(bells ringing).
NARRATOR: A city state like no other,
feared the world over.
JAMES: A rich, powerful republic,
making vast amounts of money,
protected by a massive fleet of the world's fastest war ships.
NARRATOR: Venice would be nothing without its ships,
but their secrets have been lost for centuries.
What can three discoveries reveal about how Venice
becomes a renaissance superpower?
JON: This could give us a clue into how the Venetians
ruled for almost 500 years.
NARRATOR: And why it finally falls into ruin.
GIOVANNI: There have been extended excavations and they found thousands of bodies.
JON: In a very real sense, the history of Venice lies underwater.
We just have to find it.
NARRATOR: A city of high culture,
magnificent architecture, stunning natural beauty,
made possible by a past steeped in conquest.
JON At its height, 700 years ago,
Venice controlled an area spanning 1,000 miles,
and its influence stretched across three continents.
It was a maritime empire of unequalled power,
and the wealthiest city in Western Europe.
JAMES: The key to Venice is its watercraft,
and while many people know of the famous gondolas,
the true Venetian vessel is the galley.
These ships dominate the Mediterranean for centuries,
and are key to Venice becoming a naval power,
an economic power and a political power.
NARRATOR: And the seed of this power is the Arsenale,
once the biggest industrial facility in the west.
Hidden behind high walls,
thousands worked to build the best warships the world has ever seen.
PETER: But the master ship builders kept their designs to themselves,
handing them down from father to son,
by word of mouth only.
So we have no blueprints or plans for any galleys,
and we've never been able to find any evidence of one.
STEFANDO: Any archaeologist dreams of discovering a Venetian medieval galley.
I've been living and working in Venice for 25 years.
It's a place that never ceases to amaze me.
NARRATOR: For his entire career,
maritime archaeologist, Stefano Medas,
has been searching for evidence of Venice's naval power.
He's focused his search in the waters of the lagoon that surrounds the city.
JAMES: The difficulty in excavating Venice's past
is that it sits in a lagoon 200 square miles in size,
and that's three times the area of Washington DC.
JON: Trying to find a ship in these waters is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Actually, it's worse than that,
it's like looking for a needle in a haystack underwater with
a bucket over your head.
JAMES The city sits on 118 small islands connected by bridges and canals.
From above, it looks beautiful,
but drain the canals and then the lagoon,
and you start to understand why nobody, after 700 years,
has been able to find any shipwrecks of any significance.
Today, over 80% of the lagoon is thick mud,
just about 11% is water.
So even if you were lucky enough to find anything,
it would most likely be trapped under the mud,
and to dredge the lagoon would take 1,000 years.
NARRATOR: Despite the challenges,
Stefano is convinced his quest for evidence of an
ancient warship is worth continuing.
STEFANDO: We know from historical sources, old maps,
that something important was there.
NARRATOR: In 1997,
a team of divers makes a tantalizing discovery.
A piece of wood.
JON It might not sound much
but for archaeologists it's a breakthrough.
A piece of wood could mean a ship.
STEFANDO: It was an extraordinary discovery
that could give us a lot of information.
When you're lucky enough to find a piece of wood,
the first thing to do is to try and find out how old it is,
so it's sent to the lab for radio carbon analysis.
It was amazing because we found out that it was from the 14th Century.
JAMES: Wood from the 14th Century,
for Stefano and the team it's like finding the holy grail.
This is from the time when Venice is at the peak of its naval and economic power.
You couldn't have found a piece from a better period.
JON: So now Stefano knows there's something worth finding
in the mud of the lagoon.
NARRATOR: In 2001,
Stefano and his team begin their search
in the area where the 14th Century piece of wood was discovered.
JAMES: But the problem is, that you're in very muddy water
where you can see nothing the moment you stir the mud up.
NARRATOR: When they do find something, it's something big.
¶ ¶
STEFANDO: We started seeing this gigantic hull in perfect condition.
It was very emotional for the whole team of archaeologists.
NARRATOR: To find out if this structure they found could be a long-lost galley,
Stefano turns to the one man who can help him,
Venetian historian and ship expert, Mauro Bondioli.
MAURO: They called me because I was the only person
in the world with the knowledge to study and identify
this particular type of wreck.
When Stefano called, I immediately said okay,
I'll drop everything and tomorrow morning I will be at the lagoon.
I had thought all night about how to identify a galley from other types of ships.
I calculated the length and I said okay,
in this particular point,
we should be able to find a structure typically found in galleys,
which is the mast step.
JAMES: A mast step is a notch cut into the backbone of a ship,
deep down in its hold.
That's a key piece of evidence,
but good luck trying to find that along the entire length of a ship
buried in the mud when you're doing it by feel.
NARRATOR: Armed with this potential lead,
the team returns to the submerged wreck.
MAURO: It was a very long operation because they had to dig through all that mud.
I waited at least three hours for an answer.
Finally, an archaeologist came to the surface and said,
"We've located the structure made this way and that way,"
and I told them, "You've found a galley."
STEFANDO: It was obviously extraordinary and exciting because we were certain
it was the first wreck of a galley ever found in the Mediterranean and beyond.
JON: So it's a very, very important find,
and what you want to do is record every single part of that wreck,
inch by inch, do a forensic study of it.
The problem is, this wreck is completely covered in mud,
you can't even see your hand in front of your face under water.
NARRATOR: How will they excavate this medieval fighting galley
from the Venice lagoon?
JON: They're really gonna have to come up with a pretty unique solution.
NARRATOR: Setfano Medas and his team believe the 14th Century galley they found
in the Venice lagoon is so important it needs to be fully excavated.
JAMES: So they come up with this crazy idea.
Why don't we just drain the water away.
And the government agrees.
Even though this is gonna cost a million dollars.
NARRATOR: The strategy create a cofferdam,
a watertight enclosure they can pump dry.
To build it, engineers sink 36 foot long steel girders
vertically into the muddy floor of the lagoon,
300 of them.
JAMES: They have to fit everything together,
girder by girder, perfectly.
The slightest gap, even a fraction of an inch,
can lead this thing to fail and the water can't be drained.
JAMES: Now comes the real test.
It's getting the water out of there.
You have to take huge pumps, and they use five of them,
to remove millions of gallons, and they work around the clock.
STEFANDO: While lowering the water,
we spend days anxiously watching because the water level was dropping so slowly.
JAMES: It takes two weeks to build the wall,
and it takes a full week to get that cofferdam dry.
NARRATOR: What begins to emerge is the outline of a sleek, narrow hull.
But to examine it in detail, they have to move fast.
JON: There's a problem with draining the water away
because it's the water and mud that protected the site in the first place,
and the moment you remove it,
it instantly starts to decay, and actually that can be quite
a quick process, particularly when you expose timbers to the
air for the first time.
JON: So the important thing was to keep it wet,
but also to cover it with a protected canvas,
and they did that each time they were excavating the timbers.
PETER: The excavators worked painstakingly for three months,
little by little
exposing the vessel's unique hydrodynamic shape.
Finally, the 700 year old galley,
the pride of the Venetian fighting fleet,
and the only one in existence today,
is visible in all its glory.
STEFANDO: It was amazing to see the beauty of the hull,
the internal frames and the benches,
seeing it from the stern to the bow,
with its sharp lines.
It was really emotional because it was like going back
for one moment into a 14th Century boat yard.
NARRATOR: The team takes measurements.
The hull is 120 feet long and just 15 feet wide.
For the first time,
they could confirm the number and position of oarsmen powering the vessel.
JAMES: Now, using all the new data from the excavation,
we can bring this lost Venetian galley to life.
When you see this extraordinary design slicing through the water,
you really get a sense of how these warships made Venice a naval superpower.
The engine of this machine? Muscle power.
140 oarsmen rowing together.
More rowers equals more power.
Uniquely, they set three abreasted places,
propelling the hydrodynamic hull through the water
at an astonishing six miles an hour,
making this the fastest ship on the seas at the time.
And because of this speed and power,
a galley could outmaneuver its slower opponents.
That's naval superiority.
MAURO: When a fleet of galleys appeared
with so many oars rowing with an incredible, harmonious rhythm,
like the wings of a bird,
it must've looked fantastic,
really incredible for people who had never seen things like this before.
NARRATOR: The crew can even harness the power of a 65 foot long sail
to carry them effortlessly forward when winds are favorable.
PETER: Before this galley was excavated,
we had no idea how they were made,
we had to guess at the design of these vessels.
Now we know, from the design of the hull to the power of the oarsmen,
these ships were simply years ahead of their time.
JON: They were very maneuverable, sleek, fast, war machines.
JAMES: When the archaeologists are done,
they face two choices.
To raise, recover and chemically treat it to preserve it
at a cost of millions,
or put it back in its time capsule.
They let the water reclaim the cofferdam and bury the ship once again to preserve it.
(bells tolling).
JAMES: 700 years ago,
ports across the Venetian Empire would've been filled
with hundreds of galleys like the one lying in Venice lagoon today.
Guarding the coast, protecting trade routes,
because trade is the beating heart of the Venetian Republic.
MAURO: If you had visited Venice 700 years ago,
you would've found one of the richest markets in the world.
Any type of goods could be found in Venice.
PETER: And making this trade possible are
vast fleets of Venetian merchant ships,
sailing to the far reaches of the Mediterranean into Syria.
JAMES: Historical documents hint that these ships were loaded with riches,
filled to the brim with millions of dollars worth of goods.
The problem is, there's not many physical examples left in the archaeological record.
NARRATOR: So what could a looted wreck,
discovered off the coast of Croatia,
reveal about the wealth of ancient Venice?
IRENA: There was something important but nobody knew
what was actually hiding on the seabed.
IRENA: The second I saw this wreck, I was hooked.
Nothing prepared me for its strange attraction.
NARRATOR: For nine years, Irena Radic Rossi,
has been diving here, off the coast of Croatia.
The reason lies 80 feet below,
a shipwreck first discovered and picked over
decades ago.
IRENA: We know for sure that in the early 60s a fisherman found the shipwreck site.
He kept the information for himself for some time,
and then somehow better divers came across this find
and started to loot it.
JAMES Back then, Croatia is part of communist Yugoslavia,
and so when they hear about this find and the looting,
the government send out a team to take a look.
NARRATOR: Although the wreck has been looted,
the government team still finds some important artifacts.
JAMES: Among the most exciting things they found are objects that have a date on them.
JON: Two cannon were brought up marked with the initials Z and A,
and these initials stand for Zuanne Alberghetti,
and Zuanne Alberghetti was actually a very famous bronze gun maker based in Venice,
and that makes us think instantly there's a
connection between this ship and Venice.
But even more incredibly there's a date inscribed on the
cannons in Roman numerals, and that date is 1582.
And that's a time when Venice has established a place as the number one trading city.
The place where anything and everything is bought and sold,
all at a great profit for the merchants and government.
And so if that ship is from around this crucial period of the 1580s,
the question is, what else can the ship tell us?
IRENA: The guns were an important clue for discovering the story of the shipwreck,
but of course they didn't tell everything.
NARRATOR: Starting in 2012,
Irena and her team begin charting the size and scale
of the plundered wreck
to see if they can figure out what the ship was and
how it ended up here.
IRENA: So I will be working in V18,
so that's the plan for today.
Okay, let's go.
NARRATOR: But with every dive, they face danger.
IRENA: It is forbidden to dive without the gloves on
the site because it is full of toxic material.
There was elementary mercury, we have lead carbonate.
JON: Mercury and lead were used back in the 1500s
for decorating furniture and its pigments for painting.
If the divers touched the liquid mercury underwater with bare skin,
it would cause burns.
Above the surface, it can vaporize and if inhaled,
can lead to brain damage, even death.
Lead poisoning can damage the kidneys and nervous system.
IRENA: When they come out of the water,
they become dangerous, so we have to be very careful.
JAMES: When you study a wreck,
you need to carefully measure it,
so we lay out metal grids that allow us to map everything in its place.
It's a very meticulous science,
it's CSI underwater.
NARRATOR: After hundreds of dives over several years,
Irena collects enough data to map the wreck's structure.
Putting it all together begins to reveal what sort of
ship it is.
JAMES: If we were to drain the water away,
what you would see if that this truly is,
not only a large ship,
but you'd get a sense of the scale of the hold.
It could carry up to 800 tons of cargo.
Now today that's about 5,000 barrels of oil,
so we're talking about the 16th Century equivalent of a modern containership.
NARRATOR: Although much of the cargo has been looted, some remains.
What was this ship carrying and what can that reveal about its mission?
JON: Finding a historic wreck with that much cargo on it,
that many riches, is actually very, very rare.
NARRATOR: Irena Radic Rossi and her dive team hope the cargo of
a 16th Century Venetian ship
will allow them to unlock its mysteries.
JON: The hope is that we can find out where the ship was going,
and crucially, put a name to it.
NARRATOR: And a major clue lies in pieces over
the sea floor.
JAMES: The most extraordinary thing they found were window panes,
hundreds of them, and they're still bringing them up today.
IRENA: It was great.
Tomas collected some glass down there,
and we will see now what is inside.
There is a lot of this glass lying everywhere in the surface layer of the site.
When it was baked, it was completely transparent,
and now, after four centuries of lying down on the seabed,
the window pane's degraded.
So this was beautiful glass that was used in nice buildings.
In the 16th Century, it was quite a luxury product.
(bells ringing).
NARRATOR: To put a name on the wreck,
Irena and her team contact the one man who might be able
to figure it out, Mauro Bondioli.
MAURO: And so she asked me to start archive research,
not just to identify the wreck,
but the reconstruct its whole history.
NARRATOR: Mauro gets two solid leads,
the age of the ship's guns and a list of the artifacts recovered so far.
Then, he goes looking for more.
JAMES: The Venetian state archives is an incredible trove of documents,
state papers, correspondence, cargo lists for ships.
It's so vast that it has 50 miles of shelves and over 300 rooms.
Often times researchers go there and they will realize
they are the first to touch a piece of paper since it was deposited in the archives
hundreds of years ago.
IRENA: Then, Mauro discovers a document about 5,000 window panes,
so we immediately thought that it must have been our ship.
NARRATOR: According to the records,
in 1583 a ship leaves Venice loaded with chandeliers,
silk and 5,000 window panes.
Its name, the Gagliana Grossa.
MAURO: I discovered that this was a ship that set out from Venice and was
destined for Constantinople.
JON: But that makes no sense.
Constantinople is the center of Venice's mortal enemy, the Ottomans.
Why are they sailing directly into their enemy's backyard?
JON: But the story gets even stranger when it's found out who the cargo's meant for.
It goes right to the top of the Ottoman Empire.
MAURO: One of the most interesting things about this wreck
is that this document research has confirmed
that the cargo was going directly to the Sultan.
JAMES: The archives revealed that Sultan, Murad the Third,
is not your typical warrior king.
He loves the finer things in life.
He has a big, beautiful palace.
He also loves women, lots of women.
Murad keeps his 50 wives in the harem,
a beautiful building decorated with many glass windows.
We know that in 1583,
the Sultan faces a terrible disaster.
A fire burns down his most precious room in the palace.
The harem.
IRENA: The Sultan was very upset about it,
so he wanted to reconstruct it as soon as possible.
He gave the orders to purchase the material for the reconstruction
and ordered 5,000 window panes,
and the Senate of Venice decided to load them on Gagliana.
JAMES: Venetian merchants would sell to anyone,
even their enemies, and the government would likely turn a blind eye to that.
The trade with the Ottomans was filling the coffers,
so if this means trading with the enemy, why not?
JON: But the Sultan never got his consignment of glass.
NARRATOR: A fraction of the way into its journey,
the Gagliana Grossa sinks,
making it the richest renaissance wreck in the Mediterranean.
JON: You have to wonder how such a state of the art merchant ship
ended up at the bottom of the ocean.
NARRATOR: To find out what could've caused the
Gagliana Grossa cargo ship to sink,
the team turns to clues within the archives.
JAMES: The Venetian archives tell us that the Gagliana sails
from Venice in late October, 1583.
That's late in the season,
and the ban on sailing in the winter is about to start.
JAMES: There is a good reason for that ban.
JON: The Adriatic's a dangerous sea at the best of times.
It acts like a big funnel and it channels storms up and along its length,
coming in from the mountains,
and it makes it treacherous,
particularly if you're pushing it into the stormier
part of the season.
JAMES: What happened?
Perhaps it took a while to finish the glass
and then to load that precious cargo into the ship.
If that's the case, it would be a fatal delay.
NARRATOR: The Gagliana's course would've taken it
right through an area nicknamed Little Ocean,
renowned for its storms.
JAMES: What probably happened is that a squall storm strikes,
and Gagliana Grossa, overloaded with all that heavy glass,
begins to list,
takes on water and then falls to the bottom of the sea,
taking the Sultan's precious cargo with her.
JON: The fate of the Gagliana tells a bigger story
and it's really about the demise of Venice as a trading power.
NARRATOR: The Gagliana sinks at a critical time of change in the Mediterranean.
JON: By the 1580s, you've got the English,
you've got the Spanish building much bigger ships
which could survive brutal voyages across the Atlantic,
and they begin to take on the trading role that Venice was once so famous for.
JON: Venice is teetering on the brink,
her enemies are expanding into her territory.
(bells ringing).
JAMES: But the Venetian civilization is brought to its knees,
not by guns and swords but from an invisible silent enemy
that Venice has no defense against.
This new deadly force plunges Venetians into a war they have no chance of winning.
GIOVANNI: For most people,
Venice begins and ends with the city and its famous landmarks.
But, to really know Venice, you have to look in the less glamorous places.
NARRATOR: Venetian historian, Giovanni Caniato,
has spent years piecing together the lives of Venetians
during the last decades of the Republic.
GIOVANNI: No one has paid much attention to the island we're headed to
until recently.
But I've discovered it hides a disturbing secret.
GIOVANNI: Walking around this island, I discovered a huge building
with hundreds and hundreds of inscriptions,
drawing traced on the plaster inside the building.
Incredible. Incredible. Fascinating.
And the more I looked, the more I found.
I wanted to know who wrote these inscriptions,
why they did it and this curiosity made me crazy
and I start looking for documents to understand why certain names
were traced on the walls.
I had the impression that most of these drawings were strictly related with trade,
with goods that were disembarked in this place,
and most of them were the initials of a merchant.
NARRATOR: Back at the state archives,
Giovanni discovers that the mysterious building dates back to 1562.
JAMES: The archives tell us that this is a warehouse
under which merchants store all the goods that are coming by sea.
But if that's the case then you'd expect it to be built in the center of the city
or at the port entrance,
not on some remote island two miles from the city.
NARRATOR: When a team of archaeologists starts digging
for artifacts in the shadow of the building,
the mystery only deepens.
JON: They find skeletons, bones, human remains.
So far they've dug up about 40 skeletons.
It takes a long time to record a human skeleton fully
and it can actually be quite an upsetting process,
a disturbing process as well.
It takes 14 excavators two days to work on just one skeleton and record it fully.
One of the first things you do with human bone is find out what period it came from,
and what's really interesting is they all seem to date from the same period as the building.
That means these people died when the building was in use.
What was surprising was they were finding that the skeletons weren't whole,
they'd been cut in half, legs were removed,
and this is quite a macabre discovery.
NARRATOR: To figure out if the terrible mutilations were the cause of death,
the team carries out a forensic examination.
JAMES: Looking at the edges of the bones where these bodies have been cut in half,
they find that they're brittle,
they're fractured, they're jagged.
Bone dries out in the soil, it loses collagen, it becomes brittle,
and all of these bones have been
fractured in a way that showed that this had happened long after death.
NARRATOR: There's only one explanation for what they foun.
The skeletons must have been dug up and then cut into pieces.
JAMES: So the question is then...
Why did them up after they've been buried?
NARRATOR: Archaeologists believe the 42 skeletons they
found are just the tip of the iceberg.
JON: We don't know what lies under the rest of the island,
but the amount of skeletons they found,
they were probably looking at thousands of skeletons on the site,
layer after layer, essentially a killing field.
¶ ¶
NARRATOR: Historian, Giovanni Caniato,
believes clues as to what's behind this mass grave
and its brutal burial methods lie in the history books.
GIOVANNI: From the 14th Century on,
you begin to see accounts of mass death,
thousands are dying, hundreds a day,
and bodies are piling up in the streets,
and this fills the population with fear, suspicion.
What's causing this?
And this is death that spares no one,
from the poorest to the richest and the most powerful.
JON: The Venetians don't know what the cause of these terrible outbreaks actually are,
But there is one clue.
They begin to notice that the ships that are coming in,
that often the sailors are getting ill a short time after they dock at the port.
JAMES: What we now know is that this is the age of the Black Death.
The Bubonic Plague, carried in fleas on rats,
and as this plague spreads throughout Europe and kills so many,
it will even hit a place like Venice because rats can be found in ships,
and it's ironic that for all of the power and the wealth that comes to Venice
in the hold of a ship, now comes death, unstoppable death.
NARRATOR: Now, for Giovanni, it all comes together.
He realizes the merchant's building is much more than a simple warehouse.
GIOVANNI: Venetians understood that it was a good idea
to have a place for people who were suspected to have the plague,
and so they created Lazzaretto Nuovo.
NARRATOR: Historical records and archaeological findings
allow them to rebuild the isolation facility as it was in 1562,
revealing the truth about what happened here.
PETER: This was an island where all the ships
coming into the lagoon would wait for 40 days,
quaranta in Italian, or quarantine.
GIOVANNI: This building marks the height of a revolutionary Venetian innovation.
It was the world's largest and most sophisticated quarantine building
of the 16th Century.
JAMES: It's amazing when you think about it.
This is 400 years before germ theory,
but here they are figuring out that you need to isolate people
and move them away so that they don't spread it.
Sound familiar?
NARRATOR: For Giovanni and the team of excavators,
the mass graves begin to make sense.
JAMES: So, what you see is with an estimate of over 500 a day dying,
this quarantine island now becomes the overflow
for the dying and for the dead.
GIOVANNI: Can you imagine to live in this island with thousands of other people,
half of them dying?
You couldn't move, you couldn't go out from the building.
Armed guards are checking that you don't move,
and if you try to run away you are killed immediately.
That was a terrible situation.
NARRATOR: And the team realizes even the
desecration of the bones serves a chilling purpose.
JON: With hundreds of bodies a day arriving on the island,
there just wasn't enough space to bury everyone,
so they'd have to cut down into the existing graves there,
cutting through bodies,
cutting through corpses to create space for new bodies.
I mean this is quite a picture of hell really
for the people that were working there.
JAMES: These inscriptions on the wall take on new meaning and poignancy.
Whoever wrote these probably didn't realize this would be the
last thing they would ever write and the
last trace of them, other than their bones.
NARRATOR: But even with the plague island,
this unique city state is brought slowly to its knees.
JAMES: Nearly a third of the population is gone,
practically overnight, and that includes key people.
Shipwrights, soldiers, sailors, merchants,
all of the people that made Venice great.
Venice never recovers her position.
JON It goes to show just how fragile even great civilizations can be.
Their warships allowed them to dominate the seas,
giving them control of ports and trade routes.
Their merchant vessels sailed from port to port a
massing fast fortunes,
making connections around the Mediterranean,
all the way to Constantinople.
JON: But it's actually those contacts that ended up bringing death to Venice.
There was no defense against the plague,
all their technology could do nothing about this deadly disease.
Essentially, Venice became a victim of its own success.
¶ ¶
JAMES: But Venice adapted, and the Venetians rode out the Bubonic Plague.
Today their city is one of the most beautiful and most visited in the world,
and that speaks to the power of the human spirit,
that speaks to resilience,
and that speaks to our ability as humans to go through something tough
and come out on the other side.
¶ ¶
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.