Topic 6. Science and technology in the Middle Ages

The disaster that destroyed the civilization of the ancient world was caused by the fundamental discovery of nomads - the invention of stirrup. The stirrup made the rider steady in the saddle and allowed the use of a long sword or saber. Standing in the stirrups, the rider brought down on the Roman legionnaire or the Chinese infantryman a blow in which he put the whole mass of his body. The invention of stirrup caused a terrible wave of invasions, which ruined the civilization of the ancient world.

“Look how suddenly death has dawned on the whole world,” wrote the Bishop of Oridencia. - Those who managed to resist the force, fell from hunger ... In cities and villages - everywhere death, suffering, ruins and grief. Only smoke remained from Gaul, which burned down in a general fire. ” “Time has returned to the silence that prevailed before the creation of man,” an Italian chronicler testifies, “not a voice in the fields, nor a shepherd’s whistle. The fields turned into graveyards, and the houses of people became lairs of wild animals. ”

The descendants of the conquerors, the German barbarians, became the masters of Europe. These were the heavily armed knight horsemen; they subjugated the local peasants, turned some of them into slaves, and forced others to pay tribute. Ownership of a knight was called a feud, and historians call social system of those times feudalism; thus, the fundamental discovery, the invention of stirrups, gave rise to knights and feudalism.

After the first wave of invasions that came from the depths of Eurasia, the second wave came - this time from the sea. The Scandinavian Normans created the Dracar - a nautical vessel with 40-70 rowers and a rectangular sail. The distinctive quality of a drakar was that it could with equal ease overcome the seas and climb rivers, it could even be dragged through the watersheds. Thanks to the Drakar, the Normans could suddenly appear almost anywhere - where they wanted to; a flotilla of 50-100 ships landed several thousand soldiers who plundered cities and villages and left as soon as the enemy gathered large forces. Drakar allowed the Normans to plunder most of Western Europe, but, not having an advantage over the knightly cavalry, they were able to gain a foothold in only a few areas, in Normandy, in Sicily, in England. The situation in Eastern Europe is different: there were no knightly cavalry here, and, thanks to their swords and mail, the Norman-Varangians had military superiority over the local population. Ultimately, the Vikings conquered the country of the Slavs; they gave this country its name, Russia - after all, in Finnish Russia means "Swedes". Later, the Vikings became equestrian warriors, Russian boyars.

It is well known that the Russian princes bear Scandinavian names, Rürich is Rorich of Jutland, famous for plundering London, Oleg is Helga, Olga is Helga, Igor is Ingvarr, Svyatoslav (seemingly a Slavic name) is Svendisleiv, Vladimir is Woldemar and so on.

The barbarian invasions swept all of Eurasia, and there was only one city that managed to survive in this storm; this was the last fortress of civilization — Constantinople. Barbarians, Turks and Arabs, stormed Constantinople from the sea and land, but the Greeks were saved by the invention of Greek fire - an incendiary mixture, which was thrown onto enemy ships using powerful pumps. Constantinople survived - but the country was ravaged, and for a long time the Greeks were not up to the sciences and the arts. The situation changed only under Emperor Basil I (867-886); being an illiterate peasant, Vasiliy treated the learned monks with respect and did not spare the gold for the revival of Greek scholarship. In the middle of the 9th century, under the authority of Bishop Leo Mathematics, the Higher School was reopened in the Magavsky Palace - the revival of ancient sciences and arts began. Teachers of the Magnau school began to collect old books kept in monasteries; The famous grammar Photius compiled a collection of 280 antique manuscripts with brief retellings. The court grammars collected a huge library and participated in the creation of extensive compilations on law, history and agronomy. The Greeks again met Plato, Aristotle, Euclid and again learned about the sphericity of the Earth. In Greece, the principles of building art created by the Romans were also maintained; It was the Greeks who taught the surrounding nations to build stone cathedrals - they built the Cathedral of St. Mark in Venice and the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Kiev.

At the beginning of the 8th century, Greek masters invited by the Caliph erected in Jerusalem the main mosque of the Arabs - “The Dome of the Rock”, Kubbat al-Sakhra; This mosque and to this day remains a masterpiece of architecture. Caliph Mamun, who ruled in the 9th century, was a great admirer of Greek scholarship; under the impression of the legends about the Alexandrian Musee, he created in Baghdad a “House of Science” with an observatory and a large library; there were collected poets, scholars and interpreters who translated Greek books. It is said that the caliph paid as much gold for transfers as the book weighed; hundreds of manuscripts were sent from Constantinople or found in Syrian monasteries; the Muslim world became acquainted with the works of Plato, Aristotle, Euclid. From the book of Claudius Ptolemy (which the Arabs called “Al-Magest”), Muslims learned about the sphericity of the earth, learned how to determine latitude and draw maps. The works of Hippocrates became the basis for the “Canon of Medicine” of the famous physician and philosopher Ibn Sina; Ibn Khayan laid the foundation for Arabian alchemy and astrology. Arab astronomers worked especially hard - their main task was to learn how to determine the direction in which Mecca was located - it was precisely in this direction that the faithful should incline during prayer. The most famous Arab astronomer was al-Khorezmi, known to European translators as Algorismus - the word “algorithm” comes from his name. Al-Khorezmi borrowed from the Indians decimal digits, which then fell from the Arabs to Europe and which Europeans call Arabic. However, the main occupation of the Arab sages was the search for the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone, which allowed to turn mercury into gold.

Gradually, science returned to Europe. Sparks of ancient knowledge have long been preserved in monasteries, where monks copied old books and taught young novices to Latin literacy so that they could read the holy Bible. In those days, Latin was the only written language, and in order to learn to read and write, it was necessary to learn Latin: first, learn by heart fifty psalms, and then learn the alphabet. In addition, the monastic school was taught church singing and a little - counting, that was what the then education was all about. Literate people, of course, were considered monks, they were called clerics, they wore a tonsure and were highly respected, a cleric could become a priest or scribe with the count - if only he led a decent monk life, that is, did not marry. For a long time, scientists monks tried to collect in one book all that remained of ancient knowledge and compiled extensive manuscripts telling about the lives of the saints, the magical properties of numbers, and a little about medicine or geography. In the VII century, Isidore of Seville wrote twenty volumes of “Etymology”, and a century later, Bede Honorable composed the extensive “Church History of England”.

Emperor Charlemagne, in imitation of the ancients, created his own Academy - but it was just a small circle of learned monks, here they composed Latin poems and chronicled. From these chronicles it is clear that the literacy of that time represented the earth as flat, in the form of a huge disk surrounded by the ocean. The edge of the earth was lost in the darkness and was inhabited by wonderful tribes - one-legged people and wolf people. Legend says that in the 10th century a young monk, Herbert, went to Spain in search of knowledge; He studied the "forbidden sciences" from one Arab sage, and then seduced his daughter and stole secret books with her help. In these books it was written that the earth has the shape of a ball, that numbers can be written using special icons, numbers, and much more. Subsequently, the monk Herbert told all of this to people and for his scholarship he was elected pope under the name of Sylvestre II - but the darkness of ignorance was so thick that Herbert’s students did not understand much of his stories, and the Franks still considered the earth to be flat.

Muslim Spain was closer to Europeans than Constantinople, so they traveled to Spain, where they learned from the Arabs what they borrowed from the Greeks. After the Christians conquered the capital of Spain, Toledo, from the Muslims, they got rich libraries with hundreds of books written in Arabic script. Bishop Raimund called for scholars of monks from all over Europe, and they, along with Arab and Jewish sages, translated these books - among them were the medical treatise of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), the philosophical manuscripts of Ibn Rushd (Averoess), the alchemical study of Ibn Hayan (Heber), and Arabic translations of Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy. In Spain, the Europeans became acquainted with paper, a magnetic needle, a mechanical clock, a distillation cube for the production of alcohol. The works of translators continued throughout the XII century, and all this time the European literacy lasted to Spain for new books. Scientists pushed the impatience of their students - because in the XII century in Europe, the thirst for knowledge opened, trading cities grew, and merchants could not do without education. In the cities, “common schools” appeared, accessible not only to monks; these schools taught the “seven liberal arts”, which split into “trivium” and “quadrium”. “Trivium” was “grammar”, “rhetoric” and “dialectic”, and “quadrium” consisted of “arithmetic”, “astronomy”, “music” and “geometry”, and “astronomy” was in fact astrology, and “Geometry” - by geography. In arithmetic, most of the course was occupied by the interpretation of the secret meaning of numbers, and the divisive number division was considered the pinnacle of wisdom. Under the rhetoric, it was understood the art of writing letters, letters and legal documents - it was a very important science for citizens, which eventually formed the basis of all higher education.

It must be said that in the era of the domination of the barbarians there were no laws and laws in the sense that we understand them now. The barbarians had their own barbaric "truths", collections of laws, but the main law was the "court of God" - the judicial duel on swords. Who won - that was right. The merchants, who did not want to fight with swords, used the laws of the perishing Roman Empire, preserved fragments of the code drawn up by Emperor Justinian once.

At the end of the XI century, the Bologna ritor Irneri restored the Roman law code and founded the first law school. Over time, this school grew, thousands of students from all over Europe began to arrive in Bologna, and at the end of the 12th century, the school of Irneria became a “university” - a scientist “corporation”, a workshop with masters-masters, apprentices-bachelors and students-students. Like all workshops, the university had its own banner, its own charter, its own treasury, and its foreman rector. The title of master (or doctor) was conferred after the exam-dispute, when a new “master” was clothed in a robe and was given a ring and a book - a symbol of science. The popes supported respect for the academic workshop and endowed the doctors with benefits - income from church property; they built dormitories for poor students, “colleges”; later, doctors began to lecture at these colleges, and thus new colleges appeared - colleges. The university had four faculties, one of which, “artistic,” was considered preparatory: it was the former “common school” where they studied “the seven liberal arts”. Only a few students stood all tests and continued their studies at senior faculties - legal, medical and theological. Lawyers and physicians studied for five years, and theologians fifteen; there were very few of them, and for the most part these were monks who dedicated their lives to God.

The emergence of the university brought Bologna honor and considerable benefits, so soon other cities began to establish higher schools in the Bologna style. In the middle of the XIII century in Italy there were 8 universities. The most famous university in England was the University of Oxford, where the famous astrologer and alchemist Roger Bacon taught in the XIII century.

Bacon lived in a tower, on top of which he spent his nights watching, measuring and drawing something with strange instruments — he was considered a sorcerer and superstitiously afraid. He composed a treatise in which, in deliberately vague, understandable only to initiates, he wrote phrases about the secret of gunpowder and magnifying glasses; he taught locating with latitude and longitude. Bacon also wrote that in the future there will be cars that will carry people and cars that will fly across the sky - it’s hard to say how such thoughts could have occurred to those times. In the end, Bacon was accused of witchcraft and imprisoned in prison, from where he emerged only shortly before his death.

From the point of view of the development of technology, the main achievement of the Middle Ages was the use of the horse. The Middle Ages were an era when the horse became the first mate of man; the life of a European peasant became unthinkable without a horse. The invention of stirrups led to widespread horse riding. The appearance of the yoke allowed to use the horse on arable land - because before it was plowed on bulls. Horse-drawn carts and carriages became the main means of transport. Among other achievements, the spread of water and windmills should be noted - although the mills appeared in ancient Rome, their widespread use refers specifically to the Middle Ages.

The Middle Ages were a time of cavalry domination. In the XIII century, in the hands of the nomads, a new weapon once again turned out to be - this was the Mongolian bow, “Saadak”, an arrow from which any armor pierced through 300 steps. It was a complicated killing machine, glued together from three layers of wood, boiled veins and bones and wrapped in tendons to protect against dampness; gluing was done under pressure, and drying lasted for several years - the secret of making these bows was kept secret. For the Mongolian bow tension, an effort of at least 75 kg was required - twice as much as in modern sports bows and more than in the famous English bows - those who destroyed French knighthood in the battles of Crécy and Poitiers. Saadak was not inferior in power to the musket, and the whole thing was in the ability to hit the target at a gallop - after all, the bows did not have a sight and shooting from them required many years of training.

Possessing such an all-destructive weapon, the Mongols did not like to fight hand to hand. “In general, they are not hunters before manual fights,” noted the famous historian S.M. Solovyov, “but first they try to smash and crush as many people and horses as possible with arrows, and then they seize upon the enemy thus weakened. A classic example of such tactics was the battle with the Hungarians on the Sayo River, when the Hungarian knightly army was never able to impose hand-to-hand fighting on the Mongols and was shot with bows during a six-day retreat to Pest.

Mongolian bow was a fundamental discovery that spawned a new wave of conquest. The Mongols devastated half of Eurasia, destroyed the city and destroyed most of the population. The development of China, Iran, Russia was rejected centuries ago. Only Western Europe managed to avoid this terrible invasion - and since that time Europe has become a haven for science and the arts.