"NIALL FERGUSON:" "Just over three centuries ago, the fate of Western civilization hung in the balance." "In 1683, just outside the Austrian capital Vienna, two armed forces were pitted against each other the Muslim East against Christian West." "The result of this conflict would be decisive for the West, and ultimately fatal for its enemies in the East." "The Siege of Vienna was one of many attacks that, throughout history," "Western civilization has faced from its enemies in the East." "But, for most of the past 300 years, give or take the odd temporary setback, the West has always won." "Why?" "In this series, I'm identifying six unique factors," "I'm calling them the killer applications - that put the West on top." "The first was the competition between Europe's warring little kingdoms that propelled them ahead of China's monolithic empire." "In this film, I'm turning to killer app two - science - and, in particular, the science that helped the West to win at war." "But I'm also asking, if we lose our scientific pre-eminence, could the West be consigned to history?" "(INDISTINCT SPEECH OVER RADIO)" "Without superior science, there would be no Western superpower today." "But it wasn't always like this." "1,000 years ago, it was the Muslim world that was at the cutting edge of science." "Building on Greek and Indian foundations, Muslim mathematicians invented algebra." "Libraries like the House of Wisdom in Baghdad had no equal in the West, and Arab science meant improved navigation and weaponry." "So, how did the Muslim world later come to lag so far behind the West when it came to science?" "And how did a scientific revolution help Western civilization take over militarily, as well as academically?" "To answer those questions, you need to take a trip back in time... (SLOW TICKING) ...back more than 328 years to the Iast time an islamic empire menaced the West, and you need to follow an Eastern invader" "all the way from istanbul to the gates of Vienna." "(GIVES ORDER)" "(DRUMMING)" "(BAND STARTS) lt was to be the battle that decided the fate of the West." "On one side was the Ottoman Sultan's army, led by Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Koprulu." "On the other were the defending forces of Leopold I," "Holy Roman Emperor and the Habsburg ruler of Austria." "This was the turning point in a clash of civilization that had begun when Islam first burst from the Arabian desert in the 7th century." "In July 1 683, with the Ottoman army surrounding Vienna, the prospects for the Christian defenders looked bleak indeed." "(BELLS RINGING)" "Bells rang out in Vienna and all across Central Europe, summoning the faithful to pray for divine mercy." "(BELLS RINGING)" "You can get an idea of the desperate yet defiant mood in Vienna from the graffiti in the old bell tower of the cathedral." "This says, "Mohammed, you dog - du hund - go home!"" "But it wasn't the Muslim Turks who'd turned tail." "To the disgust of many, the Christian Emperor Leopold decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and stole away." "By the middle of july, the Turkish armies had come to within 450 paces of the city walls." "The fate of the West hung in the balance." "It was one of those moments when it could all have gone horribly wrong." "An Ottoman victory seemed inevitable." "But then, fatally, Kara Mustafa hesitated." "His men had marched far beyond their natural range." "supplies were running short." "What's more, even if Vienna fell, he had no plan for its Iong-term occupation." "How long would they have to stay there, so far from home?" "would the army actually survive the winter?" "He might win the siege, but could Kara Mustafa win the peace?" "Kara Mustafa's hesitation gave the West vital time to gather allies and work out a military strategy to repel the Ottoman horde." "A relief force of 60,000 men now advanced on Vienna under the command of Jan Sobieski, the King of Poland." "Sobieski was portly and past his prime, but intent on glory." "On 12th September 1683, the Christian army came charging down these hills above Vienna, as one Turkish eyewitness put it," ""like a flood of black pitch coming down the mountain," ""consuming everything it touched"." "(BOOMING EXPLOSIONS)" "At 5.30 in the afternoon, Sobieski entered the tent of Kara Mustafa, but it was deserted." "He had fled." "The siege was over." "The West was saved." "Sobieski was exultant, telling the Pope, "We came, we saw, and God conquered. "" "Captured Turkish cannon were melted down and turned into the main bell of St Stephen's Cathedral." ""The Boomer", as it was known, was emblazoned with the heads of six Turks." "For his part, Kara Mustafa paid a high price for failure." "He was executed on the orders of the Sultan - strangled with a silken cord." "For the Ottoman Empire, it was the beginning of the end, a moment of imperial overstretch with disastrous consequences." "It was actually the first time the Ottomans had had to accept a peace treaty from victorious Christian adversaries." "From that point on, from the late 1 7th century until the empire's dissolution in the early 20th," "Turkish power in Europe was inexorably rolled back." "At the same time, the Austrian Empire rose to a position of splendid predominance in Central Europe." "The raising of the Siege of Vienna was a pivotal moment in the rise of the West." "In the years that followed, there was an upsurge of Western interest in the science of warfare and of government." "Indeed, if there was one real difference between the West and the East, it was the widely varying degrees to which science was systematically pursued and applied in the field of power politics." "Why did the islamic world get it so wrong?" "And why did the West get it so right?" "7 0 years after the Siege of Vienna, two men came to personify the widening gap between Western civilization and its biggest rival in the East." "In Istanbul, Sultan Osman lll presided over an ever-weakening Ottoman Empire while in Potsdam, the Prussian King, Frederick the Great, embarked on a programme of reforms that would ultimately give not just Prussia, but the entire West" "an unassailable advantage over its rivals." "Frederick the Great lived here, just outside Berlin, in a palace he designed himself." "He called it Sanssouci, "without a care", but Frederick was anything but careless when it came to running his country." "In 1 752," "Frederick wrote the first of two political testaments intended for his successor." "In it he said, "The ruler is the first person of the State." ""He's paid well in order to maintain the dignity of the office." ""But in return," ""he's required to work diligently for the wellbeing of the State."" "In other words, Frederick firmly subordinated his own personal gratification to the interests of the Prussian State." "The simple design of this modest palace, maintained by an astonishingly small retinue for a major European monarch, served as an example to the entire Prussian bureaucracy." "Following the King's example, the office-holding class worked in an environment of discipline, routine and zero tolerance for corruption." "There could scarcely be a greater contrast than with the stultifying atmosphere in which the heirs of the Sultan were raised here at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul." "7 0 years after the disastrous defeat at the Siege of Vienna," "Sultan Osman lll's life was one of cloistered indulgence." "And this is it, the "ha-rem", or harem, as we would say, also known as "the cage"." "It was here that Osman spent his time, stuItified with sex and Turkish delight, and wholly untutored in the business of government." "By the time he finally became sultan at the age of 57, he'd spent 51 of the previous years here, banged up with the concubines." "He'd developed such an aversion to women by that time that he devised a special way of keeping them out of his way." "He wore iron-soIed shoes." "At the sound of the imperial footfaII, the ladies were supposed to scuttle away." "Half a century of dodging concubines was hardly the best preparation for government." "Here in istanbul, this degeneration of leadership became systemic until it began to infect the entire culture of government." "The school here at the Topkapi palace had once been considered the best in the Empire and it was here that talented Christians who'd been enslaved were trained to serve the sultan." "The result of this creaming off of talent had been a civil service that was meritocratic and non-hereditary at a time when no such thing existed in Europe." "And yet, gradually, things began to change." "Native-born Turks gained admission to the civil service, and promotion came to depend more on bribery and favouritism than on merit." "Expenditure ran ahead of tax revenue." "Inflation surged." "Corruption was rife." "Centrifugal forces were strengthening." "And there was religious strife too between fundamentalists and Sufi mystics." "This was a threadbare empire." "Here in the Ottoman Archives in istanbul, you can get the impression of a system of government on the slide." "Now, I don't want you to get the idea that I can actually read Ottoman calligraphy, because I can't, but I can tell neat handwriting from sloppy handwriting." "So, Iet's take a look at this land register from 1 458, which is meticulous, absolutely beautiful, almost a work of art, and compare it with another land register from almost 250 years later in 1694." "This one's, frankly, a bit of a mess." "It's full of crossings out, there are lots of smudges." "It seems to have been done in much greater haste, with much less care." "I suppose they may have been getting more efficient, but they certainly weren't getting more orderly." "In comparison with the decadence of Osman lll's administration," "Frederick the Great was committed to the rational rule of Prussia." "And you can see just how well run it was by coming here to the secret state archive, where you'II find the minutes, perfectly preserved, of Frederick's cabinet, page after page of royal decisions and letters." "August 1 756 was an especially busy month for him because that was the month when he ordered the invasion of neighbouring Saxony at the beginning of the Seven Years' War." "well, it was this kind of clockwork organisation that really set the West apart from the rest, and it was the lack of it that condemned the Ottoman Empire to inexorable decline." "For Frederick, the ruler was the servant, not the master of the state." ""I can have no interests," he declared, "which are not equally those of my people." ""If the two are incompatible," ""the preference should always be given" ""to the interest and advantage of the country."" "In other words, the state would be strengthened rather than undermined by education, culture and toleration." "And to ram the point home, he set out to construct a whole series of spectacular buildings." "While his private palace may have been modest, these grand public buildings were intended as political statements." "One of the first edifices in what Frederick thought of as a kind of forum in the heart of berlin was this wonderful theatre, the State Opera House." "unlike any other in Northern Europe, it wasn't connected to a royal palace or court." "It was a completely freestanding institution." "The aim was not royal gratification, it was public enlightenment." "Next to the opera house, Frederick built a Roman Catholic cathedral." "Although he himself was agnostic," "Frederick was prepared to tolerate religion provided it didn't interfere with the political life of the nation." "people in Prussia were free to pray as they pleased as long as their beliefs didn't stand in the way of scientific enquiry and technological progress." "This was a secular state." "Power had been taken away from the pastors and priests." "(CALL TO PRAYER)" "In stark contrast, the Ottomans'progress was severely hampered by religion." "In the words of one Muslim cleric," ""lt is rare that someone becomes absorbed in this foreign science" ""without renouncing religion and letting go the reins of piety within him. "" "Muslim scientists couldn't even access the latest research from Europe, because their religion now prevented them from reading printed books." "For the Ottomans, script was sacred." "There was a religious reverence for pen and ink, a preference for calligraphy over printing." "Scholar's ink, it was said, is holier than martyr's blood." "If the scientific revolution was a kind of network of scholars all over Europe corresponding and publishing, then the Ottoman Empire was effectively offline." "In 1 51 5, a decree of Selim I had threatened with death anyone involved in the development of printing." "This taboo lasted into the 1 8th century." "This failure to reconcile science and islam was to prove fatal." "By rejecting the printed book and insisting on the laborious work of the calligrapher, the Ottomans were cutting themselves off from Western knowledge and hence from progress." "In fact, the only work of science to be translated into Ottoman in the 1 7th century was a treatise on the possible cures for syphilis, which I suppose gives you some idea of the priorities of the sultan's court." "In Ottoman schools, science yielded to narrowly religious study." "Nothing illustrates better the contrast between the cultures of Frederick and Osman than the fate of an observatory that was built here in istanbul in 1577 by the renowned astronomer Taqi aI-Din." "Taqi al-Din was a religious man, who taught in an Islamic school, but he was also a scientist of astonishing breadth and inventiveness." "Like earlier Persian philosophers, he held rational investigation of the natural world to be compatible with Islamic faith." "From his observatory, as well as from the Galata Tower," "Taqi al-Din studied the solar system." "The author of numerous treatises on astronomy, mathematics and optics, he also designed his own highly accurate astronomical clocks, and even experimented with steam power." "But on 1 1 September 1 577 Taqi al-Din made a momentous mistake." "A comet observed in the sky over Istanbul caused panic." "Asked for an astrological opinion," "Taqi al-Din predicted that it might signal a forthcoming Ottoman military victory over the Persians." "unfortunately, Taqi aI-Din got it wrong and, as a result, he and his observatory were blamed for the defeat." "An irate sultan gave in to religious pressure and in January 1580, just three years after its completion," "Taqi aI-Din's observatory was destroyed." "The powerful muslim clergy had effectively snuffed out any possibility of Ottoman scientific advance at the very moment when the Christian churches in Europe were relaxing their grip on free public enquiry." "All across Europe by the late 1 7th century, rulers were actively promoting science." "In 1 662, the Royal Society of London received its charter from King Charles ll, a model for similar institutions in Paris, Vienna and Berlin." "Among the society's founders was Christopher Wren, architect, mathematician, scientist and astronomer." "When charles II commissioned Wren to build this observatory at Greenwich in 1675, it wasn't a matter of royal prestige or personal interest." "He understood that science was in the national interest." "What made the royal Society so important was that it promoted a new kind of scientific community which allowed ideas to be shared and problems to be collectively addressed." "A classic example is Isaac Newton's theory of gravity, which he could never have come up with without the prior work of royal Society founder Robert Hooke." "Even geniuses can benefit from teamwork." "(SLOW TICKING)" "In the West, science and enlightened government worked in tandem, and no monarch understood this better than Frederick the Great, who offered scientists cash prizes for solutions to unsolved problems." "Yet rulers like Frederick were interested in science for more than purely intellectual reasons." "They saw that scientific knowledge could be crucial to Western military power." "What began as scholarship would end as conquest." "In the middle of the 1 8th century," "Frederick the Great of Prussia personified the nexus between science and military power." "The centre of his sphere of operations was Potsdam." "Today it's just another dowdy suburb of Berlin." "In Frederick's time, however, most of the inhabitants of Potsdam were soldiers." "Almost all the buildings in Potsdam had some sort of military connection or purpose." "Today it's a bank, but in Frederick's day that was the guardhouse and this Baroque beauty was the military orphanage." "Back there is where the garrison church used to stand, and this is all that's left of the riding school." "Even in this seemingly ordinary residential street, the houses were built with an extra top floor for use by lodging soldiers." "The army ceased to be merely an instrument of dynastic power." "It became an integral part of Prussian society, with Junker landlords as the officers and peasants as the men." "It was once famously observed," ""The Prussian monarchy is not a country which has an army." ""It's an army which has a country."" "Here, society and the military became inextricably intertwined." "If you were a landowner, you were expected to serve as an officer." "Ordinary men took the place of mercenaries in the ranks." "Prussia was the army, and the army was Prussia." "A focus on drill and professionalism was paramount in Prussia's military success." "The discipline and speed with which the Prussian infantry could redeploy in the midst of battle was legendary." "This lovely contemporary map allows you to follow the course of the battle Of Leuthen, fought in December 1 757, when the very existence of Prussia was threatened by a formidable coalition of France, Russia and Austria." "Not for the first time, and not for the last, the West was at war with itself." "But it was precisely this kind of conflict that spurred innovation." "In this 1 930s reconstruction, you can see how the Prussian infantry surprised the long Austrian line on its southern flank." "As the Austrians were rolled back, they tried desperately to regroup, but they were hit first by the Prussian cavalry, and then by Frederick's lethally accurate artillery." "It was a devastating lesson in the science of war." "artillery was as crucial as mobility and discipline to Prussia's rise." ""We are fighting against more than men," Frederick argued." ""The wars we're waging from now on will be a question of artillery duels."" "At Leuthen, the Prussians had 63 field guns and 8 howitzers." "They had ten so-caIIed Brummer, "growIers", known as such because of the rumbling noise they made when fired." "Weapons like these exemplified the application of scientific knowledge in the realm of military power." "Mobile, accurate artillery was the key to a Western military predominance that lasted for more than 200 years." "The application of science to artillery perfectly illustrates the process of cumulative advance that was happening in Europe as rival states competed with one another and learnt from one another." "The scientific revolution was a field day for creative nerds." "In the 1 7 40s, a self-taught mathematician called Benjamin Robins applied Newtonian mechanics to the problem of artillery, using differential equations to provide the first true description of the impact of air resistance on high-speed projectiles." "By measuring the influence of wind and air," "Robins was able to achieve an epoch-making improvement in the accuracy of field guns." "It didn't take Frederick the Great long to commission a German translation of Robins's New principles Of Gunnery." "The translator Leonhard Euler couldn't resist improving on the work by adding a comprehensive appendix of tables determining the velocity, range, maximum altitude and flight time for a projectile fired at a given muzzle velocity and elevation angle." "The killer app of science had given the West a truly lethal weapon - accurate artillery." "But this baIIistics revolution was something from which the Ottomans were largely excluded." "Only slowly, in the course of the 1 8th century, did it dawn on the Ottomans that they had to get up to speed with the Western revolutions in science and in government." "And one obvious way to do that was to start publishing and reading books, instead of relying on the traditional scribbIings of the calligraphers." "Among the first Ottoman printers was Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Ottoman official and polymath born in Transylvania." "In 1 731 , Muteferrika presented to sultan Mahmud I this book, his Rational Bases For The Politics Of Nations, and in it he asked the question that's haunted muslims ever since." ""Why is it," he asked, "that the Christian nations," ""which used to be so weak compared with the muslim nations," ""now dominate so many lands," ""and even inflict defeats on the once victorious Ottoman armies?"" "well, Muteferrika's answer to the question ranges pretty widely." "It covers, for example, the Dutch and english parliamentary systems, the Christian conquest of the New world and the Far East, and he also makes the point that whereas the Ottomans ruled on the basis of sharia law, religious law," "in Europe, he says, "The laws are invented by reason."" "The message is really clear." "The Ottoman Empire has to get the scientific revolution and the enlightenment if it's to remain credible as a great power." "Books alone wouldn't suffice." "Military reform meant importing Western expertise." "A French officer of Hungarian origin, Francois de Tott, was brought in to oversee the construction of new defences around the capital." "Boating his way along the Bosphorus, de Tott noticed that many of the fortifications were quite wrongly located." "Any enemy ship would have been completely out of range." "The Ottomans might as well have been firing blanks." "In his memoirs, de Tott was scathing about the Ottomans, calling their castles "more like the ruins of a siege" ""than preparations for a defence"." "Determined to modernise the Sultan's antiquated armed forces, de Tott started a course in mathematical science for the navy." "He built a new foundry for the manufacture of howitzers, and encouraged the creation of mobile artillery units." "Even the Ottoman army had to march to a brand-new beat." "Just imagine arriving here in istanbul in the mid-19th century." "You'd probably have expected to be greeted by those terrifying drums that put the fear of allah and Mohammed in the defenders of Vienna back in 1683." "But instead, the sound that would have greeted your ears would have been composed by Giuseppe Donizetti, who'd been imported from italy to compose a special ItaIian-styIe and rather operatic national anthem for the Ottoman Empire." "(ANTHEM PLAYS)" "The most enduring symbol of the era of reform was built by Sultan Abdulmecid I." "A fluent French speaker," "Abdulmecid was determined to emulate Western civilization in every respect." "So, he moved from the cushioned comforts of the Topkapi Palace, the ancestral home of the Sultans, to a new custom-built Westernised seat of government, the Dolmabahce Palace." "Built between 1 843 and 1 856, the Dolmabahce Palace has no fewer than 285 rooms, 44 halls, and one spectacular crystal staircase." "1 4 tonnes of gold leaf were used to gild the palace ceilings from which hung a grand total of 36 chandeliers." "The grandest room is this, the Muayede lounge." "It has the largest one-piece carpet in the world and a chandelier that weighs over four tons." "This place is so wildly over the top, it's like a cross between Grand central Station and a stage set at the Paris Opera." "But it shows just how far the Ottomans were prepared to go to imitate the ways of the West." "This extraordinary clock tells you all you need to know." "It's not just a clock, actually, it's also a thermometer, a barometer and a calendar." "And it was a gift from the Khedive of Egypt to the sultan." "It's even got a lovely Arabic inscription on it," ""May your every minute be worth an hour" ""and your every hour, a hundred years."" "It looks like a masterpiece of oriental technology, except for one small thing - it was made in Austria by wilhelm Kirsch." "As Kirsch's clock perfectly illustrates, the mere facade of Westernisation, no matter how impressive, was no substitute for a home-grown Ottoman modernisation." "The Ottomans still didn't really get it, because if they were serious about catching up with the West they needed so much more than just a Western-styIe palace." "They needed a new constitution, a new alphabet, a whole new state." "And the fact that they ultimately ended up getting all of these things was thanks in very large part to one man." "His name was Kemal Ataturk." "His mission was to be Turkey's Frederick the Great." "For six centuries, the Christian West and the Ottoman Empire in the Muslim East had been locked in conflict." "Now, under the rule of Kemal Ataturk in the early 20th century, that conflict would finally come to an end." "For centuries, Ataturk argued," "Turks had been walking from the East in the direction of the West." "Now, under his leadership, they would finally reach their destination." "Here on the banks of the Bosphorus," "East would meet West not just geographically, but culturally." "Central to the western reorientation of Turkey was the introduction of a secular form of government." "No longer would religion be allowed to dominate the political arena." "There would be secular laws for a secular state." "Ataturk's idea was that you couldn't drag Turkey into the modern world as long as islam played such a dominant role in public life." "What he wanted to do was to scythe religion ruthlessly away from politics to create a truly secular state." "Of course, that whole notion of the separation of Church and State was itself a very Western idea." "To give impetus to scientific research," "Ataturk created a new Western-style University of Istanbul." "And one of the first scientific facilities he built was an observatory." "Whereas Taqi al-Din's observatory had been destroyed under pressure from the Muslim clergy in the 1 6th century, now, at last, Turkish scientists could do their work unimpeded by religion." "Scientific advance and military power went hand in hand in Ataturk's mind." "Science, he argued, was the only true guide in life." "Here at last was a Turkish leader who really got it, and it was enough to transform Turkey into the modern nation state we know today." "What it couldn't do was to salvage the Ottomans' most explosive legacy - their Empire in the holy Land." "When the British commander Edmund Allenby marched into Jerusalem on 1 1th December 1 91 7, it marked the end of Ottoman rule in the Holy Land." "The question was, who would rule there now?" "This is the Jaffa Gate, which AIIenby walked through in 191 7." "Now, in order to defeat the Turks and end their 500-year control of jerusalem, the British had to make promises to the sultan's internal enemies." "To the Arabs they promised independent kingdoms." "To the Jews they promised a national home." "It was obvious long before the British left this place in 1948 that these two promises were fundamentally incompatible." " (INDISTINCT SPEECH OVER RADIO) - (RADIO BLEEPS)" "Jerusalem today is the modern equivalent of Vienna in 1 683 - a fortified city on the frontier of Western Civilization." "Founded in 1 948 as a secular state by Jews but not exclusively for Jews, Israel is unquestionably a Western outpost but it's a beleaguered one." "This is part of the security wall that divides JerusaIem, which israel regards as its capital, from the occupied West Bank." "Now, it's not exactly a popular structure round the world, but when you spend time in israel you can see why people feel insecure." "They feel threatened by Hamas in Gaza, by HezboIIah in neighbouring Lebanon." "They feel threatened by Syria, by the muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, by Iran, not forgetting Saudi Arabia." "Even Turkey has turned away recently from the secular legacy of Ataturk to embrace IsIamism and, some would say, a neo-Ottoman foreign policy." "As a result, many people in Israel feel as threatened as the Viennese in 1 683." "They feel besieged by an implacable religious foe." "Here too, however, they have the killer app of modern science to keep their enemies at bay." "As an authentically Western society, Israel is at the cutting edge of scientific and technological innovation." "This company near tel Aviv is pioneering a new network of electronic cars that will be able to change batteries as easily, if not more easily, than you now fill your car with fuel." "In 2008 alone, Israeli inventors applied to register 9,591 new patents." "The equivalent figure for Iran was 50." "(CAR HORN) Israel has more scientists and engineers per capita than any other country." "The lesson of history is that a small country can overcome numerous adversaries provided it has science on its side." "Think of Frederick the Great's Prussia." "Yet today the scientific gap between West and East shows signs of closing." "Until now, Israel has been the sole nuclear power in the Middle East." "But today, Iran is closing in on its long-cherished dream of owning the ultimate weapon of mass destruction." "More than three centuries after the Siege of Vienna, the Islamic world is finally acknowledging that there's no power without brain power." "From Tehran to Riyadh, to the private Saudi-financed Muslim girls' school I visited last year in west London, the taboo against educating women is receding." "The majority of these girls at the King Fahad Academy in Acton in west London are wearing headscarves, as their religion requires." "This is a school that offers an explicitly IsIamic-based education but, as you can see, that doesn't stop them studying the principles of biochemistry, complete with Bunsen burners." "The key question is, how far the West today is still capable of maintaining the scientific lead on which, among other things, its military superiority has for so long been based." "is this just another killer app that the rest have succeeded in downloading?" "Yet, as we'll see in the next episode of civilization, science is only one of the six killer applications that set the West apart from the rest." "The Iranians may eventually be able to copy our most lethal weaponry but what about our democracy?"