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Only the literate elites made use of codices and manuscripts, but their illuminations were seen and used by church wall-painters, workers in stained glass, sculptors, masons and other artisans engaged in the enormous building and rebuilding program that, beginning early in the twelfth century, transformed thousands of Romanesque churches and cathedrals into Gothic ones. It is worth noting that the new choir of Canterbury Cathedral, which replaced a Romanesque one after a fire in , with a corona added to house the shrine of the murdered Thomas A Becket, included Corinthian columns, which we would date from fifteenth-century Italy, did we not possess documentary evidence that they were the work of William of Sense in the last quarter of the twelfth century.

With the new universities in place, the time and setting were ripe for the revival of Aristotle, the greatest encyclopedias and systematic philosopher of antiquity. The early church fathers had regarded Aristotle with suspicion, ranking him as a materialist, in contrast to Plato, whom they saw as a more spiritual thinker and a genuine precursor of Christian ideas. Booths in the sixth century expounded Aristotle with enthusiasm but he had few imitators, partly because the texts were known only in extracts or recessions.

However, Aristotle's writings on logic began to circulate in the West from the ninth century, though they were not available in full until about The Ethics became available in Latin translation about and the Politics half a century later, and various scientific texts were translated from the Arabic, with learned Arabic commentaries, at the same time. Because of the transmission through Islam, Aristotle remained suspect in the church's eyes, as a possible source of heresy, but that did not stop the great thirteenth-century philosophers, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, from constructing their summae on an Aristotelian basis.

Indeed they, and particularly Aquinas, used Aristotle with brilliance, the net effect being to place Christian belief on a solid foundation of reason as well as faith. The incorporation of Aristotelian ideas and methods must be regarded as the first great complicated act in the long story of the recovery of the culture of antiquity, and it took place in the thirteenth century, before the Renaissance as such even began. If so many elements of what constitutes the Renaissance were already in place even before the year , why is it that the movement took so long to gather momentum and become self-sustaining?

Here it is right to look for two explanations, one economic, one ' human.

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Athens in its prime was a rich trading center, the center of a network of maritime colonies; and the Alexandrine Empire that succeeded it was much larger and disposed of far greater resources; and the Roman Empire, which incorporated Alexander's as its eastern wing, was far larger still, and disposed of resources that have not been equaled until comparatively modern times.

Such wealth made possible not only colossal public works programs and generous state patronage of the arts but leisure classes of ample means who both patronized the arts and practiced them. The Roman Empire was a monumental physical, legal and military fact, gathering and spending vast sums of money, from which the arts and literature incidentally benefited. Once that monumental fact collapsed in irretrievable ruin-caused in part by hyperinflation-the inability to maintain an honest currency, the gross economic product of the empire of the West's component parts declined steeply to today's standards and appeared superhuman to medieval man.

But there was something suspect about Roman monumentality. It was built on muscle power rather than brain power. The forts, the roads, the bridges, the enormous aqueducts, the splendid municipal and state buildings were put up thanks to a conscript or servile multitude, whose human energies were the chief source of power. The slave gangs, constantly replenished by wars of conquest, were always available in almost unlimited numbers. The disincentive to develop new engineering skills, as opposed to the brute strength of immensely thick walls and buttresses, was continual.

Indeed, there is disconcerting evidence that the Roman authorities were reluctant to use labor-saving methods, even when available, for fear of unemployment and discontent. Considering the wealth of the Roman Republic in its prime, its technology was minimal, barely in advance of Athenian Greece, and confined largely to the military sphere.

Yet even in the navy, the Romans made pitifully little use of sail power, preferring oars rowed by galley slaves. Technology stagnated, and in the late empire, as inflation strengthened its grip, even regressed. Medieval Europe had no such luxury in the use of manpower. Under the impact of Christian teaching, slavery declined slowly, then precipitously, especially in the Germanic north but later even in the Mediterranean south. By the time of the Domesday Book the number of slaves listed in England was tiny. Most men and women were glebae adscripti, tied to the soil of a particular place by elaborate feudal obligations, reinforced in time by statutory law, which forbade freedom of movement.

It was difficult for villeins to flock to towns to constitute a labor market. Even unskilled laborers were in short supply, and ambitious building programs soon ran into trouble on this account. When Edward I of England embarked on his huge castle-building effort in North Wales in the late thirteenth century, he found himself competing with the ecclesiastical authorities, who were rebuilding their cathedrals, for a limited pool of skilled draftsmen and even for builders' laborers. The impact of labor scarcity is reflected in the rising costs recorded in the accounts of the King's Works.

French experience was similar.


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The Black Death, in the mid-fourteenth century, by reducing the population of Western Europe by 25 to 30 percent, made labor still scarcer, even in agricultural areas, and seaports were hit too. For all these reasons, there were strong incentives, which grew in the later Middle Ages, to improve labor-saving machinery and develop alternative sources of power to human muscles.

Some of the medieval inventions were very simple' though important, like the wheelbarrow. The Romans had been extraordinarily slow in making effective use of the horse, making do with a type of ox yoke or a harness consisting chiefly of a breast band. By contrast, medieval farmers had developed, by the twelfth century, shafts, little used by the Romans, and traces, and they transformed the inefficient breast band into the stiff, padded horse collar, thereby multiplying the tractive power of the horse fivefold.

To support the medieval knight, with his heavy armor, the French bred ever-stronger horses, which developed into the modern carthorse. These powerful animals, substituted for oxen at the plow, more than doubled agricultural productivity, and made it possible for farmers to substitute all-iron for wooden plows, thus raising it further. Such horses also pulled bigger carts, equipped with a swiveling front axle, and more efficient concave wheels.

In fourteenth-century England, cartage costs, where the return journey could be made in a day, fell to a penny per ton per mile, and more and more bridges made land travel, for the first time, competitive with water transport. The Romans knew about the water-powered mill and they made some large specimens.

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But they were slow to build mills, preferring slaves, donkeys and horses to supply power; Vespasian, emperor A. Shortage of iron also made the Romans reluctant to replace inefficient wooden gearing. In the Middle Ages, iron production increased steadily, making it cheaper and available for a variety of purposes, including gearing.

Medieval forges also produced, for the first time, cast iron, invaluable for harnessing power of all kinds. So thousands more water mills were built. In England, south of the Trent, the Domesday Book lists 5, water mills. Gradually, water-powered mills were used for sawing timber, fulling, ore crushing, metal hammering and mining. Their ubiquity and importance is reflected in complex laws governing the control of rivers.

Moreover, from the twelfth century, water power was joined by wind power as a means of turning heavily geared metal-grinding machinery.


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    • Windmills, unknown to the Romans, were built in large numbers, and often of prodigious size. There were eight thousand in the Netherlands alone, where they were used not only for grinding corn but for pumping water, thus making possible drainage schemes that expanded the cultivable land area, a process taking place in many parts of Europe. The complex sail power used in the powering of windmills and the development of sail power for ships were connected, and helped to explain why medieval mariners were able to improve so markedly on Roman sea transport, largely confined to the oar-propelled galley.

    The cog, driven entirely by sail, made its appearance in the thirteenth century, chiefly in the northern waters of the Hanseatic League. It was succeeded in the fourteenth century by the Portuguese caravels, lateen-rigged ships with two or three masts, multiple decks and a big hull-in all essentials modern sailing ships—often weighing six hundred tons or more and carrying their own weight in cargo. This vessel was capable of sailing into and across Atlantic seas, and eventually did so, aided by the invention of the magnetic compass, mechanical timepieces, and navigational charts, which were improving all the time.

    With revolutionized sea power and improved land transport, internal and external trade in Europe virtually doubled with each generation. Overseas trade, especially with the East, made plague more common, and outbreaks such as the Black Death 1 decimated the population. But there is no evidence plague interrupted the wealth-producing process. It more likely accelerated it in the long run by providing yet more incentives to the use of nonhuman power, metals and labor-saving devices.

    At the same time the expansion of trade produced ancillary practices, such as insurance and banking, on an ever-growing scale, aided by the invention of techniques such as double-entry bookkeeping. Thus in the later Middle Ages, wealth was being produced in greater quantities than ever before in history, and was often concentrated in cities specializing in the new occupations of large-scale commerce and banking, like Venice and Florence.

    Such cities were chiefly to be found in the Low Countries, the Rhine Valley and in northern and central Italy.

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    As wealth accumulated, those who possessed it gratified their senses by patronizing literature and the arts, and they were joined by sovereigns, popes and princes, who found ways of taxing the new wealth of their subjects. But wealth alone would not have produced the phenomenon we call the Renaissance. Money can command art, but it commands in vain if there are no craftsmen to produce it. Happily, there is evidence everywhere that Europe, in the later Middle Ages, was entering a period of what modern economists call intermediate technology.

    Especially in the Low Countries, Germany and Italy, thousands of workshops of all kinds emerged, specializing in stone, leather, metal, wood, plaster, chemicals and fabrics, producing a growing variety of luxury goods and machinery It was chiefly the families of those who worked in these shops that produced the painters and carvers, the sculptors and architects, the writers and decorators, the teachers and scholars responsible for the huge expansion of culture that marked the beginnings of the early modern age. There was one respect in which the growth of intermediate technology had a direct, explosive, effect on this cultural spread.

    Indeed, it was the most important cultural event by far of the entire period. This was the invention, followed by the extraordinarily rapid diffusion, of printing. The Romans produced a large literature. But in publishing it they were, as in many other fields, markedly conservative. They knew about the codex-that is, a collection of folded and cut sheets, sewn together and enclosed within a binding-but they clung on to the old-fashioned scroll as the normative form of book.

    It was the early Christians who preferred the codex, and the replacement of the scroll by ever more sophisticated codices was the work of the so-called Dark Ages.

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    What the Christians took from the Romans was a version of their screw wine-press, to bind the codex. The material on which the Romans originally wrote was papyrus, the dried leaves of a grass grown along the Nile, and it is from this term that our word "paper" is ultimately derived.

    But between B. Vellum was a luxury material, extremely durable, and was used throughout the Middle Ages for the finest manuscripts. Indeed, it continued to be used in the Renaissance, even for printed work, though special care was required to produce satisfactory results.

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    Parchment was cheaper but also durable and continued to be used for certain legal documents until the mid-twentieth century. However, during the Middle Ages both were largely superseded by paper, or cloth parchment as it was originally called. This was produced by an industrial process that turned fibrous material, such as straw, wood, linen or cotton, into pulp, which was then spread in sheets over a wire framework. It came from China via the Moslem world, from which it reached Spain and Sicily.

    By about the Spanish had improved on the original process by developing a stamp mill, turned by hand, which used a wheel and tappets to raise and drop pestles in mortars.


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      • By the thirteenth century, paper mills were powered by water, and leadership in the industry had shifted to Italy, which by had developed the practice of sewing a figure of wire into the mold to produce a watermark. Efficiently produced, paper was cheaper than any other writing material by far. Even in England, which was backward in the trade, a sheet of paper eight octavo pages cost only one penny by the fifteenth century.