The Silk Road - Light From Darkness | Full Documentary

foreign [Music] Eurasia the world's largest landmass some ten thousand kilometers from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans a formidable distance even in today's world and yet over that vast distance human beings have pursued one of History's Greatest Enterprises the Silk Road a tremendously profitable trade route and so much more for thousands of years exotic Goods new technologies [Music] conquering armies and Brilliant ideas traveled along the Silk Road foreign Silk Road trade helped to build Empires and to break them it fanned the fires of revolution drove Great Explorations and forged powerful bonds between far away peoples Silk Road made human beings realize that there are other people out there and it opened the eyes of the East and the West this is the story of how Silk Road trade made so much more than money epic tale of how the Silk Road helped create a world a world that created us [Music] at the Battle of Cressy in 1346 the English one and historic victory over France by a Chinese invention that had traveled to Europe gunpowder [Music] oh [Music] and in the same year of 1346 some 2000 kilometers east of Cressy another battle was taking place on the shores of the Black Sea [Music] a Mongol Army had been laying Siege to the Crimean Port City of Cafe a Silk Road Trading Post belonging to the Italian city of Genoa the Mongols were masters of Siege Warfare but kapha was still holding out after more than two years suddenly the Mongol Army was decimated not by kapha's Defenders but by an unknown disease the Mongols quickly ended their Siege but before they left kapha they loaded their Siege engines with the corpses of their dead and flung them over the city's walls believing that the stench of death would kill the Defenders medieval Chronicles say that kapha's Defenders did die by the thousands but not from the smell of death [Music] one year later in 1347 the same disease that had killed the Mongols at kapha was killing people in Constantinople by 1348 it was killing people across Western Europe [Music] by 1350 it was killing people as far away as Greenland [Music] and terrified Europeans had given it a name the black death in just under a decade from 1347 to 1356 the Black Death killed at least 25 million Europeans one-third of Europe's population today most scholars believe that the Black Death was an outbreak of bubonic plague that was transmitted to humans by infected fleas living on rats and we believe that it spread across Eurasia by hitching a ride with armies ships and Caravans along trade routes that were already ancient by the time of the Black Death microorganic Travelers of all kinds have moved across Eurasia for thousands of years a biomigration that has had as big an impact on history as the more famous exchanges of new technologies and luxury goods and as a recent discovery shows tiny living things moving along the Silk Road brought life as well as death we were putting together some new methods of looking for early agriculture and for that we needed to do a survey of all the fines of early crops in Europe when you looked at a map of all of Europe and you could see there were these Chinese crops in small numbers very early on in Europe very early on was around 2000 BCE when a Chinese grain called broom corn Millet appears in the Eastern European archaeological record special crop itself will will Decay or be eaten but rather fortunately if it's cooked and overburned it turns to carbon that will stay in the archaeological record for a long time in the Chinese province of inner Mongolia archaeologists are studying the origins of broomcorn millet one of the world's oldest domestic crops but it isn't clear just how and why broomcorn Millet traveled thousands of kilometers across Eurasia through some of the world's harshest environments all the way to Europe millet's long journey may have begun simply because it traveled so well essentially cereals but are very small and because they have very small grains they're Hardy and they're tough and they can grow quite fast broom call minute at a push can get from seed to seed in 45 days you can plant a seed in the ground and 45 days later in the right conditions you may have plants that's incredibly fast so if you're moving around part of Asia where on the one hand there's a Long Winter a short growing season and you can't particularly rely on rainfall then something that gets a move on in terms of its growth cycle is very valuable there are accounts of communities that are on horseback for quite a lot of the time and herding animals and so forth but for that short short season of the year that minute grows in they can actually sew the Millet on horseback trampled it in with the horse's feet and then either leave a few teenagers there to scare the birds off for a couple of months come back two months later and harvest the crops Millet was a highly mobile grain but there wasn't any evidence of how it might have traveled from its home in northern China until archaeologists found signs of millet cultivation around 2500 BCE in the foothills of the Chan Shan mountains in Central Asia at that point we asked ourselves well what is it about these Foothills you know why the foothills clearly it's about water if one travels across the center of Asia one realizes why water is a key and wherever you are in Asia it can be very dry of course but if one goes uphill to those Foothills then one has somewhere where there will be streams running off the mountains and water archaeologists found that around 1000 BCE Millet Farmers left the chenshan Foothills and their reliable water supply and began moving into much harsher environments we can see uh if you like the confidence of farmers spreading out from where the water is really safe two areas where you have to know more about the water and the landscape and the geography both into the step to the north and to the desert to the South millet's local migrations may have linked it with the world migrating Millet farmers in search of water may have settled near trade routes and long distance Travelers would have chosen routes near reliable sources of food and water I think very much those Traders are definitely working through networks that are already centuries old it's at least a millennium before you see something crystallizing that you can start calling the Silk Road another Discovery has revealed that this ancient grain migration wasn't only from east to west yes trading Millet and wheat between China and Europe may have done much more than feed people it may also have enabled profound social change [Applause] germinate at one time of year and a harvested another time of year and that's kind of hardwired into their biology and so farming is a one season activity and there are other things going on at other times of year and during the second millennium BC a number of societies are doing something which is quite radically different and that is putting more than one season in a single year crops like millets are really useful for that in that if you are a western farmer with Wheaton barley fields reaching maturity during the summer and you think right with the same plot of land I want to increase production and so I was another crop after I've harvested the first crop you can't do a long season large grain crop like wheat and barley again so something that's short and sharp like Millet you can tag onto the end of it and catch another season before the Winter's set in interestingly when you get to China it's the converse you have this short season crop already there and by rearranging your life you can bring a long season such as wheat and barley in at that stage so the implications are with the same plot of land you could basically get two harvests rather than one so two sets of calories rather than one it may release some of the community to not farm at all and occupy roles within cities or as craft people or leaders if we look at the second millennium BC what we certainly see is at the same time as multi-cropping is there then there are a lot of the community are not Farmers but instead metal workers or Kings or priests or something else so what we see evidence of is multi-cropping allows a non-farming sector within the community so what we have is a small not very impressive looking seed but because of the way it grows and because of its biology it has a massive impact in changing the productivity of the heartlands of Western farming so those Western farmlands could in the same area produce two crops rather than one and that enabled a whole series of things that we associate with the word civilization finding Chinese Millet in Europe and European wheat and Bali in China suggests that long before the Silk Road East and West we're introducing one another to new foods and that the movement of crops may have helped create the earliest East-West trade routes and in the deserts of Far Western China archaeologists have discovered another way living organisms could travel the Silk Road relay station an archaeological site near the town of Don Juan a major stopping point on the Silk Road 2000 years ago during the Han Dynasty songzhanji was a very busy and very Cosmopolitan place [Music] [Music] um foreign [Music] it would be used for merchants and it would also be used for government business people could travel long distances knowing that there was somewhere they could stay and be refreshed and recover change their horses and then move on to the next relay station the wonderful thing about the shranshanji trading post was that it's in a part of the country that is not built up now and the environment being very dry and often very cold in the winter means that things are preserved there very well so a lot of the things with inside that Trading Post have have survived instead of decomposing excavators were especially excited to find something that perhaps only an archaeologist could love the 2 000 year old equivalent of toilet paper in China they wrote back in in the hand Dynasty times how they would have a stick with cloth wrapped on the end so people would wipe themselves with and there were quite a few of these sticks thrown into the latrine as if people discarded them in there when they'd finished these sticks have been found at some other excavations in China as well but what's great about this particular relay station is we still have the cloth wrapped on the end and we still had the human feces on so we scraped off the dried feces from the cloth and took them to the lab we found four different species of parasite in those who use this latrine two of the species are spread by feces contaminating your food or your hands or your your drink so roundworm and whipworm another species was a kind of tapeworm that they probably acquired by eating raw or undercooked pork and then we found a really exciting find which was the Chinese liver fluke this is a small a flatworm that lives in eastern and southern China and in Korea it can only survive in Marshy wet places but here we found it one and a half thousand kilometers away from anywhere that has it in modern times so it wasn't what we expected to find it was brilliant that we could find it on the Silk Road the liver flu requires a life cycle where it passes through freshwater snails and through small fish and then bigger fish and if you cook the fish then you don't get the liver fluke but if you eat the fish raw then it hatches out in your stomach migrates through your body crawls into the liver and then develops there there was no way that people in the area of this relay station could have caught it in that particular area because it was far too dry there were no Lakes there were no freshwater snails and fish for them to infect Ed guys yeah there you go hey um foreign have shown that humans could carry diseases long distances along the Silk Road another Discovery has revealed what could happen when they did foreign German scientists began investigating a puzzling Discovery in the Bavarian town of ashheim um this is foreign foreign Mass burial was an archaeological enigma but there was one crucial clue the bodies had been buried during the 6th Century CE in the 6th Century a terrifying illness called the plague of Justinian ravaged the Eastern Roman Empire [Music] healed 30 to 50 million people in Europe Asia and Africa nearly half of all the people on Earth um the Justinian plague arrived in Constantinople on ships from Egypt but what the disease was and where it came from remained unknown the team investigating usheim's Mass burial hoped its bones might reveal the answer is individual foreign foreign foreign studies like the ashheim DNA project have concluded that 800 years before the Black Death plague traveled the Silk Road and that centuries later the Black Death followed in its path most Scholars now agree that the Black Death originated in Central Asia and that it first reached Europe on Italian Merchant ships returning from the East [Music] the Black Death killed with Incredible speed victims had only a week to a few hours to live [Music] entire towns and monasteries were wiped out and no one knew what to do it may have spent about five miles a day which is a lot faster than a lot of modern Bubonic plague outbreaks whether it was because the rate at which people fled from it that spread it faster than it might otherwise have been and it certainly was something that had a dramatic effect on people in Europe they all wrote about it they were all scared of it [Music] [Music] foreign concept of contagion and the idea that the disease could be spread from one person to another but they didn't know how [Music] it had no idea about bacteria or the spread of microorganisms of that stage so they hadn't worked out how disease was spread but they just realized that one person seemed to be able to spread it to the rest of their family so they realized something must be happening there [Music] thank you [Music] baffled Physicians consulted the works of ancient authorities like Hippocrates who lived four centuries before the birth of Jesus and Galen who lived two centuries after Jesus's death Hippocrates and Galen believed that illness was a result of an imbalance among four so-called humors blood phlegm yellow bile and black bile the theory was that if you had your four humors in balance your blood your phlegm your black vial and your yellow bile then you'd be healthy but if they came out of balance or if you had Corruption of one of your humors then that would make you unwell so the treatments the doctors used were largely based on their understanding of humoral Theory so at the beginning they tried the normal treatments of dietary modification and bloodletting and bars and so on but they had no effect they believed that bad Vapors were coming up from the ground making people ill affecting their humors they believed that a strong southerly wind was a bad thing that made a lot of people ill that it was a combination of the alignments of the planets because they believed in astrology and its effect on your risk of disease they really didn't have a structured medical approach to how to deal with it it took everyone off guard no one knew how to deal with it the doctors were effectively powerless [Music] some citizens attempted another cure [Music] [Applause] Jews in Europe suffered fewer deaths from played that may have been because they were socially isolated and practiced better hygiene than the general population but surviving the Black Death cost thousands of European Jews their lives all across plague stricken Europe the already age-old Christian prejudice against Jews exploded into murderous hatred they believed that people with Leprosy or Jewish people may have actually exacerbated the plague by poisoning people so this is a sign of how panicked and how worried everybody was that they were thinking of really quite bizarre kind of interpretations as to why everyone was coming sick I understand [Applause] while mobs murdered Jews Physicians tried to stop the Black Death when traditional theories of disease failed they resorted to studying the disease itself they were desperate to understand what was causing the Black Death how it spread and how to treat it slowly they found answers they tried various treatments but no medicines had any effect but that's why they moved over time to trying to restrict the contact of people burning the clothes of people that had died rather than giving them to other people and they realized that the clothes and spread of people was an important way they could stop the spread of disease so we have the introduction of concept of quarantine where people weren't allowed to move from one area to another if there was a plague outbreak and also that when sailors and ships arrived in a port they may have to stay in a quarantined area for a certain number of days until they were found to be clear of the disease and then they could move Inland and actually go into town [Music] over time this new trial and error approach would spawn a medical Revolution [Music] some 200 years after the Black Death the brilliant physician Andreas vaselius published meticulous studies of the human body that exploded ancient and medieval theories and gave birth to Modern Anatomy Europe's battle against the Black Death taught lessons that helped create modern medicine and even centuries later the Black Death still has much to teach so this is a skull of a man who survived the black death and died in Cambridge in the later part of the 1300s we know he survived the Black Death because we have a radiocarbon date that's showing when he died and we know he was a fairly old individual one of the things we're doing here is a project looking at the effect of the Bubonic plague upon the British population specifically in Cambridge and what we're trying to find out is what are different about people who survived compared with people who died that way we can work out how a black death really changed the population of Britain and what our population might have been like had half of us not died in the mid-1300s and to do that we're looking at the genetics the height the health and many other aspects of the skeletons that we find who died before the Black Death the ones who died afterwards so we can see the effect of this epidemic upon people in Britain so what we're hoping to find out is what is different about the genes of the people that survived did they somehow have a better resistance D Bubonic plague than other people or was it just mere chance as to who survived and who died those who did survive LED Better Lives as the greatest horror of their age gave way to a new era [Music] the Black Death had decimated Europe's Workforce [Music] desperate for labor the nobility had to compete for surviving workers by offering higher wages [Music] over the next few centuries we see a complete rebalancing in the population so the poor hungry farmers who didn't have enough land were suddenly in a different position the farmers around them had died their income could go up because they could Farm much more land and so there was less poverty and famine among the farmers opportunities increased due to the shortage of workers women could now be scribes and hold other jobs formally reserved for men the European middle class was born he then had fewer people able to do manual labor means that not only did the price of their labor go up so they then had better income it also means that there seems to have been a number of inventions made specifically for labor-saving devices we find the introduction of the spinning wheel we find horizontal looms we find filling Mills we've had blast furnaces mechanized tools and we have three mastered ships that could hold a lot more cargo for only a small number more Sailors so it was much more efficient way of trade so over the next 200 years or so we see big improvements in mechanization and the fact that fewer people around meant that these things may have been invented because of the shortage of people following the Black Death newly affluent Europeans created a bigger market for exotic imported goods [Music] all right especially for one far away luxury traded since ancient times along the Silk Road spices [Music] in the late Middle Ages Asian spices like pepper cinnamon and cloves were highly valuable commodities thank you in London Dock Workers bonuses were paid with Indonesian clothes in Venice people bought houses with pepper [Music] anyone brave enough to seek out spices could get very very rich and trading in spices meant traveling the trade routes between east and west [Music] Venetian Merchants traveled those routes and dominated the spice trade Europe had to pay whatever Venice demanded [Music] Venice became a fabulously wealthy City [Music] while the rest of Europe crumbled and paid [Music] China was also making epic voyages to the spicelands and developing some of the world's most advanced Maritime technology during the 13th and 14th centuries foreign visitors to China were awed by the size and sophistication of Chinese vessels in the year 1345 the Moroccan traveler iban batuta wrote of seeing massive ships that could carry a thousand men the only ships big enough to make the long journey from China to India and Marco Polo told of sailing on a Chinese spice trading vessel in the year 1292 CE are they [Music] experience deeply impressed him he claimed the Chinese ship he sailed on was capable of holding five thousand to six thousand baskets of pepper a much bigger cargo than the spice ships of his native Venice could hold and that his vessel was escorted by smaller ships that could carry a thousand pepper baskets Polo embarked on his journey from the Chinese Port of chengzhou a place he described as teeming with hundreds of vessels from China and from distant lands but he didn't report his vessel's exact dimensions leaving historians to wonder if he'd exaggerated the ship's size or even if he had actually sailed on it and then in 1973 Chinese archaeologists found a shipwreck in chenjao Harbor side um ship was carrying rare woods from java and Cambodia frankincense from Arabia even ambergris from Somalia [Music] it sank in the year 1277 just 15 years before Marco Polo visited shenzhou and its design and construction were remarkably Advanced for their time featuring watertight compartments and other Innovations centuries before Western vessels had them um foreign 35 meters long and 10 meters wide the chenzhou ship could have been one of the smaller vessels that escorted Marco Polo's bigger ship and there's also evidence that very large Chinese trading vessels did exist this park in the Chinese city of Nanjing is built on the remains of a shipyard dating from the 14th century when they excavated that Shipyard archaeologists found two giant Rudder posts each of them over 10 meters long Chinese records speak of giant treasure ships carrying trade goods on Epic Journeys to far away lands [Music] commanded by the distinguished Admiral jung-ho a Chinese Armada called the Great Fleet made Seven voyages between the years 1405 and 1433 from lujagong in China's zhangsu Province the fleet sailed on diplomatic missions to Southeast Asia the Great Indian Seaport of Calicut Arabia and along Africa's East Coast forging relationships that linked Seabourn and Overland trade over 300 ships carrying nearly 30 000 men sailed on the first of those expeditions Chronicles of those voyages claim that the largest of jung-ho's ships were over 130 meters long and over 50 meters wide but marine engineers doubt ships that big would have been seaworthy [Music] the American clipper ship great Republic launched in 1853 was 102 meters long and 16 meters wide [Music] in 1872 her leaking Hull sank her in a hurricane the Wyoming built in 1909 was 110 meters long [Music] its extreme length made it structurally unstable in Heavy Seas in 1924 the Wyoming sank during a storm if jongher's treasure ships were as big as Chinese Chronicles claim they would have been as long and wide as the Wyoming and longer than the great Republic s um foreign deeply impressed Maritime trading nations from Indochina to Africa China seemed poised to dominate the coveted spice trade but in 1433 Admiral jung-her died about the same time the Chinese Court began losing interest in long-distance voyaging and Chinese seafaring entered a long decline scarcely more than 100 years after the great fleet's last Voyage the emperor declared overseas voyaging a crime and it wasn't long before East-West trade suffered another blow by the middle of the 15th century the once Mighty Byzantine Empire was in deep decline the ottoman Turks descendants of Central Asian Nomads had conquered most of its territory the Byzantine emperor ruled only his capital of Constantinople in the spring of 1453 the ottoman Sultan Mehmet II laid Siege to Constantinople foreign was defended by a mere 7 000 troops Mehmet had an army of some 80 000 men but Mehmet wasn't sure he would win the city's massive walls had withstood sieges for a thousand years protected by those walls constantinople's Defenders held out for weeks but Mehmet didn't just have an army he had a mega weapon a bronze Cannon nearly 10 meters long with a barrel nearly a meter in diameter and 20 centimeters thick it said it could hurl a 450 kilogram Stone Cannonball more than one and a half kilometers this Behemoth a nearly 70 smaller Cannon bombarded constantinople's walls day and night damaging them so badly that the Turks succeeded in taking the city [Music] the fall of Constantinople was a devastating blow to Europe Constantinople had been one of christendom's oldest and holiest cities [Music] now it was the capital of a powerful Muslim empire renamed Istanbul from a Turkish word meaning find Islam from their new capital of Istanbul the Ottomans now controlled access to the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean European Merchants were cut off from the Silk Road for nearly a hundred years Europeans had been growing wealthier and more and more eager to buy Asia's luxury goods Europe needed to find new routes to the East and within 50 years of constantinople's fall it would at the Battle of Cressy and the siege of Constantinople an ancient Chinese invention gunpowder had helped transform medieval Europe [Music] thank you now another Chinese invention and European innovation would help transform the future [Music]

Channel: Get.factual

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Keywords: Documentary, Documentary series, Full Documentary, Nature, science, history, biography, biographical documentary, historical documentary, wildlife, wildlife film, wildlife documentary, science documentary, nature documentary, Documentaries, get factual, get.factual, getfactual, get factual documentary, silk road, how the silk road made the world, eurasia, east and west, east silk road, west silk road, silk road and conflict, silk road conflict, conflicts, silk road history, enterprises

Id: qNdcL5CsteA

Length: 52min 14sec (3134 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 12 2023