Original subtitles

In the Renaissance,

people started keeping track of time.

In 1510, precision mechanic Peter Henlein

invented the pocket watch.

It became a powerful tool.

Merchants earned a fortune with it,

while it helped seafarers with their navigation.

(dramatic music)

Shortly before, Columbus had discovered America,

and the known world tripled in size.

People began to understand the earth.

An empire was created where the sun never set.

(dramatic music)

People owed all of this to the new portable time.

Scholars were able to measure and calculate

the course of the heavenly bodies.

They discovered the mechanisms of planetary motion,

and finally placed the sun at the heart of their system.

It was a departure to the stars, at least in the mind.

The invention of the pocket watch

became the turbo charger of history.

(dramatic music)

Florence in 1504.

Leonardo da Vinci

was the lead character in an era

that was to become known as the Renaissance,

during which the best known painting of all time

was to be created, the Mona Lisa,

the mysterious beauty with the inimitable smile.

It's probably a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo,

the wife of a cloth and silk merchant from Florence.

It's reported the Leonardo

didn't complete the painting for years.

The artist was always at odds with his works.

He was never happy with them,

and was always trying to improve them.

Pope Leo X said of Leonardo,

"This man will never achieve anything."

How wrong he was.

Leonardo was a polarizing figure.

He was described as foppish, as excessively vain

as a fashionista who stood by his homosexuality

at a time when gay men were being burned at the stake.

Leonardo da Vinci is considered

the greatest polymath of all time.

The star of the Renaissance was much more

than just a painter.

He was also an architect, an anatomist,

a sculptor, lateral thinker, mathematician,

inventor, and artist.

But for the brilliant creator of the Mona Lisa,

painting was maybe just a necessary evil.

A mere 15 paintings are attributed to Leonard today,

most have been lost because he was constantly experimenting

with new paint mixes,

many of which decomposed over time.

He cared most about inventing more than about painting..

(speaking in foreign language)

When it comes to his inner working,

Leonardo was a seeker and explorer,

someone who was interested in new secrets

more than a painter

who would've had to nurture his craft

laboriously every day, brush stroke after brush stroke.

We know he spent days making minor corrections to a canvas,

but he wasn't in front of the canvas all the time.

Maybe he just painted to make a living.

His painting were in great demand after all.

They were extremely well done,

at least those that were completed.

Maybe he just painted to earn money

so he had the freedom to pursue his scientific research.

In the 15th century,

Italy was ravaged by numerous local wars.

In 1405, Venice defeated Padua,

and Florence conquered Pisa.

The Neapolitans attacked Rome in 1413.

And 1440, Florence fought with Naples and Venice.

The Italian cities had an insatiable

appetite for each other.

Their constant battles fueled progress however,

war as a driver of art.

(speaking in foreign language)

War didn't just have negative effects

in the Renaissance.

It ensured that huge sums of money were mobilized

through the Condottieri, the war contractors.

They were often based in small places

from where they waged the wars

of the big players for good money.

Money from Florence, Milan, Naples, Venice, and Rome

flowed into smaller places.

If you go to Italy and you take pleasure

in the diverse appearances of these small towns,

you get an idea of what it meant back then

to worn iron into gold, and gold into art.

Milan in 1485,

Leonardo's employer was Ludovico Sforza

who ruled the city state.

In his application to Ludovico,

Leonardo advertised himself as a military engineer

and maker of weapons.

He only mentioned at the end

that he also knew about painting and sculpture.

Ludovico was getting ready for war.

He had great expansion plans.

And so Leonardo built high-tech weapons for the Sforzas

inspired by antiquity,

he combined the idea of a closed chariot

with the tortoise formation of the Roman legions,

and armored vehicle with incredible fire power.

However, it failed in practice because of a lack of energy.

It was too heavy and the steam engine

hadn't been invented yet.

The Codex Atlanticus contains more than a thousand pages

with sketches by Leonardo.

He designed a perpetual motion machine,

a gear box, and vehicles powered by springs

like Henlein's pocket watch,

but many of his imagination still cause us headaches today.

Some consider his cog device to be a calculating machine.

Critics say that interpretation goes much too far.

In the Renaissance, there was no way

of actually constructing this mechanical gear train.

Leonardo knew that,

and so he elevated himself onto a theoretical plain,

and that was new.

In 1495, Leonardo also showed himself

to be a brilliant entertainer and master of ceremonies

for the parties of the nobility.

He presented a further invention at these parties,

one that centuries later

would be counted as one of his most spectacular,

an automatic knight that could walk under its own power.

Allegedly, it could even lift its elbows

and moved its shoulders and wrists,

a construction that generated great excitement

at the court in Milan.

But how did it work?

The knight was moved by a complicated system

of 13 pulleys, all hidden by the suit of armor.

(applauding)

Did the brilliant Leonardo invent a robot 600 years ago?

Professor Uwe Schwiegelshohn

runs the Robotics Research Institute

in Dortmund in Germany.

He specializes in autonomous robots

that work without external control.

They can take their own decision so to speak.

He's familiar with Leonardo's prototype.

(speaking in foreign language)

Leonardo da Vinci

recognized the mechanics of motion,

maybe from his anatomical studies.

And he tried to give artificial devices motion

using pulleys.

He didn't have the propulsion options we have today

with electric motors.

Mechanics wasn't developed in his day.

It only truly flourished following Newton,

and the materials Leonardo had available

were quite rudimentary.

Leonardo had no screws,

no crankshafts or metal cogwheels,

nor did he have a power unit,

but he recognized the principle of the mechanical man.

Attack of the now devils, RoboCup World Champion in 2016.

These robotic footballers, roughly 50 centimeters tall,

act autonomously.

They size up their opponent and the ball.

They plan their moves and sometimes they even score goals.

Football is a complex game,

and well suited as an experimental environment

for the development of a new generation of robots.

Research today requires a team, not an individual,

never mind how brilliant.

Modern success strategies are fundamentally different

from how Leonardo worked.

(speaking in foreign language)

Leonardo had a university in his head.

He wrote down the entire knowledge of his day.

That's not possible with today's knowledge anymore.

If we want technological and scientific progress today,

we'd depend it on a number of people from different fields

cooperating closely and working together

to produce new results.

But in order to collaborate with members

of other faculties, it's necessary to at least understand

the basics of the other fields.

In order to build robots, it takes programmers,

engineers, electronics engineers,

and also experts in human anatomy

and movement sequences.

The robotic footballers are among the most advanced

robotic developments,

but the robotics field is still very far from creating

a real R2D2.

Leonardo amazed those around him,

but he scared people too.

His superiority threw up questions like,

how did he do that?

How can these people create something so outstanding?

What made the greats of the Renaissance tick?

Joachim Funke is a psychology professor from Heidelberg.

He doesn't believe that the brains

of the Renaissance's geniuses were any different.

He isn't looking for an answer in the function

and anatomy of the brain,

but in the strategies of the scholarly artists.

Funke is an expert in problem solving and creativity.

(speaking in foreign language)

Without knowledge,

creativity wouldn't be conceivable,

and to that, a broad spectrum of interests.

His curiosity spanned many fields.

He also paid close attention.

From a psychological perspective, that's very important.

Another factor would've been his competitiveness.

Those around him accepted that he crossed boundaries.

That was the spirit of the Renaissance.

People weren't forced to believe anything anymore.

They were able to find out how something works.

That was a huge driving force.

(gentle music)

Creativity is a new arrangement of knowledge,

knowledge that must already exist in the brain.

The creative spark can ignite something

that's already there,

but a high degree of education alone isn't enough.

Da Vinci was a natural thinker who explored new avenues.

(speaking foreign language)

Don't just always accept the same ideas

and be around the same people.

Listen to other opinions and world views.

Take a different perspective.

In the past, you had a court jester

to tell you different opinions.

That's still very helpful because you need a corrective

and you should be challenged, and a jester can do that.

You have to get up from your comfortable sofa

and head out into new areas and try new things.

If you want to be creative, you need to have courage.

Leonardo's preference for mechanics

was in line with the spirit of the time.

Many multi talented people like him

were looking for the engines that set humans,

the earth and the universe in motion.

Clockwork was mechanically

the most elaborate thing on offer in Leonardo's time.

In around 1505, Peter Henlein

invented a portable watch.

People started treating time as if they owned it.

But those who earned money with time

by loaning money for periods of time while charging interest

were committing a mortal sin.

Time belonged to God alone.

(clock ticking)

(speaking in foreign language)

The prohibition on charging interest

is in the Bible,

and it's one of the really important biblical prohibitions,

almost as important as thou shall not kill.

That's because people believed that humans

shouldn't profit from time,

because time belonged to God.

But in the middle ages and the Renaissance,

the economy played a quite a different role.

Money must circulate in the economy.

And if the available of money and time is an advantage,

then you can remunerate their worth.

As a result, there were more and more ways in practice

of avoiding this ban on charging interest.

The imperial decrees of the 16th century

now also allowed Christian money lenders

to charge interest on money loaned.

The maximum was 5%.

Up until then, the credit industry

had been solely in the hands of Jewish money lenders.

This now changed.

While Martin Luther

denounced the practice of charging interest,

the Swiss reformer John Calvin

had quite a different opinion.

(speaking in foreign language)

Calvin said,

"One could see from one's economic success

"whether one was predestined to salvation or damnation."

That meant people didn't just sit around

to see whether they would be chosen,

they worked incredibly hard.

The great sociologist Max Weber

said that Calvanism was the father of capitalism.

We know that other religious movements

of the 16th and 17th centuries

did just as much for the economy.

It's a pretty theory,

but it was the general forces of the society at the time,

along with technical developments

that led to the incredible economic boom.

The city of Zurich started setting up

official currency exchanges in 1419.

The money changers tended to be

gold smiths or master coiners,

because they had to be able to tell the value of the coins,

change currencies, but they also issued loans.

Later, with its Zwinglian and Calvanist tradition,

Switzerland became a banking pioneer,

and affluence became a symbol of divine favor.

Measuring time is still inseparably tied

to exploring the heavens.

The mind of Renaissance man

left the small world behind

and reached out for the stars.

Many medieval clocks were astronomical clocks.

The exact measurements of time

is a necessary requirement for studying

the movements of the sun, moon, and planets.

It was the start of an age

in which scholars, for the first time,

bravely proclaimed

that the church's world view was incorrect.

The sun didn't revolve around the earth,

and the earth was not the center of the universe.

Frombork in Polland in around 1540,

Nicolaus Copernicus was a canon of the cathedral,

as well as a high-ranking government official

and a polymath.

He was a physician, had a law degree,

and he was a mathematician,

and he was also an economist

who wrote a highly regarded work on the theory of money.

But his personal passion was astronomy.

His astronomical observations and calculations

contracted the generally accepted model put forward

by the ancient scholar Claudius Ptolemy,

namely that the earth was at the center of the solar system.

This geocentric world view was also taught by the church,

but Copernicus saw the sun

at the center of the solar system.

Even though he spent 30 years working on his model,

he didn't publish it.

Friends and confidants, including high-ranking clerics,

tried to persuade him to publish his work,

but without success.

(speaking in foreign language)

Copernicus was scared

of publishing his theory

because he was frightened he would make himself

a laughing stock.

Educated people knew that the earth wasn't flat,

that it was a sphere.

With Copernicus's world view,

this sphere was also moving.

It's spun on its own axis,

and it also traveled around the sun at high speed.

People thought this would produce certain consequences,

such as strong headwinds

and objects falling over and things like that.

And then there was a theological aspect

that Martin Luther threw into the mix.

He said to Copernicus that it was written in the Bible

that the sun moved around the earth,

and that scared Copernicus out of publishing.

Martin Luther called him a fool.

Copernicus's model was dismissed not so much as heretical,

but more as fantastical.

It wasn't until 70 years after his death

that Galileo's observations provided convincing arguments,

but the physical proofs had to wait for another 300 years.

Nicolaus Copernicus supplied the astronomical model

for our solar system,

refuting the ancient scholar Ptolemy.

And that in itself was revolutionary.

The earth was removed from the center of the universe

and classed as a simple planet

that orbited the sun along with others.

Copernicus saw how the stars moved in the night sky.

He realized that this impression

was the result of the earth's own rotation

or the orbits went around the sun.

Consequently, the actual center of the world

had to be near the sun.

Almost no other discover has had such a great significance

on our time.

Our departure to the stars

started 500 years ago in a scholar study.

Without Copernicus, without space flight,

without satellite supported communication,

our lives today would be very different.

(speaking in foreign language)

The calculations performed by Copernicus

have real impacts on us today.

We sent our spaceships into space

knowing where the plants were.

Had Ptolemy's world view been correct,

we would've reach none of those planets,

and it would all have been a waste.

It wasn't until the Jacob's staff came along

that it became possible to determine latitude at see

using astronomical calculations,

a breakthrough in seafaring.

It made it possible to navigate on the high seas

without landmarks.

A further achievement came in the form of the ephemerides,

astronomical tables,

calculations by the German astronomer and mathematician

Johannes Muller, known as Regiomontanus.

For the years 1475 to 1506,

his table set out the location of the celestial bodies.

Together with the Jacob's staff,

they guided sailors on their journeys.

(speaking in foreign language)

Regiomontanus made people

aware of trigonometry.

He published his own work,

taking advantage of the new invention of printing.

Trigonometric solutions

occur constantly in every receiver,

in a billion receivers.

Without trigonometry,

there would be no satellite navigation, no GPS.

Europe is currently developing its own

satellite supported navigation system

called Galileo.

But countries outside of Europe are also involved,

China for example.

The navigation system is intended to work

independently of the American GPS

but to be more precise, down to the nearest centimeter.

(ringing)

Be it the Jacob's staff or Galileo,

the trigonometrical approach is the key to new routes.

The search for new trade routes also drove explorers

to new goals.

Put in modern terms, they wanted to maximize their profits.

The people of the Renaissance started thinking about

completely new questions.

What lies beyond the known world and how can I get there?

Europe's merchants recognized that it was

cheaper to bring large quantities

of pepper, cinnamon, and silk to Europe

via the Portuguese shipping routes

than to transport them in smaller units

on the overland route controlled by Venice.

And with that, the Venetian spice monopoly collapsed.

Many trading establishments of the Renaissance

invested in shipping.

Portugal and Spain became leading trading nations.

(speaking in foreign language)

Merchants wanted to get their hands on

interesting luxurious and beautiful things

and sell them for as much profit as possible.

These things existed in the Mediterranean,

but even more so in the far east.

And so merchants along with Marco Polo

set off to search for silk, and incense,

and other luxurious fabrics.

They traveled the world.

They were followed by warriors and missionaries,

and sometimes by artists, thinkers and explorers,

so they all fueled each other,

hoping to get beyond their own horizons.

Lisbon in 1484.

Maybe he was just hours away

from his life's dream coming true,

the 33-year-old Christopher Columbus had an audience

with the Portuguese King John II.

The professional seafarer from Genoa

had profound knowledge of mathematics and cartography,

and was a passionate defender of the idea

of the ancient philosopher, Aristotle,

who claimed that Asia could be reached in just a few days

by a western route.

The ancient scholars estimated that Europe and Asia

made up roughly half of the earth's width.

Columbus believe that Eurasia

was much bigger than that even.

In fact, Eurasia only makes up around

a third of the earth's circumference.

Columbus imagined the earth

to be very much smaller than it really is,

namely, half its size.

He believed that the western route to China and India

was 4,500 kilometers.

A challenge for him and his crew, but doable.

An actual fact, it's a journey of 20,000 kilometers.

That went far beyond the capabilities of his time.

Columbus therefore was taking on not only a risk,

but one that he had miscalculated.

King John's experts believed that he was mistaken

and refused to give him financial support.

He only got that eight years later

from the Spanish King Ferdinand II.

After six weeks at sea on the 12th of October 1492,

Columbus reached the Bahamas.

Then Cuba, and Hispaniola.

He believed he had fond the western route to Asia.

He thought Hispaniola was the Chinese coast.

In his report, he promised the Spanish crown

as much gold as it needed,

and as many slaves as it asked for.

Columbus discovered the New World

and plunged it into catastrophe.

(speaking in foreign language)

Columbus was good at navigating ships

through difficult waters,

but he was a very poor manager.

He wasn't able to keep his own men together.

And ultimately, the Spanish crown took away his powers.

America was already populated when he discovered it,

so it wasn't a real discovery in that sense,

but his arrival opened the door to unprecedented disasters.

Millions of indigenous people

died at the hands of the germs

that the Europeans brought with them.

They were interested in gold,

and yet more gold, a little bit in God,

but more so in spices.

His travels opened the newly discovered lands,

and that robbed the indigenous population

of its good fortunes for a good long time.

During his second trip to Hispaniola in 1493,

Columbus found the fort he had built

had been destroyed by the indigenous people.

He immediately embarked on his revenge and never stopped.

Bartolome de las Casas, who later became the defender

of the rights of the indigenous population in the New World,

described the inconceivable cruelty of the conquerors.

On his arrival, there were between 400,000

and a million people living on Hispaniola.

By 1542, that figure had dropped to less than 200.

It was the systematic extermination

of the indigenous population, genocide.

(speaking in foreign language)

The only justification for colonization

and for the slavery that was legitimized by the Papal Court

came through missionary work.

Unbelievers could be converted to Christianity.

The problem was when they had converted,

when they had been baptized,

theY couldn't be enslaved anymore,

but the slave trade was profitable.

Their only justification was that they led people

to the correct faith,

thereby opening up paradise for them.

Columbus believed until the day he died

that he had found the sea route to the Chinese mainland.

His discovery changed the world.

The threshold nation Spain and Portugal

became imperial super powers,

but he was also the first in a line of cruel conquerors.

What drove him, a lust for adventure,

the promise of power, wealth, or fame?

(speaking in foreign language)

Columbus was definitely someone

who wanted fame and fortune,

but he was also a very devout person.

He thought he helped countless individuals

by bringing their souls to the Christian faith,

at least there are many indications that he believed this.

As was so often the case,

the desire for profit and fame

was mixed with medieval motivations.

The Renaissance had two sides to it,

and so too did Columbus.

Emperor Charles V,

thanks to the discoveries and discoverers,

the sun never set on his empire.

Besides large parts of Europe,

it included colonial territories

in North and South America and in Asia.

When the sun set in Mexico City,

it was already day in Manila in the Philippines.

In 1530, he was crowned by the Pope.

Already King Charles I of Spain,

he now become Charles the V,

Holy Roman Emperor.

He saw himself as a universal monarch,

defender of the faith, appointed by God.

He issued several decrees in an attempt

to counteract the enslavement of the indigenous population.

In 1540, he even ordered their liberation,

but the colonies were far away.

And in the end, Charles's need for gold was too great.

He failed.

(speaking in foreign language)

The last thing he might have seen

is a painting by Titian

that hung near his deathbed,

but you can see him in the white gown a confessor, barefoot.

He has put down the crown and the insignia of the emperor,

and he's praying to the Holy Trinity.

Maybe that's how he saw himself at the end of his life.

In amongst that,

the attempt to create a universal monarchy,

not in a sense of a cruel dictatorship,

but in the sense of supreme rule

over all the Christian rulers.

He failed across the board.

In the end, he abdicated,

but I think deep down we'll find a very devout person.

Charles's empire

was greedy for silver and gold.

Between 1541 and 1560,

67 tons of gold

and 480 tons of silver reached Spain,

triggering an economic crisis.

(speaking in foreign language)

Gold and silver were currencies

that stored value,

the only sensible medium of exchange.

Then suddenly, the whole system was flooded.

There were distortions and production.

And suddenly your currency, gold and silver,

dramatically declined in value.

Expectations had to find their new level.

That always happen when you have a shock to the system

from the outside.

In the Middle Ages,

the Jews were the only people in Europe

who were able to issue loans and charge interest.

Jewish businessman controlled

the international financial world.

For that some of them saw them as profiteers

and cursed them for it.

Brutal pogroms took place in the Iberian Peninsula.

The Jewish population was persecuted, killed, or expelled.

The Jewish financial system collapsed

and the European money market reoriented itself.

In the middle of this development

stood the small German town of Augsburg.

It became the financial capital of the known world,

the headquarters of the Fugger Empire.

The Fugger family business,

which grew to be a European-wide company

in just a few decades went back to Jakob Fugger,

Europe's most significant merchant,

mining entrepreneur, and banker between 1495 and 1525.

(speaking in foreign language)

Jakob Fugger funded the state.

The state gave him unique opportunities

to use or exploit the land.

On the other hand, Fugger himself

didn't do anything by halves,

invested a lot of money in estates

that are still at the heart of the Fugger foundations.

TheY used calculable risks to make money

and he worked with those in power,

but he also always invested in safe real estate.

He always diversified his investments,

and he had a good eye for what was doable,

so he was very successful.

Fugger, pious

and one of the most powerful men of his day,

wanted an aristocratic title.

With one foot still in the Middle Ages,

Fugger was nevertheless a manager with a modern spirit.

(speaking in foreign language)

Take Durer's famous portrait of Jakob Fugger.

Put this man into a gray suit

and take the gold cap off his head,

and you've got a modern CEO.

He was a tough and incredibly efficient manager.

That's undoubtedly true,

but he was also a contrite Christian.

The best evidence for that

is that he built a whole estate for the poor

in his hometown of Augsburg,

the Fuggerei of 1516.

That's a rich successful businessman

balancing his books with God,

so he's investing in the well-being of his soul,

and that plays a big role here too.

Fugger was active around the world.

He gave loans to princes and the church.

And in return, he negotiated mining rights,

trading privileges and estates.

The income he received was much higher

than the borrowing costs,

another product of the Renaissance,

a type of global player.

But Fugger combined his entrepreneurial spirit

with social commitment.

In 1521, he paid for the Fuggerei,

a Renaissance time capsule

in the middle of Augsburg.

The Fuggerei is the oldest social housing project

in history,

and it's still used as such.

The 67 houses are now home

to 150 Catholic residence of Augsburg.

The entry conditions are still the same as they were

in the 16th century.

Anyone wanting to live in the Fuggerei

has to be from Augsburg, a Catholic

and of good reputation.

And it's still maintained by the fortune

managed by the Fugger Foundation,

a financial instrument set up in the Renaissance

and still in effect today.

The annual rent also remains unchanged,

one rhenish guilder, or 88 Euro cents.

Compared with the living standards

of most people of the Renaissance,

the houses in the Fuggerei are positively luxurious.

A home for an entire family with around 60 square meters,

generous and bright,

at least by Renaissance standards.

In addition to the symbolic rent,

Jakob Fugger placed another condition

on the residence of the Fuggerei, regular prayer.

Every day, they were to say one Our Father, one Creed,

and one Hail Marry for Fugger, the founder,

and his family.

The prayers for him and his family

paved his way to paradise.

That's what people believed in the middle ages,

another investment in the salvation of his soul

was the construction of the Fugger Chapel,

a burial place dynasty,

and an immiscible statement of it's social significance.

Jakob Fugger hired important artists.

First and foremost, Albrecht Durer,

who designed the tomb stones fir his brother's

Georg and Ulrich Fugger.

The Fugger Chapel in Saint Anne

was the first church interior in Germany

to be build in the Renaissance style.

This is where Jakob and his brothers

found their final resting place.

This donation says a lot about Jakob,

his commercial foresight,

and his attitude in general.

He must've believed that there was a financial solution

to the salvation of the soul and the afterlife.

Jakob Fugger, a pious Christian and a financial genius,

and one of the richest men of his time.

(speaking in foreign language)

Fugger was incredibly rich.

The gap was immense.

If you think of the sum that Fugger

and the consortium stumped up

to fund the imperial election of Charles V,

it was than 800,000 guilders.

A craftsman would've had to work 32,000 years

to earn that.

Fugger also made money with a fear of hell.

Its terrible torments were everywhere in Fugger's time.

The church preach that punishments in hell

could be lessened or even avoided entirely

because it had been granted the divine powers to remit them.

But this indulgence as it was called

didn't come for free.

The sale slogan of the Dominican friar Johann Tetzel,

one of the most notorious sellers of indulgences, was

"As soon as a coin in the box does ring,

"the soul from purgatory does spring."

He even sold indulgences for blasphemy and murder.

In the autumn of 1511,

the 28-year-old Augustinian friar Martin Luther was in Rome.

He too was seeking indulgence.

He climbed the holy stairs of the Lateran

on his knees to achieve forgiveness for his sins

and free his deceased relatives from purgatory.

The Lateran palace,

the official seat of the popes,

a 16th century Renaissance building,

built by Pope Sixtus V.

The money-spinner of the Renaissance popes

was the sale of indulgences.

Between 1470 and 1530,

six popes ruled Rome,

who were later to go down collectively in history

as the Renaissance popes.

Their papacies were characterized

by a previously unseen level of corruption,

immorality, greed, and calamitous power politics,

or so their critics say.

Pope Alexander VI was particularly notorious.

He celebrated orgies with well-known whores in the Vatican.

Martin Luther labeled the Roman church

as the whore of Babylon,

and the holy city as a hot bed of sin.

(speaking in foreign language)

When we talk about the Renaissance popes,

we often hear terrible stories,

and you get the impression

that they trigger the reformation

with their immoral behavior,

but that's a very one-sided story.

They were modernizers.

They were Renaissance men.

They were princes who held court in line

with the European standards at the time.

(speaking in foreign language)

In 1508, Pope Julius II

commissioned the 33-year-old Michelangelo Buonarroti

to cover the interior of the Sistine Chapel in frescoes,

but Michelangelo didn't want the job.

Painting wasn't his strength.

He primarily saw himself as a sculptor, he said.

But Julius, more a warrior than a man of God,

asserted himself.

Michelangelo asked for artistic freedom.

"Do what you want," Julius replied.

520 square meters of frescoes to be painted overhead,

a tortuous work of epic proportions.

(gentle music)

The Frescoes in the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

and Leonardo's Mona Lisa

are indisputably the most famous paintings

of the Renaissance, if not the whole of art history.

And the interpretation of the creation of Adam

is the most reproduced work of art in the world,

a god who overcomes people like a thunderstorm.

(suspenseful music)

And a last judgment that depicts the heavenly host

naked like the gods of Mount Olympus.

The brave work of the great man

only made possible thanks to his papal patron.

(speaking in foreign language)

We wouldn't have Saint Peters,

we wouldn't have all these wonderful arts in Rome,

we wouldn't have many pieces of music

if these Renaissance popes hadn't existed.

Renaissance popes were ambivalent,

like the whole of modernity.

They have admirably good traits,

and they also behave like princes,

like Machiavelli, free and confident,

and sometimes they put that church brief on the back burner

or even forgot about it altogether.

Pope Julius II, Il Terribele,

that's what the Romans called him,

the architect by his side, Donato Bramante,

called maestro rovinante, master of destruction,

this duo put their stamp on Rome.

Julius had buildings torn down,

squares enlarged, and roads rebuilt.

Donate Bramante asserted himself

as a hip architect in Rome

with the cloister at Santa Maria della Pace,

the Chiostro del Bramante.

The client was Cardinal Oliviero Carafa,

an influential prince of the church.

(suspenseful music)

Bramante came to fame with the Tempietto del Bramante,

the little temple inspired by Roman round temples.

It's considered a paradigm of high Renaissance architecture.

Pope Julius II asserted himself

against all the protest of his cardinals

and had the venerable Basilica of Constantine demolished.

He wanted to build the biggest church of Christendom

in its place, Saint Peter's.

Julius was a gigantomaniac.

His basilica was also to house his monumental tomb,

bigger than anything the world had ever seen,

Saint Peter's as the mausoleum for Julius II.

Donato Bramante got the commission,

construction started in 1506.

40 years were to pass before sculptor, painter,

poet, and scientist Michelangelo

became the architect and site manager of Saint Peter's.

In 1547, the 72-year-old Michelangelo Buonarroti

took over the supervision of Europe's

largest building site.

The dome of Saint Peters,

the largest self-supporting masonry structure in the world .

the dome with its ribs was his idea.

Its construction was the pinnacle of his artistic career.

His creative life lasted 70 years.

He considered himself a sculptor,

but he created epoch-making works

as a painter and architect.

He spent years in quarries, always searching for material.

He literally moved mountains.

Michelangelo lived through nine popes

and worked until his final breath.

He died at 89, a biblical age in his day.

He was the last among the great scholarly artists

of the Renaissance.

The year of his death

is considered by many art historians

as the end of this era.

Michelangelo died on the 18th of February, 1564.

(dramatic music)

But even this masterpiece of the Renaissance

was funded by the fear Christians had

of facing punishment in hell.

It was Pope Leo X who supported the sale

of indulgences to fund the new building.

Martin Luther was appalled by the moral decline

he encountered in Rome.

His trip to Rome is seen as his key experience.

Luther himself mentioned it regularly

in later writings and speeches.

He fulminated against the trade in indulgences,

a trade which became synonymous with this moral decline

with the greed of the church and its popes,

and with the triggering of an event

that would go down in history as the Reformation.

A simple friar defied the emperor and the pope,

and split the church.

Not a revolutionary, but a reformer.

Just two generations after Luther,

Europe was shaken by a conflict

more gruesome than any that had gone before,

the 30 years war

the fighting between Catholics and Protestants

devastated the empire.

Martin Luther castigated the practice

of selling indulgences very publicly in Ninety-five Theses.

In just a few months, Luther published more

than 80 individual treatises and collections.

There were more than 600 editions.

Luther became a media star.

Printing became the first mass medium of human kind.

(speaking in foreign language)

There wouldn't have been a reformation

without the mass media of the 16th century.

Martin Luther wrote thesis

about a relatively abstruse theological problem,

indulgences.

But these thesis spread all over Southern Germany

in just a few weeks.

It was printing.

It was fly sheets and pamphlets

that spread all across the empire

and mobilized people.

People read and they read to others,

and the issues were discussed with people who couldn't read.

How do people work?

What drives us?

Questions that scholars were now able to discuss publicly,

thanks to the new mass medium.

Global communication started in the Renaissance.

For the first time, it was possible

for thousands of people to refer to the same contents

at the same time.

It was the first time

the future could be depicted and planned

in a realistic fashion.

People understood what moved them.

They copied themselves.

The first machine man were created,

an anticipation of a future

in which robots play football.

Within just a few generations,

the known world tripled in size.

Global transport and global trade

became a reality for the first time in the Renaissance.

The people didn't just travel their own planet.

They also laid the ground work

for trips to distant worlds

and the exploration of the universe.

(speaking in foreign language)

The legacy of the Renaissance

has never died.

It has remained alive.

I think we can say that the industrial revolution

and therefore our modern world

wouldn't have been possible

without all the things that were invented

in the Renaissance.

At no other time in its history

has human kind experienced

a comparable boost in development.

The Renaissance even beats our current fast-changing age.

Never before was so much developed, invented,

moved, changed, revolutionized,

and rejected in such a short space of time,

a development driven by people who mastered

what was seemingly impossible,

because they understood their world.

The Renaissance is a plea against closed minds

and a cult of experts for intellectual curiosity

and the courage to take unusual paths.

It's a story about people who didn't have faith

but wanted to know and wouldn't accept limits.

The Renaissance is our past

and our future.

(gentle music)