Original subtitles

From the dust of empires,

New forces rise.

New ideas propel us forward.

New beliefs unite us.

And tear us apart.

Amidst the chaos of an unforgiving planet,

Most species will fail.

But for one, all the pieces will fall into place.

And a set of keys will unlock a path for mankind to triumph.

This is our story, the story of all of us.

Rome, 455A.D..

At the gates of the imperial palace.

Gaiseric...

Known as the 'spear king',

Chief of a tribe of Germanic warriors: the Vandals.

They've crushed Roman armies in North Africa.

Now they're after the riches of Rome itself.

Trapped inside the palace, the empress, Licinia Eudoxia.

Daughter of a Christian convert,

Widow of a murdered emperor.

She and her children are the last of Rome's ruling family.

The imperial capital is under attack.

Ruling a fifth of the world's population...

...has stretched the empire to breaking point.

Like a supernova,

The empires we've seen on this planet

Have collapsed under their own weight.

A great mass of energy,

There's nothing brighter in the sky.

There was certainly nothing brighter and more powerful

Than the Roman Empire...

...until it wasn't.

Rome, the world's first megacity.

Population: one million.

The most modern city in the world.

Now, in ruins.

An empire in meltdown.

When you think about the Roman Empire

And the complexity of the system that failed,

It's incredibly frightening.

A system that could create the best army in the world,

That could unite the entire Mediterranean region,

The idea that a system like that

can fragment and break apart...

...it's apocalyptic.

Gaiseric's men wreak havoc.

The Roman Empire will never recover.

When you see that kind of horror,

And you're stuck and trapped inside this city,

You start running out of options very quick.

You can't run, you can't hide,

You can't defeat this force.

They will rape,

they will pillage and they will plunder.

But the Vandals are no savages.

They're educated and skilled in warfare,

Thanks to the Romans.

By the time the Vandals arrived in Rome,

They'd been living in the Roman Empire for a long, long time.

These were people who probably spoke Latin,

Who had served in armies alongside Roman soldiers,

They'd been mercenaries,

They'd engaged in trade with the Roman Empire.

Gaiseric has been fighting the Romans since his teens.

Now he's in reach of the ultimate prize:

Eudoxia.

Worth more to the Vandal chief than gold,

Having the empress as his hostage will bring him prestige.

Eudoxia will spend the next seven years

at Gaiseric's side.

Her daughter, forced to marry his son.

The empress of Rome enslaved by a barbarian.

The Roman Empire lasted for five centuries.

At its height, it ruled over 60 million people

And two million square miles.

As it disintegrates,

Barbarian tribes seize their opportunity.

Angles and Saxons push into Britain.

Franks sweep across Gaul,

Giving their name to modern France.

Visigoths seize what is now Spain.

When power collapses at anytime, anywhere,

It creates a vacuum, by definition,

Others come running in, territory gets grabbed up,

Ideas are repudiated, the Romans learned it,

We don't know who's going to be next.

With the collapse of Rome,

Europe reverts to a dark age of war,

famine and savagery.

Many essentials of Roman life are lost for centuries:

The technology to build aqueducts,

The use of coins,

In some areas even writing.

Rome loses 95% of its population.

London is abandoned.

The drama of Rome suggests,

That civilization does not progress in a straight line

Towards more prosperity,

More order, more law, more technology.

It shows us, in the picture,

Amazing things being achieved by the Greeks and the Romans,

And then those things being lost again.

With the fall of Rome,

Europe will fragment and stay divided for 1500 years.

But two new forces emerge,

Key to the story of mankind.

From the frozen north: the Vikings.

From the sun-baked south: the Arabs.

the Arabian Desert, 1,400 years ago.

Buried deep beneath...

...gold.

It'll help build a new civilization,

Founded on a new religion: Islam.

The Mahad Al Dahab mine,

worked by a thousand slaves,

Owned by Al-Hajjaj Al-Bahizi.

From the same tribe as the prophet Mohammed.

Already a mining tycoon,

soon worth his weight in gold.

Gold is an amazing metal,

It's easy to work with, it doesn't tarnish.

And it's so beautiful

That it seems to symbolize wealth and royalty

By its very existence.

All the gold ever mined comes from outer space,

From a time almost four billion years ago,

Known as the 'heavy bombardment'.

Asteroids carrying traces of gold rained down on the earth.

Fourteen million times rarer than iron,

All the gold ever mined would fill

Just three Olympic swimming pools.

Extracting gold in 7th-century Arabia

is dangerous work.

Tunnels, propped up by simple wooden struts.

With each blow, a worker can strike it rich...

...or dig his own grave.

A cave-in at a gold mine in the Arabian Desert.

Owner Al-Hajjaj Al-Bahizi risks his life

To save his men and his investment.

This mine alone will produce 50 tons of gold,

Worth two billion dollars today.

A gold rush sparks a boom in trade

And a new chapter for mankind.

From the trading center of Mecca,

A charismatic leader emerges, the prophet Mohammed,

And a new religion.

In twenty years,

Islam unites the warring tribes of Arabia.

It was a particular genius

of the burgeoning Islamic state,

to use that gold to fund a massive army

that was able to push beyond the Arabian Peninsula,

to create a new kind of empire,

a distinctly Islamic Empire.

From Mecca, in modern-day Saudi Arabia,

Islam spreads across North Africa and into Europe,

Dominating lands once controlled by the Romans.

A new civilization reaches into Spain

And builds a new city:

Cordoba.

Home to a remarkable inventor:

Abbas Ibn Firnas.

Astronomer, engineer, inventor.

He's invented a water clock,

A planetarium, a magnifying glass.

Now, he'll risk his life for a new invention.

A thousand years before the Wright brothers,

He wants to fly.

An extraordinary experiment in an extraordinary city.

Cordoba is home to half a million

Muslims, Christians and Jews.

In Europe's Dark Ages, a beacon of tolerance and learning.

37 libraries, the knowledge of mankind,

Much of it rescued from ancient Greece and Rome.

What one wonders about is,

if Islamic scientists had not played this role

of nursemaid to science,

how would we have gotten here?

Because in the West,

we had lost that with our Dark Ages.

How would science have survived in the West

if it had not been for the Islamic scholars?

Arabs take a great leap forward

In Astronomy, Engineering, Medicine.

They create Algebra and Simplify Math,

With the numbers zero to nine,

Still known as Arabic Numerals.

Ibn Firnas is fascinated by the laws of flight

And has built his own flying machine.

What an extraordinary thing to try to do.

This crazy guy was willing to jump off a building

to improve the state of human knowledge.

"By guiding these wings up and down, I will fly.

"If all goes well, after soaring for a time,

"I will return safely."

Accounts at the time report:

"He attached a couple of wings to his body,

"And from a great height flung himself into the air.

"He flew a considerable distance,

"As if he had been a bird."

But without a tail, he can't control his descent.

He'll suffer back pain for the rest of his life.

But he enters the historical records:

The first human to fly.

This willingness to risk life and limb

for knowledge is one of the things

that has really brought humans to where we are today.

We wouldn't be here if people weren't constantly willing

to push and experiment and really risk everything

just for a hunch.

Fifty years later, two and a half thousand miles away,

Another Arab pushing the boundaries of knowledge:

Ahmad Ibn Fadlan.

Diplomat, chronicler,

devout Muslim.

His mission: to seek out new trade routes.

In Russia, he makes contact with people

Who will dominate Northern Europe: the Vikings.

He records:

"I have never seen more perfect physical specimens.

"They are big men with white bodies,

tall as palm trees.

"But they are also the filthiest of God's creatures.

"They drink alcohol night and day.

"Everyone carries an axe.

"They are like wild asses."

Their appearance to Ibn Fadlan must've been shocking,

because they were so unabashed and promiscuous,

and completely unaware of sort of the sense

of privacy and properness

that Ibn Fadlan would've carried with him.

From their native Scandinavia,

These Vikings have journeyed 1,200 miles by sea and river,

Before settling in Western Russia.

This country will be named after them.

The Vikings call themselves the Russ - "Men who row".

We tend to think of the Vikings

as these brutal and frightening people,

but they helped open up the world,

they connected the world in ways that it had not been before,

and we do owe a debt to them for that.

The Viking trade network

Stretches across central and northern Asia.

What they offer their visitor

is a rare luxury in Arabia: fur.

In exchange, Arabian gold.

Imagine two people who cannot communicate verbally,

and yet they both come with something

that is of value in their culture.

The exchange is made, and this is what has created trade

across every culture in every part of the world.

Ibn Fadlan has arrived at a momentous time

For these Vikings.

Their chief has died. It's time for a funeral.

"They told me, before cremating their chieftain,

"They place him in a grave for ten days,

"While they make his funeral garments.

"Surprisingly, he had not yet begun to stink."

The dead Viking is destined for Valhalla,

The legendary resting place of chiefs and warriors.

He will not go alone.

"The chief's son asked his father's slave girls,

'Who will die with him?'

"One stepped forward.

"Once she had done this, there was no backing down."

The dead chief's favorite slave-girl

Chooses to join her master,

Believing that in Valhalla she will become his wife.

But first, she must die.

On the banks of Russia's Nolga River, a pagan people,

Who'll dominate much of Christian Europe.

Vikings prepare their chief for the afterlife.

One of his slave girls has volunteered

To be cremated with him,

So she can enter valhalla with her master.

Lbn Fadlan, an Arab chronicler,

Writes the first surviving account of a Viking funeral.

"They took the dead man and carried him onto the ship,

"Where they laid him on a quilt."

"A woman issued instructions.

"They called her the Angel of Death.

"The slave girl was given an intoxicating drink.

"The Angel of Death placed a rope around her neck.

"Then she took a broad-bladed dagger

"And thrust it in and out between the girl's ribs,

"While two men throttled her until she died."

The Viking chief takes his final journey

On his prized possession:

His longship.

We tend to think of these guys as barbarians,

but Vikings were extraordinary explorers.

The Vikings were on the cutting edge of human exploration

at the beginning of the mediaeval world.

The key to Viking exploration: their longships.

Built with overlapping oak planks,

Riveted along the keel,

They are strong but quick.

Powered by sail and oars, some can reach 20 knots,

A good speed for a modern racing yacht.

The Viking longship was an incredible piece

of military technology.

It could cross vast open ocean,

but then navigate a tiny inlet or river.

And when the Vikings came to attack, the longship was fast,

it was stealthy, they could sneak up unseen, unheard,

and make their attack with incredibly devastating force.

The Vikings launch raids along the coasts

Of Britain, Ireland, France and Spain.

30,000 Vikings settle in iceland in 60 years.

And they set up colonies in greenland.

The big crisis in the Viking civilization

was farmland.

So the Vikings would set off to find new farmland,

and Greenland was one of the big real estate promotions,

they called it green land to get people to move there.

It's not actually green, you know!

From greenland, they'll push on to North America,

The first Europeans, 500 years before Columbus.

By 1000 A.D., Vikings settle

Among many of the communities they once attacked.

Novgorod in russia, kiev in the ukraine,

Rouen in france, york in england, dublin in ireland,

All transformed into cities by the Vikings.

They convert to Christianity,

Replacing pagan shrines with great churches,

Reinventing themselves as European knights.

In Russia, they form a dynasty of princes.

In France, they're known as 'Norsemen'

and rule Normandy.

The most famous of them, William the Conqueror,

Invades Britain and becomes king of England.

As rulers of Christian Europe,

The Vikings will be on the frontline

In a clash of civilizations, the Crusades.

As the Vikings help lift Europe from its Dark Age,

Other explorers create an entirely new civilization...

...on an island in the Pacific Ocean.

Mankind is ever restless.

The urge to create,

indeed the urge to glorify,

no matter where we are in the world,

no matter what our resources are,

no matter even what tools are available,

that urge is universal.

Living in total isolation,

These people will build some of the most iconic statues

In the world.

Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean.

Polynesians carve statues from rock with stone age tools.

Mankind the builder.

It's extraordinary because they were made

so many centuries ago,

and yet they capture the imagination.

They startle us because they're so mysterious.

With all our technology,

the statues of Easter Island still awe us.

A monument to an ancestral chief.

Like the man who first led them here:

Hotu matu'a.

Pioneer, savior, founder of a civilization.

Driven from his native land by tribal warfare,

He's taken a few dozen of his people on an epic journey.

He's taken a few dozen of his people on an epic journey.

Hotu Matu'a must have been an incredible leader,

to convince this group of people to follow him into the unknown.

He must have had this great sense of hope and optimism,

which fortunately for him turned out to be well founded.

Without charts or compasses,

He has traveled 2,500 miles,

To one of the remotest places on earth.

A volcanic island, half the size of Detroit,

In the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean.

I've sailed across the Pacific

and I know how big that ocean is, it's huge.

You're down in a canoe,

you can only see four, five maybe six miles.

You can't see that far, you're on the sea level.

If you sail past an atoll, it's only a tree high.

If you're ten miles away, you've missed it.

So actually putting a real needle in a haystack,

you'll find that needle before you'll to find Easter Island.

The key to crossing the ocean: an instinct for navigation.

The Polynesians were so amazing.

Their ability to navigate,

their understanding of the stars,

celestial navigation was unparalleled.

And they used it to spread over almost the entire Pacific,

all the way to New Zealand.

On Easter Island, entirely alone,

They'll create a unique civilization,

Surrounded by statues of their ancestral gods.

If you think about it,

virtually all the great monuments of the past

were built for a spiritual purpose,

as if satisfying the human need to reach out to the afterlife.

And Easter Island reveals the urge

to celebrate, to commemorate,

epic monuments that are still impressive

thousands of years later,

and will be thousands of years from now.

Known as Moai,

The tallest is 33 feet high and weighs 82 tons,

As heavy as the space shuttle.

Humans work so hard.

We never just settle down and happily farm and live,

we're always building something, exploring something,

doing something that's a challenge,

that's bigger than ourselves.

Legend says the statues walk magically into place.

In reality, they are dragged overland.

The forests provide all the building materials

the islanders need.

Palm trees 80 feet tall become canoes and huts,

and rollers, to transport the Moai.

To lift them into place,

wooden levers and ropes made from tree fiber.

There is nothing like these statues,

and they were made with such primitive technology,

we are fascinated by them.

With these beautiful eyes staring out at you,

it captures something, I think, in our hearts.

The Easter Islanders build 900 Moai,

Protecting their isolated community.

But in doing so, they hasten their own downfall.

Unfortunately their protection didn't last.

Once the forests were cut down,

you had an ecological disaster on Easter Island.

Once the last trees were gone,

and they couldn't make canoes any more,

their paradise became a prison.

Religion...

...the most potent force in the story of mankind.

It has built civilizations and destroyed them.

As the Easter Islanders pay homage to their Ancestral Gods,

On the other side of the planet

Holy Warriors destroy those of a different faith.

In the Middle East, Jerusalem, a city under siege.

Inside its walls, pandemonium.

Outside, 12,000 men...

...intent on butchery.

Crusaders.

Spearheading the attack: Tancred de Hauteville.

A norman knight, descended from Vikings,

Filled with bloodlust.

So many people have died in the name of religion.

Wars fought over religious belief

have spilled so much blood,

but I think of all the wars fought over religion,

the Crusades belong in their own category.

The slaughter here resonates to this day.

Tancred de Hauteville,

A Christian knight on a mission from God,

In the holy land,

Waging war on Islam.

By the end of the 11th century,

600 years after the fall of Rome,

The two religions are great rivals.

Christianity dominates in the west and north,

Islam in the east and south.

Determined to curb the advance of Islam,

The pope calls on Christians to take up arms.

Their target: the holy city of Jerusalem.

On the eve of the Crusades,

Jerusalem under Muslim rule was actually a hotbed

of creativity and inter-religious dialogue.

There were Jews, there were Christians, there were Muslims.

For the most part, they lived in relative harmony.

But each lays claim to the city.

Jews revere it as their ancient capital.

Muslims know it as Al Quds, "The holy".

From here the prophet Mohammed journeyed to heaven.

And for Christians,

Christ was crucified here.

It's amazing when you go to Jerusalem,

if you just stop for a second,

you'll see that these people actually have more in common

than they have that are differences.

They are the sons and daughters of Abraham.

To all who join the Crusade,

Pope Urban offers eternal salvation, declaring:

"The Lord beseeches you to destroy that vile race

"From the lands of our friends.

"All who die by the way

"Shall have immediate remission of sins."

A knight could sin as much as he liked,

and simply by going to the Holy Land,

he had been given forgiveness by the Pope,

he had been given his passport to heaven.

He could win fame, he could win glory,

and he could come back with booty.

It is one of the most shameful undertakings

ever embarked upon by our species.

With absolution assured,

Nothing holds back the Crusaders.

One records joyfully:

"Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen

"In the streets of the city.

"It was a just and splendid judgment of God

"That this place should be filled

"With the blood of the unbelievers."

If I have a belief system that literally says

God tells me I must slaughter anyone

who wants to stop me from being here,

it will allow you to justify any horrific act you take

at that point.

Tancred hesitates.

He decides to ransom the Muslims and stop killing them.

He gives them his standard...

...A signal to others that they are under his protection.

At the church of the Holy Sepulcher, he prays.

Having a singular belief system

where I've deferred responsibility to God,

can allow me to do brutal things on the battlefield.

But I think when it gets quieter,

when the images come back into the mind,

that has an effect on a human being.

Amen.

Returning, he finds his captives slaughtered behind his back

By other Crusaders.

The Crusades were as bad as it gets.

Remember that these guys embrace the same God,

many of the same beliefs, the same prophets,

and yet the streets ran deep

with their blood and that of their brothers.

It shows the extraordinary power of ideas

to take hold of people's minds

and drive them to commit acts

of great sacrifice and love on the one hand,

but also acts of tremendous barbarity and hatred

on the other.

It's the double edge sword of religious belief.

The crusades will continue for two centuries

And cost more than a million lives.

But mankind's greatest hour is to come.

We harness new riches and new powers.

Build new civilizations

In Europe & Asia,

Rich in invention, culture and art.

A new chapter in the story of mankind.