Waldemar Looks At The Dark Ages In A New Light | Age Of Light: Full Series | Perspective

hello this is valdemar nostrak art critic producer and presenter of documentaries thanks for watching perspective youtube's home for classical art [Music] this is a series about an artistic era 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 up its dilemmas i'm going to call it the dark ages [Music] so the dark ages go roughly from the 4th century to roughly the 11th they begin when the roman empire starts to crumble 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 and various powerful artistic forces stepped up to take its place [Music] 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 a.d 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 they were already christians here by 79 a.d and the thing they found that proved it was this [Music] it's what they call a rotas square and these rotate squares are deeply mysterious they've been found all over the roman empire in syria in gaul even in england in siren chester 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 a repo and sator [Music] rotas at the top is satour backwards and you can see rotas down this side as well and satou down that side and here in the middle a repo is opera work backwards the actual words mean something like as ye so so shall ye 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 rota square was not the words but the letters because these letters of the rota square can be rearranged to form a cross which reads the same both ways up and down and 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 [Music] 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 rota 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 imagine 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 ubiquitous christian symbol [Music] 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 [Music] this famous christian sign the christogram or key row represents jesus himself it's made by combining two greek letters key and row the first two letters of the word christos which means the anointed one [Music] 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 but the top of it here looked like a cross [Music] everywhere you look in these haunting roman catacombs the first christians are declaring their faith in such mysterious and cryptic ways [Music] 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 till the beginning of our period the so-called dark ages 300 years after the birth of christ the figures and scenes begin to pop up at last in christian art look how puzzling they were 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 israelites 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 [Music] 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 and look how many different ways we've already seen to represent jesus without actually showing him he's the kiro the word sign he's jonah in the whale he's the fish the anchor what we haven't seen yet is a jesus we can all recognize a 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 [Music] the shroud of turin doesn't get shown very often but when it does thousands of pilgrims flocked at you in 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 at the remains of jesus but 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 blonde 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 at first is a happy-go-lucky character curly haired and handsome he's 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 babyface jesus and over here the blind man is being cured by jesus again and finally with a wave of that harry potter wand of his this is jesus raising lazarus from the dead you can always tell lazarus in early christian art because he looks like an egyptian mummy all wrapped up [Music] what you never see in these very first examples of christian art is a 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 [Music] what horrible pains the artistic mind went on to inflict on the crucified jesus in the centuries ahead how harshly it whipped him and scourged 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 head 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 handsomeness of the pagan gods they chose apollo the god of the sun blonde and unbearded youthful and curly-haired apollo was a god who made you feel good [Music] so the first jesuses 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 a muse 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 too 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 jesuses 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 galicians 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 baptistery there's an unbearded jesus being baptized in the river jordan and he's so soft and feminine a podgy and delicate christ with child bearing 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 [Music] 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 [Music] they rewrote history from their point of view dramatized it exaggerated it 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 guard 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 in 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 the typical roman sarcophagus of 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 they're 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 [Music] when you wanted babies you prayed to isis when you wanted your crops to grow you prayed to isis however you were slave servant outcast 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 regally [Music] 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 [Music] 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 byproduct because it did away with the need to feminize or soften 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 what 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 britain when 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 has seen christianity got to britain quite early all the way from over here right up to here and just about there in a village in dorset called hinton saint 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 key row 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 walking on water and there he is again healing a making him walk too here in lovingstone 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 [Music] if you put all those four letters together alpha rho key and omega you get the word arco which means i rule from the outside you wouldn't have known the lulling stone house 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 in 313 a.d 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 saint helena was a christian and he probably inherited the faith from her in 313 a.d constantine's famous edict of milan made christianity legal in the roman empire and from then on its power grew and grew and grew constantine was a builder by instinct look at this magnificent triumphal arch he plonked in front of the colosseum [Music] 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 wonky house churches found itself having to invent a grand new style of worship these huge christian basilicas 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 basilicas it's a new type of religious space no one in any religion had worshipped like this before pagan temples worked very differently from a christian church pagan temples were spaces for worshiping 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 [Music] 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 [Music] at the start of the ceremony the priests would enter in a magnificent procession that went all the way up to the front [Music] you see them illustrated sometimes high up on christian walls an ornate and stately priesthood progressing through these new knaves in a magnificent wave of finery and color [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 basilicas were public meeting halls built to house big crowds there was nothing religious about them every sizeable roman settlement had a basilica roman basilicas 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 on a magisterial throne sitting in a special rounded apps that signaled his importance [Music] the christians took over the magistrate's apps as well it's where they put their sacrificial altar and above it a great abs mosaic the climactic moment of this magnificent religious journey [Music] but you're looking up at this glorious abs 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 basilicas so the early christians wanted a god they could look up to a god who was a match for all the other gods [Music] and when the time came for a more imposing jesus to emerge jesus the adult 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 phidias had shown the king of the gods enthroned in majesty an image the christians were determined to match they took it 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 and unsmiling wise and infallible meanwhile back down in the roman catacombs darker christian forces were also stirring when 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 that 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 seven thousand 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 [Music] these are the catacombs of saint agnes of rome she's the patron saint of chastity of teenage girls engaged couples rape victims and virgins agonis was a 13 year old girl murdered in the reign of diocletian the story goes that a roman prefect wanted her to marry his son but agonis was a christian she refused so the roman prefect condemned her to death 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 gnese in piazza navona where the faithful come to kneel before it and worship it martyrs like agnes 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 [Music] to improve their chances of salvation every christian wanted to be buried as close to a martyr as possible and so the catacombs became a very desirable piece of real estate directly above agnes 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 [Music] the story goes that when constanza was a little girl she contracted leprosy so she prayed to saint agnes and agnes saved her [Music] that was the power that martyrs had their miracles could change history and that's why constanza wanted to be buried here as close to saint agnes as she could be [Music] these roman mausoleums as you can see were a completely different shape from the basilicas mausoleums were round they weren't places for the crowd to charge up and down these were places of burial and contemplation sacred spaces that enfold you and these round roman mausoleums were to have a profound effect on the christian church [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 gibbon here rome collapsed because the romans grew 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 mosaic lovers among you will know ravenna already you'll know that it's mosaic heaven where the 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 for churches devoted to the martyrs like san vitale up there who'd stood up to diocletian and died for his faith [Music] the basilicas were action spaces where you met and assembled and paraded 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 of a 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 too their hair their bones and to house these precious relics the christians began to create marvelous jewelled containers relic boxes made from the finest materials with astonishing delicacy and beauty [Music] because these relics had the power too every christian altar had to have a relic inside it to validate it and 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 [Music] holy so by the time we get to this glorious byzantine cathedral of monreal in sicily [Music] all the ingredients of christian worship are in place just look at it by the time monreali was finished the dark ages were over but all this was shaped by dark age achievements at this end the nave it's like a basilica long and thin a space for assemblies and parades [Music] at this end of the church the east end where the main altar is filled with precious relics the magisterial labs 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 a 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 from the dead and over there he's 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 apps an enormous byzantine jesus zeus-like and bearded unmistakably divine [Music] this is a proper divinity a byzantine ruler god you can look up to magnificent all powerful and look also on either side of jesus you can see his name spelled out in greek letters on the left yata 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 yotta and sigma j and s for jesus and ki and sigma for christ my fingers are a bit too stubby for it but he's doing it perfectly [Music] 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 plenty [Music] the word barbarian is a misleading expression and the art that goes with it is misleading too [Music] this picture was painted in 1890 by an arrogant french painter called joseph noel sylveste it shows the sack of rome in 410 a.d by the visigoths the visigoths were a so-called barbarian tribe you can't miss them they're the ones without any clothes on it's such nonsense the visigoths were never naked savages clambering about rome destroying civilization they were pioneering europeans who produced beautiful art and who achieved important things it was actually these so-called barbarians who invented trousers riding a horse was much easier in trousers so if it wasn't for the barbarians we'd all be wearing togas so this is a film about misunderstood peoples and their misunderstood achievements about how we've got the dark ages wrong again and about a word whose meaning has been warped by time it's this word here barbarian [Music] the dark ages go roughly from the 4th century to roughly the 11th and i've been looking at the art made in these years trying to convince you that it wasn't dark at all in this film i'll be leaping to the defense of the so-called barbarians [Music] the word barbarian actually comes from the ancient greek its original meaning was someone whose language you can't understand a foreigner you know like we say it all sounds like greek to me when we can't understand something well the greeks said it all sounds like baa baa baa so it was an onomatopoeic word anyone who spoke a funny foreign language was a barbarian the same word barbara can be found in sanskrit the ancient language of india where it means gibberish or stammering and if you're actually called barbara like barbara windsor or barbara streisand that i'm afraid your name means barbarian woman and you madame are particularly in touch with your barbarian self [Music] when the romans took over the word it came to mean anybody anywhere who wasn't a roman so the persians were barbarians the indians the chinese the entire non-roman world it isn't just this word barbarian that's been demonized and distorted if you open your dictionary and start looking for words with bad dark ages connotations you'll find lots of them take this word here vandal the vandals were actually another fascinating and creative ancient peoples who made things like this but their names been stolen from them and turned into something dark oh what about the goths today goths are oily punks with dyed black hair who worship the devil but in real life in roman times the goths were fabulous international creatives who made the most beautiful bible i've ever seen [Music] but the worst of these so-called barbarians these forgotten ancient peoples whose reputation has been trashed by the romans the very worst of them were the huns [Music] huns if anyone in ancient history deserves some rebranding it's this notorious nation of energetic invaders [Music] no one had a good word to say about them the goth historian jordanis tells us they were scarcely human a stunted puny and faithless tribe christian writers were even harsher according to a christian cleric writing in syria the huns eat the flesh of children and drink the blood of women it's like reading a bad airport paperback the christians were determined to demonize all pagans and they were particularly determined to demonize the hunts [Applause] so we can't trust the christian clerics we need to trust the art and that tells a different story [Music] in the first world war the british began calling the germans huns it was the worst insult they could think of but also very bad geography because [Music] exactly where they came from is one of the big mysteries of the dark ages nobody knows for sure but it was somewhere out here in the euro asian step somewhere far away and different the first record of the huns in europe dates from around 376 a.d when a group of retreating goths turned up here on the banks of the danube and begged the romans to take them in the fleeing goths have been pushed out of their lands by a nation of nomads coming in from the east a fighting tribe of whom everyone was scared huns were fierce warriors there's no denying that but not all the time like all nomads they lived a precarious traveling existence and moved around in small family groups of men folk women and goats the default lifestyle of the huns was a tinkerish domesticity and among the splendid honey objects they've left behind the defining ones are these battered hunnic cauldrons preserved in the museum in budapest in these robust vessels the huns cooked their goats and boiled their water a man can live to fifty is an old kazak saying that still circulates but a cauldron will lift to a hundred [Music] something else we know about the huns is that they loved gold oh how the huns loved gold the hunnic graves that have been dug up the buried caches of treasure and valuables reveal such a deep and instinctive passion for treasure these days we've lost sight of gold's crazy hypnotic power and that special relationship it enjoys with the sun the incas called it the sweat of the gods and in the dark ages gold was a substance with a magical presence and the huns loved it in a visceral and unbalanced way in my book that's a good reason to love them back [Music] [Music] because they spent so much of their life on the move traveling from pasture to pasture the huns had a particularly creative relationship with the natural world hum treasure is dominated by exquisite animal forms [Music] in the hermitage museum in saint petersburg there's a wonderful piece of jewelry it's a golden bit of a bangle or a neck talk like one of these and it's this piece here at the end shaped so atmospherically like the head the creeping wolf [Music] this is gold that nurses an intense symbolic ambition to commune with the natural world to speak to it and steal some of its power to steal the power of the wolf [Music] another animal that was dear to them was the eagle they probably used eagles to hunt with as nomads of the steps still do and the great bird in the sky inspired such beautiful hun bling eagles have a special significance for the hun they were ready made symbols of power and beauty combined and right across the barbarian world these garnet-studded eagle brooches became noticeably popular [Music] this powerful new relationship to the natural world was one of the great barbarian contributions to civilization [Applause] and then of course there was the magnificent hunnic horsehart the hunt depended on their horses totally and they loved them deeply so of course they made sure their horses looked suitably splendid too [Music] these are the remains of a full-length hunnic horse ornament fashioned delicately from gold and studded so generously with precious stones lucky is the horse who got to wear this the huns would ride into battle with wolf skins pulled down on their faces screaming demonically in a deliberate effort to get inside their enemies heads now this was dark psychological warfare very sophisticated one of the reasons the huns were so easy to demonize is because they looked so strange they practiced ritual deformation and their skulls were deliberately misshapen at birth infant huns would have their heads tightly bound so they grew into these uncanny and elongated mekong shapes and on these deformed heads of theirs the huns would balance spectacular crowns of unimaginable preciousness [Music] so the big question is where did the huns get their gold they were nomads not miners and although they were busy tradesmen you'd need to trade an awful lot of goat skins the amount of gold left behind by the huns they didn't trade for it the huns got their gold more directly straight from the romans [Music] because their bows were so lethal and their horsemen so skilled the huns were soon operating a protection racket across most of the roman empire what they do is invade somewhere or threaten to invade somewhere and then demand large quantities of gold to go away again [Music] the romans cowardly diplomats that they were preferred to pay them than to fight them and by the time the hunnic empire was at its largest extent the huns were receiving two and a half thousand pounds of gold coins from the romans every year two and a half thousand pounds of gold every year to melt down and turn into art [Music] a few tribes of nomads raiding along these roman borders could never pressurize the romans into giving up these enormous quantities of gold so we need to forget this image of the huns as a tribal horde sweeping across europe because they were something much more sophisticated than that this is a map of the hanukk empire under attila it's the bits in orange and just look at the size of it all this was hunnic this wasn't a bunch of nomads on the make this was a rival empire a new superpower of the dark ages turned up to take on the romans i've kept attila back because the moment you mention him the story of the huns takes on a satanic glint all the huns were demonized by history but attila was demonized most of all the exciting thing is we actually know a lot about him a roman diplomat called priscas was sent on one of these diplomatic missions to negotiate with the huns and he's left behind a vivid account of his journey and this gentleman here is building a replica of attila's palace on the actual site on which he thinks it actually stood so janos when did you first become interested in attila i bought this land 20 years ago to breed horses that was when we came across the history of this site the byzantine ambassador visited attila in 450 a.d and describes how he found his way here and he definitely identified this place as the site of attila's palace [Music] that's why we'd like to erect a memorial to him here by constructing a wooden pallas janos's palace will be created in timber exactly as priscas describes it's shaped like a giant nomads tent a kind of glorified yurt with two wooden towers rising cockily at the front [Music] priskus tells us that when he arrived he was treated to an enormous banquet served on silver plates and a procession of young women dressed in white veils came out to sing for him [Music] attila himself was simply dressed and ate nothing but meat on a wooden platter while the guests were given goblets of gold and silver [Music] what does attila mean to the hungarian people because for a lot of people in europe he has a very bad reputation but not here in hungary he seems to be thought of more as a hero when people say attila was a barbarian that's something i reject it's not something i believe he spoke eight languages by the age of 15 and laid europe at his face someone unintelligent a barbarian could not have done the things that attila did only someone blessed with special talents did attila's palace really look like this i very much doubt it but neither do i think janos's fantasy is more misleading than all the other hun fantasies about satanic hordes sweeping through europe [Music] by the time attila became their ruler the huns had created a complex political system their huge empire was actually a federation of many nations a kind of barbarian eu opposed to the romans with goths and burgundians allen's even a few greeks all linked together and ruled by attila so here at the kunst historical museum in vienna there's something really spectacular i just have to show you [Music] when this was dug out of the ground on the romanian border in 1799 it was thought to be attila the huns personal dinner service you can see why they thought that just look at how splendid this is 23 golden vessels nearly 10 kilos of pure gold today no one thinks this was a tillers dinner service the most recent thinking is that it was left behind by the avars one of those mysterious tribes that emerged from the confederation of the huns they obviously had that special relationship with nature too this magnificent bull-headed bowl is another example of powerful natural magic channeled into gold this is what the dark ages were capable of this is what makes these times so exciting that bull bowl has a power to it an animal energy that you just don't get later on when art loses this connection to the basic stuff of life [Music] the empire of the huns didn't last long for a few decades it rivaled the romans and then it was gone [Music] attila the glue that held it all together had a taste for young brides and on his final wedding night he drank himself into a stupor took his latest bride to bed and promptly died of a heart attack they found him the next morning with blood streaming down his nose what we'd call these days a rock star's death [Music] within a few years attila's empire was gone torn apart by feuds and incompetence but the huns had done their job they'd punched a hole in the invincible reputation of the romans now all manner of barbarian was queuing up to pour through it when we think of the barbarians we think of hordes of bellicose warriors storming across the plains to attack rome but that's wrong it was more of a migration think of those wagon trains rolling across the american west full of brave pioneers searching for a new future that's a more accurate image particularly in the case of another great barbarian nation whose name has been well and truly blackened by dark age propaganda the vandals according to my shorter oxford dictionary a vandal is a willful or ignorant destroyer of anything beautiful venerable or worthy of preservation that's what it meant in 1663 but it shouldn't be what it means today the story of the vandals is actually rather poignant they were basically a nation of germanic farmers living peacefully in central europe until the huns pushed them out for a while they ended up here in spain until a group of goths pushed them out of there as well and the poor old vandals had to move on again to here north africa [Music] in 429 a.d 80 000 people came across the straits of gibraltar crammed onto small boats a kingdom on the move looking for a homeland the vandals had arrived in africa originally this word vandal meant something like wanderer someone who's looking for something it comes from the same germanic route as the english word to wind as in i was wending my way home from work and the vandals were great winders and great wanderers [Music] the vandals who arrived here in africa were led by a formidable king called gizerik [Music] if you think of the vandals as a lost people and africa was the promised land then gizerik was their moses leading them across the oceans they made their way along the north african coast here attacking cities collecting followers absorbing territory until eventually in 439 a.d they reached their destination carthage carthage was the second largest city in the western roman empire busy rich a crucial trading center the romans depended on it for most of the olive oil they burned in their lamps and the wheat from which they made their bread when the vandals took carthage they shocked the roman empire the capture of carthage was surprisingly peaceful gizerik was so clever he entered the city on the 19th of october the day of the roman games sports day now the romans who are obsessed with sports were far too interested in the gladiatorial combat and the chariot racing to fight the vandals thus gizarrick and his vandal army strolled into the second largest city of the western roman empire took control of it and stayed there for the next century [Music] people used to think the vandals went about destroying and pillaging carthage as soon as they got here but today we know they didn't the most remarkable thing about the vandal occupation of africa is not how much they destroyed but how little later on angry romans and christians writing about these events made sure they blackened the vandals reputation as they did with all the barbarians but the art that remains from these times tells a different story [Music] to signal their new status as overlords of rome's most prosperous province the vandals did what the nouveau riche always do they spent money on the arts their jewellers were commanded to make gorgeous vandal bling and out in the countryside they built elegant villas for themselves and filled them with superb decorations [Music] that's the julius mosaic it's one of the masterpieces of the period and judas himself is sitting there in his white robe he's the man who commissioned the mosaic no one is a hundred percent certain if this was made just before the vandals got here or just after and that's the most telling thing about it this is how rich romans lived and also rich vandals [Music] julius's house where this was found is shown in the middle the posh fortified villa those domes at the back are the bath houses the equivalent today of a luxury swimming pool all around the villa there are busy scenes of rural life in north africa up on the left that's winter see the people picking olives that's what you did in winter on the other side on the right is summer see the shepherds with their summer flock and those fields of ripe wheat behind them down here are spring and autumn spring is the season of flowers and there's mrs julius in her garden admiring herself in a mirror while a servant brings her a bowl of roses they're beautiful and so is she [Music] on the other side it's autumn and there's lord julius himself sitting on a throne in his orchard while a labourer brings him a basket of grapes and a hair he's caught running about among the vines [Music] this is mosaic making of the highest caliber so imaginative and clever it isn't just a portrait of julius and his house this is a visualization of the perfect lifestyle a rural dream made real [Music] the message here is how glorious life is when man lives in harmony with nature when order prevails and the land is fertile and balanced welcome to the good life in africa [Music] instead of knocking down carthage the vandals set about making it more homely they put small houses in the huge roman clearings and famously an ambitious new bath house was built here by the art loving vandal king thrasamond bath houses were hugely important in roman society they were a kind of social club where people went to chat and gossip a bit like modern health clubs except much cheaper [Music] roman bath houses had two main spaces a hot room or caldarium that heated you up and a cold room or frigidarium that cooled you down [Music] the largest of all roman bath complexes was here in carthage the antonine baths built in the second century by the roman emperor antoninus pius these are the ruins so imagine how big the baths must have been [Music] long before the vandals conquered carthage the antonine baths had fallen into disrepair so the vandal king thrasmund built some new ones we know a lot about thrasaman's baths because amazingly a collection of vandal poems on the subject has survived [Music] that's right vandal poems the vandals were particularly keen on poetry and hundreds of poems written here in carthage in the vandal years have survived and this thick body of unexpected literature tells us so much about them [Music] a poet called felix has left behind an evocative description of thrasaman's bathhouse this magnificent monument erected by royal command where water and fire display their obedience [Music] there are no less than five poems by felix about these great baths and the big idea in all of them is this dramatic contrast between the cool refreshing springs of the frigidairium and the hot boiling waters of the caldarium [Music] here says felix icy spring waters exist harmoniously with flames here the shivering nymph is startled by the fiery bath [Music] felix's poems were actually displayed all around you as you bathed as mosaics so they surrounded you pushed their way into your thoughts and as you read them you were prompted to marvel at this great miracle achieved here by thrasamont in the vandal baths brazilmund has achieved the ultimate harmony thrasamund has united fire and water [Music] [Music] goth goth oh yeah gothic barbara's rude uncouth gothic oh here we are goth one of a germanic tribe who invaded the roman empire in the lexicon of hate spawned by the dark ages a special place is set aside for the goths the dark ages are full of nasties but the goths are particularly spooky [Music] if you walk down the street where i live in london in camden town you'll find plenty of modern goths wandering about they're dressed from head to toe in black and covered in satanic insignia and they're trying so hard to look do me and i just want to give them all a big hug and tell them to cheer up because if they want to be goths they should be like real goths energetic colorful inventive the kind of people who did that [Music] stunning isn't it i love the way the mosaic sparkles with all that gold and throws light all around the dome it's so exciting [Music] but there's something peculiar about it too something slightly awkward that's obviously jesus up there being baptized but why is he so pink and flaccid and not very divine how did jesus end up like this originally the goths came from up here the baltic coast they were farmers successful farmers and when their population exploded they made their way south to the black sea searching for better land and better farming conditions when the goths moved south they came into direct contact with the roman empire and their history immediately grew more problematic [Music] it would take me several programs to deal with all the twists and turns in the story of the goths and their migrations but to boil it down to its essentials when they settled here in the south they found themselves in the way of the huns coming in from the east so to get away from them the goths split in two now some of them fled across the danube here and begged the roman empire to let them in and they became the visigoths or western goths and they settled initially here in france and finally in spain but the other ones they stayed put over here and joined the huns in the hunnic empire and they became the ostrogoths or eastern goths and they're the ones who did this when you think of barbarians you think instinctively of pagans don't you of godless and violent people with strange and primitive beliefs [Music] the barbarian is hardly alter boy material is he [Music] actually most of the barbarians were christians even the vandals so were the ostrogoths and the visigoths all of them were converted to christianity in the fourth century however the form of christianity they were converted to was unusual [Laughter] the reason why this christ looks so unfamiliar and even peculiar is because he's an aryan christ and not a catholic one and aryan christianity is different arianism was a christian heresy a different form of christianity proposed by a priest called arius in alexandria in egypt in the fourth century from there it spread across the roman empire and then out among the barbarians the aryans believed that jesus was different from god he was divine yes but less so the catholics believed that god and jesus father and son were equal two different forms of the same great divinity but the aryans disagreed for them god the father was the one true god he was the god at the top and jesus his son was below him and that's why the jesus up here in the baptistery mosaic looks so whimpish this is a jesus who's more like the rest of us less divine more human perhaps that's why the barbarians preferred him he's less imperial and more like them [Music] this is ravenna in northern italy the capital of the ostrogoths right across the empire catholics and aryans distrusted each other as only co-believers can but in ravenna it was the aryans who held sway and it was aryanism that created this it was a bit like the sunnis and the shia in islam same religion different only in its details but so antagonistic towards each other the ostrogoths were led by a formidable aryan king called theodoric and it was theodoric who built this theodoric had been brought up in constantinople in the court of the eastern roman empire he'd been sent there by his own father as a hostage and educated as a roman so he was sophisticated and clever having gained the trust of the roman emperor zeno in constantinople theodoric persuaded zeno to let him come to italy and reconquer it from another germanic despot called odo accur [Music] theodoric invited odo aker to a banquet in his honor and there he murdered him with his bare hands or so they say and thus theodoric made himself ruler of all italy based here in ravenna [Music] under the ostrogoths ravenna thrived as never before this is the great basilica of santa pollinaire that theodoric built early in the 6th century and then filled with this spectacular parade of mosaics upon the ceiling a baby-faced aryan christ performs such a lively set of miracles raising lazarus from the dead conjuring up miraculous fish [Music] so up there is the story of the young jesus performing his miracles and on the other side over there the other end of the story christ's terrible death and resurrection the last supper the kiss of judas [Music] below that there's this great golden procession of the 22 virgins bearing sumptuous crowns lined up to pay homage to the virgin mary with jesus in her lap [Music] on the other side in a kind of aryan call and response the 26 martyrs dressed more simply in white and advancing in a mighty procession towards the enthroned jesus what marvelous religious theater this is what vivid and exciting mosaics and all you pretend goths in camden if you're watching the real goths made this unfortunately later on when the roman emperor justinian reconquered ravenna for the byzantines he set about tampering with what theodoric had done removing what he could of the aryans so see this portrait here that's actually theodoric but justinian has taken over his identity and he's pretending to be him [Music] this they say is what's left of theodorix ravenna palace you can see it inside santa pollinaire as well a great golden palace filled once with magnificent ostrogoth treasures there's a museum in romania in bucharest that's bursting with this ostrogoth bling and personally i'd be happy to put on some shades and just stare at it for the next few days but we can't because back in ravenna the story of the ostrogoths has darkened and grown eerie when justinian conquered ravenna he had all signs of theodoric and the ostrogoths removed and the great mosaic palace is now a ghost town with no one in it though if you look very carefully you can still make out a few of the bodyless ostrogoth hands that remain the ordering left his mark on many art forms but the one that surprises me most is this totally unexpected piece of dark age literature the silver bible is a gothic gospel book written in gothic with a gothic alphabet it was written in northern italy probably in ravenna and probably for the gothic the ostrogothic king theodoric the great in the beginning of the sixth century [Music] most people imagine that what used to be called the barbarian tribe such as the goth didn't have a literature but this of course is written in in the gothic language yes and that's very remarkable because we don't know anything about the other germanic languages but the gothic languages is preserved in this manuscript [Music] it's very beautiful to look at it's got these lovely purple pages with with the silver writing on it yes it's the imperial color the purple color and at the other the great he got the permission from the east roman emperor to to use this purple color and he behaved and acted like a roman emperor [Music] theodoric who lived to be over 70 deserves to be remembered as one of the great achievers of the dark ages this is where he was buried his mausoleum in ravenna and i can't think of another building anywhere that looks anything like this what eerie and inventive architecture i love this thing it's so stocky and unusual a unique example of austrogoth building which seems to have popped out of nowhere and that's just the outside wait till you see the inside [Music] theodoric died in 526 a.d and was buried here in this huge sarcophagus shaped like a roman bath i find this such a spooky space and it's absolutely unique that roof is made from a single piece of history and stone it's a meter thick 33 meters wide and weighs 300 tons to get it here from istria which is roughly where modern croatia is they had to load it onto an enormous raft and sail it across the adriatic can you imagine that cross up above that's original too there used to be silver stars all around it so when you looked up in here it was like looking up at the sky at night there are some exciting stories about theodoric's death some say he went mad after seeing one of his victims inside the head of a fish others say he was thrown from a volcano one thing certain the ostrogoth empire he created collapsed quickly after his death justinian reclaimed ravenna the ostrogoth era was over so that's the end of the ostrogoths but what about the visigoths or western goths the goths in spain over here what happened to them you might be thinking and what did they achieve well rather a lot as it happens this is palencia in spain and what you're looking at is the oldest surviving spanish church built in the seventh century by the visigoths [Music] the visigoths ruled spain from around 500 a.d to around 700 a.d that's 200 years but you hardly ever hear about them you hear about the romans in spain you hear about the muslims in spain but you don't hear about the visidos [Music] one cruel wag has christened them the invisi goths which is very unfair if you hunt around in spain you'll find plenty of evidence of visigoth achievement like this rustic enunciation carved into an emerald and sometimes you don't have to look hard at all to see the visigoths showing off their dark age skills like these superb vizigoth crowns with the name of the king who commissioned them spelled out helpfully for the heart of remembering aren't they magnificent those visigoth crowns are not for wearing on your head they're what's called votive crowns and they are for hanging above an altar in a church like the ostrogoths the visigoths were originally aryans but here in spain they were surrounded by roman catholics and quickly adopted the romanic version of christianity and that's when they built these exciting and inventive visigoth churches this is the church of saint john the baptist in palencia it's been remodeled here and there but most of what you see is visigoth the story goes that the visigoth king riches vinto built this church to thank god for curing him of liver disease he washed himself just out here in the holy waters of palencia and was suddenly cured richard's vinto was on his way north to fight the basques so he was particularly grateful for his miraculous cure and even put up a plaque with the date the church was finished january the 3rd 661 a.d riches vinto's plaque is surrounded by typically vigorous bits of visigoth decoration so energetic and busy completely unlike anything the romans came up with i really like this visigoth church decoration when i look at it i feel as if i can hear the sculptor whistling there's something so boisterous about it something real and untutored it's as if for the first time in art we're hearing from the common man [Music] this wasn't made by an artiste this was made by a bloke someone with big hands who's speaking to us across the ages [Music] the sheer inventiveness of these visigoths is so invigorating i mean look at these arches they're special right why are they special because they look like one of these [Music] i don't know how much you know about arches but if you're any sort of student at all you'll know that horseshoe arches are remarkable your bog's standard arch certainly wasn't shaped like this before the visigoths invented these arches were semi-circular they came round like that and that's it but these horseshoe arches they come down to here and they have a very different effect [Music] horseshoe arches look wider airier taller more elegant as if a sail has been unfurled and filled with wind they're more playful too less stern this is architecture doing more than has been asked of it this isn't just holding something up this is having fun and looking good so the visigoths invented these elegant horseshoe arches and these were a brilliant barbarian invention but although the visigoths invented them they didn't perfect them it was someone else who did that [Music] the perfecters of the horseshoe arch are the subject of the next film when we look at the art of islam in the hands of islamic artists the horseshoe arch would create architecture of spine tingling beauty it's yet another of the great achievements of the dark ages this is a series about the dark ages when civilization was said to have stopped and ignorance flooded the world i've been trying to convince you that it didn't happen that the dark ages were a fine era for art but in this film i'm going further the art we'll be looking at in this film is some of the most sophisticated ever made if any art challenges the myth of the dark ages it's the art of islam [Applause] [Music] [Music] this is cordoba in spain that's the great mosque of kodaba up there and this handy little dark age gadget is an astrolabe some people call this the first computer and what this thing does is calculate exactly where you are by using the stars [Music] islamic stargazers perfected the astrolabe in the dark ages to work out the direction of mecca so they always knew which way to pray and it filled their art with cosmic patterns later on i'll be showing you how to use one of these i hope but first we need to travel back in time to the beginnings of islam to the first fascinating creations of islamic art and architecture so right now we're here in cordoba in spain to go back to the beginnings of islamic art we need to go right across the mediterranean to here jerusalem the heart of the religious dark ages what huge dramas have been enacted here what important art has been created most of it's gone unfortunately but not all of it some of it has survived notably that magnificent golden dome on the horizon the dome of the rock it's one of the most significant buildings ever put up a piece of architecture that changed history you couldn't really ask for a more dramatic location could you and if you think it looks good from up here on the mount of olives just wait till we get closer muhammad died in 632 a.d and for the first 50 years or so after his death islam was preoccupied with conquest the speed at which the islamic empire expanded was remarkable in just a few decades it went from nothing to gigantic it was the most dramatic most aggressive and fastest feat of empire building the world has seen this is the islamic empire just a hundred years after muhammad's death up here the whole of spain all of north africa the entire middle east as far across as the borders of india but all this astonishingly successful conquest didn't leave much time for art almost nothing survives from the first years of islam clearly art wasn't a priority and then out of nothing as if by magic this appears the dome of the rock nothing in islamic art prepares us for this it's just suddenly there a definitive islamic creation seemingly conjured out of thin air it's like a flying saucer or something that's landed out of nowhere and something you sense immediately even from this distance is the powerful geometry of it that air of mathematical clarity and that's something that continues in islamic architecture [Music] as you can see it's an octagon it's got eight sides and octagons have a special symbolic presence because they combine the geometry of a circle with a geometry of a square i'll show you if i draw a circle here [Music] and then two intersecting squares here and here the shape they form shape in the middle that's the octagon the octagon is a surprisingly popular dark age shape with powerful sacred meanings if the earth is a square that heaven is a perfect circle the octagon is a symbolic bridge between the two all the proportions of the dome of the rock are meaningful so these walls here the walls of the octagon each of those is about 20 meters long and the dome in the middle the height of that is again about 20 meters and the diameter of it is also 20 meters so all these proportions have been carefully calculated and have a purpose it's as if the entire building has been shaped by a divine mathematics and those divine mathematics have given it a sacred meaning this location temple mount is the holiest spot in jerusalem this is where king solomon built the first jewish temple the one destroyed by nebuchadnezzar and then herod the infamous king herod built the second temple here as well [Music] herod's temple was made entirely from white marble and was so huge it covered 67 acres of this sacred location so grand so pompous and to my eyes so inelegant [Music] so the dome of the rock sits on layer upon layer of crucial religious history and when the muslims conquered jerusalem in 638 a.d and claimed this site for islam they took possession of what is probably the most loaded religious spot on earth and that's just the outside [Music] for me this mysterious interior is one of the most atmospheric achievements of the dark ages there's something so haunting about the way the light works in here the shimmer of the mosaics the whispers of the calligraphy [Music] basically it's a circular shrine it's not a mosque it's a place of pilgrimage that's been built around a sacred site and the site it's all been built around is the site of this holy rock here the jews believe this is the rock on which abraham prepared to sacrifice his son isaac and the ark of the covenant is thought to lie hidden somewhere underneath as well islam has a different tradition islam believes that this is the holy rock from which the prophet muhammad set off on its great night journey to heaven the angel gabriel came to visit muhammad in mecca and brought him here to jerusalem and from this rock the prophet ascended to heaven and there in paradise he met god and god instructed him on the muslim duty [Music] so this holy rock like the architecture around it is a point of contact between man and god and that's the religious message of the whole building if you saw the first film in this series you'll recognize this shape because we've seen it before this type of encircling architecture built over a precious sight something we found in the round churches of byzantium remember san vitale in ravenna and santa constanza in rome the muslim caliph admin al-malik who built the dome of the rock was deliberately taking on the architecture of the christians this round shape the proportions none of it is an accident [Music] aberdale malik also added an explicit inscription which runs all the way around and which gives the date in which the dome was finished 691 a.d and it also includes a stern message to the christians oh you people of the book it says meaning the bible jesus is only a messenger of god god is only one it's a god challenge to the christians jesus is just a prophet there's only one god and gods don't have sons this entire building is taking on christianity look at that from floor to ceiling it's covered in the most exquisite mosaics gold and green there's a palm tree and these beautiful jeweled crowns and all the pieces of the mosaic are set at different angles so they reflect the light differently at different times of day and all this all these glorious mosaics are intended to evoke a vision of paradise [Music] when you look there in paradise says the quran you will see delights that cannot be imagined fruits of every kind and all that you ask for at a stroke islam had invented for itself an unmistakable new architecture and at the center of this new architecture was a vision of paradise [Music] the islamic paradise is a green and verdant alternative to the harsh desert landscape in which islam was born these are lands where water is precious and so is hope [Music] just a few years after the dome of the rock was finished the umayyad caliphs in damascus gave the world another wonderful islamic structure the damascus mosque i think it's one of the most exciting buildings i've ever been in look what's on the walls inside the fabulous damascus mosque the umayyad caliphs set out actually to describe paradise and to surround the islamic pilgrim with delightful and irresistible visions of it [Music] it's one of islam's most dramatic artistic moments these are the joys that await us in heaven these are the beautiful cities in which we'll live and this is the water the cool and endless water that we will drink [Music] those magnificent images of paradise in the great mosque at damascus are like images of a wonderful oasis in the desert with water palm trees flowers everything that's so hard to find out here and the islamic paradise promises so many pleasures in the next life to the true believer all you can drink all you can eat and all you can dream of [Music] this is kazir amra it's one of the desert palaces which the umayyad rulers of damascus built out here to get away from the city its heat and its pressures no one certain which of the umayyad princes chose this distant desert location was it the caliph al walid the first or al-waleed the second what is sure is why they chose this particular spot is built in a wadi the woody albatum and waddies are desert valleys that fill up seasonally with water so when it rains in the desert the precious water floods through the wadi and fertilizes it around the back of the building over here are various contraptions for channeling this water through the palace because believe it or not what you have before you hear is a bath house [Music] kazeramra is a bathing establishment in the desert one of the earliest surviving secular buildings of islam [Music] the reason we've driven all this way across the desert to find it is because this fabulous bath house in the sands has something remarkable inside it something you'd never expect to find here floor to ceiling islamic frescoes [Music] a troop of acrobats gives a busy performance and there's a bear strumming a loot there's so much going on in here and a group of statuesque female dancers show off their figures and their beauty the dancing girls are particularly surprising we're just not used to islamic imagery as abandoned as this but it's important to remember that this is just as old and just as traditional as everything else we've seen this too is a precious islamic heritage a negative way to understand kaziramara's remarkable frescoes is to see them as signs of moral relaxation away from damascus deep in the desert a wayward umayyad prince is indulging an appetite for wine and music and women but i don't think that is what it's about if we go back to the many descriptions of paradise in the quran there are constant references to the pleasures available there rivers of wine served in crystal cups beautiful flowers beautiful jewels and beautiful girls for the righteous says the quran there shall be gardens and vineyards and high bosomed virgins for companions dark-eyed and bashful as fair as corals and rubies inside here is the caldarium the hot room and in here the umayyad prince would soak himself in hot water heated up by all those gubbins we saw outside and as he lay here in his bath the umayyad prince would stare up at the dome where he'd see something one dress an evocation of the stars at night [Music] this is the earliest known islamic star chart painted onto the dome at kaziramra around the edge are the 12 signs of the zodiac and in the middle frescoed representations of the constellations the great bear the little bear what a thing to find in an 8th century bath house a fabulous image of the heavens at night above your head it's as if someone's taken the roof off the dome and looked out into the sky at night in the desert full of twinkling stars what a beautiful idea [Music] it takes a bit of getting to kazeramra but i wanted to make it clear right from the start that islamic art from its beginnings in the dark ages has this sensuous dimension to it a relationship to pleasure that you just don't find in other art [Music] scattered across this great syrian desert are the remains of fantastical umayyad palaces filled once with beautiful mosaics and marvelous colonnades what tangible sensuousness you find here in this first islamic art [Music] these eighth century desert palaces must once have been filled with the accoutrements of pleasure vases hangings plates and cups almost all of which have disappeared but in 1986 here in jordan they dug up this it's an 8th century islamic brazia and it gives us a tiny hint of what life was like in the khasiramra bathhouse the brazier was used to heat up the prince's room and for burning incense originally there were wheels on it and it could be wheeled around from room to room to fill them with sweet smells it's made of iron and bronze and at the front here as you can see there are these arches a little bit like the ones in kazaramra and inside the arches are scenes of lovemaking and couples canoodling and it's also atmospheric and so beautifully done i mean look at these eagles at the bottom the way they've been shaped their wings their feathers this is metal work of the highest quality at the four corners four cuddly nudes prepare to release a small bird into the incense filled air above them and there's a floaty feeling to this marvelous metal work what a beautiful thing and the figurative sculptures you see here the female figures are again very surprising because this is an aspect of islamic art that was there at the start that it's very traditional but which modern islam often forgets the beautiful brazia was an object of private delectation it had no religious purpose but it's important to remember that sensuality played a role in the art of these times in the beginning this was islamic art too and this and [Music] this when joy was called for islamic art inspired great joy and when sobriety was more appropriate it achieved great sobriety [Music] this is the finest early mosque in cairo the mosque of eben tulun i like everything about it but most of all i admire its architectural seriousness the way you know as soon as you step in here that this is a space devoted to important understandings who founded this mosque in 879 a.d was the son of a turkish slave who became governor of egypt originally the mosque stood at the center of a new city that ibn tulum also founded the city of al-qatai but al-qatai was destroyed in the 10th century and this is all that's left of it they say ibun tulun chose this site because this is where noah's ark came to rest there was certainly water here that domed creation in the center is the ablutions fountain where all muslims must wash themselves before prayers all mosques and not just this one are based on the very first mosque which was the prophet's own house in medina it was a typical mud brick dwelling with a courtyard and in that courtyard the prophet's followers would gather to hear him speak so all these great courtyards of islam all of them are descended directly from the prophet's own courtyard their evocative sparseness is an echo of their origins and their sun-baked simplicity has been there from the start the walls that encircle you here are like the walls of the prophet's own courtyard their task is to keep the outside world at bay and here at ibu tulun there's actually two sets of walls a kind of double glazing that separates you from the hustle and bustle out there i like these playful crenellations arranged along the top as well they look like paper cut outs something my daughter might have made to protect his followers from the sun the prophet built a simple shelter at the end of his courtyard with a roof made out of palm branches and leaves and that simple shelter was the inspiration for these great arcades which still protect the prophet's followers from the sun the shelters in his courtyard were also used as somewhere to meet and discuss community affairs [Music] and that marvellous communal atmosphere of a space with many purposes is something else that survives to this day in the islamic mosque [Music] the largest covered space was the prayer hall which was basically the prophet's own house at the end of the courtyard and in every prayer hall today there's a continuation of this marvelous islamic sense that underneath all this mighty religious architecture you can still feel the humble presence of the prophet's own dwelling these prayer halls are so welcoming they have a sense of the living room about them a home from home [Music] most mosques are square or rectangular in plan and that's because they're all arranged in relation to this wall here which is called the qibla wall the qibla wall indicates the direction of mecca in arabic the word qibla means direction and in muhammad's house a simple spear stuck in the ground would mark the way to pray the center of the qibla wall is marked by the mikrab which is always the most ornate part of the wall usually a niche and these niches were probably inspired by the culminating niches of byzantine churches christian architecture and to the right of the mikrab is the minbar or pulpit and this is based once again on the prophet's own house [Music] they say that when muhammad had gathered so many followers he could no longer be heard by everyone he stepped up onto some blocks of wood and those are the origins of the minbar [Music] how fascinating that all the great mosques of islam inherited their wonderful clarity their simplicity and their underlying sacred geometry from the humble house of the prophet look at all that wonderful stucco work around the arches all that repetition and variety this is art used in a different way not to illustrate something but to create a visual rhythm christian churches are full of pictures that tell you stories but there are no pictures in these great islamic interiors the decoration here communicates in other ways there's a sense of endlessness to it it develops in all directions and it makes you feel part of something that's bigger than you so there are no pictures instead all the way around runs this quranic inscription carved into wood you know i said this mosque was built on the site where noah's ark was said to have come to rest well another story they tell here is that this quranic inscription is carved on the actual wood from noah's ark at the mosque of the quranic inscription runs for two kilometers around the building that's one fifteenth of the entire quran written up on these walls this is the word of god in its most sacred and purest form the power of the word is one of the great creative obsessions of the dark ages and in the metropolitan museum in new york the most beguiling of the first qurans the so-called blue quran turns the words of god into such glorious art [Music] [Music] i don't know if you remember the building of the azwan dam in the 1960s it was rather controversial the president of egypt president nasa joined up with the russians to build a dam across the nile and various archaeological sites were lost forever or had to be moved to new locations stone by stone all sorts of ecological disasters were predicted for the dam most of which haven't happened the conquest of water was another of islam's great achievements in the dark ages in cairo the nile would overflow its banks every summer and the agriculture of the entire nile delta depended on the success of this fertile flooding thick black silt rich with nutrients will be deposited across the flood plain ensuring a splendid harvest that was in the good years in the bad years the levels were either too low which meant disaster or too high which also meant disaster the azwan dam was built to control that process so you might wonder what did they do before [Music] in islamic times they used this the celebrated nylometer of rhoda island on the nile opened for business in 861 a.d it's one of the oldest islamic monuments in egypt and what dramatic evidence it offers of the aquatic brilliance of islam's engineers what this thing does is measure the height of the nile flood it's basically a big well sunk some 10 meters under the level of the river in the middle is an octagonal marble column a kind of giant ruler which as you can see is marked off at different heights [Music] the measurements are in cubits and one cubit is about half a meter so around 16 cubits is the perfect flood fertile controllable below 16 cubits there's not enough water so famine conditions ahead and higher up once you get past 19 cubits that's really bad a catastrophic flood [Music] the islamic authorities in cairo used the great nylometer to calculate their annual tax demands the perfect flood meant perfect profits ahead thus this brilliant piece of design was an early islamic alternative to the pocket calculator before they built the azwan dan these tunnels here led off into the nile at three different levels so if they weren't closed off now i would be underwater and look at those pointed arches above the tunnels i mean that's pure gothic 400 years early [Music] the nylometer was designed by the famed persian astronomer abu abbas ahmed mohammed ibn khattir better known to us by his latin name alfred anus [Music] alfred gaines's most famous achievement as an astronomer was calculating the diameter of the earth copernicus was said to have used his results there's even a crater on the moon named after him the alpha again as crater but it isn't just science that created this and it isn't just commerce either all the way around there are also these beautiful quranic inscriptions in a lovely kufic script thou seest the earth barren and lifeless it says at the 17 cubit mark but when we pour rain on it it is stirred to life at the nilometer in cairo science commerce and faith have combined in a uniquely islamic fashion to create a technological wonder this entire series is about how the dark ages weren't dark but sometimes i should just shut up and let you see the proof for yourselves because it couldn't be more obvious [Music] this is carawan in tunisia once this was a city of enormous power the most important islamic outpost in north africa now it's a marvellous place to visit for any true student of the dark ages carawan they say was founded by the great arab warrior city akbar ibanafi who conquered these parts for islam just 50 years after the death of the prophet when sydney akbar got here this was all desert but something made him pause and looked down at his feet when siddi looked down he saw a miraculous spring of fresh water bubbling up and in that water a golden cup which he'd lost many years before at the holy spring in mecca the underground waters seemed to have carried it here so it was clearly a sign and on this holy spot city akbar founded carawan [Music] at the center of the new city he built a new mosque the oldest such mosque in north africa from the outside there's not much sign of it islam isn't a religion that flaunts itself in the streets but when you get inside into the great courtyard of the city akbar mosque what a powerful sight awaits you another practical use for these great mosque courtyards particularly here in carawan where it's so dry it's for collecting water when it rains all the water is channeled down here to the center see these decorative openings they actually have a practical purpose when the water flows through them all these arabesques they actually filter out the impurities the dust the feathers then the water pure and clean is saved below in two giant systems so all of carawan can make use of it [Music] because it was built from nothing carawan is a particularly pure islamic city there are a few traces here of the romans or the vandals or the byzantines in carawan islam started from scratch [Music] except here in the courtyard of the mosque look at this column look at the top what is that corinthian next to it i don't know phoenician over here roman perhaps could even be egyptian who knows of the 414 columns arranged around this great courtyard of the mosque in kerawan no two are the same every column is different [Music] that's because they were all taken from other people's temples and palaces and city halls this entire mosque was built from bits and pieces of other ancient buildings in the old days it was actually forbidden to count the columns in here anyone caught doing it was blinded if you look closely you find some really surprising things about this courtyard for example up here there's a christian cross so this column must have come from a byzantine church but through some miracle of architectural power despite all this busy borrowing the end result is an unmistakable sense of islamic unity this space could have come from nowhere else this is unmistakably an islamic space [Music] there are many remarkable things about the carawan mosque but particularly remarkable i think is the proof that is offered here that architecture is an art form of spaces not of details of courtyards not of capitals see the tower here it's got these slabs of stone at the base with latin inscriptions on them see this one here it's upside down so these must have come from a roman building this is actually the oldest surviving islamic minaret and it's got a bulky militaristic presence rising up in these three squat pieces but like all minarets its original purpose is glorious to spread the word to share the news to shine a light the minaret is one of the defining islamic achievements of the dark ages islam did much that was inventive and progressive in architecture but in its minarets it surpassed itself this word minaret comes from the arabic manara which means lighthouse and that's its function to be a beacon of hope to offer safety and protection and of course the faithful were called to prayer from up there in the very first mosque built by muhammad the faithful were called from the rooftops but the cities got bigger mosques got bigger you needed somewhere higher up from which to broadcast the faith and look what inventive shapes were found for this conquest of the sky this is the minaret of the great mosque of samara in iraq its nickname for obvious reasons is the snail shell no one else in the dark ages built anything as aerially ambitious as this and it wasn't just the mosques this extraordinary brick masterpiece in iran is the tomb of the zirayad prince kabus ibn vashim gear it's a thousand years old but looks like something the bauer house might have come up with don't you think inside caboose had himself suspended at his death in a coffin of pure rock crystal what a thrilling islamic conquest of the heavens speaking of rock crystal it's a very special substance isn't it according to the quran when the chosen arrive in paradise they'll be given drinks of ginger served in goblets of crystal [Music] crystal or rock crystal to be more specific was a substance with which islam seemed to have a special affinity they say it was ahmed ibn tulun himself who introduced the art of carving rock crystals into egypt what's certain is that it was in egypt that this difficult art reached perfection i don't know about you but i can't think of many substances in the world with a presence as magical as rock crystal [Music] particularly when it has passed through the hands of the master carvers of islam only a handful of these gorgeous islamic viewers have survived and that just makes them feel even more precious rock crystal itself is actually very common it's just a type of quartz and quartz is the most common mineral in the earth's crust you get it everywhere look there's a stripe of it here what isn't common is pieces of quartz so pure and perfect and transparent that they satisfy the demands of the great crystal carvers of islam no one has ever carved rock crystal more finely than this what they do is find a perfect lump of crystal and shape it on the outside and then begin hollowing out the inside and they'd hollow it further and further and further till in the very best islamic art the walls of the crystal were only a couple of millimeters thick now that was unbelievably difficult [Music] the shimmering images carved into these gorgeous crystal viewers would transport the drinker to paradise [Music] hunting scenes flowers beautiful birds so crystal clear that none could resist them and it wasn't just islam that saw something magical in this rock crystal in ireland when ireland was still pagan they used to put pieces of rock crystal at the entrance of the burial chambers and in egypt they carved it into perfect spheres which apparently kept your hands cool when you touched it and of course it was used for telling the future and it still is [Music] all sorts of dark age societies were fascinated by rock crystal the roman naturalist pliny the elder believed that rock crystal was actually frozen water trapped for eons under the glaciers even the early christians worshiped it for them rock crystal had a natural relationship with divine perfection so they put it on the outside of their renicris and up in their golden crosses where it's perfect presence seen somehow to connect them to god christian rock crystal has a different feel to it in christian hands the light-filled paradise of islam seemed to fill up with shadows with christian rock crystal the dark ages are what you expect them to be mysterious spooky and talismanic [Music] the water engineers of islam perfected their hydraulic skills in lands where water was precious and rare so their relationship to it had something of the dream about it for islam water wasn't just a necessity it was an enticement too this is corodaba in spain the muslim armies got here in 711 a.d and conquered it from the visigoths remember them from the last film and when islam arrived in spain it could not believe how fertile this new territory was how full of paradisical waters [Music] this is the quad al-hivir in andalucia the largest navigable river in spain the name is islamic it comes from al-wadhi al-kabir which means the great valley these days the guadalce river is only navigable up to seville but in islamic times you could sail all the way up here to cordoba and in this great city islamic water architecture surpassed itself all along a cunning system of mills dams and water wheels channeled the energy of the waters the water wheels of cordoba lifted water from the river high up to the bank where the gardeners of islam used it to recreate paradise on earth [Music] this isn't actually an islamic garden it's an islamic style garden built by the christian kings here in cordoba unfortunately the original islamic garden has disappeared but islam was here for 500 years so this style of garden making is ingrained in the culture and what you still get here is a vivid sense of how the islamic garden felt fountains waterways flowers these are the divine atmospheres of those magical paradisical mosaics we saw in the great mosque at damascus except this time they're real to enter the mosque at cordoba you need to pass through another beautiful evocation of the paradise ahead an orange grove so divinely harmonious this was obviously a very desirable location they say there was a visigoth church here originally and later when the muslims were finally kicked out of spain a catholic cathedral was plonked in the middle of the mosque creating this ungainly hybrid it was the umayyad prince abdul rahman the first who began building the cordoba mosque he actually bought the land from the christians and in those early days of religious tolerance muslims and christians shared the building [Music] the cordoba mosque is famous for its columns 856 of them like a rows of palm trees in the oasis of syria is how someone's described them columns are very laborious to make and they use up a lot of precious stone so they're very heavy and if you can avoid making them you will for the cordoba mosque the columns came from the visigoth church that was there before and also from nearby roman temples but these reused visigoth columns weren't quite tall enough so to make the cordoba mosque higher and more airy the architects of islam came up with a brilliant new idea the double arch two arches for the price of one at the bottom the horseshoe arch borrowed as we saw in the last film from the visigoths then on top of that a round arch arch number two making the mosque taller less solid looking more see-through for the first time in european architecture the aesthetics of light were shaping a building [Music] you know cordoba when the muslims were here had half a million people living in it it was by far the largest and most prosperous city in western europe and all of those inhabitants had running water they had toilets that flushed street lamps in the 10th century [Applause] in urban planning architecture mathematics and water engineering islamic knowledge was peerless and in one area it was spectacular astronomy the study of the stars 90 of the 200 brightest stars in the sky have arabic names vega betelgeuse algol deneb they're all creations of the dark ages because arabic astronomy allowed the dark ages to glimpse the cosmos [Music] remember those stars painted onto the roof at the palace in kaziramra well that was just the beginning while christian science was insisting on a backward biblical understanding of the cosmos islamic science was investigating the heavens more adventurously [Music] this little baby here the astrolabe has been called the first computer it was developed to pinpoint the direction of mecca muslims needed to pray five times a day in a specific direction at specific times the astrolabe could work all that out in relation to the stars so this was the first compass as well and the first clock [Music] so the way it works the first thing you need to do is decide on which star you want to focus on and i'm going to choose vega so i find vega in the sky and with these sights here i line it up until i can see vega in the middle it's exactly there and that gives me a reading here in degrees degrees from the horizontal so i can see that vega right now is 35 degrees so the next thing to do is to set the date measured of course in the old-fashioned way in phases of the zodiac right now we're in gemini so in fact we're in the 15th degree of gemini about there otherwise known as the end of may [Music] so this is basically that in diagrammatic form and whatever is true on here is also true out there so i know the date i know where vega is so with the help of this handy dark age sat nav i can finally work out where i am it was alfred the multi-skilled designer of the nilometer in cairo who undertook the first great islamic exploration of the stars he was followed by many others without islamic science and its sensuous delight in the cosmos perhaps this really would have been a dark age with islamic science it was anything but in the next film we'll be heading north to celebrate those fine craftsmen the vikings and to investigate those particularly skilled jewellers of the dark ages the anglo-saxons [Music] so far on this artistic journey through the dark ages we've been hugging the mediterranean and following the sun but the dark ages wouldn't be as significant as they were in the story of art if they'd stayed in the south to be properly influential they needed also to venture north [Music] this is lindisfarne high up on the north coast of britain holy island they call it and this monastery you see there was founded early in the 7th century by an irish monk called aidan what a place to build a monastery eh cut off from the mainland beaten up by the sea it's so out of the way and impractical and that's precisely why it was chosen [Music] the irish monks who founded lindisfarne weren't looking for an easy life they were looking for difficulties to conquer these were hardcore northern christians who'd isolated themselves up here on purpose who worked their fingers to the bone and created something out of nothing as they saw it jesus had sacrificed his life for them so the least they could do was sacrifice their comfort the hardcore determination of the lindisfarne monks shows not only in the miraculous building of their great monastery but also in the stunning book art they made up here so intricate so detailed so difficult and that's the thing about the north's contribution to the art of the dark ages what it achieved it achieved by going the extra mile working the extra hour adding the extra detail nothing was given to it on a plate [Music] so in this film we're going to be looking at the carolingians dark age expansionists from france whose huge empire gobbled up most of modern europe but who made art of exquisite finesse and richness also the vikings who despite their terrible reputation for raping and pillaging were actually exceptionally inventive craftsmen the extreme delicacy of dark age valking art is an unexpected pleasure [Music] then up here in the north of england we'll be celebrating the dark age nation whose artistic handiwork was admired across the whole of europe i'm thinking of course of the anglo-saxons so skilled so hard-working so ingenious speaking of hard work one of the things we're going to be doing in this film is following the creation of an anglo-saxon jewel from start to finish later on i'll introduce you properly to sean greenhouse here for now all that really matters is that he's going to be making something exquisite a silver disc brooch in the anglo-saxon manor sean greenhouse's anglo-saxon brooch is a pleasure we're saving for later [Music] first we need to confront the north's most notorious barbarians we've tackled some terrifying warrior nations in this series the huns the vandals the goths but when it comes to bellicosity no one has quite as fearsome a reputation as the vikings [Music] you know people get so much wrong about the vikings they didn't wear these ridiculous helmets for a start these were invented in the 19th century by a stage designer working on a wagner opera he had to make one of the singing vikings look particularly evil so he stuck the devil's horns on a helmet and the vikings have been lumbered with these helmets ever since this is what their helmets really looked like the only surviving viking helmet in the national museum in oslo the vikings were particularly interesting because while all the other germanic tribes headed south and became thoroughly italianate the vikings stayed in the harsh and windy north where they climbed to the old ways so they were a barbarian nation of a pure and exciting type [Music] the vikings were a living link to an older and deeper european past there were forces at work in them that civilization hadn't dimmed and that's what's so exciting about them [Music] in fact most of the time they were simple farmers tending the land keeping livestock growing what they could but in the lands of the vikings you can't go very far without encountering water and this constant presence of the sea had turned them into superb sailors exactly where they reached is still fiercely debated but they certainly got to greenland and then to newfoundland the vikings discovered america a long long time before columbus so boatmanship was one of their great achievements and another of their great achievements was art in the great years of viking expansion roughly 800 a.d to roughly 1100 a.d the vikings put almost as much energy into making their own art as they did into stealing other peoples [Music] this trefoil viking brooch was modeled on the buckles used by roman soldiers on their sword belts the vikings adapted it and turned it into a brooch for ladies much of what they made is so intricate and fine it's difficult to see so to make absolutely clear what adventurous creatives they were i've brought you to oslo to one of the great viking museums where i wanted to show you this whopping great nautical masterpiece on the 8th of august 1903 a norwegian farmer called knut rahm knocked on the door of professor gabrielle gustafsson of the museum of antiquities here in oslo while digging on his farm said rom he'd come across a buried ship and he thought it might be viking two days later professor gustafsson arrived at the farm and confirmed the discovery of this thing the ulcerberg ship [Music] will you look at that eh it's made entirely of oak over 60 feet long 15 feet wide and decorated at both ends with these boisterous viking carvings inside the ship were two dead bodies an older woman who may have been a queen and a younger woman probably her slave who was buried with her there were also 14 horses three dogs and an ox all sacrificed together and buried with their master [Music] in the stern of the boat was a four-wheeled cart the first such viking cart ever discovered but no one seemed too sure what the weather was going to be like in heaven because there were also four sledges but it's the carving of these boats and carts and sledges that makes this particular viking find so exciting look at the elegant line of this ship how it ends so gracefully out there with the curved head of the snake at either end above the waterline where they can be seen are these busy expanses of carving so active and lively scores of twisting bodies clutching hands staring eyes sniffing snouts all jumbled together excitedly a gymnasium of animal acrobats tying themselves into knots you have to get your eye in with viking carvings otherwise they can frighten you with all this amazing complication it's all based on animal shapes all interwoven and overlapping so that for example is one animal there's the head and there's the tail and this figure eight shape here that's the whole of its body and that's biting the tail of this animal here and that animal is biting the tail of that animal and so on so imagine the 3d vision you need to carve this the steady hand the computer brain so if anyone ever says to you the vikings were barbarous grab them by the ear and tug them here to oslo rooms more rooms and still more rooms all over scandinavia norway denmark and particularly here in sweden you find these magnificent standing stones left behind by the vikings covered in wobbly carvings and all these runes runes are the bits of writing on the twisty snakes you usually find them on viking gravestones these ones here say gideo loved her husband and remembers him with her tears because they're carved on these mighty stones and not written down on handy bits of parchment or vellum there's a tendency to mythologize them to see great truths in the ruins according to norse mythology the runes were found by odin the supreme god of the norsemen while he was hanging from the tree of life the famous igdrasil [Music] days and nights odin stayed in the great tree waiting hoping until eventually the runes fell into his hands and revealed themselves to him odin passed them to us thus from the start the runes were associated with magic and the mysteries of the cosmos [Music] this splendid story about odin up in the trees and the origin of the runes is another example of the extraordinary power that words had in these fateful years words letters symbols seemed to mean so much in the dark ages they were so loaded they had such resonance [Music] it's actually a simple alphabet so this shape here that's a v sound and that's an a l and so on so that says valdemar and in fact this whole message is here stands valdemar in viking land the runic alphabet or footage as it's called had 24 letters in it originally later on when the vikings attacked britain they took the runes with them and the foothack grew to 33 letters the new letters were needed to describe new sounds every time the vikings conquered the new territory and new words entered their language they needed new letters to describe them so for example originally there was no w and i have to use a v sound for my name valdemar so the runes were never some cobweb covered dead language fit only for a museum they were always alive vibrant and constantly changing [Music] what a good looking alphabet it is too so energetic and upright it's based on vertical lines because verticals are easier to carve particularly in wood but also in stone this vertical emphasis gives the runes a spiky presence and a mysterious relationship with time as if every mark is somehow counting down the days the vikings were the last of the great barbarian nations to convert to christianity it wasn't until the 10th century a thousand years after the birth of christ that paganism's hold on the frozen north was broken so around here the paganism was stubborn and in viking art it's often difficult to tell where the paganism ends and the christianity begins this is the biggest and most famous of all scandinavian runestones the yelling stone [Music] it weighs over 10 tons it's two and a half meters tall and as you can see the entire stone seems to writhe with energy what a fabulous thing this inscription here just goes all the way around tells us that the yelling stone was put here by harold bluetooth the energetic viking ruler who's usually credited with converting the danes to christianity i am harold it says here son of gorm and i made the danes christians it's carved on all three sides and on this side there's an image of a giant snake attacking a stylized lion now obviously there are no lions in scandinavia it's an image they found abroad but the vikings identified with the lions fighting spirit so it pops up a lot in their art it's an image they made theirs now i know what you're thinking you're thinking what lion and what snake well inside the visitor center at yelling there's a coloured replica of the great stone which shows you how the lion and the snake would originally have looked before all their paint fell off but the most surprising sight is here on the biggest side it's the culmination of the entire stone but you can't see it yet the light has to be exactly right [Music] what you have to do is wait till the twilight begins to work its magic can you see it it's a splendid viking crucifixion with this stern christ in the center surrounded by all these writhing viking knots it's as if the whole stone can't keep still and i like the way christ hasn't actually got a cross he's just standing there with his arms outstretched so it's obviously another image that's been imported from abroad and is now being misunderstood so confidently [Music] when the vikings began behaving like vikings and invaded britain they encountered the most exciting jewellers of the dark ages the anglo-saxons how do we know they were exciting because they've left behind this the sutton who treasure this is the finest horde of anglo-saxon gold ever dug up in britain one of the great treasures of the british museum just look at it my legs go weak every time i see it because it's in such excellent condition [Music] much of the art that survives from the dark ages has been battered by time but not the sutton who treasure in the finest pieces here there's hardly a gram of gold bent out of place or a garment missing the sutton who treasure was dug up out of the ground in east anglia just a few weeks before the start of the second world war in 1939 so it couldn't be investigated properly till after the war was over and what a torture that must have been for the waiting archaeologists the treasure dates from around 620 a.d and comes from the grave of an important east anglian king [Music] the king was buried in a ship his transport to the next world and all this was buried with him to serve him in the afterlife [Music] these bits of sword here and the helmets mark him out as a mighty warrior he wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of this man in heaven [Music] they found a liar in his grave as well so the king could listen to his favorite music in the afterlife that's a recreation of it he had to eat well so this fabulous cooking cauldron was buried with him look at all the intricate celtic decoration around it [Music] most important of all the people who buried the king made sure that he'd look good in the next world by burying him with his best anglo-saxon ruler bling which is where this gold comes in and those magnificent garnets if you've ever seen finer jewelry than this let me know where because i want to go there how did they do it these anglo-saxon wizards to penetrate their secrets i've tracked down a man who knows in his youth shawn greenhouse was a skilled forger and some of the world's greatest museums have admired his output shawn was finally caught and said to prison so he served his time and these days puts all that expertise to much better use as an independent craftsman the methods he uses aren't exactly the same as the methods of the dark ages the modern world has changed too much for that but they're about as close as you can get and what shawn's work gives us is an insider's view of how anglo-saxon jewelers actually made their pieces so sean can you tell us what it is you're going to be making oh it's an anglo-saxon disc silver with some enamel gilding covering most of the aspects that the anglo-saxon jewelers would use they obviously had lots of different techniques in the way they made their jewellery yeah yeah so which ones are you picking up here well this is probably a 10th century it's like a late saxon disciple which the earlier ones were the golden garnet mostly but these are religious symbolism on these is this based on on a existing broach it's my own design but it kind of encompasses elements of other other things going on so it's an original design in itself so the center part will be done in gold ribbon glossone different colored animals and that's a picture of an anglo-saxon king yeah yeah but just a generic long tash beard with every other sword in his right hand and the elements i have entitled put it this is the hand of god over his shoulder in white and golden hour wonderful let's get going okay let's go [Music] the delights of sean's anglo-saxon disc broach will have to wait first we need to cross the channel and search out those powerful dark age creatives the carolingians rulers of the franks the franks were the ancestors of the modern french originally they were germans just like the anglo-saxons but they arrived in gaul on one of those expansionist barbarian waves that we saw in film two and early in their story the franks converted to christianity and they became particularly fierce defenders of the faith [Music] plenty of dark age societies liked their art to sparkle a taste for gold is one of the dark ages defining characteristics but when it comes to religious bling [Music] the frankish christians were top of the charts [Music] if you've ever wondered why the french sometimes conduct themselves as if they were the chosen people it's because that's exactly what they thought they were in 732 a.d the franks led by the heroic charlemagne charles the hammer defeated an invading muslim army which had come up from spain hoping to conquer europe the franks believed god had chosen them to save europe from islam they were his chosen people and their art seems particularly aware of this special position in god's good books the mightiest of the frankish kings charles the great or charlemagne as he's usually called came from a dynasty called the carolingians he was crowned in 768 and with typical frankish modesty pushed himself right to the front of dark age politics charlemagne was determined to expand the frankish empire after all it was god's chosen empire and the carolingians were god's chosen leaders and this expansion of charlemagne's christian empire was achieved with deep brutality [Music] in germany the saxons who were still pagans were given a very simple choice convert to christianity or die if they didn't become christians they were killed that was charlemagne's choice in 800 a.d in rome on christmas day itself the pope rewarded charlemagne for his efforts on behalf of christianity by crowning him as the holy roman emperor charlemagne was now the leader of the largest empire europe had seen since the fall of the romans the center of gravity of europe had shifted and it had shifted to the north this is the chapel that charlemagne built here in arghan on the belgian borders and from here he ruled his new christian empire and this is actually the marble throne on which he sat [Music] there's a spooky simplicity to charlemagne's throne four slabs of ancient marble a few metal clamps six marble steps and that's it [Music] a gold-loving emperor is pretending to be a simple man charlemagne began building this chapel in 786 a.d and at exactly the same time in spain the muslims were building the great mosque in cordoba which i hope you remember from the last film such inventive and dramatic architecture with those nimble double arches and that gorgeous forest of columns [Music] charlemagne's chapel this chapel was intended to be a deliberate riposte to the muslims a christian answer to the cordoba mosque look up there at the arches and see how they have these alternating bands of color just like the arches in the cordoba mosque [Music] but in our home the stripy arches don't float or soar nothing does this is architecture drawn with the biceps not the wrist effortful and ponderous i don't like this building it feels brutal clunky this round shape was based originally on a roman mausoleum and you can still sense the doomy and cold atmospheres of the mausoleum in here [Applause] gloomy expensive intense frankish christianity bulldozes the senses [Music] but it doesn't really pleasure them at least i don't think so in the battle of the northern christians give me anglo-saxon art any day [Music] christianity arrived in britain from three directions at once in a three-pronged religious assault in the south in ancient kent a team of monks led by saint augustine were sent here by the pope in rome and they brought with them the official roman version of christianity up here in the north of britain it was irish monks from across the sea who came over to convert the pagans and they brought with them a harsher more basic more penitential form of christianity they deliberately built their monasteries in difficult locations and where they produced glorious art with an ecstatic and insistent tone to it like the chanting of a great monks choir the third type of christians found in anglo-saxon britain were the ones who were already here remember in film one how the romans converted to christianity under constantine and how one of the earliest known christian house churches was found in roman britain in lollingstone in kent we don't know much about these existing christians they were a modest christian presence but perhaps tiny droplets of this modesty were thrown into the melting pot as well so the endless saxons would have had uh wood wood heated kilns or a charcoal grazer i should imagine this is the silver i'm going to make the uh broadcast of it's basically about 82 percent silver a bit of copper quite a lot of lead which designates his ankle sacks not viking a few other bits and bats in it all the trees telling which you don't get in one silver sean melts down the anglo-saxon silver and to turn it into something useful pours it into some molds made from cuttlefish bones so tell me about this cuttlefish is is this what was used uh in ancient times to make molds it's been used i [Music] we'll quench that first of all that basically just cools it down it cleans the blowing hole then all right the next thing to do is to reduce this piece of silver for the main body down to about one and a half millimeters to replicate and low saxon disco which is in existence so first of all we have to start yeah basically yeah on the other side you start in the center and work to the middle and that's so you keep a uniform thickness because it tends to bowl to a natural ball shape it starts to split once you start to spread it out even further [Music] it gets higher and higher the pitch and with the you can tell when it's hard enough so you don't crack it [Music] it's more or less brought it to the next stage so it's just a matter of us now repeating the process and as we reduce it the area will get larger and once we've made a big enough piece if we reduced it to one and a half millimeter inside our boats we'll have a large enough piece to cut the disc out of this is one and a half millimeters as you can see that is just the same as this it's just the same silver but i've worked on it it takes about two days work hammer work and a lot of airbashing following it with your neighbors and what have you to get into that so we'll start on with this now i mean that is the basic shape of the brush basic shape of the approach [Music] while sean greenhouse bangs away in his lair back at the front line of the dark ages the anglo-saxon custom of burying the dead with things that would be useful to them in the afterlife was of course a pagan custom and unfortunately when the anglo-saxons were converted to christianity that custom was stopped in a christian burial you buried the body and that was it so nothing as sumptuous as the sutton who treasure has survived from the christian era instead we get another kind of anglo-saxon treasure [Music] it's a treasure made of granite and limestone the resilient spiritual treasure that is the anglo-saxon funeral cross [Music] earlier on we saw how the vikings commemorated their dead with these mighty standing stones covered in runes and this idea that stone is somehow eternal and lasts much longer than you is something that was shared by all the voyaging tribes of the north [Music] there's something splendidly basic about these anglo-saxon crosses they're supposed to be christian but somehow their christianity feels superficial and confined to the surface underneath you can still sense the atmospheres of stonehenge a connection with the faraway past and the central mysteries of creation see all this decoration here it's called interlacing it's celtic in origin you get it on the anglo-saxon crosses but also on the great manuscripts written later in the monasteries like lindisfarne [Music] a lot of people have written a lot of books on the subject of celtic interlacing what it means why it was used it's so beautiful to look at but also so intrinsically mysterious [Music] they say that its origins lie in basket weaving and plating and we'll never know for sure but my guess is that this is also an attempt by the dark age mind to grasp and mimic the rhythms of creation to convey the sense that the cosmos goes on and on and on that everything in it is interrelated [Music] this is a rather wonky specimen which is why i like it so much it's not quite right so you just want to hug it but because it's so wonky the interlacing on the london cross in the isle of man is particularly clear [Music] we're going to be seeing a lot of this celtic interlacing in the marvelous manuscripts that are coming up so i just wanted to show you quickly how it was done it looks immensely complicated but it's actually relatively simple [Music] so first you need to mark out a grid say we want to do a decorative border or a gospel book so here's the border and we know from unfinished bits of manuscript that the monks have left behind that the way they did it was to make this grid with dots to guide them so then we got three dots two dots and he don't sleeve up three dots two dots two dots two dots so like the dots on a dice three two three two three two then you start filling in the spaces in between now the big rule in interlacing is that one line goes over and the other line goes under over under over under over under all the way along and when you're about to get to the edge you stop because you need to work out how you're going to do the edges now i'm just going to square them off that's the simplest way of doing it but they also did all these elaborate things and leave out bits of the pattern and create this kind of asymmetrical symmetry um it's too complicated for me i'm afraid and once you've got your overall over under over under you start to fill in the bits of the background red and black [Music] there you are again [Music] so i've done this very big because i've got insensitive and stubby fingers but if you're a dark age monk poring over a precious manuscript then the borders you made were tiny i mean these people must have had extraordinary eyesight of course if you're a sculptor on the other hand once you've designed your interlacing you need to carve it into stone and that's mightily difficult too and with this cross the lone and cross you can see that the interlacing it's okay when it begins up here but as it comes down it gets wonkier and wonkier and wonkier [Music] back in bolton sean greenhouse has engraved the symbols of the four evangelists round the edges of his silver brooch and he's now ready for the really difficult bit in the middle the anglo-saxon king created so carefully with quasomete enamels the clustonia enamel technique is a very old technique practiced by the romans and the celts even before them it's just powdered glass ground up and mixed in with water and then just fighting the kiln but the anglo-saxons and other people in the dark age and into the middle ages would use roman glass tesseracts groaned up the kind of thing you see in war mosaics in ravenna and such places constantinoplans because although they had the technology to make the glass they didn't have the oxides to get the various colours as you can see the yellows and the greens and the blues the first stage is to lay down the king's outlines in a delicate framework of itsy bitsy bits of pure gold it's all fiddling these little bits you know the eyes and the nose then the really tough work begins getting the powdered glass into this labyrinth of gold cells you know just filling in the background though the dark blue it's always better to get the background in first the largest area to fill the largest area that kind of holds most of the wires in position then so you know pushing everything about so carefully don't drop any into the other cells but otherwise it has to be washed off if you do that you know start again it's all right i just got to work out the color schemes now uh i think the yellows can go in next so we'll mix some yellow right here we go now see this is the difficult part to fill the small pieces because just touching them with the surface tension tends to like glue them to the damn brush so slowly does it i think a general costa hairdo just slow fiddly work you know always fighting the surface tension with it because right pale green into the cloak itself and then we're ready for firing when i've dried it out while sean prepares to pop his anglo-saxon king into the kiln i'm thinking that his brooch reminds me strongly of the most famous of all anglo-saxon jewels the so-called alfred jewel they say that originally it was the top of a reading implement sent out to the bishops by king alfred himself it's now found in the ashmolean museum in oxford and what a beautiful thing it is [Music] so this style of broach which is obviously a late anglo-saxon yeah probably 10th century i should imagine the design i mean a lot of people always say that the anglo-saxon jewelry was at its peak earlier than that they think of the sutton the garnet stuff and the garnet the gold and whatever that's right fashions change i suppose i i prefer the later stuff i think it's far more elegant and there's far more to it which in any way that's the plus only finished beautiful so that's obviously uh an echo if you like of the alfred jewel isn't it yeah yeah so it's kind of like a mishmash of various things but it's all of its time it's period so can i have a look at that and i see yes beautiful and who is this figure you put on there it's kind of king alfred is it well no it's just a generic figure of a saxon king i suppose with the long tash in the pointy beard and the blonde and the blue eyes you kind of really like to portray themselves as you should imagine so anyway we just have to get on now and assemble it yes so that will do that next shall we yes first thing to do is put the crystal into the silver gilt collar and that just drops into there and then this piece will be riveted on the back with these little rivets guilt guilty so yeah so i'll put them in though it's a little bit [Applause] there we have it that it finished that's beautiful thank you the shawn greenhouse jewel moving about in the light you can get the edges of the actual gold plus only it kind of sparkles yeah beautiful i love quasimodo i love it up in the harsher corners of the anglo-saxon world the irish monks who converted the north of britain were deliberately cutting themselves off from life's little comforts exiles for christ they called themselves lindisfarne up there where the monastery was founded by saint ayden in 635 a.d was deliberately out of the way secluded when the tide was out the only way across was along this path here the pilgrims way it was called marked out with these wooden stakes but if you were coming from the other side of the island from the sea then lindisfarne wasn't cut off at all in fact it was very tempting the viking raids on britain which did so much to tarnish the reputations of the norsemen began with a raid on lindisfarne in 793 and for the next century or so the vikings kept coming back monasteries were easy pickings they were basically undefended manned by peaceful monks and they were packed with sumptuous religious treasures and excellently positioned for viking raids the monasteries of the dark ages were aladdin's caves of treasures duel encrusted relic boxes golden crosses studded with rubies and pearls we live in a world in which louis vuitton luggage and jimmy choo shoes seemed precious in the dark ages they knew better [Music] for the vikings the main attraction of the monasteries was obviously all that fabulous christian gold in them the rubies the pearls but it's recently been suggested that there were other reasons why they targeted the monasteries religious reasons remember in 793 a.d when they raided lindisfarne the vikings were still hardcore pagans stubborn believers in odin thor and freya for these pagan vikings the fierce missionary enthusiasm of the irish monks and the brutal conversion tactics of charlemagne constituted an assault on their religion the vikings liked being pagans they didn't like being told they were worshiping the wrong gods so when they attacked the monasteries it wasn't just to grab all this fabulous christian loot it was also a form of religious payback you think our religion's wrong we think your religion's wrong the monks on lindisfarne were also fighting a religious war their monastery was a hive of busy missionary activity but unlike the vikings the preferred weapon of the monks wasn't the sword but the word you must have noticed that all the way through this series i've been harping on about the power of words in the dark ages i'm like a stuck record on the subject words letters inscriptions they keep appearing in this story and wherever they appear they seem to glow with dark age urgency if you controlled the word in the dark ages you controlled the world and for me the most captivating evidence of this immense power that words had is the great book created here by the monks of lindisfarne [Music] this isn't just one of the great masterpieces of british art this is one of the great masterpieces of all art written and decorated on lindisfarne by a monk called edfrith the lindisfarne gospel contains a calligraphic cosmos of exceptional vitality [Music] it contains the four gospels of the new testament the story of christ as told by matthew mark luke and john and each of these evangelists gets a portrait to himself so there's saint matthew writing his gospel and it says mattels matthew up here all the portraits in here are rather traditional they could easily be italian or byzantine but then you turn the pages and you come across this and this certainly isn't traditional or italian this is a uniquely british contribution to the art of the dark ages look at all this amazing celtic interweaving that's filling all the letters and all these cosmic swirls and twirls and spirals it's like a magnificent garden of paradise that's erupted across the pages and yet it's got this pagan kick to it as well [Music] this is saint john the writer of the fourth gospel that's his portrait and there above his head the eagle that's his sign just so we know who it is and this is the actual beginning of john's gospel and look how astonishingly beautiful it is and you know what this says what all this amazingly complicated interlacing and all this cosmic calligraphy do you know what this says it says in principio erat verbum at verbum era in the beginning was the word the word was with god [Music] in the lindisfarne gospel christian energy and celtic inventiveness pictures and letters have come together in cosmic adulation of the word so that's the story of the dark ages they weren't dark at all the christian struggle to imagine their god was one of the most exciting struggles in art the barbarians were inventive peoples who made glorious bling islam spent these years reaching for the stars while the anglo-saxons were magnificent goldsmiths and brilliant wordsmiths when william the conqueror invaded britain in 1066 and brought the dark ages to some sort of official end he brought to an end one of the great ages of art you

Channel: Perspective

Views: 3,371,137

Keywords: history documentaries, art history documentaries, art and culture documentary, TV Shows - Topic, art history, Documentary movies - topic, tv shows - topic, waldemar januszczak, art history documentary, the arts, the dark ages, art documentary, waldemar januszczak gauguin, waldemar januszczak documentary, waldemar, perspective, waldemar perspective, dark ages waldemar, full series, islamic art, viking art, barbarian art, vikings, dark ages an age of light, bbc four documentary

Id: 1eWIe5M4FA4

Length: 237min 57sec (14277 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022