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Eurasia: the world's largest land mass.

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Some 10,000 kilometers from the Pacific
to the Atlantic ocean.

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A formidable distance, 
even in today's world.

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And yet over that vast distance,

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human beings have pursued
one of history's greatest enterprises:

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The Silk Road.

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A tremendously profitable trade route

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and so much more.

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For thousands of years,

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exotic goods,

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new technologies,

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conquering armies,

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and brilliant ideas

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traveled along the Silk Road.

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Silk Road trade helped to build empires

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and to break them.

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It fanned the fires of revolution.

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Drove great explorations,

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and forged powerful bonds
between far away peoples.

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The Silk Road made human beings realize

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that there are other people out there,

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and it opened the eyes 
of the east and the west.

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This is the story of how Silk Road trade 
made so much more than money.

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It's the epic tale of how the Silk Road
helped create a world;

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a world that created us.

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2,000 years ago, the Roman Empire
seemed unstoppable.

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Rome had conquered much of Europe

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and was sending its legions beyond
the eastern Mediterranean

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to the Middle East

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-- gateway to the riches of Asia.

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But a journey to the east 
could become a road of blood.

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In 53 BC. near the Mesopotamian
town of Carrhae,

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the Parthians — an empire blending
Persian and Greek cultures —

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confronted a Roman army.

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The outcome of the battle
seemed beyond doubt.

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Some 40,000 Romans
faced only 10,000 Parthians.

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And Rome's legions
were Europe's finest foot soldiers.

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There was just one problem.

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The Parthian army didn't fight on foot.

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The Parthians, they were cavalry.

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They were horse archers.

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Versatile. Rode like the wind.

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What the Romans did
was what the Romans always did.

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They took a fixed position.

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They were ordered into a hollow square
defending all sides.

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But that was nothing 
to the Parthian horse archers

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because they could just ride
around them, and they did.

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They galloped around and around 
and around and around,

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shooting as they went.

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Thousands and thousands of arrows
loosed into those Romans.

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What the Romans eventually did 
was they were ordered to go into testudo.

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That's that Roman formation
where they lock their shields together

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and put the next layer
of shields to make a roof.

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Testudo is Latin for tortoise.

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But the Parthians 
had the answer to this tortoise.

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They had a hammer 
to break open its shell.

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The Parthian hammer was a cataphract,

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a Greek word meaning 
"clothed in full armor".

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Horse and rider wore heavy coats of mail.

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The cataphract was the ancient world
equivalent of a battle tank.

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At Carrhae, charging cataphracts
broke open the testudo.

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Exposing the Romans inside
to more arrow attacks.

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Some 30,000 Romans 
were killed or captured.

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Parthian losses were minor.

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It was one of Rome's 
worst military defeats.

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But it may have been 
something else as well.

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A Roman historian wrote

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that the Parthians dazzled the Romans

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with banners made of a beautiful fabric:

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silk.

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That may only be a legend.

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But around the time of Carrhae,

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Romans began coveting Chinese silk,

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and China began selling silk to Rome

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in exchange for fine
Roman glassware and gold.

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Inspiring the name
we give Eurasian trade today:

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the Silk Road.

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But long before Romans and Parthians
fought at Carrhae,

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trade between the peoples of Eurasia
were shaping lives,

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making new things possible,

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and changing the world.

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At Carrhae, the Parthians 
won with a style of warfare

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that had evolved centuries earlier

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and thousands of kilometers away.

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On the steppes of Central Asia,

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an ocean of land,

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where victory in battle, and life itself,

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depended on moving 
very far, very fast.

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Thousands of years 
before the battle of Carrhae,

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a transportation revolution 
took place on these vast plains.

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There's good evidence for the existence
of domesticated horses

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in what is today Kazakhstan
and southern Russia by 3500 BC.

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And we actually think that probably
horses were domesticated

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and began to be ridden 
500 or maybe 1,000 years before that,

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maybe as early as 4500 BC.

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The domestication of the horse

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was the first step
towards cavalry warfare.

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But the second step 
would be a long time coming.

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The first use of horses in warfare 
was with chariot warfare,

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and we have that well established
Tutankhamun's chariot,

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which many people have seen
in museum exhibits.

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And we know that people
were using chariots in warfare

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starting in the Near East
in about 1600, 1700 BC..

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Horses were not used as organized cavalry

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until after about 900 BC,

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almost 1,000 years 
after chariot warfare began.

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And it's always seemed odd to me
that cavalry began after chariotry.

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Chariotry is very difficult to manage.

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You have to train horses to work together.

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They have to pull this clumsy vehicle

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that has two people in it:
a driver and a warrior.

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Training the units to work together,
very difficult thing to do,

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whereas jumping on the back of a horse
is an easy thing.

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So, why did cavalry come after chariotry?

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I think the real reason 
that cavalry waited

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is that you needed to have
really three innovations.

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The earliest evidence for the recurved bow
is in Shang Dynasty, China,

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probably dated between 1300 and 1100 BC.

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Shang emperors communicated 
with their ancestors

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by heating animal bones or turtle shells
until they cracked

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and then interpreting
the patterns made by the cracks.

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One of these so-called oracle bones

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is carved with the Chinese 
character for bow

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— the earliest known image
of a recurved bow.

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And in the tomb of Lady Fuhao

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— an imperial consort 
and renowned military commander —

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archaeologists found more evidence.

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It's a thumb cover 
for drawing bow string

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and there's another piece that went
in the middle of a recurved bow,

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a hand grip.

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The bows themselves are not preserved,

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so, it's a difficult thing to identify
the origins of the recurved bow.

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The different components of it

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probably came from different places
geographically.

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Just how far the recurved bow
traveled across Eurasia

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was revealed in 2005 at Yanghai,
in China's Xinjiang region.

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Wooden bows rarely survive 
burial in the ground,

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but Xinjiang's cold, dry climate
preserved one

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in a 3,000-year-old tomb.

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Other grave goods 
and the human remains

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found in the Yanghai tombs

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confirmed that the bow was made
by the Scythians,

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a highly sophisticated culture
that originated in southern Russia

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and migrated on horseback

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across the length and breadth of Eurasia.

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The true birthplace 
of the recurved composite bow

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remains an archaeological mystery.

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But there is no doubt 
that 3,000 years ago

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anyone who fought on horseback
would have found it revolutionary.

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A bow is as strong as it is long.

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It derives its strength from its length.

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And the recurved bow 
packs the same length

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into this very short bow

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that can be swung over the horse's rear 
and over the horse's neck.

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And it was much, much easier 
to use on horseback.

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And the recurved bows are
technologically quite difficult to make.

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It took a long time to develop
the craft of bow making to that point.

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The recurve all these sinewy bends
— reflex and deflex —

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that gives it in-built spring.

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But that can only be created
with composite materials.

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What we mean by that is
it's made of a number of materials.

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The heart of it is wood, usually beech.

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And then you have horn,
horn from a water buffalo,

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and then sinew, the tendons of an animal.

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That, when you bash it,

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you can tease apart
and get these very fine fibers,

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fibers with tremendous tensile strength.

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That has elasticity and spring,

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and it stops the bow bursting apart.

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These are all materials that enhance
the power, the spring of the bow.

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But only if bow makers
could solve a very big problem.

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How to keep such a powerful bow

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made from so many different materials

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from breaking up when its own power
was pulling it apart?

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Somewhere in Eurasia, sometime long ago,

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some unknown genius discovered the answer.

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This is the swim bladder of a sturgeon
— a fish from the Black Sea.

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And if you start to break these up 
then put it in hot water,

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and you get this wonderful, viscous glue.

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This simple idea of making a glue
out of a swim bladder of a fish

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was a technological breakthrough
of immense consequences.

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It is what enabled
the composite bow to exist.

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And in turn the composite bow
was a military revolution

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of far-reaching consequences.

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The composite recurved bow
gave birth to a new kind of warrior

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the horse archer.

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The horse archer was able
to shoot from the saddle

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in part because of the new technology
of the composite bow.

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They were short, compact bows,

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and that meant that you 
can shoot them from horseback.

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You see I can cross
to the other side of the horse,

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I can turn and shoot behind.

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It's much more suitable
for shooting on horseback.

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Everyone who fought with Eurasian nomads,

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whether as enemy or friend,

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wanted a recurved composite bow.

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By the early first millennium BC,

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it was in use from east Asia
to eastern Europe.

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A recurved bow gave a horse archer
unprecedented killing power.

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But it didn't make him a cavalryman.

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Before horse archers could fight
as an effective military force,

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they needed a large supply
of identical arrows.

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And that didn't exist.

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Arrowheads were a variety 
of different sizes and weights.

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Some were made of bone.

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00:16:14,787 --> 00:16:16,743
Some were made out of flint.

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Some were made out of bronze.

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00:16:18,621 --> 00:16:20,775
All of them would be individually made

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and you had to adjust your shot
for the weight of different arrows.

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Also a unit of soldiers 
who were firing at the same time

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would be firing arrows
of slightly different weights

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and they might go different distances.

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One of the features of a stone arrowhead
is its flattened rear

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But how did it connect 
with the arrowshaft?

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It can only be tied to the shaft
by rope or ox tendons.

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But what about the disadvantages?

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First, the released arrows 
tend to change direction easily.

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Second, they are likely to fall off,

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One of the technological innovations

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was the invention
of the socketed arrowhead.

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They were made of bronze, usually,

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and they were made in a mould 
and cast in a mould,

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so that an infinite number 
of socketed arrowheads of the same weight

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could be made from the same mould.

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Making socketed projectile points 
was actually a big deal.

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You have to have a mould with a core
where the socket is going to be

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that you can pour molten metal around

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so that it's the same thickness 
all the way around.

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Making arrowheads
of the same size and weight

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was another Central Asian
technological revolution.

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For the first time, mounted warriors
could unleash

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coordinated arrow attacks 
on their enemies.

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With arrowheads of the same weight,

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every time you drew the bow to shoot

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you knew that you were firing an arrow

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that was exactly the same weight
as the last arrow that you fired,

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so you could determine
the range and the distance well.

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And also all of the archers 
that were firing

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were firing arrowheads
at the same weight at the same time.

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So the distance for all of them 
would be the same.

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With a socketed arrowhead

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you can directly insert 
the head into the shaft.

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It look like this.

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So what are the advantages
of this type of arrowhead?

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Its improvements greatly enhanced

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00:18:52,314 --> 00:18:54,671
the lethality and efficiency
of ancient arrows.

247
00:18:54,722 --> 00:18:58,341
Even in the chaos of war, the shooter 
could aim t the target easily.

248
00:18:58,465 --> 00:19:01,835
He wouldn't loose the direction
by aiming t the target quickly.

249
00:19:02,379 --> 00:19:06,048
This ivention is a giant leap 
in the development of human history.

250
00:19:07,768 --> 00:19:11,888
Archaeologists believe that sometime
in the second millennium BC,

251
00:19:12,368 --> 00:19:15,494
socketed bronze arrowheads
began spreading east

252
00:19:15,819 --> 00:19:19,879
while the composite 
recurved bow spread west.

253
00:19:20,649 --> 00:19:23,004
Sometime around 900 BC,

254
00:19:23,004 --> 00:19:25,559
socketed arrowheads and recurved bows

255
00:19:25,589 --> 00:19:28,649
met in the Tarim Basin area 
of Central Asia,

256
00:19:31,069 --> 00:19:35,284
brought together by traders,
warriors, and migrating nomads.

257
00:19:38,804 --> 00:19:43,773
After about 700 BC, you begin to see
thousands and thousands of arrowheads

258
00:19:43,813 --> 00:19:47,510
and dozens of arrowheads
in a single quiver in a grave.

259
00:19:47,591 --> 00:19:50,089
It's like they're being mass produced.

260
00:19:52,259 --> 00:19:56,263
Bronze socketed arrowheads
turned central Asia into an arsenal,

261
00:19:56,643 --> 00:19:59,506
but cavalries still couldn't exist

262
00:20:00,883 --> 00:20:03,871
until warriors could become soldiers.

263
00:20:08,057 --> 00:20:10,619
It was really the age of heroic warfare

264
00:20:10,619 --> 00:20:14,484
— individuals going out 
and doing great deeds by themselves

265
00:20:14,534 --> 00:20:16,926
and attracting glory for their own name.

266
00:20:17,016 --> 00:20:19,714
And this is the kind of warfare
that's described

267
00:20:20,034 --> 00:20:23,878
in the "Iliad", in the "Odyssey," 
or in the "Rigveda,"

268
00:20:23,928 --> 00:20:27,955
a religious text that's at the deep roots
of modern Hinduism.

269
00:20:29,201 --> 00:20:32,503
What had to change
was a psychological change

270
00:20:32,503 --> 00:20:35,099
in the nature of the warrior.

271
00:20:35,759 --> 00:20:39,152
You had to change
from individuals to units

272
00:20:39,262 --> 00:20:42,983
working under the command
of a commanding general,

273
00:20:43,152 --> 00:20:46,468
who would attack and retreat
upon command.

274
00:20:48,305 --> 00:20:52,343
The psychological change 
from the heroic warrior to the soldier,

275
00:20:53,735 --> 00:20:57,461
probably is a feature of urban warfare.

276
00:20:57,891 --> 00:21:00,384
The armies that were associated

277
00:21:00,384 --> 00:21:04,198
with the great cities 
of Mesopotamia and Iran.

278
00:21:06,516 --> 00:21:11,536
That psychology had to spread 
northward up into the steppes

279
00:21:12,168 --> 00:21:16,350
and be accepted by warriors
in the steppes,

280
00:21:16,652 --> 00:21:19,336
in the same area 
where the recurved bows

281
00:21:19,396 --> 00:21:22,090
and the socketed arrowheads were crossing.

282
00:21:24,630 --> 00:21:27,214
While recurved bows were spreading west

283
00:21:27,244 --> 00:21:29,656
and socketed arrowheads
were spreading east,

284
00:21:29,676 --> 00:21:32,922
the concept of military discipline
was spreading north.

285
00:21:36,462 --> 00:21:38,905
Sometime around 900 BC,

286
00:21:39,085 --> 00:21:42,561
all three combined
in the heart of central Asia.

287
00:21:44,861 --> 00:21:47,169
When those three things came together,

288
00:21:47,169 --> 00:21:51,922
cavalry became a really deadly form
of military force.

289
00:21:55,182 --> 00:21:59,542
A force that would severely test
the ancient world's most powerful armies.

290
00:22:02,318 --> 00:22:03,836
2,000 years ago,

291
00:22:03,846 --> 00:22:07,500
as the Romans pushed east 
to expand their empire,

292
00:22:08,340 --> 00:22:10,652
China was pushing west.

293
00:22:13,224 --> 00:22:15,063
And like the Romans,

294
00:22:15,093 --> 00:22:18,376
the Chinese encountered
a formidable enemy on horseback.

295
00:22:23,008 --> 00:22:26,584
The Xiongnu were nomads
from the Central Asian steppes.

296
00:22:28,044 --> 00:22:30,964
Armed with recurved bows
and socketed arrows,

297
00:22:30,964 --> 00:22:34,660
they fought under commanders 
as a disciplined military force.

298
00:22:38,250 --> 00:22:41,093
They raided Chinese villages

299
00:22:41,483 --> 00:22:44,956
and plundered the growing trade
between East and West,

300
00:22:46,304 --> 00:22:48,915
and no one could stop them.

301
00:22:49,745 --> 00:22:55,806
The Xiongnu was the migraine
of the ancient world for the Chinese.

302
00:22:56,820 --> 00:23:01,401
They simply just kept coming
and they would not stop.

303
00:23:04,731 --> 00:23:12,270
The Xiongnu wanted the finest
material goods produced by the Chinese.

304
00:23:16,115 --> 00:23:18,742
That is why they raided.

305
00:23:23,311 --> 00:23:27,025
Imagine you're a villager in China
and these men come from nowhere.

306
00:23:27,055 --> 00:23:29,196
They come from over the hill 
without warning,

307
00:23:29,286 --> 00:23:30,919
tearing into your village.

308
00:23:30,937 --> 00:23:33,294
They shoot the headman, 
they shoot your husband.

309
00:23:33,334 --> 00:23:34,822
They chase the women out.

310
00:23:34,862 --> 00:23:38,426
There is no hiding place
and there's a flurry of dust and arrows.

311
00:23:38,436 --> 00:23:41,649
They're in and they're out 
and they take the stuff and they go.

312
00:23:44,788 --> 00:23:47,693
China sent its military might
against the Xiongnu.

313
00:23:49,819 --> 00:23:51,696
The famed Terracotta Warriors

314
00:23:51,716 --> 00:23:54,504
reveal the size and power
of Chinese armies.

315
00:23:56,543 --> 00:23:59,883
But the Chinese fought on foot
and from chariots.

316
00:24:02,723 --> 00:24:05,683
Not effective against hit-and-run cavalry.

317
00:24:07,030 --> 00:24:12,857
A Chinese courtier wrote that the Xiongnu
moved like a flock of birds over the land,

318
00:24:13,227 --> 00:24:15,600
impossible to control.

319
00:24:16,420 --> 00:24:20,101
Once mounted warfare really
became deadly and effective,

320
00:24:20,261 --> 00:24:22,666
it became a real problem.

321
00:24:22,856 --> 00:24:27,669
If you're a farmer, the nomads know
where you're going to be all the time.

322
00:24:27,729 --> 00:24:31,276
Your house is in the same place
12 months of the year,

323
00:24:31,445 --> 00:24:35,321
and when your crops become ripe,
you have to harvest,

324
00:24:35,548 --> 00:24:39,257
and the nomads know when that season is.

325
00:24:40,187 --> 00:24:43,152
Whereas when you're trying
to strike them back,

326
00:24:43,172 --> 00:24:45,759
it's impossible to know
where they're going to be

327
00:24:45,799 --> 00:24:47,698
or when they're going to be there.

328
00:24:47,868 --> 00:24:50,017
You have to search to find them.

329
00:24:53,188 --> 00:24:58,168
To beat the Xiongnu, the Chinese 
needed soldiers who could fight like them.

330
00:25:01,089 --> 00:25:03,077
They needed cavalry.

331
00:25:06,198 --> 00:25:09,357
There are manuals of warfare
that were written

332
00:25:09,367 --> 00:25:12,638
to instruct Chinese warriors

333
00:25:12,638 --> 00:25:16,694
on how to counter the tactics
and the methods of the Xiongnu.

334
00:25:17,824 --> 00:25:20,522
Those manuals introduced 
the idea of cavalry

335
00:25:20,572 --> 00:25:22,641
to the Chinese military.

336
00:25:23,151 --> 00:25:26,266
The Chinese military
had not really used cavalry

337
00:25:26,306 --> 00:25:28,801
before about probably 350 BC.

338
00:25:30,628 --> 00:25:34,009
Chinese military, at first 
with some resistance

339
00:25:34,029 --> 00:25:36,750
from the old aristocratic families, said:

340
00:25:36,870 --> 00:25:39,004
"Well, my father fought on a chariot,

341
00:25:39,034 --> 00:25:40,871
"and his father fought on a chariot,

342
00:25:40,891 --> 00:25:44,809
"and I'm gonna fight on a chariot
in my long robes like my ancestors."

343
00:25:46,409 --> 00:25:49,020
But it wasn't long before Chinese warriors

344
00:25:49,050 --> 00:25:51,742
traded their traditional
long, flowing robes

345
00:25:52,462 --> 00:25:56,665
for shorter tunics that didn't get
in the way of fighting on horseback.

346
00:25:59,165 --> 00:26:05,109
Eventually, the practicalities
forced them to get rid of their robes,

347
00:26:05,162 --> 00:26:07,968
to put on riding trousers,

348
00:26:08,008 --> 00:26:10,786
to learn to shoot the bow on horseback,

349
00:26:10,981 --> 00:26:14,655
and they, too, became 
a mighty horse archer force.

350
00:26:19,656 --> 00:26:23,613
Chinese cavalry became experts
at shooting the recurved composite bow,

351
00:26:25,623 --> 00:26:30,134
and a lethal Chinese weapon, the crossbow.

352
00:26:34,132 --> 00:26:36,403
While its cavalry trained,

353
00:26:36,473 --> 00:26:41,043
China agreed to Xiongnu demands
for payments of money and silk

354
00:26:42,343 --> 00:26:45,283
until the year 133 BC,

355
00:26:46,103 --> 00:26:49,249
when Emperor Han Wudi refused to pay.

356
00:26:53,218 --> 00:26:55,696
And sent his army to attack the Xiongnu.

357
00:27:30,952 --> 00:27:33,645
Chinese cavalry defeated the nomads.

358
00:27:37,305 --> 00:27:40,802
And China seized
new territories in the steppes,

359
00:27:42,932 --> 00:27:46,654
pacifying trade routes 
and opening new horizons.

360
00:27:52,030 --> 00:27:55,019
On one hand, 
we have this perpetual conflict

361
00:27:55,119 --> 00:27:59,400
— in Chinese culture would be
the Xiongn and the Han Chinese

362
00:28:00,381 --> 00:28:03,985
that created incessant warfare.

363
00:28:05,390 --> 00:28:08,557
On the other hand, it is this conflict

364
00:28:08,567 --> 00:28:11,954
that demolished physical boundaries.

365
00:28:12,995 --> 00:28:17,054
Even territory boundaries 
were constantly being pushed farther,

366
00:28:17,154 --> 00:28:20,144
pushed back between the two forces.

367
00:28:20,554 --> 00:28:26,029
This was a stimulus for exchanges,

368
00:28:26,753 --> 00:28:28,876
for political changes,

369
00:28:28,876 --> 00:28:32,607
for new ideas, for artistic traditions.

370
00:28:36,057 --> 00:28:38,684
It was also a new era for the Silk Road.

371
00:28:40,488 --> 00:28:43,677
A fortune in Roman gold 
traveled east

372
00:28:43,677 --> 00:28:46,138
in exchange for Chinese silks.

373
00:28:51,400 --> 00:28:53,940
And the Central Asian kingdom of Kushan

374
00:28:54,000 --> 00:28:57,355
made its own fortune 
selling another luxury to China:

375
00:28:59,565 --> 00:29:00,868
jade.

376
00:29:03,915 --> 00:29:06,613
Silk Road caravans passed 
through this border station

377
00:29:06,613 --> 00:29:08,988
on China's western frontier.

378
00:29:10,839 --> 00:29:13,380
So many of them carried Kushan jade

379
00:29:13,430 --> 00:29:16,570
that this station became known 
as the Jade Gate.

380
00:29:21,860 --> 00:29:25,450
Chinese aristocrats
coveted jade for its beauty

381
00:29:25,493 --> 00:29:27,414
and something more.

382
00:29:30,034 --> 00:29:33,659
They believed that jade 
would keep them alive forever.

383
00:29:36,789 --> 00:29:39,538
The ruling elite commissioned 
jade burial suits

384
00:29:39,558 --> 00:29:42,327
to preserve their bodies in the grave.

385
00:29:45,617 --> 00:29:48,722
They believed that, upon death,

386
00:29:48,762 --> 00:29:51,822
all the orifices should be plugged in

387
00:29:51,842 --> 00:29:56,076
to preserve the spirit inside the person.

388
00:29:56,966 --> 00:30:00,347
And this notion of jade

389
00:30:00,347 --> 00:30:05,318
as a material with protective power
in the afterlife,

390
00:30:05,368 --> 00:30:08,348
is further enhanced by the fact

391
00:30:08,348 --> 00:30:11,062
that they built an armor

392
00:30:11,062 --> 00:30:16,876
made of thousands
of pieces of jade.

393
00:30:17,916 --> 00:30:20,120
And of course, if you're the emperor,

394
00:30:20,120 --> 00:30:25,855
your jade armor would be made
from the finest jade

395
00:30:26,997 --> 00:30:29,731
from the western regions.

396
00:30:30,451 --> 00:30:33,523
During the Roman empire,
Silk Road trade flourished

397
00:30:33,569 --> 00:30:36,522
as Chinese, Persian, and Kushan armies

398
00:30:36,532 --> 00:30:39,173
kept the trade routes open across Eurasia.

399
00:30:46,743 --> 00:30:48,568
China had leveled the battlefield

400
00:30:48,629 --> 00:30:51,282
with nomad raiders from the steppes.

401
00:30:57,492 --> 00:30:59,757
But Central Asian horse archers

402
00:30:59,757 --> 00:31:02,717
were about to carve
their names on History.

403
00:31:04,452 --> 00:31:08,912
In the 4th century CE., Europe was invaded
by a Central Asian people

404
00:31:09,042 --> 00:31:12,174
whose name still evokes barbaric cruelty.

405
00:31:18,664 --> 00:31:22,464
The Huns, who fought their way West,
all the way to Rome.

406
00:31:32,708 --> 00:31:35,214
European peoples
like the Goths and Visigoths

407
00:31:35,268 --> 00:31:37,703
— the so-called barbarians —

408
00:31:37,713 --> 00:31:39,410
fled before their onslaught,

409
00:31:39,440 --> 00:31:41,894
and sought refuge in Roman territory.

410
00:31:43,684 --> 00:31:46,662
When the Huns withdrew
from the Roman world,

411
00:31:46,732 --> 00:31:49,439
those barbarian refugees stayed.

412
00:31:55,449 --> 00:31:58,197
And the rest is History.

413
00:32:02,387 --> 00:32:05,882
The western Roman empire 
was plunged into chaos

414
00:32:07,766 --> 00:32:10,655
as barbarian tribes, 
dissatisfied with their lot,

415
00:32:10,685 --> 00:32:13,835
rebelled against Roman authority,

416
00:32:14,138 --> 00:32:17,303
and weak Roman emperors 
failed to crush them.

417
00:32:21,743 --> 00:32:26,209
As Rome declined, migrating 
horse archers, called the Avars,

418
00:32:26,209 --> 00:32:30,436
carved their own country 
out of eastern Europe,

419
00:32:30,436 --> 00:32:33,949
bringing with them 
another Asian military innovation:

420
00:32:36,739 --> 00:32:38,252
the stirrup.

421
00:32:41,755 --> 00:32:44,703
This Chinese statue 
from the fourth century CE,

422
00:32:44,783 --> 00:32:48,092
is the earliest known
depiction of stirrups.

423
00:32:52,572 --> 00:32:54,788
Some 300 years later,

424
00:32:54,788 --> 00:32:57,218
an Avar horseman
was riding with these stirrups

425
00:32:57,264 --> 00:32:59,440
across Hungary.

426
00:33:05,428 --> 00:33:07,277
By the eighth century CE,

427
00:33:07,287 --> 00:33:11,633
the stirrup had spread
from one end of Eurasia to the other

428
00:33:11,831 --> 00:33:14,997
and mounted warfare
was entering a new era.

429
00:33:18,083 --> 00:33:19,959
The importance of the stirrup

430
00:33:19,989 --> 00:33:24,087
relates to what kinds of weapons
can you use from horseback,

431
00:33:24,198 --> 00:33:28,682
and it made it possible to use 
certain kinds of weapons from horseback

432
00:33:28,682 --> 00:33:31,389
that you couldn't use without stirrups.

433
00:33:31,409 --> 00:33:33,958
Those weapons are the long sabre.

434
00:33:34,228 --> 00:33:37,720
You have to lean over and absorb shock,

435
00:33:38,062 --> 00:33:40,669
if you're going to use
a long sabre in battle.

436
00:33:40,699 --> 00:33:44,998
And the stirrups allow the rider 
to absorb the shock of contact

437
00:33:44,998 --> 00:33:47,308
with a stationary target.

438
00:33:47,788 --> 00:33:50,382
The other big weapon 
that was possible with stirrups

439
00:33:50,422 --> 00:33:54,074
was a seated lance held under the arm.

440
00:33:54,354 --> 00:33:58,796
You could stab somebody with the lance
and then remove it,

441
00:33:58,956 --> 00:34:01,992
riding past them without stirrups.

442
00:34:02,521 --> 00:34:07,639
But if you seated it under your arm
and used the lance as a shock weapon,

443
00:34:07,814 --> 00:34:10,428
it would knock you
off the back of the horse

444
00:34:10,468 --> 00:34:12,431
if you didn't have stirrups.

445
00:34:12,441 --> 00:34:16,693
So stirrups made it possible to use
long swords and lances

446
00:34:16,812 --> 00:34:19,598
as shock weapons 
against stationary targets

447
00:34:19,608 --> 00:34:21,930
and keep your seat.

448
00:34:21,936 --> 00:34:27,150
And of course that made it possible
to have really heavy mounted warriors.

449
00:34:28,090 --> 00:34:31,877
Now, the rider becomes 
a unit with the horse.

450
00:34:32,237 --> 00:34:35,295
He's so anchored with his stirrups,
anchored with this,

451
00:34:35,295 --> 00:34:37,535
and then with his long lance

452
00:34:37,585 --> 00:34:41,395
he becomes a single projectile unit.

453
00:34:43,320 --> 00:34:48,942
Man, horse, saddle, lance, 
all locked together for the impact charge.

454
00:34:52,762 --> 00:34:55,753
This was the age of the medieval knight.

455
00:35:01,108 --> 00:35:02,929
A medieval knight's power

456
00:35:02,969 --> 00:35:06,744
came from combining the Asian stirrup
and the ancient shock tactics

457
00:35:06,794 --> 00:35:10,868
of the Persian cataphract
with a European invention:

458
00:35:11,431 --> 00:35:13,788
articulated plate armor.

459
00:35:15,930 --> 00:35:19,354
Strong enough to protect the wearer 
from sword and lance thrusts

460
00:35:20,765 --> 00:35:24,918
while light enough to allow him 
to move freely on horseback

461
00:35:24,988 --> 00:35:26,769
and on foot.

462
00:35:29,519 --> 00:35:33,639
Heavy cavalry had never been
a more potent weapon of war.

463
00:35:35,719 --> 00:35:38,954
Medieval mounted warfare 
could be warfare

464
00:35:38,984 --> 00:35:42,707
that generated
a lot of force on the rider,

465
00:35:43,089 --> 00:35:45,175
a high impact warfare.

466
00:35:46,785 --> 00:35:49,517
In that case, the mounted warrior
is being used

467
00:35:49,577 --> 00:35:53,117
really as a shock weapon
to strike the enemy.

468
00:36:00,259 --> 00:36:03,229
But even Europe's 
formidable mounted knights

469
00:36:03,239 --> 00:36:06,634
would be outfought
by Central Asian cavalry

470
00:36:08,859 --> 00:36:12,129
that burst out of the steppes 
and changed the world.

471
00:36:16,821 --> 00:36:21,677
The largest conquest empire
that the Earth has ever seen

472
00:36:23,647 --> 00:36:27,743
was created by pastoral nomads
from Central Asia.

473
00:36:35,962 --> 00:36:37,929
In the 13th century,

474
00:36:37,929 --> 00:36:40,632
the Mongols conquered 
as far West as Poland

475
00:36:40,656 --> 00:36:43,328
and as far East as the Sea of Japan.

476
00:36:47,978 --> 00:36:52,019
Mongol armies combined the devastating
shock tactics of horse archers

477
00:36:52,259 --> 00:36:55,445
with a highly sophisticated
military organization.

478
00:36:57,796 --> 00:37:02,794
They could gather quickly
and march to distant battlefields.

479
00:37:04,690 --> 00:37:08,103
Then the cavalry could reach
the enemy's battlefield

480
00:37:08,162 --> 00:37:11,111
before they set up defenses

481
00:37:11,164 --> 00:37:16,014
which could deter their enemy
psychologically and strategically.

482
00:37:16,864 --> 00:37:21,052
It is said that the cavalry came suddenly

483
00:37:21,542 --> 00:37:25,241
like something falling fro the sky.

484
00:37:25,522 --> 00:37:29,485
and disappeared quickly

485
00:37:29,515 --> 00:37:32,625
leaving no trace at all.

486
00:37:32,715 --> 00:37:35,633
Western, especially European historians,

487
00:37:35,663 --> 00:37:41,281
wrote that the Mongols appeared 
far away like several spots

488
00:37:41,508 --> 00:37:46,011
but would suddenly gather
before you, like dark clouds.

489
00:37:46,311 --> 00:37:50,284
Unexpected attack was the core

490
00:37:56,474 --> 00:38:00,091
The Mongols have gone down
in History as bloodthirsty killers,

491
00:38:00,895 --> 00:38:04,359
but they were also sophisticated,
open-minded,

492
00:38:04,359 --> 00:38:06,661
often generous conquerors.

493
00:38:08,671 --> 00:38:11,237
They pacified the Silk Road.

494
00:38:16,777 --> 00:38:18,783
Trade between West and East

495
00:38:18,783 --> 00:38:21,530
flourished under 
this Mongol-enforced peace,

496
00:38:21,580 --> 00:38:23,646
the Pax Mongolica.

497
00:38:26,376 --> 00:38:29,079
Before the age of Pax Mongolica,

498
00:38:29,129 --> 00:38:33,496
banditry was a very serious
problem for traders,

499
00:38:33,575 --> 00:38:36,039
for caravans, along the Silk Road.

500
00:38:37,089 --> 00:38:40,561
The reputation of Genghis Khan
and his descendants

501
00:38:41,433 --> 00:38:45,797
created peace and safe passage
along the Silk Road

502
00:38:45,867 --> 00:38:53,773
because bandits were so afraid
of the Mongol soldiers.

503
00:38:54,243 --> 00:38:56,821
The Pax Mongolica,

504
00:38:57,221 --> 00:39:05,071
the control of trade and exchange

505
00:39:05,499 --> 00:39:08,389
that was made possible under the Mongols

506
00:39:08,449 --> 00:39:12,334
connected China with Europe
and with the Near East

507
00:39:12,397 --> 00:39:16,196
in a really close way 
for the first time in world History

508
00:39:16,586 --> 00:39:19,423
And that had a profound effect

509
00:39:19,490 --> 00:39:22,547
on the development
of European civilization.

510
00:39:24,355 --> 00:39:26,479
Protected by the Pax Mongolica,

511
00:39:26,479 --> 00:39:30,181
and anxious for good relations 
with the Mongol empire,

512
00:39:30,245 --> 00:39:34,099
Europeans began traveling East 
as never before.

513
00:39:36,243 --> 00:39:38,745
Merchants, missionaries, and diplomats

514
00:39:38,815 --> 00:39:41,346
flowed East along the trade routes,

515
00:39:43,386 --> 00:39:46,833
bringing back popular Asian goods
like cloth and spices

516
00:39:48,562 --> 00:39:51,975
and tales of the wealth 
and wonders of the East,

517
00:39:52,145 --> 00:39:56,265
some true, some fabulous, 
but all fascinating.

518
00:39:57,906 --> 00:39:59,571
From Europe to China,

519
00:39:59,581 --> 00:40:03,557
Silk Road trade spread 
new knowledge of far-away lands.

520
00:40:04,567 --> 00:40:09,079
The Silk Road made human beings realize

521
00:40:09,229 --> 00:40:12,077
that there are other people out there,

522
00:40:12,117 --> 00:40:15,975
and it opened the eyes 
of the East and the West.

523
00:40:19,672 --> 00:40:23,699
The Italian cities of Venice and Genoa
reaped huge rewards.

524
00:40:27,048 --> 00:40:29,951
Their merchants traveled safely
throughout Eurasia

525
00:40:31,681 --> 00:40:34,102
and founded trading posts on the Black Sea

526
00:40:34,142 --> 00:40:37,173
to receive and pass on Silk Road goods.

527
00:40:38,805 --> 00:40:42,831
Their Silk Road profits funded
magnificent art and architecture.

528
00:40:45,404 --> 00:40:49,333
But their competition frequently
plunged them into war with one another.

529
00:40:51,644 --> 00:40:56,149
In one of these wars, Genoa captured
a prosperous Venetian merchant

530
00:40:56,189 --> 00:40:58,101
named Marco Polo.

531
00:40:59,091 --> 00:41:02,774
Imprisoned by the Genoese, 
Polo dictated the story

532
00:41:02,823 --> 00:41:06,257
of his Silk Road journey to China
to a fellow prisoner.

533
00:41:09,170 --> 00:41:13,078
Today, experts debate whether
Marco Polo really visited China

534
00:41:14,308 --> 00:41:16,866
or was simply retelling stories

535
00:41:16,916 --> 00:41:19,264
he heard from fellow Silk Road travelers.

536
00:41:23,666 --> 00:41:26,991
But there's no debate 
that "The Travels of Marco Polo"

537
00:41:27,051 --> 00:41:31,256
was one of the most influential books
in all of human History.

538
00:41:32,036 --> 00:41:34,241
It tantalized Europe with tales

539
00:41:34,241 --> 00:41:37,926
of China's immense wealth 
and advanced civilization.

540
00:41:45,190 --> 00:41:49,887
And years before Marco Polo was telling
those tales in a Genoese prison,

541
00:41:52,717 --> 00:41:57,556
a Chinese invention was making
its way across Eurasia to the West.

542
00:42:02,566 --> 00:42:05,105
Something created centuries earlier

543
00:42:05,105 --> 00:42:08,815
when an experiment ended very badly.

544
00:42:19,455 --> 00:42:23,755
Ancient Chinese alchemists
prepared potions of lead or mercury

545
00:42:23,755 --> 00:42:26,050
for their aristocratic patrons

546
00:42:26,060 --> 00:42:29,402
who believed that drinking these metals
would help them live forever.

547
00:42:32,748 --> 00:42:36,934
Instead, those concoctions killed them 
or made them insane.

548
00:42:38,804 --> 00:42:41,684
Another deadly combination was sulfur

549
00:42:41,684 --> 00:42:45,634
heated with an organic nitrate
found in soil throughout China,

550
00:42:48,041 --> 00:42:50,750
known today as saltpeter.

551
00:42:52,950 --> 00:42:55,465
When alchemists experimented
with this formula,

552
00:42:55,525 --> 00:42:57,668
it burst into flame,

553
00:42:57,678 --> 00:42:59,741
injuring the alchemists,

554
00:42:59,822 --> 00:43:01,186
(Explosion)

555
00:43:01,256 --> 00:43:03,923
and burning down their laboratory.

556
00:43:05,943 --> 00:43:10,536
From that disaster was born 
a chemical mixture like none other.

557
00:43:15,036 --> 00:43:18,193
It may have failed
as an elixir of immortality,

558
00:43:18,193 --> 00:43:22,554
but it would prove to be
a potent agent of death.

559
00:43:25,273 --> 00:43:29,427
This Chinese Buddhist scroll 
dating from around 950 CE,

560
00:43:29,427 --> 00:43:32,819
depicts demons surrounding
a seated Buddha.

561
00:43:34,259 --> 00:43:39,465
One demon holds what the Chinese called
a "huo quiang", or fire lance.

562
00:43:42,352 --> 00:43:44,886
It's the earliest known image of a weapon

563
00:43:44,906 --> 00:43:48,328
powered by that deadly mixture 
of saltpeter and sulfur.

564
00:43:51,518 --> 00:43:55,739
Known to history as gunpowder.

565
00:44:01,094 --> 00:44:03,545
In the early 13th century,

566
00:44:03,545 --> 00:44:06,695
the Mongols attacked China's Jin Dynasty.

567
00:44:07,205 --> 00:44:11,635
The Jin Dynasty's army fought back 
with exploding gunpowder bombs.

568
00:44:15,755 --> 00:44:18,860
But as the Mongols conquered 
more and more of China,

569
00:44:18,860 --> 00:44:22,368
Han Chinese artillerymen
joined their armies

570
00:44:22,418 --> 00:44:26,162
and marched West, bringing
their gunpowder weapons with them.

571
00:44:29,142 --> 00:44:32,284
The Mongols attacked 
Russian and Polish cities

572
00:44:32,294 --> 00:44:34,720
with exploding fire bombs.

573
00:44:36,120 --> 00:44:39,973
And Europeans found out the hard way 
what gunpowder could do.

574
00:44:44,396 --> 00:44:46,763
By the end of the 13th century,

575
00:44:46,763 --> 00:44:49,986
the formula for gunpowder 
was known as far West as England,

576
00:44:51,754 --> 00:44:55,953
and Europeans were inventing 
their own versions of the new weapons.

577
00:44:59,873 --> 00:45:04,479
It wasn't long before this Chinese 
invention changed European history.

578
00:45:08,385 --> 00:45:11,051
On 26th August, 1346,

579
00:45:11,417 --> 00:45:14,332
near the village of Crecy
in northern France,

580
00:45:14,692 --> 00:45:18,407
the armies of France and England
prepared to fight.

581
00:45:26,940 --> 00:45:30,543
Mounted on their war steeds, 
encased in their armor,

582
00:45:30,583 --> 00:45:33,959
the flower of French nobility 
formed their battle line,

583
00:45:42,728 --> 00:45:46,087
while the English deployed 
a very different force.

584
00:45:50,197 --> 00:45:52,966
Thousands of expert archers.

585
00:45:59,966 --> 00:46:04,555
The French sent their higher Genoese
crossbowmen to attack the English

586
00:46:04,575 --> 00:46:07,650
before French knights annihilated them.

587
00:46:14,813 --> 00:46:17,429
But the English king, Edward III,

588
00:46:17,429 --> 00:46:20,537
had spent years training his longbow men.

589
00:46:24,517 --> 00:46:27,576
And all that training
was about to pay off.

590
00:46:41,426 --> 00:46:46,505
Nothing like this had been seen
on a western battlefield up to this time.

591
00:46:46,685 --> 00:46:51,754
The first time that a volley of arrows 
was unleashed by the archers at Crecy

592
00:46:52,214 --> 00:46:55,329
would have represented 
something completely new

593
00:46:55,369 --> 00:46:58,513
to many of those
in the French army watching it.

594
00:46:58,553 --> 00:47:01,150
A cloud of arrows descending towards them.

595
00:47:02,440 --> 00:47:04,713
It would have been frightening,

596
00:47:04,733 --> 00:47:07,630
and of course the effect
was almost immediate.

597
00:47:11,660 --> 00:47:15,957
Showered by English arrows, 
the Genoese turned and ran,

598
00:47:17,318 --> 00:47:19,917
and according to medieval 
accounts of the battle,

599
00:47:19,917 --> 00:47:23,136
they were also panicked 
by another English weapon.

600
00:47:32,031 --> 00:47:35,156
Giovanni Villani, writing
very soon after the battle,

601
00:47:35,206 --> 00:47:39,563
says in his chronicle that 
so loud and intimidating

602
00:47:39,693 --> 00:47:42,235
was the noise created by the guns

603
00:47:42,355 --> 00:47:45,418
that they thought God was thundering.

604
00:47:48,997 --> 00:47:51,909
"The English guns cast
iron balls by means of fire.

605
00:47:52,689 --> 00:47:54,950
"They made a noise like thunder

606
00:47:55,020 --> 00:47:57,625
"and caused much loss
in men and horses."

607
00:48:04,835 --> 00:48:07,373
Noise like that would have been 
unprecedented

608
00:48:07,413 --> 00:48:09,911
to the soldiers on the battlefield.

609
00:48:10,538 --> 00:48:13,668
Nothing in their lives
could have prepared them

610
00:48:13,668 --> 00:48:15,464
for a a bang of that size

611
00:48:15,464 --> 00:48:19,539
and accompanied by smoke
and acrid sulfur smell,

612
00:48:19,662 --> 00:48:22,219
which would hang in the air.

613
00:48:22,409 --> 00:48:25,043
The impact of which, of course,
they couldn't see

614
00:48:25,063 --> 00:48:27,387
until men around them dropped.

615
00:48:29,087 --> 00:48:32,119
Not even professional soldiers 
like the Genoese

616
00:48:32,298 --> 00:48:36,039
would have experienced anything 
like this before in their lives.

617
00:48:36,189 --> 00:48:38,776
That would have been terrifying,

618
00:48:38,806 --> 00:48:41,759
and it's no wonder
that they scattered and ran.

619
00:48:44,019 --> 00:48:49,721
They turned and fled into the face
of the oncoming French cavalry charge.

620
00:48:50,100 --> 00:48:53,205
The French cavalry were now
coming onto the battlefield

621
00:48:53,204 --> 00:48:55,310
and they were appalled

622
00:48:55,310 --> 00:48:59,000
at these people they'd hired
running away.

623
00:49:01,270 --> 00:49:03,830
And they cursed them
and they rode into them,

624
00:49:03,850 --> 00:49:06,675
and as many Genoese fell to French hooves

625
00:49:06,725 --> 00:49:09,643
as they did to English 
arrows and gunshots.

626
00:49:11,813 --> 00:49:14,220
And the French knights, 
all 12,000 of them,

627
00:49:14,220 --> 00:49:16,099
double the size of the English army,

628
00:49:16,101 --> 00:49:18,531
they came charging down onto the English.

629
00:49:21,911 --> 00:49:26,031
And they, too, fell to the English arrows
and the English gunshot,

630
00:49:27,621 --> 00:49:30,431
and they came again and again and again.

631
00:49:30,501 --> 00:49:32,846
15, 16 times, they came.

632
00:49:34,706 --> 00:49:36,716
And their horses were ripped to shreds

633
00:49:36,716 --> 00:49:39,133
and the men were thrown from their horses.

634
00:49:39,203 --> 00:49:40,633
And those that weren't thrown,

635
00:49:40,653 --> 00:49:43,218
they had the opportunity
that the dagger men rushed in

636
00:49:43,218 --> 00:49:45,517
and they brought these knights down.

637
00:49:50,787 --> 00:49:54,609
This was a moment in History
where the world changed.

638
00:49:54,789 --> 00:49:58,715
It spelled the beginning of the end 
for the medieval knight.

639
00:50:01,772 --> 00:50:04,215
The Battle of Crecy
has gone down in history

640
00:50:04,215 --> 00:50:07,413
as one of the earliest uses 
of gunpowder weapons

641
00:50:07,563 --> 00:50:10,507
on a European battlefield.

642
00:50:17,987 --> 00:50:19,945
Some 500 years after,

643
00:50:19,985 --> 00:50:22,664
it burned down 
a Chinese alchemist's workshop,

644
00:50:22,752 --> 00:50:26,081
gunpowder had become 
destiny's weapon of choice.

645
00:50:28,566 --> 00:50:31,614
After Crecy, it was only a matter of time

646
00:50:31,614 --> 00:50:35,276
until the fates of peoples and nations
were decided by the gun.

647
00:50:40,126 --> 00:50:42,367
Within two centuries,

648
00:50:42,387 --> 00:50:45,307
Europeans would use their powerful 
gunpowder weapons

649
00:50:45,347 --> 00:50:47,907
to dominate the world,

650
00:50:51,747 --> 00:50:55,826
creating empires that would evolve
into today's global trading culture,

651
00:50:59,832 --> 00:51:03,378
which binds people together
by commerce instead of the gun.

652
00:51:10,019 --> 00:51:13,459
But before Europe could embark 
on its empire-building adventure,

653
00:51:14,799 --> 00:51:16,529
its medieval social order

654
00:51:16,529 --> 00:51:19,589
would be shattered
by a catastrophic event.

655
00:51:21,409 --> 00:51:25,184
One that would forge a new Europe
in a crucible of horror.

656
00:51:29,154 --> 00:51:31,631
While guns thundered at Crecy,

657
00:51:31,643 --> 00:51:34,932
something else was spreading
along the Eurasian trade routes.

658
00:51:39,607 --> 00:51:43,749
Something that would kill
tens of millions of Europeans.

659
00:51:48,509 --> 00:51:51,400
An apocalyptic destruction of human life

660
00:51:52,350 --> 00:51:55,585
that would lay the foundations
of the modern world.

661
00:52:18,095 --> 00:52:20,920
At the Battle of Crécy in 1346,

662
00:52:21,261 --> 00:52:24,876
the English won 
an historic victory over France,

663
00:52:27,836 --> 00:52:31,299
helped by a Chinese invention
that had traveled to Europe.

664
00:52:40,339 --> 00:52:42,065
Gunpowder.

665
00:53:18,785 --> 00:53:20,977
And in the same year of 1346,

666
00:53:21,517 --> 00:53:24,741
some 2,000 kilometres east of Crécy,

667
00:53:25,241 --> 00:53:29,367
another battle was taking place 
on the shores of the Black Sea.

668
00:53:33,677 --> 00:53:38,209
A Mongol army had been laying siege
to the Crimean port city of Caffa,

669
00:53:38,729 --> 00:53:42,730
a Silk Road trading post belonging
to the Italian city of Genoa.

670
00:53:45,514 --> 00:53:48,390
The Mongols were masters 
of siege warfare.

671
00:53:51,340 --> 00:53:55,343
But Caffa was still holding out
after more than two years.

672
00:53:58,983 --> 00:54:02,154
Suddenly, the Mongol army was decimated.

673
00:54:02,954 --> 00:54:06,894
Not by Caffa's defenders, 
but by an unknown disease.

674
00:54:10,005 --> 00:54:12,515
The Mongols quickly ended their siege.

675
00:54:13,125 --> 00:54:14,965
But before they left Caffa,

676
00:54:14,995 --> 00:54:18,060
they loaded their siege engines 
with the corpses of their dead

677
00:54:18,330 --> 00:54:21,131
and flung them over the city's walls,

678
00:54:21,481 --> 00:54:25,179
believing that the stench of death
would kill the defenders.

679
00:54:29,959 --> 00:54:31,712
Medieval chronicles say

680
00:54:31,712 --> 00:54:34,724
that Caffa's defenders
did die by the thousands,

681
00:54:35,114 --> 00:54:38,241
but not from the smell of death.

682
00:54:42,311 --> 00:54:44,908
One year later, in 1347,

683
00:54:44,958 --> 00:54:48,957
the same disease that had killed
the Mongols at Caffa

684
00:54:49,142 --> 00:54:51,779
was killing people in Constantinople.

685
00:54:53,429 --> 00:54:58,907
By 1348,it was killing people 
across Western Europe.

686
00:55:02,238 --> 00:55:06,807
By 1350, it was killing people
as far away as Greenland.

687
00:55:11,447 --> 00:55:14,362
And terrified Europeans
had given it a name.

688
00:55:16,982 --> 00:55:19,119
The Black Death.

689
00:55:20,879 --> 00:55:26,485
In just under a decade, 
from 1347 to 1356,

690
00:55:27,175 --> 00:55:31,401
the Black Death killed a
t least 25 million Europeans.,

691
00:55:31,511 --> 00:55:34,649
one third of Europe's population.

692
00:55:38,829 --> 00:55:40,766
Today, most scholars believe

693
00:55:40,766 --> 00:55:43,880
that the Black Death was 
an outbreak of bubonic plague.

694
00:55:44,460 --> 00:55:48,059
that was transmitted to humans
by infected fleas living on rats.

695
00:55:52,006 --> 00:55:54,716
And we believe
that it spread across Eurasia

696
00:55:54,868 --> 00:55:58,348
by hitching a ride with armies,
ships, and caravans

697
00:55:59,228 --> 00:56:02,253
along trade routes 
that were already ancient

698
00:56:02,363 --> 00:56:05,030
by the time of the Black Death.

699
00:56:07,740 --> 00:56:10,460
Micro-organic travelers of all kinds

700
00:56:10,480 --> 00:56:13,610
have moved across Eurasia
for thousands of years.

701
00:56:15,214 --> 00:56:19,032
A bio-migration that has had 
as big an impact on history

702
00:56:19,032 --> 00:56:23,775
as the more famous exchanges
of new technologies and luxury goods.

703
00:56:24,805 --> 00:56:27,352
And as a recent discovery shows,

704
00:56:27,362 --> 00:56:30,400
tiny living things 
moving along the Silk Road

705
00:56:30,440 --> 00:56:33,324
brought life as well as death.

706
00:56:34,584 --> 00:56:36,989
We were putting together some new methods

707
00:56:37,057 --> 00:56:39,221
of looking for early agriculture,

708
00:56:39,251 --> 00:56:42,155
and for that we needed to do a survey

709
00:56:42,262 --> 00:56:45,459
of all the finds of early crops in Europe.

710
00:56:47,163 --> 00:56:49,221
When you looked at a map of all of Europe,

711
00:56:49,231 --> 00:56:52,103
then you could see
there were these Chinese crops

712
00:56:52,135 --> 00:56:55,027
in small numbers very early on in Europe.

713
00:56:57,017 --> 00:57:00,208
"Very early on" was around 2,000 BC,

714
00:57:02,485 --> 00:57:05,244
when a Chinese grain
called broomcorn millet

715
00:57:05,326 --> 00:57:09,011
appears in the Eastern European
archaeological record.

716
00:57:10,061 --> 00:57:13,730
The actual crop itself
will decay or be eaten,

717
00:57:14,169 --> 00:57:16,178
but rather fortunately,

718
00:57:16,218 --> 00:57:19,642
if it's cooked and over-burnt,
it turns to carbon.

719
00:57:19,675 --> 00:57:23,387
That will stay in the archaeological
record for a long time.

720
00:57:27,368 --> 00:57:29,965
In the Chinese province of inner Mongolia,

721
00:57:30,445 --> 00:57:33,923
archaeologists are studying
the origins of broomcorn millet,

722
00:57:34,631 --> 00:57:37,596
one of the world's oldest domestic crops.

723
00:57:40,346 --> 00:57:44,293
We are looking at a broomcorn millet field
of almost 16 acres

724
00:57:44,543 --> 00:57:47,342
The cultivation of broomcorn millet
in this place

725
00:57:47,402 --> 00:57:49,834
dates back to nearly 8000 years ago.

726
00:57:49,949 --> 00:57:53,826
It's the earliest area of human-cultivated
broomcorn millet in the world.

727
00:57:53,896 --> 00:57:56,170
After broomcorn millet's birth
in this place,

728
00:57:56,170 --> 00:57:58,048
it spread to the West from the East.

729
00:57:58,048 --> 00:58:00,049
It spread to Europe.

730
00:58:01,499 --> 00:58:04,308
Since it originated from the East
and then spread to Europe,

731
00:58:04,313 --> 00:58:06,637
it can be regarded 
as an important contribution

732
00:58:06,637 --> 00:58:09,479
of our Eastern civilization
to the Western counterpart.

733
00:58:11,999 --> 00:58:14,966
But it isn't clear just how and why

734
00:58:15,136 --> 00:58:19,275
broomcorn millet travelled thousands
of kilometres across Eurasia,

735
00:58:19,806 --> 00:58:22,845
through some of the world's
harshest environments,

736
00:58:22,925 --> 00:58:25,505
all the way to Europe.

737
00:58:27,185 --> 00:58:31,450
Millet's long journey may have begun
simply because it travelled so well.

738
00:58:35,160 --> 00:58:38,662
Millets are essentially cereals, 
but they're very small.

739
00:58:39,482 --> 00:58:41,618
And because they have very small grains,

740
00:58:41,648 --> 00:58:43,301
they're hardy and they're tough,

741
00:58:43,301 --> 00:58:45,418
and they can grow quite fast.

742
00:58:45,448 --> 00:58:47,586
Broomcorn millet, at a push,

743
00:58:47,906 --> 00:58:50,635
can get from seed to seed in 45 days.

744
00:58:53,225 --> 00:58:55,290
You can plant a seed in the ground

745
00:58:55,300 --> 00:58:58,761
and 45 days later, 
in the right conditions,

746
00:58:58,801 --> 00:59:00,808
you may have plants.

747
00:59:00,865 --> 00:59:02,642
That's incredibly fast.

748
00:59:02,722 --> 00:59:04,996
So, if you're moving around parts of Asia,

749
00:59:05,050 --> 00:59:07,739
where, on the one hand, 
there's a long winter,

750
00:59:07,779 --> 00:59:09,304
a short growing season,

751
00:59:09,374 --> 00:59:12,378
and you can't particularly r
ely on rainfall,

752
00:59:12,468 --> 00:59:16,087
then something that gets a move on
in terms of its growth cycle

753
00:59:16,115 --> 00:59:18,220
is very valuable.

754
00:59:21,260 --> 00:59:24,692
There are accounts of communities
that are on horseback

755
00:59:25,172 --> 00:59:28,497
for quite a lot of the time
and herding animals and so forth,

756
00:59:28,497 --> 00:59:32,263
but for that short season of the year

757
00:59:32,313 --> 00:59:33,879
that millet grows in,

758
00:59:33,879 --> 00:59:36,738
they can actually 
sow the millet on horseback,

759
00:59:36,948 --> 00:59:39,287
trample it in with the horse's feet,

760
00:59:39,509 --> 00:59:41,599
and then either leave 
a few teenagers there

761
00:59:41,599 --> 00:59:44,081
to scare the birds off 
for a couple of months,

762
00:59:44,169 --> 00:59:47,539
come back two months later, 
and harvest the crops.

763
00:59:51,369 --> 00:59:53,819
Millet was a highly mobile grain,

764
00:59:53,849 --> 00:59:55,664
but there wasn't any evidence

765
00:59:55,714 --> 00:59:58,941
of how it might have travelled
from its home in northern China.

766
01:00:02,167 --> 01:00:08,610
Until archaeologists found signs 
of millet cultivation around 2500 BC

767
01:00:09,102 --> 01:00:13,224
in the foothills of the Tian Shan
Mountains in central Asia.

768
01:00:16,064 --> 01:00:18,035
At that point we asked ourselves,

769
01:00:18,045 --> 01:00:20,246
"Well, what is it about these foothills?"

770
01:00:20,300 --> 01:00:22,133
You know, "Why the foothills?"

771
01:00:23,333 --> 01:00:25,590
Clearly, it's about water.

772
01:00:26,630 --> 01:00:29,521
If one travels across the centre of Asia,

773
01:00:29,605 --> 01:00:32,213
one realizes why water is a key.

774
01:00:32,323 --> 01:00:35,922
And wherever you are in Asia, 
it can be very dry, of course.

775
01:00:36,112 --> 01:00:38,740
But if one goes uphill to those foothills,

776
01:00:38,740 --> 01:00:40,638
then one has somewhere

777
01:00:40,748 --> 01:00:44,440
where there will be streams
running off the mountains and water.

778
01:00:47,165 --> 01:00:50,202
Archaeologists found that around 1,000 BC,

779
01:00:50,212 --> 01:00:53,679
millet farmers left theTian Shan foothills

780
01:00:53,749 --> 01:00:56,271
and their reliable water supply

781
01:00:56,291 --> 01:00:59,367
and began moving
into much harsher environments.

782
01:01:00,017 --> 01:01:03,765
We can see the confidence of farmers

783
01:01:03,905 --> 01:01:06,944
spreading out from where
the water is really safe

784
01:01:07,054 --> 01:01:09,653
to areas where you have to know more

785
01:01:09,653 --> 01:01:13,143
about the water and the landscape 
and the geography,

786
01:01:13,163 --> 01:01:16,882
both into the steppes to the north
and to the desert to the south.

787
01:01:19,573 --> 01:01:23,663
Millet's local migrations
may have linked it with the world.

788
01:01:24,347 --> 01:01:27,057
Migrating millet farmers
in search of water

789
01:01:27,077 --> 01:01:29,227
may have settled near trade routes.

790
01:01:33,067 --> 01:01:35,657
And long-distance travelers
would have chosen routes

791
01:01:35,657 --> 01:01:38,597
near reliable sources of food and water.

792
01:01:43,087 --> 01:01:48,935
I think very much 
those traders are definitely working

793
01:01:49,076 --> 01:01:51,956
through networks
that are already centuries old.

794
01:01:53,502 --> 01:01:58,702
It's at least a millennium
before you see something crystallizing

795
01:01:58,732 --> 01:02:01,327
that you can start calling the Silk Road.

796
01:02:04,717 --> 01:02:08,153
Another discovery has revealed 
that this ancient grain migration

797
01:02:08,163 --> 01:02:11,319
wasn't only from East to West.

798
01:02:14,249 --> 01:02:17,755
Wheat was transmitted from West to East,

799
01:02:17,865 --> 01:02:21,162
arrived in China and was accepted
as our main staple.

800
01:02:21,322 --> 01:02:26,598
This reflects the transaction
between Eastern and Western cultures.

801
01:02:29,528 --> 01:02:32,439
The Eurasian steppe, acting as a route

802
01:02:32,439 --> 01:02:35,297
for early exchanges between
Eastern and Western cultures.

803
01:02:35,359 --> 01:02:38,686
is the predecessor
of the ancient Silk Road.

804
01:02:38,742 --> 01:02:41,596
Ethnic migration, the fusion of cultures,

805
01:02:41,746 --> 01:02:44,910
and the flow of trade
are ll embedded in this road.

806
01:02:46,755 --> 01:02:50,092
Trading millet and wheat
between China and Europe

807
01:02:50,162 --> 01:02:52,840
may have done much more than feed people.

808
01:02:54,590 --> 01:02:58,330
It may also have enabled
profound social change.

809
01:03:02,450 --> 01:03:05,320
Seeds germinate at one time of year

810
01:03:05,410 --> 01:03:08,070
and are harvested another time of year,

811
01:03:08,120 --> 01:03:11,230
and that's kind
of hardwired into their biology.

812
01:03:11,290 --> 01:03:13,900
And so farming is a one-season activity,

813
01:03:13,970 --> 01:03:16,590
and there are things going on
at other times of year.

814
01:03:16,630 --> 01:03:19,235
And during the second millennium BC,

815
01:03:19,255 --> 01:03:21,262
a number of societies are doing something

816
01:03:21,262 --> 01:03:23,127
which is quite radically different,

817
01:03:23,127 --> 01:03:28,173
and that is putting more
than one season in a single year.

818
01:03:29,486 --> 01:03:31,981
Crops like millet 
are really useful for that,

819
01:03:32,011 --> 01:03:35,218
in that if you are a western farmer,

820
01:03:35,278 --> 01:03:37,624
with wheat and barley fields

821
01:03:37,624 --> 01:03:39,967
reaching maturity during the summer,

822
01:03:39,987 --> 01:03:41,101
and you think

823
01:03:41,228 --> 01:03:44,166
"Right, with the same plot of land,
"I want to increase production.

824
01:03:44,696 --> 01:03:48,851
"And so, I want another crop
after I've harvested the first crop."

825
01:03:49,581 --> 01:03:52,465
You can't do a long season, 
large-grain crop

826
01:03:52,465 --> 01:03:54,449
like wheat and barley again,

827
01:03:54,533 --> 01:03:57,166
so, something that's short and sharp
like millet

828
01:03:57,166 --> 01:03:59,269
you can tag on to the end of it

829
01:03:59,319 --> 01:04:02,237
and catch another season 
before the winter's set in.

830
01:04:05,297 --> 01:04:08,586
Interestingly, when you get to China, 
it's the converse.

831
01:04:08,606 --> 01:04:11,026
You have this short season crop
already there,

832
01:04:11,036 --> 01:04:13,311
and by rearranging your life,

833
01:04:13,321 --> 01:04:17,658
you can bring a long season crop
such as wheat and barley in at that stage.

834
01:04:17,722 --> 01:04:20,789
So the implications are, 
with the same plot of land,

835
01:04:21,139 --> 01:04:25,285
you could basically get 
two harvests rather than one.

836
01:04:25,372 --> 01:04:28,263
So, two sets of calories rather than one.

837
01:04:31,673 --> 01:04:35,409
It may release some of the community
to not farm at all

838
01:04:36,015 --> 01:04:40,852
and occupy roles within cities,
or as craftspeople, or leaders.

839
01:04:43,152 --> 01:04:45,744
If we look at the second millennium BC,

840
01:04:45,744 --> 01:04:47,345
what we certainly see

841
01:04:47,345 --> 01:04:50,621
is at the same time 
as multi-cropping is there,

842
01:04:51,241 --> 01:04:54,633
then there are a lot of the community,

843
01:04:54,706 --> 01:04:57,462
are not farmers, 
but instead metalworkers,

844
01:04:57,532 --> 01:05:00,165
or kings, or priests, or something else.

845
01:05:00,165 --> 01:05:02,038
And so what we see evidence of

846
01:05:02,038 --> 01:05:07,767
is multi-cropping allows a non-farming
sector within the community.

847
01:05:09,792 --> 01:05:14,370
So, what we have is a small, 
not very impressive-looking seed,

848
01:05:14,400 --> 01:05:17,812
but because of the way it grows
and because of its biology,

849
01:05:17,812 --> 01:05:20,279
it has a massive impact

850
01:05:20,345 --> 01:05:22,466
in changing the productivity

851
01:05:22,496 --> 01:05:25,287
of the heartlands of western farming.

852
01:05:27,637 --> 01:05:30,319
So, those western farmlands
could, in the same area,

853
01:05:30,387 --> 01:05:32,753
produce two crops rather than one,

854
01:05:32,803 --> 01:05:35,343
and that enabled a whole series of things

855
01:05:35,401 --> 01:05:38,900
that we associate 
with the word "civilization."

856
01:05:43,290 --> 01:05:47,770
Finding Chinese millet in Europe
and European wheat and barley in China

857
01:05:47,960 --> 01:05:51,095
suggests that long before the Silk Road,

858
01:05:51,195 --> 01:05:55,117
East and West were introducing 
one another to new foods,

859
01:05:56,277 --> 01:05:58,665
and that the movement of crops

860
01:05:58,665 --> 01:06:02,239
may have helped create
the earliest East-West trade routes.

861
01:06:05,269 --> 01:06:08,016
And in the deserts of far western China,

862
01:06:08,066 --> 01:06:10,477
archaeologists
have discovered another way

863
01:06:10,477 --> 01:06:12,889
living organisms
could travel the Silk Road.

864
01:06:15,219 --> 01:06:18,156
This is Xuanquanzhi relay station,

865
01:06:18,156 --> 01:06:21,635
an archaeological site 
near the town of Dunhuang,

866
01:06:21,949 --> 01:06:24,591
a major stopping point on the Silk Road.

867
01:06:29,011 --> 01:06:31,967
2,000 years ago during the Han dynasty,

868
01:06:32,017 --> 01:06:36,815
Xuanquanzhi was a very busy
and very cosmopolitan place.

869
01:06:39,535 --> 01:06:43,272
According to records 
written on bamboo and wood

870
01:06:43,342 --> 01:06:45,661
unearthed from Xuanquanzhi

871
01:06:45,817 --> 01:06:49,312
Xuanquanzhi was not only serving
as a relay station,

872
01:06:49,312 --> 01:06:52,807
but also as a place to receive 
caravans and government officials.

873
01:06:52,849 --> 01:06:56,008
During the Han Dinasty, 
the major officials received here

874
01:06:56,008 --> 01:06:59,248
included the king of Kholan Kingdom
from the Western Regions,

875
01:06:59,279 --> 01:07:02,331
the king of the Wusun, 
also called the Issedones

876
01:07:02,331 --> 01:07:05,384
and the king of the Kangu, 
also called the Sogdians.

877
01:07:05,564 --> 01:07:08,911
At most, the number of received guests
would be over 1000.

878
01:07:11,921 --> 01:07:16,669
Therefore, this place was filled up
with a mixture of people from all regions.

879
01:07:17,909 --> 01:07:20,118
It would be used for merchants,

880
01:07:20,118 --> 01:07:22,945
and it would also be used
for government business.

881
01:07:22,975 --> 01:07:24,729
People could travel long distances

882
01:07:24,729 --> 01:07:27,004
knowing that there was somewhere
they could stay

883
01:07:27,024 --> 01:07:29,315
be refreshed and recover,
change their horses,

884
01:07:29,335 --> 01:07:32,240
and then move on
to the next relay station.

885
01:07:34,120 --> 01:07:37,648
The wonderful thing about
the Xuanquanzhi trading post

886
01:07:37,658 --> 01:07:43,112
was that it's in a part of the country
that is not built up now,

887
01:07:43,179 --> 01:07:47,095
and the environment, very, very dry
and often very cold in the winter,

888
01:07:47,145 --> 01:07:49,813
means that things
are preserved there very well.

889
01:07:49,823 --> 01:07:52,800
So, a lot of the things 
- inside that trading post -

890
01:07:52,890 --> 01:07:55,557
have survived instead of decomposing.

891
01:08:01,119 --> 01:08:04,247
Excavators were especially excited
to find something

892
01:08:04,267 --> 01:08:07,276
that perhaps only
an archaeologist could love:

893
01:08:09,486 --> 01:08:12,921
the 2,000-year-old equivalent 
of toilet paper.

894
01:08:14,081 --> 01:08:16,957
In China, they wrote back,
in the Han dynasty times,

895
01:08:16,997 --> 01:08:19,738
how they would have a stick 
with cloth wrapped on the end

896
01:08:19,738 --> 01:08:21,424
for people to wipe themselves with.

897
01:08:21,424 --> 01:08:24,444
There were quite a few 
of these sticks thrown into the latrine

898
01:08:24,454 --> 01:08:27,209
as if people discarded them
in there when they'd finished.

899
01:08:27,209 --> 01:08:30,566
These sticks have been found
at some other excavations in China as well

900
01:08:30,566 --> 01:08:32,532
but what's great about this relay station

901
01:08:32,532 --> 01:08:34,663
is we still have the cloth
wrapped on the end

902
01:08:34,663 --> 01:08:37,318
and we still have the human faeces on.

903
01:08:38,048 --> 01:08:41,782
So, we scraped off 
the dried faeces from the cloth

904
01:08:41,851 --> 01:08:43,664
and took them to the lab.

905
01:08:43,754 --> 01:08:45,832
We found four different
species of parasite

906
01:08:45,832 --> 01:08:47,910
in those who used this latrine.

907
01:08:47,989 --> 01:08:51,076
Two of the species are spread by faeces

908
01:08:51,076 --> 01:08:54,374
contaminating your food
or your hands or your drink:

909
01:08:54,414 --> 01:08:56,688
roundworm and whipworm.

910
01:08:56,888 --> 01:08:59,802
Another species was a kind of tapeworm

911
01:08:59,812 --> 01:09:03,859
that they probably acquired
by eating raw or undercooked pork.

912
01:09:04,289 --> 01:09:07,477
And then, we found
the really exciting find,

913
01:09:07,477 --> 01:09:09,606
which was the Chinese liver fluke.

914
01:09:11,326 --> 01:09:13,978
This is a small flatworm

915
01:09:13,978 --> 01:09:16,630
that lives in eastern and southern
China and in Korea.

916
01:09:17,326 --> 01:09:20,226
It can only survive in marshy, wet places.

917
01:09:20,306 --> 01:09:25,384
But here, we found it 1500 kilometres away
from anywhere that has it in modern times.

918
01:09:27,002 --> 01:09:29,780
So, it wasn't what we expected to find.

919
01:09:29,820 --> 01:09:33,094
It was brilliant that we could find it
on the Silk Road.

920
01:09:33,164 --> 01:09:35,321
The liver fluke requires a lifecycle

921
01:09:35,321 --> 01:09:37,538
where it passes through freshwater snails,

922
01:09:37,599 --> 01:09:39,918
and through small fish
and then, bigger fish.

923
01:09:39,938 --> 01:09:43,308
If you cook the fish, 
then you don't get the liver fluke.

924
01:09:43,368 --> 01:09:46,498
But if you eat the fish raw, 
then it hatches out in your stomach,

925
01:09:46,508 --> 01:09:49,408
migrates through your body, 
crawls into the liver,

926
01:09:49,438 --> 01:09:50,893
and then develops there.

927
01:09:51,483 --> 01:09:54,910
There was no way that people
in the area of this relay station

928
01:09:54,910 --> 01:09:57,289
could have caught it 
in that particular area

929
01:09:57,289 --> 01:09:59,303
because it was far too dry.

930
01:09:59,323 --> 01:10:00,766
There were no lakes.

931
01:10:00,776 --> 01:10:03,674
There were no freshwater snails
and fish for them to infect.

932
01:10:04,962 --> 01:10:10,296
The discovery of the liver fluke
is of great importance.

933
01:10:12,836 --> 01:10:17,787
It indicates that the caravans 
or government servants

934
01:10:17,944 --> 01:10:21,546
brought their excrement,
as well as diseases ,here

935
01:10:21,597 --> 01:10:25,739
over thousands of kilometers
of travel to this place, Xuanquan station.

936
01:10:30,262 --> 01:10:33,328
With state of the art overseas analysis,

937
01:10:33,410 --> 01:10:36,769
we are comparing it with similar
evidence originating in Europe.

938
01:10:36,839 --> 01:10:39,723
to figure out whether the liver was spread

939
01:10:39,723 --> 01:10:42,584
from China's eastern 
coastal area to Europe

940
01:10:42,614 --> 01:10:45,540
or if it was spread from Europe to China

941
01:10:45,540 --> 01:10:48,058
or if the disease spread 
between these two areas.

942
01:10:48,058 --> 01:10:50,075
We are doing some further research.

943
01:10:51,725 --> 01:10:54,493
The finds at Xuanquanzhi have shown

944
01:10:54,503 --> 01:10:58,582
that humans could carry diseases
long distances along the Silk Road.

945
01:11:03,892 --> 01:11:07,379
Another discovery has revealed
what could happen when they did.

946
01:11:13,354 --> 01:11:18,119
In 2009, German scientists began
investigating a puzzling discovery

947
01:11:18,840 --> 01:11:21,713
in the Bavarian town of Aschheim.

948
01:11:25,684 --> 01:11:31,647
About 20 years ago a graveyard was found 
which contained more than 400 individuals.

949
01:11:32,097 --> 01:11:38,153
We dated it back to a period from 
around the 5th century to the 7th century.

950
01:11:38,443 --> 01:11:41,395
It was exciting for us 
that there were a lot of graves

951
01:11:41,411 --> 01:11:44,365
that contained more than one person

952
01:11:44,385 --> 01:11:51,192
around 20 graves 
where 2 to 5 people were buried

953
01:11:53,142 --> 01:11:56,971
Aschheim looked like any other cemetery

954
01:11:56,971 --> 01:11:58,885
that we would expect to find here

955
01:11:58,885 --> 01:12:00,892
except for these multiple burials

956
01:12:00,912 --> 01:12:05,352
These people were buried together
in one grave and that made us curious.

957
01:12:05,366 --> 01:12:07,148
And we asked ourselves why exactly

958
01:12:07,148 --> 01:12:09,380
these people were buried
together in one grave

959
01:12:10,880 --> 01:12:14,609
The Aschheim mass burial 
was an archaeological enigma,

960
01:12:15,128 --> 01:12:17,447
but there was one crucial clue.

961
01:12:19,377 --> 01:12:23,316
The bodies had been buried
during the 6th century CE.

962
01:12:29,736 --> 01:12:34,099
In the 6th century, a terrifying illness
called the Plague of Justinian

963
01:12:34,419 --> 01:12:37,115
ravaged the Eastern Roman Empire.

964
01:12:41,744 --> 01:12:47,786
It killed 30 to 50 million people
in Europe, Asia, and Africa,

965
01:12:49,379 --> 01:12:52,590
nearly half of all the people on Earth.

966
01:12:52,890 --> 01:12:57,075
Historians tell us that thousands
of people were lying on the street

967
01:12:57,175 --> 01:12:59,218
and that tens of thousands

968
01:12:59,218 --> 01:13:01,590
were dying at the peak of the plague,

969
01:13:01,650 --> 01:13:05,118
so many that they could not be buried.

970
01:13:05,189 --> 01:13:09,882
The corpses were thrown 
into watchtowers and sealed inside

971
01:13:09,882 --> 01:13:13,394
because no one knew what to do with them.

972
01:13:13,484 --> 01:13:17,791
So, this epidemic is quite comparable
to the Black Death.

973
01:13:17,888 --> 01:13:21,014
We asked ourselves what
the multiple burials were about

974
01:13:21,014 --> 01:13:24,975
and chose to screen for plague pathogen

975
01:13:26,511 --> 01:13:30,522
The Justinian plague arrived
in Constantinople on ships from Egypt,

976
01:13:32,533 --> 01:13:34,677
but what the disease was

977
01:13:34,677 --> 01:13:37,543
and where it came from 
remained unknown.

978
01:13:39,674 --> 01:13:42,304
The team investigating
Aschheim's mass burial

979
01:13:42,334 --> 01:13:45,366
hoped its bones might reveal the answer.

980
01:13:45,473 --> 01:13:50,290
We tested more than 20 individuals,
analysing their DNA

981
01:13:50,300 --> 01:13:55,116
and found small fragments 
of plague DNA in four individuals,

982
01:13:55,517 --> 01:13:58,820
Just on this young woman, 
on one young woman,

983
01:13:58,890 --> 01:14:01,483
there was enough DNA
to be able to analyse it really well.

984
01:14:01,483 --> 01:14:03,418
And that is this individual.

985
01:14:03,438 --> 01:14:06,207
This woman has quite open skull sutures.

986
01:14:06,227 --> 01:14:09,996
This is how we know 
that she died quite young.

987
01:14:10,096 --> 01:14:14,770
We would estimate this individual's age 
at approximately early 20s.

988
01:14:14,915 --> 01:14:17,543
In this case, we would see

989
01:14:17,543 --> 01:14:20,957
if we could find the plague pathogen

990
01:14:21,007 --> 01:14:24,962
and to do that we prefer to use teeth

991
01:14:25,013 --> 01:14:28,109
like these teeth here.

992
01:14:28,429 --> 01:14:30,578
Teeth with a lot of root

993
01:14:30,848 --> 01:14:34,332
because the root contains DNA

994
01:14:34,342 --> 01:14:37,006
and because it is embedded in the jaw.

995
01:14:37,065 --> 01:14:42,035
It is well protected there, 
and the DNA is preserved there best.

996
01:14:42,152 --> 01:14:46,234
And then we took this tooth 
to the laboratory

997
01:14:46,364 --> 01:14:50,186
to extract and examine the DNA
with chemical methods.

998
01:14:51,118 --> 01:14:54,040
And when we had looked at the DNA 
of this individual

999
01:14:54,107 --> 01:14:57,357
we determined that
we had actually found Yersini pestis,

1000
01:14:57,377 --> 01:15:01,577
the plague pathogen, the Black Death's.

1001
01:15:01,721 --> 01:15:04,415
What we could also determine

1002
01:15:04,465 --> 01:15:09,785
is that this pathogen did not develop
in Europe but evolved in Asia

1003
01:15:11,259 --> 01:15:14,201
Studies like the Aschheim DNA project

1004
01:15:14,211 --> 01:15:17,804
have concluded that 800 years
before the Black Death,

1005
01:15:17,917 --> 01:15:21,149
a plague traveled the Silk Road

1006
01:15:21,149 --> 01:15:25,455
and that centuries later,
the Black Death followed it in its path.

1007
01:15:29,358 --> 01:15:30,892
Most scholars now agree

1008
01:15:30,892 --> 01:15:34,256
that the Black Death
originated in central Asia

1009
01:15:35,785 --> 01:15:37,727
and that it first reached Europe

1010
01:15:37,727 --> 01:15:40,983
on Italian merchant ships 
returning from the East.

1011
01:15:51,933 --> 01:15:55,106
The Black Death killed 
with incredible speed.

1012
01:16:00,026 --> 01:16:03,942
Victims had only 
a week to a few hours to live.

1013
01:16:07,372 --> 01:16:10,330
Entire towns and monasteries 
were wiped out,

1014
01:16:11,230 --> 01:16:13,794
and no one knew what to do.

1015
01:16:16,554 --> 01:16:19,119
It may have spread about five miles a day,

1016
01:16:19,189 --> 01:16:24,097
which is a lot faster than a lot 
of modern bubonic plague outbreaks.

1017
01:16:25,703 --> 01:16:29,950
Whether it was because of the rate
at which people fled from it

1018
01:16:29,990 --> 01:16:33,138
that spread it faster than it might 
otherwise have been.

1019
01:16:34,038 --> 01:16:35,620
And it certainly was something

1020
01:16:35,640 --> 01:16:38,302
that had a dramatic effect
on people in Europe.

1021
01:16:38,322 --> 01:16:40,864
They all wrote about it,
they were all scared of it.

1022
01:17:17,804 --> 01:17:19,921
So, they had some concept of contagion

1023
01:17:19,991 --> 01:17:21,515
and the idea that the disease

1024
01:17:21,545 --> 01:17:23,616
could be spread
from one person to another,

1025
01:17:23,616 --> 01:17:25,426
but they didn't know how.

1026
01:17:27,476 --> 01:17:30,060
They had no idea about bacteria

1027
01:17:30,060 --> 01:17:32,762
or the spread of microorganisms
at that stage,

1028
01:17:32,792 --> 01:17:35,613
so, they hadn't worked out 
how a disease was spread.

1029
01:17:35,633 --> 01:17:38,255
But they just realized that one person
seemed to be able

1030
01:17:38,255 --> 01:17:40,267
to spread it to the rest of their family,

1031
01:17:40,277 --> 01:17:43,565
so, they realized something
must be happening there.

1032
01:17:58,566 --> 01:18:00,742
Baffled physicians consulted the works

1033
01:18:00,742 --> 01:18:03,209
of ancient authorities like Hippocrates,

1034
01:18:03,220 --> 01:18:06,654
who lived four centuries
before the birth of Jesus,

1035
01:18:08,904 --> 01:18:12,786
and Galen, who lived 
two centuries after Jesus' death.

1036
01:18:16,696 --> 01:18:20,317
Hippocrates and Galen believed
that illness was a result

1037
01:18:20,377 --> 01:18:23,733
of an imbalance among
four so-called humours:

1038
01:18:24,783 --> 01:18:28,646
blood, phlegm, 
yellow bile, and black bile.

1039
01:18:31,886 --> 01:18:35,821
The theory was that if you had
your four humours in balance

1040
01:18:35,891 --> 01:18:39,045
— your blood, your phlegm, 
your black bile and your yellow bile —

1041
01:18:39,045 --> 01:18:40,410
then you'd be healthy.

1042
01:18:40,416 --> 01:18:41,892
If they came out of balance

1043
01:18:41,892 --> 01:18:44,850
or if you had corruption 
of one of your humours,

1044
01:18:44,850 --> 01:18:47,439
then that would make you unwell.

1045
01:18:47,569 --> 01:18:49,571
So, the treatments that doctors used

1046
01:18:49,579 --> 01:18:52,660
were largely based on their understanding
of humoural theory.

1047
01:18:52,840 --> 01:18:56,237
So, at the beginning, they tried
the normal treatments

1048
01:18:56,247 --> 01:19:00,367
of dietary modification
and bloodletting and baths and so on,

1049
01:19:00,476 --> 01:19:02,125
but they had no effect.

1050
01:19:04,860 --> 01:19:08,661
They believed that bad vapours 
were coming up from the ground,

1051
01:19:08,757 --> 01:19:11,766
making people ill, 
affecting their humours.

1052
01:19:11,786 --> 01:19:15,882
They believed that a strong 
southerly wind was a bad thing

1053
01:19:15,984 --> 01:19:18,308
that made a lot of people ill,

1054
01:19:19,148 --> 01:19:22,305
that it was a combination 
of the alignments of the planets,

1055
01:19:22,365 --> 01:19:26,396
because they believed in astrology 
and its effect on your risk of disease.

1056
01:19:27,766 --> 01:19:31,883
They really didn't have a structured 
medical approach to how to deal with it.

1057
01:19:31,973 --> 01:19:33,781
It took everyone off guard.

1058
01:19:33,801 --> 01:19:36,311
No one knew how to deal with it.

1059
01:19:38,426 --> 01:19:40,638
The doctors were effectively powerless.

1060
01:19:49,048 --> 01:19:52,129
Some citizens attempted another cure.

1061
01:20:02,419 --> 01:20:05,445
Jews in Europe suffered 
fewer deaths from plague.

1062
01:20:07,105 --> 01:20:09,908
That may have been because
they were socially isolated

1063
01:20:09,948 --> 01:20:13,269
and practiced better hygiene 
than the general population.

1064
01:20:15,479 --> 01:20:17,950
But surviving the Black Death

1065
01:20:17,950 --> 01:20:21,025
cost thousands 
of European Jews their lives.

1066
01:20:22,835 --> 01:20:25,088
All across plague-stricken Europe,

1067
01:20:25,108 --> 01:20:28,559
the already age-old Christian
prejudice against Jews

1068
01:20:28,899 --> 01:20:31,729
exploded into murderous hatred.

1069
01:20:32,239 --> 01:20:35,400
They believed that people 
with leprosy or Jewish people

1070
01:20:35,640 --> 01:20:38,980
may have actually exacerbated the plague
by poisoning people.

1071
01:20:44,820 --> 01:20:48,525
So, this is a sign of how panicked
and how worried everybody was,

1072
01:20:48,575 --> 01:20:52,371
that they were thinking of really 
quite bizarre kind of interpretations

1073
01:20:52,431 --> 01:20:55,414
as to why everybody was becoming sick.

1074
01:21:05,474 --> 01:21:07,477
While mobs murdered Jews,

1075
01:21:07,737 --> 01:21:10,483
physicians tried to stop the Black Death.