Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

CHAPTER 10: PAGANS AND CHRISTIANS, MEDITERRANEAN AND GERMANIC TRADITIONS

1. Ferrill, Op. cit., page 12.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., page 15.

4. Ibid., page 17.

5. Turner, The Great Cultural Traditions, Op. cit., page 270.

6. Ibid., pages 270ff. Bauer, Op. cit., page 57, discusses a ‘Gospel of the Hebrews’.

7. Turner, Op. cit., page 273.

8. Ibid., pages 275–276.

9. Ibid., page 278. This embarrassing fact may also explain why the gospel of Mark transfers the responsibility for Jesus’ execution from Pontius Pilate to the Jewish leaders. Ibid. Some modern scholars believe that Brandon exaggerates the meaning of the term ‘zealot’ – that they were more bandits than full-scale revolutionaries.

10. Ibid., page 279. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 36, considers the four brothers of Jesus.

11. Freeman, Op. cit., page 108.

12. Rowland, Op. cit., page 195.

13. Turner, Op. cit., page 280.

14. Rowland, Op. cit., page 216. See Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 23ff, for Paul’s conversion and the importance of Antioch in early Christianity.

15. Turner, Op. cit., page 317.

16. Ibid., page 318.

17. Rowland, Op. cit., pages 220ff.

18. Turner, Op. cit., page 374.

19. Ibid., page 375. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 26 for the details.

20. Freeman, Op. cit., page 121.

21. Ibid., page 119.

22. Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick, A History of Pagan Europe, London: Routledge, 1995, page 53.

23. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 109.

24. Ibid., page 110.

25. Jones and Pennick, Op. cit., page 55.

26. Ibid., page 57.

27. Ibid., page 58.

28. Lane Fox, Op. cit., pages 168ff; Moynahan, Op. cit., page 29, for the links between Stoicism and Christianity.

29. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 94.

30. Ibid., page 30, but see Chapter 25 of this book.

31. Ibid., page 299.

32. Another idea, not exactly anathema to pagans, but seen by them as irrational, was that of angels. These divine presences had apparently been conceived in late Judaism (among the Essene sects at Qumran, who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example), and Paul had made much of them on his travels. They appeared at times of crisis, to help believers, and so the early years of the church were especially favourable circumstances.

33. See Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, London and New York: Viking, 1986, chapter 9, pages 419ff, for the violence of this time.

34. Jones and Pennick, Op. cit., page 62. Bauer, Op. cit., pages 24f.

35. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, Op. cit., page 567.

36. Turner, Op. cit., page 377. See Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 70ff, for the different tortures used on martyrs and the different ways they devised for being crucified.

37. It should not be overlooked that his immediate predecessor, Galerius, had issued an edict of toleration in 311 on his deathbed. Many consider this, rather than the conversion of Constantine, the turning-point in religious history. Jones and Pennick, Op. cit., pages 64–65. In 311 the same man reported how the people of several cities had approached him to plead for a renewed persecution of the Christians. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, Op. cit., pages 612–613.

38. Jones and Pennick, Op. cit., page 65. Bauer, Op. cit., page 45, for the role of Julius Africanus and that of the early bishops. And see Moynahan, Op. cit., page 104, for Julius’ role in specifying holy sites, such as that for Noah’s Ark.

39. Turner, Op. cit., page 1054.

40. Ibid., page 1057. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 76, for the problems faced by Diocletian and Valerian.

41. Turner, Op. cit., page 1059.

42. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, Op. cit., pages 613–614. Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 91–93, for a vivid description of the battle of the Milvian bridge.

43. Jones and Pennick, Op. cit., pages 68–69.

44. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, Op. cit., pages 150–151.

45. Jones and Pennick, Op. cit., page 75.

46. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, Op. cit., page 670.

47. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 147.

48. The number seven was chosen because that was the number of sub-leaders appointed by the Apostles in Jerusalem. Turner, Op. cit., pages 1070–1071.

49. Ibid., page 1075.

50. Ibid., page 1076.

51. However, he was forced to surrender church vessels and gold. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 154.

52. Turner, Op. cit., page 1080.

53. Ibid., and Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 129ff.

54. Turner, Op. cit., page 1080.

55. Monks were not allowed to wash and had to cover their heads at meals, because Pachomius thought that eating was ‘an unbecoming act’. Ibid. See Moynahan, Op. cit., page 133, for Pachomius and his method for the prevention of fraud.

56. Norman Cantor, The Civilisation of the Middle Ages, New York: HarperCollins, 1963/1993, page 149.

57. Ibid., page 149.

58. Turner, Op. cit., page 1095, and Moynahan, Op. cit., page 44 for early Christian writing.

59. Turner, Op. cit., page 1096.

60. Ibid., page 1097.

61. Ibid., page 1104. See Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 115–116, for the Montanist beliefs about diet.

62. The ‘Muratorian Fragment’, so called after its discoverer Muratori (1672–1750), was written at about this time and its layout suggests that Roman congregations had by then long regarded the canon as divinely inspired.

63. Turner, Op. cit., page 1112.

64. Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 56–57.

65. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 113.

66. Ibid., page 118. See Moynahan, Op. cit., page 46, for Origen’s doubts about Paul’s authorship of ‘his’ epistles.

67. Turner, Op. cit., page 1114.

68. Ibid.

69. Barrow, Op. cit., page 364.

70. Colish, Op. cit., page 22.

71. St Augustine, Confessions, London: Penguin Books, 1961, introduction by R. S. Pine-Coffin, page 11. Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 144ff, for a vivid picture of the young man, with his hard-drinking father and his boisterousness.

72. He had a further weakness for being liked, a fault (as he saw it) which led him to rob an orchard as a boy and as an adult to admit to crimes he had not committed.

73. Colish, Op. cit., page 28.

74. Ibid. In his later book she carried this thinking further. In On Order, for example, he considers two types of evil – natural and moral. An example of a natural evil is an earthquake. It is evil because innocent people suffer. At the same time, however, earthquakes in the long run enhance the fertility of the soil, so they are also good. This is not so much an explanation as an explaining away: the residual Neo-platonist in Augustine was alive and well. Moral evil was more difficult, and he admitted as much. Some of it could be explained away – two examples he gives are sewers and prostitutes, both of which are evil in the short term, but both of which are needed in the wider scheme, to maintain order. But Augustine always had a problem with, for example, murder. He couldn’t explain that away, and he couldn’t explain why God allowed it. See Moynahan, Op. cit., page 149, for a discussion of Augustine’s idea of predestination.

75. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 126.

76. Ibid., page 135.

77. Ibid., page 142.

78. Colish, Op. cit., page 29.

79. Ibid.

80. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., pages 139ff.

81. Ibid., page 145. But see Moynahan, Op. cit., page 149 for what he says is Augustine’s denial of original sin.

82. Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 192ff, for Gregory’s administrative genius.

83. Colish, Op. cit., page 40.

84. The full moon shows the glory of perfection, to which man must aspire, and which only Jesus attained. Accurate dating of future festivals was also important because early Christians believed that to celebrate Easter too soon was sacrilegious. To do so meant you thought you could be ‘saved without the assistance of God’s grace’, hubris on a colossal scale. To celebrate too late was also sacrilegious – it meant you didn’t care, were not assiduous in the profession of your faith. The date of Easter was thus pivotal, and many other feasts depended on it. Richards, Op. cit., pages 345ff.

85. Ibid., page 350.

86. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 57, for details about the early variations in the celebration of Easter.

87. Ibid., pages 1–2.

88. There was even a tradition that the rules of the computus had been disclosed to St Pachomius, the fourth-century Egyptian monk, who had been visited by an angel. See Bauer, Op. cit., pages 152–154 for details.

89. Richards, Op. cit., page 350. Regarding the changing nature of Christianity, see, for example: Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981/1982; and R. A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press/Canto, 1990/1998.

90. Ferrill, Op. cit., pages 17–18.

91. Ibid., page 18.

92. Ibid.

93. Ibid., page 17.

94. Ibid.

95. Arno Borst, Medieval Worlds: Barbarians, Heretics and Artists in the Middle Ages, London: Polity, 1991, page 3.

96. Ibid.

97. Ibid., page 5.

98. Ibid.

99. Ibid.

100. Ibid., page 6. See Moynahan, Op. cit., page 152, for St Augustine’s reaction.

101. Borst, Op. cit., page 6.

102. D. Herlihy, Medieval Culture and Society, London: Macmillan, 1968, page xi.

103. William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire, New York and London: Little Brown, 1992, page 3.

104. Ibid., page 5.

105. Ibid.

106. Ibid., page 7.

107. Ibid., page 15.

108. Peter S. Wells, The Barbarians Speak, Princeton, New Jersey and London: Princeton University Press, 1999, page 100.

109. Ibid., page 103.

110. P. J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, Princeton, New Jersey and London: Princeton University Press, 2002, page 64.

111. Wells, Op. cit., pages 107–108.

112. Ibid., page 108.

113. Warwick Bray and David Tramp, The Penguin Dictionary of Archaeology, London: Penguin Books, 1970, page 130.

114. Geary, Op. cit., page 73.

115 Ibid., page 79. See Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 191ff, for a vivid account of pagan conversions to Christianity.

116. Geary, Op. cit., page 81.

117. Wells, Op. cit., pages 116–117.

118. Ibid., page 118.

119. Ibid., pages 118 and 126.

120. Ibid., page 123 – see map there.

121. Ibid., page 114.

122. Jones and Pennick, Op. cit., page 81.

123. Ibid.

124. Wells, Op. cit., pages 163ff.

125. Ibid., page 185.

126. Jones and Pennick, Op. cit., pages 120ff.

127. Wells, Op. cit., page 256.

128. Geary, Op. cit., page 93.

129. Ibid., page 109.

130. Borst, Op. cit., page 6. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 197, describes pagan and Christian practices that existed side-by-side ‘for many centuries’.

131. Borst, Op. cit., pages 6–7.

CHAPTER 11: THE NEAR-DEATH OF THE BOOK, THE BIRTH OF CHRISTIAN ART

1. Joseph Vogt, The Decline of Rome, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967, page 51.

2. Ibid., page 183.

3. Ibid., page 185. Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 150–151.

4. Vogt, Op. cit., page 187.

5. Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001, page 137.

6. Vogt, Op. cit., page 188.

7. Ibid., page 198.

8. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 153fn.

9. Vogt, Op. cit., page 236.

10. Ibid., page 234.

11. Reynolds and Wilson, Op. cit., page 48.

12. Anne Glynn-Jones, Holding Up a Mirror, London: Century, 1996, page 201.

13. Ibid., pages 201–202.

14. Freeman, Op. cit., page 321.

15. Richard E. Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages, New York and London: Harcourt, 2003, pages 77–78.

16. Freeman, Op. cit., page 325.

17. Ibid., page 327.

18. Ibid., pages 322–323.

19. Vogt, Op. cit., page 202. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 101.

20. Freeman, Op. cit., page 323.

21. Ibid.

22. Vogt, Op. cit., page 203.

23. Casson, Op. cit., page 139.

24. Ibid., page 140.

25. Reynolds and Wilson, Op. cit., page 53.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., page 59. See also: Michael Angold, Byzantium: The Bridge from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001, pages 138–139, for the schools of Constantinople.

28. Nigel Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium, London: Duckworth, 1983, page 50.

29. Ibid., page 51.

30. Ibid.

31. Colish, Op. cit., page 43.

32. Cantor, Op. cit., page 82.

33. Colish, Op. cit., page 43.

34. Ibid., page 48.

35. Cantor, Op. cit., page 82. Angold, Op. cit., page 98.

36. Colish, Op. cit., page 51. Charles Freeman, personal communication, 30 June 2004.

37. Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilisation, Op. cit., page 288. See also below, Chapter 12, note 47.

38. Reynolds and Wilson, Op. cit., page 63.

39. Ibid., page 65.

40. Ibid., page 66. Bischoff, Op. cit., page 183.

41. Reynolds and Wilson, Op. cit., page 67. Angold, Op. cit., pages 89–90, for the survival of some manuscripts.

42. Reynolds and Wilson, Op. cit., page 68.

43. Ibid., page 61. Angold, Op. cit., page 124, for the role of Bardas. See Bischoff, Op. cit., pages 97, 150ff, 170 and 176 for abbreviations.

44. Reynolds and Wilson, Op. cit., page 60.

45. Warren T. Treadgold, The Nature of the Bibliotheca of Photius, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, Center for Byzantine Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 1980, page 4. See Angold, Op. cit., page 124, for a perspective on Photius.

46. Cyril Mango, Byzantium, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980, page 62.

47. Ibid., pages 71–72.

48. Ibid., page 80. See also Angold, Op. cit., page 70. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 96, says there were 4,388 buildings of ‘architectural merit’ in the city’s heyday.

49. Lawrence Nees, Early Medieval Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, page 31.

50. Mango, Op. cit., page 258. For Diocletian, see: John Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, London: Penguin, 1970/1979, page 14.

51. Mango, Op. cit. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 96.

52. Mango, Op. cit., page 259.

53. Nees, Op. cit., page 52. David Talbot Rice, Byzantine Art, London: Penguin Books, 1935/1062, page 84, considers Ravenna superior to Rome. For purple codices, see Beckwith, Op. cit., pages 42–43.

54. Mango, Op. cit., page 261. Angold, Op. cit., pages 35f, for imperial themes in Christian art.

55. Nees, Op. cit., page 52. Dominic Janes, Gold and Gold in Late Antiquity, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

56. A word here about Christian art in books. The development of the codex, between the second and the fourth centuries, was, as we have seen, at least partly associated with the rise of Christianity, the codex being harder to forge than the scroll. The earliest illustrated biblical manuscript is that known as the Quedlinburg Itala, a much-damaged version of the book of Samuel. No less a person than Jerome himself, the creator of the Vulgate, criticised the production of luxuriously illustrated books, suggesting they were a new phenomenon. The Quedlinburg Itala had illustrations with loosely-painted atmospheric backdrops, and with shadows on the ground, each scene being painted in a small square frame. There was nothing like this in antiquity, says Lawrence Nees (except illustrated parchment codices of Homer and Virgil), which suggests that these illustrated books were central to Christian society and probably helped it become even more a religion of the book. Nees, Op. cit., pages 94–96.

57. Ibid., page 141. Beckwith, Op. cit., page 59, for Justinian.

58. Ibid., page 142. See Talbot Rice, Op. cit., page 147, for the ‘golden ages’ of Byzantine art, and page 149 for the schools of icon painting. Beckwith, Op. cit., pages 125–126.

59. Nees, Op. cit., page 143.

60. Mango, Op. cit., page 264.

61. Nees, Op. cit., page 146. Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 210ff; Angold, Op. cit., pages 70ff; Talbot Rice, Op. cit., pages 22ff. Beckwith, Op. cit., page 168.

62. Cantor, Op. cit., page 173. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 211. Beckwith, Op. cit., page 169.

63. Nees, Op. cit., page 149.

64. Beckwith, Op. cit., pages 151 and 158. Nor should we overlook the fact that the iconoclasts did not object to the use of human figures in non-Christian art. Cyril Mango says that the Milion arch in Constantinople, for example, marked the start of a great road that crossed the entire Balkans. This arch was dominated by an elaborate sculpture of the emperor’s favourite charioteer. No one thought of attacking this. Mango, Op. cit., page 266.

65. Ibid., page 267. See Moynahan, Op. cit., page 211, for how the iconodules were themselves mocked.

66. Mango, Op. cit., pages 271–272. See Talbot Rice, Op. cit., page 151, for painting techniques. Beckwith, Op. cit., page 191.

67. Mango, Op. cit., page 278, for the ‘intense aura’. See Angold, Op. cit., for a similar interpretation. Beckwith, Op. cit., page 346.

CHAPTER 12: FALSAFAH AND AL-JABR IN BAGHDAD AND TOLEDO

1. Philip K. Hitti, A History of the Arabs, London: Macmillan, 1970, page 90.

2. Ibid., page 25.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., page 91.

5. In fact, in certain circumstances it was more. The Arabian poet, the shaʾir, was understood to be privy to secret knowledge, not all of which was good and some of which might come from demons. As a result, the eloquent poet could bring misfortune on the enemy at the same time that he inspired his own tribe to valour. Even in peacetime he had a role, Philip Hitti says, as a sceptic to subvert the ‘claims and aims’ of demagogues. See Angold, Op. cit., page 60, for the place of poetry in Arab society.

6. Some of the pre-Islamic poets are household names in the Arabic world, even today. The love poems of Imru’ al-Qays and the moral maxims of Zuhayr are probably better-known than most. Apart from poets, high prestige also attached to the orator (khatib) and the rawi, who related the legends of bygone ages. Their stature dominated that of the scribes who became significant only after the rise of Islam. Hitti, Op. cit., page 56.

7. G. F. von Grunebaum, Classical Islam, London: Allen & Unwin, 1970, page 24.

8. Hitti, Op. cit., pages 64–65.

9. Ibid., page 112.

10. Anwar G. Chejne, The Arabic Language: Its Role in History, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969, pages 7–13. Hitti, Op. cit., page 123.

11. Bernard Lewis, The Middle East, London: Phoenix, 1995, page 53.

12. Hitti, Op. cit., page 118. See Angold, Op. cit., page 61, for a discussion of the qiblah.

13. Lewis, Op. cit., page 53.

14. Hitti, Op. cit., page 128.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., page 129.

17. Originally, Allah asked to be prayed to fifty times a day, but Muhammad reached a compromise when he was in heaven on his nocturnal journey there.

18. Hitti, Op. cit., page 132. The prohibition on alcohol, incidentally, may not have been insisted on from the beginning. One of the chapters in the Qurʾan contains a suggestion that it was introduced early on to prevent disturbances during the Friday service.

19. Ibid., page 124. For Islamic judgement see: Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, page 64.

20. Hitti, Op. cit., pages 124–126.

21. Chejne, Op. cit., page 25.

22. Ibid., page 28.

23. Ibid., page 356.

24. Lewis, Op. cit., page 54. Angold, Op. cit., page 60, on the battles for the caliphate.

25. Lewis, Op. cit., page 64.

26. Ibid., page 65.

27. Ibid., page 68. Angold, Op. cit., pages 57–59, for the role of coins.

28. Hitti, Op. cit., page 242. See Angold, Op. cit., pages 61ff, for the Umayyads and, in particular, their architectural achievements.

29. Hitti, Op. cit., page 393.

30. Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Beauty in Arabic Culture, Princeton, New Jersey and London: Markus Wiener/Princeton University Press, 1998/1999, page 126. Angold, Op. cit., page 62, for the Dome of the Rock and page 65 for the Great Mosque of Damascus.

31. Behrens-Abouseif, Op. cit., page 124.

32. Ibid., page 132.

33. Lewis, Op. cit., page 37. Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991, pages 56ff.

34. Behrens-Abouseif, Op. cit., page 148.

35. Angold, Op. cit., page 67. Calligraphy was important in all walks of life, political as well as religious, and many objects were adorned with writing or, in some cases, simply with beautiful letters which had no intrinsic meaning relevant to the context. Two forms of calligraphic script in particular developed in tenth-century Baghdad. These were Kufic and Nashki, the first of which emerged in a religious tradition, and the latter in a secular, bureaucratic tradition. Kufic tends now to be used in traditional religious contexts, whereas Nashki is used for historical purposes, often against richly decorated backgrounds. Hourani, Op. cit., page 56.

36. Apart from its prohibitions on the visual depiction of the human form, Islam was also inherently hostile to music. In yet another hadith, Muhammad described the musical instrument as ‘the devil’s muezzin’, the means by which he called people to worship him. Despite this, the Umayyads did patronise music at their court, to the extent that ‘four great singers’ are still remembered, one of whom, Ibn Surayj (c. 634–726), is credited with being the man who introduced the baton for conducting musical performances. Hitti, Op. cit., page 275.

37. Lewis, Op. cit., page 75.

38. Ibid., page 77.

39. Hitti, Op. cit., page 301.

40. Ibid., page 303.

41. In 988, al-Nadim composed al-Fihrist, a sort of compendium of books then available in this city and this gives some idea of the range of ideas and activities then current. He refers to manuscripts devoted to such subjects as hypnotism, sword-swallowing, glass-chewing and juggling. But there were more serious subjects too.

42. Howard R. Turner, Science in Medieval Islam, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995, pages 28–29 and 132–133.

43. Boyer, Op. cit., pages 211ff.

44. P. M. Holt et al. (editors), The Cambridge History of Islam, volume 2, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970, page 743.

45. Hugh Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004, pages 246 and 255. William Wightman, The Growth of Scientific Ideas, Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1950, page 322.

46. Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, London: Routledge, 1998, page 132. Kennedy, Op. cit., pages 258–259.

47. The translation of Greek, Persian and Indian authors was encouraged by the introduction of paper. This was a Chinese invention, probably from the first century AD. According to tradition, paper reached the Middle East in 751 after the Arabs had captured some Chinese prisoners at the battle of Talas (in modern Kyrgystan, 150 miles north-east of Tashkent). On this account, the prisoners taught their conquerors how to manufacture the new product and their lives were spared. This is now thought unlikely, however, as it appears that Chinese painters, weavers and goldsmiths were living in Kufa, in southern Iraq, at the time of the Arab conquest. Almost certainly they were familiar with papermaking as well. But it doesn’t change the point that this was another important idea/invention that flourished in Baghdad having come from outside. The ancient Arabic word for paper, kaghdad, is derived from Chinese. In Baghdad, there was an area of the city known as the Suq al-warraqin, the Stationer’s Market: lining its streets were more than a hundred shops selling paper. Baghdad was an important centre of papermaking and, for the Byzantines at least, it was the best. They referred to paper as bagdatixon and the standard size, 73 cm × 110 cm, was known as a ‘Baghdadi sheet’. There were many different types, usually named after rulers: Talhi paper, Nui paper, Tahiri paper. Paper was the new technology and the Arabs were the masters. Jonathan Bloom, Paper Before Print, Op. cit. See also Gutas, Op. cit., page 13.

48. Howard R. Turner, Science in Medieval Islam, Op. cit., page 133.

49. Ibid., page 139.

50. Hitti, Op. cit., pages 364–365.

51. His book on this subject went through forty editions between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Turner, Op. cit., page 135.

52. He was born in the ninth century in the central Asian region of Bukhara and, early on in his career – to great acclaim – cured the local ruler of an illness. This gave him access to that ruler’s formidable library which, combined with Ibn Sina’s phenomenal memory, turned him into one of the most impressive synthesisers of all time.

53. Turner, Op. cit., page 136. See: Wightman, Op. cit., pages 165 and 335–336 for a chronology of translation. Ibn Sina’s grave, at Hamadan, in Iran, is now an impressive monument. These two were the greatest doctors but far from being the only ones: Hunayn Ibn Ishaq’s ninth-century treatise on the eye opened the way for modern optics; al-Majusi discovered the capillary system of the blood in the tenth century; and in the twelfth Ibn al-Nafis described the circulation of the blood between the heart and lungs, some centuries before William Harvey discovered the greater, or complete circulation (see Chapter 23). Turner, Op. cit., page 137.

54. Boyer, A History of Mathematics, Op. cit., page 227. See also: Bernal, Op. cit., volume 1, pages 275ff.

55. Boyer, Op. cit., page 227.

56. Ibid., page 229.

57. Ibid., page 237.

58. Boyer, Op. cit., page 234.

59. Turner, Op. cit., page 190.

60. Holt et al. (editors), Op. cit., page 777. See: Bernal, Op. cit., volume 1, page 278 for optics and the beginnings of scientific chemistry.

61. Philip K. Hitti, Makers of Arab History, London: Macmillan, 1969, page 197.

62. Ibid., page 205.

63. Ibid., page 218. And see: Hourani, Op. cit., page 173, for further discussion of Ibn Sina’s idea of the soul. For other Islamic ideas about the soul, and its relation to the body, see: Smith and Haddad, Op. cit., pages 40ff.

64. Hitti, Op. cit., pages 393–394. The current phrase ‘suicide bomber’, as applied to the many outrages perpetrated in particular in the Middle East, is strictly speaking inaccurate. Suicide is a mortal sin in Islam, as it is in Catholic Christianity. But a martyr’s death guarantees the faithful a place in paradise. See Smith and Haddad, Op. cit., page ix.

65. Hitti, Op. cit., page 408.

66. Ibid., page 410.

67. Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, page 98.

68. Hitti, Op. cit., page 414.

69. Hourani, Op. cit., pages 63–64.

70. Hitti, Op. cit., page 429.

71. Hourani, Op. cit., page 65.

72. Hitti, Op. cit., page 434. See also: Bernal, Op. cit., volume 1, page 275.

73. Hourani, Op. cit., pages 167–171.

74. Holt et al. (editors), Op. cit., page 527. See also: Ivan van Sertina, The Golden Age of the Moor (a special issue of the Journal of African Civilisations, volume 11, Fall 1991), New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Transaction Publishers 1992.

75. Holt et al. (editors), Op. cit., page 531. And see Hourani, Op. cit., page 193 for new forms of poetry developed in Cordova.

76. Hitti, Op. cit., page 252, quoting Franz Rosenthal, Ibn Khaldun, The Maqaddimah: An Introduction to History, volume 1, New York: Pantheon Books, 1958, page 6.

77. Cordova was the biggest university but it wasn’t the only one. Similar institutions were set up at Seville, Malaga and Granada. The core departments were astronomy, mathematics, medicine, theology and law, though at Granada philosophy and chemistry were offered as well. Books were plentiful owing to the spread of papermaking, imported into Spain from Morocco in the middle of the twelfth century. (The English word ‘ream’ derives from the Arabic rizmah, meaning ‘bundle’.)

78. Boyer, Op. cit., pages 254–271.

79. Ibid., page 254.

80. Holt et al. (editors), Op. cit., page 579.

81. Ibid., page 583.

82. Philip K. Hitti, Islam: A Way of Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, page 134.

83. Hourani, Op. cit., page 175. See also: Bernal, Op. cit., volume 1, page 275 on ‘the two truths’. For Islamic ideas on paradise see: Smith and Haddad, Op. cit., pages 87–89.

84. Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, Op. cit., pages 110 and 120.

85. Holt et al. (editors), Op. cit., page 854.

86. Ibid., page 855.

87. Bernal, Op. cit., volume 1, pages 303f. It was this translation which produced the English word ‘sine’. The Hindus had originally given the name jiva to the half-chord in trigonometry. The Arabs had taken this over, as jiba. However, in Arabic there is also a word jaib, meaning ‘bay’ or ‘inlet’. When Robert of Chester came to translate the technical term, jiba, he seems to have confused it with jaib, possibly because in Arabic vowels were omitted. He therefore used the Latin word for bay or inlet – sinus.

Adelard of Bath was also one of those who introduced Latin readers to Arab-Hindu numerals. These caught on surprisingly slowly, with many people still using the nine Greek alphabetical letters, plus a special zero symbol. One reason for the slow adoption of the Hindu system was that its advantages were not so apparent while people still used the abacus. There was in fact keen competition between the ‘abacists’ and the ‘al-gorists’ for several centuries. It was only with the wider spread of literacy that the advantages of Arabic-Hindu numerals became clear (in pen-and-paper calculations, rather than with an abacus). The algorists didn’t finally triumph until the sixteenth century. Boyer, Op. cit., pages 252–253.

CHAPTER 13: HINDU NUMERALS, SANSKRIT, VEDANTA

1. Basham (editor), A Cultural History of India, Op. cit., page 48.

2. John Keay, India: A History, London: HarperCollins, 2001, page 138. Romila Thapar, A History of India, London: Penguin Books, 1966, volume 1, pages 136ff.

3. Keay, Op. cit., pages 156–157. See Thapar, Op. cit., page 146, who says that Chinese Buddhist pilgrims mentioned them.

4. Keay, Op. cit., page 157.

5. Ibid., page 136.

6. T. Burrow, The Sanskrit Language, London: Faber & Faber, 1955, page 64. See also: Thapar, Op. cit., page 58.

7. Burrow, Op. cit., page 65.

8. Keay, Op. cit., page 139.

9. Ibid., page 145. See also: Thapar, Op. cit., page 140.

10. Keay, Op. cit., page 145.

11. Guilds even acted as bankers, lending money on occasion to the royal court.

12. Keay, Op. cit., page 145.

13. Ibid., page 146.

14. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 162.

15. Burrow, Op. cit., page 43.

16. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 162; see also Keay, Op. cit., page 61 and Thapar, Op. cit., page 123.

17. Burrow, Op. cit., page 58.

18. Ibid., page 2.

19. Ibid., page 50.

20. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 170.

21. Keay, Op. cit., page 151.

22. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 172.

23. Keay, Op. cit., page 152.

24. Ibid. Inside India itself, the development (or non-development) of Sanskrit led to certain anomalies. In Kalidasa’s plays, for example, there was a theatrical convention that servants, people belonging to the lower castes, and all female and child characters, spoke and understood only Prakrit, showing that it was everybody’s first language. Burrow, Op. cit., page 60. Sanskrit is preserved in the drama only for the ‘twice-born’ principals – kings, ministers, learned Brahmans. Keay, Op. cit., page 153. Because Sanskrit was frozen, writers who lived a full millennium after Panini were forced to replace innovation with ingenuity. One consequences was that, eventually, sentences sometimes ran to several pages, and words might have more than fifty syllables. (In early Sanskrit, in contrast, the use of compounds is no different from, say, Homer.) Burrow, Op. cit., page 55. But although Sanskrit was understood by just a tiny minority of the population, that minority was all-important and, as we shall see, this did not inhibit the development or the spread of new ideas. Sanskrit acted as a cultural bond in India, as the vernacular languages fragmented and proliferated.

25. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 197.

26. Ibid., page 203.

27. Ibid., 204. See Thapar, Op. cit., page 158, for the plan of the Vishnu temple at Deogarh.

28. Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols of Indian Art and Civilisation, Princeton, New Jersey, and London: The Bollingen Series of Princeton University Press, 1972/1992, page 48.

29. Ibid., page 49.

30. Ibid., page 53.

31. Unlike in so many areas of the world, the sun was not worshipped in India. On the contrary, it was seen as a deadly power. The moon, however, was understood as life-giving. The dew followed its appearance and the moon also controlled the waters through the tides. Water was the earthly equivalent of amrita, the drink of the gods (and a word related to the Greek ambrosia). Water, sap, milk and blood were all different forms of amrita and its most conspicuous manifestations on earth were the three holy rivers – the Ganges, Sarasvati and Jumna. Sinners who expire near these rivers are released from all their sins. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 110.

32. Ibid., page 81.

33. Keay, Op. cit., page 152.

34. Ibid., page 174.

35. Thapar, Op. cit., page 190, for a detailed description.

36. Keay, Op. cit., page 206.

37. Ibid., page 214.

38. Ibid., page 208. See also: Thapar, Op. cit., page 195.

39. Keay, Op. cit., page 217, while Thapar, Op. cit., page 210 gives details of the income of the temple.

40. Keay, Op. cit., page 209.

41. Gernet, Op. cit., page 92.

42. Thapar, Op. cit., pages 143–146. Gernet, Op. cit., page 96.

43. Mukerjee, The Culture and Art of India, Op. cit., pages 269–271.

44. Ibid., pages 267ff.

45. Thapar, Op. cit., pages 161ff.

46. S. N. Das Gupta, ‘Philosophy’, in Basham (editor), Op. cit., pages 114ff.

47. Das Gupta, Op. cit., page 118.

48. Mukerjee, Op. cit., pages 255ff.

49. Thapar, Op. cit., page 162.

50. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 119. Thapar, Op. cit., page 185.

51. Boyer, A History of Mathematics, Op. cit., page 207.

52. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 147.

53. Tamil poems of the first four centuries AD make frequent references to Yavanas, Westerners familiar with Hellenic science and Roman technology. As was mentioned earlier, this word is seen by some as derived from ‘Ionian’. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 151 and W. W. Tam, The Greeks in Bactria and India, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1951.

54. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 154.

55. As discussed earlier (Chapter 12, note 87), the actual word ‘sine’ emerged through a mistranslation of the Hindu name, jiva.

56. Boyer, Op. cit., page 210. See also: Thapar, Op. cit., page 155.

57. Boyer, Op. cit., page 198.

58. Ibid., page 212.

59. D. E. Smith, History of Mathematics, New York: Dover, 1958, volume 1, page 167.

60. Joseph Needham et al., Science and Civilisation in China, volume 3, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1954, page 11n.

61. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 157.

62. Boyer, Op. cit., page 215.

63. Ibid., page 216. The mathematics of India have influenced the whole world. But Westerners should never forget that, historically, India’s international influence has been primarily on the countries to the east of her. In particular, Sanskrit literature, Buddhism and Hinduism, in their various guises, have helped shape south-east Asia. In terms of sheer numbers of people affected, certainly up to the medieval period, India’s influence on the world is second to none. Hindu doctors believed that life began in the ‘primal waters’, that the appearance of people (their physiognomy) recalled the appearance of different gods, and that fever was due to demons, as was indigestion, the commonest cause of illness. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 148. Health was maintained by the proper balance of the three humours – phlegm, gall and wind (or breath), which depended on diet (blood was added later, as a fourth humour). The lungs were believed to transport water through the body and the navel was the ultimate source of the blood vessels. Hindus had a vast pharmacopoeia based on a theory that certain essences of herbs and foods corresponded to the humours in differing proportions. Honey was believed to have healing powers and was associated with amrita, the ‘elixir of immortality’. Ibid., page 149. There was, interestingly, no conception of brain disease – consciousness was centred on the heart. Dropsy, consumption, leprosy, abscess, certain congenital diseases and a number of skin complaints were recognised and described. The name of the Hindu god of medicine was Asvin and the best-known physician was Charaka, who described many real and not-so-real conditions. For example, he gave the name Ayurveda to the science of longevity. Ibid., page 150. All illnesses were seen as having an ethical element, resulting in some way from a moral lapse. There was a specialist tradition of elephant medicine.

64. S. A. A. Rizvi, ‘The Muslim ruling dynasties’, in Basham (editor), Op. cit., pages 245ff.

65. Ibid., pages 281ff.

66. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 284.

67. Mukerjee, Op. cit., pages 311–327. Thapar, Op. cit., pages 306–307, explores Sufism’s links to mainstream Islam and its role in non-conformism and rationalism.

68. Mukerjee, Op. cit., pages 298–299.

CHAPTER 14: CHINA’S SCHOLAR-ELITE, LIXUE AND THE CULTURE OF THE BRUSH

1. Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire, New York: Norton, 2000, pages 171–174. Our word ‘China’ is derived from transliteration of Qin, the Chinese empire of the third century BC.

2. Needham et al., Science and Civilisation in China, Op. cit., page 134. Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual, Op. cit., page 844.

3. Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, AD 1250–1350, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, page 316.

4. Yong Yap and Arthur Cotterell, The Early Civilisation of China, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975, page 199.

5. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, London: Verso, 1976, page 71.

6. The oldest samples of paper were discovered by Sir Aurel Stein in central Asia, in the stonework of an abandoned tower on the Great Wall which had been evacuated by the Chinese army in the mid-second century AD. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 72. Microscopic analysis revealed that the pages – letters written in Sogdian – were made solely from hemp. (Sogdiana was a central Asian kingdom near Samarkand, now modern Uzbekistan.) Paper thus spread rapidly. See Richard N. Frye, The Heritage of Central Asia: From Antiquity to the Turkish Expansion, Princeton, New Jersey, and London: Markus Wiener/ Princeton University Press, 1998, pages 151ff, for the Silk Road; pages 183ff, for the world of the Sogdians.

7. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., pages 72–73.

8. Gernet, Op. cit., page 332. For the intellectual effects of printing, see: Hucker, China’s Imperial Past, Op. cit., page 272. Wang Tao, personal communication, 28 June 2004.

9. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 75.

10. Gernet, Op. cit., page 335.

11. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 76.

12. Ibid.

13. Hucker, Op. cit., page 317. Curiously, the Europeans seemed singularly uninterested in what the East had to offer in this area. For example, the Mongols sent a number of xylographs with bright red seals printed on some messages to the kings of France and England, and to the pope, in 1289 and again in 1305, but no one in the West picked up on the new technique. Even Marco Polo, inveterate traveller and a man of normally extraordinary curiosity, marvelled at the banknotes he saw in China but seems not to have grasped that they had been printed from engraved woodblocks. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 76.

14. Yu-Kuang Chu, ‘The Chinese language’, in: John Meskill et al. (editors), An Introduction to Chinese Civilisation, New York: Columbia University Press, 1973, pages 588–590.

15. Ibid., page 592.

16. Ibid., page 593.

17. Ibid., page 595 and 612.

18. Ibid., pages 597–598.

19. Ibid., page 603. See Hucker, Op. cit., page 197, for a discussion of the difference between ‘new text’ and ‘old text’ Chinese writing, and the scholarship attached to old words.

20. Gernet, Op. cit., page 325.

21. Hansen, Op. cit., page 271. Among other things, paper money aided the development of the Chinese merchant navy which, at the time, was by far the largest in the world (see here).

22. Raymond Dawson, The Chinese Experience, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978, pages 181–182. Gernet, Op. cit., page 324.

23. A completely different set of innovations was introduced in China as a result of advances in ‘wet rice’ growing. From the sixth century on, the Chinese began the systematic selection of seeds so that, by the eleventh century, five hundred years later, yields had been dramatically improved and there were two harvests a year. Traditional keng (rice) had needed 120–150 days to ripen. But, by the turn of the eleventh century, an early-ripening and drought-resistant form had been evolved at Champa on the south coast of Vietnam. Although its yield was less, the fact that it ripened in sixty days solved many problems (fifty-day rice was developed in the sixteenth century and a forty-day variety in the eighteenth century). Early-ripening rice had a major impact on the population of China and meant that the country was able to meet its food needs more adequately than was possible in Europe during the same period. ‘It was precisely because of her more abundant food supply that China’s population began to increase relatively rapidly since the opening of the eleventh century, while the rapid growth of Europe had to wait till the late eighteenth century.’ Ho Ping-Ti, ‘Early-ripening rice,’ in James Liu and Peter Golas (editors), Change in Sung China, Lexington, Massachusetts: D. C. Heath and Co., 1969, pages 30–34. In association with the new form of rice, the crank gear, the harrow and the rice-field plough were all developed at this time. Probably the most effective piece of new technology was the chain with paddles (long guzhe), which allowed water to be lifted from one level to another by means of a crank gear. Hansen, Op. cit., page 265.

24. The wheelbarrow (the ‘wooden ox’), by means of which loads of 300 lb could be carried along narrow, winding paths, was invented in the third century.

25. Gunpowder was in fact only one of several advances in military techniques which were to have a marked effect on world history. The Chinese also perfected a selection technique for its forces – giving recruits a series of tests (shooting ability, eyesight) and assigning them to specialised units on that basis. New weapons were invented, including repeating crossbows, a type of tank, and a paraffin flamethrower operated by a piston to ensure a continuous jet of flame. A treatise on military matters, General Principles of the Classic on War (Wu jin zong yao), discussed new theories about siege warfare. Gernet, Op. cit., page 310. Published in 1044, this treatise also contains the first mention of the formula for gunpowder (the first reference in Europe is by Roger Bacon, in 1267).

26. Gernet, Op. cit., page 311.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., page 312.

29. David Battie (editor), Sotheby’s Concise Encyclopaedia of Porcelain, London: Conran Octopus, 1990, pages 15ff.

30. Gernet, Op. cit., page 320. See also: Hucker, Op. cit., page 204.

31. Gavin Menzies, The Year That Changed the World: 1421, London: Bantam Press, 2002. Its thesis, that the Chinese circumnavigated the world and discovered America, has been heavily challenged.

32. Gernet, Op. cit., pages 326–327.

33. This was probably born in the great estuary of the Yangtze, 10 to 20 kilometres wide at its mouth, and which stretched inland for 150 kilometres. Here the transition from river to ocean is imperceptible. Gernet, Op. cit., page 327.

34. Taoist experiments initiated the compass (see Chapter 20). The idea of the experiment was also introduced ahead of Europe though it was not sustained. See Hucker, Op. cit., page 204. Chinese maps were also better than European maps at this time, using an early idea of both latitude and longitude. European maps were held back by religious concepts. Gernet, Op. cit., page 328.

As Joseph Needham has pointed out, the Song were a pivotal people in Chinese history, and not least in naval affairs. The greater foreign trade promoted by the Song encouraged the rise of its navy, and the associated inventions and innovations. However, despite her prominence as a sea power, China always remained primarily a land empire. Politically and militarily, she faced her greatest threats from inner Asia and she always raised more financial support from agricultural taxes than she did from taxes on international commerce. This basic truth never altered, says Lo Jung-Pang, and helps to explain why, although the Chinese were so ingenious, it was ultimately others who took greatest advantage of her many inventions. Lo Jung-Pang, ‘The rise of China as a sea power’, in Liu and Golas (editors), Op. cit., pages 20–27.

35. Yong Yap et al., Op. cit., page 43.

36. F. W. Mote, Imperial China, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999, page 127.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., page 128.

39. This meant that very poor families might have to save for two to three generations until they could afford to send a favoured son to a private academy.

40. For this and other aspects of the examination system in Song China, see: John W. Chaffee, The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China: A Social History of Examinations, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pages 104–105, and passim.

41. See Frye, Op. cit., page 164 for details about Changʾan.

42. Chaffee, Op. cit., page 104.

43. Fairbanks, Op. cit., page 95.

44. Chaffee, Op. cit., page 134. See Hucker, Op. cit., pages 315–321, where he says later dynasties fell back on the sponsorship system.

45. C. K. Young, Religion in Chinese Society, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1961, page 216.

46. Gernet, Op. cit., page 215. See Frye, Op. cit., pages 195–196, for the organisation of Sogdian society, especially the absence of a priestly hierarchy.

47. Gernet, Op. cit., page 216.

48. Hucker, Op. cit., page 210, says Kumarajiva’s translation of The Lotus Sutra is the single most influential book in east Asian Buddhism. See also Gernet, Op. cit., page 218, and Frye, Op. cit., pages 145–147, for Buddhist complexes between India and China.

49. Gernet, Op. cit., page 221.

50. Young, Op. cit., pages 119–120.

51. Gernet, Op. cit., page 226.

52. See Frye, Op. cit., for archaeological discoveries at Dunhuang.

53. In 1900, a Daoist known as Wang took up residence at the site of the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas, at Dunhuang in Gansu, an important monastic centre along the Silk Road. In the course of Wang’s exploration he noticed a gap in the plaster of one of the caves and, when he tapped it, he found it was hollow behind. This was how he discovered the so-called Library Cave, which contained 13,500 paper scrolls, from which daily life in eighth-century Dunhuang has since been recreated. These scrolls show that, in a town of 15,000, there were thirteen monasteries and that one in ten of the population was directly linked to these establishments, either as monks or nuns or as workpeople. Hansen, Op. cit., pages 245–251.

54. Gernet, Op. cit., page 295.

55. Hansen, Op. cit., page 198.

56. Mote, Op. cit., page 339.

57. See Hucker, Op. cit., page 370, for a portrait of Zhu Xi.

58. Lixue: alternatively, li-hsueh, see Ibid., page 365. Yong Yap et al., Op. cit., page 198.

59. Mote, Op. cit., page 342.

60. Yong Yap, et al., Op. cit. page 198.

61. Ibid., page 208.

62. Ibid., page 170. Wilkinson, Op. cit., page 686.

63. Yong Yap et al., Op. cit., page 171.

64. Ibid. Wilkinson, Op. cit., page 679.

65. Yong Yap et al., page 171. In the eleventh century, the emperor Song Huizong sent officials all over the country in search of rocks, strangeness of shape and texture being most sought-after, in particular limestone that had been turned into fantastic shapes by water, which were witness to the awe-inspiring forces of nature. These forces of life had to be lived with and the perfect garden was a reminder of that. See Hucker, Op. cit., page 260 for the role of grottoes and cliffs.

66. Yong Yap et al., Op. cit., page 172.

67. Gernet, Op. cit., page 341.

68. Mote, Op. cit., page 151.

69. Ibid.

70. Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past, London: Eyre Methuen, 1973, pages 164ff and 179ff.

71. Mote, Op. cit., page 152. And see Hucker, Op. cit., page 263 for the difference between ‘clerical script’ and ‘cursive script’.

72. Mote, Op. cit., page 326.

73. Ibid., but see also: Robert P. Hymes, ‘The elite of Fy-Chou, Chiang-hsi’, in his Northern and Southern Sung, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986. See also: Nathan Sivin, Science and Technology in East Asia, New York: Science History Publications, 1987, xv–xxi.

74. Abu-Lughod, Op. cit., page 4.

CHAPTER 15: THE IDEA OF EUROPE

1. Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997, page 3.

2. Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982, page 82.

3. The argument was also developed in Fernand Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism, volume 2, 15–18th Centuries, The Wheels of Commerce, London: Collins, 1982, pages 68ff.

4. Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communication and Commerce, AD 300–900, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001, page 794.

5. Ibid., pages 704–708.

6. Ibid., page 344.

7. Ibid., page 789.

8. Ibid., page 790. Recent underwater excavations have supported this argument. See: Dalya Alberge, ‘Shipwrecks cast new light on the Dark Ages’, The (London) Times, 9 June 2004, page 8.

9. McCormack, Op. cit., page 796.

10. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, Op. cit., page 4.

11. Ibid., page 3.

12. Ibid., page 19.

13. Ibid., page 357.

14. Ibid., page 34.

15. Ibid., page 360.

16. Needham, The Great Titration, Op. cit., page 121.

17. Ibid., page 150. But Frye, Op. cit., pages 194–195, says nearby Sogdiana was very different, with a thriving merchant class.

18. Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science in Islam, China and the West, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993, page 120.

19. Ibid., page 129.

20. Ibid., page 189.

21. Douglas North and Robert Thomas, The Rise of the Western World, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1973, page 33.

22. Ibid., pages 34–35.

23. Ibid., page 41.

24. Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700 (third edition), London and New York: Routledge, 2003, page 141.

25. Ibid., pages 160–161.

26. Ibid., page 180. See also: J. R. S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, page 103.

27. Anthony Pagden (editor), The Idea of Europe, Cambridge, England, and Washington: Cambridge University Press/Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002, page 81.

28. Ibid., page 84.

29. R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, volume 1, Foundations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995, page 1.

30. Pagden (editor), Op. cit., pages 83–84.

31. Southern, Op. cit., page 2.

32. Ibid., page 3.

33. Ibid., pages 4–5.

34. Ibid., page 5.

35. Ibid., pages 5–6.

36. Herbert Musurillo SJ, Symbolism and the Christian Imagination, Dublin: Helicon, 1962, page 152.

37. Ibid. See Moynahan, The Faith, Op. cit., pages 206ff, for general events around the year AD 1000.

38. Southern, Op. cit., page 6.

39. Ibid., page 11.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid., pages 189–190.

42. Southern, Op. cit., pages 205–206. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 242.

43. D. A. Callus (editor), Robert Grosseteste, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955, page 98.

44. Ibid., page 106.

45. Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual: 1050–1200, London: SPCK, 1972, pages 161ff. See also Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind, Op. cit., page 335. Robert Pasnau, Aquinas on Human Nature, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

46. Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, Op. cit., page 177.

47. Ibid., page 181.

48. Ibid., page 188. See also: Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300–1450, London: Routledge, 1996, pages 132–133, who emphasises that Aquinas did not accord total autonomy to the secular world.

49. Tarnas, Op. cit., page 191.

50. Robert Benson and Giles Constable (editors), Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, page 45.

51. Ibid., page 56.

52. Ibid., page 61.

53. Ibid., pages 65–66.

54. Ibid., pages 150–151. See Moynahan, Op. cit., page 229, for the range of views about Jerusalem.

55. Morris, Op. cit., page 23.

56. Ibid., pages 26–27.

57. Ibid., page 28. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 216.

58. Morris, Op. cit., page 27.

59. Ibid., page 31.

60. Musurillo SJ, Op. cit., page 135.

61. Morris, Op. cit., page 34.

62. Benson and Constable (editors), Op. cit., page 67.

63. Ibid., page 71.

64. Ibid. See Moynahan, Op. cit., page 302, for Lateran IV and transubstantiation. This question of intention was matched by a keen interest in the twelfth century in psychology. For example, two lovers in Chretien de Troyes’ Cliges spend several pages debating their feelings for one another. Many theological works – for the first time – examined whatever affectus or affectio influenced someone’s actions. Psychology was understood as the ‘Godward movement of the soul’. Morris, Op. cit., page 76.

65. Georges Duby (editor), Arthur Goldhamer (translator), A History of Private Life, volume II, Revelations of the Medieval World, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988, pages 272–273.

66. Ibid., page 512.

67. Ibid., page 538.

68. Benson and Constable (editors), Op. cit., page 281.

69. Morris, Op. cit., page 79.

70. Ibid., page 84.

71. Ibid., page 85.

72. See Musurillo SJ, Op. cit., chapters 10 and 11, for a somewhat different view, and the gradual escape of the Christian imagination from St Augustine’s influence, as revealed through poetry.

73. Morris, Op. cit., page 88.

74. Illuminated manuscripts show the same naturalism and interest in individual character.

75. Morris, Op. cit., page 90.

76. Ibid., pages 134ff.

77. Christopher Brooke, The Age of the Cloister, Stroud, England: Sutton Publishing, 2003, page 110.

78. Ibid., page 10.

79. Ibid., page 18.

80. Ibid., pages 126ff.

81. Ibid., page 211.

82. Morris, Op. cit., page 283. The speed of canonisation also reflected this change. See: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 247.

83. Ibid., page 158.

CHAPTER 16: ‘HALFWAY BETWEEN GOD AND MAN’: THE TECHNIQUES OF PAPAL THOUGHT-CONTROL

1. Cantor, Op. cit., pages 269ff.

2. Ibid., pages 258–259.

3. Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001, page 23.

4. Ibid., page 23.

5. Ibid., page 24. See Moynahan, Op. cit., page 216, for other measures, including celibacy for all clerics above deacon.

6. Grant, Op. cit., page 24.

7. David Knowles and Dimitri Obolensky, The Christian Centuries, volume 2, The Middle Ages, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1969, pages 336–337.

8. Ibid., Op. cit., page 337.

9. Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978, page 23.

10. Ibid., page 27.

11. Ibid., page 29.

12. Ibid., page 31. For Ambrose, see Canning, Op. cit., page 34.

13. Bendix, Op. cit., page 32. No less important to the developing notion of kinghood, and its relation to the papacy, was the notorious ‘Donation of Constantine’, now generally agreed to have been a forgery produced by sources very close to the pope himself. ‘It is impossible,’ says Walter Ullmann, ‘to exaggerate the influence which this fabrication had upon medieval Europe generally and on the papacy specifically.’ This idea, based on the Legenda Sancti Silvestri, a novelistic best-seller of the fifth century, alleged that Constantine had been cured of leprosy by the pope, Sylvester, and in contrition had prostrated himself before His Holiness, divesting himself of his imperial emblems – including his crown – and had performed the office of strator, or groom, and had led the papal horse for a short distance. The message could not be plainer. Walter Ullmann, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages, London: Penguin Books, 1965, page 59.

14. Cantor, Op. cit., pages 178–179. Charlemagne was subjected to a bizarre – but revealing – encounter in Rome in 800. The pope of the time, Leo III, was unsuccessful and unpopular. So unpopular that he had been beaten up by a Roman mob, charged with ‘moral turpitude’ and forced to seek Charlemagne’s protection. When the emperor arrived in Rome for the trial of Leo, when he purged himself of the charges against him, Charlemagne went to visit the tomb of St Peter, on Christmas day 800, to pray. As he rose from his prayers, Leo suddenly stepped forward and placed the crown on the king’s head. This was a crude attempt to reassert the right of the papacy to award the imperial title and Charlemagne was not at all pleased – he said he would never have entered the church had he known what the pope intended. Cantor, Op. cit., page 181. See also Canning, Op. cit., page 66, for a discussion of Carolingian theocratic ideas.

15. Bendix, Op. cit., page 33.

16. Cantor, Op. cit., page 195. See also Canning, Op. cit., pages 60–61.

17. David Levine, At the Dawn of Modernity, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001, page 18.

18. Cantor, Op. cit., page 203.

19. Ibid., pages 218–223. See also Canning, Op. cit., page 75, for Otto and his imperial affectations.

20. Cantor, Op. cit., page 218.

21. Ibid., page 244.

22. Colish, Op. cit., page 227.

23. Cantor, Op. cit., page 341.

24. Colish, Op. cit., page 228.

25. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976, pages 147–148.

26. Levine, Op. cit., page 74.

27. Colish, Op. cit., page 235. See also Moynahan, Op. cit., page 272.

28. Colish, Op. cit., page 237.

29. Cantor, Op. cit., page 249.

30. Colish, Op. cit., page 245.

31. Canning, Op. cit., page 85.

32. Cantor, Op. cit., pages 254–255.

33. Ibid., page 258. See also: Canning, Op. cit., page 88.

34. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 218. See Canning, Op. cit., pages 98ff, for the debate sparked by Gregory. See also: Cantor, Op. cit., page 262.

35. Cantor, Op. cit., page 267.

36. Ibid., page 268.

37. Elisabeth Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986, pages 2–3.

38. Ibid., page 4.

39. Ibid., page 10.

40. In the early Middle Ages monarchs usually lent their weight to church decisions, so that excommunicants lost their civil rights too. This derived from the Roman concept of infamia, which disqualified immoral persons and criminals from voting.

41. Also, people who didn’t know that an excommunicant was an excommunicant were also judged not to be contaminated. Vodola, Op. cit., page 25.

42. Ibid., page 29.

43. Ibid., page 32. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 87.

44. Vodola, Op. cit., page 52.

45. Cantor, Op. cit., page 271.

46. Ibid., page 290. Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 186–187 for Christian losses.

47. Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 190ff.

48. Cantor, Op. cit., pages 292–293.

49. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 222, lists five accounts of Urban’s historic speech which, he says, ‘are substantially different’.

50. The First Crusade was fortunate in its timing. Emotions among Christians still ran high. The millennium – AD 1000, as it then was – was not long over, and the millennium of the Passion, 1033, closer still. In addition, because of a temporary disunity among the Arabs, which weakened their ability to resist the five thousand or so who comprised the Christian forces, the crusaders reached Jerusalem relatively intact and, after a siege lasting well over a month, took it. In the process they massacred all Muslim and Jewish residents, the latter being burned in their chief synagogue.

51. Steven Runciman, The First Crusade, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press/Canto, 1951/ 1980, page 22.

52. The veneration of saints and relics offered an incentive for large numbers of the pious to make pilgrimages, not just to the three major sites – Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela – but to many other shrines associated with miracles or relics. David Levine speaks of an ‘economic geography of holiness [that] sprouted in rural Europe’. Areas of France were criss-crossed with pilgrimage routes – for example, the chemin de Paris and the chemin de Vézelay, which funnelled the faithful from the north to Spain, where they met up with others who had travelled along the chemin d’Arles. Levine, Op. cit., page 87. The basic view was that as given by Henry of Ghent (c. 1217–1293), the influential Parisian scholastic and metaphysician, who argued that saints and certain visionaries have access to God’s mind and therefore have ‘full and infallible certitude’ in their knowledge. Colish, Op. cit., page 305. Patrick Geary, professor of history at the University of Florida, studied more than one hundred medieval accounts of the thefts of saints’ relics, and found that these were often carried out not by vagabonds but by monks, who transferred the relics to their home towns or monasteries. As the pilgrimage routes showed, relics stimulated a constant demand for hospitality – food and lodging. In other words, relics were a source of economic support. But the cult of the saints may also be seen as a return to a form of polytheism: the saints’ disparate characters allowed the faithful to relate to figures they found sympathetic – humans rather than gods – who had done something extraordinary. Geary shows that the cult of saints was so strong that in Italy at least there were also professional relic thieves, operating a lively trade to points north. Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978/1990.

53. Cantor, Op. cit., page 388, and Moynahan, Op. cit., page 279. See also: Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (editors), Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994, page 94.

54. Bernard McGinn, AntiChrist, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, page 6.

55. Ibid., pages 100–113; see also Moynahan, Op. cit., page 215.

56. McGinn, Op. cit., page 138.

57. Ibid., pages 136–137.

58. Colish, Op. cit., page 249.

59. Cantor, Op. cit., page 389.

60. Biller and Hudson (editors), Op. cit., pages 38–39. Colish, Op. cit., page 251. See Moynahan, Op. cit., page 280–281, for an account of the Bogomils.

61. Cantor, Op. cit., page 390.

62. Colish, Op. cit., page 251.

63. Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages, Op. cit., page 24.

64. Cantor, Op. cit., page 417. Canning, Op. cit., page 121, agrees that Innocent’s reign was the crux of the medieval papacy.

65. Cantor, Op. cit., pages 389–393.

66. Edward Burman, The Inquisition: Hammer of Heresy, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian Press, 1984, page 16.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid., page 23.

69. Ibid., See Stephen Haliczer (editor), Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe, London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1987, page 10, for more statistics.

70. Burman, Op. cit., page 23.

71. Ibid., page 25.

72. James B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997, page 11. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 281.

73. Burman, Op. cit., page 33 and Given, Op. cit., page 14, for the early organisation of the inquisition.

74. Burman, Op. cit., page 41. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 41.

75. Burman, Op. cit., page 57.

76. Ibid., pages 60–61. On another occasion, he had eighty men, women and children burned in Strasbourg. See: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 286.

77. In the wheel the prisoner was tied to a cartwheel and beaten. The rack, as is well known, stretched the body to breaking point, a bit like the strappado.

78. Jews offered a different but allied problem. There was a large and prosperous Jewish community in the south of France – Cathar territory – and, as we have seen, there may well have been Jewish ideas mixed up in the genealogy of Catharism. So although Innocent forbade attempts to convert Jews by force, he did advocate ghettoisation – physical separation – which not only limited contact but implied that they were social pariahs. It was at the Fourth Lateran Council, held towards the end of Innocent’s papacy in 1215, that it was decreed the Jews should wear a yellow patch ‘so they could be easily distinguished as outcasts’. See: Cantor, Op. cit., page 426.

79. William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages, London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2001, page 9; and Cantor, Op. cit., pages 418–419. See also as a general reference: Jacques le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, especially part 2, section 2, ‘The perception of Christendom by the Roman Curia’ and ‘The organisation of an ecumenical council in 1274’.

80. Knowles and Obolensky, Op. cit., page 290.

81. Cantor, Op. cit., page 491.

82. Canning, Op. cit., pages 137–148.

83. Cantor, Op. cit., page 493.

84. Ibid., page 495. See also: Canning, Op. cit., pages 139–140.

85. Cantor, Op. cit., page 496.

86. Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 298ff.

CHAPTER 17: THE SPREAD OF LEARNING AND THE RISE OF ACCURACY

1. Georges Duby, The Age of the Cathedrals, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, pages 97ff.

2. Ibid., page 98.

3. Ibid.

4. Anders Piltz, The Medieval World of Learning, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981, page 26. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 269, and Le Goff, Op. cit., page 54.

5. Duby, Op. cit., page 100.

6. Ibid., page 101.

7. Ibid., page 111.

8. R. W. S. Southern, ‘The schools of Paris and the schools of Chartres’, in Benson and Constable (editors), Op. cit., page 114.

9. Ibid., page 115.

10. Ibid., pages 124–128.

11. Ibid., page 129.

12. Chester Jordan, Op. cit., page 116. R. W. S. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, The Penguin History of the Church, London: Penguin Books, 1970/1990, page 94. See also: Le Goff, Op. cit., page 179, for the concept of civitas in the Middle Ages.

13. Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children, Op. cit., page 127. See also: Chester Jordan, Op. cit., page 113, and Duby, Op. cit., page 115.

14. Duby, Op. cit., page 115.

15. Ibid., page 116.

16. Alan Cobban, The Medieval Universities, London: Methuen, 1975, page 8.

17. Ibid., page 9.

18. Ibid., page 10.

19. Ibid., page 11.

20. Piltz, Op. cit., page 18.

21. Cobban, Op. cit., page 12.

22. Ibid., page 14.

23. Rubenstein, Op. cit., page 104.

24. Cobban, Op. cit., page 18. Alexander also studied at Montpellier. See: Nathan Schachner, The Medieval Universities, London: Allen & Unwin, 1938, page 263.

25. Ibid., page 15. See Schachner, Op. cit., pages 132–133, for the prosperity of medieval doctors.

26. Rubenstein, Op. cit., page 17.

27. Ibid., page 162.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., page 186.

30. Ibid., page 187.

31. Ibid., page 42.

32. Ibid., page 210.

33. Ibid., page 197.

34. Ibid., page 198.

35. Ibid., page 220.

36. Ibid., page 221.

37. Cobban, Op. cit., page 22.

38. Ibid., page 23. See also: Schachner, Op. cit., page 62, for the dress requirements.

39. Cobban, Op. cit., pages 23–24.

40. Ibid., page 24.

41. Ibid., page 25.

42. Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (new edition in three volumes), edited by F. M. Powicke and A. B. Emden, Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1936, volume II, page 22.

43. Ibid., pages 24ff.

44. Cobban, Op. cit., page 31.

45. Ibid., page 37. See Schachner, Op. cit., page 51, for the lame and blind.

46. Chester Jordan, Op. cit., page 125. Cobban, Op. cit., page 41.

47. Olaf Pederson, The First Universities, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pages 122ff.

48. Cobban, Op. cit., page 44.

49. Ibid., page 45.

50. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (editor), A History of the Universities in Europe, volume 1, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pages 43ff.

51. Cobban, Op. cit., page 49–50.

52. Chester Jordan, Op. cit., page 127. Cobban, Op. cit., page 50. Schachner, Op. cit., page 151, says that there is some doubt that Irnerius ever existed.

53. Cobban, Op. cit., page 51.

54. Ibid., page 52.

55. Ibid., page 53.

56. Rashdall, Op. cit., page 23.

57. Cobban, Op. cit., page 54. See Schachner, Op. cit., page 153, for the ages and economic status of Bologna students.

58. Cobban, Op. cit., page 55.

59. Carlo Malagola, ‘Statuti dell’ università e dei collegii dello studio Bolognese’, 1888. In: Lynn Thorndike (editor), University Records and Life in the Middle Ages, New York: Octagon, 1971, pages 273ff

60. Cobban, Op. cit., page 58.

61. Ibid., page 62.

62. Ridder-Symoens (editor), Op. cit., pages 148ff.

63. Ibid., page 157. See also: Schachner, Op. cit., page 160f.

64. Cobban, Op. cit., page 65.

65. Ibid., pages 66–67.

66. See Thorndike (editor), Op. cit., page 27, for the rules of Paris University and page 35 for papal regulations.

67. Cobban, Op. cit., page 77.

68. Ibid., pages 82–83. And see Schachner, Op. cit., pages 74ff, for the concept of the ‘nations’.

69. Cobban, Op. cit., page 79.

70. Ibid., page 96.

71. See Ridder-Symoens (editor), Op. cit., page 342, for the introduction of learning into Britain via Northampton, Glasgow and London.

72. Cobban, Op. cit., page 98.

73. Ibid., page 100.

74. Thorndike (editor), Op. cit., pages 7–19.

75. Cobban, Op. cit., page 101.

76. Pederson, Op. cit., page 225, describes early life in Oxford.

77. Cobban, Op. cit., page 107.

78. Schachner, Op. cit., pages 237–239. See also: Rubenstein, Op. cit., page 173.

79. Cobban, Op. cit., page 108.

80. Chester Jordan, Op. cit., page 119, Cobban, Op. cit., page 116.

81. Cobban, Op. cit., page 116. Colleges were especially a feature of Paris, Oxford and Cambridge. These were usually legal bodies, self-governing, and generously endowed. Often, they were charitable and pious foundations. Colleges were also established to reflect the idea that student poverty should not be a barrier to academic progress. This was true most of all of Paris, the origin of the collegiate idea in the sense that colleges existed there first. ‘The earliest European college about which there is information,’ says Alan Cobban, ‘is the Collège des Dix-Huit which had its beginnings in Paris in 1180, when a certain Jocius de Londoniis bought the room he had in the Hospital of the Blessed Mary of Paris and endowed it for the perpetual use of eighteen poor clerks.’ The idea was soon followed but it was the foundation of the College of the Sorbonne, begun c. 1257 by Robert de Sorbon, chaplain to Louis IX, which really created the system familiar today. This college was intended for graduates, for established scholars who had already gained an MA, and were about to embark on the doctorate in theology. Some nineteen colleges were established in Paris by 1300, and at least three dozen by the end of the fourteenth century, ‘which was the century par excellence of collegiate expansion in western Europe’. Another eleven were founded in the fifteenth century, making sixty-six in all. The Paris colleges were suppressed in 1789 at the French Revolution, and the university was never allowed to revert to collegiate lines.

English colleges originated later than in Paris and were always intended for graduate use – undergraduates were a later innovation. Originally housed in taverns, or hostels, Merton College was first, in 1264, followed by University College c. 1280, and by Balliol in 1282. At Cambridge, Peterhouse was established in 1284. By 1300, Cambridge had eight colleges, housing 137 fellows. At Oxford, King’s Hall was the first to admit undergraduates, in the early part of the fourteenth century. The graduate colleges were gradually transformed into undergraduate ones, largely for economic reasons – tutorial fees. This process was completed, for the most part, by the Reformation. It was the (undergraduate) colleges which introduced the tutorial system of instruction, as the public lecture system was falling into disarray. Cobban, Op. cit., pages 123–141, passim.

82. Ibid., page 209.

83. Ibid., page 214. See also: Schachner, Op. cit., pages 322ff.

84. Cobban, Op. cit., page 215.

85. Crosby, Op. cit., page 19. This may have been aided by what Jacques le Goff calls the new education of the memory, brought about by Lateran IV’s requirement for the faithful to make confession once a year. Le Goff also says that preaching became more precise at this time. Op. cit., page 80.

86. Crosby, Op. cit., pages 28–29.

87. Ibid., page 33.

88. Ibid., page 36.

89. Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, Stanford and London: Stanford University Press, 1997, page 136.

90. Crosby, Op. cit., page 42. Numbers still had their mystical side. Six was perfect because God made the world in six days, seven was perfect because it was the sum of the first odd and the first even number, and because God had rested on the seventh day after the Creation. Ten, the number of the commandments, stood for law, whereas eleven, going beyond the law, stood for sin. The number 1,000 also represented perfection because it was the number of the commandments multiplied by itself three times over, three being the number of the Trinity and the number of days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Ibid., page 46.

91. Jacques le Goff, ‘The town as an agent of Civilisation, 1200–1500’, in Carlo M. Cipolla (editor), The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Middle Ages, Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester, 1976–1977, page 91.

92. Crosby, Op. cit., page 57.

93. Saenger, Op. cit., pages 12, 17 and 65. John Man, The Gutenberg Revolution, London: Review/Headline, 2002, pages 108–110.

94. Chester Jordan, Op. cit., page 118. Crosby, Op. cit., page 136. Saenger, Op. cit., page 250.

95. A. J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, pages 147–150. See Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, Op. cit., pages 12–14, for medieval ideas of space and time.

96. Crosby, Op. cit., page 82.

97. Ibid., page 101. Jacques le Goff says there was a great wave of anti-intellectualism at this time which retarded the acceptance of some of these innovations. Jacques le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, pages 136–138.

98. Crosby, Op. cit., page 113.

99. The German marks fought for supremacy with and throughout the sixteenth century and were not finally adopted until the French algebraists used them.

100. Crosby, Op. cit., page 117.

101. Ibid., page 120.

102. Charles M. Radding, A World Made by Men: Cognition and Society, 400–1200, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985, page 188.

103. Piltz, Op. cit., page 21.

104. Crosby, Op. cit., page 146.

105. Albert Gallo, Music of the Middle Ages, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985, volume 2, pages 11–12.

106. In particular a form of syncopation known as the hoquet, a French word for the technique where one voice sang while another rested, and vice versa rapidly. Hoquet eventually became the English word ‘hiccup’. Crosby, Op. cit., page 158.

107. Piltz, Op. cit., pages 206–207.

108. Man, Op. cit., page 87, for the demand stimulated by universities.

109. Crosby, Op. cit., page 215. In intellectual terms, the disputation was perhaps the most important innovation of the university, allowing the students to see that authority isn’t everything. In an era of ecclesiastical domination and canon law, this was crucial. The exemplar system of manuscript circulation also enabled more private study, another important aid to the creative student, and something which would be augmented by the arrival of the printed book at the end of the fifteenth century.

110. Even so, a country like France easily produced 100,000 bundles of vellum a year, each bundle containing forty skins. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 18.

111. Ibid., page 20.

112. Man, Op. cit., pages 135–136.

113. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 50. For early presses see: Alister McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2001, pages 10ff.

114. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 54. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 341.

115. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 56. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 341 on the print quality of early books.

116. Douglas MacMurtrie, The Gutenberg Documents, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941, pages 208ff.

117. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 81. See McGrath, Op. cit., page 13, for Gutenberg’s type.

118. Martin Lowry, ‘The Manutius publicity campaign’, in David S. Zeidberg and F. G. Superbi (editors), Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture, Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1998, pages 31ff.

119. McGrath, Op. cit., page 15, for early edition sizes.

120. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 162.

121. The first move was when publishers agreed not to print a second edition of a book without the author’s permission, which was only granted on payment of a further sum. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 164.

122. Ibid., page 217.

123. McGrath, Op. cit., page 18, says the price of a Gutenberg Bible was equivalent to that of a large town house in a German city in 1520.

From the start, books were were sold at book fairs all over Europe. Lyons was one, partly because it had many trade fairs and merchants were familiar with the process. It was also a major crossroads, with important bridges over the Rhône and Saône. In addition, to preserve the fair, the king gave the merchants in Lyons certain privileges – for example, no merchant was obliged to open his account books for inspection. Some forty-nine booksellers and printers were established in the city, mainly along the rue Mercière, though many of them were foreign. This meant that books in many languages were bought and sold at the Lyons book fair and the city became an important centre for the spread of ideas. (Law books were especially popular.) The main rival was at Frankfurt (not far from Mainz). There too there were many trade fairs – wine, spices, horses, hops, metals. Booksellers arrived at the turn of the sixteenth century, together with publishers from Venice, Paris, Antwerp and Geneva. During the fair they were grouped in the Büchergasse, ‘Book Street’, between the river Main and St Leonard’s church. New publications were advertised at Frankfurt, where the publisher’s catalogue seems to have started, and it also became known as a market in printing equipment. Thus Frankfurt slowly became a centre for everyone engaged in the book trade – as it still is for two weeks every year in October. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin went through these Frankfurt book catalogues in their study on the impact of the book and they found that, between 1564 and 1600, more than 20,000 different titles were on offer, published by 117 firms in sixty-one towns. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) had a catastrophic effect on book production and on the Frankfurt fair. Instead, political conditions favoured the Leipzig book fair and it would be some time before Frankfurt regained its preeminence. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 231.

124. Ibid., page 244.

125. Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods, London: Macmillan, 1996, pages 172–173.

126. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 246.

127. Ibid., page 248.

128. See for example, Ralph Hexter, ‘Aldus, Greek, and the shape of the “classical corpus”’, in Zeidberg and Superbi (editors), Op. cit., page 143ff.

129. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 273. See McGrath, Op. cit., pages 24ff and 253ff, for the rise of vernacular languages caused by printing.

130. Febvre and Martin, Op. cit., page 319.

131. Ibid., page 324. See McGrath, Op. cit., page 258, for Robert Cawdry’s The Table Alphabetical of Hard Words (1604), which listed 2,500 unusual or borrowed words.

132. Hexter says Aldus promoted Greek as well as Latin. Hexter, Op. cit., page 158.

CHAPTER 18: THE ARRIVAL OF THE SECULAR: CAPITALISM, HUMANISM, INDIVIDUALISM

1. Jardine, Worldly Goods, Op. cit., pages 13–15.

2. Harry Elmer Barnes, An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, volume 2, New York: Dove, 1965, page 549.

3. Charles Homer Haskins, The Twelfth Century Renaissance, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1927, though William Chester Jordan, in Europe in the High Middle Ages, Op. cit., page 120, wonders whether the twelfth century just saw ‘an exceptional series of towering figures’.

4. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960, pages 3, 25 and 162.

5. Norman Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague, New York: Harper Collins, 2001, page 203.

6. Ibid., pages 204–205. For Florence and the plague, see Gene Brucker, Renaissance Florence, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983, pages 40ff.

7. Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning 1300–1600, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, page 410.

8. Ibid., page 43.

9. Ibid., pages 122–124.

10. Ibid., pages 72–73.

11. Ibid., pages 310–311.

12. Ibid., pages 318–319.

13. Hall, Cities in Civilisation, Op. cit., 1998, page 78.

14. R. A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, pages 20–22.

15. Gene Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, 1343–1378, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1962, pages 33ff, for the old- and new-style merchants.

16. G. Holmes, Florence, Rome and the Origin of the Renaissance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, page 39. See also: Brucker, Op. cit., page 71.

17. R. S. Lopez, ‘The trade of medieval Europe: the south’, in M. Postan et al, (editors), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, volume 2: Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1952, pages 257ff.

18. Hall, Op. cit., page 81.

19. J. Lamer, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch: 1216–1380, London: Longman, 1980, page 223.

20. Hall, Op. cit., page 81. The woollen industry showed different aspects of fledgling capitalism. For example, most of the 200 woollen companies were associations of two or more lanaiuoli, entrepreneurs who provided the capital for the plant’s operation, but rarely got involved in management, which was done by a salaried factor who might have as many as 150 people under him – dyers, fullers, weavers and spinners. In the 1427 census, wool merchants were the third most numerous profession in Florence after shoemakers and notaries. The spirit of capitalism was also evident from the growing concentration into fewer and larger firms, which reduced in number between 1308 and 1338 from 300 to 200. ‘Fortunes were made but there were also many bankruptcies.’ Ibid., page 83 and Lamer, Op. cit., page 197.

21. Hall, Op. cit., page 84. See Brucker, Op. cit., page 105, for the arrogance of the Bardi family.

22. Hall, Op. cit., page 85.

23. Brucker, Op. cit., page 105 for the conflict between mercantile and noble values.

24. Hall, Op. cit., page 101.

25. Ibid., page 87.

26. See Brucker, Op. cit., pages 217–218, for the convegni of like-minded groups.

27. Hall, Op. cit., pages 94–95.

28. Ibid., page 98.

29. For painters and sculptors, the fundamental unit was the bottega or workshop, often producing a variety of objects. Botticelli, for instance, produced cassoni or wedding chests and banners. And masters worked with assistants, like modern artisans. Ghirlandaio, Raphael and Perugino all had workshops, which were often family affairs. Hall, Op. cit., pages 102–103 and M. Wackenagel, The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist: Projects and Patrons, Workshop and Market, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981, pages 309–310. Translation: A. Luchs.

30. Brucker, Op. cit., pages 215–216.

31. Hall, Op. cit., page 108.

32. Brucker, Op. cit., page 26.

33. Hall, Op. cit., pages 98 and 106.

34. Ibid., page 108.

35. Brucker, Op cit., pages 214–215, for the role of Dante.

36. D. Hay, The Italian Renaissance in Its Historical Background, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977, page 139.

37. Hall, Op. cit., page 110.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., page 371.

40. William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, pages 7–8.

41. Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, Op. cit., page 212.

42. Brucker, Op. cit., pages 226–227.

43. James Haskins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990, volume 1, page 95.

44. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (two volumes), Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1955, volume 1, page 38.

45. Kerrigan and Braden, Op. cit., page 101. Some scholars have doubted that the academy ever existed.

46. Ibid. One reason Ficino found Plato so congenial, rather than Aristotle (over and above the fact that the texts were newly available), was his belief that ‘deeds sway us more than the accounts of deeds’ and that ‘exemplary lives’ (the Socratic way of life) are better teachers than the moral instruction of Aristotle.

47. Tarnas, Op. cit., page 214; Brucker, Op. cit., page 228. Haskins, Op. cit., page 295.

48. Tarnas, Op. cit., page 216. Haskins, Op. cit., page 283.

49. Barnes, Op. cit., page 556.

50. Ibid., page 558.

51. A. J. Krailsheimer, ‘Erasmus’, in A. J. Krailsheimer (editor), The Continental Renaissance, London: Penguin Books, 1971, pages 393–394.

52. McGrath, Op. cit., pages 253ff. See also: Krailsheimer (editor), Op. cit., page 478ff, for Montaigne.

53. Barnes, Op. cit., page 563.

54. Ibid.

55. Bronowski and Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition, Op. cit., page 61.

56. Kerrigan and Braden, Op. cit., page 77.

57. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 67.

58. Krailsheimer (editor), Op. cit., pages 388–389, for the background to Adages and its success.

59. Barnes, Op. cit., page 564.

60. Ibid., page 565.

61. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 72. See Moynahan, Op. cit., page 339, for what Erasmus wrote elsewhere about Luther.

62. Francis Ames-Lewis and Mary Rogers (editors), Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998, page 203.

63. Peter Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, 1420–1540, London: Batsford, 1972, page 189.

64. Ibid., page 191.

65. Kerrigan and Braden, Op. cit., page 17.

66. Burke, Op. cit., page 191.

67. Kerrigan and Braden, Op. cit., page 11.

68. Ibid., pages 19–20. Even the economic records of the Datini family, referred to earlier, were kept for ‘posterity’, as if they equated to some sort of literary archive in which money was the equivalent of poetry. Ibid., pages 42–43.

69. Ibid., page 62.

70. Burke, Op. cit., page 194. And see Brucker, Op. cit., page 100 for criticism of Burckhardt and the conclusions he draws.

71. Burke, Op. cit., page 195.

72. Ibid., page 197.

73. Hall, Op. cit., page 90. Brucker, Op. cit., pages 218–220, for universities and tolerance in Florence.

74. Tarnas, Op. cit., page 225.

75. Peter Burke, Introduction to Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, London: Penguin Books, 1990, page 13.

76. They even felt they could conquer death, in the sense of gaining a measure of fame that would outlive them, and cause them to be remembered. In fifteenth-century tomb sculpture, for example, the macabre is almost totally absent. Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, Op. cit., page 201.

77. Ibid., page 200. See Brucker, Op. cit., pages 223–225, for Bracciolini and Florentine attitudes to money and fame.

78. Burke, Op. cit., page 201.

CHAPTER 19: THE EXPLOSION OF IMAGINATION

1. There are many accounts. See, for example: Herbert Lucas SJ, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, London: Sands & Co., 1899, pages 40ff; and see Pierre van Paassen, A Crown of Fire: The Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola, London: Hutchinson, 1961, pages 173ff, for other tactics of Savonarola.

2. Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, Op. cit., pages 302–303. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 334–335, for another account.

3. Elizabeth Cropper, Introduction to Francis Ames-Lewis and Mary Rogers (editors), Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art, page 1.

4. Ibid., page 2, and Burckhardt, Op. cit., volume II, page 351.

5. Aerial perspective deals with the tendency for all observable objects, as they recede from the spectator, to become more muted in tone and to become bluer in proportion to their distance, owing to the density of the atmosphere. (This is why mountains in the background always appear blueish.) Peter and Linda Murray, Dictionary of Art and Artists (seventh edition), London: Penguin Books, 1997, pages 337–338.

6. It was a bishop, the Bishop of Meaux, who argued in his mammoth poem, Ovide Moralisé, that Christian instruction could be found in many of the myths of Ovid. Burke, Op. cit. And see Moynahan, Op. cit., page 335, for the way Botticelli changed under the influence of Savonarola.

7. In line with all this there grew up what could be called an allegorical literature. As academies like Ficino’s spread to other cities beyond Florence, it became a desirable accomplishment for a courtier to be able to decipher allegories. Books of emblems began to appear in which a mythological device was shown alongside a few lines of verse explaining the meaning and moral of the picture. Venus, for instance, standing with one foot on a tortoise, teaches ‘that woman’s place is in the home and that she should know when to hold her tongue’. See: Peter Watson, Wisdom and Strength: The Biography of a Renaissance Masterpiece, New York: Doubleday, 1989, page 47. The impresa was a parallel innovation: it consisted of an image and text but was devised specifically for an individual, and commemorated either an event in that person’s life, or some trait or character. It did not appear in book form but as a medallion or sculpture or bas relief, the latter as often as not on the ceiling of the distinguished person’s bedroom so that he could reflect on its message as he went to sleep. There was also an array of popular manuals which appeared in the middle of the sixteenth century, such as The History of the Gods (1548) by Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, and The Images of the Gods (1556) by Natale Conti. Conti explains best the purpose of these works: that from the earliest times – first in Egypt, then in Greece – thinkers deliberately concealed the great truths of science and philosophy under the veil of myth in order to withdraw them from vulgar profanation. He therefore organised his own book according to what he thought were the hidden messages to be revealed: the secrets of nature, the lessons of morality, and so on. Jean Seznec sums up the spirit of the times when he says that allegories came to be regarded as a means of ‘rendering thought visible’. Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press/Bollingen Series, 1972/1995.

8. Umberto Eco (translated by Hugh Bredin), Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986/2002, pages 116–117.

9. Ibid., page 114.

10. Ames-Lewis and Rogers (editors), Op. cit., pages 180–181.

11. Dorothy Koenigsberger, Renaissance Man and Creative Thinking, Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979, page 236.

12. Burckhardt, Op. cit., page 102.

13. Koenigsberger, Op. cit., page 13.

14. Ibid., pages 19–21.

15. Ibid., page 22. See also Brucker, Op. cit., page 240.

16. Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, Op. cit., pages 51–52.

17. Ames-Lewis and Rogers (editors), Op. cit., pages 113–114.

18. Burke, Op. cit., pages 51–52.

19. Ibid., pages 55–56. Brucker, Op. cit., page 243, says Brunelleschi also ‘learned some mathematics’.

20. Ames-Lewis and Rogers (editors), Op. cit., pages 32–35.

21. Ibid., page 33.

22. Koenigsberger, Op. cit., page 31.

23. Ames-Lewis and Rogers (editors), Op. cit., page 81.

24. Ibid., page 72.

25. One particular aspect of the effect of humanism on art was the notion of ekphrasis, the recreation of classical painting based on ancient written accounts of works which the classical authors had seen but were now lost. In the same way, Renaissance artists emulated ancient artists. For example, Pliny recounts a famous story about the trompe l’oeil qualities of the grapes in a painting by Zeuxis that were so lifelike the birds mistook them for real grapes and flew down to peck at them. Likewise, Filarete paraphrased an anecdote about Giotto and Cimabue: ‘And we read of Giotto that as a beginner he painted flies, and his master Cimabue was so taken in that he believed they were alive and started to chase after them with a rag.’ Ibid., page 148.

26. Burke, Op. cit., illustration facing page 148.

27. Ibid.

28. In fact, nothing came of this approach.

29. Watson, Op. cit., page 31.

30. Barnes, Op. cit., page 929.

31. Ibid., page 931.

32. Yehudi Menuhin and Curtis W. Davis, The Music of Man, London: Methuen, 1979, page 83.

33. Ibid., page 83.

34. Ibid., page 84.

35. Al-Farabi thought the rabab most closely matched the voice. Anthony Baines (editor), Musical Instruments Through the Ages, London: Penguin, 1961, page 216.

36. Joan Peysor et al. (editors), The Orchestra, New York: Billboard, 1986, page 17. See Baines (editor), Op. cit., page 68, for more on Pythagoras. Ibid., page 53, also links the shawm to instruments in Ur. John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

37. Alfred Einstein, A Short History of Music, London: Cassell, 1936/1953, page 54.

38. Barnes, Op. cit., page 930.

39. Baines, Op. cit., page 117, who says, page 192, that Orfeo also made use of a double harp.

40. Barnes, Op. cit., page 932.

41. Hall, Cities in Civilisation, Op. cit., page 114. Sheldon Cheney, The Theatre: Three Thousand Years, London: Vision, 1952, page 266, says only a third of the plays have survived.

42. Hall, Op. cit., page 115.

43. Richard Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642, London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1972, page 75.

44. L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, London: Chatto & Windus, 1937, page 118. See also Cheney, Op. cit., pages 261ff, for the social changes behind the rise in theatre.

45. N. Zwager, Glimpses of Ben Jonson’s London, Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1926, page 10.

46. Hall, Op. cit., page 125.

47. Ibid., page 126.

48. See Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, pages 20–21, for repeated attempts to control the theatre.

49. See Cheney, Op. cit., page 264, for another candidate. Patterson, Op. cit., page 30, points out that at least five of the characters in Hamlet are university men.

50. Hall, Op. cit., page 130, and Cheney, Op. cit., page 169. See the latter source, page 271, for a rare, uncontested drawing of a Shakespearean theatre.

51. But see Patterson, Op. cit., page 33, for the cultural divisions of the time, and pages 49–50, for Shakespeare’s own attack on illiteracy.

52. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994, pages 46–47.

53. Ibid., pages 67–68. Cheney, Op. cit., page 273, for Shakespeare’s adaptations and hack writing.

54. Barnes, Op. cit., page 620.

55. Krailsheimer (editor), Op. cit., page 325, for La Celestina.

56. Angus Fletcher, Colors of the Mind, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991. See also: William Byron, Cervantes, London: Cassell, 1979, pages 124ff, for the battle of Lepanto, and page 427 for more on the relation between the Don and Sancho Panza.

57. Byron, Op cit., page 430.

CHAPTER 20: THE MENTAL HORIZON OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

1. Valerie Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus, Princeton, New Jersey, and London: Princeton University Press, 1992, page 115.

2. Beatrice Pastor Bodmer, The Armature of Conquest, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1992, pages 10–11.

3. John Parker, Discovery, New York: Scribner, 1972, page 15.

4. Ibid., page 16.

5. Ibid., pages 18–19.

6. For the dimensions and speeds of Columbus’ ships, see E. Keble Chatterton, Sailing the Seas, London: Chapman & Hall, 1931, pages 150–151.

7. Parker, Op. cit., page 24.

8. Ibid., page 25.

9. Ibid., page 26.

10. To prove this once and for all, Alexander instructed Nearchus, a trusted officer, to sail back west to Persia, where Alexander would meet him. Nearchus’ voyage was eventful. He encountered people who lived only on fish – they even made bread out of fish; he saw terrifying whales which spouted water like geysers; and he was blown in all directions by unpredictable winds. But some of the ships made it and Nearchus and Alexander met up again in the Persian Gulf, having discovered the way to India by both land and sea. Parker, Op. cit., pages 30–32.

11. Ibid., page 33.

12. John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers, New York: Vintage, 1982, pages 19–20.

13. For Eratosthenes’ map of the world, see: Ian Cameron, Lode Stone and Evening Star: The Saga of Exploration by Sea, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965, page 32.

14. Parker, Op. cit., pages 48–49.

15. Ibid., page 51.

16. Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space, London: British Library, 1997, pages 108–109, which includes a map showing Paradise in the east as a ‘sunburst-island’ with four rivers draining out of it.

17. Parker, Op. cit., page 54.

18. Ibid., page 55.

19. See Tryggi J. Oleson, Early Voyages and Northern Approaches 1000–1632, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press/McClelland Stewart, 1964, pages 100ff, for other ‘mythical’ voyages.

20. Noble Wilford, Op. cit., page 38.

21. Parker, Op. cit., page 62.

22. Ibid., page 63.

23. Oleson, Op. cit., page 101, says that Brendan ‘probably’ reached the St Lawrence.

24. Ibid., chapter 6, for the Skraelings. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, Op. cit., pages 166–179, for the medieval discovery of America. The Vinland Map, at Yale University, purportedly made about 1440, but very probably a forgery, shows that these ‘western isles’ were still (fairly accurately) in the mind of the mapmaker and that they constituted a traditional part of the idea of the north Atlantic.

25. Parker, Op. cit., page 83. Phillips, Op. cit., page 192 for the Prester John/Alexander the Great legend.

26. Bodmer, Op. cit., pages 13–14. And Phillips, Op. cit., page 69.

27. Parker, Op. cit., page 89.

28. Bodmer, Op. cit., page 15.

29. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 188, for Polo’s other (Christian) adventures.

30. Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986/1989. Phillips, Op. cit., page 113, for Rustichello of Pisa.

31. Flint, Op. cit., page 3.

32. Ibid., page 7.

33. This position also implied an arduous uphill journey to reach it, which accorded well with the moral preoccupations of the time.

34. Flint, Op. cit., page 9.

35. Ibid., page 10.

36. Ibid., page 26.

37. Ibid., page 36.

38. Bodmer, Op. cit., page 13.

39. Flint, Op. cit., page 40 and ref. Samuel Morison, Christopher Columbus: Mariner, maps by Erwin Raisz, London: Faber, 1956, page 103.

40. Flint, Op. cit., page 42.

41. Bodmer, Op. cit., page 15.

42. Flint, Op. cit., page 53.

43. He would actually set up a council to govern the first island he discovered, based on his reading. Joachim G. Leithäuser, World Beyond the Horizon, translated by Hugh Merrick, New York: Knopf, 1955, page 73.

44. Ibid., page 44.

45. Bodmer, Op. cit., chapter 4, which includes a discussion of ‘models’, ways to understand the new world and its social arrangements.

46. Flint, Op. cit., page 95.

47. Ibid., page 96.

48. J. D. Bernal, The Extension of Man: The History of Physics Before the Modern Age, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1954, pages 124–127.

49. J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963, pages 100ff. See also: Edson, Op. cit., especially chapter 1; and Noble Wilford, Op. cit., chapters 4 and 5, pages 34–72.

50. Parry, Op. cit., page 103.

51. Ibid., page 105.

52. Ibid., page 106.

53. Noble Wilford, Op. cit., pages 71ff.

54. Parry, Op. cit., page 112.

55. Noble Wilford, Op. cit., page 75.

56. At night the so-called ‘guards’ of the Pole Star describe a complete circle around the pole every twenty-four hours. ‘A nocturnal’ consisted of a circular disc with a central hole for sighting Polaris and a rotating pointer to be aligned on Kochab. Around the edge of the disc were a series of marks indicating the angle for midnight on various dates of the year. This gave a crude measure of midnight for every day of the year. Noble Wilford, Op. cit., page 77.

57. Ibid., page 79.

58. Ibid., page 82.

59. Tidal races were also much more important in the Atlantic, where the tides rose and fell many feet, than in the Mediterranean, where they did not, and where the only dangerous tidal race was in the Straits of Messina. The relation of the tides to the moon now came into sharper focus, since they often affected access to Atlantic ports. Noble Wilford, Op. cit., page 85.

60. Parry, Op. cit., page 98. Phillips, Op. cit., page 194, for the implications of the disappearance of the Pole Star.

61. Parry, Op. cit., page 63.

62. Ibid.

63. For a vivid description of travel aboard a galley see: Chatterton, Op. cit., page 139.

64. Parry, Op. cit., page 58. See Chatterton, Op. cit., page 144, for a description of the development of lateen rigging and the highpoint of its use at the battle of Lepanto in 1571. The format allowed a ship to sail ‘two points nearer the wind’. And see the illustration facing page 142.

65. Ronald J. Watkins, Unknown Seas: How Vasco da Gama Opened the East, London: John Murray, 2003, page 118.

66. Parry, Op. cit., page 140.

67. He also found Christians on the Malabar coast, whose liturgy was in Syriac. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 553.

68. Parry, Op. cit., page 149.

69. Bodmer, Op. cit., page 10.

70. Parry, Op. cit., page 151.

71. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Columbus and the Conquest of the Impossible, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974, pages 166–167.

72. Parry, Op. cit., page 154 and ref. See also: Peter Martyr, De Orbo Novo, edited and translated by F. A. McNutt, New York 1912, volume 1, page 83, quoted in Parry, Ibid.

73. Ibid., page 159.