The Dark Ages: An Age Of Light - Part One (Ancient History Documentary) | Timeline

this is a series about an artistic error that's looked down on and never gets the respect it deserves it's a shadowy era so shadowy people even disagree about its name so I'm going to use the old one the one that best sums on these dilemmas I'm going to call it the Dark Ages [Music] Dark Ages roughly from the fourth century to roughly the eleventh they begin when the Roman Empire starts to crumble in the end when William the Conqueror invades England now in this shadowy slab of time everything changed the greatest empire the world has seen melted back into the cultural shadows in various powerful artistic forces stepped up to take its place later in the series we'll be examining those much misunderstood creatives the barbarians what wondrous bling they brought into the world what fabulous things they achieved I'll also be looking at that joyous and inventive religion Islam which did so much to light up the dark ages but we begin with a group of people whose achievements were enormous they started with nothing and ended up with so much I'm thinking of course of those thoroughly underestimated Dark Age creatives those intrepid voyagers into the unknown the Christians art never lies and the story that art tells us of these exciting times is that this was never an age of darkness this was an age of light these are the famous ruins of Pompeii and as I'm sure you know Mount Vesuvius erupted here in 79 AD and all this was covered in ashes and preserved for posterity in perfect conditions now one of the things they found here which really surprised them was proof that there were already Christians here by 79 AD the thing they found that proved it was this [Music] it's what they call a rote ass square and these wrote ass squares are deeply mysterious they've been found all over the Roman Empire in Syria in Gaul even in England in Cirencester they found one of these and they're usually inscribed on the walls of houses or sometimes on the columns outside the house and of course when they found them they didn't have a clue what these were just mysterious word games plastered outside houses what it is is a letter square made up of five Latin words rotas Opera tenet AREPO and sat or [Music] wrote ass at the top is sat or backwards and you can see wrote s down this side as well and sat off down that side and here in the middle a depo is opera work backwards the actual words means something like as you sow so shall you reap but only if you ignore Latin grammar various code breakers twisted it this way and that for decades but it still didn't mean much but then a Eureka moment one of these code breakers realized that the important thing about the wrote s square was not the words but the letters because these letters of the wrote s square can be rearranged to form a cross which reads the same both ways up and down it says Paternoster which is Latin for our Father the opening words of the Lord's Prayer [Music] what's more these two letters that are left over Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet Alpha and Omega in their Roman form [Music] you can see them down in the Roman catacombs popping up everywhere Alpha and Omega the beginning and the end popular Christian code for the one true God so these mysterious word squares were put outside houses to signify that the occupants were Christians and also as a kind of lucky charm to ward off evil [Music] of course this isn't art yet this is an inscription but it has artistic implications what you see in here this appetite for signs and symbols and secret meanings that Christian appetite is something that transferred to Christian art the Christian art of the Dark Ages is an art of mystery and magic of suggestions and miracles transcendence light the rotas square isn't art yet but it is an excellent pointer to a new artistic direction one of the reasons early Christian art is so exciting is because you find it in exciting places Rome is wild enough on the surface but when you descend into its underground look how scary and fascinating it becomes people often imagined the catacombs were hiding places underground shelters in which persecuted Christians hid from the Romans but you can't hide an underground city as huge as this under anyone's nose the Romans knew these were here all right [Music] what they didn't know is what one Christian was saying to another down here because the first Christian art was filled with secret signs and hidden meanings that's why the fish became an obokata steam symbol when two Christians met on the road it said that one of them would draw this shape in the sand and the other one would draw this shape and the two of them knew immediately that they were Christians together this famous Christian sign the Christa gram or Kiro represents Jesus himself it's made by combining two Greek letters key and ro the first two letters of the word Christos which means the anointed one it said the sign had magic powers even today we still call Christmas Xmas because of this another popular Christian sign was the anchor for the simple reason at the top of it here looked like a cross everywhere you look in these haunting Roman catacombs the first christians are declaring their faith in such mysterious and cryptic ways these symbols and signs weren't just a secret language they're also a different way of seeing things a different way of understanding not just with your eyes but with your imagination and what's most interesting about this first Christian art you find down here is how few pictures there are in it [Music] no images of Jesus no Mary's no Saints for the first few centuries of Christianity there were no Christian images it's not the beginning of our period the so-called Dark Ages 300 years after the birth of Christ figures and scenes begin to pop up at last in Christian art we're in a third century Christian burial chamber in the catacombs of Priscilla a rich Christian family was buried here and look what's on the walls over here some peacocks over there three chaps standing in a fire and over here some kind of sea dragon with someone coming out of its mouth so let's decode all this the peacocks are symbols of eternity because peacocks replace their beautiful feathers every year the ancients believed their flesh couldn't rot it was eternal the three young men are described in the Bible by the prophet Daniel three young his rights were set on fire by the Babylonians but God protected them and the Babylonian fires couldn't touch them the chap coming out of the sea monster is the prophet Jonah who you may remember was swallowed by a whale for three whole days after three days the whale spat him out again and he returned to dry land a wiser man the thread that unites all these cryptic images is salvation hope God saved the three young men from the fire he saved Jonah from the whale and he'll save you too Jonah is also the subject of the earliest surviving masterpieces of Christian sculpture found today in the Cleveland Museum of Art Jonah swallowed by the whale spat out by the whale and returned to dry land a wiser man Jonah is particularly significant because the early Christians used him as a stand-in for Jesus himself Jesus remember also rose from the dead after three days and the reason why Jonah is so popular in the catacombs is because he's a way of showing Jesus without showing Jesus a replacement another code a symbol we've been down here what five minutes it'd look how many different ways we've already seen to represent Jesus without actually showing him he's the clear oh the word sign he's Jonah in the whale he's the fish the anchor what we haven't seen yet is that Jesus we can all recognize that Jesus who actually looks like Jesus the truth is no one in early Christian art had a clue what he actually looked like the Bible doesn't describe him no one does so art took an extremely long time to come up with a face for Jesus and I think the search for that face is the greatest artistic tussle of the dark ages [Music] the proof that no one actually knew what Jesus looked like is this controversial relic the Shroud of Turin it's said to be the cloth in which Jesus was wrapped at his death this haunting likeness is the true face of Christ preserved miraculously in his blood also they say the Shroud of Turin doesn't get shown very often but when it does thousands of pilgrims flock to Chuen to see it and most of them believe they're looking at the true face of Christ when I went to see it there was such a powerful atmosphere in the church so many people so certain they were staring of the remains of Jesus I'm afraid they weren't because Jesus Christ didn't look like that at least not according to the evidence left behind by the first Christian artists who described him according to these first Christian artists Jesus actually looked like this blond fresh-faced boyish the earliest images of Jesus look nothing like the Jesus we know today and nothing like the Jesus on the Turin Shroud Jesus at first is a happy-go-lucky character curly haired and handsome his usually shown waving his wand about performing remarkable miracles so here he's turning water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana and here he's curing the paralytic who couldn't walk until he met the baby-faced Jesus and over here the blind man has been cured by Jesus again and finally with a wave of that Harry Potter of his this is Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead who was towel Azeris in early Christian art because he looks like an Egyptian mummy wrapped up what you never see in these very first examples of Christian art is that Jesus who's suffering in pain covered in blood like the one on the Turin Shroud that Jesus doesn't turn up in art for a thousand years or so because the tortured Jesus is a creation of the Middle Ages an expression of medieval guilt and terror what horrible pains the artistic mind went on to inflict on the crucified Jesus in the centuries ahead how harshly it whipped him and scourge him and punctured him [Music] in the beginning though artists didn't do that the first Jesus is in art a young and handsome curly haired and free so either Jesus deliberately misled his followers about what he actually looked like for the first 1,000 years or so of Christianity or the Turin Shroud is a medieval fake I know what I think [Music] the first Christians weren't looking for a God who made them feel guilty that would never have caught on they were looking for a God who would save them and fill them with hope so was their model for the first Jesus Christian artists selected the youngest and handsomest of the pagan gods they chose Apollo the god of the Sun blonde and unburied youthful and curly haired Apollo was a God who made you feel good [Music] so the first jesus' were curly-haired and pretty because they borrowed that look from apollo and it went further than that when this mysterious christian statue was dug up out of the ground it was thought to represent a woman an unknown goddess amuse only later was it realized that this too was an early Jesus in that wonderful Museum in Cleveland the one with the Jonah marbles there's a carving of Apollo performing a miracle with Nike the goddess of victory Apollo is the robed figure on the left and look how shapely he is how easily we might mistake him - for a woman pagan gods could be male and female they could amalgamate the sexes and represent both genders at once just like this Jesus here extraordinary as it sounds the first jesus' were sometimes made to look feminine on purpose they were given suggestions of breasts beautiful faces soft bodies and long hair there is neither male nor female wrote Saint Paul to the Colossians you are all one in Jesus the pagans had lots of goddesses to worship Venus Isis Diana but Christianity had none Christianity believed in one true God and he was masculine there was an entire feminine side missing so the feminization of Jesus was a deliberate artistic attempt to cater for both sexes it produced some of the dark ages most unexpected imagery in Ravenna in the Magnificent Aryan baptistry there's an unburden Jesus being baptized in the River Jordan and he's so soft and feminine a pudgy and delicate Christ with childbearing hips before this girlish Jesus could become fully masculine grow a beard and turn into a man Christianity needed to find a feminine presence of its own the borrowing of Christ's face from Apollo shouldn't really surprise us the early Christians borrowed from the pagans because that's what art does it uses what's already there it's important to remember too that for most of these early centuries of Christianity Christians and pagans lived together in reasonable harmony those terrible periods of persecution when the Romans murdered the Christians in terrible ways those were rare the exception not the rule later when the Roman Empire became officially Christian under the Emperor Constantine aggressive Christian writers looking back on these times did what the victor always does in a war they rewrote history from their point of view dramatized it exaggerated in most of the Roman Empire particularly at the borders like here in Roman Syria pagans live next door to Christians Christians live next door to Jews and all of them muddled along together the earliest known Christian Church has been found in the Syrian border town of dura Europos it was next to the earliest known synagogue and around the corner was the temple of the bull God Mithras all these different religions swapped each other's converts borrowed each other's gods and influenced each other's art take the halo that miraculous circle of light that you see around the heads of holy figures and Christian art at first there were no halos Jesus was the magician with the wand and that was enough to differentiate him but as Christian art grew busier and more and more characters popped up in it Jesus needed to look more obviously divine so Christian artists did what the pagans did they gave him a halo borrowed once again from Apollo long before Jesus acquired his miraculous Nimbus of light apollo already had one a circle of symbolic sunshine emanating from his head to signify his solar divinity another crucial borrowing from the pagans was the image of the angel if you look at a typical Roman sarcophagus the early Christian era you'll usually see a pair of winged figures carrying a portrait of the deceased upwards in glory they look exactly like angels but they're not there Roman figures of victory Nikes pagan transporters of the soul but the most significant of these pagan borrowings was a female figure adapted from Egyptian art she became very popular in Christianity indeed she was central to it but that's not how she began [Music] the Egyptian Earth Mother Isis was one of the most revered of all pagan gods she was the goddess of fertility the mother goddess from whom all life originally sprang you wanted babies you prayed to Isis when you wanted your crops to grow you prayed to Isis however you were slave servant outcasts you prayed to Isis because Isis would protect you to emphasize her caring nature Isis was often shown with a baby on her knee whom she breastfeeds legally he's Horus son of Isis Horus was the god of the sky the Egyptian Apollo and his birthday fell at the winter solstice sometime around December the 25th when Christian art grew hungry for a distinct female presence to worship a mother goddess who nurtured you and protected you Isis the mother of Horus was an obvious model and the two of them were soon successfully transported into Christian art this is the first known image of Mary holding the baby Jesus on her lap it was found in the Roman catacombs of Priscilla a touching fragment of a mother and her child Mary caring for the baby Jesus became one of the most popular of all the Christian images of the dark ages with such glorious results [Music] this great artistic discovery of the Virgin Mary had an important by-product because it did away with the need to feminize or softened Jesus when Mary emerged as a powerful divine presence Jesus no longer needed to be girlish his image was free to become fully masculine but where to put all this powerful new art that Christianity was inventing it's all very well finding a new image for Jesus and Mary but were also needed to be invented was the Christian Church the Roman Empire was huge it stretched from the Middle East at one end to this primitive cultural backwater at the other the place we now call written what you're imagining the Roman Empire you need to stop thinking about countries because there weren't any no clear divisions either between Asia and Africa or Europe all of them were part of this massive collar of power surrounding the entire Mediterranean the mightiest Empire the world is seen Christianity got to Britain quite early all the way from over here all right up to here just about there in a village in Dorset called Hinton st. Mary they've dug up one of the earliest mosaic images of Jesus he looks stately doesn't he more like a Roman senator than a Christian God except for the large Kiro that surrounds his head the sign of Christ [Music] this is lulling stone in Kent and we're here because I wanted you to see what's left of one of the earliest known Christian churches [Music] if you're thinking to yourself that this looks more like the remains of a big house not a church you'd be absolutely right the first churches were ordinary houses adapted for Christian use some Christians were richer and more active in the community than others and their house became the Neighborhood House Church the house church they found in dura Europos the one next door to the jewish synagogue was just a small town house in which the Christians had done some DIY knocked down a wall roofed over a courtyard to create more space for their meetings on the walls of this makeshift church the dura Christians painted Christ's walking on water and there he is again healing a cripple making him walk to here in loving stone the house church was on the first floor of this elegant Roman villa it was just above that pagan shrine there basically it was a simple room with painted walls decorating it was a procession of praying Christians with crosses on their robes there was also a key row and around this key row the two momentous letters of the Greek alphabet again Alpha and Omega the beginning and the end if you put all those four letters together alpha Rho P and Omega you get the word Arco which means I rule from the outside you wouldn't have known the lulling Stonehouse Church was there it was a modest Christian conversion and almost invisible and for the first 300 years all churches were like this humble spaces in people's houses wonky bits of DIY where Christians could worship and celebrate and then 31:3 ad Constantine the great converted to Christianity and everything changed suddenly this cryptic and secretive religion with its instinctive fondness for codes and clues became the official religion of the Roman Empire and modesty was no longer an option oh he's a big one isn't he [Music] Constantine the Great Roman Emperor mighty warrior and defender of the faith Constantine's mother st. Helena was a Christian and he probably inherited the faith from her in 313 ad Constantine's famous Edict of Milan made Christianity legal in the Roman Empire and from then on its power grew and grew grow Constantine was a builder by instinct look at this magnificent triumphal arch he plunked in front of the Colosseum but his greatest achievement as a builder was the unexpected invention of the Christian Church until Constantine Christian churches were small and makeshift often hidden away but when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Emperor everything changed suddenly all the building resources of the mightiest Empire the world has seen began to be lavished on Christian architecture and a religion which had hitherto made do with one key house churches found itself having to invent a grand new style of worship these huge Christian basilica's that constantine began building were another Christian achievement for which there was no precedent the little house churches were useless as an example for these giant halls of worship this was a completely new kind of architecture this is Santa Sabina in Rome the best-preserved of the first Christian basilica's it's a new type of religious space no one in any religion had worshiped like this before pagan temples worked very differently from a Christian Church pagan temples were spaces for worshipping outdoors in a pagan temple the congregation stayed outside only the priests of the cult could enter the holy sanctuary in which the sacred Idol was kept Christian churches were the opposite a Christian Church was a huge Assembly Hall with a roof where people could worship indoors and the style of worship was different too nowadays churches have these neat rows of pews where everybody sits quietly and piously but in the first Christian churches there were no pews in the beginning Christian churches were huge open spaces in which an ecstatic Christian crowd would heave and circulate this was a space for moving and chanting and talking start of the ceremony the priests would enter in a magnificent procession that went all the way up to the front you see them Illustrated sometimes higher on Christian walls an ornate and states.we priesthood progressing through these new knaves in a magnificent wave of finery and Colour [Music] so these were spaces full of constant movement and chaotic crowding and the only precedent for such a building was a useful Roman construction called a basilica basilica's were public meeting halls built to house big crowds there was nothing religious about them every sizeable Roman settlement had a basilica Roman basilica's were entered from the side somewhere about here but when the Christians took over the shape they swiveled it around and put the entrance over here so the entire building pointed that way one of the most common uses of a Roman Basilica was as a law court the populace would mill about down here while the magistrate would sit up at the end raised one a magisterial throne sitting in a special rounded apps that signaled his importance [Music] the Christians took over the magistrates apps as well that's where they put the sacrificial altar and above it a great apse mosaic the climactic moment of this magnificent religious journey [Music] but you're looking up at this glorious apse mosaic and you're thinking hmm there's Jesus with a big beard what happened to the curly-haired boy well he just wasn't grand enough for Constantine's new basilica's so the early Christians wanted a God they could look up to a God who was a match for all the other gods when the time came for a more imposing Jesus to emerge Jesus the adults the Christians turned once again to that reliable source of raw materials that lay all around them the art of the pagans [Music] the most powerful and important of all the Roman gods was Jupiter or in his Greek incarnation Zeus king of the gods Zeus or Jupiter was grand and bearded in the great temple of zeus at olympia the most famous sculptor of the Classical Age vibius had shown the king of the gods enthroned in majesty an image the Christians were determined to match they took at all the beard the hair the throne that sense of omnipotent power it was all borrowed from Zeus and the curly-haired youth with the girlish body who'd buzzed around performing all those miracles was replaced by this manly mature Jesus who sits in judgment on his flock Stern an unsmiling wise and infallible meanwhile back down in the Roman catacombs darker Christian forces were also stirring what I said the persecution of the Christians has been exaggerated I didn't mean it never happened of course it did particularly under Constantine's predecessor Diocletian though not perhaps in the numbers we've been led to believe some estimates say they're only about 2,000 Christians were killed in the Roman persecutions I think there must have been more than that but the modern age is definitely better at killing Christians than the Romans ever were in the Spanish Civil War 7,000 priests monks and nuns were murdered and you never hear about them but for the early Christians death had a special significance the idea took hold in their imaginations that suffering was a necessary part of redemption it was crucial and this belief in death had a profound influence on their art and their architecture these are the catacombs of st. Agnes of Rome she's the patron saint of chastity of teenage girls engaged couples rape victims and virgins agamous was a thirteen year old girl murdered in the reign of Diocletian the story goes that a Roman prefect wanted her to marry his son but aganist was a Christian she refused so the Roman prefect condemned her to death [Music] roman law didn't permit the execution of virgins so Agnes was stripped paraded naked through the streets and dragged to a brothel afterwards they tried to burn her but the flames wouldn't touch her and everyone who looked at her naked body was blinded in the end a Roman soldier beheaded her and her body decapitated is kept here in this church but her skull that's in Santa glaze a in Piazza Navona where the faithful come to kneel before it and worship it martyrs like agonists were believed to offer special protection for the early Christians they were baptized in blood and sat next to God in the next world if a martyr favored you you too were guaranteed a place in heaven to improve their chances of salvation every Christian wanted to be buried that's close to a martyr as possible and so the catacombs became a very desirable piece of real estate directly above Agnes's tomb are the ruins of a giant funeral Basilica all this was once covered in Christian graves but the building I really want to show you is this one the one next door to the Basilica this is Santa Constanza it's a Christian Church now but originally this was a Roman mausoleum it was built by Constantine's own daughter Constanza this is where she was buried in this big sarcophagus here the story goes that when Constanza was a little girl she contracted leprosy so she prayed to Saint Agnes and Agnes saved her that was the power that martyrs had their miracles could change history and that's why Constanza wanted to be buried here that's close to Saint Agnes that she could be [Music] these Roman mausoleums as you can see were a completely different shape from the basilica's mausoleums were round they want places for the crowd to charge up and down these were places of burial and contemplation sacred spaces that unfold you and these round Roman laws aliens were to have a profound effect on the Christian Church [Music] [Music] see this famous book it's the decline and fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon the history of Rome in 12 mighty volumes so this is the Roman Empire at the time of Constantine now according to given here Rome collapsed because the Romans group decadent and soft but I think you can see from this map here what the real problem was the Empire was just too big this way it went all the way to Scotland up here and the other way deep into the Middle East there was just too much empire to govern efficiently and when Constantine came along he made the momentous decision to divide the Empire in two with a Western Empire over here and an Eastern Empire over there to govern this new Eastern Empire which came to be called Byzantium Constantine founded a new Christian capital on the Bosphorus a grand ruling city designed from scratch which he named after himself Constantinople though these days we call it Istanbul [Music] here in the western half of the empire Rome was no longer cut out to be the capital either it was living on former glories a pretty collection of ruins the Empire needed somewhere more vigorous to be ruled from somewhere better placed somewhere near the sea perhaps with good connections to the east somewhere about here Ravenna the music lovers among you will know Ravenna already you'll know that it's mosaic heaven with a Christian mosaic excelled itself how could anyone ever have thought any of this constituted a Dark Age this is the Church of San Vitale it's one of a group of churches in Ravenna that's filled with these stunning mosaics but the reason I brought you to this particular church is because of its shape as you can see it's round like a mausoleum not long and thin like a basilica these round churches of early Christianity have a particular effect on the visitor they offer a 360-degree experience a sense of enclosure and centering the early Christians used round architecture particularly the church is devoted to the martyrs like San Vitale up there who'd stood up to Diocletian and died for his faith the basilica's were action spaces where you met and assembled and parade it but these round churches these are thinking spaces they're like a protective bell jar dropped onto an important location protecting it and sanctifying it you still get a sense here the transcendental space built around a precious relic and that mysterious magical effect of an interior sculpted from light [Music] and it wasn't just the burial sites of the martyrs that had special power bits of their bodies had it - their hair their bones and to house these precious relics the Christians began to create marvelous jeweled containers relic boxes made from the finest materials with astonishing delicacy and beauty because these relics have the power to every Christian altar had to have a relic inside it to validate it make it sacred [Music] relics were like pieces of portable magic that could be transported from church to church and wherever they were placed they made that space holy so by the time we get to this glorious by Sam time Cathedral of Monreale Holly and Cicely all the ingredients of Christian worship are in place just look at it by the time Monday Ali was finished the Dark Ages were over but all this was shaped by Dark Age achievements but this end the nave it's like a basilica long and thin a space for assemblies and parades at this end of the church the east end where the main altar is filled with precious relics the Magisterial Apps has grown huge and enveloping so at this end this is like a round church a special place filled with light and a golden magical air but over here it's like a basilica the space for assemblies and processions so up there a-thinking space down here an action space all brought together in one magnificent piece of architecture high up on the walls scenes from Christ's miracles there he is again raising Lazarus and the dead and over there is curing the paraplegic making him walk again [Music] look what's above the altar the Virgin and Child borrowed from the Egyptian Isis on either side of her two angels borrowed from pagan victories and above that trumping them all in size and magnificence sitting so proudly in his golden apse an enormous Byzantine Jesus Zeus like and bearded unmistakeably divine this is a proper divinity a Byzantine ruler God you can look up to magnificent all-powerful look also on either side of Jesus you can see his name spelled out in Greek letters on the left your tap and Sigma J and s the first and last letters of Jesus and on the right key and Sigma C and s the first and last letters of Christus it's that Christian word code again look at his fingers too Christ the ruler is spelling out his own name with his hands there's your tap and Sigma J and s for Jesus and P and Sigma for Christ my fingers are a bit too stubby for it but he's doing it perfectly it's that secret religious language again that Christianity had employed from the beginning even in this giant Jesus larger than any Roman Emperor Christianity couldn't resist a final moment of mystery in the next film I'll be looking at the artistic achievements of the so called barbarians and asking what the barbarians did for us the answer is [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 987,931

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Keywords: Documentary, history documentary, Documentary Movies - Topic, Full Documentary, BBC documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Channel 4 documentary, documentary history, History, stories, real, 2017 documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries

Id: M4o1dc41r28

Length: 59min 22sec (3562 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 14 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Alimbiquated]

Even by the 7th or 8th centuries, technology had moved far beyond the Roman era. For example, they have stirrups and horse collars, making horses much more effective, and they were bred to be much bigger and stronger. Oxen are just too slow, even when pulling a cart or a plow.They also had pants, which the Romans banned in the late empire. Buttons are another dark ages innovation, but it's not clear when they came in. Romans used safety pins to keep their togas up, and the Chinese found buttons strange in the early 20th century. The Slavic steel plow (and the horse collar) made Northern Europe farmable, something the Romans never managed, and the population boomed as a result. Tanning and metallurgy also improved greatly. The big Eastern expansion of the Franks and Saxons was largely driven by technology improvements in mining. agriculture and water mills. The Vikings may be remembered as barbarians, but Viking ships could literally sail circles around Roman ships, because they could tack and sail across the wind. And so on.