Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

In contrast to the hermits of the desert, the first community of monks was established very early in the fourth century, some 600 miles further up the Nile, at Tabennesi. Here, Pachomius (c. 292–346) conceived the first set of rules for a way of life removed from the world. Each monk had his own hut and his time was divided

This became an alternative to papyrus about the end of the eighth century, when the Arabs are believed to have learned the secret of the technique from some Chinese prisoners of war taken at the battle of Tales, in 751.37

However, the first precisely dated book written in a clear and accomplished cursive miniscule script is the famous gospel book named after the archimandrite Porphyri Uspenskij, who picked it up on one of his visits to the monasteries of the Levant.40 It is dated to 835.

From 850 on, whenever a new copy of a literary text was needed, the chances were that it would be composed in the new script; and after 950 it invariably was (few books in capitals are now extant).

The question mark (?) evolved at this time, though Bernhard Bischoff found ten different forms; 300 might be written iiic and new letters were invented: and for example.

This was too much for some people and their anger was further kindled by the fact that Jesus’ image was allowed on to coins by Justinian II. In the middle of the eighth century a sharp reaction set in against the worship of ‘holy images’ and this led to the so-called iconoclast controversy, which lasted from 754 to 843.

These arguments lay behind the church Council of Hieria, in 754, held under the auspices of the emperor Constantine V, which officially condemned the veneration of images and sought their destruction.

‘That the Byzantines regarded these images as true likenesses gave their basilicas an intense, sacred aura that we can only guess at today.’67 These hard-won ideas adopted at the end of the iconoclast controversy, in 843, would remain unaltered for centuries. Not until the great age of cathedral building would change be allowed.

It was the camel which made the deserts habitable but this animal wasn’t domesticated until around 1100 BC, so the Bedouins are unlikely to be much older.

On this view, the text of the Qur’an was finalised by two viziers only in 933. More than three hundred years therefore elapsed before the authorised version of the Qur’an was settled, much longer than for the Christian Bible after the Crucifixion.

In the year AD 499 the Hindu mathematician Aryabhata calculated pi as 3.1416 and the length of the solar year as 365.358 days.

At much the same time he conceived the idea that the earth was a sphere spinning on its own axis and revolving around the sun. He thought that the shadows of the earth falling on the moon caused eclipses. One wonders what all the fuss was about when Copernicus ‘discovered’ some of the above nearly a thousand years later.

According to D. E. Smith, in his history of mathematics, ‘the earliest undoubted occurrence of a zero in India is in an inscription of 876’–in other words, more than two centuries after the first mention of the use of the other nine numerals. It is still not certain where the zero was first introduced, and the concept of nought, or emptiness, was independently arrived at by the Mayans, as we shall see in a later chapter. Joseph Needham, the Cambridge-based historian of Chinese

But this is no doubt the result of Hindu influence, and it does seem that it was the Indians who first used all three of the new elements which are the basis of our counting system: a decimal base, a positional notation, ciphers for ten, and only ten, numerals. And this was in place by 876.

One sign of the sophistication and success of China was her population, which was in excess of 70 million in the twelfth century and may have been 100 million a century later, almost double what it was in Europe.

the eunuch Cai Lun (d. AD121). He it was who wrote the report to the emperor in AD 105 in which the invention of paper is first mentioned, but it must have been in use for some time by then, after being developed by some lesser soul whose name was never recorded.

The oldest printed book in the world is now in the British Library, a long roll printed by a xylographic (woodblock) process in 868. It is a Buddhist text and has a beautiful frontispiece, of such quality that it suggests the technique was already advanced.

Some 100,000 sorts (letters) were cast as a result of this edict, and ten more founts were made during the course of the century, the first three of which (1403, 1420 and 1434), we now know, preceded the invention of printing by Gutenberg.

They were the precursors of true banknotes, which appeared in 1024 and spread rapidly, at least for a time, remaining important until the end of the Mongol period (mid-fourteenth century), when they fell into disrepute.

Some idea of Chinese success in this field is given by one calculation, that, in the eleventh century, China was already producing 70 per cent of the iron that would be manufactured in Great Britain at the beginning of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century.

The discovery of the incendiary/explosive capacities of coal, saltpetre and sulphur originated in alchemical circles in the Tang age but was not used in anger until 904–906.26

The third and most deadly development was the explosion of gunpowder in a tube, use of which dates from 1132. The first tubes, which formed a sort of mortar or rocket, in effect the first gun, were made of wood or bamboo, and gunpowder was used twice over, once as a propellant for the arrows, and secondly for adding fire to the tip.

The last of the great inventions of the Chinese Middle Ages concern the development of the country’s extraordinary seafaring activities, from the eleventh century on, which culminated in the great maritime expeditions of the Ming period in the years 1405–1433, which ventured as far as the Red Sea and the east coast of Africa.

This was first referred to in a Chinese work, the Pingzhou ketan, by Zhu Yu, dated to 1119, which says it was used on Cantonese ships at the end of the previous century. The compass was not used on European ships before 1280, two hundred years later.

in 1086, the Domesday Book recorded 5,624 mills for 3,000 communities in England.

He notes that the terms ‘banks’ and ‘bankers’ make their first appearance in the twelfth century. Gold coinages appeared in Venice, Genoa and Florence between 1252 and 1284 and quickly became standards of value.

So, when his treatise A Concordance of Discordant Canons, aka the Decretum, appeared in 1140 it was rapturously received right across the continent.42 Gratian attempted to rethink, reorganise and rationalise ecclesiastical law (which was of course the main form of law in a totally religious society) in such a way that blind custom was done away with. He did not always succeed but, after him, the law was much more subject to the test of reasonableness, so that it could be accepted by popes and local bishops and priests with more or less equal enthusiasm. It was liberating as well as unifying.

At the same time, the clock was invented (the 1270s).

The third scholar who helped to lay the fundamentals of the West was Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274). His attempt to reconcile Christianity with Aristotle, and the classics in general, was a hugely creative and mould-breaking achievement,

For England, where the figures are known fairly accurately, the number of monasteries for men rose between 1066 and 1154 (the accession of Henry II) from just under fifty to about five hundred, and Christopher Brooke calculates that the number of monks and nuns rose seven- or eight-fold in just under a hundred years.77 The Cistercian order alone built 498 monasteries between 1098 and 1170.78

In Germany the numbers of houses for women rose from about seventy in 900 to five hundred in 1250.79

‘The discovery of the individual,’ says Colin Morris, ‘was one of the most important cultural developments in the years between 1050 and 1200.’82

Towards the end of January 1077, in the middle of a bitter winter, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV arrived in Canossa, twenty miles south-east of Parma in north Italy. Henry was barely twenty-three at the time, a large energetic man, with blue eyes and flaxen hair, a typical Teuton. He was in Canossa to see the pope, Gregory VII, ‘the Julius Caesar of the papacy’, who was staying in the fortress there.

At the end of the previous year, in a work he wrote for himself, called Dictatus papae (The pope’s dictate), Gregory proclaimed that ‘the Roman church has never erred, nor will it err in all eternity’. He claimed that the pope himself ‘may be judged by no one’, and that ‘a sentence passed by him may be retracted by no one’.

This great quarrel, what became known as the Investiture Struggle, was a protracted conflict with secular authorities for control of Church offices, where Gregory was merely the first in a long line of popes who followed his lead.3 The process he began culminated in 1122 in the Concordat of Worms (during the reign of the French pope Calixtus II, 11191124), whereby the emperor agreed to give up spiritual investiture and allow free ecclesiastical elections.

Between 1076 and 1302 there were two more papal bulls asserting superiority of the papacy and four more kings were either excommunicated or threatened with it. The 1302 bull Unam sanctam is widely regarded as the ne plus ultra of the claims of the medieval papacy and certainly, the pope of the time, Boniface VIII, meant it to be an assertion of his continued paramountcy.

Instead, the period between 1050 and 1250 in the church, in commerce, in politics and in scholarship may well be, as R. W. S. Southern has said, the most important epoch in Western history apart from the equivalent time-frame 17501950.

But what really drew the world’s attention was the publication, immediately after his election as pope in 1073, of Dictatus papae. This was by any measure a trenchant assertion of papal power, ‘a sensational and extremely radical document’.33 As was mentioned above, the bull insisted that the Roman pontiff was sanctified by St Peter, that the papacy had never erred and, according to the scriptures, never would err. Only the papal office was universal in authority, said the bull, only the pope could appoint bishops, nothing was canonical without papal assent, no one could be a true believer unless he agreed with the pope, and the pope himself was beyond the judgement of any human being. The pope had the power to depose emperors, and people with grievances against their rulers could lawfully bring those grievances to the Holy See.

But the most terrible of all bulls in the history of the inquisition was issued in May 1252 by Innocent IV. This was luridly entitled Ad extirpanda, ‘to extirpate’, which allowed for torture to obtain confessions, for burning at the stake, and for a police force at the service of the Office of the Faith (the Roman euphemism for the inquisition).

The auto de fe carried out by Bernard Gui in April 1310 in the area of Toulouse shows the sort of thing that might happen. There, between Sunday, 5 April and Thursday, 9 April he tried and sentenced 103 people: twenty were ordered to wear the badge of infamy and go on pilgrimages; sixty-five were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment; and eighteen were consigned to the civil authorities to be burned at the stake.

The new piety was recognised and formalised by the Fourth Lateran Council, held at the Lateran Palace in Rome in 1215. This was one of the three most important ecumenical councils of the Catholic church, the other two being the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, which considered the Catholic church’s response to Protestantism. Four hundred bishops and eight hundred other prelates and notables attended Lateran IV, which set the agenda for many aspects of Christianity and clarified and codified many areas of worship and belief. It was Lateran IV that nullified Magna Carta and fixed the number of the sacraments as seven (the early church had never defined the number of sacraments and, previously, some theologians like Damian had preferred nine, or even eleven). These seven were: baptism, confirmation, marriage, and extreme unction, marking the stages in life, plus mass, confession and the ordination of priests. Lateran IV also decreed that every member of the church must confess his or her sins to a priest and receive the Eucharist at least once a year, and as often as possible. This, of course, was a reassertion of the authority of the priesthood and a direct challenge to heretics. But it did reflect the needs of the new piety. In the same vein the council also decreed that no new saints or relics were to be recognised without papal canonisation.

In 1210 a local synod of bishops in Paris commanded that all study of Aristotle at Paris be halted. He was to be read neither privately nor taught publicly, ‘under penalty of excommunication’.

The first imperial university, in fact the first university of all to be founded by a deliberate act, was installed at Naples in 1224 by the emperor Frederick II. The first papal university was at Toulouse, authorised by Gregory IX in 1229 and founded, in part, to combat heretical belief. These gave birth to the notion that the authority to found studia generalia was vested only in papal or imperial prerogative, a concept that was accepted doctrine by the fourteenth century.

These advances progressed most at Bologna and Montpellier. The earliest reference for human dissection occurred at Bologna c. 1300.

The earliest text on surgery is the anonymous treatise now titled the Bamberg Surgery (c. 1150). Among the conditions described are fractures and dislocations, surgical lesions of the eye and ear, diseases of the skin, haemorrhoids, sciatica and hernia.48 There is a description for the treatment of goitre with substances containing iodine, and for a form of surgical anaesthesia, a ‘soporific sponge’ soaked in hyoscyamus and poppy.

The mechanical clock was probably invented in the 1270s (the same decade as spectacles), and Dante refers to clocks in Paradiso, written about 1320.

equal hours were in general usage in Germany in the 1330s.

The familiar ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ signs, + and ?, appeared in print in Germany in1489. Their origins, Alfred Crosby says, are obscure:

A continuous record of the books belonging to Francesco di Marco Datini, a merchant of Prato, from 1366 to 1410, shows that Hindu-Arabic numerals began to appear about 1366 and that until 1383 the accounts were kept in narrative form. After that date, however, the practice changed and assets and liabilities began to be kept in parallel columns either on the same page, or on facing pages. From then on it was immediately obvious, as it had not been obvious before, whether a business was in profit or loss.

Gutenberg appears to have returned to Mainz from Strasbourg in the late 1440s, where he teamed up with Johann Fust, a rich citizen who was his new backer, and Peter Schoeffer, an erstwhile student at the University of Paris who may have been a copyist before he turned printer. All seems to have gone well until 1455, when Fust and Gutenberg fell out and there was another lawsuit. Gutenberg lost, had to repay the interest on his loan, and what remained of the capital, and Fust and Schoeffer went on without him. On 14 October 1457, the first printed book that can be dated came from the new press. This was the so-called Mainz Psalter, the first product of a business that was to flourish for more than a hundred years. Lucien Febvre judges that the Psalter was of such a quality that it cannot have been the first attempt, and it is now more or less agreed among historians that other presses were in operation between 1450 and 1455 producing many books on a commercial scale–grammars, calendars, Missals, the famous 42-line and 36-line three-volume Bibles.115 Gutenberg later got into debt but after that he was ennobled by the archbishop elector of Mainz, for personal services–so perhaps he installed a printing press. There was no uniformity in letter formation and none was agreed until the eighteenth century in the French Enlightenment, when a standard measure, ‘the point’, was adopted. This was the size of the king’s foot and is still in use today.