Secrets of the Dark Ages

Dublin, Ireland is much more than a city of pubs and pints. Pagan burial tombs, subterranean defense tunnels, and mysterious burial crypts line the underground below the rolling hills.

The Knights Templar defended the Holy Land for nearly 200 years before falling from power. Explore the legend of the Knights Templar and learn the secrets behind such landmarks as Temple Mount and the city of Tortosa.

From the swords of barbarian hordes to the guns of the Spanish Empire, Europe's darkest days lasted 1,000 years. Beneath the streets, another world was being carved out.

New research allows us to journey back to the 13th-century world of William Wallace. Traveling down secret pathways beneath Scotland, rediscover a surprisingly sophisticated culture that Wallace died to protect.

A medieval symbol of power, religion, and authority, the broadsword's final mold resulted from thousands of years of technological advances. Peter Woodward describes the weapon's history.

Are King Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, and the Knights of the Round Table real or legend?

For nearly two centuries, the Knights Templar was the medieval world's most powerful order, a fearsome and unstoppable Crusader militia. Explore the Templar's origin, rise to power, and eventual downfall.

The failure of wealthy crusaders to win back the Holy Land by the end of the 13th century prompted two 12-year-old boys to begin their own Children's Crusade to save Christendom.

It begins like the common cold. Then fever, swelling, and coughing of blood. From the Pope's palace to the humble huts of medieval peasants, watch as people live and die in the unforgiving grip of the Plague.

In 1095, Pope Urban II launched an unprecedented military campaign to seize back Jerusalem from Muslim hands. Over 60,000 Christian warriors would spend years journeying and fighting to reclaim the Holy City in the name of God.

In 1099 the Crusaders took Jerusalem in the bloodiest of battles, wrenching it back from the Muslims for the first time in 400 years. But over the decades that followed, the Islamic world dreamed of fighting back.

Under the cloak of the Dark Ages, people like Charlemagne, St. Benedict, and the Empress Theodora helped to bridge the gap of civilization between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance.

At the end of the 8th century, fearsome warriors from Denmark and Norway raided and plundered Western Europe's coastal monasteries, later constructing magnificent ships to sail up rivers and sack inland towns.