Greek Gods- Rome- Middle Ages- England
- Автор: Harding Samuel B.
- Год: 1909
- Язык: английский
- Год: Heritage History
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «Greek Gods- Rome- Middle Ages- England». Краткое содержание книги:
Greek Gods and Heroes
City of the Seven Hills
The Story of the Middle Ages
The Story of England
After fifty-three days, the city was taken. Then the Christian churches became Mohammedan mosques; and the standard of the Sultans floated where for a thousand years had hung the banner of the Eastern Emperors. In this way was established the Ottoman Empire, the continued existence of which causes some of the hardest problems which the Christian nations have to face to-day.
To escape from Turkish rule, great numbers of Greek scholars fled from Constantinople to the West, bringing with them their knowledge of the Greek tongue, and great quantities of Greek manuscripts.
All these events which we have been recounting helped to bring the Middle Ages to a close; but other things helped even more than these. One was what we call the Revival of Learning; another was certain great inventions which the later Middle Ages produced; and a third was the discovery of new lands and new peoples across the seas.
Although the monks had done much for learning during the Middle Ages, nevertheless a great deal of the knowledge and literature of the olden time had disappeared. Many of the most famous works of the old Greek and Latin authors had been lost sight of altogether. Others, also, which the monks had, they did not understand; and still others they almost feared to read because they were full of the stories of the old gods, whom the Middle Ages regarded as evil spirits. The Latin, too, which the monks spoke and wrote was very incorrect and corrupt; and practically no one outside of the Eastern Empire understood Greek at all.
About the beginning of the fourteenth century, however, men began to take a new interest in the old literature. They began to write more correct Latin. They searched for forgotten manuscripts which might contain some of the lost works. They corrected and edited the manuscripts they had, and began to make dictionaries and grammars to aid them in understanding them. Soon some began even to learn Greek, and collect Greek manuscripts as well as Latin ones.
Above all, scholars tried to put themselves back in the place of the old Greeks and Romans, and look at the world through their eyes, and not through the eyes of the medieval monks.
The result was that many things began to seem different to them. They no longer feared this world as the monks had done. They took delight in its beauty, and no longer thought that everything which was pleasant was therefore sinful. And because they believed that man’s life as a human being was good in itself, the new scholars were called "humanists," and their studies and ways of thinking "humanism."
This change in the way of thinking came only gradually, and it was a hundred years before humanism began to spread from Italy, where it first arose, to the countries north of the Alps. But then the Germans contributed something which helped to spread humanism more rapidly. This was the invention of printing.
The making of books, by forming each letter in each copy, separately with the pen, was so slow that men had long hunted for some means of lessening the labor. They found that by engraving the page upon a block of wood, and printing from this, they could make a hundred copies almost as easily as one, so in the fifteenth century "block books," as they were called, began to be made. But the trouble with these was that every page had to be engraved separately, and this proved such a task that only books of a very few pages were made in this way.
Then it occurred to John Gutenberg, of Strasburg, that if he made the letters separate, he could use the same ones over and over again to form new pages; and if instead of cutting the letters themselves, he made moulds to produce them, then he could cast his type in metal (which would be better than wood anyway), and from the one mould he could make as many of each letter as was necessary.
In this way printing from movable metal types was invented by Gutenberg, about the year 1450. It seems like a very small thing when we tell about it, but it was one of the most important inventions that the world has ever seen.
The first book that was printed was the Bible, in Latin. Soon presses and printing offices were established all over Western Europe, printing Bibles and other books, and selling them so cheaply that almost every one could now afford to buy. The invention of printing thus served to spread humanism and the knowledge of the Bible throughout Europe, and these two together brought on the Reformation and helped put an end entirely to the Middle Ages.
EARLY PRINTERS
The introduction of gunpowder was also, in the end, of very great importance.
Nobody knows just when or by whom gunpowder was invented; but it was used to make rockets and fireworks in India and China long before it was known in Europe. In the fourteenth century the Moors of Spain introduced the use of cannon into Europe; and by the date of the battle of Crecy (1346) cannon were to be found in most of the western countries. These, however, were usually small, and were often composed merely of iron staves roughly hooped together, or even of wood or of leather; and the powder used was weak and without sufficient force to throw the ball any great distance.
It was not gunpowder, as is sometimes said, that first overthrew the armored knight of the Middle Ages; it was the archers who did this, and the foot-soldiers armed with long pikes for thrusting, and with halberds hooked at the end by means of which the knight might be pulled from his horse.
As the cannon were improved, however, they became of great service in breaking down the walls of feudal castles, and of hostile cities; and so, in the end, they helped greatly to change the mode of making war. But it was not until the Middle Ages had quite come to an end that gunpowder had become so useful in small hand guns that the old long-bows and crossbows completely disappeared.
EARLY CANNON
Two other inventions that came into use in the Middle Ages were also of great importance in bringing in the new time. These were the compass, or magnetic needle, and the "cross-staff" used by sailors for finding latitude.
Like gunpowder, the compass came from Asia, where it was used by the Chinese long before the birth of Christ. It was introduced into Europe as a guide to sailors about the beginning of the fourteenth century. It enabled them to steer steadily in whatever direction they wished, even when far from land; but it could not tell them where they were at any given time.
The cross-staff did this in part, for it could tell them their latitude by measuring the height of the north star above the horizon. The "astrolabe" was another instrument which was used for the same purpose. These were very ancient instruments, but they did not begin to be used by sailors until some time in the fifteenth century. Even then the sailor had to trust to guess-work for his longitude, for the watches and chronometers by which ship captains now measure longitude were not yet invented; and sailing maps were only beginning to be made.
THE CROSS-STAFF.
Yet, in spite of these disadvantages, and in spite of the smallness of the vessels, and the terrors of unknown seas, great progress was made in the discovery of new lands before the close of our period. The commerce of the Italian cities made their citizens skillful sailors, voyaging up and down the Mediterranean and even beyond the straits of Gibraltar. The Normans and certain of the Spanish peoples, early sailed boldly into the northern and western seas.
But it was the little state of Portugal that led the way in the discovery of new worlds. A prince of that state gave so much attention to discovery in the first half of the fifteenth century, that he was called Prince Henry "the Navigator." Under his wise direction Portuguese seamen began working their way south along the coast of Africa. In this way the Madeira and Canary Islands, the Azores, and Cape Verde were discovered one after another before 1450; and after Prince Henry’s death, a Portuguese captain succeeded in 1486 in reaching the southernmost point of Africa, to which the Portuguese King gave the name "Cape of Good Hope." Twelve years later, in 1498, Vasco da Gama realized this hope by reaching the East Indies, and so opened up communication by sea with India.