The first European paper mills appeared in Italy in the middle of the thirteenth century and slowly moved west, reaching England by the fifteenth century.
His printing press worked, but it still needed refinements, and Gutenberg was out of cash. In 1450, Gutenberg convinced a wealthy local businessman, Johann Fust, to loan him the money he needed to complete his invention. Fust invested eight hundred gulden—$150,000 in today’s money—in Gutenberg’s printing press. The collateral for the loan was the printing equipment yet to be built. Gutenberg ran through the loan in two years. Fust came to the rescue again, but this time the money wasn’t a loan. Fust wanted equity in the business, and a share of the profits.
PRINTING IN CHINA
Johannes Gutenberg wasn’t the first person to come up with the idea of printing.
Around 868 CE the Chinese began printing sacred Buddhist texts on sheets of paper, using a hand-carved wooden block for every page. The technology left no room for error: if part of a sheet needed to be changed, the entire block had to be carved again.
The next advance came in 1045, when a Chinese printer named Pi Sheng had the idea of pasting separate fired-clay characters, no thicker than a coin, on an iron plate with tree resin and wax. The plate could then be inked like a woodblock. If a character needed to be changed, the plate could be heated to soften the paste.
Over the years, other printers tried making reusable characters from wood, tin, and porcelain. Wood was too uneven; tin was too soft; porcelain cracked. But the real problem was not the material used for the type; it was the nature of the Chinese language. With thousands of separate characters, making movable type was expensive.
By the thirteen century, some printers were producing booklets, calendars, and dictionaries using a combination of woodcuts and movable type, but block printing was cheaper and more common.
In 1455, Gutenberg and his foreman, Peter Schöffer, had almost completed the first print run of Gutenberg’s forty-two-line Bible when Fust took him to court for defaulting on the original loan. The court ordered Gutenberg to repay the loan immediately or forfeit his machinery and type to Fust. With no cash to repay the loan, Gutenberg was forced to turn over the shop. Fust finished the edition of the Bible with the help of his new partner, Peter Schöffer. The new firm of Fust and Schöffer continued as printers for four generations.
Fust could take Gutenberg’s machinery, but in the days before patents, he could not claim ownership of Gutenberg’s ideas. Gutenberg started a new print shop with financial assistance from another wealthy lawyer, Konrad Humery. He spent the next three years making new type molds, casting type, building presses, and printing another, less-elaborate edition of the Bible.
Soon, several other print shops were operating in Mainz. Pupils of the early printers spread across Europe. Within thirty years of Gutenberg’s first press run, there were printing presses in more than 110 towns across Europe, and more than 15 million copies of books had been printed. By 1600 CE, Europe had twenty-five hundred printing houses. Every city and big town had one. Together they produced more than ten million copies of forty thousand different titles: from grammar texts and vernacular Bibles to scientific treatises and manuals on how to conduct religious inquisitions.
Books were cheaper. More people learned to read and write. Ideas spread more quickly and reached more people than ever before: good ideas, bad ideas, old ideas, new ideas—revolutionary ideas.
THE PRINTING PRESS CHANGES HISTORY
The printing press was not a single invention. Gutenberg created a whole series of new materials and techniques to make a working press: a metal alloy strong enough to allow repeated impressions of a piece of type; ink that would actually stick to the metal type; paper of just the right weight and density; and the flat, shallow frame, called a “chase,” that locks type together into text. The press itself was based on the screw press used for making wine and olive oil.
Gutenberg’s most important innovation was molding and casting movable metal type, an early application of the theory of interchangeable parts, which would become a basic principle of the machine age. He carved each letter of the alphabet onto the end of a steel punch and hammered it into a copper blank. He then put the copper impression into a mold and poured molten metal into it. When the metal cooled, it left a reverse image of the letter attached to a metal base that could set in the type chase. The base varied in width according to the size of the letter.
Before the printing press, it took a scribe three years to produce a copy of the Bible, which then sold for the price of a fifteenth-century home. Gutenberg’s invention of movable type—single, reusable, metal letters and characters—that could be mass-produced and reassembled page by page to produce a whole text—was the breakthrough that enabled us to spread knowledge through the written word.
The printing press forever changed the evolution of mankind, enabling our intellectual progress on a previously unimaginable scale. Printing laid the foundation for the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. It also ignited the machine age and set the stage for the industrial revolution. Learning and communication were never the same, with ramifications up to and including the invention of the Internet, and the digitization of every book ever written—a massive undertaking appropriately called “Project Gutenberg.”
Page from the Gutenberg Bible, ca. 1455
Alhambra Palace, Granada, Spain
THE FALL OF GRANADA
JANUARY 2, 1492 CE. GRANADA, Spain. Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon walked together up the heavily shaded hill that led to the Alhambra, the palace of the Muslim rulers of Granada. They were dressed in Moorish clothing for the ceremonial occasion. The palace grounds were already in the hands of Spanish troops. Boabdil, the last ruler of Muslim Spain, handed the keys to his ancestral palace to the Catholic monarchs. Moments later, their banner and the Christian cross rose above the highest tower of the Alhambra, signaling the completion of the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula.
Boabdil, also known as Muhammad XII, rode away from the city with his family and entourage, their safe passage guaranteed by the Spanish crown. When he reached the last point from which he could see the city, Boabdil turned and wept, a moment known as “the Moor’s last sigh.”
His mother reproached him, saying, “You may well weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man.”
With “the Moor’s last sigh,” eight hundred years of Muslim Spain had come to an end.
THE END OF THE MOORS’ CONTROL of the Iberian Peninsula played out over four centuries.
The Umayyad dynasty of Spain crumbled in the early eleventh century. By 1031, the glorious state of al-Andalus had fractured into twenty-three city-states and small principalities, known as the “taifa,” or “party kings,” from the Spanish word for faction. The cultural brilliance of Muslim Spain did not dim with the fall of the Umayyads. The rulers of Seville, Granada, and Toledo competed to attract the artists, scholars, and scientists who had made Córdoba an intellectual and cultural mecca.
The taifa states maintained the cultural legacy of the Umayyads, but they lacked the military and political strength of the earlier dynasty. For the first time in centuries, the states of the Christian north were in a position to reclaim Spain for Christendom.
The most aggressive player in the effort at Reconquista was the state of Castile, which shared a long border with Muslim Spain. Beginning in 1037, Castile attacked one taifa state after another, marking each stretch of conquered territory with a defensive castle. In 1085, Alfonso VI, king of Castile and Navarra, besieged and captured Toledo, the former capital of Spain under the Visigoths who had ruled Spain before the Muslims.
Shocked by the loss of Toledo and unable to stand up to the continued assault by Christian forces, the emirs of the taifa states reluctantly called for help from the Almoravid dynasty of North Africa. The party kings knew it was a risk. The Almoravids were Berber nomads honed by military struggle on Islam’s deser
t frontier, and potentially as great a threat to taifa freedom as was Christian Castile. Muhammad Ibn Abbad Al Mutamid, the emir of Seville, summed up their difficult decision: “I would rather be a camel-driver in Africa than a swineherd in Castile.”
In 1086, an Almoravid army routed Alfonso IV at the Battle of Zallaqa (also called Sagrajas). The Almoravids withdrew to North Africa, as they had promised, but they were not gone for long. The taifa states were unable to defend themselves against their Christian neighbors, or each other. The Almoravids found the prosperity and military weakness of al-Andalus irresistible. They returned in 1089, conquered the taifa states, and reunited Muslim Spain.
Unlike the rulers they had deposed, the Almoravids were revivalists who followed a literal interpretation of Islam’s core values. They imposed their rigid orthodoxy on a population accustomed to a greater degree of religious tolerance, alienating Christians both inside and outside the borders of Muslim Spain.
The reunification of Muslim Spain under the Almoravids coincided with the beginning of the Crusades. Pope Urban II chose to treat the Reconquista as another crusade. He offered knights who fought against the Muslims in Spain the same indulgences against sin that he gave knights who fought the Muslims in the Holy Lands.
By 1145, the Almoravids’ hold on Spain had disintegrated. Another group of party kings called on another puritanical dynasty from North Africa to intervene. Despite initial successes, the Almohads were unable to halt the progress of the Reconquista. A coalition of Christian kings under the leadership of Alfonso VIII of Castile defeated the Almohads at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 and went on to conquer the great Muslim cities of Valencia, Seville, and Córdoba.
By 1260, Muslim rule had been reduced to a single kingdom: Granada. Precariously balanced between the twin threats of the Christian kings and the Muslim rulers of North Africa, Granada managed not only to survive but to flourish for more than two centuries. Christians and Muslims existed in an uneasy truce marked by low-grade warfare at the borders and increasing religious intolerance on both sides.
GUNS, WAR AND
THE AXIS OF POWER
When the gun arrived in Europe from China, the addition of a trigger turned it into the most powerful weapon on any battlefield.
Previously, guns were held at the waist and set off with an external fuse, a dangerous, clumsy enterprise. The arquebus, a hand-held gun crafted by Italians and manufactured by Germans during the fourteenth-century intra-European wars, was a change for the better. It featured a wooden stock to nestle on the shoulder, and a hook with which to fire. A revolutionary “matchlock” device allowed the gunner to concentrate on aiming as he moved a lever to mechanically align the lighted match to the touch-hole in the bore of the gun. With a refined trigger, the soldier could fire the arquebus faster and farther.
By the time the Spanish declared war on the Moors of Granada, the use of the arquebus as a tactical weapon had been perfected, thanks to revolutionary new battlefield strategies developed by Spanish military leader Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. Córdoba invented the Spanish Square, a mixed infantry formation of pikemen, swordsmen, and arquebusiers or “musketeers” who fought in a mutually supportive formation.
Córdoba’s tactic was widely adopted, and it dominated European battlefields in the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century.
Religious intolerance hardened when Isabella inherited the throne of Castile in 1474. She was determined to complete the Reconquista with the conquest of Granada. By 1480, preparations for the campaign were under way. The pope allowed priests to sell indulgences to finance the costs of the war. Isabella hired French and German engineers to make heavy artillery, ordered Venetian and Genoese ships to blockade Granada’s ports, and secured thousands of donkeys to carry supplies. Isabella required all nobles in the kingdom to fight. Knights from France, England, and Ireland flocked to Spain to take part in the war against the Moors.
The Granada War lasted from 1482 to 1492. One by one, Isabella’s forces captured the Muslim towns and cities around Granada until the city was surrounded. By the end of 1491, Granada had been under siege for nine months. The sultan, Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad XII, known in the West as Boabdil, signed a secret agreement with Ferdinand and Isabella, agreeing to surrender the city in exchange for safe passage out of Spain, ending eight centuries of Muslim rule.
Boabdil tried to provide another form of safe passage to the thousands of Muslims he left behind in Granada. Under the terms of the “Capitulation of Granada,” signed and ratified between himself and Spain’s Catholic monarchy, Ferdinand and Isabella’s new Muslim subjects would be free to practice their own faith. But unlike the Muslim rulers they had followed, the king and queen did not honor their promises of religious freedom. Within a decade, official attempts to convert Muslims sparked a revolt in Granada. Once the revolt was repressed, Isabella issued a decree that all Muslims in Castile must convert or be forced into exile. Many Muslims left for lands under Muslim control. Others accepted baptism and remained in Spain.
These new Christians and their descendants came to be called Moriscos, or “little Moors.” Over the years, they endured various forms of persecution and oppression. Beginning in the 1530s, the Spanish Inquisition arrested thousands of Moriscos and confiscated their property. They were subjected to public penances, lashings, torture, and even execution. In 1609, Phillip II ordered the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain. At least three hundred thousand Moriscos were driven out of the country by 1614. Those going to Muslim countries were forced to leave behind any children younger than seven so they could be raised by Christians and thereby “saved.”
1434 CE. GIL EANES, SQUIRE OF Prince Henry of Portugal’s own household, stood on the deck of the caravel and prepared to travel to his death.
Cape Bojador was the Cape of No Return. Everyone knew it was as far south as you could safely sail along the coast of West Africa. The tides and shoals around the cape formed a furious surge twenty miles across that forced any sailor foolish enough to try to circle it out into the dark Atlantic Ocean. That was frightening enough, though the prince’s sailors now regularly sailed hundreds of miles from the coast to the Azores and Madeira. The mariners’ tales of boiling seas and man-eating monsters were worse.
Eanes had made the same voyage the year before without success, returning with excuses that the currents and the south winds had stopped him. Henry had railed at him for believing in childish fables. This time Eanes’s instructions from the prince were clear: sail around Cape Bojador and return with an account of the Cape and the seas beyond, or don’t return.
Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal was not a sea captain or a navigator. His only personal seafaring experience included trips along the Portuguese coast and the short voyage from the southern tip of Portugal to Ceuta in Morocco. But for more than forty years he pushed Portuguese sailors to sail farther than they ever had before and to make careful records of what they found.
Henry was the third surviving son of King John I of Portugal. With little hope of inheriting the throne, the ambitious prince created a role for himself in Portuguese politics as a crusader and adventurer. He won his reputation at the age of twenty-one in the Portuguese assault on the Moroccan port of Ceuta in 1415. The Portuguese took the Muslim stronghold in a single day, giving the young prince the moment of glory that he sought. More important, it also gave him his first glimpse of the riches of Islamic Africa. Ceuta was an important commercial city, both as a Mediterranean port and as the northern end of the trans-Saharan caravan trade. Caravans carried European silver and horses to the powerful Muslim kingdoms south of the Sahara; they returned with gold, slaves, ivory, and other luxury goods.
In 1419 Henry was sent back to Ceuta to put down a Muslim uprising. While there, he learned everything he could about the gold-laden caravans that crossed the Sahara from the mines of West Africa. He returned to Portugal determined to find a sea route that would bypass the overland caravans through I
slamic lands. It was a bold plan with the potential for a big payoff, half commercial venture and half crusade. Henry wanted to gain direct access to the gold of Guinea, but he also wanted to convert the heathens and form an alliance against the Islamic states of North Africa with Prester John, the legendary Christian king of Ethiopia.
Henry sponsored his first expedition along the largely unknown African coast in 1418. His goal was to find a way around Cape Bojador. Shallow reefs, difficult currents, and changing winds meant the only way to round the cape was to sail into the Sea of Darkness that surrounded the African continent. Sailors said it was impossible to sail around the cape, telling mariners’ tales of horrors at sea. Henry refused to believe them.
Henry’s first expedition was blown off course, reaching the Atlantic island of Porto Santo Madeira instead of Africa. It was a lucky error, providing useful information about the possibility of sailing west into the Atlantic.
It took twelve years and fifteen expeditions before Henry’s ships reached the equator.
Henry’s expeditions continued south along the African coast, passing Cape Blanco in 1443 and Cape Verde in 1444. Having passed the southern boundary of the Sahara and successfully circumvented the Islamic caravan routes, the expeditions began to pay for themselves. In addition to knowledge about ocean currents and the topography of the African coast, Henry’s ships brought back gold dust and exotic goods, like ostrich eggs. Their most profitable cargo was slaves. By 1448, the slave trade was so large that Henry built a fort and a warehouse on Arguin Island off the coast of Mauritania—the first European trading post overseas.
Portuguese trade with West Africa grew quickly. Soon twenty-five caravels made the voyage down the African coast each year. Although most of the ships were dedicated to trade, exploration continued. Henry’s mariners discovered the Cape Verde islands in 1456, traveled sixty miles up the Senegal and Gambia rivers, and sailed as far south as Sierra Leone.
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