by Ian Mortimer
Picture Credits
View of Moretonhampstead, Devon (author’s collection).
Gatehouse of Exeter Castle (author’s collection).
Speyer Cathedral, Germany (author’s collection).
Mural in Chaldon Church, Surrey (author’s collection).
Arab physician performing a bleeding, c.1240 (Bridgeman Art Library).
Window depicting a wine merchant in Chartres Cathedral, France (Bridgeman Art Library).
Hereford world map (Bridgeman Art Library).
Cadaver effigy in Exeter Cathedral (author’s collection).
Golden rose of Pope John XXII (copyright Brian Shelly).
Image of cannon from Walter de Milemete’s treatise on kingship (Bridgeman Art Library).
Portrait of a Man in a Turban by Jan van Eyck (Bridgeman Art Library).
Printing press, from a book printed in 1498 (Bridgeman Art Library).
Clock in the chapel at Cotehele House, Cornwall (author’s collection).
Portrait of Columbus by Sebastiano del Piombo (Bridgeman Art Library).
Map of the world from Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1570 (Bridgeman Art Library).
Wheel-lock hunting pistol dating from 1578 (Bridgeman Art Library).
Iris from Leonhart Fuchs’s De Historia Stirpium, 1542 (Bridgeman Art Library).
Bamberg witch house (Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, shelf-mark V B 211m).
Johannes Hevelius’s telescope (public domain).
Isaac Newton’s telescope (Bridgeman Art Library).
London opera rehearsal, painted by Marco Ricci, 1708 (Bridgeman Art Library)
Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine, 1718 (Getty Images).
The Tennis Court Oath, after Jacques-Louis David (Bridgeman Art Library).
Power looms, painting by Thomas Allom, 1834 (Bridgeman Art Library).
Advertisement for the Plymouth to London stagecoach, Plymouth and Dock Telegraph and Chronicle, 4 May 1822 (author’s collection).
The Boulevard du Temple, Paris, photographed by Louis Daguerre, 1838 (public domain).
SS Great Britain in Cumberland Basin, photographed by William Fox Talbot, 1844 (public domain).
The Wright Brothers’ Flyer, airborne on 17 December 1902 (Library of Congress).
Autochrome photograph of French soldier, June 1917, by Paul Castelnau (Ministère de la Culture – Médiathèque du Patrimoine, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Paul Castelnau).
Dr Nagai in Nagasaki after the nuclear bombing, August 1945 (Bridgeman Art Library).
Park Row Building, New York (Library of Congress).
Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur (Bridgeman Art Library).
Earthrise: the Earth photographed from Apollo 8, 24 December 1968 (NASA).
Illustrations
Moretonhampstead in Devon. In the Middle Ages the manor was inaccessible to wheeled transport. The incorporation of such places within the Latin world, through the construction of churches, is one of the most significant changes of the eleventh century.
Exeter Castle, constructed by William the Conqueror in 1068. William found Saxon England undefended by castles and thus relatively easy to conquer. Such fortifications secured a stronger political relationship between leadership and the land.
Speyer Cathedral, built between 1030 and 1106. A massive construction for its time, its chief purpose was to demonstrate the power of the Holy Roman Emperors at a time when they were losing authority to the pope.
The late twelfth-century mural from Chaldon Church in Surrey, depicting the judgement and torment of souls. In the twelfth century the doctrine of Purgatory emerged: people started to believe they were not sent directly to Heaven or Hell but could redeem themselves through good works and prayer.
An Arab physician performing a bleeding, c.1240. Over the course of the twelfth century a large number of medical texts from the ancient world were translated from the Arabic in libraries around the Mediterranean. In Salerno, translations gave rise to an early university specialising in medicine.
Part of an early thirteenth-century stained glass window in Chartres Cathedral, depicting a wine merchant transporting a barrel of wine in a cart. At this period trade was flourishing across the Continent.
The Hereford world map, drawn by Richard of Haldingham about 1290. It is a spatial representation of knowledge rather than a true map. Jerusalem lies at the centre, the Red Sea top right, the British Isles bottom left, and the straits of Gibraltar at the bottom. Three quarters of this world – Asia and Africa – lay outside Christendom and were practically unknown to its author.
A cadaver effigy in Exeter Cathedral. The Black Death forced people to rethink their relationship with God. Many leading figures built reminders of death like this as demonstrations of their earthly humility and awareness of their sinful state.
The golden rose of Pope John XXII, made by Minucchio da Siena in 1330. Golden roses were mystical gifts given by the pope each year to a deserving prince or lord, or a favoured church. The craftsmanship and delicacy of the rose is a marked contrast to our widespread assumptions about culture on the eve of the Hundred Years War and the Black Death.
The earliest image of a cannon, from the treatise on kingship written in 1326 by WaIter de Milemete for the young Edward III. Edward as a king did more than any other ruler of his age to encourage projectile warfare. including the construction of gun emplacements at his castles in southern England.
Commonly known as Portrait of a Man in a Turban, this is very probably a self-portrait. Johannes van Eyck dated it 21 October 1433, a year before he painted The Arnolfini Marriage, which openly shows a glass mirror in the background. Glass mirrors are one of the most underrated technological innovations of the Middle Ages, having an impact on everything from visual perspective to individualism.
A printing press, from a book printed in 1498. In 1620 Francis Bacon declared that printing, along with gunpowder and the compass, had changed the world. By then he was right, but in its early days printing produced lavish books in Latin which few could read and even fewer could afford. It was not until the Bible was printed in the vernacular languages that the change really got underway.
The late fifteenth-century clock in the chapel at Cotehele House, Cornwall. Over the course of the late Middle Ages, time shifted from a natural, God-given state of reckoning to a secular, machine-measured one. The hour became the first internationally recognised unit of standardisation.
Portrait of Columbus by Sebastiano del Piombo. He may have been a brutal tyrant to the people of the West Indies but Columbus’s legacy was of supreme importance in the history of the world, demonstrating the inadequacy of ancient knowledge as well as the wealth of the undiscovered world.
Map of the world from Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570). This was the first published map to use Mercator’s projection. Compare it to the Hereford world map of c.1290 and you can see what great strides were made in the discovery and recording of the world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Before 1500, most guns were enormously cumbersome as well as inaccurate. Extraordinarily rapid advances in firearms technology were made over the course of the sixteenth century: this wheel-lock hunting pistol dates from 1578.
Printing was not only important for the circulation of written texts, it also was of huge importance in the dissemination of scientific knowledge in visual form. This is a hand-coloured printed (woodcut) image of an iris from Leonhart Fuchs’s De historia stirpium (1542).
For all those who think of social history as a march of progress, the witchcraft terror of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries carries a salutary message. The prince-bishop of Bamberg designed this building for the systematic imprisonment, torture and burning to death of witches.
Initially the thinking was that the longer the telescope, the greater the magnification obtainable. This is Johannes Hevelius’s 150-ft-long telescope that he built in Danzig (now Gdańsk). It shows the lengths, literally, to which astr
onomers were prepared to go.
It was Isaac Newton who demonstrated to astronomers that, when it came to telescopes, size wasn’t everything. Newton’s reflecting telescope, although small, could magnify images 40 times.
A London opera rehearsal, painted by Marco Ricci in 1708. The gentlemen’s wigs, the paintings on the walls, the assembly of instruments and the very performance of an opera reveal an elegant bourgeois event – something unthinkable in the London of a century earlier.
Dartmouth today is not what you would call an industrial hub but it was the birthplace of Thomas Newcomen, the man who invented and manufactured the world’s first economically viable steam engine. This example, depicted in 1718, is one of 1,200 machines installed across Europe in the eighteenth century.
The Tennis Court Oath, after an uncompleted sketch by Jacques-Louis David. On 20 June 1789 all but one of the 577 members of the French National Assembly swore to continue to meet until the constitution of the kingdom was established. It was a seminal moment in the French Revolution – which became a testing ground for revolutionary ideas everywhere.
Thomas Allom’s 1834 painting of power loom weaving. The Industrial Revolution developed from the need for individual businesses within the same industries to compete with one another. The power loom was invented by Edmund Cartwright in 1785; by the time of this painting there were 100,000 of them operational in Britain alone.
Advertisement for the Plymouth to London stagecoach covering the 215 miles in 32 hours, from an 1822 local paper. Speeds of travel increased hugely even before the advent of the railways – this journey would have taken five days in 1700. The distribution of information also quickened: before 1700 there were no English newspapers; by 1800 several were being published daily in London, among them the Morning Post, the Morning Chronicle, the Morning Herald and The Times.
The rights to Louis Daguerre’s method of photography were purchased by the French nation from him and given freely as a gift to the world. Hence ‘daguerreotypes’ became the most common form of photograph until the 1850s. This 1838 image of the Boulevard du Temple, Paris, is reputedly the first photograph of a person: the man having his shoes polished in the foreground and the shoe polisher were stationary for long enough to appear in the ten-minute-long exposure.
In England, the preeminent pioneer photographer was William Fox Talbot. This photograph shows Isambard Brunel’s great ship, the SS Great Britain, being fitted out in Cumberland Basin in 1844. It was the first iron-hulled, screw-propeller-driven steamship, and the largest ship in the world when it was launched in 1843.
Orville and Wilbur Wright were determined to fly. First they experimented with gliders and then with engines. On 17 December 1902 this picture was taken by one of the witnesses of the first ever flight by a heavier-than-air machine, their Flyer, as it covered 120 feet in 12 seconds.
Autochrome photograph of a French soldier on lookout duty on the Upper Rhine, taken by Paul Castelnau on 23 June 1917. Photography in many ways undermined the authority of the artist: the realism of a photographic image of war or poverty is much harder to dismiss than a carefully composed painting.
Dr Nagai, medical instructor and x-ray specialist at Nagasaki Hospital, amid the ruins of the city after the nuclear bombing in August 1945. He died from radiation sickness shortly afterwards. In the twentieth century, war came to affect the whole of society, not just soldiers.
The Park Row Building, New York. Standing at 119 metres it was the tallest building in the world in 1900.
At 375 metres, the Petronas Towers – the tallest building in the world in 2000 – stood more than three times the height of the Park Row Building.
Earthrise, the first photograph of Earth from space and probably the most important photograph ever taken. It was snapped in a flurry of excitement on Christmas Eve 1968 by the crew of Apollo 8, as they were in orbit around the Moon. It provided an objective view of the Earth for the first time – and, disturbingly, it showed our world as a rather small, isolated planet.
Index
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
Abelard, Peter, 33, 42–4, 46, 52, 56, 67
Academia Naturae Curiosorum (Leopoldina), 168
Académie des Sciences, 168
Accademia dei Lincei, 168
accountability, origins of, 69–73
Acre, 59
Adam de Moreton, 81–2
Adelard of Bath, 45
adultery, 21, 79, 186, 202–3
Africa: in 15th century, 111–12; in 16th century, 155, 156; in 17th century, 178; in 19th century, 235
Agincourt, battle of (1415), 97
Agnolo di Tura, 87
Agricola, Mikael, 133
Agricultural Revolution, 195–9
agriculture: in 12th century, 35–7, 41; in 13th century, 60; in 14th century, 85, 90, 91; in 17th century, 161–2; in 19th century, 228, 229, 236; in 20th century, 267, 270–1, 277, 292; in the future, 330–2, 339, 341–2; see also feudal system
air travel see aviation
Albania, 108
Albertus Magnus, 77
Albigensian Crusade, 58
Albucasis, 48, 49, 50
Alcock, John, 266
Alembert, Jean Baptiste le Rond d’, 199
Alexander III, pope, 52–3
Alexander of Hales, 76
Alexis Comnenus, Byzantine emperor, 18
Alfred the Great, king of Wessex, 24
Aljubarotta, battle of (1385), 97
Almanzor, 20, 27
Almohad dynasty, 58
Alnwick, battle of (1174), 34
Alphanus, bishop of Salerno, 49
Alphonso IX, king of León, 72
Alphonso the Wise, king of Castile, 104
Amalfi, 13
America: in 17th century, 170, 171, 176–8, 180, 186; in 18th century, 188, 192; see also South America; USA
American Civil War (1861–5), 248, 251
American Revolution (1775–83), 216–17
Americas, European discovery of, 113–16, 127–8, 154–5
Amsterdam, 162, 204
anaesthetics, 244
Anatolia, 13, 14, 18–19
anatomy, 135
Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett, 256
Andrew of Longjumeau, 80
Anger, Jane, 138
Angkor Wat, 247
Annan, Thomas, 248
Anthony, Susan B., 255
anthrax, 244
antibiotics, 277
Antioch, 19
Aquinas, Thomas, 56, 77, 200
Aragon, 12, 58, 72, 101; Aragonese language, 104
Aragona, Tullia d’, 138
archdeacons, 17
archery, 94–7
architecture and building: in 11th century, 26–30; in 12th century, 41; in 15th century, 110; in 16th century, 135; defensive, 144–5; Romanesque style, 26–7, 28; tall buildings, 269–70
Archpoet, 34
Aretino, Guido, 50
aristocracy, 276
Aristotle: 12th-century interest in, 43, 45, 46, 55, 56; 13th-century interest in, 76; 15th-century interest in, 116; 17th-century reaction against, 164, 168
Arkwright, Richard, 214
Arlandes, Marquis d’, 194
armies: in 16th century, 147–8, 157; overview, 305–6; see also warfare
armour, 145–6
art: in 17th century, 160; in 18th century, 189, 203; in hierarchy of human needs, 316; landscapes, 182; perspective, 106; portraiture trend, 120–1, 130; religious, 123–4; Renaissance, 110, 123–6, 158
Arthur, King, 57
artillery and firearms: in 14th century, 96–7; in 15th century, 108; in 16th century, 144–8, 158; in 19th century, 225
Ascelin of Cremona, 80
Assize of Clarendon (1166), 53
Aston, 88
astrolabes, 54
astrology, 48, 122, 166
astronomy, 134, 135–6
, 164–8, 186–7, 249, 272
asylums see mental illness
Atlantic crossings, 235, 266
atlases see maps and atlases
Augsburg, 63
Augustinians (Order of Canons Regular), 39, 75
Austen, Jane, 199
Australia, 155, 178, 228, 252, 265, 278
Austria and Austria-Hungary: in 12th century, 45; in 17th century, 180; in 18th century, 213, 220, 257; in 19th century, 232, 233, 241–2; in 20th century, 274, 278; Austro-Hungarian Empire, 275; warfare overview, 304–7
aviation, 193–5, 265–7, 273, 292, 299
Avicenna, 45, 48, 50
Avignon, 88, 100
Aztecs, 154
Bacci, Livi, 351, 353
Bacon, Francis, 1, 108, 164, 169, 170
Bacon, Roger, 76–7, 286–7
Bahamas, 114
Bakewell, Robert, 195, 196
Balliol, Edward, 94
balloons, hot-air, 193–5
Balmis, Francisco de, 241
banking, 65, 208–9
Bannockburn, battle of (1314), 93–4
Barcelona, 12, 13
Barnstaple, 10
Barrie, J. M., 224
Barrow, John, 237
Barry, Dr James, 244
Bartlett, William Henry, 247
Basil II, Byzantine emperor, 13
Bastille, storming of (1789), 218
Batavia see Jakarta
bath plugs, 224
Bazalgette, Joseph, 243
BBC, 281
Beaumont, Henry, 94–5
Bee monastery, 41
Beccaria, Cesare, 203–4
Becket, Thomas, 35
Belesbat, seigneur de, 205
Belgium: in 17th century, 351; in 19th century, 230, 232, 233; in 20th century, 274, 278; homicide rate, 149; wealth overview, 315; see also Low Countries
Bell, Alexander Graham, 239, 259