The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  The sea was not safe from war, either. Throughout the sixteenth century the various wars and rebellions made the sea so dangerous that fishing boats went about in convoy with an armed escort. There was no refuge inland; the country was torn up by the revolt against the Spanish rulers that would eventually make the Netherlands to the north an independent country. When mercenaries came to the shoreline around Walraversijde they came to wreck and to steal, to take away all the comfort that the people of Walraversijde had made for themselves. Fishermen lost their sense of owning their trade, of being independent rather than borderline. The heart of the place died.

  Some of the houses at Walraversijde, a whole quarter of the village, were abandoned suddenly and left to rot. The brewery closed. By the time peace returned, the wind had pushed the dunes over the sea-dike and changed the shoreline again. Nothing could come back except as memories, and when the people who remembered were gone, as ruins. Nature has, as always, the last word.27

  8.

  Science and money

  They were not just different: they were the opposite of everyone else. Flat noses, little eyes far apart, prominent chins, eyebrows from their foreheads to their noses and an absolute refusal to wash their clothes ‘especially in time of thunder’; their thick, short thighs, their short feet and pigtails made them seem ominously different from people who imagined they had noses like Roman statues, big blue eyes and long legs to show off with short clothes. The faces of the Mongols were ‘contorted and terrible’, so the archbishop Ivo of Narbonne heard from an Englishman who had lived with them.1

  They were nomads, always moving, just when Europe was netted with solid towns. They didn’t use money as Europeans did for almost everything from buying a better afterlife to settling the account on a market stall; William of Rubruck said ‘there was nothing to be sold among (them) for gold and silver, but only for cloth and garments’, and if you offered them a gold coin from Byzantium ‘they rubbed it with their fingers and put it to their noses to try by the smell whether it was copper or no’.2 They hadn’t got the point of money at all, the Westerners said; they still thought it was a kind of barter.

  They were single-minded drunkards and ‘when any of them hath taken more drink than his stomach can well bear, he casteth it up and falls to drinking again’. They ate their dead, and even the vultures would not touch the bones they left; they gave their old and ugly women to the cannibals,3 and subjected the better-favoured ones to ‘forced and unnatural ravishments’. They seemed to be doing their best to be appropriate for the world east of the Baltic and the Caspian, which Europeans had populated thickly with their own fears and legends, with dog-headed, ox-hoofed men who hopped on one foot and lived on the steam from their soup.

  They were a surprise, because nobody had known about the Mongols. They were appalling because they were winning.

  Even the Assassins, the Ismaili Muslims of modern Syria who were famous for their courage, their ingenious killings and perhaps their smoking habits (although the name ‘assassin’ probably does not come from ‘hashish’), sent ambassadors to France and England to ask for help in beating them back. By 1241, Mongol armies had taken Hungary, taken Poland; they had all of Russia except for Novgorod, which was their vassal. They had defeated the Teutonic Knights, they were harassing the borders of Bohemia and Saxony. Their spies were all around Vienna, but when the Duke of Austria asked for help from the West, there was silence. Indeed, for all the flurry of talk and arming and planning in various castles, there seemed to be nothing that could stop them moving west as far as the edge of the world. Christendom was cut up between factions, between the friends of the Pope in Rome and the friends of the Roman Emperor, and there was no time to spare from that struggle just to save Christendom itself. The Pope declared a crusade, but nobody came. The Emperor was suspected of making it impossible to help the Hungarian king unless the king became his vassal, and the chronicler Matthew Paris thought it possible the Emperor had somehow ‘plotted this infliction … and that by his grasping ambition he was like Lucifer or Antichrist, conspiring against the monarchy of the whole world, to the utter ruin of the Christian faith’.

  This is after the time of the great Genghis Khan, the ‘mighty hunter’ who ‘learned to steal men and to take them for a prey’. His successor, his son Ögedei, also knew how to hunt and trap human beings, and when Franciscans on a papal mission reached Kiev they saw for themselves what it meant to be defeated by the Mongols: ‘an innumerable multitude of dead men’s skulls and bones lying upon the earth’. ‘They have no human laws, know no mercy, and are more cruel than lions or bears,’ Matthew Paris wrote.4

  Also, they were quite brilliant fighters. They were better, suppler horsemen than the Europeans, which was hardly surprising since they almost lived on horseback; they were manoeuvring while the Westerners were still charging forwards in a fixed line.5 They fought in lighter armour than the clanking mail of the West, and the backs of the armour, Ivo of Narbonne reported, ‘are only slightly armed, that they may not flee’; anyone running away was shot. They had the distinct tactical advantage in an age of siege warfare that, as William of Rubruck reported after his mission there, ‘they have in no place any settled city to abide in’; so they had no special place to defend, no sense of loss if they moved on. William regretted that his best metaphors were spoiled by their way of life; ‘neither know they of the celestial city to come’.6

  They had magic, or so it must have seemed. Their catapults were light and portable, and could hurl metal a full hundred metres from anywhere in the field; there is no proof they had cannon, but they did not need them. They had gunpowder to fire rockets and create smoke and confusion, to raise a true fog of war. They also knew how to pitch burning tar at the enemy, and how to firebomb towns and armies. In his encyclopaedia, Vincent of Beauvais reckoned they let loose a whole series of evil spirits. Their courier services kept every part of the army informed and they had signalling systems by flag and by torch; so they were always connected, and their tactics could be complicated. Dividing their army into separate sections actually gave them an advantage. They could swing around and harry and pretend to retreat so the enemy would fall into traps.7 They were everywhere on the other side of the smoke, and they had spies all around, and they were ruthlessly disciplined. Where Europeans worked by weight and mass and force, armies like battering rams made of men and horses, ‘the Tartar fights more by policy than by main force’.

  Or so John of Plano Carpini reported in the 1240s, having seen them at first hand; he considered them ‘like devils … always watching and devising how to practise mischief’. ‘I deem not any one kingdom or province able to resist them,’ he wrote. The more they advanced, the more absurd it seemed to imagine that Christendom could ever be united as the Mongols were, that Church or Emperor or both together could rule as effectively as the khans. Christendom was losing both authority and its identity. Confusingly, some of the Mongols also seemed to be Christian, even to have chapels in their camps with bells ringing and psalms chanted;8 and the Mongols looked down on the Westerners not just as dogs but also as ‘idolaters because they worship wood and stones when the sign of the Cross is carved on them’.9

  It was hard to think straight about the Mongols, which gave a new use for some very old and abject certainties. There was an old legend that Alexander the Great had locked away a whole race of people in the mountains of the Caucasus behind a great wall sealed with bitumen; so maybe these Mongols were ‘those Jews who were enclosed by the great king Alexander’. Mongols were nomads, which meant they were landless, and Jews ‘had no proper land of their own’; that was almost evidence. The year 1240 was the year 5000 in the Jewish calendar, which was the due date for the coming of the Messiah according to some traditions, which led some Jews in Germany to think that perhaps the Mongols were indeed the ‘enclosed people’ come to save them at last. The name of King David was mentioned. The Jews of Prague sold all they had and quit the city in 1235, expecting the astonish
ments to come. It is possible the Mongols, who were excellent manipulators and always prepared the ground before their attacks, were encouraging the rumours; there were certainly a remarkable number of Mongol spies deployed along the Rhine and in Bohemia.10

  Riot followed: Jewish houses burned and Jews died. There were the usual blood libels, the usual Christian fury at the very idea that the Jewish community might prevent a Jew converting,11 but there was also a wider and terrifying idea: that all the outsiders in the world were conspiring together against Christendom.

  The alarm had practical results: around the North Sea the rumours stopped the boats from Gotland and Friesland risking their brief, regular haul across the North Sea to Yarmouth, so that herring was left unsold and almost worthless in 1237–8, even when it was carted far inland, where people should have been grateful.

  But more than anything, the terror made people think even more about the end of the world, which was already the usual and obsessional subject.

  The world survived when a comet drew a line of light across the sky in 1066; all that happened was the Norman invasion of England. Nothing final happened in 1096 when the Irish expected to be punished for their part in cutting off the head of John the Baptist (they thought a druid called Mog Roth killed the saint); there was terrible plague, but not terrible enough to undo all St Patrick’s good work of conversion.12 But in the 1240s the end seemed truly and horrifyingly imminent, what with mankind coming close to the end of the sixth age of the world, so it was calculated, and the unstoppable threat from the East.

  The khans made apocalyptic minds think of the Antichrist. The chronicler Roger of Howden painted him ‘expert in all the false and wicked and criminal arts’, able to upset the whole natural order and bring on ‘all the might of his devil’s power’. Men, especially Franciscan friars, were fascinated by the Calabrian abbot Joachim of Flore, who had worked out that the Antichrist was arriving in 1260 precisely; some of their associates reckoned the very fact of a new prophet like Joachim was proof the world was ending, that mankind was in the dies formidandi, the terrible days when evil runs wild in the world and judgement is close.13

  The Franciscan friar Roger Bacon was much alarmed by the prospect of dark magicians in the East, people with appalling knowledge; he valued secret things, strange things alongside his respectable experiments, but he wanted the secrets in the right hands and minds. He was sure the West would need all the magic of the East to fight back. He wanted everything in the books of the East before it was turned against the Christian West. In writing to the Pope, he didn’t just boast about the twenty years he had laboured on such things, the two thousand pounds he had spent on books, experiments, tables, but mostly on books; he also made promises. He listed wonders: a flying machine, boats that moved on their own without sails or rowers, an instrument three fingers long which could lift a man and his companions, even out of a prison; he was clearly preparing for hostages and war. He said that ‘these things have been made in our days’.14

  He proposed them all against the coming of the Antichrist, the darkest magician of them all. He was absolutely sure that science was now an urgent matter.

  He could not know that the Mongols did not only have magic; they had politics. Their Ögedei Khan had long been a famous drinker, even by Mongol standards, with servants whose only job was to count up his diet of alcohol and a liver whose survival was almost miraculous. In 1242, just when he seemed to have decided on moving as hard into Europe as his father had gone into Asia, he died quite suddenly, so suddenly that there were rumours his wife had poisoned him. Once he was gone, the Mongol nation was obliged to choose a new khan, and to do that they had to assemble from the edges of Europe, from the edges of Asia, so the camps near Vienna were rapidly and surprisingly dismantled, and for the time being the threat moved back east. Pope and Emperor couldn’t save Europe, but drink did.

  When the Mongols withdrew, they left behind all the alarms and worries they had caused in the first place. Christendom was very vulnerable, the world was still coming to an end, the Last Judgement was close, there was magic about that the West did not share and it was an urgent matter to make sense of all the changes that had happened in people’s minds over the past hundreds of years. Those changes were coming to a crisis.

  The world had not been exactly itself for the longest time. We think we know the world with our senses, the stars we see, the cold of a snake or the warmth of a cat, the likelihood of rain from a certain kind of cloud, and when we think about such things we usually begin from what our senses tell us. We examine what we know. In the times of the Mongol invasions, people thought rather differently. They did not see and sense the world in its own terms; they saw it only through a different dimension, what others had already written about it, what God might be trying to say.

  The world was more like a picture in a church that had to be read, studied, interpreted and learned, or some set text whose meanings had to be teased out. Any event might turn out to be a promise, or more likely a warning, and everything would be clear after the event. When the Vikings raided Lindisfarne, the great Alcuin demanded what it had meant when, months before, a rain of blood ‘fell threateningly on a clear day from the peak of the roof on the North side’ of the church of St Peter in York, ‘the principal church of the entire kingdom’. He was sure of the answer, of course; he could find it in his assumptions about how God would adjust the world to give rewards or warnings. He wrote to the King of Northumberland: ‘How can it not be thought that a blood price was coming down to the people from the North?’15

  The idea of thinking of weather as a phenomenon in itself, not the expression of some higher power, took another three hundred years, when William of Conches, grammarian and natural philosopher, discussed blood rain in his Philosophia.16 He didn’t deal in miracles or omens, but in a world that is mechanical and physical, in which the wind raises water in droplets from the ground, which then fall back as rain; he had noticed that downpours often follow intense heat, and he reckoned the sun’s warmth turns the coldness of the earth to moisture just as fire melts ice. He saw that the same process could lift living things into the air – tadpoles, fish and frogs – so they could rain down later and look exactly like plagues. As for the colour of blood rain, he put that down to the bright-red colour of heat, so when rain was hot and condensed it was bound to look very much like blood.

  A change has happened. Alcuin looked about for meanings that he expected; William looked and thought about his experience of the immediate world, and how it worked. Once men looked and observed, the next stage was measuring, calculating, subjecting the world to the rules of logic rather than relying on God’s interventions, or those of angels, or even demons.

  Adelard of Bath, in the twelfth century, wrote dialogues with an imaginary and inquisitive nephew who asked questions like: why do green things grow out of the earth? ‘It is the will of the Creator,’ Adelard tells him, ‘that green things grow from the earth. But that doesn’t mean there is no other explanation.’ He says later: ‘I do not want to take anything away from God, because everything that is exists for Him and because of Him; but things are not all random and muddled. When human knowledge advances, we should be listening to it.’17

  Adelard was ready to find things out by experiments of sorts: to understand how veins and muscles work, he left a corpse in running water until the flesh was washed away. He got the idea, it seems, from a magic water jar belonging to some witch. He sometimes used observation rather brilliantly, as when he claimed to know which part of the brain handled reason and which part did the imagining; he had seen the changes in a man who had been injured in the front of his head.18 He disapproved of simple wonder, simple terror at natural things; he dared to disagree with St Augustine’s insistence on feeling awe at the mighty works of God instead of trying to see how the world worked. His nephew says thunder is ‘an object of wonder to all nations’, but Adelard insists on a simple explanation: the collision of frozen clouds. ‘Look mo
re closely,’ he writes, ‘consider the circumstances, propose causes and you will not wonder at the effects.’19

  He did not find it easy to teach such things. His nephew asks why he prefers the ‘opinions of the Saracens’, the texts that were arriving in Arabic and Greek from Spain and the Middle East, to the Christian ‘schools of God’. Adelard says the present generation is biased against ‘modern’ discoveries and unfamiliar things; he’s afraid he would not get a hearing for his own ideas; ‘therefore it is the cause of the Arabs that I plead, not my own’.20 The Arabs had conserved Euclid’s geometry and Aristotle’s will to investigate, and added Arab astronomers’ sophistication about the irregular movements of the heavens, all of which were unfamiliar and so ‘modern’ ideas; but their books were easy to accept because they were still authorities to be studied and interpreted in the old, familiar ways, as you might with the Church fathers and the Gospels. They were just a different kind of old.

  The bishop, scientist and teacher Robert Grosseteste grew to believe in the thirteenth century that knowledge came from the mind facing outwards to the world and making sense of it, and not from some miraculous illumination from God. Knowledge of this world was worth while in itself. That sounds startling from a senior priest, but it is not at all what we might think. The process of investigating the world, Grosseteste thought, was also the glimpse of a trace of a glimmer of light, God’s light, so that asking questions about the world might lead straight on to a sense of God and Godliness. Science could easily fit into the very heart of a religious view of this world, and even the next.21

  The point of view has changed. What began with the kind of thinking we call superstitious or dark or plain medieval was beginning to allow the very start of the modern world.