Eurasia: the world's largest land mass.

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

A formidable distance, 
even in today's world.

And yet over that vast distance,

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

The Silk Road.

A tremendously profitable trade route

and so much more.

For thousands of years,

exotic goods,

new technologies,

conquering armies,

and brilliant ideas

traveled along the Silk Road.

Silk Road trade helped to build empires

and to break them.

It fanned the fires of revolution.

Drove great explorations,

and forged powerful bonds
between far away peoples.

The Silk Road made human beings realize

that there are other people out there,

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

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

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

a world that created us.

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

Rome had conquered much of Europe

and was sending its legions beyond
the eastern Mediterranean

to the Middle East

-- gateway to the riches of Asia.

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

In 53 BC. near the Mesopotamian
town of Carrhae,

the Parthians — an empire blending
Persian and Greek cultures —

confronted a Roman army.

The outcome of the battle
seemed beyond doubt.

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

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

There was just one problem.

The Parthian army didn't fight on foot.

The Parthians, they were cavalry.

They were horse archers.

Versatile. Rode like the wind.

What the Romans did
was what the Romans always did.

They took a fixed position.

They were ordered into a hollow square
defending all sides.

But that was nothing 
to the Parthian horse archers

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

They galloped around and around 
and around and around,

shooting as they went.

Thousands and thousands of arrows
loosed into those Romans.

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

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

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

Testudo is Latin for tortoise.

But the Parthians 
had the answer to this tortoise.

They had a hammer 
to break open its shell.

The Parthian hammer was a cataphract,

a Greek word meaning 
"clothed in full armor".

Horse and rider wore heavy coats of mail.

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

At Carrhae, charging cataphracts
broke open the testudo.

Exposing the Romans inside
to more arrow attacks.

Some 30,000 Romans 
were killed or captured.

Parthian losses were minor.

It was one of Rome's 
worst military defeats.

But it may have been 
something else as well.

A Roman historian wrote

that the Parthians dazzled the Romans

with banners made of a beautiful fabric:

silk.

That may only be a legend.

But around the time of Carrhae,

Romans began coveting Chinese silk,

and China began selling silk to Rome

in exchange for fine
Roman glassware and gold.

Inspiring the name
we give Eurasian trade today:

the Silk Road.

But long before Romans and Parthians
fought at Carrhae,

trade between the peoples of Eurasia
were shaping lives,

making new things possible,

and changing the world.

At Carrhae, the Parthians 
won with a style of warfare

that had evolved centuries earlier

and thousands of kilometers away.

On the steppes of Central Asia,

an ocean of land,

where victory in battle, and life itself,

depended on moving 
very far, very fast.

Thousands of years 
before the battle of Carrhae,

a transportation revolution 
took place on these vast plains.

There's good evidence for the existence
of domesticated horses

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

And we actually think that probably
horses were domesticated

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

maybe as early as 4500 BC.

The domestication of the horse

was the first step
towards cavalry warfare.

But the second step 
would be a long time coming.

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

and we have that well established
Tutankhamun's chariot,

which many people have seen
in museum exhibits.

And we know that people
were using chariots in warfare

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

Horses were not used as organized cavalry

until after about 900 BC,

almost 1,000 years 
after chariot warfare began.

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

Chariotry is very difficult to manage.

You have to train horses to work together.

They have to pull this clumsy vehicle

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

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

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

So, why did cavalry come after chariotry?

I think the real reason 
that cavalry waited

is that you needed to have
really three innovations.

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

probably dated between 1300 and 1100 BC.

Shang emperors communicated 
with their ancestors

by heating animal bones or turtle shells
until they cracked

and then interpreting
the patterns made by the cracks.

One of these so-called oracle bones

is carved with the Chinese 
character for bow

— the earliest known image
of a recurved bow.

And in the tomb of Lady Fuhao

— an imperial consort 
and renowned military commander —

archaeologists found more evidence.

It's a thumb cover 
for drawing bow string

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

a hand grip.

The bows themselves are not preserved,

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

The different components of it

probably came from different places
geographically.

Just how far the recurved bow
traveled across Eurasia

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

Wooden bows rarely survive 
burial in the ground,

but Xinjiang's cold, dry climate
preserved one

in a 3,000-year-old tomb.

Other grave goods 
and the human remains

found in the Yanghai tombs

confirmed that the bow was made
by the Scythians,

a highly sophisticated culture
that originated in southern Russia

and migrated on horseback

across the length and breadth of Eurasia.

The true birthplace 
of the recurved composite bow

remains an archaeological mystery.

But there is no doubt 
that 3,000 years ago

anyone who fought on horseback
would have found it revolutionary.

A bow is as strong as it is long.

It derives its strength from its length.

And the recurved bow 
packs the same length

into this very short bow

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

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

And the recurved bows are
technologically quite difficult to make.

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

The recurve all these sinewy bends
— reflex and deflex —

that gives it in-built spring.

But that can only be created
with composite materials.

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

The heart of it is wood, usually beech.

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

and then sinew, the tendons of an animal.

That, when you bash it,

you can tease apart
and get these very fine fibers,

fibers with tremendous tensile strength.

That has elasticity and spring,

and it stops the bow bursting apart.

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

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

How to keep such a powerful bow

made from so many different materials

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

Somewhere in Eurasia, sometime long ago,

some unknown genius discovered the answer.

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

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

and you get this wonderful, viscous glue.

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

was a technological breakthrough
of immense consequences.

It is what enabled
the composite bow to exist.

And in turn the composite bow
was a military revolution

of far-reaching consequences.

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

the horse archer.

The horse archer was able
to shoot from the saddle

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

They were short, compact bows,

and that meant that you 
can shoot them from horseback.

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

I can turn and shoot behind.

It's much more suitable
for shooting on horseback.

Everyone who fought with Eurasian nomads,

whether as enemy or friend,

wanted a recurved composite bow.

By the early first millennium BC,

it was in use from east Asia
to eastern Europe.

A recurved bow gave a horse archer
unprecedented killing power.

But it didn't make him a cavalryman.

Before horse archers could fight
as an effective military force,

they needed a large supply
of identical arrows.

And that didn't exist.

Arrowheads were a variety 
of different sizes and weights.

Some were made of bone.

Some were made out of flint.

Some were made out of bronze.

All of them would be individually made

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

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

would be firing arrows
of slightly different weights

and they might go different distances.

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

But how did it connect 
with the arrowshaft?

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

But what about the disadvantages?

First, the released arrows 
tend to change direction easily.

Second, they are likely to fall off,

One of the technological innovations

was the invention
of the socketed arrowhead.

They were made of bronze, usually,

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

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

could be made from the same mould.

Making socketed projectile points 
was actually a big deal.

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

that you can pour molten metal around

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

Making arrowheads
of the same size and weight

was another Central Asian
technological revolution.

For the first time, mounted warriors
could unleash

coordinated arrow attacks 
on their enemies.

With arrowheads of the same weight,

every time you drew the bow to shoot

you knew that you were firing an arrow

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

so you could determine
the range and the distance well.

And also all of the archers 
that were firing

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

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

With a socketed arrowhead

you can directly insert 
the head into the shaft.

It look like this.

So what are the advantages
of this type of arrowhead?

Its improvements greatly enhanced

the lethality and efficiency
of ancient arrows.

Even in the chaos of war, the shooter 
could aim t the target easily.

He wouldn't loose the direction
by aiming t the target quickly.

This ivention is a giant leap 
in the development of human history.

Archaeologists believe that sometime
in the second millennium BC,

socketed bronze arrowheads
began spreading east

while the composite 
recurved bow spread west.

Sometime around 900 BC,

socketed arrowheads and recurved bows

met in the Tarim Basin area 
of Central Asia,

brought together by traders,
warriors, and migrating nomads.

After about 700 BC, you begin to see
thousands and thousands of arrowheads

and dozens of arrowheads
in a single quiver in a grave.

It's like they're being mass produced.

Bronze socketed arrowheads
turned central Asia into an arsenal,

but cavalries still couldn't exist

until warriors could become soldiers.

It was really the age of heroic warfare

— individuals going out 
and doing great deeds by themselves

and attracting glory for their own name.

And this is the kind of warfare
that's described

in the "Iliad", in the "Odyssey," 
or in the "Rigveda,"

a religious text that's at the deep roots
of modern Hinduism.

What had to change
was a psychological change

in the nature of the warrior.

You had to change
from individuals to units

working under the command
of a commanding general,

who would attack and retreat
upon command.

The psychological change 
from the heroic warrior to the soldier,

probably is a feature of urban warfare.

The armies that were associated

with the great cities 
of Mesopotamia and Iran.

That psychology had to spread 
northward up into the steppes

and be accepted by warriors
in the steppes,

in the same area 
where the recurved bows

and the socketed arrowheads were crossing.

While recurved bows were spreading west

and socketed arrowheads
were spreading east,

the concept of military discipline
was spreading north.

Sometime around 900 BC,

all three combined
in the heart of central Asia.

When those three things came together,

cavalry became a really deadly form
of military force.

A force that would severely test
the ancient world's most powerful armies.

2,000 years ago,

as the Romans pushed east 
to expand their empire,

China was pushing west.

And like the Romans,

the Chinese encountered
a formidable enemy on horseback.

The Xiongnu were nomads
from the Central Asian steppes.

Armed with recurved bows
and socketed arrows,

they fought under commanders 
as a disciplined military force.

They raided Chinese villages

and plundered the growing trade
between East and West,

and no one could stop them.

The Xiongnu was the migraine
of the ancient world for the Chinese.

They simply just kept coming
and they would not stop.

The Xiongnu wanted the finest
material goods produced by the Chinese.

That is why they raided.

Imagine you're a villager in China
and these men come from nowhere.

They come from over the hill 
without warning,

tearing into your village.

They shoot the headman, 
they shoot your husband.

They chase the women out.

There is no hiding place
and there's a flurry of dust and arrows.

They're in and they're out 
and they take the stuff and they go.

China sent its military might
against the Xiongnu.

The famed Terracotta Warriors

reveal the size and power
of Chinese armies.

But the Chinese fought on foot
and from chariots.

Not effective against hit-and-run cavalry.

A Chinese courtier wrote that the Xiongnu
moved like a flock of birds over the land,

impossible to control.

Once mounted warfare really
became deadly and effective,

it became a real problem.

If you're a farmer, the nomads know
where you're going to be all the time.

Your house is in the same place
12 months of the year,

and when your crops become ripe,
you have to harvest,

and the nomads know when that season is.

Whereas when you're trying
to strike them back,

it's impossible to know
where they're going to be

or when they're going to be there.

You have to search to find them.

To beat the Xiongnu, the Chinese 
needed soldiers who could fight like them.

They needed cavalry.

There are manuals of warfare
that were written

to instruct Chinese warriors

on how to counter the tactics
and the methods of the Xiongnu.

Those manuals introduced 
the idea of cavalry

to the Chinese military.

The Chinese military
had not really used cavalry

before about probably 350 BC.

Chinese military, at first 
with some resistance

from the old aristocratic families, said:

"Well, my father fought on a chariot,

"and his father fought on a chariot,

"and I'm gonna fight on a chariot
in my long robes like my ancestors."

But it wasn't long before Chinese warriors

traded their traditional
long, flowing robes

for shorter tunics that didn't get
in the way of fighting on horseback.

Eventually, the practicalities
forced them to get rid of their robes,

to put on riding trousers,

to learn to shoot the bow on horseback,

and they, too, became 
a mighty horse archer force.

Chinese cavalry became experts
at shooting the recurved composite bow,

and a lethal Chinese weapon, the crossbow.

While its cavalry trained,

China agreed to Xiongnu demands
for payments of money and silk

until the year 133 BC,

when Emperor Han Wudi refused to pay.

And sent his army to attack the Xiongnu.

Chinese cavalry defeated the nomads.

And China seized
new territories in the steppes,

pacifying trade routes 
and opening new horizons.

On one hand, 
we have this perpetual conflict

— in Chinese culture would be
the Xiongn and the Han Chinese

that created incessant warfare.

On the other hand, it is this conflict

that demolished physical boundaries.

Even territory boundaries 
were constantly being pushed farther,

pushed back between the two forces.

This was a stimulus for exchanges,

for political changes,

for new ideas, for artistic traditions.

It was also a new era for the Silk Road.

A fortune in Roman gold 
traveled east

in exchange for Chinese silks.

And the Central Asian kingdom of Kushan

made its own fortune 
selling another luxury to China:

jade.

Silk Road caravans passed 
through this border station

on China's western frontier.

So many of them carried Kushan jade

that this station became known 
as the Jade Gate.

Chinese aristocrats
coveted jade for its beauty

and something more.

They believed that jade 
would keep them alive forever.

The ruling elite commissioned 
jade burial suits

to preserve their bodies in the grave.

They believed that, upon death,

all the orifices should be plugged in

to preserve the spirit inside the person.

And this notion of jade

as a material with protective power
in the afterlife,

is further enhanced by the fact

that they built an armor

made of thousands
of pieces of jade.

And of course, if you're the emperor,

your jade armor would be made
from the finest jade

from the western regions.

During the Roman empire,
Silk Road trade flourished

as Chinese, Persian, and Kushan armies

kept the trade routes open across Eurasia.

China had leveled the battlefield

with nomad raiders from the steppes.

But Central Asian horse archers

were about to carve
their names on History.

In the 4th century CE., Europe was invaded
by a Central Asian people

whose name still evokes barbaric cruelty.

The Huns, who fought their way West,
all the way to Rome.

European peoples
like the Goths and Visigoths

— the so-called barbarians —

fled before their onslaught,

and sought refuge in Roman territory.

When the Huns withdrew
from the Roman world,

those barbarian refugees stayed.

And the rest is History.

The western Roman empire 
was plunged into chaos

as barbarian tribes, 
dissatisfied with their lot,

rebelled against Roman authority,

and weak Roman emperors 
failed to crush them.

As Rome declined, migrating 
horse archers, called the Avars,

carved their own country 
out of eastern Europe,

bringing with them 
another Asian military innovation:

the stirrup.

This Chinese statue 
from the fourth century CE,

is the earliest known
depiction of stirrups.

Some 300 years later,

an Avar horseman
was riding with these stirrups

across Hungary.

By the eighth century CE,

the stirrup had spread
from one end of Eurasia to the other

and mounted warfare
was entering a new era.

The importance of the stirrup

relates to what kinds of weapons
can you use from horseback,

and it made it possible to use 
certain kinds of weapons from horseback

that you couldn't use without stirrups.

Those weapons are the long sabre.

You have to lean over and absorb shock,

if you're going to use
a long sabre in battle.

And the stirrups allow the rider 
to absorb the shock of contact

with a stationary target.

The other big weapon 
that was possible with stirrups

was a seated lance held under the arm.

You could stab somebody with the lance
and then remove it,

riding past them without stirrups.

But if you seated it under your arm
and used the lance as a shock weapon,

it would knock you
off the back of the horse

if you didn't have stirrups.

So stirrups made it possible to use
long swords and lances

as shock weapons 
against stationary targets

and keep your seat.

And of course that made it possible
to have really heavy mounted warriors.

Now, the rider becomes 
a unit with the horse.

He's so anchored with his stirrups,
anchored with this,

and then with his long lance

he becomes a single projectile unit.

Man, horse, saddle, lance, 
all locked together for the impact charge.

This was the age of the medieval knight.

A medieval knight's power

came from combining the Asian stirrup
and the ancient shock tactics

of the Persian cataphract
with a European invention:

articulated plate armor.

Strong enough to protect the wearer 
from sword and lance thrusts

while light enough to allow him 
to move freely on horseback

and on foot.

Heavy cavalry had never been
a more potent weapon of war.

Medieval mounted warfare 
could be warfare

that generated
a lot of force on the rider,

a high impact warfare.

In that case, the mounted warrior
is being used

really as a shock weapon
to strike the enemy.

But even Europe's 
formidable mounted knights

would be outfought
by Central Asian cavalry

that burst out of the steppes 
and changed the world.

The largest conquest empire
that the Earth has ever seen

was created by pastoral nomads
from Central Asia.

In the 13th century,

the Mongols conquered 
as far West as Poland

and as far East as the Sea of Japan.

Mongol armies combined the devastating
shock tactics of horse archers

with a highly sophisticated
military organization.

They could gather quickly
and march to distant battlefields.

Then the cavalry could reach
the enemy's battlefield

before they set up defenses

which could deter their enemy
psychologically and strategically.

It is said that the cavalry came suddenly

like something falling fro the sky.

and disappeared quickly

leaving no trace at all.

Western, especially European historians,

wrote that the Mongols appeared 
far away like several spots

but would suddenly gather
before you, like dark clouds.

Unexpected attack was the core

The Mongols have gone down
in History as bloodthirsty killers,

but they were also sophisticated,
open-minded,

often generous conquerors.

They pacified the Silk Road.

Trade between West and East

flourished under 
this Mongol-enforced peace,

the Pax Mongolica.

Before the age of Pax Mongolica,

banditry was a very serious
problem for traders,

for caravans, along the Silk Road.

The reputation of Genghis Khan
and his descendants

created peace and safe passage
along the Silk Road

because bandits were so afraid
of the Mongol soldiers.

The Pax Mongolica,

the control of trade and exchange

that was made possible under the Mongols

connected China with Europe
and with the Near East

in a really close way 
for the first time in world History

And that had a profound effect

on the development
of European civilization.

Protected by the Pax Mongolica,

and anxious for good relations 
with the Mongol empire,

Europeans began traveling East 
as never before.

Merchants, missionaries, and diplomats

flowed East along the trade routes,

bringing back popular Asian goods
like cloth and spices

and tales of the wealth 
and wonders of the East,

some true, some fabulous, 
but all fascinating.

From Europe to China,

Silk Road trade spread 
new knowledge of far-away lands.

The Silk Road made human beings realize

that there are other people out there,

and it opened the eyes 
of the East and the West.

The Italian cities of Venice and Genoa
reaped huge rewards.

Their merchants traveled safely
throughout Eurasia

and founded trading posts on the Black Sea

to receive and pass on Silk Road goods.

Their Silk Road profits funded
magnificent art and architecture.

But their competition frequently
plunged them into war with one another.

In one of these wars, Genoa captured
a prosperous Venetian merchant

named Marco Polo.

Imprisoned by the Genoese, 
Polo dictated the story

of his Silk Road journey to China
to a fellow prisoner.

Today, experts debate whether
Marco Polo really visited China

or was simply retelling stories

he heard from fellow Silk Road travelers.

But there's no debate 
that "The Travels of Marco Polo"

was one of the most influential books
in all of human History.

It tantalized Europe with tales

of China's immense wealth 
and advanced civilization.

And years before Marco Polo was telling
those tales in a Genoese prison,

a Chinese invention was making
its way across Eurasia to the West.

Something created centuries earlier

when an experiment ended very badly.

Ancient Chinese alchemists
prepared potions of lead or mercury

for their aristocratic patrons

who believed that drinking these metals
would help them live forever.

Instead, those concoctions killed them 
or made them insane.

Another deadly combination was sulfur

heated with an organic nitrate
found in soil throughout China,

known today as saltpeter.

When alchemists experimented
with this formula,

it burst into flame,

injuring the alchemists,

(Explosion)

and burning down their laboratory.

From that disaster was born 
a chemical mixture like none other.

It may have failed
as an elixir of immortality,

but it would prove to be
a potent agent of death.

This Chinese Buddhist scroll 
dating from around 950 CE,

depicts demons surrounding
a seated Buddha.

One demon holds what the Chinese called
a "huo quiang", or fire lance.

It's the earliest known image of a weapon

powered by that deadly mixture 
of saltpeter and sulfur.

Known to history as gunpowder.

In the early 13th century,

the Mongols attacked China's Jin Dynasty.

The Jin Dynasty's army fought back 
with exploding gunpowder bombs.

But as the Mongols conquered 
more and more of China,

Han Chinese artillerymen
joined their armies

and marched West, bringing
their gunpowder weapons with them.

The Mongols attacked 
Russian and Polish cities

with exploding fire bombs.

And Europeans found out the hard way 
what gunpowder could do.

By the end of the 13th century,

the formula for gunpowder 
was known as far West as England,

and Europeans were inventing 
their own versions of the new weapons.

It wasn't long before this Chinese 
invention changed European history.

On 26th August, 1346,

near the village of Crecy
in northern France,

the armies of France and England
prepared to fight.

Mounted on their war steeds, 
encased in their armor,

the flower of French nobility 
formed their battle line,

while the English deployed 
a very different force.

Thousands of expert archers.

The French sent their higher Genoese
crossbowmen to attack the English

before French knights annihilated them.

But the English king, Edward III,

had spent years training his longbow men.

And all that training
was about to pay off.

Nothing like this had been seen
on a western battlefield up to this time.

The first time that a volley of arrows 
was unleashed by the archers at Crecy

would have represented 
something completely new

to many of those
in the French army watching it.

A cloud of arrows descending towards them.

It would have been frightening,

and of course the effect
was almost immediate.

Showered by English arrows, 
the Genoese turned and ran,

and according to medieval 
accounts of the battle,

they were also panicked 
by another English weapon.

Giovanni Villani, writing
very soon after the battle,

says in his chronicle that 
so loud and intimidating

was the noise created by the guns

that they thought God was thundering.

"The English guns cast
iron balls by means of fire.

"They made a noise like thunder

"and caused much loss
in men and horses."

Noise like that would have been 
unprecedented

to the soldiers on the battlefield.

Nothing in their lives
could have prepared them

for a a bang of that size

and accompanied by smoke
and acrid sulfur smell,

which would hang in the air.

The impact of which, of course,
they couldn't see

until men around them dropped.

Not even professional soldiers 
like the Genoese

would have experienced anything 
like this before in their lives.

That would have been terrifying,

and it's no wonder
that they scattered and ran.

They turned and fled into the face
of the oncoming French cavalry charge.

The French cavalry were now
coming onto the battlefield

and they were appalled

at these people they'd hired
running away.

And they cursed them
and they rode into them,

and as many Genoese fell to French hooves

as they did to English 
arrows and gunshots.

And the French knights, 
all 12,000 of them,

double the size of the English army,

they came charging down onto the English.

And they, too, fell to the English arrows
and the English gunshot,

and they came again and again and again.

15, 16 times, they came.

And their horses were ripped to shreds

and the men were thrown from their horses.

And those that weren't thrown,

they had the opportunity
that the dagger men rushed in

and they brought these knights down.

This was a moment in History
where the world changed.

It spelled the beginning of the end 
for the medieval knight.

The Battle of Crecy
has gone down in history

as one of the earliest uses 
of gunpowder weapons

on a European battlefield.

Some 500 years after,

it burned down 
a Chinese alchemist's workshop,

gunpowder had become 
destiny's weapon of choice.

After Crecy, it was only a matter of time

until the fates of peoples and nations
were decided by the gun.

Within two centuries,

Europeans would use their powerful 
gunpowder weapons

to dominate the world,

creating empires that would evolve
into today's global trading culture,

which binds people together
by commerce instead of the gun.

But before Europe could embark 
on its empire-building adventure,

its medieval social order

would be shattered
by a catastrophic event.

One that would forge a new Europe
in a crucible of horror.

While guns thundered at Crecy,

something else was spreading
along the Eurasian trade routes.

Something that would kill
tens of millions of Europeans.

An apocalyptic destruction of human life

that would lay the foundations
of the modern world.

At the Battle of Crécy in 1346,

the English won 
an historic victory over France,

helped by a Chinese invention
that had traveled to Europe.

Gunpowder.

And in the same year of 1346,

some 2,000 kilometres east of Crécy,

another battle was taking place 
on the shores of the Black Sea.

A Mongol army had been laying siege
to the Crimean port city of Caffa,

a Silk Road trading post belonging
to the Italian city of Genoa.

The Mongols were masters 
of siege warfare.

But Caffa was still holding out
after more than two years.

Suddenly, the Mongol army was decimated.

Not by Caffa's defenders, 
but by an unknown disease.

The Mongols quickly ended their siege.

But before they left Caffa,

they loaded their siege engines 
with the corpses of their dead

and flung them over the city's walls,

believing that the stench of death
would kill the defenders.

Medieval chronicles say

that Caffa's defenders
did die by the thousands,

but not from the smell of death.

One year later, in 1347,

the same disease that had killed
the Mongols at Caffa

was killing people in Constantinople.

By 1348,it was killing people 
across Western Europe.

By 1350, it was killing people
as far away as Greenland.

And terrified Europeans
had given it a name.

The Black Death.

In just under a decade, 
from 1347 to 1356,

the Black Death killed a
t least 25 million Europeans.,

one third of Europe's population.

Today, most scholars believe

that the Black Death was 
an outbreak of bubonic plague.

that was transmitted to humans
by infected fleas living on rats.

And we believe
that it spread across Eurasia

by hitching a ride with armies,
ships, and caravans

along trade routes 
that were already ancient

by the time of the Black Death.

Micro-organic travelers of all kinds

have moved across Eurasia
for thousands of years.

A bio-migration that has had 
as big an impact on history

as the more famous exchanges
of new technologies and luxury goods.

And as a recent discovery shows,

tiny living things 
moving along the Silk Road

brought life as well as death.

We were putting together some new methods

of looking for early agriculture,

and for that we needed to do a survey

of all the finds of early crops in Europe.

When you looked at a map of all of Europe,

then you could see
there were these Chinese crops

in small numbers very early on in Europe.

"Very early on" was around 2,000 BC,

when a Chinese grain
called broomcorn millet

appears in the Eastern European
archaeological record.

The actual crop itself
will decay or be eaten,

but rather fortunately,

if it's cooked and over-burnt,
it turns to carbon.

That will stay in the archaeological
record for a long time.

In the Chinese province of inner Mongolia,

archaeologists are studying
the origins of broomcorn millet,

one of the world's oldest domestic crops.

We are looking at a broomcorn millet field
of almost 16 acres

The cultivation of broomcorn millet
in this place

dates back to nearly 8000 years ago.

It's the earliest area of human-cultivated
broomcorn millet in the world.

After broomcorn millet's birth
in this place,

it spread to the West from the East.

It spread to Europe.

Since it originated from the East
and then spread to Europe,

it can be regarded 
as an important contribution

of our Eastern civilization
to the Western counterpart.

But it isn't clear just how and why

broomcorn millet travelled thousands
of kilometres across Eurasia,

through some of the world's
harshest environments,

all the way to Europe.

Millet's long journey may have begun
simply because it travelled so well.

Millets are essentially cereals, 
but they're very small.

And because they have very small grains,

they're hardy and they're tough,

and they can grow quite fast.

Broomcorn millet, at a push,

can get from seed to seed in 45 days.

You can plant a seed in the ground

and 45 days later, 
in the right conditions,

you may have plants.

That's incredibly fast.

So, if you're moving around parts of Asia,

where, on the one hand, 
there's a long winter,

a short growing season,

and you can't particularly r
ely on rainfall,

then something that gets a move on
in terms of its growth cycle

is very valuable.

There are accounts of communities
that are on horseback

for quite a lot of the time
and herding animals and so forth,

but for that short season of the year

that millet grows in,

they can actually 
sow the millet on horseback,

trample it in with the horse's feet,

and then either leave 
a few teenagers there

to scare the birds off 
for a couple of months,

come back two months later, 
and harvest the crops.

Millet was a highly mobile grain,

but there wasn't any evidence

of how it might have travelled
from its home in northern China.

Until archaeologists found signs 
of millet cultivation around 2500 BC

in the foothills of the Tian Shan
Mountains in central Asia.

At that point we asked ourselves,

"Well, what is it about these foothills?"

You know, "Why the foothills?"

Clearly, it's about water.

If one travels across the centre of Asia,

one realizes why water is a key.

And wherever you are in Asia, 
it can be very dry, of course.

But if one goes uphill to those foothills,

then one has somewhere

where there will be streams
running off the mountains and water.

Archaeologists found that around 1,000 BC,

millet farmers left theTian Shan foothills

and their reliable water supply

and began moving
into much harsher environments.

We can see the confidence of farmers

spreading out from where
the water is really safe

to areas where you have to know more

about the water and the landscape 
and the geography,

both into the steppes to the north
and to the desert to the south.

Millet's local migrations
may have linked it with the world.

Migrating millet farmers
in search of water

may have settled near trade routes.

And long-distance travelers
would have chosen routes

near reliable sources of food and water.

I think very much 
those traders are definitely working

through networks
that are already centuries old.

It's at least a millennium
before you see something crystallizing

that you can start calling the Silk Road.

Another discovery has revealed 
that this ancient grain migration

wasn't only from East to West.

Wheat was transmitted from West to East,

arrived in China and was accepted
as our main staple.

This reflects the transaction
between Eastern and Western cultures.

The Eurasian steppe, acting as a route

for early exchanges between
Eastern and Western cultures.

is the predecessor
of the ancient Silk Road.

Ethnic migration, the fusion of cultures,

and the flow of trade
are ll embedded in this road.

Trading millet and wheat
between China and Europe

may have done much more than feed people.

It may also have enabled
profound social change.

Seeds germinate at one time of year

and are harvested another time of year,

and that's kind
of hardwired into their biology.

And so farming is a one-season activity,

and there are things going on
at other times of year.

And during the second millennium BC,

a number of societies are doing something

which is quite radically different,

and that is putting more
than one season in a single year.

Crops like millet 
are really useful for that,

in that if you are a western farmer,

with wheat and barley fields

reaching maturity during the summer,

and you think

"Right, with the same plot of land,
"I want to increase production.

"And so, I want another crop
after I've harvested the first crop."

You can't do a long season, 
large-grain crop

like wheat and barley again,

so, something that's short and sharp
like millet

you can tag on to the end of it

and catch another season 
before the winter's set in.

Interestingly, when you get to China, 
it's the converse.

You have this short season crop
already there,

and by rearranging your life,

you can bring a long season crop
such as wheat and barley in at that stage.

So the implications are, 
with the same plot of land,

you could basically get 
two harvests rather than one.

So, two sets of calories rather than one.

It may release some of the community
to not farm at all

and occupy roles within cities,
or as craftspeople, or leaders.

If we look at the second millennium BC,

what we certainly see

is at the same time 
as multi-cropping is there,

then there are a lot of the community,

are not farmers, 
but instead metalworkers,

or kings, or priests, or something else.

And so what we see evidence of

is multi-cropping allows a non-farming
sector within the community.

So, what we have is a small, 
not very impressive-looking seed,

but because of the way it grows
and because of its biology,

it has a massive impact

in changing the productivity

of the heartlands of western farming.

So, those western farmlands
could, in the same area,

produce two crops rather than one,

and that enabled a whole series of things

that we associate 
with the word "civilization."

Finding Chinese millet in Europe
and European wheat and barley in China

suggests that long before the Silk Road,

East and West were introducing 
one another to new foods,

and that the movement of crops

may have helped create
the earliest East-West trade routes.

And in the deserts of far western China,

archaeologists
have discovered another way

living organisms
could travel the Silk Road.

This is Xuanquanzhi relay station,

an archaeological site 
near the town of Dunhuang,

a major stopping point on the Silk Road.

2,000 years ago during the Han dynasty,

Xuanquanzhi was a very busy
and very cosmopolitan place.

According to records 
written on bamboo and wood

unearthed from Xuanquanzhi

Xuanquanzhi was not only serving
as a relay station,

but also as a place to receive 
caravans and government officials.

During the Han Dinasty, 
the major officials received here

included the king of Kholan Kingdom
from the Western Regions,

the king of the Wusun, 
also called the Issedones

and the king of the Kangu, 
also called the Sogdians.

At most, the number of received guests
would be over 1000.

Therefore, this place was filled up
with a mixture of people from all regions.

It would be used for merchants,

and it would also be used
for government business.

People could travel long distances

knowing that there was somewhere
they could stay

be refreshed and recover,
change their horses,

and then move on
to the next relay station.

The wonderful thing about
the Xuanquanzhi trading post

was that it's in a part of the country
that is not built up now,

and the environment, very, very dry
and often very cold in the winter,

means that things
are preserved there very well.

So, a lot of the things 
- inside that trading post -

have survived instead of decomposing.

Excavators were especially excited
to find something

that perhaps only
an archaeologist could love:

the 2,000-year-old equivalent 
of toilet paper.

In China, they wrote back,
in the Han dynasty times,

how they would have a stick 
with cloth wrapped on the end

for people to wipe themselves with.

There were quite a few 
of these sticks thrown into the latrine

as if people discarded them
in there when they'd finished.

These sticks have been found
at some other excavations in China as well

but what's great about this relay station

is we still have the cloth
wrapped on the end

and we still have the human faeces on.

So, we scraped off 
the dried faeces from the cloth

and took them to the lab.

We found four different
species of parasite

in those who used this latrine.

Two of the species are spread by faeces

contaminating your food
or your hands or your drink:

roundworm and whipworm.

Another species was a kind of tapeworm

that they probably acquired
by eating raw or undercooked pork.

And then, we found
the really exciting find,

which was the Chinese liver fluke.

This is a small flatworm

that lives in eastern and southern
China and in Korea.

It can only survive in marshy, wet places.

But here, we found it 1500 kilometres away
from anywhere that has it in modern times.

So, it wasn't what we expected to find.

It was brilliant that we could find it
on the Silk Road.

The liver fluke requires a lifecycle

where it passes through freshwater snails,

and through small fish
and then, bigger fish.

If you cook the fish, 
then you don't get the liver fluke.

But if you eat the fish raw, 
then it hatches out in your stomach,

migrates through your body, 
crawls into the liver,

and then develops there.

There was no way that people
in the area of this relay station

could have caught it 
in that particular area

because it was far too dry.

There were no lakes.

There were no freshwater snails
and fish for them to infect.

The discovery of the liver fluke
is of great importance.

It indicates that the caravans 
or government servants

brought their excrement,
as well as diseases ,here

over thousands of kilometers
of travel to this place, Xuanquan station.

With state of the art overseas analysis,

we are comparing it with similar
evidence originating in Europe.

to figure out whether the liver was spread

from China's eastern 
coastal area to Europe

or if it was spread from Europe to China

or if the disease spread 
between these two areas.

We are doing some further research.

The finds at Xuanquanzhi have shown

that humans could carry diseases
long distances along the Silk Road.

Another discovery has revealed
what could happen when they did.

In 2009, German scientists began
investigating a puzzling discovery

in the Bavarian town of Aschheim.

About 20 years ago a graveyard was found 
which contained more than 400 individuals.

We dated it back to a period from 
around the 5th century to the 7th century.

It was exciting for us 
that there were a lot of graves

that contained more than one person

around 20 graves 
where 2 to 5 people were buried

Aschheim looked like any other cemetery

that we would expect to find here

except for these multiple burials

These people were buried together
in one grave and that made us curious.

And we asked ourselves why exactly

these people were buried
together in one grave

The Aschheim mass burial 
was an archaeological enigma,

but there was one crucial clue.

The bodies had been buried
during the 6th century CE.

In the 6th century, a terrifying illness
called the Plague of Justinian

ravaged the Eastern Roman Empire.

It killed 30 to 50 million people
in Europe, Asia, and Africa,

nearly half of all the people on Earth.

Historians tell us that thousands
of people were lying on the street

and that tens of thousands

were dying at the peak of the plague,

so many that they could not be buried.

The corpses were thrown 
into watchtowers and sealed inside

because no one knew what to do with them.

So, this epidemic is quite comparable
to the Black Death.

We asked ourselves what
the multiple burials were about

and chose to screen for plague pathogen

The Justinian plague arrived
in Constantinople on ships from Egypt,

but what the disease was

and where it came from 
remained unknown.

The team investigating
Aschheim's mass burial

hoped its bones might reveal the answer.

We tested more than 20 individuals,
analysing their DNA

and found small fragments 
of plague DNA in four individuals,

Just on this young woman, 
on one young woman,

there was enough DNA
to be able to analyse it really well.

And that is this individual.

This woman has quite open skull sutures.

This is how we know 
that she died quite young.

We would estimate this individual's age 
at approximately early 20s.

In this case, we would see

if we could find the plague pathogen

and to do that we prefer to use teeth

like these teeth here.

Teeth with a lot of root

because the root contains DNA

and because it is embedded in the jaw.

It is well protected there, 
and the DNA is preserved there best.

And then we took this tooth 
to the laboratory

to extract and examine the DNA
with chemical methods.

And when we had looked at the DNA 
of this individual

we determined that
we had actually found Yersini pestis,

the plague pathogen, the Black Death's.

What we could also determine

is that this pathogen did not develop
in Europe but evolved in Asia

Studies like the Aschheim DNA project

have concluded that 800 years
before the Black Death,

a plague traveled the Silk Road

and that centuries later,
the Black Death followed it in its path.

Most scholars now agree

that the Black Death
originated in central Asia

and that it first reached Europe

on Italian merchant ships 
returning from the East.

The Black Death killed 
with incredible speed.

Victims had only 
a week to a few hours to live.

Entire towns and monasteries 
were wiped out,

and no one knew what to do.

It may have spread about five miles a day,

which is a lot faster than a lot 
of modern bubonic plague outbreaks.

Whether it was because of the rate
at which people fled from it

that spread it faster than it might 
otherwise have been.

And it certainly was something

that had a dramatic effect
on people in Europe.

They all wrote about it,
they were all scared of it.

So, they had some concept of contagion

and the idea that the disease

could be spread
from one person to another,

but they didn't know how.

They had no idea about bacteria

or the spread of microorganisms
at that stage,

so, they hadn't worked out 
how a disease was spread.

But they just realized that one person
seemed to be able

to spread it to the rest of their family,

so, they realized something
must be happening there.

Baffled physicians consulted the works

of ancient authorities like Hippocrates,

who lived four centuries
before the birth of Jesus,

and Galen, who lived 
two centuries after Jesus' death.

Hippocrates and Galen believed
that illness was a result

of an imbalance among
four so-called humours:

blood, phlegm, 
yellow bile, and black bile.

The theory was that if you had
your four humours in balance

— your blood, your phlegm, 
your black bile and your yellow bile —

then you'd be healthy.

If they came out of balance

or if you had corruption 
of one of your humours,

then that would make you unwell.

So, the treatments that doctors used

were largely based on their understanding
of humoural theory.

So, at the beginning, they tried
the normal treatments

of dietary modification
and bloodletting and baths and so on,

but they had no effect.

They believed that bad vapours 
were coming up from the ground,

making people ill, 
affecting their humours.

They believed that a strong 
southerly wind was a bad thing

that made a lot of people ill,

that it was a combination 
of the alignments of the planets,

because they believed in astrology 
and its effect on your risk of disease.

They really didn't have a structured 
medical approach to how to deal with it.

It took everyone off guard.

No one knew how to deal with it.

The doctors were effectively powerless.

Some citizens attempted another cure.

Jews in Europe suffered 
fewer deaths from plague.

That may have been because
they were socially isolated

and practiced better hygiene 
than the general population.

But surviving the Black Death

cost thousands 
of European Jews their lives.

All across plague-stricken Europe,

the already age-old Christian
prejudice against Jews

exploded into murderous hatred.

They believed that people 
with leprosy or Jewish people

may have actually exacerbated the plague
by poisoning people.

So, this is a sign of how panicked
and how worried everybody was,

that they were thinking of really 
quite bizarre kind of interpretations

as to why everybody was becoming sick.

While mobs murdered Jews,

physicians tried to stop the Black Death.

When traditional theories of disease failed,

they resorted to studying the disease itself.

They were desperate to understand
what was causing the Black Death,

how it spread, and how to treat it.

Slowly, they found answers.

They tried various treatments, 
but no medicines had any effect.

But that's why they moved over time

to trying to restrict
the contact of people,

burning the clothes 
of people that had died

rather than giving them to other people.

And they realized that the clothes 
and spread of people

was an important way 
they could stop the spread of disease.

So. we have the introduction
of concept of quarantine,

where people weren't allowed
to move from one area to another

if there was a plague outbreak

and also that when sailors
in ships arrived in a port,

they may have to stay
in a quarantined area

for a certain number of days

until they were found
to be clear of the disease,

and then they could move inland 
and actually go into town.

Over time, this new 
trial and error approach

would spawn a medical revolution.

Some 200 years after the Black Death,

the brilliant physician Andreas Vesalius

published meticulous studies
of the human body

that exploded ancient 
and medieval theories

and gave birth to modern anatomy.

Europe's battle against the Black Death

taught lessons that helped 
create modern medicine.

And even centuries later,

the Black Death still has much to teach.

So, this is a skull of a man
who survived the Black Death

and died in Cambridge
in the later part of the 1300s.

We know he survived the Black Death

because we have a radiocarbon date
that's shown when he died,

and we know he was 
a fairly old individual.

One of the things we're doing here

is a project looking at the effect
of the bubonic plague

upon the British population,
specifically in Cambridge.

And what we're trying to find out

is what are different 
about people who survived

compared with people who died.

That way, we can work out

how the Black Death really changed 
the population of Britain

and what our population
might have been like

had half of us not died
in the mid-1300s.

And to do that, 
we're looking at the genetics,

the height, the health,
and many other aspects of the skeletons

that we find who died 
before the Black Death

and the ones who died afterwards

so we can see the effect 
of this epidemic upon people in Britain.

So, what we're hoping to find out
is what is different

about the genes
of the people that survived.

Did they somehow have a better resistance

to bubonic plague than other people,

or was it just mere chance

as to who survived and who died?

Those who did survive led better lives

as the greatest horror of their age
gave way to a new era.

The Black Death had decimated
Europe's workforce.

Desperate for labour, the nobility
had to compete for surviving workers

by offering higher wages.

Over the next few centuries,

we see a complete rebalancing 
in the population.

So, the poor hungry farmers
who didn't have enough land

were suddenly in a different position.

The farmers around them had died.
1:25:25

Their income could go up because
they could farm much more land.

And so, there was less poverty
and famine among the farmers.

Opportunities increased
due to the shortage of workers.

Women could now be scribes

and hold other jobs
formerly reserved for men.

The European middle class was born.

The fact that we then had 
fewer people able to do manual labour

means that not only
did the price of their labour go up

so then they had better income.

It also means that there seems
to have been a number of inventions

made specifically 
for labour-saving devices.

We find the introduction
of the spinning wheel.

We find horizontal looms.

We find fulling mills.

We had blast furnaces, 
mechanized tools,

we have three-masted ships

that could hold a lot more cargo
with only a small number of more sailors,

so it's a much more efficient
way of trade.

So, over the next 200 years or so,

we see big improvements in mechanization.

And the fact that fewer people around

meant that these things
may have been invented

because of the shortage of people 
following the Black Death.

Newly affluent Europeans

created a bigger market 
for exotic imported goods.

Especially for one faraway luxury

traded since ancient times 
along the Silk Road:

Spices.

In the late Middle Ages,

Asian spices like pepper, 
cinnamon, and cloves

were highly valuable commodities.

In London, dockworkers' bonuses
were paid with Indonesian cloves.

In Venice, people
bought houses with pepper.

Anyone brave enough to seek out spices

could get very, very rich.

And trading in spices meant travelling 
the trade routes between East and West.

Venetian merchants traveled those routes

and dominated the spice trade.

Europe had to pay 
whatever Venice demanded.

Venice became 
a fabulously wealthy city,

while the rest of Europe
grumbled and paid.

Meanwhile, China was also making 
epic voyages to the spice lands

and developing some of the world's 
most advanced maritime technology.

During the 13th and 14th centuries,

foreign visitors to China were awed

by the size and sophistication 
of Chinese vessels.

In the year 1345, 
the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta

wrote of seeing massive ships 
that could carry a thousand men,

the only ships big enough

to make the long journey
from China to India.

And Marco Polo told of sailing
on a Chinese spice trading vessel

in the year 1292 CE.

The experience deeply impressed him.

He claimed the Chinese ship he sailed on

was capable of holding 
5,000 to 6,000 baskets of pepper,

a much bigger cargo than the spice ships 
of his native Venice could hold.

And that his vessel 
was escorted by smaller ships

that could carry 
a thousand pepper baskets.

Polo embarked on his journey 
from the Chinese port of Quanzhou,

a place he described as teeming
with hundreds of vessels

from China and from distant lands.

But he didn't report his vessel's
exact dimensions,

leaving historians to wonder
if he'd exaggerated the ship's size

or even if he'd actually sailed on it.

And then, in 1973,

Chinese archaeologists
found a shipwreck in Quanzhou Harbour.

The ship had a capacity of 200 tons

and displacement of over 400 tons.

The collection of excavated relics

revealed that the wrecked ship
was carrying a lot of spices

more than 2,000 kilograms of spice,

along with some other things

such as Chinese chess 
and some exotic goods.

Based on these findings, 
archaelogists concluded

that this ship was returning
from Southeats Asia

The Quanzhou Ship was carrying rare woods
from Java and Cambodia,

frankincense from Arabia,

even ambergris from Somalia.

It sank in the year 1277,

just 15 years before 
Marco Polo visited Quanzhou.

And its design and construction
were remarkably advanced for their time,

featuring watertight compartments
and other innovations

centuries before 
Western vessels had them.

The hull was easily damaged

In case of hull damage, 
if the ship was built

with watertight bulkhead compartments
and water channels in its lower hull

the ship would be able
to survive the damage.

If the opening was quite small
and the water came into the ship

you only needed to close
the water channels

near the the forward-most
and at-most bulkheads

to keep the leak inside one compartment.

It gave the crew enough time

to move the cargo to other cabins 
and repair the leakage

in the damaged compartment immediately.

In addition,
in the stern part of the ship,

we found a rudder hole.

Back in the Five Dynasties,
before the Song Dinasty,

our shipbuilders had invented
an elevating rudder,

By raising or lowering this rudder,

one could control 
the swing fluctuation and direction

while operating the ship.

Several hundred years later,

many foreign sailing ships
started using this tecnhology.

35 metres long and 10 metres wide,

the Quanzhou ship could have been

one of the smaller vessels
that escorted Marco Polo's bigger ship.

And there's also evidence

that very large Chinese
trading vessels did exist.

This park in the Chinese city of Nanjing

is built on the remains of a shipyard
dating from the 14th century.

When they excavated that shipyard,

archaeologists found 
two giant rudder posts,

each of them over 10 metres long.

Chinese records speak 
of giant treasure ships

carrying trade goods
on epic journeys to faraway lands.

Commanded by the distinguished 
admiral Zheng He,

a Chinese armada called the Great Fleet

made seven voyages
between the years 1405 and 1433.

From Liugiagang
in China's Jiangsu Province,

the fleet sailed on diplomatic missions
to southeast Asia,

the great Indian seaport 
of Calicut, Arabia,

and along Africa's east coast,

forging relationships that linked
seaborne and overland trade.

Over 300 ships carrying nearly 30,000 men

sailed on the first of those expeditions.

Chronicles of those voyages claim

that the largest of Zheng He's ships.

were over 130 metres long
and over 50 metres wide.

But marine engineers doubt

ships that big 
would have been seaworthy.

The American clipper ship
"Great Republic" launched in 1853,

was 102 metres long and 16 metres wide.

In 1872, her leaking hull 
sank her in a hurricane.

The "Wyoming," built in 1909, 
was 110 metres long.

Its extreme length made it
structurally unstable in heavy seas.

In 1924, the "Wyoming" sank 
during a storm.

If Zheng He's treasure ships were as big
as Chinese chronicles claim,

they would have been
as long and wide as the "Wyoming"

and longer than the "Great Republic."

When we consulted some shipbuilders

they tell that the size 
of the Treasure Ship

was beyond the maximum capability

that we could possibly make even today.

Therefore, more archaeological discoveries

and stronger evidence 
are needed to verify the truth

about Zhen He's Treasure Ship

and prove what was written 
in the ancient literature.

Whatever the size of its ships,

the Great Fleet deeply impressed
maritime trading nations

from Indochina to Africa.

China seemed poised to dominate
the coveted spice trade.

But in 1433, Admiral Zheng He died.

About the same time,

the Chinese court began losing interest
in long-distance voyaging,

and Chinese seafaring 
entered a long decline.

Scarcely more than 100 years
after the Great Fleet's last voyage,

the emperor declared overseas
voyaging a crime,

and it wasn't long before east-west trade
suffered another blow.

By the middle of the 15th century,

the once-mighty Byzantine Empire
was in deep decline.

The Ottoman Turks, descendants
of central Asian nomads,

had conquered most of its territory.

The Byzantine emperor ruled only
his capital of Constantinople.

In the Spring of 1453,

the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II
laid siege to Constantinople.

The city was defended
by a mere 7,000 troops.

Mehmed had an army of some 80,000 men,

but Mehmed wasn't sure he would win.

The city's massive walls 
had withstood sieges for a thousand years.

Protected by those walls,

Constantinople's defenders
held out for weeks.

But Mehmed didn't just have an army.

He had a mega-weapon:

a bronze cannon nearly 10 metres long

with a barrel nearly a metre in diameter 
and 20 centimetres thick.

It's said it could hurl
a 450-kilogramstone cannonball

more than 1 1/2 kilometres.

This behemoth and nearly 70 smaller cannon

bombarded Constantinople's walls
day and night,

damaging them so badly

that the Turks succeeded
in taking the city.

The fall of Constantinople
was a devastating blow to Europe.

Constantinople had been one of 
Christendom's oldest and holiest cities.

Now it was the capital 
of a powerful Muslim empire,

renamed Istanbul from a Turkish word
meaning "find Islam."

From their new capital of Istanbul,

the Ottomans now controlled 
access to the Black Sea

and the eastern Mediterranean.

Europeans merchants 
were cut off from the Silk Road.

For nearly 100 years, 
Europeans had been growing wealthier

and more and more eager 
to buy Asia's luxury goods.

Europe needed to find 
new routes to the East.

And within 50 years 
of Constantinople's fall, it would.

At the Battle of Crécy 
and the siege of Constantinople,

an ancient Chinese invention, gunpowder,

had helped transform medieval Europe.

Now, another Chinese invention
and European innovation

would help transform the future.

Sometime in China's ancient past,

some unknown person
invented something new.

By pounding plants 
until they fell apart...

then boiling them in water...

and then collecting the boiled plants
on a screen and letting them dry...

making what the ancient Chinese
called "refuse fibre"...

and what we know today as paper,

an invention so influential

that some believe the Silk Road 
should have been named for it.

"I would call it the Paper Road,

because I think paper 
was far more important than silk,

and that, you know silk 
is a very nice fabric.

It's very strong; it's beautiful,
lustrous, and stuff like that.

But it didn't have the impact 
on world history,

I would argue, that paper did.

The Chinese believe
that the court eunuch Cai Lun

invented paper around the year 100
of the Common Era

and started using it for writing then.

Chinese archaeologists, however,

have discovered examples of paper
in the deserts of western China

that pre-date this by several centuries,

perhaps three centuries or even more.

The Chinese probably first used
the new invention as a wrapping material,

while they kept writing
the old-fashioned way,

on strips of bamboo.

You can write so many characters
on a strip of bamboo

that's maybe 40 centimetres long, 
or you know, 12 inches.

The problem is, if you want 
to write a novel, for example,

or a long historical text,

you need to have a whole pile
of those bamboo strips

and keep them together in order.

So, that becomes heavy.

Paper, which is made from plant materials,
from the cellulose in plants,

can be made anywhere that plants grow.

So, you can make it virtually
anywhere in the world,

out of virtually anything.

By the early centuries of the Common Era,

China was using paper
in all the ways we do now,

even as facial tissue and toilet paper.

And it wasn't long before
it traveled West along the Silk Road.

A journey that began as a pilgrimage.

The transformation of paper
into a writing material

came just at the time that Buddhism
was introduced to China.

Buddhists of China were interested

in finding the original writings
about the Buddha

and would travel to India to collect them.

And so, it's thought

that the Chinese Buddhist 
monks and missionaries

brought knowledge 
of paper and papermaking

with them to India

to collect these Buddhist scriptures

and brought them back to China.

Chinese Buddhists travelled
to India along the Silk Road,

detouring around the Himalayas
through China's western desert

and turning the Silk Road oasis
of Dunhuang

into a magnificent Buddhist library.

In a desert without plants,

Dunhuang monks made paper
from rope and rags

and copied thousands of Buddhist texts
they'd brought from India.

Thanks to Chinese Buddhism

and to paper's obvious usefulness 
for keeping commercial accounts,

papermaking began to spread 
throughout Asia.

As the Chinese then disseminated 
Buddhism throughout East Asia,

they took knowledge 
of paper and papermaking

to such places as Korea, Japan, Vietnam.

We know that this is certainly

before the time of the Muslim 
conquest of Central Asia,

which occurred
around the year 700.

In the eighth century CE,

Arab armies fighting in the name 
of a new religion, Islam,

thrust deep into Central Asia
and clashed with Chinese forces.

During the same century,

the Arab world began making its own paper,

something that's traditionally 
been explained

with a story about an iconic victory
of Arabs over Chinese.

The Battle of Talas was a battle
that took place

between Muslim forces and Chinese forces,

in central Asia in 751.

According to the historian Atha Al Abi

who lived something
like 250 years after the event,

he says that at this battle,

Chinese papermakers were captured

and that is how Muslims
learned about papermaking.

It seems to me that this is a sort of nice

but not terribly believable story.

Why would papermakers 
have been in the Chinese army?

It's not as if, when you needed
a sheet of paper, then you said,

"Please, make me a sheet of paper."

It's more likely that Arabs 
learned about paper

by trading along the Silk Road

and recognized
its immense practical value.

Middle Easterners could write 
on Egyptian papyrus,

but they had to buy papyrus from Egypt.

Paper they could make themselves.

By the end of the eighth century,

Arab papermaking was well underway.

The break-out moment for paper was 
when Muslim bureaucracy encountered it.

Those bureaucrats ran
the Abbasid Caliphate,

founded around 750 CE.

From their capital in Baghdad,

the Abbasids ruled
the greatest empire of its day.

The administrators of the empire
had responsibility to keep records

about who was paid what, 
who owed what,

who owned what, who had to do what.

Less than a century of Muslims
first encountering it in central Asia,

they were already making it
in the capital of the empire.

And they quickly began using paper
for more than keeping records.

In eighth-century Baghdad
and across the Arab world,

the availability of cheap paper

made possible one of humanity's
greatest literary eras.

Baghdad becomes a centre of learning

where books are written,

books are translated from other languages.

People wrote books
on every possible subject,

not only on words 
in the traditions of the Prophet,

but also cookbooks, popular literature, 
science, astronomy, geography,

translations of Greek books 
on mathematics, all sorts of subjects.

And this explosion of learning 
has long been known,

but it's never been appreciated

that it was based 
on the availability of paper.

During the Middle Ages,

an intellectual Golden Age
flowered in Arab Spain.

Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars

collaborated to translate, 
teach, and preserve

great works of science,
mathematics, and philosophy.

One story about the library 
of the Cordovan Caliphate in Spain

in the year 960 or 970
or something like that

says that there were 400,000 books
in the royal library.

Now, that probably is an exaggeration.

So, let's take a zero off it and say
that there were 40,000 books,

but that is still more than ten times
the number of books

that was in the largest
university library in Europe,

several centuries later.

Because libraries in Europe 
were all on parchment

and the libraries in the Muslim world
were on paper.

Spain was probably where 
Europeans first encountered paper.

But Italian merchants
were also discovering it

through long-distance trade.

This is a time when 
Christian merchants from Europe,

from such cities 
as Pisa and Genoa, Venice,

are travelling to the cities 
of the Muslim world

such as Cairo and Damascus

in search of exotic items,

goods like spices and silks,

and they undoubtedly encountered paper.

Our first European use of paper 
would've been by merchants

who had seen Muslims
using this stuff

and must have brought it back.

But at first, many Europeans
were suspicious of paper.

It seemed so flimsy compared 
with parchmentsmade from animal skins.

The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II,
for example, was familiar with paper

but didn't think much 
of its qualities for preservation

or didn't know how long it would last,

so, he ordered all documents 
that had previously been copied on paper

to be recopied onto parchment.

Similarly, the Abbot of Cluny,
Peter the Venerable,

knew about paper but said,

"Oh, it was really disgusting 
that they made this stuff

"from vile materials rather than 
the pure reeds of the riverbed,"

— meaning papyrus —

"or the skins of pure animals."

And he was worried that paper
could be made

from dirty or unclean things.

But Europe's growing middle class

was not concerned
with paper's cleanliness.

A single parchment book needed 
200 animal skins and cost a fortune.

And as it happened, geography
had given Europeans the edge

in mass-producing paper.

The rivers in the Middle East 
tended not to flow fast enough

to create enough water power,

whereas the greater variability 
in European terrain

meant that you could harness
the water power more efficiently

to make more pulp more quickly.

Europeans also had 
a ready supply of linen rags.

In the late Middle Ages,

a new way of processing linen
had been developed

using something called the flax breaker,

which meant that there was
a lot more linen being made from flax

and made into people's underwear.

Linen underwear was lot more comfortable
than woollen underwear

because it didn't scratch,

and so, linen became very, very popular

and became the source 
of rags for papermaking.

By the late Middle Ages,
Italian hill towns

like Fabriano and Amalfi

had become Europe's
leading paper manufacturers

shipping tons of paper
to businessmen throughout Europe.

And this mass production of cheap paper

was changing Europe
in other profound ways.

One of the most interesting
documents that I've seen,

or seen photographs of,

is a poem by Petrarch, the Italian poet.

It's on paper and it is crossed out.

He wrote out the poem 
and then he changed his mind

and he put in a better word.

So, he was able to compose, 
in effect, on paper,

as opposed to composing it in his mind,

repeating it over and over again 
until he got it perfect

and then putting down a fair copy 
on the final expensive material.

This is something
you wouldn't do on parchment

because it was too expensive.

You'd have to scrape it off.

Paper allowed all sorts
of new ways of doing things.

It seems to me that it's no accident

that the art of drawing really develops
in the 15th century in Italy.

Paper allowed an artist
to actually do a drawing

and work out an idea in front of his eyes

and preserve it for later use, 
or to look at it and say,

"I'll change this; I'll change that."

And save it and make
a copy of the drawing.

And we know 
that Michelangelo, for example,

did drawings of his drawings

or did drawings
of other people's drawings.

This wouldn't have been possible
with parchment

because it was too expensive
to waste in this way.

Meanwhile, in Asia, the country
that had given paper to the world

had developed a technology
that had turned book production

from a laborious job for scribes
into a standardized process:

Printing.

In the ninth century CE, 
the time of the Tang Dynasty,

Chinese printers were printing book pages
carved from a single block of wood.

The world's oldest printed book

is this Chinese copy
of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra

printed in the year 868 CE

Some 400 years later, around 1300,

Asian woodblock printing 
had traveled the Silk Road to the West.

But by then, China had invented
a more efficient way of printing.

Instead of carving a single wooden block
into a book page,

printers engraved pieces of clay
with individual Chinese characters,

baked the clay letters to harden them,

and then arranged them in a frame
to create a book page.

The earliest known use of moveable type.

And then, in the year 1440,

Johannes Gutenberg,

a goldsmith in the German city of Mainz,

came up with a new way of printing.

Gutenberg began with a screw press,

a wooden screw that pushed 
a plate down on a flat surface

invented by the Romans to make wine

and used in Gutenberg's time
to make woodblock prints.

He made his own moveable type

by punching letters out of metal

and casting them using a hand mould
he'd invented himself.

He devised a system to quickly
composing lines of type in trays.

And he invented 
a new oil-based printing ink

that transferred easily to metal type.

Gutenberg's new printing process

was much faster and more efficient 
than Asian printing techniques.

But its biggest advantage 
may simply have been this:

The Latin alphabet.

In Chinese you have many characters,

and so you have to have 
like 6,000 individual characters

in order to print something.

In Europe, where you have
the Latin alphabet

with individual letters
that are not connected to each other

and you only have 26 of them

and you have upper case and lower case,
capital letters and small letters,

you don't really need that many
to write out a text.

If ever a new technology
re-wrote human History,

it was Gutenberg's printing press.

Within a few years of Gutenberg's
first printing run,

millions of Europeans
were reading the Bible

and other best-selling books 
translated into their own languages,

something we take for granted,

but in 15th-century Europe,
it was revolutionary.

Working together,
paper and the printing press

had achieved something
never done before.

They had democratized knowledge.

I have to say that if Gutenberg
had not invented the letterpress,

then someone else
would have presumably invented it.

because at that time, there was 
an enormous demand for written texts.

For thousand of years it had been enough

for monks to copy manuscripts
in monasteries by hand.

But this system was 
so to speak a one-way road.

The pope could distribute his information

but those that were on the bottom

could not distribute
their information to the top

In all of Europe, a new class
had established itself

which were the merchants, 
bourgeoisie that was newly arising

They created a whole new market

where the written word
was in very high demand

Europe's new demand for books

and its new ability to mass-produce books
to meet that demand

would soon have enormous consequences.

In Germany, a firebrand monk
named Martin Luther

wrote a list of 95 proposals

for reforming what Luther denounced

as the corrupt practices
of the Catholic Church.

Thanks to paper and the printing press,

his ideas spread like wildfire
across Germany and Switzerland.

And so, began the Protestant Reformation,

a spiritual revolt that ended 
Catholicism's tousand-year monopoly

of the European soul.

And some other best-selling books

helped an Italian
living in Spain realize his dream.

His name was Cristobal Colon,

and he was deeply disturbed
that the holy cities of Christendom

had fallen under the rule 
of the Ottoman Turks.

Colon drew up plans for a new Crusade
to liberate Jerusalem.

To fund it, he decided to travel to Asia

to trade for spices and other luxury goods

he could sell 
for a large profit back home.

But the Ottoman Empire
had blocked Europeans from the Silk Road.

Colon needed to find a new route to Asia.

His deep study of two books,

"The Travels of Marco Polo"

and the ancient Greek 
author Ptolemy's "Geography,"

convinced him that he could find Asia

by sailing West across the Atlantic.

And when he landed
in the Americas in 1492,

Colon, known to history 
as Christopher Columbus,

was sure he'd found it.

In fact, it wouldn't be until 1498
that the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama

rounded Africa's Cape of Good Hope 
and sailed east to India,

discovering the true sea route to Asia.

But the new world Columbus had given Spain
proved to have riches of its own.

By the middle of the 16th century,

the Portuguese had established
good trading relations

with China in Guangzhou and Macau.

And Spain's American colonies
were sending so much silver home

that there was hardly 
any room to store it.

Spain was sending it
on to northern Europe,

especially the Netherlands,
as payment for trade goods.

Their pockets bursting 
with American silver,

Europeans became addicted
to two Asian luxuries.

One was porcelain, 
an extraordinary ceramic

made by firing a soft white clay
called kaolin

at very high temperatures,
well over 1,000 degrees Celsius.

China had been making porcelain for export

and trading it throughout 
Asia and the Middle East

since at least the ninth century CE

In the 17th century, the Dutch captured
two Portuguese ships filled with porcelain

and held a giant porcelain auction.

It was the beginning of Europe's 
300-year obsession with Chinese ceramics

or, as they became known 
in Europe and America, "fine China."

It was a status symbol for the West,

and they had never seen
anything like that before.

But also, they certainly 
didn't know how it was made.

Porcelain imports were indispensable

to consuming another Chinese 
trade good craved by Europeans:

Tea.

Like porcelain, tea had been
a profitable Chinese export

since at least the ninth century

to the Middle East but not to Europe.

The Portuguese began
trading for it in the 16th century.

In 1657, a London merchant 
sold the first tea in Britain.

By the year 1700, tea-drinking 
had become a British obsession

heavily promoted 
by the British East India Company,

which traded British textiles to China

and needed a profitable luxury good
to bring back to Britain.

And as Chinese tea began
moving West to Europe,

Europeans began trading
exotic new foods to China.

In the 17th century, dozens 
of never-before seen food crops

from the Americas

— potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn,

peanuts, pineapples, 
chilies, and tomatoes —

began appearing in Chinese markets.

Some of these new foods offered more
than just the appeal of the exotic.

Corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes

grew in harsh New World environments

like the South American Andes.

Chinese farmers soon discovered
these hardy crops

would survive the frequent droughts 
that wiped out many native crops

starving large numbers of Chinese.

It's no coincidence
that in the 17th century,

after the introduction 
of drought-resistant crops,

China's population began to grow

and kept growing until China
became the world's most populous nation.

And the new sea routes brought 
even more to China from the West.

An Italian named Matteo Ricci
arrived in China in 1582

and spent the rest of his life there.

Ricci was a Catholic missionary,

and his mission to China produced

one of history's most enlightened
meetings of minds.

Ricci learned to speak, 
read, and write Chinese,

and formed deep friendships 
with Chinese scholars.

One of Matteo Ricci's closest collaborators and first converts to Catholicism
2:10:03
was the mathematician Xu Guangqi. AGNES: My ancestor Xu Guangqi,
2:10:11
who is known in Vatican history as Paul Hsu, met him around the time when he first came to China.
2:10:20
And in 1603, my ancestor converted to Roman Catholicism.
2:10:28
NARRATOR: Working together, Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi translated works from
2:10:34
the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid and other classics of Western science and mathematics into Chinese.
2:10:42
They also translated Confucian writings into Latin.
2:10:48
Ricci wrote to his superiors in Europe, asking them to send more missionaries to China,
2:10:53
but only their smartest men. In China, he wrote, "We are dealing with a people both intelligent and learned."
2:11:03
Xu Guangqi himself was an astronomer, a highly accomplished astronomer and a mathematician.
2:11:12
But the introduction of Western science opened his eyes to a different way of thinking,
2:11:21
a different way of approaching natural phenomena.
2:11:26
NARRATOR: Matteo Ricci was a Jesuit, a member of the Society of Jesus, a new Catholic order founded on the principles
2:11:34
of the European Renaissance. Jesuit priests were trained in science and mathematics
2:11:41
as well as in theology. As missionaries, they respected other cultures
2:11:46
and worked to integrate Christianity with non-Christian beliefs.
2:11:56
From the 16th until the 19th century, nearly a thousand Jesuits worked in China
2:12:02
teaching everything from engineering to mathematics to geography and sending back translated classics
2:12:09
of Chinese learning to Europe, giving Europe its first in-depth knowledge
2:12:14
of Chinese civilization and China its first in-depth knowledge of the West.
2:12:24
Chinese and Europeans became more and more fascinated with each other's civilizations.
2:12:30
King Louis XIV of France sent French Jesuits to the mission in China.
2:12:37
And Chinese emperors appointed Jesuits to important government positions.
2:12:45
For more than 100 years, Jesuit astronomers directed the Imperial Astronomical Bureau.
2:12:53
One of them, the German Johann Adam Schall von Bell, helped create a new Chinese calendar
2:12:59
that predicted solar and lunar eclipses with more accuracy.
2:13:06
He also introduced his Chinese colleagues to a new European invention, the telescope.
2:13:17
The Belgian priest Ferdinand Verbiest built an aqueduct, made European-style cannons for the army,
2:13:24
and built a steam-powered vehicle for the emperor considered by some to be the world's earliest automobile.
2:13:33
In 1674, Verbiest presented the emperor with a new map of the world.
2:13:40
The collaborative product of European and Chinese knowledge, it was more than just a map.
2:13:47
It was an expression of a new worldview. A worldview based on science, exploration,
2:13:55
and confidence in the human ability to discover, to invent, and to create a better world.
2:14:03
A worldview that saw the world as one. Arguably the most famous scholar
2:14:09
of that age is Voltaire. And in his essay "Sur le Moeurs"
2:14:17
which was first published in 1756,
2:14:22
he argued that China was the paragon
2:14:29
of Enlighted monarchy ruled by intellectuals.
2:14:39
It challenges the fundamental notion that the Christian European world
2:14:45
was the beginning and the centre of civilization.
2:15:00
China, in Voltaire's mind, was a civilization ruled by reason
2:15:07
and ruled by men promoted through education...
2:15:14
Through virtue, and through their scholarly accomplishments,
2:15:22
their merits; not by hereditary rights.
2:15:28
(gunfire, faint shouting) NARRATOR: In Voltaire's time, Europeans were fighting their hereditary kings
2:15:34
for the right to rule themselves. By 1800, political revolutions in Britain, America, and France
2:15:44
had ended centuries of absolute monarchy.
2:15:49
New technologies like the mechanical loom and the steam engine and the rise of industrial capitalism
2:15:56
were connecting the far corners of the world. And an ancient Chinese invention
2:16:02
that had spread westward centuries earlier was playing a critical role. (men shouting faintly, gunfire)
2:16:15
NARRATOR: Gunpowder had made modern warfare possible. (cannon booms)
2:16:21
(gunshot)
2:16:28
NARRATOR: And in mineral-rich areas like France's Vosges Mountains, it was helping in a different way
2:16:34
to create the modern world. At the beginning of the 17th century,
2:16:41
these mountains were honeycombed with mines and crowded with miners from all over Europe
2:16:47
chasing rumours of riches underground.
2:16:58
(Francis speaking French)
2:17:16
(water dripping)
2:17:24
NARRATOR: In the accounting books of the Thillot Mine, archaeologists discovered an entry from the year 1617
2:17:32
recording the purchase of gunpowder to do something revolutionary--
2:17:38
blast a mine tunnel from the living rock. (water dripping)
2:17:44
(speaking French)