Late summer, 1498, Milan.

Leonardo da Vinci had just put the finishing touches to a defining image of
the High Renaissance. This wasn't just a decisive time in the history of art, but also for the world's
competing civilisations. After centuries of relative dullness, Europe was now home to the most dynamic
culture of all. Why? The answers are a little unexpected. The story of Europe's rise from what used to
be called the Dark Ages is often presented as a purely European story. Somehow the glories
of the Classical Age are rediscovered, and then the sculptures and the paintings just get better, and
the churches get flashier, and the kings get mightier. Go, those Europeans! Not quite. Europe had been
outclassed and outshone by the Chinese and Muslim civilisations. And it was only by learning, and then
profiting from the misfortune of others, that Europe rose and shone.
YELLING AND CLASH OF BLADES Europe's emergence would involve explosive brutality far way...
EXPLOSIONS AND SCREAMING ..other cultures Europeans barely new... ..Oriental inventions..titanic
sieges. YELLING Few cultures just keep going all by themselves. They steal rivals' ideas. They flow into
the gaps that others leave behind. Civilisations aren't just shaped at the centre but also at the
margins, on the edges, in the empty spaces where one day something unexpected arrives. BIRDSONG
THE VIKINGS
After the fall of Rome in the 5th century AD, Europe huddled, her optimism froze. Strange migrants
poured in from the east. Towns shrunk. Learning was forgotten. The vitality came not from the old
centres but from the edges. And no people were more vital, more unexpected than the Vikings.
Crossing the seas and oceans by flat-bottomed boat, the Vikings had already terrorised and begun to
colonise the British Isles, Iceland and France. They'd even reached Greenland and North America.
Now they were heading deep into the heartlands of eastern Europe. BIRD CALLS When it comes to
civilisation, the Vikings from Norway, Sweden and Denmark haven't had a very good press. Europeans
tended to see them as ravening marauders, pagans without mercy. They prayed to God, "Preserve us
from the fury of the Norsemen." And raid they did, quite a bit of ravening. But the reason the Vikings
really matter is because their greatest talent was for settling down.
And one morning in the year 882, a group of Slavs in the small trading settlement of Kiev were about
to be confronted by this strange talent of the men from the north. We know what happened next,
astonishingly enough, through written records. Though only from the point of view of the Vikings, or
the Rus', as they were known. Below the ancient Monastery of the Caves in the Ukrainian capital of
Kiev is a labyrinth of cells and underground churches - the last resting place of mummified monks.
And here, in the early 10th century, some of the monks wrote what became known as The Russian
Primary Chronicle.
The great thing about The Primary Chronicle is that it is the Vikings speaking. It's quite clearly
the Viking world view still. And the story it tells is that the local Slav tribes had no law and rose up
against one another.
And so they went to the Rus' and they said, "Our land is vast and rich, but it has no order in it. "Come
in and rule over us."
Is it likely that the invitation was quite so polite? No. But come the Vikings did. At the head of their
expedition was Oleg, a Viking prince and leader of the Rus'. He now staked his claim to Kiev. SPEAKS
NORSE YELLS SCREAMS YELLS IN TRIUMPH
Victorious, Oleg declared himself the new prince of Kiev. And Kiev grew into the royal capital of a
region that became known
as the land of the Rus'. Or as we'd say today...Russia. Kiev still celebrates Oleg's victory as its real
founding moment.
And quite rightly, because what Oleg achieved was he united all the tribes around and forced them to
pay tribute.
He and the Vikings now had a stranglehold on all the trade running from north to south. Many great
civilisations
have begun on river banks. And here on the Dnieper, furs, wax and slaves went south, while silver mined in Afghanistan
by the powerful, new civilisations of Islam - went north. At the mouth of the Dnieper was the Black Sea
- gateway to the largest and wealthiest city in Europe, Miklagard, the Viking name for Constantinople.
A source of trade and ideas, it was also home to
the Greek Orthodox Christian Church. BIRD CALLSA century after its birth, Kiev was still as pagan as its
Viking founders.
Its ruler at the time, Vladimir the Great, wasn't an obviously religious man. One chronicler described
him as "Fornicator immensus". But Vladimir decided that an up-and-coming city needed one of these
fashionable, new-fangled religions.
And he came up with his own unusual way of choosing which one. It's said that he asked
representatives of Roman Catholicism,

Greek Orthodox Christianity, Judaism and Islam to come here and persuade him. "Go on, argue.
Convert me." The old Viking warrior was quite interested in Islam until he heard that it would involve
giving up alcohol, at which point he said,
in effect, "OK, you're out." In the end, he chose Greek Orthodox Christianity and began to build the first
stone church in Kiev.
It was a momentous choice because so much of what we think of as the look of old Russia, those onion
domes, the priests
and the monasteries and the icons, all goes back to Vladimir's decision. What had started with trade furs and silver -had flowered into culture, architecture and religion. By the 10th century, Europe had an
eastern Christian border, drawn by the Vikings and lasting to the present day. Inside that border,
Christian Europe still seemed unsophisticated, a bit ploddy.
Particularly compared to the vibrant, intellectual culture developing across huge areas of the world
under Islam.
MUSLIM CIVILIZATION OF THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
The year 827. A team of astronomers and mathematicians was at work in the Sinjar Desert, in northwestern Iraq.
They were led by Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi, an Uzbek scholar from the House of Wisdom, the
great centre
of Islamic learning in Baghdad, itself the heart of the new Muslim civilisation. Al-Khwarizmi was
struggling with
one of the biggest scientific puzzles of the time - trying to accurately measure the circumference of the
Earth.
This trek across the desert was only the first stage in a project which had been commanded by the
Caliph of Baghdad, Al-Ma'mun, who wanted him to use his great scientific understanding to produce an
accurate map of the world
which would show the huge extent of the Islamic empire. Islam already dominated an area bigger than
the Roman Empire.
By the ninth century, Muslim rulers had more than 30 million subjects, stretching from today's Pakistan
in the East to Spain in the West. This is the age of vigorous, young, inquisitive Islam, bringing together
ancient texts from all around the world,
trying to understand them, pushing forward in science and maths. This is Islam's golden age. AlKhwarizmi's idea was to measure the Sun's angle to the Earth until it changed by one degree. He
worked out that his men had walked 64.5 miles
before the angle changed. Using just sticks and a simple brass instrument, he calculated the
circumference of the Earth to be 23,200 miles - a figure that, remarkably, is very close to the accurate
calculation. Al-Khwarizmi went on to create a series of charts, listing more than 2,000 cities and
geographical features right across the Islamic empire. Al-Khwarizmi was taking
breakthroughs in trigonometry and arithmetic and putting them together and explaining them. His
books were still being used
hundreds of years later, and his real speciality was algorithms. In fact, the word comes from the Latin
version of his name,
Al-Khwarithmi. And of course algorithms are essential in modern computer programming, so every
time you pick up
your mobile phone, remember, there is an old Uzbek Muslim hidden inside it. At this time, the Islamic
world
had Christian Europe surrounded. The Spanish city of Cordoba was a glittering western outpost of the
Muslim world, and the
second-largest city on the planet, after Baghdad. It was a sparkling rebuke to the more meagre, muddy
Christian kingdoms
of northern Europe. At its centre stands the Great Mosque. In its praying hall shimmer 850 pillars of
marble, onyx and jasper,
an imaginative mingling of Roman columns and the memory of palm trees in some distant oasis.
Fusion architecture. Cordoba's Royal Library was said to hold 400,000 books, at a time when the
largest Christian libraries contained a few hundred. And where East met West, ideas were shared.
Places like Cordoba were wonderful at taking the news from one part
of humanity and passing it on, so, ancient Greek learning, Jewish philosophy, Hindu mathematics,
Muslim astronomy and engineering were passed to the Christian world. Eventually, the Christians
would destroy the kingdom of Al-Andalus, but not before one enemy had passed on the torch of
learning to the next, so that what we call the Dark Ages was lit up by Muslim Spain. At this point, you
might have assumed the Islamic world would just keep advancing, that the future was scientific and

Muslim. The answer to why it wasn't can be found in another story from the margins, from a world of
remote grassland
and forests. There's a very simple way of telling the human story. First, hunter-gatherers and then
farmers, and then towns and cities and all the rest of it. But there's one group of people who stand
completely outside this story, and they are the nomads,
living on grassland which is too thin for farming but is wonderful for sheep and yak and goats, and so
they move with the seasons.
*
In many ways, the nomads are the people who tread most lightly on the surface of the Earth and leave
least behind.
But there is always an exception to the rule. In the 12th century, the Mongolian Steppe was home to
hundreds of rival nomadic tribes. Into this world of feuding and violence, a boy was born. His name was
Temujin. SPEAKS IN MONGOLIAN When Temujin was nine, his father was poisoned by a rival tribe.
SPEAKS IN MONGOLIAN Cast out with his mother and brothers, the young Mongol stayed alive by
foraging and hunting. THEY SPEAK IN MONGOLIAN Temujin would never forget a lesson his mother
taught him. "Brothers who work separately, "like a single arrow shaft, can be easily broken. "But
brothers who stand together against a world, like a bundle of arrows, "cannot be broken." From unity
came strength. This single piece of learned wisdom would be the basis of everything that Temujin
would achieve. As he got older, Temujin fought and manoeuvred his way to lead his clan. But his
ambition was much greater than that. Temujin's greatest achievement was to unite the tribes of the
Steppes. When he defeated them, instead of offering them exile and disgrace, he would offer them
brotherhood and a share in the spoils of future wars. And quite soon, the rival tribes were being
melded together into one people, one army, riding and fighting together. In 1206, Temujin took the title
"universal ruler", or Genghis Khan. And he began to expand his empire beyond Mongolia. In just six
years, his army swept across northern China and in 1215, ransacked Beijing, giving the Mongols
weapons they'd never seen before. Defeating the Chinese gave Genghis Khan access to awesome new
military technology battering rams, scaling ladders, monster-sized crossbows, and catapults that
could fire firebombs. With China now absorbed into his growing empire, Genghis turned his army west
and marched into Central Asia to confront the greatest adversary of all - the forces of Islam. In the
spring of 1220, the Mongols reached the magnificent Eastern outpost of the Islamic empire, Bukhara.
Bukhara, like Merv, Baghdad, and Samarkand, was where the rich, optimistic heart of the Islamic world
could be found. SHOUTS ORDERS But Bukhara had never experienced anything like the Mongols. The
combination of Chinese technology and Genghis Khan's disciplined, fearsome army of nomad
horsemen produced a new kind of army,a new kind of threat. The siege of Bukhara raged for 15 days,
until the city was finally scorched into submission. When Genghis entered Bukhara, his army showed
no mercy. And Genghis himself was honoured, as always, with the first pick of the captured women.
Bukhara was only the start. One by one, the other great Muslim treasure-house cities were annihilated.
By 1223, Genghis Khan's destruction of the Muslim empire in Central Asia was complete. Within 20
years, the Mongol empire stretched from Beijing in the East right through the land of the Rus', into
eastern Europe, almost to the gates of Vienna. Genghis Khan's belief in strength through unity had
resulted in the largest land empire in history. In his homeland today, the great warrior emperoris
revered as a national hero and immortalised by this 40m-high steel monument. But it seems as if
Genghis Khan, a man of many concubines and conquests, may have achieved immortality of a
different kind. In 2003, scientists discovered a specific genetic marker in men in Europe and Asia,
which originated a little less than 1,000 years ago, in an area suspiciously close to that of the Mongol
empire. And they concluded that probably 16 million men alive today really did spring from the loins of
Genghis Khan. By wiping out the heart
of the original Muslim civilisation, Genghis Khan left the way clear for another part of the world to
begin to grow. Christian Europe. Trade flourished between East and West in the century after Genghis
died, an era of peace known as the Pax Mongolica. Flashy fabrics and pungent spices had travelled
along the Silk Road to Europe from ancient times, but the lands they came from - China, indeed all of
the Far East - remained a mystery in the West. After the victories of Genghis Khan, the Silk Road was
opened to outsiders. And soon, it would set the imagination of Europe aflame. Genoa, 1298. Two
political prisoners share a prison cell. One man is Rustichello of Pisa, a writer of popular tales. The
other...is a gabby Venetian with a fabulous story to tell. E dopo tre giorni di cammino sulle montagne...
And in Rustichello, Marco Polo had found his perfect ghost writer. Marco Polo was a new and
adventurous kind of European merchant. And Venice was becoming the essential hub for trade
between Europe and the rest of the world. Its prosperity was built on ruthless commercial attitudes and
a navy mass-produced at its world-famous shipyard, the Arsenale. But the Venetians were less
interested in conquering than doing deals. And in a world that craved foreign tastes, you got the best
deals by looking east. The Venetian fleets were tightly tied into a huge trade network dominated by the

Muslim world, and dealing not just in slaves but in timber, fur, salt and the incredibly valuable spices.
The young Marco Polo's world was already flavoured and scented with cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves
and pepper. This was literally the smell and taste of the East. And he dreamed from an early age of
following the ancient Silk Road which led to China. In 1271, aged just 17, he was offered a once-in-alifetime opportunity with his father and his uncle. He set out east from Venice, bearing greetings from
the most powerful man in Western Europe, Pope Gregory X. Most Europeans barely moved more than a
few miles from their birthplace. Heading out so far into the unknown must have felt like launching
yourself at the moon. The trek took them more than three years through the deserts and the
mountains of Asia. Finally, in 1275, they reached their destination. The court of Kublai Khan in
Shangdu, better known as Xanadu. Xanadu seemed an earthly paradise. Kublai Khan was entranced by
the civilisation he now ruled. He was a Mongol becoming Chinese. His court celebrated the flow of
ideas. This was a land of safe roads, broad canals and manufactured goods. Still, he was fascinated by
his visitors from Italy and their message from the Pope. He briefly considered turning Christian
himself... briefly. Pleased with their tales of distant lands, he invited them to be part of his inner circle
of diplomats and advisers. Marco Polo told Rustichello he travelled to distant corners of China on
diplomatic missions for his patron. Later, he'd tell of astonishing things never seen in Europe, such as
money made of paper, the burning of pieces of black stone for fuel, and the practice of eating snakes
and dogs. Though other things you'd think he'd notice, such as chopsticks or the Great Wall of China,
were missing from his tales when he finally got home. Around some men, stories gather like flies. It's
said that when Marco Polo returned to Venice after 24 years travelling in China and the Far East,
dressed in greasy furs and filthy silks, he simply slit open the seams of his clothes, and a cascade of
rubies and emeralds poured out. It's a good story, but take it with a pinch of salt, because even in his
lifetime, Marco Polo was known as Marco Il Milione - Marco Millions. Not because of his wealth but
because of his exaggerations. Millions of this, millions of miles, millions of that. At this point, Marco
Polo might have disappeared from the pages of history.
Instead, he dictated himself into them. ..arrive su un alto... During their imprisonment, Rustichello of
Pisa noted down his cellmate's stories. ..trovi un fiume bellissimo! And in 1298, copies of the
manuscript began circulating around Europe, as Marco Polo's Description Of The World. And Europe
was gripped. Marco Polo's message was simple and seductive. There was a fabulous world of wealth
and opportunity beyond Europe. But as Europeans would soon learn, there was also a dark side to this
new international network. Seven years after Marco Polo's death, a strange epidemic in China started
killing people in huge numbers. Very soon, the Black Death, carried on ships, probably by rats, spread
into the Mediterranean region and then beyond. The same exchange of goods and people that had
made Venice so rich was now taking a terrible revenge. Across Europe, bustling markets became ghost
towns, villages emptied, literacy retreated, authority tottered. Marco Polo had issued a great, optimistic
rallying call, but Europe was simply too weak to respond. The old core of the Islamic empire had been
destroyed by Genghis Khan. But the decimation of Christian Europe by the Black Death meant that the
stand-off between these two great religions would go on. Yet trade between them always continued,
too, especially between Venice and the fabulously wealthy Muslim city of Cairo. And in July 1324,
something appeared on the horizon that would have a startling effect on Cairo's economy. A train of up
to 60,000 soldiers, 70 camels, and 500 slaves carrying sceptres of gold. Leading this astonishing
procession was an African king, Mansa Musa, on a pilgrimage to Islam's holy city, Mecca. They had
spent a year marching more than 2,000 miles across the vast desert that separated most of Africa
from the Mediterranean world. Mansa Musa was king of the greatest of the African empires south of the
Sahara. Mali was a Muslim society where lots of people could read and write. It was a rich land based
on farmers and fishermen, and on trading towns like Timbuktu and Djenne on the River Niger. The
Niger was the lifeline of Mansa Musa's vast empire... ..carrying good throughout his kingdom, which
occupied nearly half a million square miles. But the most significant source of Mansa Musa's prosperity
was a commodity craved by rulers all over the world... ..gold. Mali was an African El Dorado, and most
of the world knew nothing about it. Until now. When Mansa Musa's glittering caravan stopped off in
Cairo, on its way to Mecca, he was an immediate sensation. He and his entourage spent three months
in the city as guests of the Egyptian ruler, freely handing out gold to its astonished residents. Cairo at
the time was the world's largest gold market. But he threw around so much of the stuff that the price
of gold plummeted. Indeed, merely because
of Mansa Musa's tips, the economy of Cairo, it is said, took ten years to recover. The sudden
appearance of Mansa Musa
and his gold was a revelation. The world had just got bigger and richer. By the end of the 14th century,
two-thirds of the gold in Europe came from Mali. It's thanks to the Muslim trading world that Mali was
able to touch hands with Europe. And it's thanks to the Muslim travellers and writers we know so much
about it. But Mali was not alone. There were plenty of other African civilisations at this time. There was
Zimbabwe, with its great stone-city dwellers. There was Benin, with its amazing metalworkers, who

could rival anything in Italy or Germany at the time. But it was gold and glittering Mali that had caught
the European imagination. And in 1375, when map-makers in Spain produced a series of charts, known
as the Catalan Atlas, Mansa Musa was shown sitting at the centre of Mali. Mansa Musa had quite
literally put Africa on the European map. Wherever European Christians reached outwards in the
Middle Ages, they found Islam. These two great religions of the Book had been at war for centuries.
The Christian Crusades to gain control of the Holy Land and the city of Jerusalem had inspired Europe,
but then the tide turned, and Muslim Turks, the Ottomans, pushed deep into once-Christian lands. But
all that time, religious propaganda cast a discreet veil over a flourishing web of trade and ideas passed
between the rivals, and that is true even of the most epic moment in the story - the Siege of
Constantinople. May, 1453. The Ottoman leader Mehmet II had dreamed of possessing Constantinople
since he was a small boy. It was a vital trading crossroads at the edge of Christian Europe, protected by
massive Roman walls. For more than 1,000 years, these were the most awesome defences in the
Western world. They kept out rebels and renegades, and Islamic armies too. If a massive Arab siege in
the early 700s had succeeded in breaking these walls, then there's no reason why the armies of Islam
wouldn't have reached the North Sea. We've heard of the Great Wall of China - well, these were the
great walls of Europe. Established by the Romans on seven hills, Constantinople had always seen itself
as the new Rome, and its people Roman. They were fiercely proud of its imperial past and its
magnificent churches. Including the greatest one in Christendom, Hagia Sophia. The city was still a
storehouse of classical learning and ancient ritual. It was still hypnotic. But now, it faced its fiercest
threat yet. SCREAMING In Mehmet, the Ottomans had a cool and calculating leader. SPEAKS IN
TURKISH He was a pious Muslim, though there were plenty of Christians among his army of up to
400,000 soldiers. By contrast, Constantinople was seriously undermanned. The army defending the
city numbered fewer than 5,000 people. Most of Christian Europe was far too busy making money to
bother to come to its aid. Among the few who did was Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, a mercenary from
Genoa and an expert at siege warfare. As the weeks passed, the city was slowly throttled. For the
people of Constantinople, the days before the final attack were days of bad omens. WOMAN SHOUTS
The priests carried a huge icon of the Virgin Mary through the streets, praying for her to intercede. But
the icon seemed strangely heavy, and they slipped and almost dropped it. Bad omen. Then, there was
a terrible rainstorm, turning the streets into rivers, worse than anyone could ever remember. Bad
omen. And finally, there was an unearthly, eerie, red glow in the sky which seemed to bathe the dome
of St Sophia with a colour rather like that of human blood. You don't get many omens worse than that.
It seemed to the people of what had once been called the city of God that perhaps God was deserting
them. BELL CHIMES At 1.30am on the night of the 29th of May, the city came under all-out assault.
EXPLOSIONS Giustiniani rallied every able-bodied defender to the walls. Facing him was, well, Christian
technology. Awesome siege guns made for Mehmet by Hungarian and German technicians.
Constantinople managed to hold off the remorseless attackers for five hours. But then, Giustiniani was
mortally wounded. Panic quickly spread amongst his exhausted men. SHOUTING Wave upon wave of
Ottoman soldiers now smashed their way into the city. On that final morning, Hagia Sophia was
crammed with the last of the Romans.
Terrified people, old men and children, nuns and noblemen, crammed in here for a final mass. Up there
on the altar, the priest
would be chanting and praying, and yet above their voices was the sound of the great oak doors
splintering under Ottoman axes. And as the screaming inside the church got louder, and the chanting
by the priests got louder, so did the sound of the axes, until finally...the doors gave way. So the most
coveted city in the world was taken. And soon the great Christian cathedral of Hagia Sophia resounded
to Islamic prayers. It's been a mosque ever since. Later that day, a triumphant Mehmet rode through
the city. Even he was shocked by the scale of the slaughter. And so an empire which had lasted for
more than 1,100 years gave way to the Ottomans. Christianity was replaced by Islam. The news of the
fall of Constantinople arrived in the rest of Europe like a thunderclap, and it spread like wildfire. But no
sooner was the blood dry on the corpses of the defenders, including many heroic Genoese and
Venetians, than boats were setting sail again from Genoa and from Venice back to Ottoman Istanbul,
seeking terms of trade with the Sultan. Almost as soon as the gunpowder smell had faded, it was back
to business as usual. Business never rests. The capture of Constantinople was the Ottomans' greatest
victory. But it also marked the end of an era. This was the last great medieval siege. And what Mehmet
could not have realised is that the most advanced, pushy part of the world had already moved on. The
great new cultural clash was between the rising and fiercely competitive city states of Italy. Now
brimming with wealth from trade and new ideas from around the world, Christian scholars who had fled
from Constantinople found these buzzing towns to be citadels of knowledge, and from within their
walls, Europe would be reborn. The Renaissance. Europe's rebirth. Well, it was a long and painful birth it went on for about 200 years. We're told that the Renaissance was all about the rediscovery of
classical learning, and it's absolutely true that in this period the great Latin and Greek writers begin to

bubble back into Europe's consciousness. But, really, the Renaissance is about the new. New ways of
building, new ways of painting and making, new money and new confidence. Not coming from empires
or nation-states but from the great city-states of Europe and, in particular, the great city-states of
northern Italy. Genoa. Pisa. Florence. Venice. And Milan. 1495. For 13 years, Leonardo da Vinci had
been employed at the court of the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. Every week, he bombarded the duke
with new ideas and schemes for portable bridges, fighting machines... deep-sea diving suits? His
talents were prodigious. A prolific inventor, he was also a musician, an engineer and an artist, and he
had found the perfect place to fulfil his talents. Milan in the late 15th century was the wealthiest city in
Italy. With its ambitious duke, it offered a fertile environment for new thinking, risk-taking. The duke's
family, the Sforzas, were part of a new political class who had grown rich from Europe's ever-expanding
trade networks. Like present-day oligarchs, they dealt in money and power, but what they craved was
respectability. Ludovico wasn't exactly aristocracy. His father had been a mercenary warlord who kept
changing sides. Fight for absolutely anybody. And he'd ended up effectively grabbing Milan. The
Sforzas didn't exactly need bling, but they needed some class. They needed some artistic
bedazzlement to try to make the people out there forget where they'd come from. Leonardo was paid
to provide this. But he wasn't a day-job kind of man. He filled notebooks with sketches and scribbled
thoughts, digging into the underlying structures and curious parallels he found all around him in
nature. In Leonardo's time, there is no division between art and science. The artist studies the laws of
perspective, works out how colours change, looks very closely at the underlying structure of things.
The artist learns how to grind lenses to look more closely,
learns how to cast metal to create a statue. Science is just knowledge, and learning the practical skills
which allow other things, including art, to be made. And now the Duke gave Leonardo a chance to pull
together his studies of geometry and perspective and human anatomy for one spectacular painting.
Sforza commissioned Leonardo to paint Christ's last supper with his 12 disciples on the wall of the
monks' dining room in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. It was a traditional scene, one that
had been painted many times before. Io voglio un grande... va bene? Above all, the Duke wanted his
Last Supper to be big and impressive. But Leonardo realised this was an opportunity to do something
genuinely new. Leonardo was obsessed by the now and the future. He was a compulsive experimenter.
Like modern scientists, he was fascinated by finding the hidden patterns underneath reality. He wasn't
about looking back. He was about looking better, looking more intently, looking around him and
looking ahead. Leonardo decided to freeze one dramatic moment in time. The climax of the story,
when Christ revealed to his disciples that one of them would betray him. And every posture, every
gesture, every facial expression in the painting would be taken from real life. Leonardo ransacked the
streets of Milan looking for faces for the disciples. The really difficult one was Judas. And, apparently,
he spent nearly a year looking for somebody with the right mix of cruelty and evil to play Judas.
Leonardo drew on a series of his own anatomical sketches to capture the essence of human
expression. Slowly, the painting and its characters began to emerge. Finally, after three years of
painstaking work, The Last Supper was finished. Boungiorno signore. Per favore. Posso... Aspetta. Art
and science had come together in miraculous harmony. Leonardo had humanised the disciples by
allowing them to show raw emotions. Shock. Grief. Anger. Building on Islamic scholarship of optics and
perspective, he draws our eye to Christ at the centre of the table. Everything radiates from him. For
the people who first saw it, this would have been almost like a hallucination. Sitting and eating in this
room, they would have been drawn towards Christ almost as if they were sitting and eating with Christ
in person. In its day, this was the shock of the new. Leonardo remains a standard-bearer for the new
confidence of Christian Europe, but its journey to Renaissance was far more than simply a European
story. That muddy backwater had absorbed wealth and ideas from all around the world. Some of that
mud was now paved with marble, and the backwater now thronged with merchants' ships,
adventurers. Europe was ready to spread her sails. In the next programme... EXPLOSION ..the age of
plunder. Exploration, conquest... ..and the birth of capitalism.