Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

by Marshall McLuhan

With the cutting-off of the supplies of papyrus by the Mohammedans, the Mediterranean, long a Roman lake, became a Muslim lake, and the Roman center collapsed. What had been the margins of this center-margin structure became independent centers on a new feudal, structural base. The Roman center collapsed by the fifth century a.d. as wheel, road, and paper dwindled into a ghostly paradigm of former power. Papyrus never returned. Byzantium, like the medieval centers, relied heavily on parchment, but this was too expensive and scarce a material to speed commerce or even education. It was paper from China, gradually making its way through the Near East to Europe, that accelerated education and commerce steadily from the eleventh century, and provided the basis for “the Renaissance of the twelfth century,” popularizing prints and, finally, making printing possible by the fifteenth century.