Rambling Speculations About Cause And Effect

I like to look at the chronological relation of events of hundreds or thousands of years ago, and speculate about possible cause-and-effect relationships, perhaps ones which have been rather seldom thought of. I'm hardly alone in this: historians often revise and refine our perceptions of events long after the fact. For example, the spires on Gothic cathedrals existed for quite a few centuries before it occurred to many people that they imitated the shape of minarets on masques, and that the Gothic style appeared in Europe in the 12th century, soon after the Crusades had begun and made masses of Western Europeans familiar with Islamic architecture. Now it is a commonplace in some circles that Gothic spires imitate minarets, and it is even somewhat difficult to understand how people failed to see this for so long.



I'm not the first to speculate about the relationship between Columbus' voyages to the Western Hemisphere and the rush of European exploration which followed, or, to use a popular phrase, the "Age of Discovery" -- between the Age of Discovery and the Protestant Reformation. Luther, Henry VIII and Calvin weren't the first Protestants, but no Protestants before them had succeeded and survived on such a large scale. The Hussites had succeeded and survived more than a century before those other three, but on a much smaller scale, and at the cost of their leader, John Hus, being arrested, condemned and executed by the Catholic authorities. Luther, Henry and Calvin all lived to die of natural causes. Did the Age of Discovery, with its shattering of conventional ideas about the extent and variety of human civilization, lead directly to an increased readiness to accept the shattering of the Medieval ideal of the one true universal Catholic Church? (Nevermind that this Medieval conceit of one Church ignored -- as some Westerners today still ignore -- the Orthodox, Coptic, Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopic and other churches.) I can't point out a link as clear and obvious as that between minaret and Gothic spire, but there's no reason we can't wonder about it.

And of course there's the effect of printing, which began before 1440 and became widespread in Europe before 1470, on both exploration and religious quarrels.

And let's go back a little further in time, and wonder about the relationship between guns and clocks on the one hand, and printing, exploration and religious conflict on the other. Usually when someone speaks of something like the "mechanical revolution" they mean something which got underway in the 18th or 19th century, with factories and mills and trains and steamships and filthy smokestacks, but there definitely was a great revolution in the 14th century when guns became more and more important in warfare, and clocks began to appear in more and more town squares, and to ring the hours with huge bells. Both inventions turned all sorts of things upside-down, it's hard to say which one did so to the greater extent, guns or clocks.



And now is the time where perhaps you expect me to wrap up this blog post in a neat bow of a conclusion full of real or feigned wisdom and relevance for the year 2015 and beyond, and I fail to do so. At least I'm not feigning something, not presented some half-baked bullshit about what the above means. Minarets, Gothic spires, guns and clocks, then the Hussites, then printing, then Columbus, then a rush of other explorers, and European colonies, then the Reformation -- what does it all mean? Well, I don't know. But at least I'm giving you the list in correct chronological order. (And as long as I'm here, I could add: the Ottomans conquered Constantinople and extinguished the "Byzantine" Roman Empire just as printing began to spread, and for a century and more before that conquest [1453, same year the Hundred Years' War ended], Greek scholars had been fleeing to Italy before the Ottoman onslaught, helping to create what we refer to as the "Italian Renaissance.") Maybe I even gave you something interesting to think about, and maybe eventually one of you will be able to tell the rest of us what it all means. (Maybe all that it means is that I'm preoccupied with the history of Western Europe to the exclusion of the rest of the universe.) I honestly just enjoy thinking about such things, and figuring out what happened before what, just for its own sake, with no pretensions to astonishing insights.

Early 16th-Century Europe

It's often been described as a time and place crowded with great personalities, and the people meant by that include Henry VIII, Francis 1, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent, Luther, the "bad" Popes, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli and Rabelais.

I don't think Henry VIII was so great. His appetite for food was great, appallingly so. Even more appalling were his treatment of his wives and his being more ready to accept religious war than a female heir. Elizabeth I turned out alright. I wonder how much that may have been due to her being neglected by Henry, since she was neither male not Henry's oldest daughter and therefore may have seemed unlikely to him to become Queen.

Many would not argue with me at all when I say that Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, who was also Charles I of Spain as well as the ruler of vast regions in the western hemisphere, was not a great statesman. He did nothing to conquer any of those regions, he merely inherited them, and one might well say that the steep decline of his huge empire began as soon as he took charge of it. He was not able to stop Luther from cracking the Western Church in half and kicking off a series of truly horrendous religious wars which lasted until 1648; he was not even in sure enough control of his own soldiers to keep them from looting Rome in 1527, in the early stages of those religious wars, when his troops were actually supposed to have been defending Rome from the Protestants. He did nothing to improve the lot of the vast numbers of natives in the Western Hemisphere who were enslaved in mines and other Spanish industries, and died from European diseases from which they had no immunity. He knew about the suffering of those natives; there were a few Spaniards brave enough to loudly complain about what was being done to them. Charles himself did not have a high opinion of his abilities as a leader. He abdicated in the 1550's, handing off the Holy Roman Empire to his brother, who became the Emperor Ferdinand I, and Spain and its huge American territories to his son, who was thus made Philip II of Spain. Ferdinand actually did a half-decent job of managing the bag of crap Charles handed him, temporarily bringing a degree of respite from the bloodshed of Catholic against Protestant within the Empire. Philip, on the other hand -- one thing you can say about Charles is that compared to Philip, he seems like a genius, a truly wonderful person, a beacon of humanity, reason and kindness. (But only compared to Philip.)

I have less bad things to say about Francis I and Suleiman the Magnificent, but that may only be because I know less about them. Suleiman expanded the Ottoman Empire as far to the north-west as it would ever grow when he besieged Vienna in 1529, an expansion they would match in 1683 when they besieged Vienna again. But I don't know how much of that expansion is due to Suleiman truly being magnificent as a general, and how much of it is due to the eastern frontier of the Holy Roman Empire having been in the hands of that klutz Charles V.

Leonardo and Michelangelo and Raphael and Machiavelli and Rabelais were impressive personalities, I admire them all, but they were only artists and engineers and writers, dependent upon the politicians, the rulers like Charles and Henry and Suleiman and Francis for their careers and for their very existences. The time and place itself, early 16th-century Europe, does have much which is exciting to the scholar, but because of things like Columbus having discovered America by accident while trying to sail west to India; and the spread of printing, which had been invented quite a while earlier. Things for which no ruler can take credit.

Luther hated the "bad" Popes for the thing for which they should be loved: for patronizing Leonardo and Michelangelo and Raphael and Machiavelli and many other creative geniuses, for participating fully in that joint which we today refer to as the Italian Renaissance, and above all, Luther hated the "bad" Popes and kicked off all that Catholic vs Protestant gore because those Popes simply weren't able to take all the religious stuff very seriously. No, I don't admire Luther, not at all. The best I can say of him is that compared to Calvin, he seems like a genius, a truly wonderful person, a beacon of humanity, reason and kindness. (But only compared to Calvin.)

And screw Erasmus too, that pious Bible-thumping twit! Take my advice: if anyone tells you they like Augustine, or Aquinas, or Erasmus: RUN!!! Drop what you're doing, turn your back and run until your legs feel like lead and your lungs are on fire, or risk being bored to death.

Invention And Application In Late-Medieval And Renaissance Europe: Timepieces, Firearms And Printing

I'm deliberately confining my remarks to Europe and European colonies. I'm not a Europhile, I just don't know much about the development of timepieces, firearms and printing outside of Europe, and I honestly try as best I can not to pontificate overmuch on subjects on which I am ignorant. Apparently there is still some debate about where and when these things were invented. I don't know how serious this debate is. I don't know whether the academic consensus about these origins is different in Damascus or Beijing than it is in Oxford or Paris. I do know that the Western academic consensus about the date and place of the invention of the firearm has undergone major revisions in the past two centuries. For example, there are certain pistols of Chinese origin which Western experts once said were 11th-century and are now dated to the 16th-century, the 11th-century dating having rested on certain linguistic and archaeological errors no competent Chinese scholar would have made.

It's certainly possible that firearms and mechanical timepieces were introduced into Europe from East Asia, Africa or the Middle East. There's no dispute that gunpowder and rockets were used in China long before the 11th century. There's no dispute that China and the Islamic world were very advanced technologically during Western Europe's Middle Ages. I certainly don't think it's impossible that Muslims and Chinese had guns long before Europeans did. I wouldn't even go so far as to say that it is improbable. I will go exactly so far as to say that the earliest evidence of firearms known to me, at this time, comes from Europe. The same way that I don't think it's impossible, and would not go so far to say that it is improbable, that Chinese fleets regularly visited the west coast of the Americas before Columbus was born. I just don't think it's been confirmed, as yet.

Those 16th-century Chinese pistols are not the only example of false assumptions about the early history of firearms springing from very elementary errors. For example, some people -- academics? Hmmm, I don't think so. And as I've said before on this blog, it may well be that I am the only autodidact on Earth who currently is as competent and reliable on historical and linguistic matters as an above-average full professor -- some people think that they have come across evidence that Ghengis Khan's armies had huge cannons, the most powerful ones on Earth. Actually Ghengis Khan (1162? – August 1227) died about a century before there was anything which we reasonably can agree is evidence of a cannon. Some people think Ghengis Khan had cannons because they do not realize that the ancestors of our English word "artillery" in Latin, French and other languages long predates the invention of firearms, and once referred to catapults, trebuchets, mangonels and every other sort of weapon which hurled something toward the enemy. Yes, there are reports that Ghengis Khan's armies had the largest and finest "artillery" in the world. It's quite reasonable to think that his catapults and mangonels might, indeed, have been the most powerful on Earth at the time. It would have been just one of several ways in which those armies represented the cutting edge of the military technology of their time. But there is no serious evidence that they had cannons.

About that evidence of a cannon about a century after Ghengis' death? Here it is, a picture in a manuscript made by an Englishman, Walter de Milemete, around 1326:

As with guns, it is difficult to say when mechanical clocks, clocks other than sundials and water-clocks, were first made. As with guns, linguistics adds to the confusion, as for some time there was no specific term to differentiate the new type of clock from a sundial or water-clock. Printing was underway as early as the 1430's, by Gutenberg and some other Germans, who kept their new invention pretty much secret until the 1460's, which is when when something which can fairly be called "an explosion of printing" spreads across Europe. The remarkable success of the German printers in keeping printing a secret of course begs the question: how long before them might printing have existed, and been kept so successfully secret that we still don't know about developments pre-Gutenberg?

 AD AMAZON If David Hockney is right,the European Old Master painters, as early as the mid-15th century, as early as the secretive Gutenberg's lifetime, had invented cameras or devices very similar to cameras, and kept the knowledge of those gadgets secret for a good 400 years, until the public learned that photographs could be made by means of the camera obscura. Perhaps Hockney is right. He certainly knows much more about both painting and photography than I ever will. I would just like to observe that his theory does nothing to explain the realism of sculpture, which greatly increased during the Renaissance right along with the realism of painting, nor does it explain the realism of some painting of ancient Rome. I still tend toward the pre-Hockney theory, that artists of certain eras tend to produce less realistic representations simply because they are less interested in realistic representation, not because they lacked the means to produce it.

Whenever and wherever guns were first invented, very soon after 1326 the means to manufacture them was no longer secret, and cannons were no longer an unusual sight on battlefields. But they were by no means an instant success. More than once I have encountered the strange phenomenon of a passionate gun-control advocate, a sworn enemy of present-day gun manufacturers, who harbors nevertheless a strong affection for, and in one case even actually collects, early firearms, because they were so unlikely ever to inflict injury upon anyone (with the possible exception of the people firing them, if they happened to explode like fragmentation bombs.) Large guns operated by teams of soldiers established themselves before firearms carried by individual soldiers. For a long time it was a very controversial question whether a foot-soldier carrying a gun was more effective than one carrying a bow and arrow, and as late as the reign of Henry VIII armies with archers, notably English armies with longbows, often trounced enemies with matchlocks and wheellocks.

Several decades of printing in secret in Germany before it became a Europe-wide trade, 225 years or more of guns before they finally eclipsed bows and arrows on the battlefield (big guns had replaced catapults and trebuchets somewhat earlier), and over 200 years of mechanical clocks, powered by free-hanging weights for most of that time, before someone came up with the idea of powering a clock with a windable spring, and before someone -- the same someone? Will we ever know? -- came up with the idea of making a clock small and stable enough and immune enough to bumps and shakes to being carried around. The idea of a watch that is, and made one. Unless watches were made long before the first ones we know of, from around 1530, and the invention was kept secret. We mustn't lose sight of how different the prevailing mentalities of other ages have been when it comes to invention. We're used to thinking of an invention as something which is publicly claimed as one's own as soon as possible, with the hope of reaping fame and fortune from it. Speaking of fame: many 16th- and 17th-century authors made anagrams of their own names on the covers of their own very popular books, so that only an initiated circle could know, for example, that German Schleifheim von Sulsfort, Samuel Griefnson von Hirschfeld, Philarchus Grosses von Trommenheim, and Michael Rechulin von Sehmsdorf were all actually just Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, so that it wasn't until the 19th ceentury, with the aid of the diligent detective work of many scholars, that the German reading public at large learned the identity of the author of perhaps the greatest work of fiction yet written in their language, AD AMAZON Simplicissimus.

Learning about other cultures and other times, really understanding them, always involves learning to let go of some of the attitudes and assumptions stereotypical to our own culture and time. Chumps like the idiots who spew forth the "History Channel" do the exact opposite of this when they say things like "Roman roads were the Internet of their time" or "Anthony and Cleopatra were the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of their time." It seems some people are quite uncomfortable even attempting to imagine lives and circumstances different from their own. No, those roads weren't an Internet, they were roads. Learning anything significant about people like Anthony and Cleopatra might actually require ceasing to think about people like Brangolina, if only for a painful and bewildering moment.

Was that last sentence unnecessary and obnoxious and Sheldon-like? Meh. I yam what I yam. And Sheldon's not all bad, he's just got a wrong-planet thing going on.

So, if you're inclined to study invention of other eras, and grappling to picture how it was with earlier inventors, as well as such things can be imagined, you need to jettison some assumptions which are specific to here and now, when significant inventions so often (not always!) are followed very quickly by application and recognition, when recognition is indeed sometimes a powerful motivation to invent. And keep in mind not just all of the differences between a certain age and now, but also between one past age and another. Imagine a Europe in 1300, with no clocks, no guns and no printing -- or perhaps with all three, but all three kept strictly secret by their inventors, for reasons which would be difficult indeed for us to really imagine to the point where we can sympathize with those reasons, and if we're not to that point we're not yet close to understanding -- and then imagine 1550, when clocks and guns and printing are not only everywhere, but are so firmly established that already it has begun to become difficult to imagine the time before them. We constantly transform our own world, and the things transformed include the way in which we study our ancestors and their transformations. We're constantly a work in progress, and by "we" I mean much more than just humans.

Am I an Historian?

[PS, 19. March 2016: No, I'm not an historian, I'm an essayist with a strong interest in history who's also written novels, stories and plays.]

Well... yes, I think perhaps I am, I think an historian may be what I am turning into. If an historian is someone who not only studies historical topics a lot, but also often has questions, the answers to which he does not find in other peoples' historical writings, and is seized by the strong desire to search among primary documents and artifacts as well as in secondary sources until he finds those answers, and then writes about what he has found, then, yes, I am very much an historian.

Here's an example of one of those questions which occurred to me recently: I had been aware that Johannes Gutenberg, whether or not he actually invented printing, had begun printing sometime in the 1430's or '40's, and from that I had assumed that the editio princeps of many a work of Classical antiquity dated from before 1450. But this appears not to be the case: I know of only one Classical work printed before 1469: Cicero's De Officiis,printed in 1465. Then beginning in 1469 a great number of first editions of Classical authors followed in close succession, with editions of Apulius, Livy, Lucan, Vergil, Caesar and Pliny the Elder all appearing in that year alone,

Why did it take so long for printers to get around to printing Classical texts? Was the interest in Classical material really so small? Were students of Classical literature somehow averse to the new technology?

No, and no. Rather, it seems that I had been puzzled because I made a couple of anachronistic assumptions: that the invention of printing, once achieved, became widely-known with a speed analogous to the news of inventions in out time; and that Gutenberg and other printers would seek out any and all customers for their invention. Actually, Gutenberg, and other of the earliest European printers in Gutenberg's corner of Germany, did not seek to publicize his invention. On the contrary, he tried very hard to keep it secret, so that others couldn't imitate what he did and compete with him. This naturally meant, for as long as they successfully maintained this secrecy, that their potential market remained small and local. And the customers they knew wanted primarily Christian things: parts of the Bible, eventually whole Bibles,and contemporary and medieval theology. The Classical printings came in great quantity as soon as the techniques of printing became less secret, and spread across Europe. This appears not to have happened until about 1469, when it spread very rapidly indeed all over Western Europe.

If I had a little more professionalism as an historian, I could, and would, tell you from exactly whom I learned all this. Unfortunately, I remembered roughly what was said and forgot who said it -- somewhere on the Internet. That was several months ago, though, and I'm getting more conscientious, more into the habit of recording attribution more as a matter of course when I note things. Good historians are good about giving attribution in their footnotes. Not only is this polite and proper, it also answers the question Oh yeah? Who sez? with which we (they? we) are perpetually confronted.

Years ago -- 10 years? 15? 20? I don't know how many years ago, I hadn't gotten into the habit yet of writing such things down -- a question which I much wanted to answer was, What was Charlemagne's native language? I read accounts of Charlemagne in several history books without learning the answer, until I found it here: Karl der Große. Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten,by Wolfgang Braunfels. It turns out that Charlemagne's native langugae was German; in fact, the written German language pretty much begins in his reign, and, more than that, at the very least the process of making German a written language received his strong support. It may have been his idea. (In those days people tended to write in languages which already had a tradition of writing: Latin, Greek, Hebrew and so forth -- mostly Latin in Charlemagne's Empire -- and it seems only rarely to have occurred to anyone to write in one of the various spoken languages of Europe.)