and his troops.
00:56:12That encouraged people to retreat from the front lines
00:56:16to the tents, and it convinced a lot of people
00:56:19that a general retreat was being called.
00:56:23General Abdu'l-Rahman tried to rally his fleeing forces,
00:56:27but as he screamed out orders to stand and fight,
00:56:30he was surrounded and struck down by enemy infantry.
00:56:36Overnight, the Moors withdrew and made a beeline south for Spain.
00:56:44It was his stunning victory at the Battle of Tours
00:56:47that earned Martel the nickname Charles the Hammer.
00:56:51At a time when many parts of the old Roman and Persian empires
00:56:55were falling under Muslim rule,
00:56:57Charles was credited as the savior of Christianity in Europe.
00:57:01He had some really good PR.
00:57:03Charles Martel was quick to stand up and basically say,
00:57:07Look what I just did. I'm the defender of Christendom,
00:57:10and I helped turn back these forces that threatened us.
00:57:16Over the next seven decades, Martel's descendants
00:57:19would transform his Christian kingdom into an empire,
00:57:23and one of them would even become powerful enough
00:57:26to assume the title Emperor of Rome.
00:57:31That grandson of Charles the Hammer
00:57:33would be remembered as the father of Europe.
00:57:36His name was Charlemagne,
00:57:38and he was the greatest king of the Dark Ages.
00:57:43Christmas Day, 800 A.D.
00:57:46At St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, a new emperor is crowned,
00:57:50the first in more than three centuries.
00:57:55The Pope is on hand to do the crowning
00:57:57and to announce the formation of a new Roman Empire.
00:58:02The new emperor, and the most powerful man in Europe
00:58:05since the days of ancient Rome,
00:58:07is Charlemagne, King of the Franks.
00:58:10Charlemagne would be remembered
00:58:12as one of the most illuminating figures of the Dark Ages.
00:58:19Everything you want to say about him,
00:58:21it's pretty obvious,
00:58:23but he was a great man,
00:58:25and he was a great emperor.
00:58:29Everything you want to say about him is probably accurate.
00:58:32He never, ever lost a military conquest.
00:58:36He gives birth again to education.
00:58:39He reestablishes the economic importance of the empire.
00:58:43Any title that's given to him is too few.
00:58:48At its largest, Charlemagne's domain
00:58:50stretched from the North Sea to the Mediterranean
00:58:53and encompassed modern France,
00:58:55Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Austria, Poland,
00:58:59and most of Italy.
00:59:04Not since the fall of Rome
00:59:06had so much of the continent been under the command of one man.
00:59:11But the only thing Roman about this kingdom was its size.
00:59:15It isn't the same empire.
00:59:17There's nothing that is the same.
00:59:19The urban areas have fallen.
00:59:21Trade is non-existent.
00:59:23The infrastructure, the transportation structure,
00:59:26engineering has all faltered.
00:59:28Charlemagne does his best to build up education once more
00:59:31because that's destroyed.
00:59:33It's going to be a very, very long time
00:59:35before Europe gets back to the empire that it once had.
00:59:39Charlemagne was a Renaissance man born 7 centuries early.
00:59:43As the founder of the Holy Roman Empire,
00:59:46he would attempt to single-handedly pull Europe
00:59:49out of the trenches of darkness.
00:59:54When Charlemagne's father died in 768,
00:59:57the Frankish kingdom was split between him
01:00:00and his brother Carloman.
01:00:05Frankish property was always divided amongst the male heirs
01:00:09and in the case of royalty, it was the same thing.
01:00:13And as a result, Charlemagne, his brother, had to share power.
01:00:17They weren't too keen on this arrangement
01:00:19and weren't very fond of each other.
01:00:22For 3 years, the brothers ruled
01:00:24separate halves of their father's kingdom,
01:00:26corresponding coldly through their mother.
01:00:32Then suddenly, Carloman turned up dead.
01:00:36History says he dies, that's all.
01:00:38We want to believe that Charlemagne had something to do with it.
01:00:41Maybe he did. We will never know for sure.
01:00:46At the age of 24, Charlemagne suddenly found himself
01:00:49the sole shareholder of the largest single kingdom in Europe.
01:00:56But his ultimate goal was to command its only kingdom.
01:01:04Over the course of his 46-year reign,
01:01:07he would launch more than 50 military campaigns
01:01:10designed to expand his empire and save souls.
01:01:15As his armies seized countless new territories,
01:01:19they gave the conquered a simple choice.
01:01:22Embrace the Christian god or meet that god immediately.
01:01:27He thought he really was going to save them
01:01:30by making them Christian,
01:01:32even if he had to do it at the point of a sword.
01:01:36When Charlemagne conquered the Saxons of northern Germany in 782,
01:01:40he condemned 4,500 tribal leaders to die by the headsman's sword
01:01:44after they were caught worshipping false gods.
01:01:52For days afterward, the river Oller ran red with blood.
01:01:57The massacre became known as the bloody verdict of Verdun.
01:02:03This brutal execution, it really was part of a bigger picture.
01:02:07Charlemagne meant business.
01:02:09Anyone who's caught worshipping pagan gods or performing pagan rites,
01:02:13it's a death sentence.
01:02:15Anyone who cremates someone, a dead body,
01:02:17instead of burying them as a Christian, is executed.
01:02:21Anyone who disobeys the king is executed.
01:02:26As his Christian soldiers enforced God's will on new frontiers,
01:02:30Charlemagne sought to enforce his own within the borders of his kingdom.
01:02:39To tighten his grip on an increasingly vast dominion,
01:02:43he divided it into 350 counties
01:02:47and put each in the charge of a count who answered directly to him.
01:02:54Charlemagne made sure each one knew he was being closely watched.
01:03:01He travelled constantly.
01:03:03It was management by walking around, as they say today.
01:03:06He didn't shut himself up in the palace, isolated from what was going on.
01:03:10And he also had a vision of what it meant to be a king.
01:03:14Like the great kings of the period after Alexander the Great,
01:03:18he believed that he had to increase the social, the political,
01:03:23and the intellectual organization of his society.
01:03:28And in putting all of these complicated aspects of rule together,
01:03:33he distinguished himself from every other ruler,
01:03:37certainly for the 300 years before him.
01:03:43As Charlemagne travelled far and wide throughout his burgeoning territory,
01:03:48he resolved to rekindle the long-lost culture of creativity
01:03:52that had been extinguished so many centuries before.
01:03:57Throughout his empire, he built a chain of royal schools
01:04:00that would ignite a new age of learning
01:04:03and provide children of all classes with access to an education.
01:04:09Even the king himself got in on the act.
01:04:13In an age when few rulers could even recite the alphabet,
01:04:16Charlemagne made a concerted effort to read and write.
01:04:21This was very unusual, that a king would actually devote serious effort
01:04:25to trying to learn how to read and to write.
01:04:28As a grown man, reading and writing were the work of the monks,
01:04:31they were not the work of a warrior,
01:04:33they were not the work of somebody who was engaged in practical political rule
01:04:37that often involved making very difficult military decisions.
01:04:41It was a luxury that simply didn't seem necessary.
01:04:45Although it wasn't one of his job requirements,
01:04:47there were a few things Charlemagne was more passionate about than learning.
01:04:52One of those things was women.
01:04:55Over the course of his life, Charlemagne had five wives,
01:04:58five known mistresses, and at least 20 children.
01:05:03In the period under Charlemagne, the whole idea of marriage as a sacrament
01:05:06hadn't even really been developed the way we think of it in this day and age.
01:05:10It's really not until much later that the church managed to enforce the notion
01:05:14that you should have only one marriage between a man and a woman
01:05:18and that it would be for life.
01:05:20And so the notion that Charlemagne had multiple wives and concubines,
01:05:23this would have been pretty standard really for someone of his background.
01:05:32By the year 800, Charlemagne was nearly 60 years old
01:05:36and had ruled for more than three decades.
01:05:43He already had a resume that would cement his celebrity status in Europe's history.
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
01:06:03on Christmas Day 800, he had no idea that the imperial coronation was going to take place
01:06:09and that he later regretted the fact that he had ever been crowned emperor.
01:06:16On the other hand, did Charlemagne really walk into that church
01:06:20not knowing what was about to happen?
01:06:25Charlemagne would rule as emperor of the West for 14 years.
01:06:30It was during these years, the twilight of his reign,
01:06:33that he would face his most daunting political challenge.
01:06:39That challenge would come not from the Byzantines, nor the Moors,
01:06:43nor any of Europe's traditional foes.
01:06:48Instead, it would descend on Europe like a cold northern wind
01:06:52and drag it village by village, back into the darkness from which it had just begun to emerge.
01:07:00They literally were out of control.
01:07:03And they would kill everything in sight.
01:07:06June 8th, 793.
01:07:10The wrath of Satan is unleashed on a house of God in northern England.
01:07:16In Lindisfarne, a barbaric band of heathens is tearing apart the local monastery.
01:07:23They are on the hunt for treasure,
01:07:25and they have no qualms about slaughtering anyone who stands in their way.
01:07:29The savage raid is the work of just a small group of men,
01:07:32but it will mark a giant setback for mankind.
01:07:37The Viking Age has begun,
01:07:39and the Dark Ages are about to get a whole lot darker.
01:07:44Nobody had anticipated being on the Northern Sea
01:07:47and being attacked from abroad.
01:07:49Pirates may have existed for a long time,
01:07:51but they were never a threat.
01:07:53Nobody had anticipated being on the Northern Sea
01:07:56and being attacked from abroad.
01:07:58Pirates may have existed for a long time,
01:08:01but they were never a threat.
01:08:03And suddenly these Vikings come in,
01:08:05they find no opposition,
01:08:07and they absolutely sack the place.
01:08:09And what do they get back?
01:08:11The greatest wealth of England.
01:08:13This was like putting up a sign in any Viking village.
01:08:16Uncle Olaf wants you.
01:08:19The raiders had sailed from Scandinavia,
01:08:21and the overpopulation had begun forcing young drifters out onto the high seas
01:08:25in a hunt for new land and high adventure.
01:08:30And with each big score, like the one at Lindisfarne,
01:08:33the monasteries to the south looked more and more like banks waiting to be robbed.
01:08:40There were no walls.
01:08:41Monks had no weapons.
01:08:43There were no defending forces.
01:08:45Ultimately, it simply becomes an idea of survival.
01:08:49If you're going to be a raider,
01:08:51you're going to want to raid where you're least likely to die.
01:08:56They were perhaps the best pirates,
01:08:58the best raiders that the ancient medieval world had ever seen.
01:09:03I think it was the unexpectedness of their arrival.
01:09:06You really couldn't tell where they might show up,
01:09:08because their ships were both seaworthy for ocean voyages,
01:09:11but because of their shallow draft,
01:09:13they could sail right up the rivers
01:09:16to cities that were far inland and didn't expect to be subjected to waterborne raids.
01:09:22And so when they appeared totally unexpected
01:09:25and sent in their killing machines,
01:09:28the Vikings could seem unstoppable.
01:09:33In the early 9th century,
01:09:35during the last years of Charlemagne's reign as emperor,
01:09:38the Vikings began terrorizing any vulnerable villages within a stone's throw of water.
01:09:44And as the raiders became more and more brazen,
01:09:47they set their sights on the heart of the Holy Roman Empire.
01:09:53In an attempt to fend off the Vikings,
01:09:55Carolingians began to pay them protection money.
01:09:58And these payments were so enormous
01:10:00that there were years when an empire had no currency anymore.
01:10:04There was no money to be had.
01:10:06It had all been chipped off to the Vikings,
01:10:08and people had to barter for what they needed.
01:10:11This was a significant setback for the recovery of Europe.
01:10:17The Emperor Charlemagne died of natural causes at the age of 72 in 814,
01:10:23while the Viking raiders were still warming up.
01:10:28They would spend the next several decades honing their craft
01:10:32and perfecting the art of savagery.
01:10:35They left legends that were then copied down later.
01:10:38They're wonderful at telling the stories of the Vikings.
01:10:41And for example, the story of Egil,
01:10:44who 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,
01:10:51and actually plants it in the guy's skull, killing him.
01:10:54His mother, instead of being rather upset,
01:10:57looks at Egil and says, he'll make a good Viking someday.
01:11:01One Viking is known as the Children's Man
01:11:05because of his refusal to kill children,
01:11:07which all the other Vikings thought was hilarious.
01:11:10And any time you're attacked by someone whose last name is Skull Splitter,
01:11:13you have to be concerned.
01:11:15The Vikings took their horror show on a whirlwind tour,
01:11:19terrorizing audiences as far and wide as Iceland,
01:11:22the Middle East, and even North America.
01:11:27But their favorite target was their first, Great Britain.
01:11:31Britain is very vulnerable to sea invasion.
01:11:34There is no place in the British Isles
01:11:37that is more than a couple of days' march from the sea.
01:11:40And for the Vikings, whose great strength was their expertise at sailing,
01:11:44an island was the perfect place for them to attack
01:11:47because they could appear anywhere within the British Isles
01:11:50with almost no forewarning at all.
01:11:53In 866, the Vikings took aim at the British kingdom of Northumbria.
01:12:00But this time, they weren't just interested in loot.
01:12:03They wanted land. Lots of it.
01:12:06So rather than sending a couple dozen men on a garden-variety raid,
01:12:10they came ashore with several thousand warriors.
01:12:14It was the largest group of Vikings ever assembled
01:12:18and came to be known as the Great Heathen Army.
01:12:22The head heathen was a massive man oddly named Ivar the Boneless.
01:12:27Theories abound as to how he got that name.
01:12:31There are stories, oh, he had only cartilage in his legs, he had no bones.
01:12:36Well, this is probably a physical impossibility.
01:12:39Maybe he was impotent and this was referring to his lack of sexual prowess.
01:12:42I don't think we'll ever know.
01:12:44What we do know is that he had to be carried around on a shield
01:12:47because he was unable to walk.
01:12:51Whatever 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.
01:13:04Within its towering walls lived his arch-enemy,
01:13:08a callous and corrupt king named Aiella.
01:13:12Aiella is supposed to have killed his father
01:13:15and this inspired Ivar to spend the rest of his life
01:13:18trying to figure out a way that he could get revenge.
01:13:22After a brutal and bloody battle, York fell to Ivar and his great heathen army.
01:13:29King Aiella managed to escape, but he couldn't stay away.
01:13:34Four months later, he tried to recapture his city.
01:13:39But instead, it was he who was captured.
01:13:42And the Vikings, never known for their mercy,
01:13:45were compelled to get creative in their torture tactics.
01:13:52They decided to punish him with what police referred to in the sources as the bloody eagle.
01:14:00What does that mean?
01:14:04To open up the torso,
01:14:08allow the ribs to be shown,
01:14:10and then pull the lungs past the ribs
01:14:14so that they actually form a couple of wings.
01:14:18And the physical image of the king then resembled an eagle.
01:14:26And this then, because of the bloodiness of it all
01:14:29and the fact that it would still be red, would be called the bloody eagle.
01:14:33Yeah, pretty gruesome.
01:14:36With King Aiella off of his chest,
01:14:38Ivar turned his attention to conquering the rest of Britannia.
01:14:43But while fighting the Irish near Dublin in 873,
01:14:47the boneless barbarian breathed his last.
01:14:54His great army endured and returned to England,
01:14:57where it continued to carve up territories at will.
01:15:01But there was one kingdom in the deep south that refused to crumble.
01:15:06It was ruled by a resourceful and resilient warrior king,
01:15:10whose name was Alfred the Great.
01:15:14He realized that the Vikings preferred raids and lightning campaigns,
01:15:19and they didn't want to have to attack fortresses.
01:15:23So what did Alfred do?
01:15:25He built fortresses.
01:15:28They were earth and wood fortifications that Alfred had built
01:15:32and they were earth and wood fortifications that Alfred had constructed
01:15:37where the people would go and hide and take their goods
01:15:40and take their cattle and other things that the Vikings might want to remove from them.
01:15:46And once they got in there, the Vikings could not attack them.
01:15:49They simply did not have the siege technology or the willfulness to do so.
01:15:55So by figuring out what would be the most effective defense against his enemies,
01:16:01Alfred was basically able to do what Muhammad Ali called his rope-a-dope strategy.
01:16:07He really let the enemy wear themselves out fighting against him
01:16:12and then mobilized his population in a way
01:16:15that could then counteract the strength of the attackers.
01:16:21It took 25 years of almost constant fighting
01:16:24for Alfred to bring down the great heathen army.
01:16:29By the time he died in 899,
01:16:32he had achieved lasting peace for his kingdom.
01:16:37But it would take another half century
01:16:39to expunge the Vikings from England once and for all.
01:16:44While some sailed off to plunder new frontiers across the Atlantic,
01:16:49others quietly settled down and assimilated into Europe's Christian culture.
01:16:55After spending more than a century on red alert,
01:16:59Viking victims throughout the continent crossed their fingers
01:17:02that the darkest days were finally over.
01:17:06But before the skies cleared completely,
01:17:09there would be one more series of catastrophic storms.
01:17:16By the middle of the 11th century,
01:17:18the people of northwestern Europe had endured a seemingly endless barrage of bad fortune
01:17:23for more than 600 years.
01:17:27Those families not torn apart by the aggression of ruthless conquerors
01:17:31were confronted with severe economic depression,
01:17:34religious persecution,
01:17:37and the devastation of rampant disease.
01:17:42As the Viking threat finally abated,
01:17:45Europe'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.
01:17:56For although foreign raiders no longer threatened the coasts and riverbanks of Christendom,
01:18:01there was an equally menacing threat lying within,
01:18:05one concealed beneath thick plates of shiny armor.
01:18:10Your typical medieval knight had much more in common with Tony Soprano than with Lancelot.
01:18:20They're thugs. They're muscle.
01:18:23They're violent individuals whose primary purpose is to beat people up.
01:18:28And the owner of a castle would unleash knights on the peasants of a neighboring territory,
01:18:35and they would enter the village,
01:18:37assaulting people, taking property,
01:18:40in an attempt to force these peasants to accept the lordship of the owner of the castle.
01:18:50In the decades after the last Viking attacks,
01:18:54Europe was teeming with unemployed soldiers,
01:18:58trained killers who found it hard to hang up their swords.
01:19:04The Viking invasions had done a lot to militarize Europe.
01:19:08A lot more soldiers and so forth were put together into armies.
01:19:12Once the threat is over, what do you do with all these soldiers?
01:19:19With no immediate danger looming, the soldiers allied with local counts
01:19:24who were wealthy enough to hire their own private armies.
01:19:29Local lords who are ruling over these very small areas,
01:19:33they become the principal sources of authority.
01:19:36These are people who built castles,
01:19:39not necessarily to protect the countryside from outside raiders,
01:19:43but to subjugate the countryside, to enforce their will upon the local peasants,
01:19:48to take from them what they needed.
01:19:50This period, particularly if you were a peasant,
01:19:53would have been a pretty rough time to be living in.
01:19:59In a desperate struggle for power,
01:20:03in a desperate bid to stem the violence,
01:20:06the Catholic Church tried to place limits on when,
01:20:09where and against whom the knights could strike.
01:20:15And to get the knights to pay attention,
01:20:18the clergy relied on the most powerful weapons in their arsenal,
01:20:22the clothes, blood and bones of the saints.
01:20:27They would gather all the relics from a given area
01:20:30and collect them in one place, often in an open field,
01:20:33a giant pile.
01:20:35And then they would summon all the knights
01:20:37and they would show them the pile of relics
01:20:40and demand that they swear to obey the peace and truth of God.
01:20:44Otherwise, the saints associated with these relics
01:20:48would attack them and punish them.
01:20:50And so, when you're trying to do that,
01:20:54And so, when you're confronted with these relics,
01:20:57it often had a powerful psychological effect on knights.
01:21:00Sometimes they'd just collapse senseless on the ground
01:21:03at the thought of all of these collected saints punishing them.
01:21:10To reinforce the power of the relics,
01:21:13the Church issued two proclamations
01:21:15detailing God's position on war.
01:21:18They were called the Peace of God and the Truths of God.
01:21:24The Peace of God proclaimed that certain individuals,
01:21:29peasants, widows, priests,
01:21:32individuals who cannot defend themselves
01:21:34should not be attacked by knights.
01:21:37The Truths of God proclaimed that certain periods of time
01:21:40should be free of knightly violence entirely.
01:21:43That Lent or the Sundays, the period around Christmas,
01:21:47those should be periods when there was no warfare.
01:21:50The bishops were trying to essentially redirect
01:21:54the energies of the nobility,
01:21:56many of whom had access to armament,
01:21:59but didn't possess land,
01:22:01so they didn't have anything really to do with that energy
01:22:04and re-channel that energy in other directions.
01:22:08One direction everyone could endorse was the Middle East.
01:22:13Ever since non-Christian forces
01:22:15conquered the Holy Land four centuries earlier,
01:22:18murmurs of a military mission to liberate it
01:22:21had echoed across Christian Europe.
01:22:25Now, with the Viking threat a thing of the past
01:22:28and soldiers everywhere itching for a cause,
01:22:32the time seemed right to launch a crusade.
01:22:36The crusades were undertaken
01:22:38as a kind of vengeance on behalf of Jesus.
01:22:41And so in the kind of fantastical imagination,
01:22:46they had this really vivid picture of Jesus' home
01:22:50being defiled by this pagan alien presence.
01:22:54And it seemed to strike a chord.
01:22:58In 1095, Pope Urban II kicked off the first crusade
01:23:02by declaring Deus Vult, Latin for God wills it.
01:23:08Over the next 200 years,
01:23:10a total of nine brutal crusades
01:23:12devastated the Holy Land and its Muslim inhabitants.
01:23:16In all, eight generations of fighters
01:23:19took part in the bloody seesaw struggle for Jerusalem.
01:23:24Ultimately, the crusaders came away with no permanent conquests,
01:23:28but they returned with something even more valuable, knowledge.
01:23:35Europe, with the crusades, turned the corner from the Dark Ages.
01:23:40There's medical information
01:23:42and surgical information that's brought back.
01:23:45Books are brought back, languages are brought back,
01:23:47Aristotle's brought back, everything is brought back.
01:23:51So the crusades really do change Europe
01:23:55in a way that we have not seen before.
01:24:01The crusades spawned a rebirth of trade and architecture
01:24:05unseen in Europe since the fall of Rome.
01:24:09Massive stone fortresses were built
01:24:11to replace the smaller wooden ones
01:24:13that had been a staple of Dark Age defense.
01:24:17Military supply lines opened up new markets for goods
01:24:20flowing in and out across the Mediterranean.
01:24:24Roads that had been neglected since Roman times
01:24:27were rebuilt to accommodate the flow of troops to and from battle.
01:24:33And tales of exotic lands to the east
01:24:36sparked a new boom in tourism.
01:24:39But the crusades and their consequences
01:24:41are just a few of countless factors
01:24:43that contributed to Europe's medieval awakening.
01:24:48It's thought that around the year 1000
01:24:50that Europe became somewhat warmer,
01:24:53that it emerged from a period of what's known as a mini Ice Age.
01:24:57And this seems to have made it possible
01:25:00to cultivate lands that had formerly been considered quite marginal.
01:25:04So starting around the year 1000,
01:25:06we see a growth in population in Western Europe.
01:25:12If you look at the archaeology of a medieval town
01:25:15during the 11th and 12th centuries, the 13th century,
01:25:18it's the exact opposite of what happened
01:25:20during the last few centuries of their own empire.
01:25:22Town walls are rebuilt bigger and bigger and bigger
01:25:25to try and encompass this growing population.
01:25:29And that suggests that Europe had, at long last,
01:25:32turned the corner.
01:25:34Europe was on the verge of one of the most productive
01:25:37and creative periods of its entire history.
01:25:40Things like the great Gothic cathedrals, the universities,
01:25:43the law courts and legal systems,
01:25:45all of those were created in the 12th and 13th centuries.
01:25:49So following this long period of darkness,
01:25:52there came a tremendous explosion
01:25:54of really brilliant cultural achievements.
01:25:58In the popular mind, the Dark Ages are an empty void
01:26:02between the glory of Rome and the triumph of the Renaissance.
01:26:07But a closer look reveals a period writhing with chaos,
01:26:11turbulence and humanity.
01:26:13A time when new life emerged from the scorched earth
01:26:16of post-Roman Europe,
01:26:18only to perish again amidst the perilous conditions of the age.
01:26:22If there was ever a time that tried men's souls,
01:26:25this was it.
01:26:27There was political chaos.
01:26:30There were injustices.
01:26:32It's certainly true.
01:26:34But what's most admirable and human
01:26:37about the people who lived during the era
01:26:40of the so-called Dark Ages
01:26:42is the efforts they made,
01:26:44sometimes successful and sometimes not,
01:26:46to illuminate themselves in the way that mattered most to them.
01:26:50This was a time when you see the landscape of Europe
01:26:53as we think of it today.
01:26:55With the cities that perish in London,
01:26:57these things all have their roots in the era
01:27:00that we call the Dark Ages.
01:27:02So on that level, were they so dark?
01:27:04Perhaps we live in the Dark Age.
01:27:06I mean, look what just happened in the 20th century
01:27:09with everything from mustard gas to atom bombs.
01:27:12I mean, who's to say?
01:27:14The sunsets and sunrises of civilization
01:27:17The sunsets and sunrises of civilization
01:27:20are inevitably separated by intervals of isolating darkness.
01:27:27The night that followed the Roman sunset
01:27:30was long and uncertain,
01:27:32and the turmoil it wrought consumed countless men.
01:27:37But mankind itself did not yield.
01:27:42With its gaze fixed on a distant future,
01:27:45it persevered
01:27:47until the first rays of a new dawn
01:27:50at long last penetrated the horizon.