Episode 3 The First Eden

I'm in the deserts of the eastern end of the Mediterranean in Jordan.

People have been wandering through these lands for tens of thousands of years

and I'm with one of the last groups to do so, the Bedouin.

Like their ancestors, they're almost entirely dependent

on their domesticated animals.

Their camels, their sheep and their goats.

But the animal that they prize most of all

is, oddly, the one which seems to have little practical value to them.

They neither eat it nor milk it,

nor use it as a beast of burden.

It's this. The horse.

The Arabs are great judges of horse flesh and great riders.

And they used the horse, only until recently,

on those raids and skirmishes which up to 30 years ago

were so much a part of their lives.

Wild horses, like these,

once lived over much of Europe and central Asia.

They have short, stiff manes that stand more or less upright

and a bold black stripe running down their back.

Man tamed them some 3,000 years after he had domesticated cattle,

initially in order to eat them.

But by 3,000BC he had found that he could use them to pull carts and wagons.

The Egyptians harnessed them with wide reins low around their necks

and used them for pulling their war chariots.

At around the same time, farther to the east,

the Assyrians were putting a jointed bar of metal, a bit, into the horse's mouth

and controlling it much more effectively.

Stirrups were unknown in the Mediterranean, even in Greek times.

That invaluable aid for riding

probably originated far away in the steppes of central Asia.

Some people there, even today, virtually live on horseback.

In Afghanistan, they still play the ancient and violent game of Buzkashi,

a kind of mass polo,

in which the ball is a sand-filled skin of a freshly killed goat.

Roman writers said that the wild tribes

who regularly raided settlements along the frontier of the empire

were perpetually on the move,

driving their livestock in front of them,

the women and children following behind in wagons.

They never slept inside a house nor planted any crops.

They lived entirely on milk and meat.

Their cruelty shocked even the Romans, who had such a taste for it.

After battles, they skinned their slaughtered enemies

and slung the bloody pelts over their horses as trophies.

This passion for horses spread right round the eastern Mediterranean

and along the northern coast of Africa, where it still flourishes.

In the fourth century, the mounted tribes living along the northern frontier

of the decaying Roman Empire,

in a series of extraordinary mass migrations,

overran western Europe,

burning, looting and destroying wherever they went.

The Huns rode west around the Caspian Sea into Hungary.

Another tribe, the Visigoths, started southwards,

fighting their way through Greece into Italy

and on into France and Spain.

The Vandals rode down from the north

right across Europe into North Africa

to cross the Mediterranean again and sack Rome.

The Huns, on the move once more, were joined by Goths

to complete the destruction of Roman power

and the civilisation that had grown up under its protection.

By this time the great Roman cities of North Africa,

such as Leptis were already in decline.

The fields around them, once so fertile,

but now stripped of their cover of natural vegetation

were badly eroded and could no longer provide the food

to support a large population.

So, the aqueducts fell into disrepair,

the columns of the temples tumbled

and the influence of Rome began to wane.

How far nomads were responsible for this change

is a matter of argument among historians.

But certainly, as the Roman way of life diminished,

so the surviving peoples took to a more pastoral way of life

becoming more and more dependent on grazing animals,

and in particular, the goat.

The goat has the most extraordinary mouth.

It seems impervious to the sharpest thorns

and goats will eat vegetation that no cow or sheep will tackle.

That means that they can live in near desert.

It also means that because they eat every seedling

and anything else that is green,

they keep the land a near desert.

The desert peoples had another important animal in their lives,

a beast of burden, the camel.

In the seventh century, a camel driver

working with the caravans that crossed the Arabian deserts,

taking gold and spices to the Mediterranean ports,

had profound religious visions and began to preach a new faith.

His name was Mohammed and his faith, Islam.

MUEZZIN CALLS FAITHFUL TO PRAYER

Mohammed's revelations were recorded in the sacred book of Islam, the Koran.

Associated with it were a great variety of religious texts

which included detailed instructions on how to care for the horse

and this account of its origin.

God took a handful of the south wind, it says,

and created the horse.

And he said unto it, "I create thee and name thee Arab.

"Goodness I tie to the hair of thy forelock.

"Booty shall come from the strength of thy back.

"Power shall be with you, wherever you are.

"I hold you above all beasts, making you lord of them all.

"I make you obedient to your master

"and able to fly without wings.

"You are destined for flight and pursuit."

Inspired with the fanatical fervour by Mohammed's teaching,

the horsemen of Islam set of on a series of lightning campaigns

to convert all the people around them to this new faith.

No foot soldiers or baggage trains accompanied this swashbuckling cavalry.

They lived off the land and they carried their swords and the Koran

all around the Mediterranean.

From Mecca, where Mohammed first preached,

they rode north to Jerusalem and onto Constantinople.

They went west all along the coast of North Africa

across the Straits of Gibraltar and into Spain.

There they defeated the armies of the Visigoths,

the one-time nomads who had ruled Spain for three centuries.

So, the Spanish people lost one alien rule and gained another.

They established their Spanish capital here at Cordoba

They partly demolished the Christian basilica

and using marble columns rescued from the Roman ruins

that lay all around this ancient city,

They converted it in the year 785, into a mosque.

They were to build over 3,000 mosques in this one city.

They installed street lighting and public sanitation.

They established a university.

And so they converted Cordoba with its half million inhabitants

into one of the great cities of Islam.

They also greatly enlarged this mosque

by building a forest of pillars.

To do that, they needed no specifically Islamic architectural technique.

But on one side, facing not east, towards Mecca, as is traditional

but south towards land from which they came,

they built a mihrab.

It's one of the glories of Islamic architecture

and epitomises the dazzling artistry craftsmanship of these people.

The Arab prince who ruled over Granada,

built himself a magnificent citadel on the hill above the city

that became known as the Red Palace, Alhambra.

As might be expected of people with traditions of living in deserts,

they lavished great care and skill on conserving and controlling water.

They built giant water wheels like these, which still survive in Syria.

Groaning as they turn on their wooden axles,

as they have done on this site for a thousand years.

Driven by the current of the river, they lift water 70 or 80 feet,

and tip it out into an aqueduct along which it flows

throughout the city to irrigate its gardens.

For them a garden was literally paradise.

They used the same word for both.

Outside its walls, lay the blazing sand and harsh sun of the desert.

Inside, cool shade, the sound of trickling water,

the colour and perfume of flowers.

So around their castles here in Spain

they built gardens, just as they had back in Africa.

And they brought with them many of their favourite plants.

Including, for example, this. The orange.

They had acquired this tree from the Chinese,

and grew it as much for its perfume as for its fruit,

which in the early varieties, was bitter,

as several oranges are still today.

They also imported peacocks from the eastern territories of their empire,

which now extended as far as India,

to glorify their gardens with their astounding displays.

The Arabs, indeed, were particularly knowledgeable and skilled

in the handling of birds.

Pigeons were probably the first birds to be domesticated by man anywhere.

The Romans had kept them imprisoned

and even broke their wings to prevent them flying

so as to fatten them for the table.

The Arabs, however, allowed them to fly free

and provided them with miniature castles, like these in Egypt.

They're built of earthenware pipes stuck together with mud,

inside which the birds nest.

From these colonies they range over the surrounding countryside,

collecting scattered grains of corn and other tiny particles of food.

These they convert into meat and eggs and droppings

which accumulate in the bottom of these towers

and constitute a magnificent fertiliser.

But falcons are the Arabs' passion.

500 years ago, when they had no guns,

hawks were almost the only means they had of catching game

and they carried falcon with them wherever they went.

The tradition continues unbroken.

The favourite quarry in winter is the Houbara bustard.

It's a big bird, about twice the size of most falcons,

which must have both strength and courage if they're to bring one down.

The hood is an Arab invention.

It has drawstrings around the neck

and fits snuggly over the beak when it's on,

so that light is totally excluded from the bird's eyes

and it immediately settles down and remains clam.

These portable perches were also devised by the Arabs.

By tradition, the falconers always make a point of handling their birds a great deal,

both to keep them tame and to make it easier to treat them for minor injuries,

such as broken feathers.

A hare, an eagerly sought-after quarry,

both for the skill needed to catch it and the value of its meat.

SQUEALING

This is exactly how falcons catch their prey in the wild.

For the bird, is of course, at this moment an entirely free agent.

The falconer allows his bird a share of its catch.

Usually the liver, the lungs and the heart.

If he did not, the falcon might not continue to hunt.

But the owners take the main part of the carcass

and they will eat it with particular relish.

For, although falconry in Arabia is certainly a sport,

it also remains, as once most importantly was,

a way of catching food in the desert,

where real hunger continually afflicts most animals and men.

The Europeans also hunted with falcons for many centuries

but their techniques were less sophisticated

and the Arab style of hawking spread from places

where Muslim influence was strong,

such as Sicily and also of course from Islamic Spain.

Although the people of Medieval Europe

were learning newer and more efficient ways of hunting animals,

their beliefs about them and their attitudes towards them

remained in many instances rooted in a pre-Christian pagan past.

They credited some animals with the most extraordinary powers.

For example in gullies like this,

where the moss-covered rocks

retain just a particle of moisture even during the hottest summer,

they believed they occasionally could find one of the most lethal and poisonous creatures

in the whole of creation.

A 13th-century writer describes

how the army of Alexander the Great

drank from a stream through which this animal had just passed

and during the night all 4,000 men

and their 4,000 horses died.

And this is the creature they were so terrified of.

It's a salamander.

And, of course, it's entirely harmless.

It's a kind of large newt that spends most of its time on land.

Being an amphibian it has a moist skin

and during the day it usually hides in damp places -

under leaves or beneath the bark of wet, rotten logs and is rarely seen.

Perhaps if such a log were thrown on a fire

a salamander might come out of it.

And if the log were really damp and rotten,

the fire might be put out.

At any rate, the salamander was believed to be so magically powerful

that it could live in fire and extinguish it.

And still, to this day,

we call a species the fire salamander.

Even as inoffensive and harmless a creature as a moth

could become in the medieval mind, a creature of dread.

If it flew in through an open window at night,

people believed it might kill them as they lay sleeping.

And all because it had on its body

a mark that looked like a death's head.

The fox was believed to be so sly and deceitful

that it would feign death and entice birds to fly down and feed on its corpse.

Then it would suddenly come to life and catch them.

The eagle was thought to be immortal.

When it got old it flew close to the sun,

scorched off its tattered, worn-out feathers

and dived into the waters of a lake.

Then it came out, rejuvenated,

perhaps even, like this one, with a fish in its talons.

Maybe the artist had seen an osprey fishing.

This species of wild goose is a rare visitor to southern Europe

and no-one living there in medieval times could have seen its nest.

So, people reasoned, these geese must come into the world in some other fashion.

Perhaps from these barnacles

which have what look like small, bedraggled feathers inside them.

And, as everyone knows, only birds have feathers.

So, the illustrators of the medieval natural history books, the bestiaries,

obligingly showed exactly how that came about.

Nonsense? 0f course.

These geese lay eggs in nests like any other bird.

But they do so out of most people's sight in the Arctic.

Nonetheless, we still call this species of goose the barnacle goose,

and that kind of barnacle, the goose barnacle.

There were also superstitions about plants.

This strange spike appears each summer on a rocky islet in Malta.

For centuries, it was thought that it lived only in this one tiny location.

Though now it has been found in one or two other places as well.

And for centuries, too, it was thought not only to be rare

but a very powerful medicine against a whole variety of diseases.

So much so, it was extremely valuable.

And the Grand Master of the Knights of St John in Malta

had to post a guard on this rock to prevent thieves.

And he regularly gathered it

and sent it as a most valued gift

to all the crown heads of Europe.

The mandrake contains a drug that produces hallucinations

and was used by apothecaries in potions.

Its root, often cleft,

was believed to be shaped like a human being.

And close inspection could determine whether it was male or female.

If it was pulled up, it was supposed to scream,

and anyone who heard that dreadful sound would be struck dead immediately.

So, an apothecary gathering a mandrake

had to take with him a horn and to plug his ears with beeswax.

Even tugging at the plant could be lethal

and to deal with that, he had to have a dog,

which he had to tie to the mandrake.

Then, blowing his horn to drown the dreadful shriek

and whipping the dog so that it bolted,

he could draw the root in safety.

CHURCH BELLS RING

Not all of these pagan beliefs have completely died.

In Cucullo, a small village in the Abruzzi mountains, east of Rome,

an ancient animal cult still flourishes.

0n the first Thursday in May, every year,

a statue of St Dominic is brought out from the church.

He is being adorned with snakes.

The snakes are harmless.

They are four-lined and Aesculapian snakes.

And as they, in the wild, frequently climb in trees,

they tend to cling to the statue.

As the saint and his snakes are carried in procession,

the worshippers entreat him to protect them from the bites of other snakes,

for there are dangerously poisonous snakes in the countryside.

He is also said, by a rather curious and convoluted logic,

to be able to cure toothache.

BRASS BAND PLAYS

The people believe that their saint, St Dominic,

who founded the Dominican order of monks in the 13th century,

was once bitten by a poisonous snake

but, miraculously, he suffered no ill effects,

and that therefore he has the power to grant protection to others.

But it's likely that the origins of this bizarre cult

are rooted in practices of a far more distant past.

Many pagan myths became absorbed into Christian practice in this way

and some were even built into the fabric of the churches themselves.

This centaur - half horse, half human -

is an inheritance from the myths of Greece.

There's also another alien influence in this cloister, that of Islam.

For this church in Le Puy in southern France

has arches reminiscent of the mosque in Cordoba.

Le Puy stands on the pilgrim road

leading to the shrine of St James in Compostela in Spain,

one of the most holy sites in all Christendom.

But Compostela was not far from the Spanish territories held by the Muslims.

And the Bishop of Le Puy must have regarded Islam as a very real threat.

In 1095, the Pope arrived here from Rome to confer with the Bishop.

We can't be certain exactly what they talked about

but we do know for sure that the Pope had been receiving urgent pleas for help

from the Christians of Constantinople

who were under continuous attack by the armies of Islam.

And it seems likely that they were planning a holy war.

At the end of their conversations,

the Pope summoned all the bishops of Christendom

to come and meet him in three months' time

in Clermont, 50 miles from here.

At the end of that conference, the Pope preached a sermon to an enormous congregation

just outside the city of Clermont.

"It was an insult to Christianity," he said,

"that Jerusalem and the Holy Land should be in the hand of the infidel."

And he called for an army to go and free it.

The sermon was met with wild enthusiasm.

The Bishop of Le Puy was one of the first to volunteer

and was put in charge of the whole enterprise.

And the next autumn, men from all over Europe

started marching eastwards to assemble in Constantinople

and to go on the First Crusade.

There was much squabbling about who should take command,

but eventually the huge army marched out of the gates of the city,

crossed the straits of the Bosphoros and set off eastwards for Asia.

In the mountains of Turkey, the going is rough.

The Crusaders' horses were large, heavily built animals,

unsuited for such country.

Many fell and were eaten by the hungry troops.

By the time the Christian army reached the desert

and turned south towards Jerusalem,

much of the baggage was being carried by locally obtained mules,

even goats and dogs.

The heavily armoured knights fought by charging the enemy,

and trying to unseat them with a lance.

They could then butcher them with their swords.

The Muslim horses were small and agile,

ideal for making swift, surprise raids.

In their citadels, they defended themselves with spears and arrows.

The Crusaders stormed the walls directly,

and tunnelled beneath them.

They used huge catapults to hurl boulders over the ramparts,

or to batter them down.

One by one, the Muslim cities were taken,

each siege ending only too often in a wholesale massacre of the inhabitants.

Until at last, July 15th, 1099,

Jerusalem, the Holy City itself,

was reclaimed for Christendom.

To keep control of their gains,

the Crusaders set up a chain of huge castles round the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

The most perfectly surviving today is Crac De Chevalier in Syria.

Inside the fortified walls lived a huge community,

some 4,000 Christian souls in the case of this particular castle.

There was the commander, his wife and his children,

100 knights or so, who had sworn allegiance to him,

and many more foot soldiers and locally recruited servants and helpers.

Here in the heart of the castle, the knights had their lodgings where they slept.

Beyond that, stood the vaulted refectory where they ate

and the chapel where together they all prayed.

Beneath, on the ground floor, is a vast hall

where they stabled all their horses.

And below that, vaults that held enough supplies

for them to withstand sieges of months or even years.

An aqueduct channelled in water, though during a siege,

rain could be collected in vast cisterns cut deep in the rock.

Even so, the Christian soldiers who patrolled these walls

began to adopt the local customs.

They developed a taste for spicy food

and wore silken robes, even turbans.

Crac's defences were unsurpassed

and surrounded by an outer ring of walls studded with towers.

Inside that lies a moat

and beyond that another line of walls.

The only way in was over a drawbridge and through a heavily guarded gate.

If, by some trickery or sheer force of arms,

attackers got across the drawbridge and through the main gate,

they then had to fight their way up this long, sloping passage.

And when they got here they were faced

with a confusing change of direction.

A hairpin bend, behind which a fresh band of defenders could be waiting.

And up this passage there was a new peril.

Holes in the roof.

Through them poured a lethal hail

of boulders and arrows

and boiling pitch and oil.

Even if he survived as far as this,

an attacker had then to face the massed knights,

who awaited him to do battle in the inner courtyard.

In fact, during the entire history of the castle,

no invader fought his way as far as this.

Indeed, these defences were so carefully planned

and so ingeniously designed,

that the castle was virtually impregnable.

But in the end, the defence of a castle depends on an adequate number of men.

And after a century and a half of sending successive armies to the Holy Land,

the Europeans were beginning to lose their zeal.

In 1271, a much depleted garrison

surrendered this castle after only a month's siege,

in exchange for a safe passage down to the Mediterranean coast, at Tripoli.

Over the next 20 years, the rest of the Crusaders straggled back home.

They took with them a love of silk and spices,

an admiration of the agile lightly built Arabian horse,

and something that ultimately

was to devastate all Europe.

It crept on board the ships of the returning armies

and travelled with them.

It was the black rat.

It had already reached Europe, one way or another, in previous centuries.

But the rats the Crusaders inadvertently carried with them

had come from the ports of the eastern Mediterranean

where plague was rampant and endemic.

The rats were infected with a form of septicaemia in their blood,

which eventually killed them.

They couldn't transmit this directly to man.

But they were also infested with fleas - and they could.

Some fleas are very particular about their hosts

and will bite only one kind of animal.

But, tragically for humanity, that was not so with these fleas.

The fleas fed by sucking the rat's blood.

And when the rat died of its disease,

the fleas hopped onto another rat,

or a human being,

and passed on the bacillus by injecting when they next fed

into the blood of their new host.

As the rats spread through the increasingly crowded

and insanitary cities of Western Europe,

so did the disease.

The great pestilence broke out in 1347.

It appeared first in Sicily

but soon it was raging all over the Continent.

Boils appeared on people's bodies.

Their breath became foul and they vomited blood.

And then they died. Sometimes in a few days,

sometimes within a few hours.

Nobody knew what caused the disease.

Nobody knew how to stop it.

Within three years of its outbreak in Europe,

it had killed one person in three.

Most of Europe at this time was covered with forest.

Although towns were growing,

there were still vast tracts of the wild wood

largely unaffected by man.

Every species of animal that had been known

to the Romans still flourished.

Wild pig were very common

and they regularly interbred with domesticated pigs

that wandered out into the forest.

Deer were abundant and much hunted for their excellent meat.

The beaver, which today is almost entirely restricted

to northern and eastern Europe,

was, in medieval times, common in rivers

right down to the coast of the Mediterranean.

But others were felling trees in the forest at that time, too.

Wood, after all, was still people's primary fuel.

It was used for building and the population,

now rapidly increasing after the ravages of the plague,

wanted more cleared land for their houses, their crops and their herds.

In Spain, this animal had a particular responsibility for the destruction of the forests.

These are merino sheep,

a breed which was introduced in the 13th century into Spain

by the Arabs from North Africa.

Every summer since then, huge herds of them

have been driven right across Spain from south to north.

They stick to the same traditional routes,

even though during the last few centuries towns have grown up in their path.

No matter. The traffic must stop to let the sheep past.

The journey is made because as summer approaches,

their winter pastures on the lowlands of southern Spain dry up

and the sheep have to get to the grass that is now sprouting in the mountains.

Merinos, when they first appeared in Europe, were a sensation.

Their wool was longer than any other known until then

and it made a marvellous cloth.

Everyone wanted it and only Spain produced it.

More and more Spanish aristocrats acquired bigger and bigger herds.

The King of Spain put a tax on the head of every merino sheep

and every pound of wool they produced.

And eventually he, too, had became a great sheep owner.

By the 16th century there were three million merino sheep in Spain.

And their wool was a major element in the country's economy.

The King of Spain did everything he could to protect them

and, therefore, his wealth.

He made it illegal to export a living merino sheep,

so as to protect the country's monopoly.

And he did his best to protect these,

These great, wide drovers' roads

running right across Spain, the canadas.

The sheep needed these broad ribbons of land

not simply to walk on but to feed on.

The 500-mile journey took them a month or so

and they had to eat as they travelled.

The King made laws forbidding the farmers to fence their fields,

or even to drive the sheep away if they started feeding on their crops.

Land was commandeered to widen the canadas,

and if a farmer objected he could be put to death.

Eventually these great paths were 250 feet across, as this one is.

Up in the mountains, the pastures were also greatly expanded.

The forests that had once come close to the summits

of all except the highest peaks, were cut down.

First around the high moorland,

and then farther and farther down into the valleys,

until, in some places, the whole mountain had been stripped bare

to provide grass in the summertime

for the searching muzzles of thousands of sheep.

So, the forests of Spain,

from the lowland winter pastures,

along the wide canadas,

and up here into the mountains

were sacrificed for the merino sheep.

At the end of the 15th century, the King of Spain sent merinos to Italy,

where he also owned vast territories.

And the same thing happened there.

And there too, there was another reason for the wholesale felling of trees.

Italy was not yet united into one nation,

but was a group of independent states.

And foremost among them was Venice,

The Most Serene Republic as she called herself,

and certainly the greatest naval power

and richest trading nation in the western Mediterranean.

Every year, her ruler, the Doge,

was rode in great states down the Grand Canal

and out into the lagoon to be ceremonially wedded to the sea

on which the city's prosperity depended.

But the cities wealth also depended on ships

and ships required trees.

Venice owned vast forest that stretched almost unbroken

from the shores of her lagoon, to the flanks of the Alps.

And in them were all the different kinds of trees her shipwrights required.

Oaks for ribs, deck beams and keels.

Elms for capstans, walnut for rudders.

Spruce and fir for masts

and beech for oars.

She built two very different kinds of ship.

Huge, square-rigged broad-bellied merchantmen

which carried her bulk trade.

And slim, speedy galleys,

driven by oars that maintained regular schedules

and carried valuables like spices and gold.

The galleys were built in the state dockyard, the arsenal.

For they were also the most powerful of the state's fighting ships.

These yards were the base of the navy

that dominated the western Mediterranean.

The fleet was essential to Venice's survival.

The war between Christendom and Islam

had not ended when the Crusaders had returned from the Holy Land.

It was now being fought at sea.

Turkish fleets were attacking Venice's eastern colonies.

Moorish pirates, the Corsairs,

were sailing from the North African coast

and plundering her merchantmen.

Eventually, this conflict came to a climax

when the massed fleets Christendom met the might of Islam

in a narrow strait in Greece called Lepanto.

The battle lasted only one day.

In that time, 44,000 men were killed or seriously wounded.

Eventually, the Christians won and the westward expansion of Islam was stopped.

For centuries to come, Lepanto was celebrated in paintings and poetry,

as one of the great turning points of history.

It was the last great battle in which oar-driven galleys played a decisive part.

Developments in naval artillery and improvements sailing technique

made them out of date.

Since then, these craft have been studied in proud detail,

and the galley that carried the Christian flag that day at the Lepanto, El Real,

has been reconstructed as this full-sized replica.

Whatever else this ship may show,

it is appalling evidence of what men will do to other men.

It was rowed by 236 slaves,

prisoners of war or criminals,

who were chained to their oars.

They were fed from a kind of stew brewed in those great iron pots.

They were cleaned simply by throwing buckets of water over them.

And they remained permanently at their oars,

rowing on command, until such time as their sentences were expired or they died.

But this ship is also evidence of the great impact

that these naval wars had on the forests of the Mediterranean.

To build this one ship involved felling 59 beech trees for the oars alone.

Over 300 pine and fir trees

for the planking and the spars.

And most important of all and in shortest supply,

over 300 oak trees to build the ribs and the hull.

Furthermore, the Christian fleet in the battle of Lepanto,

has five more ships like this,

together with over 200 smaller ships.

The Turkish fleet was even bigger,

274 fighting ships.

So, in that one battle where many of these great ships were burnt or sunk

they had to be felled over a quarter of a million mature trees.

So it's little wonder that by the end of the 15th century,

the Venetians were so short of timber that this ship, the Christian flagship,

had to be built not in Italy,

but here in Barcelona in Spain.

And by the end of the next century

the majority of ship-building had shifted away from the shores of the Mediterranean,

up to northern Europe, where the shipwrights

could get their timber from the great forests of the Baltic.

On the deforested land the horse still ruled.

Armies depended on their well-drilled cavalry

and skills of horsemanship had reached extraordinary levels.

The Spanish riding school in Vienna still preserves them.

Breeding horses to produce the different kind of animals

needed to for the many different purposes they served,

had now become a highly expert business.

Those horses, like all thoroughbreds,

can trace their ancestry back to just three stallions from the Middle East.

Indeed 90% of thoroughbreds, can trace them back to just one.

A horse that was imported by the British consul to Syria

and traded in the markets of Aleppo, it's said, for a gun.

It arrived here in 1704,

and by that time the sport of horse racing was already well established.

In the previous century, King Charles II

had become a fanatical race horse enthusiast

and he started the custom of bringing his whole court

down to this heath and this town of Newmarket, to see the races.

The famous winners, then as now, became the idols of the public.

Their portraits painted to show them to their best advantage

and even perhaps like other portraits to flatter them a little,

gives some notion of the ideal horse that breeders had in their minds

and which owed so much to the horses

that were ridden by the nomads in the Middle East.

The characteristics that go to make a really great race horse,

are of course a matter of experience in judgment and opinion.

But, in general, the animal should have a deep chest here

so there's plenty of room for a big heart and lungs.

Legs that are well boned so that they support the body,

but are also lissom and long to give it speed.

A back that neither too long nor too short

and big, powerful hind quarters

because its from here that you get the speed.

But whether you're looking at a wonderfully bred, aristocratic athlete,

like this one, or indeed a wild horse,

surely the horse is one of the loveliest of animals.

After 5,000 years of serving humanity,

carrying him on his travels and his sports,

on his business and into his battles,

the horse had now been replaced by the internal combustion engine.

But it still retains a unique place in human affections

and in human history.