5.
EUROPE’S REMARKABLE RE-BOOT

What do most people associate with the phrase "Medieval Age"? Religious fundamentalism? Witch hunts and brutality? Endless wars, plague and cholera? That sounds plausible, because the Medieval Age doesn’t strike us as a particular jolly era. However, it was, in a sense, a uniquely useful one, and we shall soon see why.

It all began when the Western Roman Empire fell and, and in many ways, what happened next can be described as a return to an earlier, simpler and more primitive form of civilization. Or perhaps just to less civilization.

Here it must be said that, after the barbarians had destroyed Rome, their intention was typically not to destroy Rome's culture or technology. No, they just wanted to be a part of it. For instance, the Germanic warrior Alaric, whose troops sacked Rome in the year 410, actually seems to have done so because he was upset that he couldn’t get a job as a general in the Roman army.

Actually, it seems that a large part of Rome's early conflicts with surrounding tribes were triggered because they had been denied permission to live within Rome’s borders. And even as Rome deteriorated from within to the frustration of its citizens, the outsiders saw something in it they wanted a part of. Indeed, when the Western Roman Empire finally collapsed and the Germanic people streamed across its former lands, the Romans were generally surprised to see that they rarely plundered, raped or took slaves as expected. Instead they tended to settle down and live peacefully among the former Roman inhabitants. They even went so far as to initially appoint another Roman (yes, Roman) emperor as their leader, but as none of them was willing to pay tax or be ruled in the sense of being told what to do, and since they all were proficient with their battle axes, the emperor ended up ruling nothing. By the year 476, the illusion that the Roman Empire still existed, albeit under new management, was finally abandoned and the only institution that remained from the former Western Roman Empire was its Catholic church.

Here is why the Medieval Age was so interesting: via a combination of partly random events, Western Europe happened to enter this period with all the criteria for creativity in place: It had plenty of 1) small units, 2) change agents, 3) networks, 4) shared memory systems and 5) competition. For instance, it had an extremely high number of small units in the form of mini-states totalling, at one point, close to 5,000, and while these gradually did amalgamate, much of Western Europe remained a chaotic mix of tiny mini-states for many centuries – the same As was true of Greece during its creative period.

There was also plenty of effective networking, partly due to the roads and port network, which the Romans had built, but also due to a remarkable tradition of sailing, which was facilitated by Western Europe’s easy access to seas and rivers. This should not be under-estimated because in the Medieval Ages and antiquity, the countryside was often full of scrub and forests inhabited by wolves, bears and robbers. Trade on a large scale was far easier to conduct over the sea or along rivers and so the fact that the Roman Empire was a shape that followed the rivers and seas was important not because this water provided fish, but because it facilitated trading. In fact, it would typically cost them less to transport goods across the Mediterranean than just a few kilometres over land.

THE SHAPE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE AS IT REACHED ITS PEAK EXTENSION IN THE YEAR 117. AS CAN BE SEEN HERE, THE ROMANS CONCENTRATED THEIR POWER AROUND RIVERS AND CLOSE TO THE SEA - ESPECIALLY THE MEDITERRANEAN, BUT ALSO THE BLACK SEA AND NORTH SEA.⁵²

Western Europe also had lots of change agents because its mix of numerous cultures and peoples who intermingled constantly. It maintained the Shared memory systems from the Roman Empire such as a common written language (Latin), common weight and measurement units (such as the amphora), and a common calendar. This was the Julian calendar, where July is called after Julius Caesar and August after Rome’s first emperor Augustus (It was modified slightly to the Gregorian calendar in 1582). There was also a shared fundamental legal concept created by Rome. In addition to this, the monks of the Catholic Church copied and re-copied the ancient Roman and Greek writings, so that knowledge was not lost and, due to the Latin language, could be shared easily across borders.

Finally, it had lots of competition between its many mini-states and between the different power centres within these, such as the competing private companies, the church, the landowners, the nobility and so on.

Let’s look a bit closer at the importance of sailing. Just as the curved coastline and countless islands had been vital for the early success of Greece, the rivers were incredibly important to Western Europe, and here is why: a significant quantity of Europe's rain falls in the Alps, and from there much of its waters run through European land out to the sea via the Rhine, Seine, Rhone, Elbe, Loire and Po. Also, rainy England has a great river in the Thames. These major rivers were attractive to traders for the following reasons:

Their water flowed slowly and there were no major waterfalls or eddies to inhibit sailing.

They ran out into the oceans, which provided connections to the rest of the world.

They had plenty of water throughout the year to allow for sailing. In Southern Europe, this was facilitated by melting ice in mountains during the summer and in the Thames – well, England always has rainfall.

They generally didn’t freeze over in the winter because of the Gulf Stream (although the Thames was an exception during a cold period in medieval times).

In addition to attractive rivers, Western Europe also had a very high number of natural harbours in both the North Sea and the Mediterranean, which further facilitated a sailing culture.

If we look at the world as a whole, there are few areas of the world with as attractive a concentration of sailing opportunities as Western Europe. Africa is far bigger than Europe, but has a much shorter coastline - and remarkably few natural harbours. Also, many of the African rivers have waterfalls and eddies a few kilometres from their outlet into the sea, and many dry out in summer. Furthermore, African access to the Mediterranean is inhibited by the Sahara Desert. It would be more demanding for Africans to start international trade than for Europeans to do so, and it should be noted that the only significant African civilization throughout history stood along the Nile, which is the continent's most navigable river. Along this natural trade route lived the Egyptians who, as we have seen, were actually very wealthy for a long time.

MAIN EUROPEAN MAIN RIVERS THAMES, RHINE, SEINE, RHONE, ELBE, LOIRE AND PO.

So yes, the Western Europeans had great access to waterways, and they had learned to use it. This was especially true of the Vikings, who were the first Europeans to navigate all of Europe’s surrounding oceans as well as its rivers. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when pre-Viking Scandinavians began to sail out further afield, but Swedish rock carvings from the Scandinavian Bronze Age (3200 – 600 BC) show at least 15,000 marine motives and, in Denmark, some 800 ship images have been found on more than 400 ornamented bronzes.⁵³ In Norway, the Simris Rock Carving Panel, which is dated around 1500 BC, shows carvings of Viking-style ships. It should be noted that this carving was done 3,500 years ago and thus around 1,500 years before the foundation of the Roman Empire and approximately 2,500 years before the beginning of the Viking Age.

The Scandinavians had been into sailing for a very long time, but it was only after the year 800 (or so) that they become really adventurous. Between the years 790 and 800, Danish Vikings began to conduct raids on the northern French coast. In 845, they sailed up the Seine and attacked Paris. The Swedish Vikings sailed up the Russian and Ukrainian rivers and, in year 860 AD, they attacked the capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople (now Istanbul) with approximately 200 boats. They plundered the suburbs, but failed to climb the city’s formidable walls. They did, however, manage to make a significant impression on the local government, which signed a trade agreement with them and later hired some of them as imperial guardsmen. In fact, by the late 10th century, the entire “Varangian Guard” protecting the emperor of Byzantium was made up of Scandinavians, even though they were known for their problematic combinations of huge axes and general drunkenness.⁵⁴

DETAIL FROM TANUM ROCK CARVING PANEL FROM AROUND 3,500 YEARS AGO DEPICTING SHIPS. CLEARLY, THE SCANDINAVIAN SAILING TRADITION STARTED VERY EARLY.

The change from a focus on plunder to a focus on trade was an example of conversion of win-lose strategy to win-win strategy and, after having made peace with Constantinople, the Vikings began to buy furs from Siberia and sell them to the Byzantines for precious metals and other commodities, and they established trading posts along the rivers, of which the city of Kiev in Ukraine was the largest. This must have taken some doing, because to make it from Sweden to Constantinople and back, they needed to row their boats 6,000 kilometres and often drag them over land to cross from one river to the next.

So important was the influence of the Vikings that the name "Russia" probably derives from the words “Ruotsi” or “Rootsi” which are the Finnish and Estonian name for Sweden, and which are both believed to have originated from the word “roðsmenn” or “roðskarlar”, which means rowers.

There are many stories of how the Vikings travelled, and some of the best documented examples are found in the Icelanding sagas, which were written in the the 13th and 14th centuries and are both rather detailed and considered reasonably accurate. Another key source is Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was written in the ninth century and included details of events that were quite recent, when documented. One illustrative story is that of the Danish Viking King Hastein’s southern raids, which took place from 859 to 862 and included 62 ships led by Hastein and Björn Ironside of Sweden. After losing out in skirmishes with Asturians on the Spanish north coast and Muslims on its south coast, they managed to sack Algeciras in Southern Spain after which they raided in Northern Africa, the Balearic Islands (Mallorca, Ibiza and Menorca) and southern France. From there, they continued north where they raided Roussillon, Narbonne, Nîmes, Arles and Valence in France, followed by Pisa and Luna in Italy and possibly the Byzantine Empire. On their way home, they bought slaves in Africa. Just after passing Gibraltar, they were badly mauled by an Islamic fleet but managed to escape with 20 remaining ships. Before coming home, they stopped in Ireland to sell their slaves.

So they travelled a lot. It was probably eight years after the return of Hasteins raids that (in 870) Norwegian Vikings settled in Iceland. Just over 40 years later, in 911, Danish Vikings (possibly with Norwegians) forced the French King Charles to give them the northern coast of France, then called Normandy, after these "northern men".⁵⁵ During the related negotiations, the French king insisted that their chief Rollo should kiss the French king's feet, which he refused. The king then agreed that one of his people could do it in his place, but instead of bending down to kiss the foot, the chosen Viking grabbed it and lifted it up so that the king fell backwards to the great amusement of the crowd.

In the 980s Norwegians from Iceland migrated to Greenland and, in 985, 26 ships containing 400-700 Norwegian settlers heading from Iceland to Greenland were blown off course, whereby they discovered America; 15 years later, Vikings in Greenland who had heard about this story crossed the Atlantic and made a temporary settlement or trading post at L'Anse aux Meadows on the Canadian island of Newfoundland (their settlement was discovered in 1960). For these trips they were helped by the fact that their boats were light and fast so a crossing from Norway to Greenland under good conditions could be done in less than two weeks.

Meanwhile, the Normans settled in North Africa, the Middle East and Southern Italy and Sicily, and travelled on pilgrimages to Jerusalem. In the year 999, as some of them were on the way home from Jerusalem, they stopped in Sicily where they helped local leaders to oust an African invading force.

Of course, even just two weeks spent in an open boat north of the Polar Circle sounds rather cold and windy. The Viking trips also sound pretty dangerous if you consider that their ships stacked just 50-130 cm under sea level. Of the aforementioned 26 ships that were blown of course and thereby found America, 14 sank. It added to the dangers that the Vikings had very poor maps, if any at all. Here is how the Norwegian Hauksbók describes to fellow sailors how to get to Greenland:

“From Hernam in Norway, head due west towards Hvarf in Greenland, and you will have sailed north of Hjaltland, so that you just glimpse it in clear weather, but south of the Faroe Islands, so that the sea is right in between the distant mountains, and thus also south of Iceland.”⁵⁶

Great, let’s go! But, of course, you would only see this Hjaltland (Shetland Islands) if indeed the weather was clear, and apparently you probably wouldn’t actually see Iceland on your way, but know when you passed it, because you would see birds from it in the sky on your right. That is assuming again that the weather is clear. Sometimes the weather was horribly bad instead, so ships were blown a few thousand kilometres off course, which is how they typically discovered new lands (or perished).

But while the Vikings were clearly the most radical adventurers in Europe (and in the world at the time), they were not the only ones in Europe who could handle boats. Numerous civilisations around the Mediterranean had also been keen sailors for centuries or even millennia; for example, the Semitic Phoenicians sailed widely in the Mediterranean between 1550 BC and 300 BC just as the Greeks did for many centuries.

In the early Medieval Age, absolutely no one in Western Europe seems to have realized that they were in the midst of a cocktail of circumstances which would lead to a creative explosion. At least, there is not a single record of anyone from that age stating that they expecting a creative Big Bang.

But the explosion came, and it was driven by a chain reaction of transformational processes. The first was the Renaissance, which lasted from the late 13th to early 17th century. As the era’s name suggests, this was a rediscovery of earlier ideas about art, politics, humanism, individualism and creativity - values that originated in Rome and, before that, actually in the Greek city-states. The Renaissance began in Florence, Italy and was stimulated partly by the Italians' memories of their Roman greatness and also by more recent Greek emigrations following Ottoman occupation of Greece.

One of the key figures of the Renaissance was the monk Thomas Aquinas, who lived from 1225 to 1274. Aquinas argued that man had a natural talent for discovering things without divine guidance and should use this talent, even though the Old Testament had blamed Adam and Eve for eating from the Tree of Knowledge.

The Renaissance led to new publications and translations of classic books by authors such as Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle was an advocate of empiricism, the concept of testing hypotheses thorugh systematic experimention. People became fascinated by these books' thoughts about logical thinking, democracy, pluralism, open discussion of politics and ethics, and also by the Greek belief that not everything is yet known; the need for everybody to seek new information and ask questions constantly, as Socrates had done.

It may be difficult for us today to comprehend how little world knowledge people of the past tended to have. However, it is illustrated by a bizarre episode in the English coastal town of Hartlepool during the Napoleonic wars (after the end of the Medieval Age). Here the local people found a stranded French ship, where the only survivor was a pet monkey dressed in French clothes. As the British had never seen a monkey nor a Frenchman, they assumed the monkey was, in fact, a Frenchman. They held a brief trial in which it failed to defend itself, after which the monkey was hanged as a spy.⁵⁷

Before the Renaissance, people - particularly those who didn’t travel much – must predominantly have based their world views on religious texts, unsubstantiated rumours and superstition. Society was then largely static, and most people never encountered any new ways of thinking or saw any new technologies; they only had limited awareness of how other people might live in completely different ways to their own. The concept of change and the idea of thinking for themselves and asking basic questions about the world would have been far from their minds. The closest thing to science that existed were catalogues of observations without any related explanations or hypotheses. So it really wasn’t science at all. Because knowledge at that time was not associated with theories, experiments such as there were, were often doomed from the start; alchemy was among the most common, involving random attempts to produce gold out of lead, urine or other stuff.

The free thinking that came with the Renaissance contributed to Europe's second great transformation: the Reformation, which is usually dated to the period 1517-1648. This was a rebellion against the Catholic Church’s institutions and its gigantic luxury palaces. These were often financed by “sinners” who had to seek the church's forgiveness by paying up. You could, for instance, buy indulgences to buy your deceased family members out of purgatory or even buy yourself a ticket to spend less time there, after your death.

The Church made sure the common man did not read the Bible by himself because it didn’t actually say anything about rich churches collecting taxes and selling indulgences. The method was simple: the Bible was written only in Latin, which only the elite and the clergy could read.

All religions with priests may be tempted to perform a trick that states: "You are under threat, but we can save you. Just submit to the God that I represent." In other words: "Submit to me." This opportunity can create an abuse of power, and it can ensure financing of a huge, self-serving institution and invite corruption. All this happened in the Church, where, for example, it was now possible to purchase certain clerical jobs, which secured lifelong access to power and money. The priests often became rich and began to accumulate wealth that they could pass on to their children, which is the reason why Pope Gregory VII imposed celibacy. By the end of the seventh century, as much as a third of the productive land in France was owned by the Church and, according to records made in Britain in 1086, the Church owned more than a quarter of all land.⁵⁸ So the Church seemed, increasingly, to repeat the scenario that had been seen in the Roman Empire - it started as a small, idealistic popular movement, but grew to become a gigantic, extractive organization demanding that citizens were Spartan, while it spent their money.

The rebellion against the church was probably stimulated by urbanization, when people moving to cities saw with their own eyes how rich the church had become with their hard-earned money and were able to discuss exactly that with their peers.

Another contributing factor to the Reformation was the growing trend of individual thought. Europeans began to deny that priests should be better interpreters of religion than themselves, and that gave rise to Protestantism. This movement “dis-intermediated” religion; it cut out the middleman. It started in Central and Northern Europe and, since Protestantism wasn’t subject to central authority, it soon split into many variants. Now people had to choose one branch of the church out of many options, so just as Europe had gone from the Roman mega-state power monopoly to medieval city-state decentralization, the central and northern European church now became fragmented and decentralized as well.

The attitude of the Protestants can be summed up roughly like this: "We share the faith of Catholics. But we do not actually need your institution and we want to read the Bible ourselves in a language we can understand." However, there were also differences in the perception of Christian faith, for most Protestants did not think they best qualified for God’s love by suffering and submitting, as some Catholics suggested, but rather by contributing something useful on Earth. Work was no longer seen as an annoying necessity best performed by slaves, but as a personal obligation that would qualify you for the love of God.

Since the Catholic Church, after a time, realized that opposition could no longer be prevented, it responded with a counter-reformation, which included better training of priests, more understandable sermons and improved decoration of churches. It also decided to update the official calendar, which seemed to have come to be ten days out of step with the seasons, due to leap years.

One of the astronomers they asked to carry out this project was Nicolaus Copernicus. In 1543, he published his work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI describing celestial rotation around the sun, and this work became the first of a series of scientific breakthroughs from a growing rank of scientists. The scientific method gradually gained more and more acceptance, and the church gave in.

Now the creativity flourished for real. For example, oxen were often replaced by horses as draft animals and this, combined with the introduction of the heavy iron plough as well as crop rotation, lead to a marked increase in farm productivity. In fact, some farms became highly profitable, which lead to the systematically clearing of forests, laying of gravity flow pipes and redirecting of streams to increase productivity further. This, in turn, freed up labour for the cities, where urbanites developed innovations such as double-entry book-keeping, new credit instruments, limited liability companies, mercantile laws, stock exchange trading and much more. In parallel, the farmers began selling their surplus production in the open markets, which put pressure to increase quality and competitiveness.

Slaves had now predominantly been replaced by self-employed farmers who had a strong interest in getting the most out of their investment and labour, which encouraged the development in productivity. In the year 1086, the government of England commissioned the Domesday Book, which was a very detailed, country-wide inventory of contemporary villages, towns and farms, and one of the most interesting documents that survives from the medieval age.⁵⁹ At this time, England had a very small population, estimated at between 1.25 and 2 million, but when we study the details of the book's statements, we see reference to no less than 5,624 water mills, and it is estimated that this number grew to between 10,000 and 13,000 in 1300.

Technologies often developed in cascades where recombinations of ideas led to development of new fields. However, reuse of skills in new ways is also important, and the development of mechanical clocks in Europe meant that there were many skilled instrument makers who could later make other mechanical devices as were needed in the Industrial Revolution.

Between 1000 and 1450, Europeans introduced wheelbarrows, four-wheeled horse-drawn carriages, rudders for boats, paper, spinning wheels, magnetic compasses, glasses and glass-blowing, and much more. Much heavy work which the Romans would have done using thousands of slaves, was now done with treadmill cranes, stationary harbour cranes, floating cranes and slewing cranes. Added to this were practical inventions such as wine presses and clothes with buttons. And for those who were sick, it was a consolation that the local doctor no longer arrived equipped only with a saw plus some opium, but now perhaps also with an illustrated anatomy atlas.

Brave new world! The lives of the richest were now embellished with pianos, fountains, floor heating and beautiful oil paintings, and their best buildings were equipped with rib-vaulted ceilings and fireplaces with chimneys. Ships grew ever larger and sturdier, and the focus shifted from labour-intensive galleys to more economical sailboats, which were tailored to their tasks, including larger boats that were suitable for long distance sea transport.

There were obviously also many military innovations. For example, the use of stirrups, spurs and saddles made an accomplished rider “one” with his horse, which created the basis for cavalry attack - a fearsome technology at the time. And there came crossbows, long bows, trebuchets, gunpowder, guns and even the first simple machine guns.

The result of all the various innovations was that Europe in the mid-15th century was infinitely more advanced in terms of technological and economic innovation than the Roman Empire had ever been, and although no-one seemed to have seen this coming, Europeans were now on the verge of the most stunning development in human history since the ousting of the Neanderthals – a development which would change everything, not just within the Europe, but across the entire globe.

In the next chapter we shall look at how Western civilization thus exploded forward at a time when its two biggest potential rivals, China and the Islamosphere, were stuck in a cultural rut, just has the Romans had been before them.