Lecture 16 min.
The catastrophe that destroyed the civilization of the ancient world was triggered by a fundamental discovery made by nomads — the invention of the stirrup. The stirrup gave a rider stability in the saddle and made it possible to wield a long sword or saber. Rising in the stirrups, a horseman could strike a Roman legionary or a Chinese foot soldier with a blow that carried the full weight of his body. The invention of the stirrup unleashed a terrible wave of invasions that destroyed the civilization of the Ancient World.
"See how suddenly death has fallen upon the whole world," wrote Bishop Orientius. "Those who withstood violence perished from hunger… In the towns and villages — everywhere there is death, suffering, ruin, and grief. Nothing but smoke remains of Gaul, consumed in a universal conflagration." "Time has returned to the silence that reigned before the creation of man," an Italian chronicler testifies, "no voice in the fields, no whistle of a shepherd. The fields have become graveyards, and the homes of men have become the dens of wild beasts."
The masters of Europe became the descendants of the conquerors, the Germanic barbarians. These were heavily armed mounted knights; they subjugated the local peasants, turning some of them into serfs and forcing others to pay tribute. A knight's holding was called a fief, and historians call the social system of that era feudalism; thus the fundamental discovery — the invention of the stirrup — gave rise to knights and feudalism.
After the first wave of invasions, which had come from the depths of Eurasia, a second wave arrived — this time from the sea. The Scandinavian Norsemen built the drakkar, a seaworthy vessel with 40 to 70 oarsmen and a rectangular sail. The distinctive quality of the drakkar was that it could cross the seas and sail up rivers with equal ease, and could even be dragged overland across watersheds. Thanks to the drakkar, the Norsemen could suddenly appear almost anywhere they wished; a fleet of 50 to 100 ships would land several thousand warriors, who plundered towns and villages and departed as soon as the enemy gathered a large force. The drakkar allowed the Norsemen to pillage much of Western Europe, but since they had no advantage over knightly cavalry, they managed to establish themselves permanently in only a few regions — Normandy, Sicily, and England. In eastern Europe the situation was different: there was no knightly cavalry there, and thanks to their swords and chainmail, the Norse Varangians held military superiority over the local population. In the end, the Varangians conquered the land of the Slavs; they gave this country their own name, Rus — for in Finnish, "rus" means "Swedes." Later the Varangians turned into mounted retainers, the Russian boyars.
It is well known that the Russian princes bore Scandinavian names: Rurik is Rorik of Jutland, famous for the sack of London; Oleg is Helgi; Olga is Helga; Igor is Ingvar; Svyatoslav (seemingly a Slavic name) is Sveindislav; Vladimir is Valdemar, and so on.
The barbarian invasions swept across the whole of Eurasia, and there was only one city that managed to withstand this storm — the last fortress of civilization, Constantinople. Barbarians, Turks, and Arabs stormed Constantinople from sea and land, but the Greeks were saved by the invention of Greek fire, an incendiary mixture that was sprayed onto enemy ships with powerful pumps. Constantinople held out, but the country was devastated, and for a long time the Greeks had no time for the sciences and arts. The situation changed only under Emperor Basil I (867–886); although an illiterate peasant himself, Basil held learned monks in great respect and spared no gold for the revival of Greek scholarship. In the mid-9th century, under the direction of Bishop Leo the Mathematician, a higher school was reopened in the Magnaura Palace, and the revival of the ancient sciences and arts began. The teachers of the Magnaura school began collecting ancient books preserved in monasteries; the famous grammarian Photius compiled a collection of brief summaries of 280 ancient manuscripts. Court grammarians assembled a vast library and took part in creating extensive compilations on law, history, and agronomy. The Greeks became reacquainted with Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid, and once again learned that the Earth was spherical. Greece also preserved the principles of building craft created by the Romans; it was the Greeks who taught the surrounding peoples how to build stone cathedrals — they built St Mark's Basilica in Venice and the Cathedral of St Sophia in Kyiv.
In the early 8th century, Greek craftsmen invited by the caliph built the chief mosque of the Arabs in Jerusalem — the Dome of the Rock, Qubbat al-Sakhra; to this day this mosque remains a masterpiece of architecture. Caliph al-Ma'mun, who ruled in the 9th century, was a great admirer of Greek learning; inspired by legends of the Alexandrian Museum, he founded the "House of Wisdom" in Baghdad, complete with an observatory and a large library; here poets, scholars, and translators gathered to translate Greek books. It is said that the caliph paid in gold equal to the weight of each translated book; hundreds of manuscripts sent from Constantinople or found in Syrian monasteries were translated, and the Muslim world became acquainted with the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid. From the book of Claudius Ptolemy (which the Arabs called the "Almagest"), Muslims learned that the earth was spherical and learned to determine latitude and draw maps. The writings of Hippocrates became the foundation for the "Canon of Medicine" by the famous physician and philosopher Ibn Sina; Ibn Hayyan laid the foundations of Arab alchemy and astrology. Arab astronomers worked with particular diligence — their main task was to learn how to determine the direction of Mecca, since the faithful had to face that direction during prayer. The most famous Arab astronomer was al-Khwarizmi, known to European translators as Algorismus — the word "algorithm" derives from his name. Al-Khwarizmi borrowed decimal numerals from the Indians, which later passed from the Arabs into Europe and which Europeans call Arabic numerals. However, the chief pursuit of Arab sages was the search for the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone, which was believed to turn mercury into gold.
Gradually, learning began to return to Europe as well. Sparks of ancient knowledge had long been preserved in monasteries, where monks copied old books and taught young novices Latin grammar so that they could read the Holy Bible. In those days Latin was the only written language, and to become literate one had to learn Latin: first memorizing fifty psalms by heart, and only then mastering the alphabet. In addition, the monastery school taught church singing and a little arithmetic — and that was the whole of education at the time. Literate people, naturally, were monks; they were called clerics, wore the tonsure, and were held in great respect. A cleric could become a priest or a count's scribe, provided he led a life worthy of a monk, that is, did not marry. From ancient times, learned monks tried to gather into a single book everything that remained of ancient knowledge, compiling extensive manuscripts on the lives of saints, the magical properties of numbers, and, to a lesser extent, medicine or geography. In the 7th century Isidore of Seville wrote the twenty volumes of the "Etymologiae," and a century later the Venerable Bede compiled his extensive "Ecclesiastical History of the English People."
In imitation of the ancients, Emperor Charlemagne created his own Academy — but this was merely a small circle of learned monks who composed Latin verses and kept chronicles. These chronicles show that the literate men of the time still pictured the earth as flat, a huge disk surrounded by ocean. The edge of the earth was lost in darkness and was said to be inhabited by strange tribes — one-legged people and wolf-men. Legend has it that in the 10th century a young monk named Gerbert traveled to Spain in search of knowledge; he studied the "forbidden sciences" under an Arab sage, and later seduced the sage's daughter and, with her help, stole his secret books. These books explained that the earth was shaped like a sphere, that numbers could be written using special symbols, and much more besides. Afterward, the monk Gerbert told people about all this, and for his learning he was elected pope under the name Sylvester II — but the darkness of ignorance was so thick that Gerbert's listeners understood little of what he said, and the Franks continued to believe the earth was flat.
Muslim Spain was closer for Europeans than Constantinople, so they traveled to Spain to learn from the Arabs what the Arabs themselves had borrowed from the Greeks. After the Christians reconquered Toledo, the capital of Muslim Spain, they gained rich libraries containing hundreds of books written in Arabic script. Bishop Raymond called learned monks from all over Europe, and together with Arab and Jewish scholars they translated these books — among them the medical treatise of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), the philosophical manuscripts of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), the alchemical studies of Ibn Hayyan (Geber), as well as Arabic translations of Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and Ptolemy. In Spain, Europeans became acquainted with paper, the magnetic needle, mechanical clocks, and the alembic used for distilling alcohol. The work of the translators continued throughout the entire 12th century, and all this time literate Europeans kept flocking to Spain for new books. The scholars were driven on by the impatience of their students, for the 12th century saw a thirst for knowledge awaken in Europe, trading cities grew, and merchants could not do without an education. "General schools," open not only to monks, appeared in the towns; these schools taught the "seven liberal arts," divided into the "trivium" and the "quadrivium." The "trivium" comprised "grammar," "rhetoric," and "dialectic," while the "quadrivium" consisted of "arithmetic," "astronomy," "music," and "geometry" — although "astronomy" was in fact astrology, and "geometry" was geography. In arithmetic, most of the course was devoted to interpreting the hidden meaning of numbers, and the division of multi-digit numbers was considered the pinnacle of wisdom. Rhetoric meant the art of composing letters, charters, and legal documents — a discipline of great importance to townspeople, which in time became the foundation of all higher education.
It must be said that in the age of barbarian rule, there was no law in the sense we understand it today. The barbarians had their own barbarian "law codes," collections of laws, but the chief law was "trial by God" — a judicial duel fought with swords. Whoever won was deemed to be in the right. Merchants who did not wish to fight with swords relied instead on the laws of the fallen Roman Empire, surviving fragments of the code once compiled under Emperor Justinian.
At the end of the 11th century, the Bolognese rhetorician Irnerius restored the Roman legal code and founded the first school of law. Over time this school grew, and thousands of students from all over Europe began arriving in Bologna; by the end of the 12th century, Irnerius's school had turned into a "university" — a learned "corporation," a guild with master-magistri, journeymen-bachelors, and student-apprentices. Like every guild, the university had its own banner, its own charter, its own treasury, and its own elected head, the rector. The title of master (or doctor) was conferred after an examination-disputation, when the new "master" was clothed in a gown and presented with a ring and a book — the symbol of learning. The popes of Rome upheld respect for the learned guild and granted doctors benefices — income from church property; they also built dormitories for poor students, called "colleges"; later, doctors began delivering lectures in these colleges, and thus new educational institutions — colleges — came into being. The university had four faculties; one of them, the "faculty of arts," was regarded as preparatory: it was the old "general school" where the "seven liberal arts" were studied. Only a few students passed all the examinations and went on to study in the higher faculties — law, medicine, and theology. Lawyers and physicians studied for five years, and theologians for fifteen; there were very few of the latter, and most of them were monks who had devoted their lives to God.
The appearance of the university brought Bologna both honor and considerable profit, so other cities soon began founding institutions of higher learning on the Bolognese model. By the mid-13th century there were eight universities in Italy. The most famous university in England was the University of Oxford, where in the 13th century the celebrated astrologer and alchemist Roger Bacon taught.
Bacon lived in a tower, at the top of which he conducted his observations at night, measuring and drawing things with strange instruments; he was considered a sorcerer and was superstitiously feared. He wrote a treatise in which, in deliberately obscure phrases understandable only to the initiated, he described the secret of gunpowder and of magnifying lenses; he also taught how to determine one's location using latitude and longitude. Bacon likewise wrote that in the future there would be machines that would carry people and machines that would fly through the sky — it is hard to say how such thoughts could have occurred to anyone in those days. In the end, Bacon was accused of sorcery and thrown into prison, from which he emerged only shortly before his death.
From the standpoint of technological development, the principal achievement of the Middle Ages was the harnessing of the horse. The Middle Ages were an era in which the horse became man's foremost helper; the life of the European peasant became unimaginable without a horse. The invention of the stirrup led to the widespread adoption of horseback riding. The appearance of the horse collar made it possible to use horses for plowing — for previously oxen had been used instead. Carts and carriages drawn by horses became the principal means of transport. Among other achievements, one should note the spread of water mills and windmills; although mills had already appeared in ancient Rome, their widespread use dates precisely to the Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages were a time of cavalry dominance. In the 13th century a new weapon once again fell into the hands of nomads — the Mongol bow, the "saadak," an arrow from which could pierce any armor at a range of 300 paces. It was a complex killing machine, glued together from three layers of wood, boiled sinew, and bone, and wrapped in tendons to protect it from moisture; the gluing was done under a press, and the drying continued for several years — the secret of making these bows was closely guarded. Drawing a Mongol bow required a force of at least 75 kilograms — twice that of modern sport bows and more than that of the famous English longbows, the ones that destroyed French chivalry at the battles of Crécy and Poitiers. The saadak was not inferior in power to a musket, and everything depended on the skill of hitting a target while riding at full gallop — for the bows had no sights, and shooting them required years of training.
Possessing such an all-crushing weapon, the Mongols did not care for hand-to-hand combat. "In general they are no great enthusiasts of close combat," noted the well-known historian S. M. Solovyov, "but try first to kill and wound as many men and horses as possible with arrows, and only then close with an enemy already weakened in this way." A classic example of this tactic was the battle against the Hungarians on the river Sajó, when the Hungarian knightly army was never able to force the Mongols into hand-to-hand combat and was shot to pieces with arrows during a six-day retreat to Pest.
The Mongol bow was a fundamental discovery that gave rise to a new wave of conquest. The Mongols laid waste to half of Eurasia, destroyed cities, and exterminated most of the population. The development of China, Iran, and Russia was set back by centuries. Only Western Europe managed to escape this terrible invasion — and from that time on, Europe became a refuge for the sciences and the arts.
Comments