In today's world of global communication and cultural interaction a lecture series on science, civilization and society should attempt to give equal prominence to all civilizations. One of the core aims of these lectures is indeed to present the history of science, and its interaction with society, without cultural bias.
If we were to apply that principle to the 1000 years after the closure of the Museum of Alexandria in 415, Europe would not rate a mention at all. The Middle Ages, as the period from 450 to 1450 is known, were the time when science progressed in India, China and the upcoming Islamic world. The next three lectures will therefore be devoted to the contributions to the development of science made by these civilizations. The state of science in medieval Europe can be characterized through an anecdote reported in Ifrah (2000):
Anecdotes are like caricatures; they exaggerate typical features, but they have a true core. The story of the medieval merchant demonstrates that spending an entire lecture on medieval science in Europe is an undeniable act of cultural bias. From the point of view of global history it cannot be justified. The only excuse I can offer is that I was born into the European civilization and therefore have an interest in even the darkest times of European history.
Not all texts on the history of science see the European Middle Ages in the same light. Beaujouan (1957) concludes the discussion of "Medieval Science in the Christian West" with the remark: "The Renaissance, though it acknowledged no masters other than those of classical antiquity, must, in fact, be regarded as the ungrateful daughter of the Middle Ages." It is worth reflecting on this and asking what the Middle Ages could have had to offer when science moved forward again during the Renaissance (the period that began in about 1450 and lasted for about 100 years).
The development of science and society is a series of rapid climbs separated by long stretches of level road. The moments of change in the history of human society (from hunter-gatherer society to slave economy, feudal society and capitalism) were discussed in the very first lecture. In science the moments of ascent from one level to the next before the Middle Ages were (a) the introduction of the position-value number system and invention of zero, and (b) the separation of science from religion and the introduction of philosophy. The next level was not reached until the 16th century, when the Ptolemaic world system was replaced by the system of Copernicus.
The European Middle Ages were a plateau: European society was in its feudal state, and European science was stagnant. The climb to the next level of science happened elsewhere. The Renaissance scientists were correct when they saw themselves as the successors of Greek science and called the medieval period the "dark ages."
Historians of science divide the European Middle Ages into four phases:
Before we address these developments in science we have to briefly summarize the evolution of society during these 1000 years.
Two societies confronted each other in the 5h century. The Roman empire was the largest slave economy of antiquity. In such an economy the land holders owned the land, the farm houses, farming implements, animals and labour force, and state-owned labour force supported public services. The barbarian tribes lived in an agricultural village society, in which the peasants owned the land, their houses, farm implements and animals and the village community owned the forests and pasture.
When Rome fell to barbarian rule, these two society forms gradually merged. Through force and debt the landowners, who had lost their supply of slaves, could get control of the land of the peasants, who continued to own their houses, implements and most of their animals but had to pay rent for the use of the land.
The new economic order, known as feudalism, was more productive than slavery because the peasants were free to decide how to run their farm, as long as they delivered the required part of their harvest to the landlord. This stimulated interest of the peasants in their own success and increased production. The drawback for the landlords was that coercion was required to collect the tax, which necessitated a police force or army.
The new feudal agricultural units were largely self-sufficient and included basic trades such as blacksmith, weaver, furniture maker and many more. Trade, which had played a large part in the Roman economy, declined during feudalism. This led to a reduced role for the cities, which declined in size. Some provincial cities originally established as Roman garrisons disappeared, larger cities were depopulated.
The church became one of the most powerful landlords in the process. Monasteries owned large tracts of land, and bishops and archbishops became feudal rulers over large territory. Within 200 years Europe consisted of a patchwork of dukedoms and bishoprics that competed for power, pawned or sold villages and towns amongst each other and formed alliances against each other.
There was one major difference between the secular rulers and the clergy. Land ownership of the aristocracy became hereditary, bishops and archbishops were appointed as feudal landlords by the pope. This gave the pope a degree of over-arching authority even in worldly affairs.
As the feudal aristocracy established itself and accumulated wealth, trade developed again, first mainly in luxury goods but later also in goods that were not locally available. This required some kind of central power, and by 800 the "Holy Roman Empire" grouped together many feudal sovereigns under one emperor, who was elected by the many independent rulers but crowned by the pope.
The power of the pope increased greatly in the process, and the three centuries 1050 - 1350 are known as the period of papal domination. In the categories of science history it covered all of the "European awakening" and the "age of scholastic science" and was characterized by crusades and the introduction of the inquisition, an institution that survived the Middle Ages and became an instrument of oppression during the Renaissance.
The outbreak of the Black Death (plague) in 1347 led to a crisis of continental proportions. Within four years the population had been decimated. In some regions only two third of the people survived, some cities lost over half their inhabitants, in England alone more than 1000 villages were abandoned forever. The history of science calls these years the period of "the decline of the universities." It was much more; it was a decline of infrastructure and spirit of the society as a whole. It took Europe 200 years to reach the population of 1340 again.
The Middle Ages witnessed some important technological developments. The productivity of agriculture was raised through the clearing of forests and the introduction of the three-field system. The introduction of the Chinese breast harness (see Lecture 15) led to improvements in the transport sector, where oxen were replaced by the swifter horse. Wind mill technology was introduced from Persia during the 10th century. Water mills reached Europe at about the same time and were made more efficient. Many new trades developed in the cities and organized themselves in guilds. Other important developments were the introduction of the spinning wheel and the application of hydraulic power to the forge bellows, which increased the temperature of furnaces to a level that allowed metal castings.
These and other technological innovations were activities of the working classes. Science, on the other hand, required sponsorship of the ruling class. The Western Empire was breaking up and its ruling class in disarray, so the only institution to maintain the scientific tradition was in the east. The Eastern Roman Empire with its capital Constantinople, also known as the Byzantine Empire, had attracted quite a number of scholars from the west, and emperor Constantine had established a university in 330.
In principle, the university curriculum comprised rhetoric, the four exact sciences arithmetic, geometry, musical theory and astronomy which made up the quadrivium, and "physics", which in fact included chemistry, biology and medicine as well. But the closure of the Academy in Athens by Justinian meant the loss of qualified teaching staff, who tried to get employment at the Persian court. As a result science lost much of its quality even in the relatively stable Byzantine environment.
An example of the degeneration of science is the Madaba mosaic, the first geographical map produced in Christian Europe. An excellent piece of art, it is more an account of stories related in the Old Testament than a geographical map and ignores all Greek attempts at giving latitudes and longitudes of places.
The proof that the decline of science in the Byzantine Empire was not intellectual inaptitude but disinterest and Christian adversity is the Hagia Sophia, one of the greatest achievements of world architecture. It was completed in 537 and covered by a cupola of immense size. Unlike the hemispheric cupola of Rome's Pantheon, which rests its weight on the walls, the shallow cupola of the Hagia Sophia directs the stress from its weight outwards, an audacious undertaking that could only be undertaken by architects who knew their mathematics and could determine the strength of the ramparts required to keep the building together.
During the "age of scholastic science" the closeness of the Byzantine Empire to the Islamic empires produced many encyclopaedic works based on translations of Arabic texts (that were translations from the Greek). When seen in the context of the history of science we have to agree with Théodoridès (1957) when he says: "No one could maintain that Byzantine scientific texts were of outstanding scientific value, or that most of them were more than poor compilations of earlier Greek or Hellenistic works or commentaries."
In the west the Dark Ages were the really dark ages, without scientific achievements or understanding. We saw in Lecture 6 that Gerbert of Aurillac, considered one of the best scientists of the 10th century, did not know what to do with the Indian numerals when he saw them in Arabic texts.
The "European awakening" prepared the ground for the many translations and collections that followed during the "age of scholastic science." An independent thinker during this period was Adelard of Bath, who was born in Bath around 1170, studied at Tours and taught in Laon, Salerno, Sicily and Palestine. During his travels he became familiar with the Arabic translations of Greek classics and learned to admire Arabic science. In his Questiones Naturales, an early work written as a dialogue between himself and his young nephew, he discussed biology, hydrography, meteorology and astronomy and took an independent stand towards the Greek scientists, who were generally regarded as irrefutable authorities at the time:
Such independent position would inevitably come into conflict with Christian teaching. Adelard asserted that "if it is the creator's wish that plants spring from the earth, this process is not without natural reason, too." In his later career he restricted himself to translations of Euclid's Elements and the astronomical and trigonometrical works of the Arabian mathematician al-Khwarizmi.
This was the period of the strengthening of feudalism in Europe, and science depended more than ever on the support of individual rulers. Occasionally a regent would show scientific curiosity, and the result would reflect his personal interests.
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor from 1220 until 1250, was an ardent hunter who practiced falconry whenever his military and political activities against the pope gave him an opportunity and he was not on a crusade. His treatise De arte venandi cum avibus (The art of hunting with birds) is an outstanding scientific work. It contains nearly 900 illustrations of different birds and a wealth of observations on the structure of their bones, flight and adaptation of their beaks to different food.
The material described in the work shows Frederick II as one of the first experimentalists of Europe. He experimented with artificial incubation of eggs, investigated whether vultures find their food by sight or by smell, and said about Aristotle's History of Animals:
This evolution of an independent scientific attitude cannot gloss over the fact that Frederick II was not a scientist. Science for him was an activity of leisure, enjoyable but without much consequence. The study of birds was among his more acceptable scientific experiments. Others involved the placing of a prisoner in a closed barrel to find out whether his soul departed his body when he died, or the raising of children in absolute silence to find out what spontaneous language they would develop. He did set up the first European state university in Naples in 1224, but it was dedicated to the training of civil servants and did not pursue science.
Alfonso X of Castile, who became known as Alfonso el Sabio (literally Alfonso the Learned but usually translated as Alfonso the Wise), was the other scientifically inclined ruler. He was king of Castile and Leon from 1252 to 1284 but never managed to fulfil his wish to be elected Holy Roman Emperor. He kept a large court, maintained by heavy taxes, where scholars produced a series of works of variable quality.
Two works on history (the Premera Crónica General and the Gran e General Estoria) were a mixture of folklore, Arabic sources and stories from the Old Testament. The Tablas Alfonsíes were planetary tables based on Arabic sources and augmented by observations made in Toledo during 1262 - 1272. The Libros del Saber de Astronomia ("Books of Astronomical Knowledge") described the celestial spheres and the instruments for astronomical observations. A work of some importance was the Siete partidas on Roman law; it became the law for Castile and Leon in 1348.
The major impact of Alfonso's court, however, was not in its contributions to science, it was in its presentation: Alfonso's scholars were the first to abandon Latin and write in the vernacular. Their use of Castilian Spanish established Castilian as the base of modern Spanish.
If there was one person who raised the science of medicine to a new level during the Middle Ages it was Hildegard von Bingen, a nun who lived from 1098 until 1179 in a convent on the Rhine river in Germany. Her mystic visions were acknowledged by the pope and made her famous during her lifetime, and she could promote ideas that would have meant persecution for others. Her fearless castigation of the avarice and immoral life of the clergy were a constant irritation for the church.
Hildegard had an extensive knowledge of the medicinal uses of plants; her works Physica and Causae et Curae ("Causes and Cures") contain descriptions of 513 of them. But she did not, like physicians before her, primarily see them as a means to cure the sick. Her concern was the healthy person, and she recognized that health requires both physical and spiritual well-being.
Hildegard von Bingen's approach was a revolution for scientific medicine. She used plants and various foods to establish a healthy diet and applied them to cure the sick only when this became necessary. Some of her concepts were clearly wrong on today's standards and can only illustrate the poor state of medieval science; but her attitude to the natural world was a rejection of medieval thinking. Hildegard stressed the unity of body and soul and stated that physical and spiritual health have to go together. She applied this concept to all human experiences, and her discussion of the physical and spiritual aspects of love included a detailed description of the female orgasm.
Such insight into the human condition could of course not be condoned by the clergy. It was tolerated during Hildegard's lifetime, but after her death her books disappeared in the cupboards for dangerous literature, and the church resisted all efforts of the public to declare her a saint.
Hildegard's death coincided with the beginning of the "age of scholastic science." An increasing stream of Arabic scientific literature arrived in Christian Europe. As a result a great wave of university foundations swept through the continent. The university scholars spent their time translating and copying the Arabic translations of the Greek classical science texts but did not develop novel concepts or ideas. The great misery of the century following the Black Death stifled the universities as well. Nevertheless, their existence provided a good starting position for the development of science during the Renaissance that followed.
Beaujouan, G. (1957) Medieval Science in the Christian West. In Taton, R. (ed.) La Science Antique et Médiévale, Presses Universitaires de France; English translation by A. J. Pomerans (1967) "Ancient and Medieval Science", Thames and Hudson, London.551 pp., p. 531 (Volume 1 of "A General History of the Sciences")
Ifrah, G. (2000) Universal History of Numbers. John Wiley & Sons. Translated from Ifrah, G. (1981) Histoire Universelle des Chiffres, (Seghers).
Théodoridès, J. (1957) Byzantine Science. In Taton, R. (ed.) La Science Antique et Médiévale, Presses Universitaires de France; English translation by A. J. Pomerans (1967) "Ancient and Medieval Science", Thames and Hudson, London.551 pp., p. 451 (Volume 1 of "A General History of the Sciences")
| next lecture |