We are strong.
We build.
Innovate.
And opened new frontiers.
But the mankind is under threat
the forces of chaos unleashed.
They'll bring us to the brink of extinction.
A midst the chaos on unforgiving planet
most species will fail.
But for one all the pieces will fall into the place
and the set of keys will unlock a path for mankind to triumph.
This is our story, the story of all of us.
Northern China, 1215 A.D.
The Mongols are coming.
50 000 warriors,
the world's greatest cavalry army.
Their leader Genghis Khan.
One of the bloodiest warlords in human history.
His target, Zhongdu,
today's Beijing, China's capital city.
Cities are key to the story of mankind.
Center of power, learning and wealth.
They need protecting.
Zhongdu has 18 miles of battlement, 40 feet high
and still vulnerable to attack.
Half a million people live in Zhongdu.
Now, a battle for the future of mankind
between city dualer and the nomad.
Genghis Khan, son of the tribal chief.
His father was murdered, he was sent to exile.
If you survived a childhood like Genghis Khan,
you're gonna have a chip on your shoulder.
You're want prove to everybody they were wrong.
You're gonna wanna prove, that you know what are you doing.
You're want to prove, that you're the baddest guy in the block.
He escapes his captives,
fights his way to the top, unites the Mongols
and begins a campaign of conquest that would change the world.
The key to his success:
a horse,
domesticated 5000 years earlier in Central Asia.
Horses are extended mankind's frontiers.
The Mongols can cover up to 300 miles in a day.
Using the horse for warfare unlocks a new key for mankind.
If we go back to the Mongols who fighting with the Chinese
we sees the first trip point in the history that
will eventually bring us to the tank
and that trip point is horses.
Mongols start on horseback at age three.
They learned to ride without using reins.
When they encounter humans on foot to the Mongols
those humans were a lot like sheep. You could scare them,
you could bolid them they run.
They can shoot at full gallop.
It's the first version of the Blitzkrieg.
It is be able to riding to a place, do damage and then disappear
before anybody even knows what hit them.
Mongol warriors have four horses each.
They can eat and sleep on the horseback.
No army would travel so far and so fast until World War II.
They would travel faster than the news of their arrival.
Climate change is one of the keys to the human story
and drives the Mongols to change the world.
93 million miles from Earth
a surge in solar activity.
Blasts of radiation scorch the planet.
It's the beginning of three centuries of global warming.
Climatic changes in the ancient world in the premodern world
directly affected historical events.
In Mongolia drought turns pastures into desert.
To survive the Mongols sweeps South towards China,
the great power in Asia,
home to the biggest cities in the world.
China is the great price. If you can conquer China
you conquer the land of infinite supplies.
Grain, silk, tea. China is the richest prize the Mongols can possibly take.
Approaching Zhongdu, Genghis Khan issues an ultimatum,
surrender or die.
Mongol cruelty is legend.
Prisoners decapitated.
Towers of human skulls.
Children slaughtered.
I imagine for someone seeing in the city,
looking at over the wall and seeing the massive Mongol horde
is coming in your direction.
You have to immediately question yourself as
to why I'm still in this city.
I need to leave or I'm dead.
Genghis Khan rape so many women
that is many is one in two hundred people alive today carry his genes.
"The greatest happiness is to gathering into the bosom your
enemy's wives and daughters."
60 000 women it is said prefer suicide
to be raped by the Mongols.
Their horses get the Mongols to the city gates,
but no further.
To take the city they used China's engineers
and force them to build battering rams.
Prisoners of war attacking their own city.
To defend themselves, Zhongdu soldiers must kill their own people.
If the gate breaks the city falls.
The Mongols overran Zhongdu,
massacre over 100 000 people, than torched the city.
The Mongols were unbelievably effective military force.
If they had a target they want it to take.
No one stood in their way.
An eye-witness reports:
"The earth was greasy of human fat."
In his life time, Genghis Khan is set to be responsible for the death
about to 40 million people.
As many as Adolf Hitler.
He conquers more land in 25 years than Rome did in 400.
4 and half million square miles, the largest empire so far in human history.
And the key to his success, communication.
600 years before the Pony Express Mongols can send messages by horseback
across an area twice the size of the United States.
Every 30 miles was relay post with 400 horses.
Government messengers carrying an official medallion
can claim food and fresh mount, the world's first passport.
As the result of Genghis Khan conquest
for the first time in history one can safely travel from one end
of the world to the other end.
Paper, printing and gunpowder
will head from East to West.
All keys to the future of mankind.
But at the same time the killer is on the loose
that wiped out up to half of Europe's population.
Mankind battles with enduring enemy, disease.
Issyk Kul, a trading post, midway between Europe and Asia.
Genghis Khan has been dead for more than a century,
but his empire continues.
Along his trade routes a deadly traveler,
bacteria.
For three and a half billion years
virtually every corner of the Earth has been covered
by these microorganisms.
Our own bodies contain more bacterial cells than human cells.
Most are harmless, many are essential,
but these have the power to kill.
At Issyk Kul pandemic begins.
One of the first recording victims, Kutluk.
Married, Christian, dubbed.
His wife's poke remedies have no effect.
Imagine your husband comes back from trading and he has
it a big blue blisters and feels ill.
Is it from the air? From the water he drag?
Is it some foreign animal inside? What's going on?
You are completely confused.
Bacteria rushed through Kutluk's bloodstream.
They are win his immune system and spread vilacesly.
The storing and swelling his glands.
His skin erupts in giant paswiled source,
buboes.
Bubonic plague.
Pass it on by an almost invisible carrier,
the flea.
It staple diet is blood.
When it bites, it famets plague bacteria into the bloodstream.
Kutlok's wife doesn't know it,
but she too has been bitten.
Within days both of them will be dead.
In 1337 four people die in Issyk Kul.
Two years later there are 100 deaths,
but this is just a beginning.
When takes spread, this infection don't stop.
Improve transportation makes diseases almost impossible to control.
The fleas they carried the plague hitch a lift,
from one our closest companions,
the Black rat.
Native to Asia, they spread to Europe with the Romans.
From a pair of rats 2000 new offspring a year
and every rat can carry eight plaque infected fleas.
Black rats infest the cargo the travels along the Mongols trade routes.
Spreading out from Issyk Kul, the plague sweeps East to China
and West towards Europe.
Kaffa on the Black sea,
the thriving port at the crossroads East and West.
Controlled by Italian merchants.
One man is credited with spreading the plague into Europe,
the descendant of Genghis Khan,
Jani Beg.
He murdered his own brother to seize power.
Now he wants to expand the Mongol empire westwards.
Kaffa stands on his way.
But he has a terrible new weapon.
The plague kills his soldiers faster than they can be replaced.
But that gives Jani Beg an idea.
His dead men become ammunition.
Biological warfare wasn't entirely new.
In the 6.century B.C. by the Assyrians and the Greeks used to poison wells,
but in the Kaffa Mongols took it another stage.
They launched it physically like a chemical bomb.
Biological weapons are so deadly, that been outlawed in 165 countries,
including Russia and United States.
But it is thought more than enough remain,
to wipe out mankind in the stroke.
No one has ever used biological weapons like Jani Beg.
One chronicler writes:
"What seems like mountains of dead would throw into the city.
The rotting corpses is tainted the air.
Stench was overwhelmed."
There can be no weapon
that is as terrifying as what is unleashed with biological warfare.
You cannot see germs, you cannot see disease
and nothing you can do can make you immune to it.
The inhabitants of Kaffa try to outrun the plaque
and flee to Europe.
They have no idea they bringing the disease with them.
The plague run out to the world's most densely populated continent.
Sienna, Italy. 1348.
A family locks itself in,
hoping to lock the disease out.
The father writes in account
one of the only surviving records
as the invasion of Europe begins.
"It was cruel and horrible thing.
I don't know where to begin,
to tell it's brutal and pitiless ways."
The battles for the survival of mankind has begun.
Mankind faces a battle against the extinction.
Sienna, Italy,
six months after the plague invades Europe.
Thousands are dead.
Agnolo De Tura,
local businessman, the town chronicler.
He barricades his family inside their home.
The killer outside must not come in.
Agnolo uses fire and smoke to war after plague.
No one suspects it's carried by rats.
You don't know what it cause it. Could be the air, could be the water
and so you have the sensation around you of something building up
but you don't know what it is.
The plague takes ten years to cross Asia,
moving slowly from village to village.
But Europe is the perfect breeding ground.
Hundreds of cities, 80 million people living in close course.
These cities have all the conditions to sustain plague.
Filth, the squalor.
Rodents that was just considered part of natural life of that point
and nobody considered that these rodents and their fleas
could potentially be a problem.
And then you had these massive number of people of pact together
in these small dwellings and this is exact sort of situation you would want
if you trying to cause a plague epidemic.
The plague has entered in Agnelo's home,
infecting his wife Nicoluccia.
If you ever seen bubonic plague it's very gross.
A huge purple growth takes place which creates psychological trauma,
havoc and incredible fear.
Agnolo tries anything. Everything.
"Vomit regularly, especially at the first sign of any illness."
"Drink glass of your own urine twice a day."
"Apply an ointment to the bulbo made from honey, egg yolks
and scorpion oil to dry out the poison."
"Avoid sex and baths."
Finally the plague doctor.
His hood filled with herbs for the protection.
His treatment, drain the disease out from the victim.
Physicians would try any desperate measure they could work.
Blood leading was tried, leeches were used but none seem to work.
The smartest thing that doctor could do is stay away from the patient,
because he's unwittingly we were taken the bacteria
from one patient to the next.
Hold the wife, the plague bacteria mutating,
finding new ways to reproduce and spread.
They no longer need to be carried by fleas,
they are airborne.
The airborne plague is fundamentally different because
it now can be transmitted from human being to human being.
The kill rate was 75 percent,
now nearly 100.
In six months 31 000 people, 60 percent of Sienna wiped out.
More than two every three person you knew in Sienna were gone.
Families decimated, clans decimated.
Everybody decimated.
"I, Agnolo di Tura, buried my children with my own hands.
There was no one who grieve for any death
for all awaited death.
So many died that all believed it was the end of the world."
Fear and panic set same. You asking yourself
what's causing this, you know?
Did I do something wrong? Did I forget to go to the Church?
And each symptoms seems like the Devil is doing it.
The overwhelming theory was an avenging God.
Somehow this was the anger of God causing this disease.
Now, disaster tasks mankind faiths.
Avignon, France.
Home to Pope Clement the sixth.
One of the most powerful man in the world,
controlling wast armies and enormous wealth.
When plague hits Avignon the people expected the Pope to come
to their salvation, to go and innersee to God to stop the plague.
But Clement the sixth can't stop the plague.
It devastates Avignon, killing 1300 people in the single day.
Pope Clement buys a field and buries 11 000 people,
but it is not enough.
He tries a radical solution.
He consecrates the river Rhone
as a floating cemetery.
As bodies floating down the Rhone river people realized
the Pope can do nothing for them either God wasn't listening
or worse.
Fear and lost turn to rage.
The mob wants someone to blame.
All over Europe the hunt is on.
1349, the plague rages across Europe.
Mankind is at its weakest and most irrational,
searching for someone to blame.
Strasburg, Germany.
The plague hasn't hit here yet,
but rumors spread faster than the disease itself
about the diabolic plague.
They said it Jews are poisoned the drinking water.
This was the Middle ages, this was before the scientific revolution
and scientific method.
You had a world that was right hood, superstition, anger, confusion
and unfortunately that often to prejudice.
Ever since the 6. century B.C. their homeland was conquered.
Jewish people have created thriving communities around the planet.
Today, 26. countries have Jewish populations over 10 000.
When fear grips mankind minority is an easy target.
The authorities in Strasburg try to protect them,
posting guards in the streets.
But isolation breeds contempt.
The mob takes the law into its own hands.
February, 14th.
The Saint Valentine's day massacre.
Jews of Strasbourg were given a choice,
convert or die.
One thousand Jews are burned alive.
But the massacre does nothing to save the city.
Five months later the plague arrives
claiming another 16 000 victims.
All over Europe great cities like deserted.
An eye-witness reports:
"Shops are shed, people rare.
A deep silence on almost every place.
Consider what we were and what we become.
There was a crowd of us, now we are alone."
Mankind rendered powerless
by tiny bacteria.
Across Asia and Europe the plague kills over 15 million people in 15 years.
But isolation can protect us.
The Atlantic ocean has stopped the plague reaching the Americas.
The key to mankind's future in a hands of visionary leaders.
Two hundred years after Genghis Khan
young Inca warrior prepares himself for battle.
Pachacuti.
Courageous, dynamic, inspired.
A vision of the Sun God drives him into a mighty battle,
it will create the Empire of the Incas.
Pachacuti had enormous sense of himself.
The name means World shaker. He gave himself the name, you know,
I am the conqueror of the world.
The Americas are home to 90 million people,
living in total isolation from the rest of mankind.
In this new world, there are no horses.
They've been hunted to extinction.
No iron tools.
No wheel vehicles.
But the key to life in the Andes high altitude agriculture.
This is a mountainous people, a mountainous society
and so if you wanna have available farmland you have to build terraces
along the mountain slopes. And when you go through the Andes today,
you see the remains of terraces everywhere.
Thousands of feet above sea level
they cultivated crops totally unknown to the rest of the world.
Potatoes, tomatoes, corn.
Sixty years later the Spanish will bring this super food back to Europe.
A key moment in shaping the diet of mankind.
But the riches of their land make the Incas a target.
To keep their territory they need to defend it.
Pachacuti will have to fight against the fearsome enemy,
lead by a dead king.
The story of mankind in shaped by men of destiny.
Pachacuti, leader of the Incas.
His enemy, the Chancas.
Bloodthirsty warriors. They use the bones of their enemies as trophies.
Their goal, crush Pachacuti
and captured the Inca capital, Cuzco.
Leading the Chancas into battle,
Uscovilca.
Powerful, ruthless and dead.
The life initiated the Chanca reign of terror.
In death he speaks to his priests.
In the Andes the ancestors are very much present in people's lives
and so important people are mummified.
Long before the Egyptians the people of south America preserved their dead.
Children, adults, whole families.
The oldest mummies have survived for 7000 years.
By Uscovilca leading them Chanca warriors feel invincible.
They outnumbered the Incas and take no prisoners
but Pachacuti has a plan.
The goal was to try the captured the mummified body of your enemy.
If you could tapel Uscovilca then victory was yours.
He believes in something more powerful than Uscovilca.
Inti, the Sun God,
the most important God in Inca mythology.
The night before the battle Inti comes to him in the dream
and promises him glorious victory.
Pachacuti seizes the idea of portraying himself as the living
son Inti himself in body by the power of the Sun.
Pachacuti's father has fled, his brother has fled.
But he chooses to stay and lead the Incas to the battle.
You go up proving yourself to your man by setting example
and say: "You know what?" "I'm might die today,
but that's okay, because I was born to do this.
And I guarantee an every true leader that's ever win the combat
has felt that way."
Pachacuti tongs the Chancas
stoking their anger.
He holds his men back,
maintain the discipline,
until they unlish of valey of stones.
Every time I winning the combat have everything to do with the will to win.
That's would wins battles.
Pachacuti makes his move.
Inca legend recall his bravery.
The young Prince prove himself at the enemy.
He was so agile, fast, he terrified Uscavilca's bodyguards.
The Chancas vanquished.
The Incas victory over the Chancas was legendary.
They never stop talking about it, they never stop celebrating it.
Pachacuti will kick-start the biggest empire ever seen in the Americas.
Most of modern-day Chile, Bolivia and Peru, united under Inca rule,
until link their territory a network of trails stretching 25 000 miles,
over some of the steepest terrain on Earth.
At the end of the trail, Machu Picchu,
Pachacuti's palace in the clouds,
unknown to the rest of mankind.
But the isolations of the Americas is coming to an end.
In Europe survivals of the plaque will rebuild,
launching a new era of conquest and exploration,
that will lead to discover of the New world.
1352, the Sahara.
The largest desert on the planet,
a siry wilderness, the size of the United States,
the toughest challenge in the explorer can face.
Ibn Battuta.
He left Morocco at age 21
and vowing never to travel the same road twice.
He's explored over 40 countries, but this is his first time in the Sahara.
"We set off into a desert, took lead avoid the settlements.
There's no rad, no track, only sand."
But at this time, the Sahara holds the key to mankind survival.
The plague rages through Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
It's killed up to a fifth world's population.
In Damascus, Syria, Ibn Battuta records 2400 deaths in a single day.
But the Sahara is the barrier against the pandemic.
With temperatures up to a 145 degrees
the plague can't survive the heat of the desert.
Few living things can.
The Sahara is vast, it's a definition of a horrible place to be.
There is no water, it's incredibly hot, your eyes are playing tricks on you,
your mind start playing tricks on you.
It's incredible ordeal.
The body's cooling system shuts down. Heat stroke.
And you stop sweating because you have no built to get rid of
fluid to light to cool down. You stop thinking normally
and you start erratic bizarre behavior that ultimately leads to death.
Ibn Battuta's life in the hands of his traveling companions,
the Touareg.
Nomads from North Africa, they lived in the Sahara
for over a thousand years, trading something we take
for granted today, but was once one of the most valuable,
commodities on the planet.
salt. -Salt was everything, salt was literally the
difference between life and death.
Before of refrigeration salt was the key to preserving food.
It absorbs water and stops bacteria from growing.
Salted food can last for a year without spoil.
Access to salt determine you would be powerful enough.
I can't send an army across the water or great distances without provisions
and their provisions are going bad if they are not salted.
The Touareg have discovered a rich supply under their feet.
Millions of years ago the Sahara was a sea.
As the water evaporated and left behind huge salt deposits.
The salt trade is the Touareg life live.
They mined in Taghaza in the middle of the Sahara.
Than tracks hundreds of miles South,
to the markets in the great cities of the Mali empire,
Djenne, Gao and Timbuktu.
But it is a dangerous journey in a deadly landscape.
The greatest fear of every traveler,
the sandstorm.
With dub in seconds by 70 miles per hour winds.
When the sandstorm hits it fills the air with sand, fills your lungs,
fills your eyes and your nose, you can't see.
This wind and the sand can strip the paint off a car.
You have to get shelter or you die.
"One of our party was lost in the desert.
After that I never went ahead or never lack behind again."
After two months in the Sahara Ibn Battuta's camel train
reaches the destination.
The cities of Mali.
"Travelers have nothing to fear. They gave me gifts of food
and treated me with the athmos generosity.
Make God reward that for their kindness."
Touareg merchants can now trade their precious cargo.
In Mali salt is so in demand its trade it for gold.
Today most gold in the world has to be mined deep underground.
In Mali it flows at the bedrock of the river Niger.
At this time, as much as two-thirds of the world's known
gold reserves are in West Africa.
The key returns Mali's rulers into some of the richest men on the world.
And their cities into center of learning.
Timbuktu University one of the oldest in the world,
the first in sub Saharan Africa.
Up to 25 000 people the quarter of the population students.
Over 300 000 scrolls.
One of the greatest libraries in the Islamic world.
Scholars from lots a lots of places went there to study the schools.
It was the world wide web.
There's the place where information was held.
This is Africa's golden age.
In the South great Zimbabwe,
climing city of stone,
legendary site of King Solomon's mines.
In the highlands of Ethiopia an ancient Christian empire
claiming to descend for the Queen of Shiva.
In on the East coast, Kilwa,
one of Africa's busiest ports.
Ibn Battuta will return to Morocco and write the oldest surviving
account of Timbuktu and the wealth of Africa.
The Touareg will carry their gold back across the Sahara.
Its destination across the Mediterranean to Europe.
African gold will be key to the greatest explosion of ideas,
the western world has ever known.
It will make some men rich and others reckless.
Venice, 117 mud islands join together,
become a thriving center of congress.
Silk from the Middle East,
spices from India
and the key to its wealth,
gold from Africa.
A young Venetian, Pietro Venier,
hoping to get rich, as a partner in a bank the Priuli Brothers.
70 years earlier the plague wiped out half the population of Venice.
But in the story of mankind disaster creates opportunity.
Venice is the nursery of modern banking and finance.
This is the cradle of Capitalism.
In the 15th and 16th centuries it is not place to be.
It's absolutely not place to be.
In Venice African gold dismantled into Ducats,
an international currency.
Merchants banked their Ducats with men like Pietro Venier.
Modern banking begins in Italy,
at the benches "the banchi", where money change his hands.
They would go to banks to borrow for personal loans
and they would go to banks for borrow for commercial loans.
Many the same reasons we go to banks today.
But Venice is a magnet for disadvantaged, lured by its wealth.
Enrico.
An unemployed migrant, hungry and tempted.
340 ducats, over two pounds of gold.
Pietro Venier has no choice, he must catch him.
When the trust in your banker disappears,
the banker's future has disappeared.
His work doesn't count for anything,
his promises don't count and if your promises don't count
you are out of business.
The authorities hang Enrico.
There's no mercy for thieves in Venice.
It's men like Pietro Venier who will finance the Renaissance.
The greatest flourishing of learning in culture mankind has ever known.
After the devastation of the plague our rebirth.
We have works of art, works of architecture, palaces,
schools, academies. All of the human arts flourish where banking flourishes.
They were buying collections for themselves,
but they were meant for eternity.
5000 miles away China is on the brink of its own rebirth.
The key a deadly new invention.
For a century and a half the Mongols have ruled China,
but the plague has killed millions, loosening their grip on power.
1356, outside Nanjing,
a gang of three plots of revolution.
Their leader, Zhu Yuanzhang.
Born dirt poor, orphaned by the plague.
Zhu Yuanzhang was a peasant.
He was an ordinary man but he had extraordinary drive.
His men call themselves The Red Turbans.
Peasants turned rebels.
People have nothing to eat
and when a rebel leader comes along and says,
drive out the Mongols that is an universal enthusiasm.
By his side his young wife Ma.
Daughter of the warlord, partner in the revolution.
Ma and Zhu were a match made in heaven
and together they were perfect partners in this rebellion.
Third member of the gang, Jiao Yu,
master craftsman, weapons expert.
Jiao Yu was not just a soldier but also one of the great
brains behind this operation.
Mongols soldiers were trained to use a bow and arrow
with deadly accuracy.
Jiao response, a gunpowder.
Invented 300 years earlier by Chinese monks looking for the elixir of life.
It's a novelty, used mostly in fireworks until its power
has realized an as explosive.
Jiao designs a weapon he calls a Human Thunder.
A small stone propelled by explosive charge, a lethal combination.
The future of warfare rewritten.
Once the gun shows up on the battlefield everything changes.
Anyone who picks up a gun is instantly lethal.
Jiao is quick to see the potential.
"With these fire weapons I'll conquered the empire as easily
as turning the palms of my hands upside down."
Zhu's confidence will soon be put to the test
against the deadliest fighting force on the planet, the Mongols.
A 150 years after Genghis Khan invades their homeland
Zhu Yuanzhang leads The Red Turbans at the city of Nanjing.
A peasant army to drive the Mongols out of China.
The key to their strategy a weapon that will change mankind,
the gun.
But their guns are crude design and can't be aimed properly.
The problem of early firearms is having the pelacly of the gun
and going to direction don't want to.
It's aimed that matters.
Gun maker Jiao's solution quantity over quality,
a hell storm of bullets.
To annihilate the enemy you must waiting until just the right moment.
The fire must be intense.
One firearm makes no difference but a hundred firearms makes a big difference
and a thousand makes even more.
It must have been incredibly confusing and incredibly frightening.
It is a game changer. Old school defenses, old school technology
is no longer effective against the gun.
Jiao's gun levels the battlefield
and allows a band of rebels take on the deadliest army in the world.
We no longer use horses on a battlefield. We still use gunpowder.
That is a lasting change the battlefield that cannot be ignored.
Over the next 12 years the Chinese drive out the Mongols.
Nanjing becomes capital of a free China.
Jiao, a peasant, orphaned by the plague, becomes the emperor
of a new Chinese dynasty
and his wife Ma the empress,
the most powerful women on the planet.
When Zhu Yuanzhang founded his dynasty he calls it
name which means bright.
The Mongols are darkness and he is the light.
The Ming dynasty lasts for 300 years.
Its rulers live in forbidden city,
a vast palatial compound.
No one can enter or leave without the emperor's permission.
It takes up to a million workers, 14 years to build.
On a borders of China and even greater engineering project,
the largest defensive structure in the world,
began by China's first emperor, completed by the Ming.
Over five and a half thousand miles long,
20 000 towers,
The Great Wall of China.
Now a technology first developed in China
will be perfecting in Europe.
It will change the world is dramatically as gunpowder.
1450, Mainz. Germany.
Johaness Gutenberg,
goldsmith, entrepreneur, inventor of the printing press.
It's still one of the greatest story in the history of invention.
You think about the impact that had, it's really hard to underestimated.
In 15. century Europe books are only in reach of the clergy and the rich.
Handwritten and labour intensive it takes it long as three years
to produce one copy of the Bible.
It was like having this powerful force of knowledge
its lock in these objects calls books
and almost nobody has these things.
The Chinese invented woodblock printing 700 years earlier,
but it was slow complex work.
People knew how to press blocks of wood, but his innovation
was the turned into an industrial process.
Manufacture books. No one ever done that before.
A goldsmith by trade he carves letters in metal
that can be moved around and rearranged
and infinite variety of words and sentences.
To print the text a modified winepress.
He has been working on his invention for over a decade,
but now he is run out of money.
He persuades a wealthy businessmen to see the press in action
and invest in it, if it really worthless.
Once you laid up that type on the page
one person could print off a dozen pages or thousand pages,
it didn't matter.
The information age begins here.
Every page printed in a last 500 years owes a debt to Gutenberg's invention.
With the investment of 800 guilders,
the equivalent of over a million dollars
is printing press goes into production.
He prints 180 copies of the Bible,
another 6 billion have been printed since.
Books can now be produced 2000 times faster than before.
20 million are printed in 50 years.
As knowledge begins to spread
it becomes more with an reach of ordinary people
in ways we had never seen before in human history.
All these parallels here to the internet
that's a very good analogy.
Now a book will inspire one man to strike out across the oceans
and change the future of mankind.
1476, off the coast of Portugal.
An Italian sailor shipwrecked and left for dead by pirates.
His name, Christopher Columbus.
a dreamer who will unite a divided world.
He believes he has been saved by God for a special purpose.
In certain cases an individual makes a huge impact
and Columbus is kind of pure example of that.
He's settles in Lisbon, Portugal.
With the help of his brother Bartolomeo he begins to pursue his dream.
He was a guy who has a tremendous personal ambition.
He was really really wanted to pull the family up from the mud
and become an aristocrat, become a gentleman.
His dream is inspired by a book,
written 200 years earlier, but thanks to the printing press
has become a bestseller,
after the Bible the most widely read book in Europe,
The Wonders of the World, by Marco Polo.
The epic story of the Venetian's merchant and his travel East,
through the Holy Lands, central Asia
and on to the exotic timing cities of China.
It is scarcely possible to sit down and writing
these magnificent of this province. Here they weave gold tissues,
as well as other kind of silk and cloth. The city contains merchants
of great wealth and incalcul belemberd people.
Columbus was a classic example of someone who really was inspired
by literature and dreamed big.
He's possessed with this some kind desire win a lottery of life.
He wanted to be the next Marco Polo.
Columbus's brother is a map maker.
Together they plot a revolutionary idea
to head East by traveling West.
Not over land like Marco Polo, but by sea.
What a great opportunity, what a wonderful thing to be part of.
When I think on of myself,
you know, a little frison.
Map makers at that time no nothing about the Americas.
To them this double continent doesn't exsist.
They believe there's a vast uncrossiable ocean between Europe and Asia.
Columbus thinks they are wrong,
that the world is smaller than realized
and it's quite easy to sail from Europe to China.
When Columbus said: "Let's sail a west",
you know, they head a picture of the Earth in your mind and
they said are you crazy. -No.
For almost a decade Columbus tries to find finances crazy skin.
He's turned down by the rulers of Portugal, Venice and Genoa.
But the balance of power in Europe is changing
with the help of the gun.
It hasn't stay the Chinese secret.
Almost as soon as the Chinese had invented the first proper gun
within 40 years that its spread all the way to Europe.
No invention that ever move this fast in the entire history of the world.
1486, southern Spain.
130 years after The Red Turbans
another rebel army fights for independence
using the latest in gun technology,
the Arcabus.
Technology is always improving but there is nothing like a war
to give an outsize advantage to where ever has that slight technological edge.
The gun improves when arrives in Europe by traying error.
They want to increase their range. So what they gonna do?
They gonna increased the link of the barrel because they know,
bigger powder charge will how that ball to travel further in distance.
They are going to tighten the talor sistum increase the accuracy that ball.
They are gonna find the way so that it becomes a one man
weapon vs. two man weapon.
The real breakthrough came with the trigger mechanism.
The lever that operate it an armed that brought this burning match code
down into the prime.
Individual soldiers will now armed with something quite deadly,
quite accurate and extremely portable.
What happens here in Spain
will help propel Columbus to the New world.
The Loja, southern Spain, 1486.
A Spanish army below the walls of an Islamic fortress.
The front line in a religious war that will shape the future of mankind.
For more than 700 years Spain has been run by the Moors,
Muslims from North Africa.
They create their own cities with their own architecture,
centers of learning, preserving the knowledge of the ancient world.
But Spanish army try to reclaim the country for Christianity.
They forced the Moors to retreat back to North Africa.
All that remains is the kingdom of Granada on the southern tip of Spain.
Key to the conquest of Granada is the fortress of Illora.
If the Spanish are to reclaim their country they need the captured
this Moorish stronghold.
A Spanish Captain, Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba.
Young, ambitious, known in court as the Prince of Cavaliers.
Cordoba will become one of Spain's greatest generals,
a tactical genius and the champion of the Arcabus.
The gun is deadly, but only at the close range.
He needs his men to be near at the enemy.
For four days stay on mat.
Now, he leads a fresh assault.
The noise of the Arcabus is the equivalent to the jet engine it take off.
Soldiers deafen.
But the Spanish regroup and fight on.
The closer they get the more effective their guns.
The victory at the Illora, a turning point in the reconquest of Spain.
Over the next six years city after city falls to the Spanish.
January 2th., 1492,
a day that changes the destiny of mankind.
Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella ride victorious into Granada.
Gonzalez de Cordoba helps negotiate the surrender of the Moors.
A Spanish chronicler calls it:
"The most blessed day that is ever been."
In the crowd one man sences an opportunity,
Christopher Columbus.
Everybody is walking around the chest of doubt
looking a new things to do.
Now do we have our country back we can start trading with luxury goods
with the Chinese and than Colombo shows up.
Spain is the new power in Europe.
Ferdinand and Isabella will fund Columbus's dream.
They'll sail under the Spanish flag.
Contact between East and West once brought death and disease,
but mankind has unlock the keys to a new future,
harvesting the power of gold,
gunpowder
and the printed word.
History is made by people with ideas and the spirit of adventure.
People who see opportunity where others see danger.
A new age is dawning,
that will unite a divided world,
the age of exploration. BY AUDIO NOTE: RE外