Topic 7. Beginning of New Time

Mongolian onions did not dominate the world for long; by the will of fate after a century, it was replaced by an even more formidable weapon - arquebus and cannon. The discoverer of gunpowder was a Chinese alchemist and physician Sun Shimyao, who lived in the VII century; he wrote in one of the treatises that heating a mixture of nitrate, sulfur and charcoal leads to a strong explosion. In the battles with the Mongols, the Chinese used gunpowder bombs, which threw ballist into the enemy - but this saved them from defeat. From China, the powder came to the Middle East; here unknown Arab masters created the first cannon - “modfu”. At first, modfa was a hollowed-out wooden trunk, where gunpowder was poured, stone was rolled in, and a shot was fired. In the XII century they began to make iron mods, shooting lead nucleoli - "nuts". Then came the big bombers weighing several tons with multi-pod stone cores - these tools were intended for the destruction of the fortress walls. In the XIII century, the Arabs used the bombers during the siege of Spanish cities, and then, in the XIV century, the whole of Europe became acquainted with new weapons.

One of the first Europeans to know the secret of gunpowder was the German monk Berthold Schwartz; he practiced alchemy in his monastery, and for this he was imprisoned, where he continued his experiments. Like all alchemists, Schwartz tried to get gold by combining various substances; Once he made a mixture of charcoal, sulfur and nitre, set fire to it - and barely survived after the explosion. Having learned how to make gunpowder, Schwartz became a famous cannon master and, joining the service of the British, participated in the Battle of Crecy.

However, in those days there were still no gunpieces or iron cores, and it was so hard to load the gun that during the day of the battle she managed to make only a few shots. In addition, the bombers were very fragile, they were made of iron bands fastened with hoops, and to protect from powder gases escaping from the cracks, they were covered with leather. The barrel bombards were laid in a wooden deck, and the gun was so heavy that it was almost impossible to change position during the battle - so the artillery was used mainly in the siege of fortresses. Onions continued to dominate the battlefield until new revolutionary changes took place in the foundry business. In the 14th century, artillery masters learned to cast bronze and copper cannons in sand molds. The invention of the one-piece gun was a FUNDAMENTAL OPENING that changed the face of human society; Knights and archers retreated before the new god of war - artillery. From now on, only those states that had a metallurgical industry, artillery and a professional army could survive. Civilization finally received a weapon in its hands, which stopped the waves of invasions from the Great Steppe.

Firearms were created in the East and the first army that adopted it was the army of the Ottoman Empire. Under Sultan Murad I (1362-1389), the first divisions of the Janissaries were created - this was a corps of regular infantry, made up of slave warriors brought up in barracks from childhood. The discipline, order and courage of the janissaries helped them to win victories in battles, but real glory came to them when in the hands of the “new soldiers” turned out to be “new weapons”. Under Murad II (1421-1451), most of the janissaries were armed with arquebuses, "tyufengami"; a powerful artillery corps was created, “trampling down the ojagi” - thus, the regular army armed with firearms came to light.

The guns of those times were too heavy to move around the battlefield, so they were installed in a central position, usually on a hill. The batteries were covered with fortifications made of wooden shields and carts - a fortified camp was obtained, in the trenches in front of the camp and in the camp itself there were janitorial arrows, and the sipahi cavalry lined up on the sides and behind the camp. The task of the cavalry was to engage the battle and lure the enemy cavalry to the fortifications of the Janissaries, where it fell under the devastating fire of guns and arquebus, then the cavalry returned and finished off the surviving enemies.

Under Murad's successor, Mehmed II, huge siege weapons were created to capture cities, including the famous Urban cannon, which in 1453 destroyed the walls of Constantinople. It was a bombardment 8 meters long, shooting stone cores weighing half a ton; in order to deliver this colossus to Constantinople, it was necessary to level the road and fortify bridges, the gun was dragged by 60 bulls, and 200 people walked side by side to keep it in balance.

The creation of a regular army armed with firearms was the fundamental discovery of the Turks; this discovery triggered a wave of Ottoman conquests. For twenty years after the capture of Constantinople, the Turks seized Serbia, Greece, Albania, Bosnia, subjugated Wallachia and Moldova. Then they turned back to the East, finally conquered Asia Minor, and in 1514, the nomads who dominated Iran were crushed in a grand battle on the Chaldaran Plain. Then Syria and Egypt were conquered, and Sultan Selim the Terrible (1512-1520) proclaimed himself deputy prophet, caliph.

The news of the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks sounded in Europe like a rumble of thunder; all the kings were in a hurry to create their own artillery. New impetus to the development of artillery gave the appearance of blast furnaces and cast iron. In the middle of the 15th century in Westphalia, on the border of Germany and France, the first blast furnaces were built; they were distinguished from the former cheese-making furnaces by large sizes (up to 6 meters in height) and a mechanical blow driven by a water wheel. The high temperature created in such furnaces made it possible to produce liquid cast iron, which was used for the casting of nuclei - and then the gun barrels. Cast iron contained a large amount of carbon and was fragile; for iron production it was allowed to be melted down; this technology was called a batch redistribution.

Another major innovation in artillery was the invention of a wheeled carriage. The wheeled carriage appeared in France at the end of the 15th century; the appearance of the gun carriage allowed to take guns on long hikes; in 1494, mobile artillery allowed the French king Charles VIII to conquer Italy. The theory of artillery was gradually developed. The Italian mathematician Niccolò Tartaglia invented the quadrant and first tried to calculate the trajectory of the projectile. Tartaglia established that the weight of the nucleus is proportional to the cube of its diameter and introduced gun caliber.

As noted above, gunpowder was invented in China. Another great Chinese invention was book printing, which appeared in China in the 11th century. At first, wood-cut boards were used for printing, then wooden letters, then cast-iron letters, the inventor of which is considered to be the blacksmith Bi Shen. In Europe, typography seems to have been discovered independently; its creator was the artisan John Gutenberg from Strasbourg. In 1440, Gutenberg made his first printing press, and in 1455 he printed the first book — of course, it was the most popular book of those times, the Bible.

We talked about the fact that Byzantium played the role of the keeper of ancient knowledge in the Middle Ages. When in the XV century the hordes of Turks approached Constantinople, the learned Greek monks began to flee to the West. They brought with them precious ancient manuscripts and taught the Europeans Greek language. The city to which the Greeks were leading the way was Florence — they taught Greek at the university there, and the Greeks found a warm welcome here; they translated into Latin the works of Aristotle, Plato, Polybius, brought with them, and transferred to the Florentines the secret thoughts of the ancient philosophers. The ruler of Florence, the famous banker Cosimo Medici, was an ardent admirer of Plato and created in his villa in Careggi a circle of lovers of antiquity, which later, following the example of the Athenian school of Plato, was called the “Academy”. Cosimo's friends were not only philosophers, but also architects, sculptors, and artists who sought to revive ancient designs in their works. The architect Filippo Brunelleschi was so passionate about antiquity that he spent several years among the ruins of the Roman Forum; he measured and sketched the remains of ancient buildings and spent long hours in the Pantheon, which was then considered a wonder of the world: the concrete dome of this temple was 43 meters in diameter, and from that time no master had the knowledge or courage to create such a thing. When Brunelleschi proposed to erect the same dome over the huge, unfinished church since the days of the Plague, the church of Santa Maria del Fiore, the Florentines at first considered him a madman - but, in the end, they allocated workers and money. For fifteen years, all of Florence, with surprise, watched an unprecedented construction site: the dome rose higher and higher and finally reached a height of 114 meters - it was the grandest building of all built until then by man, the new Tower of Babel, the symbol of the beginning of the New Time.

The revival of ancient knowledge and ancient culture - these were the essence and content of the new era, and by chance the old banker Cosimo turned out to be a man who understood this essence; he was the first to understand how important the support of the rulers is in the fate of culture. He generously handed out money to talents - and at the end of his life he was surrounded by people who had made a revolution in the world of art. All these were his friends - Donatello, who had resurrected ancient sculpture, and Filippo Lippi, who had resurrected ancient art. By the end of Cosimo’s life, art workshops appeared in Florence, in which dozens of future painters studied - this was the beginning of a great era, which was later called the Renaissance. In the workshop of Andrea Verrokio, the first experiments with oil paints were carried out; if earlier artists painted only murals on wet plaster, now these paintings have appeared, shining with brightness and depth of colors. This was the birth of a new art, and at this birth two pupils of Verrokio, Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci, were present.

The appearance of oil paints is an example of how discoveries in technology make a revolution in the world of art. The artists who first mastered this technique almost automatically became great masters - like Sandro Botticeli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael; the rest was destined to the imitators. The great masters of those times were not only artists, but also sculptors, architects and inventors. Michelangelo built the largest cathedral in the world - the Cathedral of St. Peter in Rome with a dome height of 130 meters. Leonardo da Vinci left behind a lot of projects - he imitated Archimedes, the creator of ancient mechanics and designed various military vehicles. Many of his projects were not feasible at the then level of technology; but one of his inventions was very widely used - it was a wheel lock for pistols, it was Leonardo da Vinci who created the cavalry pistol.

The Italian Renaissance was a revival of the ancient arts and sciences - including geography. A friend of Bruneleschi, Paolo Toscanelli resurrected the geography of Ptolemy, based on the definition of latitudes and longitudes. Toscanelli installed a gnomon on top of the Florentine Cathedral, and, measuring his shadow, tried to re-calculate the length of the meridian. The inaccuracy of the measurements led to the fact that Toscanelli downplayed the size of the Earth and concluded that the distance from Spain across the ocean to India is only 6 thousand miles - three times less than the real one. The calculations of Toscanelli fell into the hands of another Italian, Christopher Columbus, who was eager to achieve this by India. This project seemed real thanks to the invention of the caravel, the ship with a slanting sail and the ship's rudder; the caravel differed from its predecessors in that it could, changing tacks, sail on sails against the wind. In 1492, Columbus went to India and discovered America. In 1498, Vasco da Gama rounded Africa and opened the real road to India. In 1519, Magellan set off on his first world tour. Caravel made available to Europeans all the oceans and gave them dominance of the seas. Caravel - it was a fundamental discovery that dramatically expanded the ecological niche of European peoples. Spain became the owner of the richest colonies, hundreds of thousands of immigrants went for the Ocean in search of new lands and wealth. A century and a half after the discovery of America, Spain was empty - its population had decreased by half, while thousands of cities inhabited by colonists grew in America.

The consequence of the discovery of America was the agrotechnical revolution. Europeans got acquainted with new agricultural crops, first of all with corn and potatoes. These crops were much more productive than wheat, and their introduction into circulation allowed for an increase in food production. The expansion of the ecological niche was followed by the growth of the population, for example, the population of France in the 18th century increased one and a half times. On the other hand, American plantations became producers of sugar, coffee, cotton, tobacco — products that were widely sold in Europe. However, to organize the production of these goods, the planters did not have enough labor. Eventually, they began to bring slaves from Africa; the development of a plantation economy led to the unprecedented flourishing of the slave trade. All these were the consequences of the great fundamental discovery, the invention of the caravel.