- 8 hours ago
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00The Lone Ranger
00:30THE END
01:00THE END
01:30THE END
01:59THE END
02:01THE END
02:03THE END
02:05THE DREAM WAS MADE
02:07ABOUT 1500 YEARS AGO
02:10AROUND 450 A.D.
02:13THE ROMAN EMPIRE IS UNDER ATTACK
02:15FOR SAFETY
02:17ITS CHRISTIAN EMPERORS
02:18HAVE MOVED THE CAPITAL HERE
02:20TO THE NORTH ITALIAN CITY OF RAVENDA
02:23DEEP IN THE MALARIAAL MARSHES OF THE RIVER PO
02:26THIS DREAM OF PARADISE FAR AWAY FROM SUCH EARTHLY TORMENTS
02:33IS IN THE TINY CHAPEL
02:35WHERE THE LAST GREAT EMPERORS OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE
02:38WERE LAID TO REST
02:40THIS IS A FUNERAL VAULT
02:43THIS IS A FUNERAL VAULT
02:44THIS IS A FUNERAL VAULT
02:45THIS IS A FUNERAL VAULT
02:47THAT'S A FUNERAL VAULT
02:49THIS IS A FUNERAL VAULT
02:51IN dodgy
03:11The most remarkable person in here, so legend tells us, is an empress
03:16Galla Placidia. She's supposed to be buried in this sarcophagus.
03:21Legend says she sat bolt upright until a few hundred years ago when somebody shoved a candle in to take a look at her and she went up in smoke.
03:28She lived an amazing life, this woman. She was taken in shackles across the Pyrenees, she went to Constantinople, she invaded Italy and she ruled the Empire for 25 years.
03:39But there's not a name on the sarcophagus and there's nothing about her deeds on her little niche, just a picture of St. Lawrence.
03:48It's a bit of a legend but Lawrence was a deacon of the early church. In the time of persecution he was ordered by his persecutors to produce the treasures of the church.
03:58And Lawrence took some poor families along to them and got grilled for his trouble. You can see his grill up there.
04:05It's that act of humility and of Christian love, you might say, a demonstration of Christian love that these mighty people wanted in their tomb.
04:14It's a really rather moving, a sort of profound change from the old classical temples.
04:19Of course it's still in the classical tradition, but it's a Christian world now.
04:24But this sort of Christianity was really doomed. This is its end, its swan song, its dream really.
04:32Christianity was changed really because of the barbarism that followed.
04:39It was an age when the Bible stopped being used by clever people in clever ways and changed to being used as a book full of images.
04:47Those books over there that are firmly shut on the bookcase, it's a sort of little bibliographic monument almost, were now opened up.
04:54And their images flooded over the West. And it was these images that people seized, they were simple people, and they seized the pictures and the stories of the Bible.
05:02And they not only used it for eternal life, for the promise of eternal life, but they also used it to buttress the ideas of earthly power.
05:11The emperors took over the images of the Bible. That's what the next 1500 years of this story is all about.
05:17Well, this monster was built about 520 AD. That's about 75 years after Galliplacidae's beautiful mausoleum.
05:36It was built to house the mortal remains of a king, an emperor, called Theodoric the Goth.
05:43Of course, Theodoric was a Goth, was a barbarian. He was one of the members, prince indeed, of the tribes that were coming down from Asia into Europe.
05:53They destroyed the empire of the West like children would destroy a watch, by ignorance and barbarism, basically.
05:59The Roman Empire wasn't like a fort. It didn't fall overnight. It was slowly infiltrated by these great barbarous hordes.
06:12I can't help thinking that Theodoric's tomb is a bit like the emperor himself.
06:17A sort of terrible mix of classicism and barbarism.
06:21Theodoric took over Italy after bumping off his predecessor at a particularly heavy banquet.
06:33He ruled the country from Ravenna, Galliplacidia's elegant old palace.
06:39But these weren't Romans, these were barbarians.
06:42They didn't know how to behave, they didn't know how to frame laws, and they didn't know how to appear imperial.
06:48So they got some senators up from Rome to teach them the rules of the game.
06:53And I can't think they'd have approved of this much.
06:56Theodoric was actually buried in a bath.
06:59One of them actually said, you are like Orpheus trying to tame the wild beasts.
07:03But it really didn't work.
07:05One by one they got caught up in the sort of suspicious tribal courtly politics of Ravenna.
07:11One was clumped to death, another was strangled.
07:14But one of them, Cassiodorus, managed to get away to the south.
07:18And with him, he took the most precious thing he could find in the whole world.
07:23The ancient texts, the seed of the ancient world, all the ancient books.
07:27He had a great plan.
07:28He started up a monastery in the south of Italy.
07:31And there he got a lot of scribes to copy these texts out again in their most perfect versions.
07:36Correcting all the grammar, correcting all the punctuation and spelling to preserve the old world.
07:41Now, for our point of view, the most important texts he took were the Bible texts.
07:47The different books of the Bible, which had been translated by Jerome hundreds of years earlier for the Pope.
07:52And had been used in all the Western churches.
07:54These Cassiodorus actually gathered together and put in one book.
07:59The first Western Bible book that we know of.
08:02It's called a Pandect, a Bible book.
08:05And Cassiodorus is Pandect.
08:07It's a marvellous Bible.
08:09It's a marvellous mythical Bible, you might say, because now it's quite gone.
08:13It's called the Codex Grandior.
08:15But gone though it is, it's actually the ancestor of all our modern Western Bibles.
08:21But the dream of a Western Christian Empire had gone almost as soon as the Empire itself had been split in two.
08:31The Eastern Empire though, its old imperial cities embattled and besieged, had kept the barbarians at bay.
08:40As the West slowly descended into a terrible, anonymous dark age, the old Eastern Empire, the Greek Empire,
09:03the Empire really founded by Constantine the Great, continued on its way.
09:08Its capital, Constantinople, kept back foreign, mostly pagan armies.
09:15If you looked over the battlements at that time, you might have seen the silk tents of the Persians beneath,
09:22black tents of the Arabs, the Goths, the Bulgarians, all sorts.
09:27But none of these armies took it.
09:29Not that is until 1453, when the Ottoman Turks came over these walls and destroyed the Christian civilisation inside.
09:37That was an extraordinary civilisation. Think of it.
09:42In the West, those Dark Ages produced a sort of dislocation with the past.
09:48If people after the Dark Ages wanted to think about classical antiquity,
09:52or the age in which the Bible was written, or even its language, Greek, which practically nobody knew,
09:57they had to sort of reinvent it.
10:00It was a gone, a different age.
10:02But here, that past was part of the present.
10:05The old classical world continued.
10:07People still kept talking Greek.
10:10They went to chariot races. They knew all about the classical gods.
10:13They read Greek philosophers.
10:15They were able to read the New Testament in Greek, the language in which it had been written.
10:21Constantinople may have been founded by a Western emperor, but it always looked towards the East.
10:28The city spanned Europe and Asia.
10:31Here it was, the Roman culture met and mixed with the East.
10:37And it made a form of Christianity that Jesus of Nazareth, himself an Easterner, could have recognised and understood.
10:45And as the Western Empire dissolved, this city became the heart of the Roman Empire.
10:52An exotic, impenetrable, part-legendary city, called sometimes by its old Greek name of Byzantium.
11:06Constantinople was the greatest city in the world.
11:11The Greeks that lived here said it was the eye of all cities.
11:16And in fact, it took most of the Eastern Empire just to support it.
11:20It was a very violent city.
11:21It was a city of huge marble palaces, of circuses, of lethal court politics.
11:27Very violent crowds that used to rush around, killing and destroying.
11:30It seemed at the slightest whim.
11:32And yet, at the same time, this violent city was also a very religious one.
11:37It was said that when you went to a grocer to buy a loaf of bread,
11:40you were just as likely to get it stuck into a big theological argument,
11:44as you were about the price of the loaf.
11:46Westerners who came here found it a very exotic, very mysterious place.
11:51Lots of ambassadors came here for various reasons over the centuries.
11:55They left us letters of their accounts.
11:57They're quite extraordinary documents.
11:59First of all, as they came towards the city, they talk about its smell.
12:03Because all of Constantinople used to flavour its food with a fish sauce,
12:08made from the brown juice of rotten fish.
12:11The Westerners didn't like that very much.
12:13Neither did they like the terrible garlic that was everywhere.
12:16Already by the sixth century, Byzantium had made its own style of food and architecture too.
12:23The city was rich, prosperous and growing.
12:26The vast imperial church of Hagia Sophia, consecrated in 537,
12:32loomed over its palaces in celebration of the reign of that most astute and successful of its rulers,
12:39the Emperor Justinian.
12:42The church looks a bit like the back of an enormous stage set, promising a world within it.
13:12This is the great door, the imperial door of Justinian's church.
13:37For 800 years, only the Emperor of Byzantium and his patriarchs, the chief priests, went through this door.
13:47It's a door, I think, to probably the greatest building in the world.
13:52It's a Christian church and its secret is really in the New Testament.
13:58Right at the top of that door, hidden away somewhere, is a few lines from the Gospel of John.
14:03And it's where Jesus is talking to the Pharisees and he says,
14:06I am the door. Jesus is saying, I am the door to salvation.
14:09If you come through me, if you go into this church, you will achieve salvation.
14:13Okay, we understand that. But what a Greek thing to put on the door.
14:17To start with, it's a conversation between two people, like a couple of Greek philosophers.
14:21And it's people thinking they've got the message behind it.
14:25What message have they got? What message do this church give you?
14:28I think it gives you a message that this is a new universe.
14:33This isn't the old pagan universe. This is a new Christian universe.
14:37If you look at this building, it's difficult to see at first.
14:42After all, the Romans have been making things that look like this for 800 years.
14:48And they knew exactly how all these bits fitted together.
14:52The cornices, the dados, the doorjams. They knew how it all went.
14:55And the Romans got their slaves and bashed them a bit and they got them to make it.
15:00When you look at those Roman buildings, they're faceless, hard, machine-made things.
15:05They're pretty perfect. But this building is nothing like that at all.
15:10If you look at the small details on this building, they're not made by slaves.
15:14They're not made by machines. They're made by people's hands.
15:18Look at this little ivy plant running up here. Little leaves.
15:21Every little leaf is carefully drawn. It's a little leaf with a little bit of God's life in it.
15:26It's trembling on the vine. Every single line here moves slightly.
15:31It's got a warmth about it. It's not mechanical. It's not machine-like.
15:35You can see the hand of the man that made it.
15:38And this huge building, it's a universe of a building.
15:41This building is full and it tells you that man has a place.
15:45So let's go in the church and see what amazing beauties that holds for us.
15:50We never get in.
16:01You know, like every really great work of architecture, this building is actually unfotographable.
16:28It moves around you. It holds you inside it.
16:32And this building, too, is doubly extraordinary.
16:36What, for me, makes it probably the greatest building in the whole world
16:39is the fact that you go from these minute beauties to this vast, expansive dome.
16:45It's absolutely extraordinary. It's like a model of the universe, you might say.
16:49God is enclosed under the dome. It's sort of gone and terrifying.
16:54Every detail in the building has extreme beauty and sensitivity in it.
17:00Think about it. In Rome, the slaves made huge blank walls.
17:06But here, look at them. Look what's happened.
17:08Every wall is dissolved. It's gone. It's like a piece of lace.
17:11It's like a necklace, too, for God. Think about it.
17:14All these stones brought from all over the empire gathered together here.
17:18It's heaven in a grain of sand.
17:20It's a building. It's enormous, but you don't feel dominated in it.
17:24That's its secret.
17:25And that's why I think it's the most profoundly Christian building.
17:30So just think of the emperor Justinian. He marches in.
17:34He looks up at his dome for the first time.
17:37He said nothing for a moment.
17:39And then he suddenly said, Solomon, I have surpassed you.
17:43See? It's the Byzantine emperor immediately thinking about a Bible character
17:48and he's sort of in competition with the Bible characters.
17:51Justinian was probably the greatest of all the Byzantine emperors.
17:54He knew exactly where he was going, what he wanted to do.
17:57He took over a very rich empire.
17:59He had great generals, too.
18:01They conquered...
18:02Well, they reconquered all of the Roman Empire,
18:04everywhere from Spain to Syria, all of Italy, Rome,
18:07and right up through the country,
18:08all came under the control of Justinian.
18:11He was an extraordinary man, a very powerful man.
18:14He sat down and wrote a new code of laws.
18:16He closed all of the old pagan churches.
18:19He closed all the philosophical academies in Greece,
18:21the Egyptian temples.
18:22He was a very moral, a very tough ruler and a great man.
18:26And he had as his empress an equally remarkable woman,
18:30a lady called Theodora.
18:32Now, the trouble with Theodora is that she's had a bad press
18:36because her history was written by a man who, if he was alive today,
18:40would be writing for the Sun or the National Enquirer.
18:42So what we know about her may be as legendary as the story of Justinian and his dome.
18:48But what we do know is that apparently she'd been a prostitute before she was an empress,
18:53a woman who is alleged to have said that she would have liked to have had more orifices in her body
18:58so she could please more of her clients at the same time.
19:01Anyway, be that as it may, they ruled incredibly well for 40 years.
19:07And this, if you like, was the centre of their universe.
19:13Justinian's church was the centre of it all,
19:17their imperial ritual ground, if you like,
19:20as God controlled the clock of heaven.
19:22So this was the centre of the clock of the earth.
19:25Justinian, actually in this church, sat on a golden throne over there.
19:34Theodora was up there in the balcony, both of them looking down into their church.
19:41You've really got to think of this church as a theatre, a vast imperial theatre.
19:48See, they came in to look at the ceremonies,
19:51but the ceremonies were actually hidden behind a great screen.
19:56Between this column over here, and that one over there,
20:00was a great long screen that ran across and it had a few doors in it.
20:04Now the altar was behind the screen, so you could only catch glimpses of it.
20:08As you went past one of the doors, you'd have seen bits of this huge golden table
20:12covered in linen and embroideries,
20:14and on it the great Bibles of Byzantium, the crosses and all that sort of thing.
20:18And you'd have heard the murmuring and the choirs and the priests behind.
20:23And the incense would have come wafting over the top,
20:25and the lights in the church would have been so low
20:27that between the clouds of incense and these little stars burning just above your head,
20:32you might have fancied you'd have been in heaven and so.
20:35Then the great moment came when the choir started to sing a song called the Cherubicon.
20:41Cherubicon means the image of the cherubim.
20:44They were imitating the heavenly choir, and Justinian was moving towards them.
20:47And what were the words he was singing?
20:49The Lord of the universe has come, and it's Justinian and his court,
20:53not God and his angels that are coming.
20:56Can you imagine all that amazing Byzantine splendour?
21:00Actually, you don't have to imagine it because they're actually mosaics of the sea,
21:04made by Justinian's own artists.
21:06There you can see his bishops carrying their great jeweled Bibles and their crosses.
21:10And then Justinian himself, looking a bit stern, a bit pale, a bit impatient,
21:15an arrogant young man with great arched eyebrows.
21:18Behind him, his army. In front of him, his bishops.
21:23The unholy trinity that now ruled the earthly empire of Almighty God.
21:29These wonderful mosaics of Justinian and Theodora aren't in Constantinople at all.
21:39They're in Italy, in Ravenna, in the old imperial court.
21:43Justinian's armies had just conquered Italy again.
21:46He wanted to stamp his imperial presence on the country.
21:50Now, in these wondrous mosaics in this church, that book, the Bible, has a special significance.
21:57Because Justinian isn't just trying to unite the people with their God, serving as a servant.
22:03He's actually trying to justify his position to divine right on earth.
22:08And his theologians have used the book of Genesis to do it.
22:12What they did, you see, was to find episodes in the book of Genesis which seem to prophesy events in the New Testament.
22:21And then to link these Old Testament events with Justinian himself.
22:25To say, look, Justinian is just like one of these people.
22:28It's a complicated, circular argument.
22:31So, we have a picture of Abraham offering bread and wine to three angels.
22:35The three angels that had come to tell Sarah's wife that she was going to bear a child.
22:41That's obviously a sort of prophecy of communion itself.
22:46Now, on the right, Abraham is sacrificing Isaac.
22:50And that's a sort of a prophecy of the crucifixion.
22:52Because there, Isaac is said to be on the wood in the Bible, just as Jesus would be on the wood in the New Testament.
22:59Now, on this side, there's a man who actually hardly appears in the Bible at all.
23:14A shadowy character named Melchizedek.
23:17He's not much known today.
23:20But amongst the imperial theologians, the King Melchizedek played quite an important role.
23:26Melchizedek was king of Jerusalem, just as Justinian was king of the New Jerusalem of the Empire.
23:32Melchizedek, the book of Genesis tells us, just offered bread and wine to Abraham.
23:39Not a very strong connection, you might think, but enough for the theologians.
23:43They've transformed that event into Melchizedek actually standing in front of an imperial altar from the time of Justinian himself.
23:50In fact, an altar exactly like this one.
23:53And to rub the point home further, Melchizedek has a halo.
23:58Just as Justinian does over there.
24:01So the two figures seem to be somehow linked in time by theology.
24:06The idea is that Justinian rules by divine right, and if you go against him, you go against God.
24:12So Christ, up there, isn't he just a handsome young man?
24:17He's a judge.
24:18He's rewarding the righteous with crowns, and he threatens terrible retributions on the sinful with the seven seals of the books of Revelation.
24:27And high, high above Justinian's altar is the Lamb of God, the Holy Lamb of Jesus, whose sacrifice had not only saved the world, but which, according to theologians, also sanctified the rule of kings and emperors.
24:48So the ancient Bible stories were used to organize the lives of men.
25:13In Justinian's day, this was the very edge of the world.
25:18It's the west coast of Ireland.
25:20Out there is the Atlantic.
25:21We know that America's on the other side.
25:23Justinian's geographers would have thought, just a few monsters, and then, well, you fell off, you know?
25:29Nothing.
25:30But shortly after the time of Justinian, these same remote areas actually became the centers of Western civilization.
25:40Look, I'll tell you what's happened.
25:42Justinian's armies have absolutely devastated Italy.
25:46And they went back to the east shortly after he died, so there was nothing gained, and Italy was ruined and lost.
25:53Even old Rome, where the Pope lived, was pretty well devastated.
25:56The papacy was now very poor.
25:59And, of course, if Italy was ruined, the empire was totally ruined.
26:05All of Western Europe, which had once been huge cities, was now a desert, a wasteland.
26:11There was nothing there.
26:12People had forgotten how to live in cities.
26:14Civilization went from Western Europe.
26:16That is what is meant by the Dark Ages.
26:19But in places like Ireland and Scotland, places that had never been a part of the Roman Empire, Christianity lived on.
26:26The missionaries from the old Roman Empire had spread it through these remote areas and it never died.
26:33So what was once the froth at the edge of everything, now became the center of Western civilization.
26:40There were a few literate men living in places like Scotland, Northumbria and certainly here in Ireland.
26:47And those literate men were writing Bibles, the Word of God.
26:52And in the centuries that followed, those literate men and their Bibles, who had preserved Western civilization, would actually revive it by taking the Word of God back into Europe.
27:22To be continued...
27:40The Dark Ages almost entirely disappeared.
28:07There's just a few beautiful jewels and a few precious Bibles from the 6th and 7th century, that's all.
28:15People of those days lived in buildings made of Watland Dorb and they just washed away.
28:21But at sites like this one in Ireland, this is Clonmac Noyce, you can still see a reflection, a sort of shadow of how those people lived.
28:29Because here that lifestyle went on for hundreds and hundreds of years.
28:35This little wall ran round the edge of a settlement of monks.
28:40Right in the middle of the settlement would have been a little church, just like that one.
28:46Probably made of wood and filled with these beautiful little things, Bibles, crosses, that sort of thing.
28:52Round the edge of that would have been all the places where the monks lived and worked.
28:57There would have been the kitchens, places for the animals, places where they prepare the meat for the winter, all that sort of thing.
29:04Dallas with a beautiful smell of turf fires running over the whole thing too.
29:08The most amazing building here, the most extraordinary building, the thing that made these sort of places in the 6th and 7th century one of the centres of world culture, was the Scriptorium.
29:21The places where the Bible was written.
29:23It was in places like that that men like Bede and Columba spent their whole lives in meditation and writing the Bible.
29:31All around the edges of the old empire, these small colonies of monks and hermits prayed for the world, communed alone with God, and almost inadvertently kept learning and literacy alive in the West.
29:56Can you imagine it? Stone cold winter and summer, perhaps the room filled with smoke from a fire, bracken over the ceiling, a small window, a little wax taper to light you and a chair.
30:15That's all you had. And yet, you know, these people working like this made the most beautiful books in the world.
30:25Some of the most beautiful manuscripts man has ever made.
30:29Books so beautiful that a few hundred years later, in Gothic times, people thought they'd be made by angels.
30:35They're famous today. The Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Kells, the Book of Darrow, the Catholic of Saint Columba.
30:43The Catholic of Saint Columba is the oldest manuscript known from Western Europe, 6th or 7th century, something like that.
30:49Made in a little damp, dark room like this. Look, they've got the text from Italy. It's come out from the south, brought up from missionaries.
30:56It's a good Latin Bible. But all the pages, the decoration, are laced with their own lives.
31:02And filled in with that wonderful decoration and colour was all the events of their own lives, all the animals and plants that they knew.
31:10They saw an otter taking a salmon by a stream. That an image would go in their Bible next to a picture of an evangelist.
31:16All the plants and everything you can think of, it was all there.
31:19There were others that were actually intent on re-Christianising Europe itself.
31:24They actually landed in France. They sent many students back to the Irish monasteries.
31:29English, French students came to places like Clon Macnoisse to actually study the Word of God.
31:35Other monks went from Germany down the Rhine, Christianising Europe as they went, visiting the pagans, sometimes getting murdered.
31:42And some of the most famous churches and monasteries there now were actually founded by the Irish.
31:47And then, believe it or not, they moved actually back into Italy itself.
32:17Look at that. A splendid page of the world's oldest Latin Bible, going on its majestic way in double columns.
32:36Seventh century, and made in Northumbria of all places.
32:40Now, how it ends up in Michelangelo's masterpiece of a library in Florence is a story of exquisite improbabilities.
32:49It's one we largely know, in fact, through the writings of a Northumbrian monk, the famous Bede.
32:54In fact, Bede's scriptorium, that's the part in his monastery that made books, made this book.
33:00Perhaps some of these words here are actually Bede's own words written in his own hand. We don't know.
33:07But the story is in the book itself. Part of it is in.
33:11Let me show you the beginning of the book now.
33:13This beautiful, simple page in the front of the book is the dedication.
33:27It tells you who ordered the book to be made and to whom it was to be presented.
33:32Look, there's something quite interesting.
33:35You see that line there, where the ink's a bit different? That line there.
33:41That line there.
33:42Now, this book is made of vellum. That is, the skin of an animal.
33:47And somebody's scratched away at it and written new names on it.
33:50They've written Italian names on it, so it looks like it was written for an Italian to be given to the Pope.
33:55But in 1890, an Italian scholar looking at this realised it had been changed and saw, under that bit there,
34:03the original dedication was of a Northumbrian bishop, Bishop Chalfrith.
34:09Bede's own bishop had ordered this book to be made.
34:12Some 1,500 animals were slaughtered to make three of these ones.
34:16This is the only one that survived. And it survived because of Chalfrith himself.
34:22When he got very, very old, he decided he wanted to go back to Rome on a pilgrimage
34:26to see the Holy City for the last time.
34:28And he decided to take one of his great Bibles as a present.
34:31So they must have strapped it onto a horse or a donkey.
34:34Can you imagine finding a Bible on carrying up mountains through rivers?
34:39A little slender thread of knowledge going through illiterate Europe.
34:43Very, very few people could read.
34:45Anyway, the old man died in France, but the Bible somehow continued.
34:51And he got to Rome. And it seems that the Pope eventually gave it to a little Italian monastery
34:56in the shadow of a Tuscan mountain, Monte Ammiartis.
35:00And that's how this book gets its name, the Ammiartinus.
35:03But even more extraordinary is this, perhaps the most famous page in the whole book.
35:16It's famous because it links this Bible from Jarrow with the real history of the Latin Bible.
35:34Remember Cassiodorus, that friend of Boethius who'd been murdered by the Barbarian Emperor.
35:39You remember he went to South Italy and there he set up a sort of a monastery
35:44in which his monk sat down and got the Latin Bible and put it into its exact final form.
35:50Well, this is a picture of Cassiodorus.
35:54We know that because we know from other writers that Cassiodorus owned a certain set of Bibles.
35:59He owned one very famous set of nine-volume Bible and there it is in the bookcase.
36:07We know that he owned a little Bible in one volume and there it is on the floor.
36:11And it's open and Cassiodorus himself is copying out this big fat Bible.
36:16Now that big fat Bible was a very famous Bible, it was called the Codex Grandiore.
36:21And it seems that that very Bible was taken up to Jarrow
36:26and that this huge volume is actually a copy of Cassiodorus' book written hundreds of years earlier.
36:32This then shows you the line, the direct line of descent of all our modern Bibles.
36:39If there's one thing in the whole world which you can say lifted Europe out of the bogs of the dark ages
37:05and put it back onto the path of literacy and prosperity,
37:09it's this chair or rather it's the ideas that have come to surround it.
37:14Because this, you might say, is the throne of Europe.
37:19Legend has it, it is actually the throne of Charlemagne.
37:24Now he was the king of the Franks.
37:26He ruled an area which was much of France and part of Germany right down into Italy.
37:30And on Christmas Day 800, he was actually crowned an emperor by the Pope in Rome.
37:36This northerner was the first Holy Roman Emperor.
37:41And when he'd got home again to Germany, to the heart of his empire,
37:46to his great palace at Aachen, Charlemagne built himself this fine imperial chapel.
37:53The idea, of course, is there is a man, an emperor, sitting on the throne of Christendom,
38:01who rules all of Europe with a just and fair hand, a pure Christian king,
38:06ruling an empire organised and controlled by the Bible itself.
38:12The Bible it is in this empire that's going to give people the dignity and the prosperity and the union with God.
38:20There are hundreds of stories about Charlemagne.
38:23Some of them are probably true too.
38:25But one of them, and one of them is particularly appropriate,
38:29because it actually tells you quite a lot about the sort of man he must have been.
38:33It concerns the emperor sitting up there, looking down at a service on the ground floor of his church,
38:42somewhere down there.
38:43There's a particularly well-known verger reading from the Bible.
38:47This verger was said to be like an Italian, in that he perpetually tried to resist the course of nature.
38:53It actually meant the poor guy trimmed his fingernails and washed his hair, which was pretty rare.
38:58Anyway, as Charlemagne watched him reading the Bible, to his great fascination,
39:03the spider started to come down from the ceiling and landed straight on top of his verger's head.
39:10Now, the verger must have felt it as it landed, but he was so terrified of the emperor's eye,
39:15because Charlemagne was a big man, he didn't muck around with him.
39:18He was so terrified of the emperor's eye that he carried on reading the book.
39:22The spider jumped onto his head, ran down his neck, bit him on the neck and killed him.
39:26Charlemagne was mortified.
39:29He hadn't actually been able to look after the welfare of one of his subjects,
39:33and he did penance in his own church for it.
39:36It's a good story, it embodies all of Charlemagne's principles,
39:39the watching, the education and the idea of a just ruler.
39:43Actually, the man spent most of his life fighting all around the borders of his empire.
39:49When he wasn't fighting foreigners, he was actually fighting for good order inside his own kingdom.
39:55He did it by a number of ways. He framed marvellous laws.
39:59Charlemagne's laws are the basis of civil law in Europe to this day,
40:02education system, anything you can think of.
40:05And he also did it, too, by setting up Bible writing schools inside the monasteries.
40:10There were practically no books in Europe.
40:12Charlemagne himself was illiterate, but he knew the power of writing and of that book.
40:17This beautiful style of writing, developed by Charlemagne's scribes,
40:26is not only the ancestor of all Western handwriting,
40:30but is also the medium through which the wisdom of the ancient world has come down to us.
40:35Most of the oldest surviving manuscripts of classical writing,
40:41Cicero, Virgil and all the rest of them,
40:43are copies that were made in Charlemagne's monasteries.
40:47It was Charlemagne's Bibles, however, that had the most effect.
40:51The four evangelists became the heroes of his brave new world.
40:56Cassiodorus' Latin Bible became a standard imperial Bible text.
41:05The Bible, the written word of God, was covered in gold, made as precious as a jewel.
41:12After Charlemagne's death, though the emperors and courtiers were themselves mostly illiterate,
41:17they all thought it was a noble thing, a royal duty indeed,
41:21to support scholar monks and pay for them to make fine books.
41:25So learning was revived, and Cassiodorus' perfect Latin text came to hold the pith of European wisdom.
41:35The Bible had come to stand at the heart of the new Christian civilization
41:40that was slowly growing in Northern Europe.
41:48One of the most beautiful and one of the most moving examples of this endueling,
41:54the word of God, this making a new prestige object out of the Bible.
42:02It was a pulpit made by one of Charlemagne's successors for the court chapel at Aachen.
42:09And this is it.
42:12Down the sides are actually antique ivories from Egypt.
42:17It's a bit like the history of the Bible, really.
42:21These are much older than Charlemagne, these columns of ivories.
42:26They've actually got Greek gods and things like that on them.
42:29The goddess of Alexandria, Isis, who became the Blessed Virgin Mary.
42:33They've got Dionysius, the god of drinks, swaying around with his grapes and everything.
42:37But it's the cross in the middle that really holds your eye, isn't it?
42:41It's a magnificent thing.
42:43In each of its corners, it's got one of the four evangelists.
42:47Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, busily writing their gospels.
42:51The cross itself is a really bizarre collection of objects.
42:55There's ancient chess pieces there, but the big blobby bits,
42:59the ones that look like fruit gums, are actually bits of Roman crockery.
43:04Turned up the other way and bunged into the gold.
43:07Right in the middle of that nice blue fruit bowl down there.
43:11They used to be, stuck on, one of the finest cameos in the world.
43:16It's an ancient Roman cameo and it has a superb picture of an eagle on it.
43:20It was made in the time of the Roman emperors.
43:22Charlemagne and his successors adopted that ancient Roman sign
43:26just the same way they thought they'd put on the cloak of the Roman emperors.
43:29That became the black eagle of the German Empire.
43:33It's marvellous.
43:34They're sort of burning with the fire of northern faith now, you might say.
43:38These things have been brought from the south, like the Bible, and stuck up here.
43:42And, of course, even in the most ancient times when this was brand new,
43:47the lectern was always here.
43:49This is a new one, but there was an old one.
43:51We got fragments of it.
43:52And here, of course, would have stood one of the Carolingian Bibles,
43:56the real triumph of Charlemagne's court.
44:00They became the justification of nations, of capitalism too, the root of law,
44:06the seed, perhaps, of all the rising power of the West.
44:10And in the East, in those same centuries, old Christianity, the Christianity of Constantine and Justinian, was slowly dying.
44:25The great old city of Constantinople finally fell to the Turks on a Tuesday, the 29th of May, 1453.
44:34All that spring, the people on the walls had watched as the Turkish army dragged up its huge siege cannons.
44:41They didn't dare put any cannons on their walls.
44:44They were 1,000 years old, and they felt they'd just disintegrate.
44:47Early on that Tuesday morning, the Turkish cannons started lobbing these huge granite cannonballs against the walls.
44:54They knocked them down so much in a few places that the Turks were actually able to ride into the city.
45:00But actually, the city just fell apart.
45:03It was penetrated by the Turkish army in several different places.
45:06They were outnumbered six, perhaps even ten to one.
45:25The Turks were banging on the door shortly after they killed the Emperor.
45:29That was about an hour after sunrise.
45:32Look, what happened was this.
45:35The evening before, just before midnight, the last Emperor of Byzantium had come into this church for the last time for Communion.
45:44The great jeweled Bibles and the crosses had been carried to the altar.
45:47And all the Italian and the Greek knights who were going out with the Emperor the next day prayed.
45:52And then they'd walked out of this church, bolted the doors.
45:56They'd left the whole court of Byzantium.
45:59All the senators, the scholars, and their wives, and their children.
46:08When the Turks finally got into the church, they killed everybody who resisted, stripped the rest, put them in chains, and they were led off into slavery.
46:25Sultan Mehmed, Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, after he conquered Constantinople, came into the church on that first day on his horse.
46:34And legend says that when he came in here, he looked at the church and told his men to stop damaging him, which is what they were doing.
46:40And said, this is obviously a building meant for God.
46:43So it became the mosque of the divine wisdom instead of the church of the divine wisdom.
46:48And it's said that he put his hand in one of the pillars and spun it round to face Mecca.
46:53And three days later, of course, prayers were held in here and the Sultan's brow literally touched the marble floor.
46:59Do you know, at that time, it was said that you could buy ten books for any coin that you might possess.
47:06Now Byzantium was stuffed with books.
47:09There was all the learning of the Greek world in this town.
47:12The works of Homer, Aristotle, Plato, God knows what we do not know was here.
47:17It was all destroyed in that period.
47:19For the story of the Bible, it's probably its most tragic time.
47:23How much of the Bible's history was lost then?
47:25Obviously, all the great Bibles of Byzantine with their golden covers were just stripped and thrown down.
47:30But think of the ancient manuscripts that were here, manuscripts that went back.
47:33Who knows, practically the time of Jesus, nobody knows.
47:36Half the history of the Bible was lost on that day.
47:43On that day, too, Christianity lost its last direct connection with the real ancient Bible world.
47:52Under Turkish rule, Greek, the very language of the New Testament, became a provincial language.
47:59Since then, of course, the entire Christian world has been even further isolated from its own beginnings.
48:06This mostly by things of its own making, by social industrial revolutions and two huge wars.
48:13Yet that seed that Charlemagne planted in the middle of Europe has remained through the centuries.
48:20It's only lost its real power, indeed, in the last hundred years or so.
48:24I suppose it was his monasteries, those great monasteries that Charlemagne set up, that really started Europe on the boil again.
48:34They really generated a new economy in Europe.
48:39Even though weather got better, everything got better.
48:41Water powers developed, they started breeding animals, the population went up, bingo, you're into a new world.
48:46It was wonderful.
48:47But it was still a world based on the Bible.
48:51You see, that Gothic period, which came along after Charlemagne and really didn't conk out until the 15th, 16th century, hundreds and hundreds of years later.
49:00That period still held the Bible at its centre.
49:04Because throughout all that time, even with the new technology, the people in that society weren't that far from Bible people.
49:11When they read their Bible and it said there were shepherds abiding in the fields or there was a guy who was a tanner or this or that.
49:18They knew about that.
49:19They still had those people.
49:21They still had courts and chamberlains and all the rest, just like Herod the Great.
49:25It wasn't that different.
49:26And that Bible supplied everybody in that society in Europe for hundreds of years with an identity, with a dignity.
49:35Everybody from a thief to a king had his place in the Bible.
49:39And those great churches that they built, filled up with statues, they're all to do with placing everybody in that society in terms of their Bible characters and their Bible equivalents and the morality of it all stuck together.
49:53And you could say then that the Gothic world is the most successful Bible culture in the West.
49:58They thought it was literally a mirror image of the world in the Bible itself.
50:03His mind is his place if you are in it himself.
50:09To be continued...
50:39To be continued...
51:09To be continued...
51:39To be continued...
Comments