Mankind: The Story of All of Us (2012) s01e07 Episode Script
New World
Narrator: We struggle for new lands, new opportunities.
[fighting, yelling.]
We fight for wealth, and power, but now, mankind embarks on a new journey, risking all, for a new world.
Amidst the chaos of an unforgiving planet, most species will fail, but for one, all the pieces will fall into place, and a set of keys will unlock a path for mankind to triumph.
This is our story: The Story of All of Us.
[lightning, thunder.]
Guided by Thor, God of Thunder, the Vikings set out across the world.
Their longboats are fast, rugged, designed to navigate the most treacherous waters on earth.
Sheridan: The longboats are almost like an all-terrain water vehicle, that allows these Vikings to go further, deeper, and almost anywhere on the planet.
Narrator: From Scandinavia, warriors storm through Europe, raiding, settling, founding new cities, connecting the northern world.
Now, they head west across the Atlantic Ocean, mankind on a new journey that will connect a divided planet, the first Europeans known to land in the Americas.
Thorvald Eriksson, legendary explorer, a hero, whose exploits are remembered in Viking legend.
Shipmate speaking: They brought the ship to where they could moor her, and Thorvald walked ashore with his crew.
"This is a fine place," he said.
"I should like to make it my home.
" Narrator: Since human beings first walked out of Africa 70,000 years ago, mankind seeks new resources and opportunities, new frontiers to explore and conquer.
Williams: There are always resources and wide open spaces beyond the next mountain range, beyond the next ocean.
We're never quite satisfied nor is our curiosity ever quite satisfied.
We want to know what's over there.
Narrator: But this land belongs to the Inuit, descendants of the first pioneers, who came in to America 19,000 years before.
90 million Native Americans, a third of the planet's population, cut off from the rest of the world.
until now.
Lindbergh: It's like aliens coming from outer space, who land on your beach.
They were strangers; they looked pale and grizzly.
Narrator: The Inuit are expert hunters, armed with stone-tipped arrows, swift, silent, deadly.
Loades: The Inuit people who hunted, they hunted caribou and moose and bear.
If they could drop a great moose with their arrows, they could certainly drop a Viking.
[yelling.]
[fighting.]
Narrator: The Viking weapon of choice: the iron broad axe, designed to split a skull in a single blow.
Loades: Viking culture was a warrior culture.
[screaming.]
The man's greatest wish was to die in battle, doing a heroic deed.
That ensured his seat in Valhalla.
[fighting.]
Narrator: The Viking histories record: Viking speaking: They killed eight Inuit.
Exhausted, they made camp.
[fire crackling.]
[ocean waves.]
[dog barking.]
Suddenly, they were startled by the sound of a cry above them.
[dog howling.]
[yelling.]
[fighting.]
Narrator: Thorvald Erickson, the first European to die on American soil.
[continued fighting and yelliing.]
It would be 500 years before another European sets foot in the New World.
In the Americas, no iron tools or horses, no wheeled vehicles, yet America's people engineered great monuments thousands of years before the Egyptians.
They mapped the stars with as much accuracy as any astronomer in Europe, and high on a mountain lake in Mexico, they build one of the greatest cities on the planet, Tenochtitlan, capitol of the Aztec Empire, larger than London, Paris, or Rome.
At its heart, a stone temple 100 feet high, where sky, earth, and underworld meet, the center of a civilization dedicated to human blood.
[music.]
100 miles from the city, [yelling.]
Aztec warriors are on a hunt.
Their prey, not animal but human.
[yelling.]
They chase down the leader of an enemy tribe.
[music.]
The aim is not to kill, they need to take him alive.
[screaming.]
To keep the universe in balance, the Aztecs believe they owe a debt of blood to their gods.
Today, a special offering.
Tlahuicole skilled warrior, bitter rival, the Aztecs' greatest prize, fighting for his life.
[yelling.]
[crowd noise, chanting.]
Aztec men are trained to fight from puberty.
The fiercest become Jaguar Knights, their weapons, not metal but obsidian, volcanic glass, so sharp, some surgeons today favor it over steel.
Loades: It is the most superior cutting material known to man, perfectly capable of cutting a man in two.
Narrator: Tlahuicole's weapon: a club decorated with feathers.
[chanting continues.]
Machowicz: Not only is it terrifying if you were to imagine yourself in that position, it's also the opportunity to find out what you're made of.
Narrator: A fight to the death that will become Aztec legend.
[music.]
Tenochtitlan, Mexico capital of the Aztec Empire.
[fighting, yelling.]
A captive warrior fights for his life.
Elite Jaguar Knights slice at his flesh to wear him down.
The Aztecs have created one of the most sophisticated civilizations on the planet, a great city with laws against drunkenness, theft, and adultery, compulsory education, three and a half centuries before the United States, a city of philosophers, poets, mathematicians.
Hyland: They valued art, literature.
They were a very, very great civilized society.
[continued fighting, yelling.]
Narrator: But the Aztecs believed their gods need human blood.
Eight men down, and Tlahuicole is still standing, [yelling.]
[yelling.]
but his strength is fading.
[yelling.]
[groan.]
The warrior who cuts him down will get to wear his flayed skin for 20 days.
His family will eat his flesh, giving them the status of gods.
Aztec priests sacrificed thousands of men, women, and children a year, up to 20,000 in one of their most important ceremonies, one of the greatest acts of human sacrifice in history.
Hyland: The Aztecs are very philosophical about death.
Death is what gives meaning to life, and that by having the idea of death, it makes the here and now sweeter and more beautiful.
[chanting, yelling continues.]
Tlahuicole's beating heart, offered to the God of Sun and War, Huitzilopochtli, guardian of the universe.
In return, the Aztecs believe his blood will guarantee a bountiful harvest, a crop that will become key to mankind's future, corn.
6,000 years ago, early farmers in the Americas turn a weed into a cereal that produces more calories per acre than any other, with almost twice as many genes as a human being, found in a quarter of all supermarket products we buy today.
[chanting, yelling.]
Corn is the staple of Aztec life.
But while Aztec power reaches its height, events 7,000 miles away are about to change their world forever.
Constantinople, the Eastern capitol of the Christian world, founded by Rome's first Christian emperor, Constantine.
At the city's heart, an icon of Christian faith, Hagia Sophia, the largest cathedral of its day.
[voices.]
The year is 1453.
An epic battle is looming that will shift the balance of power between East and West, and change the story of mankind.
Wunderlich: Constantinople is going to change the entire picture of the world that we have with the discovery of new continents.
The two events are inextricably linked.
Narrator: Constantinople is under siege by the Ottoman Turks, an Islamic army 70,000 strong.
Leading the attack, Sultan Memet the 2nd, scholar, warrior, obsessed.
Conquering this city has been his dream since the age of 13.
Like the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan, the Turks were once nomads from central Asia.
[yelling.]
If Memet can take Constantinople, he'll control the key trade routes between East and West, and the city's vast trade and spices.
Wunderlich: They want to take Constantinople.
It's rich.
It's the center of a vast trade of spices and other things flowing into Europe.
Narrator: One dried berry makes up as much as two-thirds of the spice trade into Europe, pepper, a spice that changes the story of mankind.
1,000 tons shipped from southern India every year.
The sultan wants Constantinople as the jewel of a new Islamic empire.
Memet speaking: There must only be one empire, one faith, and one sovereignty in the world.
Narrator: But the city has the greatest defensive walls in Europe.
Four miles long.
Up to 100 feet high.
[voices.]
Loads: Memet's big challenge was to bring down the walls of Constantinople.
No one had ever defeated the walls of Constantinople.
[voice.]
Narrator: Now, a devastating new use of weapons: non-stop artillery bombardment, the key to the future of war.
Machowicz: Artillery becomes the king of battle, and it's proven at Constantinople.
[explosions, screaming.]
Narrator: The fate of Constantinople will change lives in every corner of the planet.
Mankind's destiny can turn on a single battle.
If the walls of Constantinople fall under bombardment by the Turks, the world will never be the same again.
Sixty-nine canons.
Dedicated teams working in shifts.
Cool, clean, reload, fire.
Each canon packed with up to ten stone balls.
[explosions, screaming.]
Bodette: Those people in Constantinople, they never experienced anything like a canon bombardment.
I have been rocketed, I have been mortared before, and it ain't no fun.
You know, you never know.
You don't know where it's going to land.
Narrator: Pounding the city around the clock, for 53 days.
Mike Loades: The great canon balls flew over the walls and crashed through the houses of the city, and then as they struck the ground, the stone shattered, and they burst in a shrapnel hail of jagged little splinters that killed and maimed and lacerated for hundreds of yards around.
Narrator: Defenders rebuild, but Mehmet breaks through.
A new era of warfare.
Stonewalls will no longer protect us.
Oz: Constantinople had managed to hold out for a century, until my namesake, Mehmet the Conqueror, brought his Turkish tribes and was able to invade Constantinople, and in that one very sleek move, tilted the axis of human history.
Took an entire part of the planet that had preserved Christianity and made it Islamic.
Narrator: Christian Constantinople becomes Islamic Istanbul.
The great cathedral, Hagia Sophia, becomes the largest mosque in the world.
The world's most important trade routes now in the hands of a new empire hostile to the West, forcing Europeans to search for a new route to the riches of the East.
[thunder.]
Thirty years after Constantinople, a ship heads into a storm off the coast of southern Africa on a journey that will open a new era of exploration.
In command, Portugese explorer Bartolomeu Dias, wealthy nobleman, expert seaman, risk taker.
Dias is heading into unchartered waters, searching for a new route to India, around the southern tip of Africa.
Meigs: These boats were hard to navigate, and yet people got in ships and sailed across oceans.
It's really extraordinary how many of those ships never came back.
Narrator: Dias has been using the coast to navigate, but as the storm gets worse, his guide becomes his enemy.
Sheridan: You don't want to be near the shore because you don't want to get driven up on the rocks.
You are getting blue water over the deck, and things are breaking, and you know, all hell's breaking loose.
You are terrified.
You are sure this is it.
I mean, you are making peace with God and hoping for the best.
Narrator: Now, Dias faces a choice that will determine the future for all of us: head out into uncharted waters or risk death on the rocks.
[rain, thunder, yelling.]
A pioneer on a journey that will change the shape of the world, caught in a storm off the coast of Africa, searching for a new sea route to the East.
Bartolomeu Dias has two options: risk death on the rocks or head out into the Atlantic Ocean and the unknown.
He lowers the ship's square sails and puts his faith in an ancient Roman technology that will become the key to a new age of exploration, the triangular lateen sail.
Meigs: The sail acts like a wing almost.
It actually develops lift much like an airplane's wing, and if you have a strong rudder able to steer that ship towards the wind, it transmits all that energy into forward motion.
Sheridan: If you can at least make a tiny bit of upwind headway, maybe you can claw your way off those rocks and not wreck and smash and destroy your boat.
Narrator: Dias turns his ship and heads into the uncharted waters of the South Atlantic, risking everything if he can't find his way back to shore.
Out of sight of land for 13 days, no idea what lies ahead.
His maps are useless.
Lost at sea.
His fate now turns on a powerful force of nature, beneath the waves, an ocean gyre, a vast circular current caused by prevailing winds working against the rotation of the Earth, creating a conveyor belt of water, 4,000x more powerful than the Mississippi River, Sheridan: So, if you are sitting in the calm of an ocean gyre, it feels like you're, you know, a painted ship on a painted ocean; nothing's happening, but what's really going on is you're covering ground, but the whole sea is moving in this arc.
Narrator: The discovery of ocean gyres will revolutionize seafaring.
Dias has no idea of the forces that slingshot his ship, from an empty ocean toward the southern tip of Africa.
Sheridan: He really had everything going for him.
He had the prevailing winds with him, he had the current with him, and he was on a ride that he may not have fully understood.
[waves crashing.]
Dias claims the land in the name of God and country.
It will become known as the Cape of Good Hope.
[voices.]
The key to a new sea route to the East, bypassing Constantinople, a direct passage to India.
Within 50 years, it becomes one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.
44,000 tons of goods shipped around the Cape each year, building new empires, new connections, and a new future.
The race to profit from the riches of the East is on.
October 12th, 1492.
a date seared on to the hard drive of humanity.
Spanish sailors discover land, leading them an Italian, Christopher Columbus.
maverick, hustler, with his own dream to find a shortcut to the East.
His plan, to sail west to China.
He calculates the journey from Spain will take him just 21 days.
He underestimates the distance by 7,000 miles.
Mann: What was striking about this is that any educated person at the time would know that Columbus was wrong.
Narrator: Undaunted, convinced he's right, Columbus has been all over Europe, begging for support for his journey.
Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, throw some money his way.
[clapping.]
barely enough to fund the expedition.
Mann: It's kinda the way that a wealthy person might bet a hundred bucks on poker, you know, without much expectation, but you could afford it.
[music.]
[waves.]
[wind.]
Narrator: After five weeks at sea, close to starvation, thousands of miles from his target, he reaches land, which he believes is Japan.
In fact, it's the Bahamas off the coast of a vast new world: the Americas.
Two worlds isolated from each other for 10,000 years.
Mann: It's not only a huge event in history, but it's a huge event in the history of life.
[voice.]
Narrator: The Bahamas are home to the Taino people.
Mann: He sees these people, for the most part by European standards, very tall, very healthy, very good-looking, you know, living in a state of abundance.
Narrator: Columbus records their first encounter.
Columbus: The people kept calling to us and giving thanks to God, as if we'd come from Heaven.
I presented them with some red caps, some beads.
They were much delighted and became wonderfully attached to us.
Narrator: Living in a different ecosystem for thousands of years, the people of the Americas have no immunity to a deadly threat, disease.
Mann: Europeans are sort of swimming in this bacterial and viral soup, that was utterly unlike anything over there.
Narrator: First contact with an invisible killer that will one day change the destiny of the New World, but Columbus is on a search for treasure.
Columbus: I kept my eyes open and tried to find if there was any gold.
Then, I saw some of them had a little piece hanging from a hole in their nose.
I gathered that by, going further, I'd find a king, who possessed in great quantities of gold.
Columbus returned to Spain a hero.
His journeys opened the floodgates.
[voices calling.]
[Heave!.]
All of Europe wants a piece of the Americas.
The Old World and the New are on a collision course.
[fighting, gunshot.]
Tenochtitlan, Mexico, heart of the Aztec Empire.
28 years after Columbus, the lust for gold is about the change the destiny of the New World, through the ambitions of one man, Hernan Cortes, devious, charming, and ruthless, leading a band of just 500 European adventurers.
Camarillo: Cortes was quite a manipulator and quite savvy.
He knows how to motivate the people, and the objective is gold, and that's what of course was the prime motivation.
Narrator: Aztec Emperor Montezuma, the richest, most powerful man in the Americas, ruler of 25 million people.
He's welcomed Cortes and his men into his palace, a mistake that will change the fate of a continent.
Camarillo: Their numbers were small.
How could they constitute a threat when you have an army that's 1000x, 10,000x, larger than the few hundred souls that they brought, right? Narrator: Cortes's plan: kidnap the Emperor.
Camarillo: Part of his calculation was, if we can show that we can take over at this level, you know, incarcerate the head of the Empire, maybe the rest of the dominoes will fall.
Narrator: Montezuma's treasuries are filled with gold.
The Spanish lust for plunder astonishes the Aztecs.
An eyewitness reports: They snatched up the gold like monkeys.
They were swollen with greed.
They hungered for that gold like wild pigs.
Narrator: The people dubbed their captive Emperor, Cortes's Whore, and revolt.
[fighting.]
[swords, screaming.]
Trapped inside the palace, Cortes receives word from his men: We are in eminent danger.
We'll all perish unless Montezuma commands the hostilities to stop.
[Cortes speaking Spanish.]
[crowd yelling and chanting.]
[yelling to the crowd.]
Montezuma: These strangers are my guests.
Lay down your arms.
[crowd continues to yell.]
Narrator: The most powerful ruler in the Americas murdered by his own people.
[fighting continues.]
Fighting for their lives, Cortes and his men barely escape with a fortune in Aztec gold and silver and leave behind a lethal time bomb.
Oz: The conquistadors are going to war with the Aztecs, but their biggest weapons aren't the ones they're carrying in their hands; it's the virus in their bodies, smallpox.
Unbeknownst to them, they bring it to battle.
Narrator: Six months later, half the city is dead from smallpox.
Eleven months after his escape, Cortes returns, his victory complete.
He's hijacked the mighty Aztec Empire, an empire of 25 million, brought down by just 500 men.
The quest for luxuries and power sends pioneers across oceans in search of opportunity.
Now, a new world brings new beginnings.
The riches of a continent flood out across the planet, changing lives in every corner of the globe.
[fighting, yelling.]
We fight for wealth, and power, but now, mankind embarks on a new journey, risking all, for a new world.
Amidst the chaos of an unforgiving planet, most species will fail, but for one, all the pieces will fall into place, and a set of keys will unlock a path for mankind to triumph.
This is our story: The Story of All of Us.
[lightning, thunder.]
Guided by Thor, God of Thunder, the Vikings set out across the world.
Their longboats are fast, rugged, designed to navigate the most treacherous waters on earth.
Sheridan: The longboats are almost like an all-terrain water vehicle, that allows these Vikings to go further, deeper, and almost anywhere on the planet.
Narrator: From Scandinavia, warriors storm through Europe, raiding, settling, founding new cities, connecting the northern world.
Now, they head west across the Atlantic Ocean, mankind on a new journey that will connect a divided planet, the first Europeans known to land in the Americas.
Thorvald Eriksson, legendary explorer, a hero, whose exploits are remembered in Viking legend.
Shipmate speaking: They brought the ship to where they could moor her, and Thorvald walked ashore with his crew.
"This is a fine place," he said.
"I should like to make it my home.
" Narrator: Since human beings first walked out of Africa 70,000 years ago, mankind seeks new resources and opportunities, new frontiers to explore and conquer.
Williams: There are always resources and wide open spaces beyond the next mountain range, beyond the next ocean.
We're never quite satisfied nor is our curiosity ever quite satisfied.
We want to know what's over there.
Narrator: But this land belongs to the Inuit, descendants of the first pioneers, who came in to America 19,000 years before.
90 million Native Americans, a third of the planet's population, cut off from the rest of the world.
until now.
Lindbergh: It's like aliens coming from outer space, who land on your beach.
They were strangers; they looked pale and grizzly.
Narrator: The Inuit are expert hunters, armed with stone-tipped arrows, swift, silent, deadly.
Loades: The Inuit people who hunted, they hunted caribou and moose and bear.
If they could drop a great moose with their arrows, they could certainly drop a Viking.
[yelling.]
[fighting.]
Narrator: The Viking weapon of choice: the iron broad axe, designed to split a skull in a single blow.
Loades: Viking culture was a warrior culture.
[screaming.]
The man's greatest wish was to die in battle, doing a heroic deed.
That ensured his seat in Valhalla.
[fighting.]
Narrator: The Viking histories record: Viking speaking: They killed eight Inuit.
Exhausted, they made camp.
[fire crackling.]
[ocean waves.]
[dog barking.]
Suddenly, they were startled by the sound of a cry above them.
[dog howling.]
[yelling.]
[fighting.]
Narrator: Thorvald Erickson, the first European to die on American soil.
[continued fighting and yelliing.]
It would be 500 years before another European sets foot in the New World.
In the Americas, no iron tools or horses, no wheeled vehicles, yet America's people engineered great monuments thousands of years before the Egyptians.
They mapped the stars with as much accuracy as any astronomer in Europe, and high on a mountain lake in Mexico, they build one of the greatest cities on the planet, Tenochtitlan, capitol of the Aztec Empire, larger than London, Paris, or Rome.
At its heart, a stone temple 100 feet high, where sky, earth, and underworld meet, the center of a civilization dedicated to human blood.
[music.]
100 miles from the city, [yelling.]
Aztec warriors are on a hunt.
Their prey, not animal but human.
[yelling.]
They chase down the leader of an enemy tribe.
[music.]
The aim is not to kill, they need to take him alive.
[screaming.]
To keep the universe in balance, the Aztecs believe they owe a debt of blood to their gods.
Today, a special offering.
Tlahuicole skilled warrior, bitter rival, the Aztecs' greatest prize, fighting for his life.
[yelling.]
[crowd noise, chanting.]
Aztec men are trained to fight from puberty.
The fiercest become Jaguar Knights, their weapons, not metal but obsidian, volcanic glass, so sharp, some surgeons today favor it over steel.
Loades: It is the most superior cutting material known to man, perfectly capable of cutting a man in two.
Narrator: Tlahuicole's weapon: a club decorated with feathers.
[chanting continues.]
Machowicz: Not only is it terrifying if you were to imagine yourself in that position, it's also the opportunity to find out what you're made of.
Narrator: A fight to the death that will become Aztec legend.
[music.]
Tenochtitlan, Mexico capital of the Aztec Empire.
[fighting, yelling.]
A captive warrior fights for his life.
Elite Jaguar Knights slice at his flesh to wear him down.
The Aztecs have created one of the most sophisticated civilizations on the planet, a great city with laws against drunkenness, theft, and adultery, compulsory education, three and a half centuries before the United States, a city of philosophers, poets, mathematicians.
Hyland: They valued art, literature.
They were a very, very great civilized society.
[continued fighting, yelling.]
Narrator: But the Aztecs believed their gods need human blood.
Eight men down, and Tlahuicole is still standing, [yelling.]
[yelling.]
but his strength is fading.
[yelling.]
[groan.]
The warrior who cuts him down will get to wear his flayed skin for 20 days.
His family will eat his flesh, giving them the status of gods.
Aztec priests sacrificed thousands of men, women, and children a year, up to 20,000 in one of their most important ceremonies, one of the greatest acts of human sacrifice in history.
Hyland: The Aztecs are very philosophical about death.
Death is what gives meaning to life, and that by having the idea of death, it makes the here and now sweeter and more beautiful.
[chanting, yelling continues.]
Tlahuicole's beating heart, offered to the God of Sun and War, Huitzilopochtli, guardian of the universe.
In return, the Aztecs believe his blood will guarantee a bountiful harvest, a crop that will become key to mankind's future, corn.
6,000 years ago, early farmers in the Americas turn a weed into a cereal that produces more calories per acre than any other, with almost twice as many genes as a human being, found in a quarter of all supermarket products we buy today.
[chanting, yelling.]
Corn is the staple of Aztec life.
But while Aztec power reaches its height, events 7,000 miles away are about to change their world forever.
Constantinople, the Eastern capitol of the Christian world, founded by Rome's first Christian emperor, Constantine.
At the city's heart, an icon of Christian faith, Hagia Sophia, the largest cathedral of its day.
[voices.]
The year is 1453.
An epic battle is looming that will shift the balance of power between East and West, and change the story of mankind.
Wunderlich: Constantinople is going to change the entire picture of the world that we have with the discovery of new continents.
The two events are inextricably linked.
Narrator: Constantinople is under siege by the Ottoman Turks, an Islamic army 70,000 strong.
Leading the attack, Sultan Memet the 2nd, scholar, warrior, obsessed.
Conquering this city has been his dream since the age of 13.
Like the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan, the Turks were once nomads from central Asia.
[yelling.]
If Memet can take Constantinople, he'll control the key trade routes between East and West, and the city's vast trade and spices.
Wunderlich: They want to take Constantinople.
It's rich.
It's the center of a vast trade of spices and other things flowing into Europe.
Narrator: One dried berry makes up as much as two-thirds of the spice trade into Europe, pepper, a spice that changes the story of mankind.
1,000 tons shipped from southern India every year.
The sultan wants Constantinople as the jewel of a new Islamic empire.
Memet speaking: There must only be one empire, one faith, and one sovereignty in the world.
Narrator: But the city has the greatest defensive walls in Europe.
Four miles long.
Up to 100 feet high.
[voices.]
Loads: Memet's big challenge was to bring down the walls of Constantinople.
No one had ever defeated the walls of Constantinople.
[voice.]
Narrator: Now, a devastating new use of weapons: non-stop artillery bombardment, the key to the future of war.
Machowicz: Artillery becomes the king of battle, and it's proven at Constantinople.
[explosions, screaming.]
Narrator: The fate of Constantinople will change lives in every corner of the planet.
Mankind's destiny can turn on a single battle.
If the walls of Constantinople fall under bombardment by the Turks, the world will never be the same again.
Sixty-nine canons.
Dedicated teams working in shifts.
Cool, clean, reload, fire.
Each canon packed with up to ten stone balls.
[explosions, screaming.]
Bodette: Those people in Constantinople, they never experienced anything like a canon bombardment.
I have been rocketed, I have been mortared before, and it ain't no fun.
You know, you never know.
You don't know where it's going to land.
Narrator: Pounding the city around the clock, for 53 days.
Mike Loades: The great canon balls flew over the walls and crashed through the houses of the city, and then as they struck the ground, the stone shattered, and they burst in a shrapnel hail of jagged little splinters that killed and maimed and lacerated for hundreds of yards around.
Narrator: Defenders rebuild, but Mehmet breaks through.
A new era of warfare.
Stonewalls will no longer protect us.
Oz: Constantinople had managed to hold out for a century, until my namesake, Mehmet the Conqueror, brought his Turkish tribes and was able to invade Constantinople, and in that one very sleek move, tilted the axis of human history.
Took an entire part of the planet that had preserved Christianity and made it Islamic.
Narrator: Christian Constantinople becomes Islamic Istanbul.
The great cathedral, Hagia Sophia, becomes the largest mosque in the world.
The world's most important trade routes now in the hands of a new empire hostile to the West, forcing Europeans to search for a new route to the riches of the East.
[thunder.]
Thirty years after Constantinople, a ship heads into a storm off the coast of southern Africa on a journey that will open a new era of exploration.
In command, Portugese explorer Bartolomeu Dias, wealthy nobleman, expert seaman, risk taker.
Dias is heading into unchartered waters, searching for a new route to India, around the southern tip of Africa.
Meigs: These boats were hard to navigate, and yet people got in ships and sailed across oceans.
It's really extraordinary how many of those ships never came back.
Narrator: Dias has been using the coast to navigate, but as the storm gets worse, his guide becomes his enemy.
Sheridan: You don't want to be near the shore because you don't want to get driven up on the rocks.
You are getting blue water over the deck, and things are breaking, and you know, all hell's breaking loose.
You are terrified.
You are sure this is it.
I mean, you are making peace with God and hoping for the best.
Narrator: Now, Dias faces a choice that will determine the future for all of us: head out into uncharted waters or risk death on the rocks.
[rain, thunder, yelling.]
A pioneer on a journey that will change the shape of the world, caught in a storm off the coast of Africa, searching for a new sea route to the East.
Bartolomeu Dias has two options: risk death on the rocks or head out into the Atlantic Ocean and the unknown.
He lowers the ship's square sails and puts his faith in an ancient Roman technology that will become the key to a new age of exploration, the triangular lateen sail.
Meigs: The sail acts like a wing almost.
It actually develops lift much like an airplane's wing, and if you have a strong rudder able to steer that ship towards the wind, it transmits all that energy into forward motion.
Sheridan: If you can at least make a tiny bit of upwind headway, maybe you can claw your way off those rocks and not wreck and smash and destroy your boat.
Narrator: Dias turns his ship and heads into the uncharted waters of the South Atlantic, risking everything if he can't find his way back to shore.
Out of sight of land for 13 days, no idea what lies ahead.
His maps are useless.
Lost at sea.
His fate now turns on a powerful force of nature, beneath the waves, an ocean gyre, a vast circular current caused by prevailing winds working against the rotation of the Earth, creating a conveyor belt of water, 4,000x more powerful than the Mississippi River, Sheridan: So, if you are sitting in the calm of an ocean gyre, it feels like you're, you know, a painted ship on a painted ocean; nothing's happening, but what's really going on is you're covering ground, but the whole sea is moving in this arc.
Narrator: The discovery of ocean gyres will revolutionize seafaring.
Dias has no idea of the forces that slingshot his ship, from an empty ocean toward the southern tip of Africa.
Sheridan: He really had everything going for him.
He had the prevailing winds with him, he had the current with him, and he was on a ride that he may not have fully understood.
[waves crashing.]
Dias claims the land in the name of God and country.
It will become known as the Cape of Good Hope.
[voices.]
The key to a new sea route to the East, bypassing Constantinople, a direct passage to India.
Within 50 years, it becomes one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.
44,000 tons of goods shipped around the Cape each year, building new empires, new connections, and a new future.
The race to profit from the riches of the East is on.
October 12th, 1492.
a date seared on to the hard drive of humanity.
Spanish sailors discover land, leading them an Italian, Christopher Columbus.
maverick, hustler, with his own dream to find a shortcut to the East.
His plan, to sail west to China.
He calculates the journey from Spain will take him just 21 days.
He underestimates the distance by 7,000 miles.
Mann: What was striking about this is that any educated person at the time would know that Columbus was wrong.
Narrator: Undaunted, convinced he's right, Columbus has been all over Europe, begging for support for his journey.
Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, throw some money his way.
[clapping.]
barely enough to fund the expedition.
Mann: It's kinda the way that a wealthy person might bet a hundred bucks on poker, you know, without much expectation, but you could afford it.
[music.]
[waves.]
[wind.]
Narrator: After five weeks at sea, close to starvation, thousands of miles from his target, he reaches land, which he believes is Japan.
In fact, it's the Bahamas off the coast of a vast new world: the Americas.
Two worlds isolated from each other for 10,000 years.
Mann: It's not only a huge event in history, but it's a huge event in the history of life.
[voice.]
Narrator: The Bahamas are home to the Taino people.
Mann: He sees these people, for the most part by European standards, very tall, very healthy, very good-looking, you know, living in a state of abundance.
Narrator: Columbus records their first encounter.
Columbus: The people kept calling to us and giving thanks to God, as if we'd come from Heaven.
I presented them with some red caps, some beads.
They were much delighted and became wonderfully attached to us.
Narrator: Living in a different ecosystem for thousands of years, the people of the Americas have no immunity to a deadly threat, disease.
Mann: Europeans are sort of swimming in this bacterial and viral soup, that was utterly unlike anything over there.
Narrator: First contact with an invisible killer that will one day change the destiny of the New World, but Columbus is on a search for treasure.
Columbus: I kept my eyes open and tried to find if there was any gold.
Then, I saw some of them had a little piece hanging from a hole in their nose.
I gathered that by, going further, I'd find a king, who possessed in great quantities of gold.
Columbus returned to Spain a hero.
His journeys opened the floodgates.
[voices calling.]
[Heave!.]
All of Europe wants a piece of the Americas.
The Old World and the New are on a collision course.
[fighting, gunshot.]
Tenochtitlan, Mexico, heart of the Aztec Empire.
28 years after Columbus, the lust for gold is about the change the destiny of the New World, through the ambitions of one man, Hernan Cortes, devious, charming, and ruthless, leading a band of just 500 European adventurers.
Camarillo: Cortes was quite a manipulator and quite savvy.
He knows how to motivate the people, and the objective is gold, and that's what of course was the prime motivation.
Narrator: Aztec Emperor Montezuma, the richest, most powerful man in the Americas, ruler of 25 million people.
He's welcomed Cortes and his men into his palace, a mistake that will change the fate of a continent.
Camarillo: Their numbers were small.
How could they constitute a threat when you have an army that's 1000x, 10,000x, larger than the few hundred souls that they brought, right? Narrator: Cortes's plan: kidnap the Emperor.
Camarillo: Part of his calculation was, if we can show that we can take over at this level, you know, incarcerate the head of the Empire, maybe the rest of the dominoes will fall.
Narrator: Montezuma's treasuries are filled with gold.
The Spanish lust for plunder astonishes the Aztecs.
An eyewitness reports: They snatched up the gold like monkeys.
They were swollen with greed.
They hungered for that gold like wild pigs.
Narrator: The people dubbed their captive Emperor, Cortes's Whore, and revolt.
[fighting.]
[swords, screaming.]
Trapped inside the palace, Cortes receives word from his men: We are in eminent danger.
We'll all perish unless Montezuma commands the hostilities to stop.
[Cortes speaking Spanish.]
[crowd yelling and chanting.]
[yelling to the crowd.]
Montezuma: These strangers are my guests.
Lay down your arms.
[crowd continues to yell.]
Narrator: The most powerful ruler in the Americas murdered by his own people.
[fighting continues.]
Fighting for their lives, Cortes and his men barely escape with a fortune in Aztec gold and silver and leave behind a lethal time bomb.
Oz: The conquistadors are going to war with the Aztecs, but their biggest weapons aren't the ones they're carrying in their hands; it's the virus in their bodies, smallpox.
Unbeknownst to them, they bring it to battle.
Narrator: Six months later, half the city is dead from smallpox.
Eleven months after his escape, Cortes returns, his victory complete.
He's hijacked the mighty Aztec Empire, an empire of 25 million, brought down by just 500 men.
The quest for luxuries and power sends pioneers across oceans in search of opportunity.
Now, a new world brings new beginnings.
The riches of a continent flood out across the planet, changing lives in every corner of the globe.