What the Barbarians Did for Us The Dark Ages: An Age of Light

The word "barbarian" is a misleading expression.

And the art that goes with it is misleading, too.

This picture was painted in 1890 by an arrogant French painter

called Joseph-Noel Sylvestre.

It shows the Sack of Rome in 410 AD by the Visigoths.

The Visigoths were a so-called barbarian tribe.

You can't miss them, they're the ones without any clothes on.

It's such nonsense.

The Visigoths were never naked savages,

clambering about Rome, destroying civilisation.

They were pioneering Europeans who produced beautiful art

and who achieved important things.

It was actually these so-called barbarians who invented trousers.

Riding a horse was much easier in trousers.

So if it wasn't for the Barbarians, we'd all be wearing togas.

So this is a film about misunderstood peoples.

And their misunderstood achievements.

About how we've got the Dark Ages wrong, again.

And about a word whose meaning has been warped by time.

It's this word here. Barbarian.

The Dark Ages go roughly from the fourth century to roughly the 11th.

And I've been looking at the art made in these years,

trying to convince you that it wasn't dark at all.

In this film, I'll be leaping to the defence of the so-called barbarians.

The word "barbarian" actually comes from the ancient Greek.

Its original meaning was someone whose language you can't understand.

A foreigner.

You know like we say, "It all sounds like Greek to me"

when we can't understand something,

well, the Greeks said, "It all sounds like bar bar bar."

So it was an onomatopoeic word.

Anyone who spoke a funny foreign language was a barbarian.

The same word, "barbara", can be found in Sanskrit,

the ancient language of India.

Where it means gibberish or stammering.

And if you're actually called Barbara, like Barbara Windsor

or Barbra Streisand, then I'm afraid your name means "barbarian woman".

And you, Madame, are particularly in touch with your barbarian self.

When the Romans took over the word it came to mean anybody,

anywhere, who wasn't a Roman.

So the Persians were barbarians. The Indians, the Chinese.

The entire non-Roman world.

It isn't just this word barbarian that has been demonised

and distorted.

You open your dictionary and start looking for words

with bad, Dark Ages connotations, you'll find lots of them.

Take this word here. Vandal.

The Vandals were actually another fascinating

and creative ancient peoples who made things like this.

But their name has been stolen from them and turned into something dark.

Or what about the Goths?

Today Goths are oily punks with dyed black hair who worship the devil.

But in real life, in Roman times, the Goths were fabulous,

international creatives who made the most beautiful Bible I've ever seen.

But the worst of these so-called barbarians,

these forgotten ancient peoples whose reputation has been trashed by the Romans,

the very worst of them were the Huns.

WOLF CRIES

HORSE WHINNIES

SHOUTING

Poor Huns!

If anyone in ancient history deserves some rebranding,

it's this notorious nation of energetic invaders.

No-one had a good word to say about them.

The Goth historian, Jordanis, tells us they were scarcely human,

a stunted, puny and faithless tribe.

Christian writers were even harsher.

According to a Christian cleric writing in Syria,

the Huns eat the flesh of children.

And drink the blood of women.

It's like reading a bad airport paperback.

The Christians were determined to demonise all pagans

and they were particularly determined to demonise the Huns.

So we can't trust the Christian clerics. We need to trust the art.

And that tells a different story.

In the First World War, the British began calling the Germans "Huns".

It was the worst insult they could think of.

But also, very bad geography,

because the Huns were not from Germany.

Exactly where they came from is one of the big mysteries of the Dark Ages.

Nobody knows for sure.

But it was somewhere out here, in the Euro Asian steppe.

Somewhere far away and different.

The first record of the Huns in Europe dates from around 376 AD,

when a group of retreating Goths turned up

here on the banks of the Danube and begged the Romans to take them in.

The fleeing Goths had been pushed out of their lands

by a nation of nomads, coming in from the east.

A fighting tribe, of whom everyone was scared.

Huns were fierce warriors, there's no denying that.

But not all the time.

Like all nomads, they lived a precarious, travelling existence.

They moved around in small family groups, menfolk, women and goats.

The default lifestyle of the Huns was a tinkerish domesticity.

And among the splendid Hunnic objects they've left behind,

the defining ones are these battered Hunnic cauldrons,

preserved in the museum in Budapest.

In these robust vessels, the Huns cooked their goats

and boiled their water.

"A man can live to 50..." is an old Kazakh sating that still circulates.

"..But a cauldron will live to 100."

Something else we know about the Huns is that they loved gold.

Oh, how the Huns loved gold.

The Hunnic graves that have been dug up,

the buried caches of treasure and valuables,

reveal such a deep and instinctive passion for treasure.

These days, we've lost sight of gold's crazy, hypnotic power.

And that special relationship it enjoys with the sun.

The Incas called it "the sweat of the gods".

And in the Dark Ages, gold was a substance with a magical presence.

And the Huns loved it in a visceral and unbalanced way.

In my book, that's a good reason to love them back.

WOLF HOWLS

Because they spend so much of their life on the move,

travelling from pasture to pasture,

the Huns had a particularly creative relationship with the natural world.

Hun treasure is dominated by exquisite animal forms.

In the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg,

there's a wonderful piece of jewellery.

It's a golden bit of a bangle, or a neck torque, like one of these.

And it's this piece here at the end,

shaped so atmospherically like the head of a creeping wolf.

This is gold that nurses an intense symbolic ambition,

to commune with the natural world.

To speak to it and steal some of its power.

To steal the power of the wolf.

WOLF HOWLS

Another animal that was dear to them was the eagle.

They probably used eagles to hunt with,

as nomads of the Steppes still do.

And the great bird in the sky inspired such beautiful Hun bling.

Eagles have a special significance for the Hun.

They were ready-made symbols of power and beauty combined.

And right across the barbarian world,

these garnet-studded eagle brooches became noticeably popular.

This powerful new relationship to the natural world

was one of the great barbarian contributions to civilisation.

And then of course there was the magnificent Hunnic horse art.

The Huns depended on their horses totally

and they loved them deeply, so, of course,

they made sure their horses looked suitably splendid, too.

These are the remains of a full-length Hunnic horse ornament,

fashioned delicately from gold

and studded so generously with precious stones.

Lucky is the horse who got to wear this.

The Huns would ride into battle with wolfskin pulled down on their faces,

screaming demonically in a deliberate effort

to get inside their enemy's heads.

Now, this was dark, psychological warfare. Very sophisticated.

And one of the reasons the Huns were so easy to demonise

is because they looked so strange.

They practised ritual deformation,

and their skulls were deliberately misshapen at birth.

Infant Huns would have their heads tightly bound

so they grew into these uncanny and elongated Mekon shapes.

And on these deformed heads of theirs,

the Huns would balance spectacular crowns of unimaginable preciousness.

So the big question is, where did the Huns get the gold?

They were nomads, not miners, and although they were busy tradesmen,

you'd need to trade an awful lot of goatskins

for the amount of gold left behind by the Huns.

They didn't trade for it. The Huns got their gold more directly.

Straight from the Romans.

Because their bows were so lethal and their horsemen so skilled,

the Huns were soon operating a protection racket

across most of the Roman Empire.

What they'd do is invade somewhere, or threaten to invade somewhere,

and then demand large quantities of gold to go away again.

The Romans, cowardly diplomats that they were,

preferred to pay them than to fight them.

And by the time the Hunnic Empire was at its largest extent,

the Huns were receiving 2,500 pounds of gold coins

from the Romans every year.

2,500 pounds of gold...

every year, to melt down and turn into art.

A few tribes of nomads raiding along these Roman borders

could never have pressurised the Romans into giving up

these ENORMOUS quantities of gold.

So we need to forget this image of the Huns as a tribal horde

sweeping across Europe,

because they were something much more sophisticated than that.

This is a map of the Hunnic Empire under Attila.

It's the bits in orange. And just look at the size of it!

All this was Hunnic.

This wasn't a bunch of nomads on the make, this was a rival empire.

The new superpower of the Dark Ages turned up to take on the Romans.

I've kept Attila back, because the moment you mention him,

the story of the Huns takes on a satanic glint.

All the Huns were demonised by history,

but Attila was demonised most of all.

The exciting thing is we actually know a lot about him.

A Roman diplomat called Priscus was sent on one of these

diplomatic missions to negotiate with the Huns,

and he has left behind a vivid account of his journey.

And this gentleman here is building a replica of Attila's palace

on the actual sight of which he thinks it actually stood.

So, Janos, when did you first become interested in Attila?

TRANSLATION:

I bought this land 20 years ago to breed horses.

That was when we came across the history of this site.

Priscus, the Byzantine ambassador, visited Attila in 450 AD,

and describes how he found his way here.

And he definitely identified this place as the site of Attila's palace.

That's why we'd like to erect a memorial to him here,

by constructing a wooden palace.

Janos's palace will be created in timber,

exactly as Priscus describes.

It's shaped like a giant nomad's tent, a kind of glorified yurt,

with two wooden towers rising cockily at the front.

Priscus tells us that when he arrived,

he was treated to an enormous banquet, served on silver plates.

And a procession of young women dressed in white veils

came out to sing for him.

Attila himself was simply dressed

and ate nothing but meat on a wooden platter.

While the guests were given goblets of gold and silver.

What does Attila mean to the Hungarian people?

Because, for a lot of people in Europe,

he has a very bad reputation, but not here.

In Hungary, he seems to be thought of more as a hero.

TRANSLATION: When people say Attila was a barbarian, that's something I reject.

It's not something I believe.

He spoke eight languages by the age of 15 and laid Europe at his feet.

Someone unintelligent - a barbarian - could not have done the things that Attila did.

Only someone blessed with special talents.

Did Attila's palace really look like this?

I very much doubt it.

But neither do I think Janos's fantasy is more misleading

than all the other Hun fantasies

about satanic hordes sweeping through Europe.

HUNNIC BATTLE CRIES

By the time Attila became their ruler,

the Huns had created a complex political system.

Their huge empire was actually a federation of many nations.

A kind of barbarian EU, opposed to the Romans,

with Goths and Burgundians, Alans, even a few Greeks,

all linked together and ruled by Attila.

So I'm here at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

There's something really spectacular I just have to show you.

When this was dug out of the ground on the Romanian border in 1799,

it was thought to be Attila the Hun's personal dinner service.

You can see why they thought that. Just look at how splendid this is.

23 golden vessels.

Nearly ten kilos of pure gold.

Today, no-one thinks this was Attila's dinner service.

The most recent thinking is that it was left behind by the Avars,

one of those mysterious tribes that emerged from the confederation of the Huns.

They obviously ha that special relationship with nature, too.

This magnificent bull-headed bowl is another example of powerful,

natural magic channelled into gold.

This is what the Dark Ages were capable of.

This is what makes these times is so exciting.

That bull bowl has a power to it.

An animal energy that you just don't get later on when art loses

this connection to the basic stuff of life.

The Empire of the Huns didn't last long.

For a few decades, it rivalled the Romans. And then it was gone.

Attila, the glue that held it all together,

had a taste for young brides.

But on his final wedding night, he drank himself into a stupor,

took his latest bride to bed, and promptly died of a heart attack.

They found him the next morning with blood streaming down his nose.

What we would call these days "a rock star's death".

Within a few years, Attila's empire was gone.

Torn apart by feuds and incompetence.

But the Huns had done their job.

They had punched a hole in the invincible reputation of the Romans.

Now, all manner of barbarian was queueing up to pour through it.

When we think of the barbarians,

we think of hordes of bellicose warriors

storming across the plains to attack Rome.

-But that's wrong.

-HORSE WHINNIES

It was more of a migration.

Think of those wagon trains rolling across the American West,

full of brave pioneers searching for a new future.

That's a more accurate image,

particularly in the case of another great barbarian nation whose name

has been well and truly blackened by Dark Age propaganda - the Vandals.

Neigh!

According to my Shorter Oxford Dictionary,

a vandal is "a wilful or ignorant destroyer of anything beautiful,

"venerable or worthy of preservation."

That's what it meant in 1663, but it shouldn't be what it means today.

The story of the Vandals is actually rather poignant.

They were basically a nation of Germanic farmers,

living peacefully in central Europe

until the Huns pushed them out.

For a while, they ended up here in Spain, until a group of Goths

pushed them out of there as well,

and the poor old vandals had to move on again to here - North Africa.

In 429 AD, 80,000 people came across the Straits of Gibraltar,

crammed onto small boats.

A kingdom on the move, looking for a homeland.

The vandals had arrived in Africa.

Originally, this word "vandal" meant something like "wanderer".

Someone who is looking for something.

It comes from the same Germanic root as the English word "to wend",

as in "I was wending my way home from work."

And the Vandals were great wenders and great wanderers.

The Vandals who arrived here in Africa were led

by a formidable king called Genseric.

If you think of the Vandals as a lost people

and Africa as the promised land,

then Genseric was their Moses,

leading them across the oceans.

They made their way along the North African coast here,

attacking cities, collecting followers, absorbing territory,

until, eventually, in 439 AD, they reached their destination...

..Carthage.

Carthage was the second-largest city in the Western Roman Empire.

Busy, rich, a crucial trading centre.

The Romans depended on it for the olive oil they burned in lamps

and the wheat from which they made their bread.

When the Vandals took Carthage, they shocked the Roman Empire.

The capture of Carthage was surprisingly peaceful.

Genseric was so clever.

He entered the city on the 19th October, the day of the Roman Games.

Sports day.

Now, the Romans, who were obsessed with sports,

were far too interested in the gladiatorial combat

and the chariot racing to fight the Vandals.

BATTLE CRIES

Thus, Genseric and his Vandal army

strolled into the second-largest city of the Western Roman Empire,

took control of it, and stayed there for the next century.

People used to think the Vandals went about destroying

and pillaging Carthage as soon as they got here.

But today, we know they didn't.

The most remarkable thing about the Vandal occupation of Africa

is not how much they destroyed, but how little.

Later on, angry Romans and Christians writing of these events

made sure they blackened the Vandals' reputation

as they did with all the barbarians.

But the art that remains from these times tells a different story.

To signal their new status as overlords of Rome's most prosperous province,

the Vandals did what the nouveau riche always do -

they spent money on the arts.

Their jewellers were commanded to make gorgeous Vandal bling,

And out in the countryside, they built elegant villas for themselves

and filled them with superb decorations.

That's the Julius mosaic. It's one of the masterpieces of the period.

And Julius himself is sitting there in his white robe,

and he's the man who commissioned the mosaic.

No-one is 100% certain

if this was made just before the Vandals got here or just after.

And that is the most telling thing about it.

This is how rich Romans lived and also rich Vandals.

Julius's house, where this was found, is shown in the middle -

the posh, fortified villa.

Those domes at the back are the bathhouses,

the equivalent today of a luxury swimming pool.

All around the villa are busy scenes of rural life in North Africa.

Up on the left, that's winter. See the people picking olives?

That's what you did in winter.

On the other side, on the right, is summer.

See the shepherds with their summer flock

and those fields of ripe wheat behind them.

Down here are spring and autumn.

Spring is the season of flowers, and there's Mrs Julius in her garden

admiring herself in a mirror

while a servant brings her a bowl of roses.

They are beautiful and so is she.

On the other side, it is autumn, and there's Lord Julius himself,

sitting on a throne in his orchard,

while a labourer brings him a basket of grapes

and a hare is caught running about the vines.

This is mosaic making of the highest calibre. So imaginative and clever.

It isn't just a portrait of Julius and his house,

this is a visualisation of the perfect lifestyle.

A rural dream made real.

The message here is how glorious life is

when man lives in harmony with nature.

When order prevails and the land is fertile and balanced.

Welcome to the good life in Africa.

Instead of knocking down Carthage,

the Vandals set about making it more homely.

They put small houses in the huge Roman clearings and, famously,

an ambitious new bathhouse was built here

by the art-loving Vandal king, Thrasamund.

Bathhouses were hugely important in Roman society.

They were a kind of social club where people would chat and gossip,

a bit like modern health clubs, except much cheaper.

Roman bathhouses had two main spaces -

a hot room, or caldarium, that heated you up,

and a cold room, or frigidarium, that cooled you down.

The largest of all the Roman bath complexes was here in Carthage - the Antonine Baths,

built in the second century by the Roman emperor, Antoninus Pius.

These are the ruins.

So imagine how big the baths must have been.

Long before the Vandals conquered Carthage,

the Antonine Baths had fallen into disrepair.

So the Vandal king, Thrasamund, built some new ones.

We know a lot about Thrasamund's baths, because, amazingly,

a collection of Vandal poems on the subject have survived.

That's right. Vandal poems.

The Vandals were particularly keen on poetry, and hundreds

of poems written here in Carthage in the Vandal years have survived.

And this thick body of unexpected literature

tells us so much about them.

A poet called Felix has left behind an evocative description

of Thrasamund's bathhouse.

"This magnificent monument was erected by Royal command

"Where water and fire display their obedience."

There were no less than five poems by Felix about these great baths,

and the big idea in all of them is this dramatic contrast between

the cool, refreshing springs of the frigidarium

and the hot, boiling waters of the caldarium.

Here, says Felix,

"I see spring waters exist harmoniously with flames.

"Here, the shivering nymph is startled by the fiery bath."

Felix's poems were displayed all around you as you bathed,

as mosaics, so they surrounded you, pushed their way into your thoughts,

and as you read them, you are prompted to marvel

at this great miracle achieved here by Thrasamund.

In the Vandal baths, Thrasamund has achieved the ultimate harmony -

"Thrasamund has united fire and water."

OWL HOOTS AND WOLF HOWLS

Goth-Goth...

There we are.

Gothic. "Barbarous, rude, uncouth."

Gothic. Ah, here we are.

"Goth - one of a Germanic tribe who invaded the Roman Empire."

In the lexicon of hate spawned by the Dark Ages,

a special place is set aside for the Goths.

The Dark Ages are full of nasties,

but the Goths are particularly spooky.

THUNDER RUMBLES

If you walked down the street where I live in London,

in Camden Town, you'll find plenty of modern Goths wandering about.

They are dressed from head to toe in black

and covered in satanic insignia.

And they're trying so hard to look doomy.

And I just want to give them all a big hug

and tell them to cheer up, because if they want to be Goths,

they should be like real Goths -

energetic, colourful, inventive.

The kind of people who did that.

Stunning, isn't it?

I love the way the mosaic sparkles with all that gold

and throws light all round the dome. It's so exciting.

But there's something peculiar about it too.

Something slightly awkward.

That's obviously Jesus up there being baptised,

but why is he so pink and flaccid, and not very divine?

How did Jesus end up like this?

Originally, the Goths came from up here - the Baltic Coast.

They were farmers, successful farmers,

but when their population exploded,

they made their way south to the Black Sea,

searching for better land and better farming conditions.

When the Goths moved south,

they came into direct contact with the Roman Empire,

and their history immediately grew more problematic.

It would take me several programmes to deal with the twists and turns

in relation to the Goths and their migrations,

but to boil it down to its essentials,

when they settled here in the south,

they found themselves in the way of the Huns coming in from the east.

So, to get away from them, the Goths split in two.

Now, some of them fled across the Danube here,

and begged the Roman Empire to let them in.

And they became the Visigoths, or western Goths,

and they settled initially here in France and finally in Spain.

But the other ones, they stayed put over here

and joined the Huns in the Hunnic Empire, and they became

the Ostrogoths, or eastern Goths,

and they are the ones who did this.

When you think of barbarians, you think instinctively of pagans,

don't you?

Of godless and violent people with strange and primitive beliefs.

Conan the Barbarian is hardly altar boy material, is he?

Actually, most of the barbarians were Christians. Even the Vandals.

So were the Ostrogoths and Visigoths.

All of them were converted to Christianity in the fourth century.

However, the form of Christianity they were converted to was unusual.

The reason why this Christ looks so unfamiliar and even peculiar,

is because he is an Arian Christ, and not a Catholic one.

And Arian Christianity is different.

Arianism was a Christian heresy.

A different form of Christianity proposed by a priest called Arius

in Alexandria in Egypt in the fourth century.

From there, it spread across the Roman Empire

and then out among the Barbarians.

The Arians believed that Jesus was different from God.

He was divine, yes. But less so.

The Catholics believed that God and Jesus, father and son, were equal.

Two different forms of the same great divinity.

But the Arians disagreed. For them, God the Father was the one true God.

He was the God at the top. And Jesus, his son, was below him.

And that's why the Jesus up here in the baptistery mosaic

looks so wimpish.

This is a Jesus who is more like the rest of us.

Less divine, more human.

Perhaps that's why the Barbarians preferred him.

He's less imperial, and more like them.

This is Ravenna, in northern Italy. The capital of the Ostrogoths.

Right across the Empire,

Catholics and Arians distrusted each other as only co-believers can.

But in Ravenna, it was the Aryans who held sway.

And it was Arianism that created this.

It was a bit like the Sunnis and the Shia in Islam.

Same religion, different only in its details.

But so antagonistic towards each other.

The Ostrogoths were led by a formidable Arian king

called Theodoric.

And it was Theodoric who built this.

Theodoric had been brought up in Constantinople

in the court of the Eastern Roman Empire.

He had been sent there by his own father as a hostage,

and educated as a Roman.

So he was sophisticated and clever.

Having gained the trust of the Roman emperor Zeno in Constantinople,

Theodoric persuaded Zeno to let him come to Italy

and reconquer it from another Germanic despot, called Odoacer.

Theodoric invited Odoacer to a banquet in his honour

and there, he murdered him with his bare hands, or so they say.

And thus, Theodoric made himself ruler of all Italy,

based here in Ravenna.

Under the Ostrogoths, Ravenna thrived as never before.

This is the great Basilica of San Apollinaire,

that Theodoric built early in the sixth century.

And then filled with this spectacular parade of mosaics.

Up on the ceiling,

a baby-faced Arian Christ performs such a lively set of miracles.

Raising Lazarus from the dead. Conjuring up miraculous fish.

So up there, is the story of the young Jesus performing his miracles.

And on the other side over there, the other end of the story.

Christ's terrible death and resurrection.

The Last Supper.

The kiss of Judas.

Below that, there is this great golden procession,

the 22 virgins bearing sumptuous crowns.

Lined up to pay homage to the Virgin Mary. With Jesus in her lap.

On the other side, in a kind of Arian call and response,

the 26 martyrs, dressed more simply in white

and advancing in a mighty procession towards the enthroned Jesus.

What marvellous religious theatre this is.

What vivid and exciting mosaics.

And all you pretend Goths in Camden, if you're watching,

the REAL Goths made this.

Unfortunately, later on when the Roman emperor Justinian

reconquered Ravenna for the Byzantines,

he set about tampering with what Theodoric had done,

removing what he could of the Arians.

So see this portrait here?

That's actually Theodoric,

but Justinian has taken over his identity

and he is pretending to be him.

This, they say, is what is left of Theodoric's Ravenna palace.

You can see it inside San Apollinaire as well.

A great golden palace filled once with magnificent Ostrogoth treasures.

There is a museum in Romania, in Bucharest,

that is bursting with this Ostrogoth bling.

And personally, I'd be happy to put on some shades

and just stare at it for the next few days.

But we can't.

Because back in Ravenna, the story of the Ostrogoths has darkened

and grown eerie.

When Justinian conquered Ravenna, he had all signs of Theodoric

and the Ostrogoths removed.

And the great mosaic palace is now a ghost town with no-one in it.

Though if you look very carefully, you can still make out

a few of the bodiless Ostrogoth hands that remain.

Theodoric left his mark on many art forms.

But the one that surprises me most

is this totally unexpected piece of Dark Age literature.

The Silver Bible is a Gothic gospel book written in Gothic

with the Gothic alphabet.

It was written in northern Italy, probably in Ravenna.

And probably for the Gothic, the Ostrogothic king,

Theodoric the Great,

in the beginning of the sixth century.

Most people imagine that what used to be called the barbarian tribes,

such as the Goths, didn't have a literature.

But this, of course, is written in the Gothic language.

Yes. And that's very remarkable,

because we don't know anything about the other Germanic languages.

But Gothic language is preserved in this manuscript.

It's very beautiful to look at.

It's got these lovely purple pages with the silver writing on it.

Yes. It's the imperial colour, the purple colour.

And Theodoric the Great,

he got permission from the East Roman Emperor to use this purple colour.

And he behaved and acted like a Roman emperor.

Theodoric, who lived to be over 70, deserves to be remembered

as one of the great achievers of the Dark Ages.

This is where he was buried. His mausoleum, in Ravenna.

And I can't think of another building anywhere that looks

anything like this.

What eerie and inventive architecture.

I love this thing. It's so stocky and unusual.

A unique example of Ostrogoth building which seems to have

popped out of nowhere, and that's just the outside.

Wait you see the inside.

Theodoric died in 526 AD,

and was buried here in this huge sarcophagus,

shaped like a Roman bath.

I find this such a spooky space.

And it's absolutely unique.

That roof is made from a single piece of Istrian stone.

It's a metre thick, 33 metres wide,

and weighs 300 tonnes.

To get it here from Istria,

which is roughly where modern Croatia is, they had to load

it onto an enormous raft and sail it across the Adriatic.

Can you imagine?

That cross up above, that's original, too.

There used to be silver stars all around it,

so when you look up in here, it was like looking up at the sky at night.

There are some exciting stories about Theodoric's death.

Some say he went mad after seeing one of his victims

inside the head of a fish.

Others say he was thrown from a volcano.

One thing's certain.

The Ostrogoth empire he created collapsed quickly after his death.

Justinian reclaimed Ravenna.

The Ostrogoth era was over.

So that's the end of the Ostrogoths,

but what about the Visigoths, or Western Goths?

The Goths in Spain, over here.

What happened to them, you might be thinking?

And what did they achieve?

Well, rather a lot, as it happens.

This is Palencia, in Spain,

and what you're looking at is the oldest surviving Spanish church,

built in the seventh century by the Visigoths.

The Visigoths ruled Spain from around 500 AD

to around 700 AD.

That's 200 years, but you hardly ever hear about them.

You hear about the Romans in Spain, you hear about the Muslims in Spain,

but you don't hear about the Visigoths.

One cruel wag has christened them the Invisi-goths,

which is very unfair.

If you hunt around in Spain,

you'll find plenty of evidence of Visigoth achievement,

like this rustic enunciation, carved into an emerald.

And sometimes, you don't have to look hard at all to see

the Visigoths showing off their Dark Age skills.

Like these superb Visigoth crowns,

with the name of the King who commissioned them

spelled out helpfully for the hard of remembering.

Aren't they magnificent?

Those Visigoth crowns are not for wearing on your head.

They're what's called votive crowns,

and they are for hanging above an altar in a church.

Like the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths were originally Arians,

but here in Spain, they were surrounded by Roman Catholics,

and quickly adopted the Romanic version of Christianity.

And that's when they built these exciting and inventive

Visigoth churches.

This is the church of St John the Baptist in Palencia.

It's been remodelled here and there,

but most of what you see is Visigoth.

The story goes that the Visigoth king Recesvinto built this church

to thank God for curing him of liver disease.

He washed himself just out here, in the holy waters of Palencia.

And was suddenly cured.

Recesvinto was on his way north to fight the Basques,

so he was particularly grateful for his miraculous cure,

and even put up a plaque with the date the church was finished.

January 3rd, 661 AD.

Recesvinto's plaque is surrounded by typically vigorous bits

of Visigoth decoration. So energetic and busy.

Completely unlike anything the Romans came up with.

I really like this Visigoth church decoration.

When I look at it, I feel as if I can hear a sculptor whistling.

There's something so boisterous about it,

something real and untutored.

It's as if, for the first time in art,

we're hearing from the common man.

This wasn't made by an artiste, this was made by a bloke.

Someone with big hands, who's speaking to us across the ages.

The sheer inventiveness of these Visigoths is so invigorating.

I mean, look at these arches. They're special, right?

Why are they special? Because they look like one of these.

I don't know how much you know about arches.

But if you're any sort of student at all,

you'll know that horseshoe arches are remarkable.

Your bog standard arch certainly wasn't shaped like this.

Before the Visigoths invented these, arches were semicircular.

They came round like that, and that's it.

But these horseshoe arches, they come down to here,

and they have a very different effect.

Horseshoe arches look wider, airier, taller, more elegant,

as if a sail has been unfurled and filled with wind.

They're more playful, too. Less stern.

This is architecture doing more than has been asked of it.

This isn't just holding something up.

This is having fun and looking good.

So the Visigoths invented this elegant horseshoe arches,

and these were a brilliant barbarian invention.

But although the Visigoths invented them, they didn't perfect them.

It was someone else who did that.

The perfectors of the horseshoe arch

are the subject of the next film, when we look at the art of Islam.

In the hands of Islamic artists, the horseshoe arch would create

architecture of spine-tingling beauty.

It's yet another of the great achievements of the Dark Ages.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media