Heretics and Heroes Page 5

  Johannes Gutenberg, the German who introduced printing to the West, was a jeweler and goldsmith who knew how to fashion metals into shapes. He realized he would need to use extremely hard material if he was to set up an assembly that could repeatedly stamp letters onto paper (thwack, thwack!) without the letters breaking up. He was the first to make durable alphabetical typefaces out of lead and similar metals. (In the East, far less durable forms, fashioned from ceramic, wood, and sometimes bronze, had been employed.) For his press, he used a slightly altered winepress.

  A little before 1440, Gutenberg produced his first printed pages, and by about 1452 he was printing his first Bible. It was a large Latin Bible, using the Vulgate, the traditional translation made by Saint Jerome in the late fourth and early fifth centuries from the original Hebrew and Greek texts. It is thought that 180 copies were printed, 135 on paper and 45 on vellum. Two colors of ink were used, black and red, and spaces were left for illuminations (in the medieval manner) to be added later by hand. In most copies the sheets were divided into two bound volumes. Fewer than fifty copies of this first Bible have survived, most of them now quite incomplete.

  What was most astounding about Gutenberg’s project—which he called Das Werk der Bücher, The Work of the Books—was the number of Bibles produced in his first print run. For in this period the catalogues of all the great university libraries of Europe barely contained, on average, more than one hundred separate book titles apiece. In the future made possible by Gutenberg, books of all kinds would be everywhere in multiple copies, and soon enough everyone would be reading, comparing, checking, communicating.

  But it inevitably takes a while for human beings to absorb the changes that each new invention will work in our lives. We are certainly not so good at predicting what these changes will be. This is because, as one observer has remarked, “real innovation in technology involves a leap ahead, anticipating needs that no one really knew they had.”7 When, for instance, motion pictures were invented at the end of the nineteenth century, most audiences and most entrepreneurs thought they would be extensions of theater. The great French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt, already in her mid-sixties, enthusiastically repeated her most praised performances for the movie camera. “This,” she exulted, “is my one chance at immortality!”

  What we see today is an aging woman, putting on weight, gesticulating silently and wildly, overacting in parts written for much younger actresses. Whatever Bernhardt’s talents, they are hidden from the camera. She should have had a look at what her fellow Frenchmen, the brothers Lumière, were doing with their new movie camera, making their unflamboyant but exceedingly observant and natural documentaries, such as Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, which gives us a much better idea of the capabilities and limitations of the new medium in its astonishing realism. Alternatively, she could have consulted another of her countrymen, Georges Méliès, the original Cinemagician, who in such beguiling and awesome spectacles as A Trip to the Moon was the first to experiment with film’s fantastic capacity for trick photography. What film has never been especially good at, however, is extending the experience of live theater.

  The first printed book was a Bible, impressed in a language intelligible only to educated Europeans. To those few who took note of what Gutenberg was up to, his must have seemed a commendably pious effort, a more efficient way of doing what had always been done by scribes in monastic scriptoriums—and nothing more.

  How wrong they would have been.

  1 This cultural movement is the subject of Volume V of the Hinges of History, Mysteries of the Middle Ages.

  2 This exhortation sounds false to me, part of the general disdainful mischaracterizations of the peasantry by the educated classes. It is at one with the conspiratorial exhortation of Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2—“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers!”—also used to demonstrate the supposed villainy of the villeins. But then, Shakespeare was hardly a fan of peasant uprisings.

  3 More than four and a half centuries after her martyrdom at the hands of churchmen, Joan was canonized by the pope and named a patron of France.

  4 See Volume II of the Hinges of History, The Gifts of the Jews, Chapter I. Quite recent and isolated finds—a few undecipherable hieroglyphs on tiny bone tags—at Abydos in Egypt may indicate that the Egyptians invented writing at almost the same time as the Mesopotamian Sumerians. But it would appear from the fragmentary evidence that the Sumerians disseminated their invention more quickly and used it far more extensively than did the Egyptians of this period.

  5 The economist W. Brian Arthur argues in The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves that new technologies are seldom, if ever, accidents but normally emerge as novel combinations of already existing technologies, brought together by human beings who are searching for means to ends they have already identified.

  6 Though Korean, like several other Eastern languages, would eventually adopt an alphabet, the Chinese languages would never do so. It is enlightening, however, to list, as Eduardo Galeano, that great list maker, has done, the principal inventions that have come to the West from China: “Silk began there, five thousand years ago. Before anyone else the Chinese discovered, named, and cultivated tea. They were the first to mine salt from below ground and the first to use gas and oil in their stoves and lamps. They made lightweight iron plows and machines for planting, threshing, and harvesting two thousand years before the English mechanized their agriculture. They invented the compass eleven hundred years before Europe’s ships began to use them. A thousand years before the Germans, they discovered that water-driven mills could power their iron and steel foundries. Nineteen hundred years ago, they invented paper. They printed books six centuries before Gutenberg, and two centuries before him they used mobile type in their printing presses. Twelve hundred years ago, they invented gunpowder, and a century later the cannon. Nine hundred years ago, they made silk-weaving machines with bobbins worked by pedals, which the Italians copied after a two-century delay. They also invented the rudder, the spinning wheel, acupuncture, porcelain, soccer, playing cards, the magic lantern, fireworks, the pinwheel, paper money, the mechanical clock, the seismograph, lacquer, phosphorescent paint, the fishing reel, the suspension bridge, the wheelbarrow, the umbrella, the fan, the stirrup, the horseshoe, the key, the toothbrush, and other things hardly worth mentioning.”

  7 The speaker is David B. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School, commenting on the role of Steve Jobs in computer technology.

  I

  NEW WORLDS FOR OLD

  INNOVATION ON SEA AND LAND

  There is something in the wind.

  The Comedy of Errors

  Winter completes an age

  With its thorough levelling;

  Heaven’s tourbillions of rage

  Abolish the watchman’s tower

  And delete the cedar grove.

  As winter completes an age,

  The eyes huddle like cattle, doubt

  Seeps into the pores and power

  Ebbs from the heavy signet ring;

  The prophet’s lantern is out

  And gone the boundary stone,

  Cold the heart and cold the stove,

  Ice condenses on the bone:

  Winter completes an age.

  Thus the perspicacious W. H. Auden in For the Time Being. Like seasons, ages are seldom so precise as to end abruptly, while allowing another age to commence. Few events of European history have been as final as the Black Death in bringing to an end one age (which we might call the Innocently Playful Medieval) and bringing into view another (which we might call the Colder Late Medieval–Early Renaissance). But even at this interstice, old forms and old mental states hang on, while new forms and new mental states peek uncertainly into view. Locality often determines how boldly or timidly the new will come to supplant the old; and localities can find their integrity, even their ancient right to existence, open to question. (“This village has alway
s been crown territory.” “But which crown, England’s or France’s?” “Which religion, Christian or Muslim?” “Oh, and where, pray, is the boundary stone, the definitive separation between Us and Them?”)

  At such a crossroads, it is difficult if not impossible to see much farther than one’s nose: the watchman’s tower is down and the prophet’s lantern out. Those who occupy traditional seats of power—those who use signet rings—may begin to find their perches less stable and secure, more open to question. The ordinary bloke, the commoner attempting to make his way in the world, is all too likely to experience a new if vague sense of unease, of doubt seeping into his pores like unhealthy air. It is not a time of dancing and embracing but of stepping back and taking stock. Yet life goes on: men travel and make deals, as they have always done; monarchs make decisions, as they have always done, with far-reaching and often unpredictable consequences.

  1492: COLUMBUS DISCOVERS AMERICA

  One such man was Christopher Columbus, born of undistinguished forebears near Genoa, long a shadowy petitioner at various European courts, now arrived at Córdoba to the new headquarters of Spanish royalty, the Alcázar, former stronghold of Muhammad XII, whom Spaniards called Boabdil; and two such monarchs were their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. The year was a fateful one, 1492. To it, historians, looking backwards, have assigned the final expiration of the Middle Ages and the (as yet unheralded) birth of a new age.

  Many Americans will recall having suffered through a school pageant or two meant to dramatize the monumental encounter between the Genoese ship captain and the Spanish royal couple. And since such dramatizations invariably contain almost as much misinformation as they do historical fact, it is worth revisiting the great moment with a colder eye.

  The ship captain was probably born in 1451 at or very near Genoa, the son of a weaver who also sold cheeses on the streets of Genoa, then of Savona, his son helping out at both locations (“Parmigiano! Mozzarella! Gorgonzola!!”). The boy would have been called Christoffa Corombo in his native Ligurian, later Cristóbal Colón by Spaniards. Since documents of any importance were written in Latin, his Latinized name, Christophorus Columbus, which appears in his own hand as well as in other records of the period, was easily Englished as Christopher Columbus. Though there have been numerous attempts to render Columbus as Jewish, or even Muslim, and to trace his origins to a European country other than Italy, there is no evidence to support such theories, but there is good evidence to support his birth as an Italian Catholic.

  Genoa and Savona, ports on the Italian Riviera north of Corsica, offered adventurous boys many opportunities for seafaring apprenticeships. Columbus claimed to have first ventured to sea at the age of ten, and there is little reason to doubt him; surely by his late teens he was almost an old salt, and by his early twenties he had already docked as far away as the west coast of Africa, Chios in the Greek Aegean, Bristol on Britain’s west coast, Galway at the edge of the Atlantic, and probably Iceland. He also began to act as agent for a consortium of Genoese merchants, who traded far and wide. One of his voyages took him to Lisbon, where a brother, Bartolomeo, worked as a cartographer. In their collaboration we may glimpse the origin of Columbus’s great endeavor.

  Thanks to the enormous expansion in world trade that had been booming for more than two centuries, Europeans of means had come to take for granted certain substances that did not originate in Europe, especially the spices, opiates, and silks of faraway Asia. No one (who was anyone) could any longer imagine doing without these things. But the fall of Greek Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 had created a profound and permanent alteration in international affairs. It was of course still possible to extract the expected goodies from the Far East, but getting them past the Turks required both more cunning and more gold—and sometimes more blood—than had been previously required, considerably raising the price of the beloved commodities by the time they came to market. (Imagine if Americans could no longer afford chocolate, salt, or cocaine, or if most of the Wal-Marts closed down.) If Europeans could not dislodge the Turks—which they could not—what were they to do? At times, it seemed as if all the best practical minds of Europe were engaged in figuring out how to solve the problem. But think as much as they might, no one could come up with a solution. Except Columbus.

  What he suggested made little sense. He proposed to sail around the world, heading west into the Ocean Sea (as it was then called) till he hit the Island of Cipangu (Japan, as identified in the writings of Marco Polo) or perhaps, if he was especially lucky, the fabulous coast of Cathay (China) itself. Maps of the period, inaccurate about many things, nonetheless show both the principal island of Japan (misshapen and lacking most of its fellow islands) and the coast of a strangely squeezed China. There are even attempts to sketch in the archipelagos of Malaysia and Indonesia.

  The diameter of the spherical Earth had been calculated accurately by the Greek Eratosthenes in the second century BC, and his calculation was still widely known in the time of Columbus. Though no European foresaw what lay in wait for Columbus, since all thought mistakenly that the Ocean Sea, empty of land, was much larger than it was, almost all who could read and had looked into the subject understood that Columbus was seriously underestimating the overall size of the Earth.1

  Columbus, basing his calculations on inaccurate assumptions, theorized that the east coast of Asia could be reached by a European ship within a few weeks of its leaving port. The actual circumference of the Earth is about 40,000 kilometers, whereas Columbus assumed it to be closer to 25,000 kilometers. Compounding his mistake was his misreading—in a Latin translation—of a renowned ninth-century Persian astronomer, Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Farghani, known to the West as Alfraganus. The Persian’s correct measurements were given in Arabic miles, which Columbus assumed to be the same as Roman miles. In actuality, Roman miles are about 25 percent shorter than Arabic ones. Had the Ocean not held the Americas and the vast sea been empty of land between Europe and Asia, Columbus and his crew, heading west, would have perished in the deep and never been heard from again. This had indeed been the fate of several earlier (and well-known) attempts.

  Columbus’s good luck lay not in his miserably wrongheaded calculations about distance but in his accurate knowledge of the North Atlantic trade winds, which flow in a great clockwise circle. How he came by this information we can’t be sure. It may have been the result of his own observations on his previous voyages, only some of which we know about. In any case, it was information not widely understood at the time, even if in our own day it is common knowledge to transatlantic airline passengers. As a result of his awareness of the trade-winds pattern, he was able to keep them at his back, plotting a southerly outgoing course and a northerly homecoming one, both of which enabled him to travel much more quickly than others had been able to do. In this way, Columbus and his crew were saved from contrary winds, becalmings, and death by dehydration on the high seas.

  Columbus was a man of high color—reddish hair and ruddy cheeks enclosing a long, handsome face, surmounting a towering, tautly muscular body—and of highly colored personality. People seem either to have been instantly attracted to him or to have taken an instant dislike. He gestured grandly and spoke engagingly and loudly with the confidence of the true aristocrat, which he was not but was determined to become. He always presented himself as a nobleman, alluding vaguely to his familial line and crest, the son certainly not of Italy but of Genoa, la Superba (the Proud One), city of cities, link between Europe and the great globe. Despite his poor resources, he managed to dress well, cutting a fine figure at the European courts he visited. No doubt his admission to the presence of several monarchs in succession was made possible by the convincing show he made. His fair coloring and cool eye (gray or green in different reports) bespoke his northern European genetic origins and assured his welcome by monarchs who were all engaged in marriage games to render their legitimate stock more blond and blue-eyed.

  B
ut after he had made his impressive presentation, his proposal would be turned over to the scholars of the court, the people who had read all the books Columbus cited and many more, which he had failed to mention. Inevitably, the scholars would return to their monarch with the same conclusion: Columbus was a crackpot, not an investment opportunity. But, as we know only too well from recent dramas in our financial sector, sooner or later someone somewhere will make the investment. In the event, that someone was Isabella la Católica, reigning Queen of Spain.

  Before this, Columbus had conducted a long dalliance with King John II of Portugal, whom he nearly succeeded in convincing. He sought out financial power brokers in both Genoa and Venice but came up short. He sent his brother Bartolomeo to Henry VII of England with the astounding proposal. Henry, father to Henry VIII and founder of the Tudor dynasty, whose claim to the throne was quite shaky, said he would think about it. He thought and thought but had nothing more to say (at least not till it was too late). Meanwhile, Columbus found himself at the Spanish court, spending nearly six seemingly sterile years in the attempt to lure the monarchs into financing his scheme.

  Ferdinand and Isabella were not naïfs. Hereditary monarchs and crafty sovereigns, they had created Spain by the ploy of their marriage, uniting Ferdinand’s Aragon with Isabella’s much larger Castile and then pushing the Iberian Peninsula’s one remaining Islamic kingdom into the sea. This last they had accomplished only in March 1492 after years of war and had come to occupy the Alcázar but minutes (as it were) before Columbus appeared once more to present his final and most eloquent plea. Political to their fingertips, the Catholic Monarchs allowed not a whisper of disagreement to squeeze between them. Their motto, “Tanto monta, monta tanto,” means something like “Each is the same as the other.” So don’t try any special pleading with one of us.