A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS49.THE INTELLECTUAL REVIVAL OF THE EUROPEANS
Throughout the twelfth century there were many signs that the European intelligence was recovering courage and leisure, and preparing to take up again the intellectual enterprises of the first Greek scientific enquiries and such speculations as those of the Italian Lucretius. The causes of this revival were many and complex. The suppression of private war, the higher standards of comfort and security that followed the crusades, and the stimulation of men’s minds by the experiences of these expeditions were no doubt necessary preliminary conditions. Trade was reviving; cities were recovering ease and safety; the standard of education was arising in the church and spreading among laymen. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were a period of growing, independent or quasi-independent cities; Venice, Florence, Genoa, Lisbon, Paris, Bruges, London, Antwerp, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Novgorod,
Wisby and Bergen for example. They were all trading cities with many
travellers, and where men trade and travel they talk and think. The
polemics of the Popes and princes, the conspicuous savagery and
wickedness of the persecution of heretics, were exciting men to doubt
the authority of the church and question and discuss fundamental
things.
We have seen how the Arabs were the means of restoring Aristotle to
Europe, and how such a prince as Frederick II acted as a channel
through which Arabic philosophy and science played upon the renascent
European mind. Still more influential in the stirring up of men’s
ideas were the Jews. Their very existence was a note of interrogation
to the claims of the church. And finally the secret, fascinating
enquiries of the alchemists were spreading far and wide and setting men
to the petty, furtive and yet fruitful resumption of experimental
science.
And the stir in men’s minds was by no means confined now to the
independent and well educated. The mind of the common man was awake in
the world as it had never been before in all the experience of mankind.
In spite of priest and persecution, Christianity does seem to have
carried a mental ferment wherever its teaching reached. It established
a direct relation between the conscience of the individual man and the
God of Righteousness, so that now if need arose he had the courage to
form his own judgment upon prince or prelate or creed.
As early as the eleventh century philosophical discussion had begun
again in Europe, and there were great and growing universities at
Paris, Oxford, Bologna and other centres. There medieval “schoolmen”
took up again and thrashed out a series of questions upon the value and
meaning of words that were a necessary preliminary to clear thinking in
the scientific age that was to follow. And standing by himself because
of his distinctive genius was Roger Bacon (circa 1210 to circa 1293), a
Franciscan of Oxford, the father of modern experimental science. His
name deserves a prominence in our history second only to that of
Aristotle.
His writings are one long tirade against ignorance. He told his age it
was ignorant, an incredibly bold thing to do. Nowadays a man may tell
the world it is as silly as it is solemn, that all its methods are
still infantile and clumsy and its dogmas childish assumptions, without
much physical danger; but these peoples of the middle ages when they
were not actually being massacred or starving or dying of pestilence,
were passionately convinced of the wisdom, the completeness and
finality of their beliefs, and disposed to resent any reflections upon
them very bitterly. Roger Bacon’s writings were like a flash of light
in a profound darkness. He combined his attack upon the ignorance of
his times with a wealth of suggestion for the increase of knowledge.
In his passionate insistence upon the need of experiment and of
collecting knowledge, the spirit of Aristotle lives again in him.
“Experiment, experiment,” that is the burthen of Roger Bacon.
Yet of Aristotle himself Roger Bacon fell foul. He fell foul of him
because men, instead of facing facts boldly, sat in rooms and pored
over the bad Latin translations which were then all that was available
of the master. “If I had my way,” he wrote, in his intemperate fashion,
“I should burn all the books of Aristotle, for the study of them can
only lead to a loss of time, produce error, and increase ignorance,” a
sentiment that Aristotle would probably have echoed could he have
returned to a world in which his works were not so much read as
worshipped—and that, as Roger Bacon showed, in these most abominable translations.
Throughout his books, a little disguised by the necessity of seeming to
square it all with orthodoxy for fear of the prison and worse, Roger
Bacon shouted to mankind, “Cease to be ruled by dogmas and authorities;
_look at the world!_” Four chief sources of ignorance he denounced;
respect for authority, custom, the sense of the ignorant crowd, and the
vain, proud unteachableness of our dispositions. Overcome but these,
and a world of power would open to men: —
“Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that great
ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be borne with
greater speed than if they were full of men. Likewise cars may be made
so that without a draught animal they may be moved _cum impetu
inœstimable_, as we deem the scythed chariots to have been from which
antiquity fought. And flying machines are possible, so that a man may
sit in the middle turning some device by which artificial wings may
beat the air in the manner of a flying bird.”
So Roger Bacon wrote, but three more centuries were to elapse before
men began any systematic attempts to explore the hidden stores of power
and interest he realized so clearly existed beneath the dull surface of
human affairs.
But the Saracenic world not only gave Christendom the stimulus of its
philosophers and alchemists; it also gave it paper. It is scarcely too
much to say that paper made the intellectual revival of Europe
possible. Paper originated in China, where its use probably goes back
to the second century B.C. In 751 the Chinese made an attack upon the
Arab Moslems in Samarkand; they were repulsed, and among the prisoners
taken from them were some skilled papermakers, from whom the art was
learnt. Arabic paper manuscripts from the ninth century onward still
exist. The manufacture entered Christendom either through Greece or by
the capture of Moorish paper-mills during the Christian reconquest of
Spain. But under the Christian Spanish the product deteriorated sadly.
Good paper was not made in Christian Europe until the end of the
thirteenth century, and then it was Italy which led the world. Only by
the fourteenth century did the manufacture reach Germany, and not until
the end of that century was it abundant and cheap enough for the
printing of books to be a practicable business proposition. Thereupon
printing followed naturally and necessarily, for printing is the most
obvious of inventions, and the intellectual life of the world entered
upon a new and far more vigorous phase. It ceased to be a little
trickle from mind to mind; it became a broad flood, in which thousands
and presently scores and hundreds of thousands of minds participated.
One immediate result of this achievement of printing was the appearance
of an abundance of Bibles in the world. Another was a cheapening of
school-books. The knowledge of reading spread swiftly. There was not
only a great increase of books in the world, but the books that were
now made were plainer to read and so easier to understand. Instead of
toiling at a crabbed text arid then thinking over its significance,
readers now could think unimpeded as they read. With this increase in
the facility of reading, the reading public grew. The book ceased to be
a highly decorated toy or a scholar’s mystery. People began to write
books to be read as well as looked at by ordinary people. They wrote
in the ordinary language and not in Latin. With the fourteenth century
the real history of the European literature begins.
So far we have been dealing only with the Saracenic share in the
European revival. Let us turn now to the influence of the Mongol
conquests. They stimulated the geographical imagination of Europe
enormously. For a time under the Great Khan, all Asia and Western
Europe enjoyed an open intercourse; all the roads were temporarily
open, and representatives of every nation appeared at the court of
Karakorum. The barriers between Europe and Asia set up by the
religious feud of Christianity and Islam were lowered. Great hopes were
entertained by the papacy for the conversion of the Mongols to
Christianity. Their only religion so far had been Shumanism, a
primitive paganism. Envoys of the Pope, Buddhist priests from India,
Parisian and Italian and Chinese artificers, Byzantine and Armenian
merchants, mingled with Arab officials and Persian and Indian
astronomers and mathematicians at the Mongol court. We hear too much
in history of the campaigns and massacres of the Mongols, and not
enough of their curiosity and desire for learning. Not perhaps as an
originative people, but as transmitters of knowledge and method their
influence upon the world’s history has been very great. And everything
one can learn of the vague and romantic personalities of Jengis or
Kublai tends to confirm the impression that these men were at least as
understanding and creative monarchs as either that flamboyant but
egotistical figure Alexander the Great or that raiser of political
ghosts, that energetic but illiterate theologian Charlemagne.
One of the most interesting of these visitors to the Mongol Court was a
certain Venetian, Marco Polo, who afterwards set down his story in a
book. He went to China about 1272 with his father and uncle, who had
already once made the journey. The Great Khan had been deeply impressed
by the elder Polos; they were the first men of the “Latin” peoples he
had seen; and he sent them back with enquiries for teachers and learned
men who could explain Christianity to him, and for various other
European things that had aroused his curiosity. Their visit with Marco was their second visit.
The three Polos started by way of Palestine and not by the Crimea, as
in their previous expedition. They had with them a gold tablet and
other indications from the Great Khan that must have greatly
facilitated their journey. The Great Khan had asked for some oil from
the lamp that burns in the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem; and so thither
they first went, and then by way of Cilicia into Armenia. They went
thus far north because the Sultan of Egypt was raiding the Mongol
domains at this time. Thence they came by way of Mesopotamia to Ormuz
on the Persian Gulf, as if they contemplated a sea voyage. At Ormuz
they met merchants from India. For some reason they did not take ship,
but instead turned northward through the Persian deserts, and so by way
of Balkh over the Pamir to Kashgar, and by way of Kotan and the Lob Nor
into the Hwang-ho valley and on to Pekin. At Pekin was the Great Khan, and they were hospitably entertained.
Marco particularly pleased Kublai; he was young and clever, and it is
clear he had mastered the Tartar language very thoroughly. He was
given an official position and sent on several missions, chiefly in
south-west China. The tale he had to tell of vast stretches of smiling
and prosperous country, “all the way excellent hostelries for
travellers,” and “fine vineyards, fields, and gardens,” of “many
abbeys” of Buddhist monks, of manufactures of “cloth of silk and gold
and many fine taffetas,” a “constant succession of cities and
boroughs,” and so on, first roused the incredulity and then fired the
imagination of all Europe. He told of Burmah, and of its great armies
with hundreds of elephants, and how these animals were defeated by the
Mongol bowmen, and also of the Mongol conquest of Pegu. He told of
Japan, and greatly exaggerated the amount of gold in that country. For
three years Marco ruled the city of Yang-chow as governor, and he
probably impressed the Chinese inhabitants as being little more of a
foreigner than any Tartar would have been. He may also have been sent
on a mission to India. Chinese records mention a certain Polo attached
to the imperial council in 1277, a very valuable confirmation of the
general truth of the Polo story.
The publication of Marco Polo’s travels produced a profound effect upon
the European imagination. The European literature, and especially the
European romance of the fifteenth century, echoes with the names in
Marco Polo’s story, with Cathay (North China) and Cambulac (Pekin) and the like.
Two centuries later, among the readers of the Travels of Marco Polo was
a certain Genoese mariner, Christopher Columbus, who conceived the
brilliant idea of sailing westward round the world to China. In
Seville there is a copy of the Travels with marginal notes by Columbus.
There were many reasons why the thought of a Genoese should be turned
in this direction. Until its capture by the Turks in 1453
Constantinople had been an impartial trading mart between the Western
world and the East, and the Genoese had traded there freely. But the
“Latin” Venetians, the bitter rivals of the Genoese, had been the
allies and helpers of the Turks against the Greeks, and with the coming
of the Turks Constantinople turned an unfriendly face upon Genoese
trade. The long forgotten discovery that the world was round had
gradually resumed its sway over men’s minds. The idea of going
westward to China was therefore a fairly obvious one. It was
encouraged by two things. The mariner’s compass had now been invented
and men were no longer left to the mercy of a fine night and the stars
to determine the direction in which they were sailing, and the Normans,
Catalonians and Genoese and Portuguese had already pushed out into the
Atlantic as far as the Canary Isles, Madeira and the Azores.
Yet Columbus found many difficulties before he could get ships to put
his idea to the test. He went from one European Court to another.
Finally at Granada, just won from the Moors, he secured the patronage
of Ferdinand and Isabella, and was able to set out across the unknown
ocean in three small ships. After a voyage of two months and nine days
he came to a land which he believed to be India, but which was really a
new continent, whose distinct existence the old world had never
hitherto suspected. He returned to Spain with gold, cotton, strange
beasts and birds, and two wild- eyed painted Indians to be baptized.
They were called Indians because, to the end of his days, he believed
that this land he had found was India. Only in the course of several
years did men begin to realize that the whole new continent of America
was added to the world’s resources.
The success of Columbus stimulated overseas enterprise enormously. In
1497 the Portuguese sailed round Africa to India, and in 1515 there
were Portuguese ships in Java. In 1519 Magellan, a Portuguese sailor
in Spanish employment, sailed out of Seville westward with five ships,
of which one, the _Vittoria_, came back up the river to Seville in
1522, the first ship that had ever circumnavigated the world.
Thirty-one men were aboard her, survivors of two-hundred-and- eighty
who had started. Magellan himself had been killed in the Philippine
Isles.
Printed paper books, a new realization of the round world as a thing
altogether attainable, a new vision of strange lands, strange animals
and plants, strange manners and customs, discoveries overseas and in
the skies and in the ways and materials of life burst upon the European
mind. The Greek classics, buried and forgotten for so long, were
speedily being printed and studied, and were colouring men’s thoughts
with the dreams of Plato and the traditions of an age of republican
freedom and dignity. The Roman dominion had first brought law and
order to Western Europe, and the Latin Church had restored it; but
under both Pagan and Catholic Rome curiosity and innovation were
subordinate to and restrained by organization. The reign of the Latin
mind was now drawing to an end. Between the thirteenth and the
sixteenth century the European Aryans, thanks to the stimulating
influence of Semite and Mongol and the rediscovery of the Greek
classics, broke away from the Latin tradition and rose again to the
intellectual and material leadership of mankind.