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00:13PIANO PLAYS
00:44PIANO PLAYS
01:10Extraordinary, isn't it?
01:12Middle of the Tunisian desert.
01:13Not a soul in sight.
01:15Traffic light goes red, I stop.
01:17And I won't start again until it goes green.
01:20Deeply meaningful thing, the humble traffic light,
01:23in what it says about how we think,
01:25about how we encourage people with a productive sense of curiosity.
01:32Take Henry Arthur Bedford Halverson.
01:34He's a fellow who invented the traffic light back in the 20s.
01:38Who knows how long he burnt the midnight oil before he came up with it?
01:41But the payoff came.
01:44The day he got this.
01:45The inventor's dream.
01:47The patent.
01:48Look.
01:50Every nut and bolt described in glowing detail, plus drawings.
01:54This is what you get when you build a better mousetrap,
01:57or a traffic light, or whatever.
01:59And the prize for all that effort?
02:01Between 16 and 20 years of monopoly to profit from your cleverness.
02:05Protected from all would-be imitators by this inscrutable legalese.
02:11The rule of law.
02:12Encouraging and protecting the drive to innovate.
02:16Oh, and speaking of driving, excuse me.
02:28In any city in the world, here in Tunis, for instance,
02:31you'll see that marriage of law and bright ideas.
02:34Business can only go international because everybody sticks to the rules,
02:38and because everybody agrees what will happen if they don't.
02:44Under the protection of the law,
02:45we've come to expect the benefits of science and technology
02:48will continue to carry us along towards ever-higher standards of living.
02:53So, we make sure, through an educational system that teaches people
02:58that the only way to go is up.
03:00That the way to succeed is to take nothing for granted.
03:03To question everything.
03:04Always to expect to find a better answer.
03:07As a result, we're basically forward-looking.
03:10Which is ironic, considering how we began,
03:13by being almost exactly the opposite.
03:21It started just down the road from Tunis,
03:24with a couple of people here in ancient Carthage,
03:271,400 years ago,
03:28as the Roman Empire began to fall apart.
03:32Here, a lawyer called Martianus Capella
03:35decided to save what he could from the imperial past
03:38by pulling together the seven main subjects of Roman education
03:42into one single book
03:44that he thought would stand a better chance of survival
03:47and be more use
03:48in a world where life is bound to become more small-time and local
03:52when things fell apart.
03:54He called his seven subjects the seven liberal arts,
03:57and his book was to become all the education there was
04:00for the next 700 years.
04:05The other fellow I mentioned
04:06was an ex-night clubber turned bishop called Augustine,
04:10and his view of the fall of Rome was good riddance.
04:15He ran this part of the world for the church,
04:17and the book he produced out of all this chaos and confusion
04:20was to set Christian thinking
04:22into a kind of drop-out mode for centuries.
04:26The world isn't worth bothering about, he said.
04:28All this fancy architecture
04:30and high living and practical knowledge
04:31and imperial glory,
04:33a load of rubbish.
04:35Perishable goods.
04:38For Augustine,
04:39there was no point in trying to understand this world.
04:42It was the hereafter that mattered.
04:44And the only way you were ever going to get to heaven
04:47was by turning your back on city life,
04:49denying yourself the daily fun and games,
04:52and leading a thoroughly hair-shirt existence.
04:57By the end of the 5th century,
04:59when the vandals were picking their noses in the forum
05:02and wondering what the villa lavatories were for,
05:05anybody who had any sense
05:06had already taken Augustine's advice
05:08and gone off to sit it out in monasteries and caves,
05:11taking with them their papers and their books,
05:14including, of course,
05:15Martianus Capella's little effort,
05:16waiting for darkness to fall on civilisation.
05:44Now, it's all very well to say
05:46that the Dark Ages which followed the fall of Rome
05:48weren't their fault.
05:50The argument goes that this hairy lot,
05:53hacking a subsistence out of some tribal clearing in the forest,
05:57had their time cut out just keeping warm
06:00and chopping wood,
06:02never mind using Roman roads that led nowhere
06:04or amphitheatres with no performers
06:07or any of the Roman junk rotting quietly in the bushes
06:10because it was culturally unsuitable.
06:12Well, it's an argument,
06:14but the plain fact is,
06:16early on,
06:17they were an uncouth, smelly, dangerous bunch of barbarian louts
06:21if you came between them and what they were after,
06:24something that was guaranteed to get their goat.
06:27And once these vandals, jutes, Anglo-Saxons or whatever
06:30had settled in and turned Europe
06:33into one vast farmyard midden dotted with ruins,
06:35well, there was little to do but get drunk
06:38and wait for the odd passer-by.
06:47Travellers were, however, rare.
06:49Well, look at the place.
06:51And tended to be types
06:52who weren't too worried about their worthless lives.
06:55Ring a bell.
07:00For these illiterate boozers of the late 6th century,
07:04the occasional monk
07:05who happened to interrupt a social evening
07:08must have seemed like a visitor from on high.
07:26In fact, on high was just where most monks came from.
07:30Up here, well away from trouble,
07:33Augustine's followers had kept the flame of learning
07:35alight in their monasteries.
07:37Gardens of knowledge in a wilderness of ignorance.
07:40Well, kind of.
07:44Thanks to Augustine,
07:46their view of what knowledge was is pretty weird.
07:49I mean, they wouldn't say,
07:51hmm, here's a red flower.
07:53They'd say, red for the blood of Christ,
07:56thorns for the pains of the devil,
07:58green for the emerald of sincerity, and so on.
08:01Nothing really existed
08:03except as a symbol for something else,
08:05something religious.
08:07And the only point in looking at all this
08:09would be to remind you of those symbols.
08:11The whole of nature was nothing but a kind of giant,
08:14holy cryptogram to be decoded by the faithful.
08:22Turning your back on reality like that
08:24was part of the whole escapist thing.
08:26In here, they lived a totally self-contained life.
08:29They might have been on another planet.
08:31The monastic rule gave a detailed schedule
08:34for every single aspect of life inside these walls,
08:38everything from electing an abbot
08:40to how much wine to drink in summer.
08:42Mind you, what reality was there outside
08:45that you'd want to let in?
08:46Look at the way these places are built,
08:48like fortresses, to keep it out.
08:58The principle here wasn't that hard to understand.
09:01Being shut behind these thick walls
09:03might not have been much of an existence,
09:05but it was preferable to anything else on offer.
09:10The whole monastic experience
09:12was a bit like jumping into bed
09:14and pulling the blankets over your head.
09:15It was a mystic experience, unreal.
09:18And it all, still hundreds of years after the fall of Rome,
09:23looked back to an age of greatness that was gone forever.
09:27Everything these people knew,
09:28and this is extraordinary for us to grasp in our world,
09:31everything they knew was old.
09:59So when this early 7th century elite
10:02nipped off after dinner
10:03to pick up the latest in bedtime reading,
10:06it was all very medieval readers' digest stuff.
10:09Anthologies, compilations, condensations, selections,
10:13rewritten and copied over the centuries.
10:22You can see that kind of unreal view of life
10:26in the way they took the same weird approach
10:28to turning the knowledge into pictures.
10:31The same convoluted playing around with ideas
10:33was applied to things like sculpture.
10:36It's all monster animals and nightmare faces.
10:39Even in the really talented work,
10:41everything's symbolic, full of double meaning.
10:44Now and again, in the mosaics,
10:45you get the odd bit of reality slipping in.
10:49But the main theme is still that only heaven matters.
10:53Below, in the earthly world,
10:56everything's shown in a cartoon view.
10:58People, animals, done to a formula,
11:00with everything in its proper place.
11:04Everything, everybody, belonged where God put them.
11:07Nobody moved.
11:09Well, after several hundred years of hanging on grimly
11:12to the old way of doing things,
11:13you'd expect the grip gradually to loosen, wouldn't you?
11:16Which is just what happened.
11:18By 700 or so,
11:20European intellectual life wasn't worth the candle.
11:29Until, at the end of the 8th century,
11:31things took an encouraging turn for the so-so,
11:34here in Aachen, Germany.
11:36This cathedral's all that's left of a posh marble city
11:39thrown up by a 26-year-old womanising whiz kid,
11:43keen to put a stop to the Dark Ages rot.
11:46Ended up Emperor of Europe,
11:47crowned by the Pope on Christmas Day 800.
11:53Name of Charlemagne.
11:55The secret of his success, a brain drain.
11:59You see, when he took over in 768,
12:01the place was a mess.
12:02The only people in Europe who could read and write
12:04were the priests.
12:06And where were they?
12:08Moonlighting, brawling, boozing, and chasing women.
12:12Charlemagne reached for his secretary
12:13and got all the eggheads he could think of,
12:15like Alcuin of York,
12:17to get over here
12:18and get a grip on the general standard of penmanship.
12:21Penmanship?
12:22You try running an empire from this throne
12:24without the bureaucrats to shuffle the parchment
12:27and you won't get far.
12:29So in no time at all,
12:30every cathedral and monastery
12:32had a free school
12:33and inspectors doing the rounds.
12:35The aim?
12:36Standardise the writing and spelling
12:38and you can standardise everything else
12:39and everybody can understand it.
12:41And so this came in.
12:43A new handwriting,
12:45small to save parchment,
12:46clear to read and easy to write,
12:48called Carolingian Minuscule.
12:50Ended up as the script we use today,
12:52as a matter of fact.
12:53But it was the school syllabus that interests us.
12:55They used the seven liberal arts,
12:58you remember,
12:58started by Capella back in Carthage,
13:00still surviving in a few scattered monasteries.
13:04They split the subjects into
13:05the facts you needed to know,
13:07music theory for singing hymns,
13:10geometry to measure things,
13:11arithmetic to add things up,
13:13and astronomy for knowing what day it was.
13:15And how to use the facts,
13:17grammar for getting it right,
13:19rhetoric for putting it in letters,
13:21and logic to explain it clearly.
13:24Now, with only seven subjects,
13:26the best Charlemagne could do
13:27was to try and save what there was.
13:29So they copied everything
13:30they could find from the past.
13:32Just enough copies
13:33to survive through what happened next.
13:37Because when Charlemagne died in 814,
13:40the rot he had stopped
13:41came back in the form of the Vikings,
13:43and the lights went out everywhere.
13:48Well, almost everywhere.
13:59By the year 950,
14:01Europe was back on its feet again.
14:03All over the place,
14:04in farmyards,
14:05outside monastery walls,
14:07when the Vikings had finally
14:09cleared off for good,
14:10people started getting together
14:11to exchange what they had
14:13for what they hadn't.
14:14And places that began
14:16just as a safe spot to meet
14:17gradually became a regular event,
14:19maybe once a week,
14:20then every day.
14:22By the year 1000,
14:23there were little places like this
14:25all over the continent,
14:26with the beginnings of a local police force
14:28to keep the bully boys in order
14:29and let people go about
14:31their business unmolested.
14:33I say business
14:34because that's what was happening.
14:36As the very first
14:37European marketplaces set up shop,
14:39and life began to be
14:40just a shade better
14:42than absolutely dreadful.
14:46With money to be made,
14:48these marketplaces
14:49rapidly turned into small towns,
14:51supporting an exciting new way
14:53to have fun called
14:54buying things,
14:57including, of course,
14:58a better diet.
14:59As trade expanded,
15:00so did the food supply,
15:02and the better people ate,
15:03the better they wanted to eat.
15:04The first inns and hostelries
15:07began to appear.
15:12The modern habit
15:13of eating out
15:14had started.
15:23By the 11th century,
15:25all the really fancy buying and selling
15:27was going on in Italy.
15:28Well, the towns there
15:29had never really gone out of business
15:30since Rome,
15:31and they all had well-developed estates
15:33outside their walls,
15:34so everybody ate well.
15:35Sure, they had been clobbered
15:37by the barbarians,
15:37like everybody else,
15:38but because of their traditions,
15:40they were recovering faster.
15:42And because of those links
15:43with Rome,
15:43they were very bloody-minded
15:45about setting up shop again
15:46without any outside interference.
15:49One such would-be independent
15:51was this place,
15:53Bologna.
15:55It's still the same,
15:56full of money,
15:57good food, elegance,
15:59streets lined with arcades
16:00to keep the weather
16:01off the shoppers.
16:03By 10.50,
16:05Bologna was a bustling,
16:06dynamic trading centre,
16:08growing fast,
16:09sitting on the main commercial route
16:10between southern and northern Europe
16:12and doing very nicely out of it.
16:14Like a lot of Italian cities at the time,
16:17they thought all they had to do
16:18was just let it happen.
16:20Unfortunately,
16:21it was all happening,
16:22too fast for their own good.
16:24The birds would soon come home to roost.
16:28It was the Bolognese
16:29who hit the problem first.
16:31Let me show you why,
16:33because the main square here
16:34says it all.
16:36Look around it
16:37and you see how the place was carved up
16:38between emperor,
16:40town council,
16:42church,
16:44and merchants.
16:46All of them wanted to run the place,
16:48none of them was strong enough
16:49to do it by themselves.
16:51The emperor,
16:52chasing all over Europe,
16:53fighting the Pope for slices
16:54of a much bigger cake than this.
16:56The town council,
16:57bunch of Johnny-come-lately amateurs
16:59who could only keep order
17:00by inviting outsiders
17:02to become mayor.
17:03And the merchants
17:04couldn't see beyond
17:05the end of their cash registers.
17:07So with all this argy-bargy
17:08going on about who was in charge,
17:11humdrum governmental necessities
17:12like taxation,
17:14administration,
17:15customs and excise,
17:16food prices,
17:17wage levels,
17:18tended to get chucked
17:19in a pending tray
17:20while much more serious matters
17:22like who threw the boiling oil
17:24got sorted out.
17:25Boiling oil?
17:26Why do you think
17:27they built those?
17:35This was the late medieval version
17:37of being upwardly socially mobile.
17:39The higher the tower,
17:40the posher the family.
17:41Giving you the drop
17:43on those below.
17:45Bologna had hundreds
17:45of these status symbols
17:46built by everybody
17:48with money,
17:49from craftsmen
17:49to merchants
17:50to soldiers
17:50to aristocrats,
17:52all wanting their own way.
17:55Trouble was,
17:56they were trying to run
17:57before they could walk
17:58because they didn't have
18:00a legal system
18:00that was remotely good enough
18:02to handle the complicated lives
18:03they were making for themselves.
18:05They had a hotch-potch
18:06of barbarian tribal law,
18:09local custom,
18:10astrology trial by far,
18:12bits of Roman jurisprudence
18:13all cobbled together
18:14and no good at all
18:16for that new social set.
18:17People who wanted
18:19to sue people.
18:20Until a monk
18:21called Ionarius,
18:22who taught liberal arts
18:24here at St Stephen's Monastery,
18:25made an illuminating discovery.
18:30In 1076,
18:31he found the great collection
18:33of imperial Roman law,
18:34originally put together
18:36by the emperor Justinian
18:37and lost since the 7th century.
18:39More law than you could ever need
18:41to run a town with.
18:47And that was the trouble.
18:49The stuff was too sophisticated
18:50and complicated,
18:51even for the literate guys
18:52in the pulpit.
18:54I'll show you what I mean
18:55with a modern equivalent.
18:58English commercial law.
19:01An action lies in conversion
19:03for loss or destruction of goods
19:05which a bailee has allowed
19:07to happen in breach of his duty
19:08to his bail law.
19:09That is to say,
19:10it lies in a case
19:11which is not otherwise conversion
19:12but would have been detinue
19:15before detinue was abolished.
19:19Great.
19:20Except if I don't know
19:21what detinue means,
19:22a fat lot of use this is to me.
19:24But I may need to use it
19:25for my business.
19:27Inerius's problem
19:28was exactly the same.
19:30So like the good grammar teacher
19:31he was,
19:32he sat down
19:32and wrote out explanations
19:34of what words like detinue meant
19:36in the margins.
19:37It's a technique called glossing
19:39and with it
19:40Inerius explained,
19:42codified,
19:43organised law
19:44for the first time
19:45in Western Europe.
19:46And as he went along
19:47he turned glossing
19:49into a new rudimentary system
19:51for thinking something through
19:52clearly.
19:53A kind of intellectual
19:54cross-questioning
19:55if you like.
19:57Unfortunately
19:58there wasn't much else
19:59to use it on
20:00except law
20:01because,
20:02well you know,
20:03their general knowledge
20:04was zero.
20:06until that is
20:08something very nasty
20:09happened
20:10in Spain.
20:19Meet Don Rodrigo
20:21Diaz de Vivar
20:22and friends.
20:23Here they are
20:24led by Don Rodrigo
20:26better known as El Cid
20:27the great Spanish hero
20:28belting off
20:29on a crusade
20:30to rescue southern Spain
20:32from the clutches
20:33of the evil
20:34perverted
20:34treacherous
20:35sadistic Arabs
20:36who have held it
20:37in terrified subjection
20:38for 300 years.
20:46Well that was the official
20:47Christian version
20:48of what they're up to
20:49churned out by the Pope
20:51to give our brave lads
20:52somewhere to go
20:52and plunder
20:53other than back home.
20:55In other words
20:55they are not
20:56what they seem.
20:58And nor are the evil
20:59perverted etc. Arabs
21:00they're off to
21:01clubber
21:01clubber
21:02au contraire.
21:08In the dark ages
21:10when we were still
21:11living in pigsties
21:12the Spanish Arab capital
21:14Cordova
21:14had pavements
21:15street lighting
21:16300 public baths
21:18parks
21:19palaces
21:19100,000 houses
21:20and two treasures
21:22unequaled for
21:23urban sophistication
21:24anywhere in the known world.
21:26you're looking at
21:27one of them.
21:33The most extraordinary
21:34mosque in the world
21:35and this is just
21:36a corner of it.
21:37Imagine what the
21:38mud hut northerners
21:40must have made of this
21:40forest of columns
21:42and double arch
21:43high load bearing
21:44architecture.
21:45200 years to build
21:46second biggest
21:48after Mecca
21:48serving a final
21:50city population
21:51of 1 million.
21:54The other treasure
21:55of Cordova
21:56was a library.
21:57You see
21:58when it was built
21:59around 970
22:01the people here
22:02had had paper
22:02and all the
22:03intellectual activity
22:04that implies
22:05for over 200 years
22:06we were still
22:08scratching on animal skins.
22:09So in that library
22:10there were 440,000 books
22:13more than in the
22:15whole of France
22:15and there were
22:1669 other libraries
22:18in town too.
22:20Small wonder
22:21that the Spanish Arabs
22:22described us
22:23as being on a
22:24cultural level
22:25from their point of view
22:26with the Sudan.
22:32They were
22:32after all
22:33surrounded by
22:34stuff like this.
22:45the Arabs
22:46called their bit
22:47of Spain
22:47Andalusia
22:48and it was both
22:50beautiful and wealthy.
22:51They exported
22:53gold, silver,
22:54rubies, silk,
22:55marble, ceramics.
22:56They enjoyed
22:57plentiful harvests.
22:59Of the crops
22:59they'd originally
23:00introduced to Spain
23:01aubergines,
23:03apricots,
23:03pomegranates,
23:04peaches,
23:05rice,
23:05artichokes,
23:06sugar.
23:07Food in abundance
23:08thanks to their
23:09advanced irrigation
23:10techniques
23:10and a high level
23:11of engineering skills.
23:13While we still
23:14lived in filth
23:15the Spanish Arabs
23:16were enjoying
23:16all the comforts
23:17technology could provide.
23:23And they used
23:24their hydraulic systems
23:25to create some
23:26of the most
23:27beautiful water gardens
23:28in history.
23:43In the few
23:44brief moments
23:45before it all
23:46got extremely nasty
23:47Arab Spain
23:48did come up
23:49with a few touches
23:50that survived
23:51to make our lives
23:52a bit more elegant.
23:53They gave us paper,
23:54rhyming poetry
23:55and rhythmic music,
23:57dressing for the seasons,
23:58table settings
23:59and manners,
24:00different courses
24:01at meals
24:02and desserts
24:04after dinner.
24:06Oh, this lot again.
24:08The worst thing
24:09about El Cid
24:09and his brotherhood
24:10of Christian knights
24:11was that they weren't
24:13Christian.
24:14Half of them
24:15were Arabs.
24:16All of them
24:17were mercenaries.
24:18Whether El Cid
24:19fought Arabs
24:19or Christians
24:20depended on
24:21who was paying
24:22and most of the time
24:23the money
24:24was Arab
24:26because by this date
24:281085
24:28Andalusia
24:29was breaking up
24:30anyway
24:30into petty kingdoms
24:32knocking each other
24:33off.
24:46So Arab Spain lost
24:48and the great
24:49Christian crusade
24:50great Christian propaganda
24:52written after the event.
25:08Now, as well as fighting
25:10on both sides,
25:11Arabs and Christians
25:12made other kinds of contact
25:13besides the fatal variety.
25:15As likely as not,
25:16this Muslim
25:17had a Christian father.
25:22Intermarriage was common
25:23along the frontier
25:24in places like Toledo
25:25where another great myth
25:27didn't happen,
25:28the fall of Toledo
25:29in 1085.
25:31The Christian version
25:31goes like this.
25:32Valiant Christian troops
25:33stormed the impregnable
25:35citadel
25:35and in the teeth
25:36of ferocious opposition
25:37took Toledo
25:38from their hated
25:38and implacable
25:39Arab enemies.
25:41Well,
25:42a lot of the Christians
25:43had Arab relatives.
25:45So how implacable
25:46can you get
25:46with your mother-in-law
25:47for a start?
25:48And then
25:49a lot of them
25:49were used to
25:50coming down here
25:50regularly
25:50from their dirty
25:51northern castles
25:52to get their teeth done
25:53or, better for all concerned,
25:55have a hot bath.
25:57And they fought each other
25:58more than the Arabs.
25:59And there were so many
26:00political deals
26:01going on with the Arabs
26:02that the loyalty
26:03of the Christian troops
26:04was at best
26:05underwhelming.
26:07How they got inside
26:07Toledo
26:08was one of those deals.
26:09You see,
26:10Alfonso the Lady Killer,
26:11the incoming Christian king,
26:12had been here before
26:13in rather comfortable exile
26:15and so he already
26:16had a few friends here.
26:18And the sitting tenant?
26:20Well,
26:20he wanted out.
26:22Poison was the flavor
26:23of the month
26:23among his advisors
26:24and he was looking
26:25for a safer seat.
26:26So Alfonso promised him one.
26:28So the fall of Toledo
26:30was more of a nudge
26:31of Toledo.
26:34But if you like your history
26:35in great moments,
26:36don't feel bad
26:37there's one coming up.
26:38Because when the occupying
26:39Christians settled in,
26:40they found something
26:41that brought every major
26:42scholar in Europe
26:43to Toledo
26:45like moths
26:46to a candle flame.
26:49Because Toledo
26:50was the greatest
26:50treasure house
26:51of knowledge
26:51any of them
26:52had ever seen,
26:53stuffed with books
26:54about science
26:55light years ahead
26:56of any of them.
26:57Mysterious subjects
26:58like that.
26:59All they had to do
27:00was translate the Arabic.
27:04The job was to take
27:05150 years
27:06and employ Toledan Jews
27:08who turned the Arabic
27:09into Spanish
27:10for Christian scholars
27:11able to translate
27:12the Spanish on
27:13into Latin
27:13for the rest of Europe.
27:15As the translations
27:16got underway,
27:17the extraordinary truth
27:18sank in.
27:19The Arab books
27:20they were looking at
27:21were themselves
27:22translations,
27:23of ancient Greek knowledge
27:24long given up
27:25for lost by the West
27:26after the fall of Rome.
27:28Europe had hung on
27:29to a few bits and pieces,
27:30scraps of philosophy
27:31and logic,
27:32but nothing like
27:33they were getting now.
27:36And it was now
27:38that the Europeans
27:38got the full measure
27:39of the Arab civilization
27:40they'd destroyed.
27:44Because as the Arabic
27:45material came through
27:46in Spanish,
27:47it was as if it were
27:48still in a foreign language.
27:50The Europeans
27:51just didn't know enough
27:52to understand the concept
27:53being translated
27:54or in many cases
27:55not being translated
27:57because a Latin equivalent
27:59didn't exist.
28:00Luego los azimut.
28:03Azimut?
28:05Que son los azimut?
28:07Si, son cÃrculos
28:08perpendiculares al horizonte.
28:10CÃrculos perpendiculares
28:12al horizonte.
28:15No veo que haya una palabra
28:16latina.
28:18Azimut?
28:18Azimut.
28:20This was when
28:21the Arab scientific words
28:22we have
28:23came into our languages,
28:24like algebra,
28:26zenith,
28:26algorithm,
28:27soda,
28:28camphor,
28:28elixir,
28:29and one really weird
28:31mathematical term
28:32nobody'd ever heard before.
28:33Y el resultado
28:35de la suma
28:36es
28:37uno,
28:39tres,
28:41cero,
28:43cinco.
28:44¿Cero?
28:45SÃ, cero.
28:46¿Qué es cero?
28:47Cero
28:48es
28:49un espacio vacÃo.
28:51¿Y cómo escribo
28:53un espacio vacÃo?
28:54Pues
28:54dejando un espacio
28:55en blanco.
28:56¿Ah?
29:07the translators
29:08flooded back
29:09over the
29:09Spanish mountain
29:10passes,
29:11their pack animals
29:11loaded with
29:12knowledge that
29:13would change
29:13the world.
29:14Maths,
29:15geometry,
29:16astronomy,
29:16medicine,
29:17biology,
29:17botany,
29:18anatomy,
29:18physics,
29:19chemistry,
29:19zoology,
29:20optics,
29:20pharmacology,
29:21philosophy,
29:21meteorology,
29:22engineering,
29:23architecture.
29:23By the middle of the 12th century, virtually every major ancient scientific discipline had been found and brought back.
29:41Now, there was only one thing wrong with all this wonderful food for thought coming in over the Pyrenean passes.
29:47And that was, it was like an over rich meal. Looked great, full of variety, irresistible.
29:53And difficult to digest all at once.
29:56Funnily enough, the genius who made it easy to take was an ancient Greek who suffered from heartburn, called Aristotle.
30:05In among all the wealth of material coming over from Spain was Aristotle's answer to, well, everything.
30:12He'd written an organised, systematic breakdown of all human knowledge.
30:16He'd split it into three kinds, practical, productive and theoretical.
30:21And then subdivided them into every possible specialisation.
30:26He put everything in its place and showed how it related to everything else.
30:31And then he gave some general rules.
30:33Everything works in a systematic way.
30:35It's not magic.
30:36There's a reason why that rock, or this bread, or that tree, looks the way it does, acts the way
30:43it does, why it's here.
30:46And he also said, believe only your own experience.
30:49There's no fact like a fact learnt from your own life.
30:52Well, just those two remarks blew away Augustine and the, life is a veil of tears, don't study it, point
30:59of view, didn't they?
31:03But Aristotle was heavy stuff.
31:06It was easy to wind people up to go looking for conclusions, but how could you prevent them from jumping
31:10to the wrong ones?
31:11I mean, Northern Europeans didn't know good scientific thinking from a hole in the ground.
31:18Well, guess who had the answer for that?
31:21Aristotle, who had a trick for never getting things wrong, claimed he'd invented it, called it logic.
31:29Now, logic's obvious to you a thousand years later, but remember to them, it was like something from outer space.
31:35It took the mystic fog away from your head and gave you a mind like a knife.
31:41Aristotle said, look, what can you say about anything?
31:44You can make remarks about everything, positive or negative, or something, positive or negative.
31:51Four kinds of remarks, using a special three-stage argument.
31:56Two things you knew, like, skin gets wet.
32:00Wet comes out through holes.
32:02That leads to a third thing you didn't know before, wet skin has holes.
32:08Even if you can't see them, you know they must be there.
32:11Logically, they have to be.
32:14Now, that special three-stage argument was called a syllogism.
32:18And with it, Aristotle's system of knowledge and the Greek and Arab data all put together,
32:24life in Europe was never going to be the same again.
32:28Because what a mainframe computer can do to the problem of two and two,
32:32it could do to those piddling difficulties of those people in Bologna.
32:44By this time, Bologna was already attracting people to its law school from all over Europe.
32:49If you wanted to get ahead, law was the only exam worth swatting for.
32:53And then, sometime in the last quarter of the 12th century, the translations arrived and blew everything apart.
33:02The mass of new knowledge from Spain hit this little teaching centre like a ton of intellectual bricks
33:07and turned it into one of the major institutions in the modern world, a university.
33:12Because there were so many students now, they decided they'd do better going for package deals in bigger numbers.
33:18So, they organised.
33:21First thing they did was to set themselves up in groups by nationality and find a place to live.
33:27This was one, the college for students from Spain.
33:30As a matter of fact, it still is.
33:32Those are students' rooms.
33:34Then they set up a student council to hire and pay the teachers, set the rate for renting books because
33:40they were too expensive to buy, and accommodation charges.
33:43They scheduled three lectures a day, split the year into three terms, and got special privileges from the town council
33:50on account of all the money they were bringing in.
33:55After six years hard grind, you were tested on a set text.
33:59And if you passed, there was a public ceremony where you got a degree and a ticket to the front
34:05row in life because it meant you could teach anywhere.
34:10But the biggest effect of all this wasn't just to turn out the first university degrees.
34:16It was how it opened the door to a new way of thinking.
34:22With the earlier question and answer approach to law they'd had, plus Aristotle's system for fail-safe logical analysis, plus
34:31the incredible amount of new raw fact pouring in from Spain,
34:34it began to seem possible to look at nature in a way totally different from the old medieval mystical approach.
34:41The new data they were getting, everything from meteorology to medicine, opened up nature to examination,
34:49and showed them that it had a kind of rational system to it.
34:54Now, if that was true, and this really blew their minds, then maybe people could understand how it worked.
35:03And the fact that most of the new information came from pre-Christian times gave it a less supernatural, more
35:11practical, hard-headed feel.
35:14Exactly the kind of thinking that makes a lawyer successful when the law is complicated.
35:18And they did nothing to make it simple. You only have to look at their textbooks. Look, here's one.
35:24Here's the teacher giving the lecture. Here's the text of the law they're studying.
35:28Here's a gloss explaining the text. And here's a gloss explaining the gloss.
35:50And so we got the universities and the professional qualified specialists the modern world couldn't do without, thanks to Bologna.
35:58We got a lot more than that, though, when somebody else tried doing the same thing further north in France.
36:03But before I go, one last little touch. You remember way back I said the big wheels who ran this
36:09place had their palaces round the square?
36:11Well, there was a fifth one added. The palace of the lawyers.
36:26Meanwhile, in France, the church had started letting congregations get involved in the Eucharist ceremony, recalling the body and blood
36:33of Christ.
36:34The idea was that everybody should be allowed to eat the bread, even bring their own to the service.
36:39The problem was, in the new mood of rationalism, doubts were being cast on the central mystery of the mass.
36:47When the priest drank the wine, did it turn into the blood of Christ as the faithful were to believe?
36:53Because if it didn't, and the Pope said it did, church authority was going to get questioned elsewhere.
37:05If this crucial ceremony was meaningless, then the faithful weren't going to go on doing what the church told them.
37:12It looked to the Pope like time for some action.
37:22The word went out to the bishops, take a hard line, crack the whip a little, make life tough for
37:28anybody asking questions they shouldn't.
37:36But things were to get a lot tougher, thanks to the subversive literature the translators were bringing back from Spain
37:41down these quiet French country roads.
37:43Put yourself in the Pope's place and you'll see why.
37:46Here we were, all over Europe, settling down to a bit of law and order, little kingdoms growing, trade on
37:51the up and up, bit of cash to take to market, even travel the roads without getting a throat slit.
37:57And here come these lunatic travelling academics, stirring things up with their questions.
38:01And some of them were right over the top.
38:04I mean, Peter Abelard, for instance, actually came out with a book of 168 quotes from church fathers showing that
38:11they all contradicted each other.
38:13And his motto, don't just accept anything you're told, if you don't understand it, don't believe it, that's nothing short
38:19of revolutionary.
38:20I mean, church authority was based on the very stuff he was picking holes in.
38:32And then two of this radical bunch, called William and Thierry, did something that in the 12th century was absolutely
38:40unthinkable.
38:41They took the Bible apart.
38:43Thierry went around saying that Genesis was all wrong, that the world could not really have been created in six
38:49days because that wasn't natural.
38:51And his mate William came right out and said that Eve hadn't been made from one of Adam's ribs because
38:56that's not how people got made.
38:59And the worst of it was, most of these people were graduates of one of the best schools in the
39:03country, where this kind of dangerous stuff, dangerous if you didn't keep it to yourself, was far from low profile.
39:09You can actually see the physical shape that kind of thinking took from here.
39:14Well, you can hardly miss it.
39:16There it is. Chartres Cathedral.
39:35If you think back to what went before, you get a feel for the knockout effect these Gothic cathedrals had
39:41when they went up.
39:42They used the latest Arab construction techniques.
39:46We call them pointed arches.
39:48And the development of pointed arch gives you vaulting, like this.
39:53Let's you support a really high roof.
39:56The other support was flying buttresses.
39:58And what they did was take all the stress off the sides and let you fill them with glass.
40:05Chartres Cathedral must have felt as if it had no walls.
40:07Thanks to the buttresses, they were able to surround the worshippers with no less than 186 stained glass windows.
40:27In keeping with the new rationalism, the whole place was like an encyclopedia in glass and stone.
40:34All over the exterior, they put the new kind of sculpture.
40:37No more mumbo-jumbo abstract designs, but real people doing real things you saw around you in everyday life.
40:44The holy figures were all still there, but now they had human features and clothes.
40:50Even the ones with wings.
40:53And there, public proof that factual knowledge about the world ought now to be regarded as an aid to faith,
40:59not an obstacle,
41:00were the sculptured portraits of the great scholars of the past,
41:03as well as figures representing the subjects being taught in the basic course at the cathedral school.
41:09Over the great west door of the building, on the royal portal,
41:13the architects of Chartres put Martianus Capella's Seven Liberal Arts.
41:23So when Paris University got going in 1200 on the left bank of the Seine,
41:28you could say the rationalist lot had set in.
41:31Because Paris, unlike Bologna, was supposed to train theology graduates
41:36in an atmosphere protected from radical new ideas.
41:39Well, you can guess how long it took for that plan to fall apart.
41:42By 1210, the Pope had banned Aristotle and Arab books, and the students were on strike, for six years.
41:49Rome sent in the Dominican friars as a kind of intellectual riot troops, and that didn't work either.
41:55Trouble was, logic had become a cult subject, and one you just couldn't suppress.
42:00Things went from bad to free thinking.
42:03In 1230, the first copies of a new book by an Arab called Ibn Rushd, from Cordova actually,
42:10started turning up, under plain wrapper of course.
42:13Full scale Aristotle, plus commentary, the works.
42:19It explained a universe like this.
42:21In the beginning, God sets everything up systematically, so it carries on by itself, in a predetermined way.
42:27No need for further intervention by God.
42:29No way to change it, so no choice, no free will.
42:33Even God can't fiddle with it.
42:34Like he can't make the internal angles of a triangle add up to more than 180 degrees.
42:41Now, this limitations on God stuff was dynamite.
42:45More strikes, more bands.
42:47One third of the student body was attending bootleg Aristotle courses run by a fanatic freethinker called Sigur of Brabant,
42:55who was calling for nothing less than total freedom of thought all round.
42:59Well, half a loaf and all that, the church compromised.
43:02OK, they said, there'll be two kinds of truths.
43:04Revealed truth you get from belief and theology and the church.
43:08And everyday truth about the ordinary world you get from reason and philosophy.
43:13Well, that let sunlight in, in more senses than one.
43:16Especially through the church windows.
43:30I've already mentioned how everybody was amazed by this new high-tech stained glass.
43:35But there was more to it than just brightening the place up.
43:38The new optical science from Spain had got some of the more adventurous thinkers all excited about light.
43:44How it spread out in a perfect sphere from a source.
43:48How it always went in straight lines.
43:50How it had to be the basic material God had used to make the universe.
43:56So, these great windows were also experimental instruments used by their designers to play with the way light behaved.
44:03In a very simple way, you understand.
44:05But for the first time, in terms of measurement, observation, cause and effect.
44:11Not just mystical awe.
44:14By the end of the 13th century, the old Augustinian disregard for the world was gone.
44:19To be replaced by an increasing curiosity.
44:22To get behind the mystical quality of nature and find out how it all worked.
44:32In 1304, a Paris graduate, a German priest called Theodric of Freiburg, took the decisive step and did what everything
44:40had been building up to.
44:42He decided to find out how one of the most mysterious forms of light actually worked.
44:48And he did it in a way that seems so modern as to be almost incredible for the period.
44:53Because Theodric took on the rainbow.
44:56About all that was known about it at the time, thanks to the Arabs, was that they thought it was
45:00caused by reflecting raindrops.
45:01But why the colours happened, nobody knew.
45:04What was incredible about the way Theodric did it was that he used laboratory models to test his theories.
45:12He used these glass spheres and bottles of water and the sun to try to reproduce the effect he'd seen
45:19by staring very close up through a dewdrop.
45:26So, he got his spherical flask, filled it with water and took a closer look.
45:35What he'd seen were four colours, red, yellow, green and blue, as you moved your eye across the drop, or
45:43moved the drop.
45:44After months of thinking and rethinking, you remember that was a scholastic way, he came up with this.
45:50The light wasn't reflecting at all.
45:53It was coming in, hitting, refracting, reflecting and refracting again.
46:01And it was that refraction that caused the colours to spread out.
46:05What more, the more obliquely it came in, the more obliquely it went out.
46:11And according to where your eye was, you either saw red light, or yellow, or green, or blue.
46:19Theodric put it all together in a manuscript that still exists.
46:23And it looks something like this.
46:25In the sky, droplets at various heights.
46:29You, looking.
46:31Sunlight hitting at various angles.
46:34But your eye only seeing from here, red light.
46:38From here, yellow light.
46:40From here, green light.
46:42From here, blue light.
46:44Which is why the rainbow looks like it does.
46:47Like this.
47:04Theodric's experiment with light, the first of its kind in Europe, brought a total and radical change in the way
47:11we looked at things.
47:12See, earlier civilizations had always looked back.
47:17To a golden age.
47:18To the good old days.
47:20All that.
47:20Not anymore.
47:22Where Augustine had said, oh, 800 years before, believe and then you'll understand.
47:28Now it was the other way round.
47:30Give me the facts, and I'll think about it.
47:34People started to look forward.
47:36To think in terms of maybe being able to do something to make tomorrow better than yesterday.
47:43It was the view that brought us the world of change we live with today.
47:47Where science brings us the new products of our curiosity before we've got used to the old ones.
47:53Thanks to Theodric and the medieval universities, we live with a rate of change so high that if you understand
48:01something today that means it must already by definition be obsolete.
48:05And if we find that increasingly hard to live with, how much harder for the third world as we come
48:10roaring in with our instant technology to do to them what Aristotle and the Spanish translators did to us.
48:16Only we're doing it overnight.
48:54Because ultimately, if you have learned then, we are all in our pensions.
49:01Like Hussie, Is Sû.
49:04Who is the new capitalism?
49:11I'm patient.
49:15Once again, we will continue it forward.
49:26PIANO PLAYS
49:54PIANO PLAYS
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