TECHNOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES*

by

Lynn White, Jr.

The traditional historical picture of the Middle Ages (roughly from the 5th century A.D. to the mid-15th
century) has been one of cultural decline, particularly in the early Middle Ages. These centuries, from the
5th to the 9th, have therefore sometimes been called the Dark Ages. Yet such a view of the Middle Ages,
and even of its early period, is false when viewed from the standpoint of the history of technology.

Medieval technology continued that of the Roman world. In the eastern half of the Roman Empire,
Byzantium, the New Rome established in 330 by Constantine, enjoyed an amazing prosperity and vigor
for a thousand years and more. Even when, in the 7th century A.D., the Arabs wrested Syria and Egypt
from Byzantium, there was no "decline and fall": on the contrary, the very creative new Islamic civilization
incorporated and perpetuated the technical achievements of Greece and Rome.

The idea of the so-called Dark Ages is therefore applicable only to the western portion of the
Roman Empire, but again, it is not in terms of technology. In the West and the turmoil of the Germanic
invasions led to a technological slump only in a few areas. The Romanized Celts of Britain, for example,
were pushed into Wales and Cornwall by the fairly primitive Angles and Sacons (who were, however,
superb goldsmiths), where they lived in such difficult circumstances that technical rejuvenation could not
be spontaneous. Eventually it came from the Continent, where culture never sank so low, despite
instability, depopulation, and economic depression. A symbol of the general maintenance of skills in the
barbarian kingdoms is the tomb of Theodoric the Ostrogoth (d. 526) at Ravenna: it is capped by a
monolithic dome weighing 276 tons which was barged some one hundred miles from Istria and lowered
with razor-edge precision onto a masonry drum.

When Roman inventions did pass out of use there was always a good reason. Roman roads were
so costly to maintain that even the wealthy Byzantine and Islamic empires decided that they were not
worth the expense. The hypocaust, the Roman system of radiant heating by means of channels through
floors and walls, used much fuel in proportion to results and did not respond quickly to the rapid
temperature changes typical of Northern Europe; so the Middle Ages invented chimneyed fireplaces and
hot -air stoves which were cheaper and more flexible than hypocausts. In Gaul the Roman sometimes
used a harvester, pushed by an animal, which chopped off the ears of grain and let them fall into a
container; this wasted the straw. When medieval peasants developed a more intensive agriculture which
habitually combined stock-raising with cereal production, the straw became valuable and what looked like
a sophisticated machine was made obsolete.

Thus, any decline in technology in the early Middle Ages was more apparent than real. As we have
seen, a technology is responsive to social needs; the needs of the psychologically urbanized and
politically centralized Roman Empire differed from those of the agrarian and politically decentralized states
which arose out of the ruins of the Empire in the West. But technical skills seem to have diminished in no
significant way. Instead, the changing conditions in the West stimulated technological advance there.

_________________
*REPRINTED FROM: Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr. (eds.) Technology in Western
Civilization, Vol. I (Oxford Univ. Press: New York, 1967), Chapter 5, pp.66-79

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MEDIEVAL EAST AND WEST COMPARED IN TECHNICAL INNOVATIONS

The most curious fact about medieval technology is that while for many centuries both Byzantium and
Islam greatly surpassed the West in commerce, political stability, and level of education, nevertheless, it
was the West which produced most of the major technological innovations.

There was, to be sure, a technological spurt in Byzantium during the 6th and 7th centuries: the
amazing single-shell dome of St. Sophia was designed by the architect Anthemios of Trales in 532, while
about 673 a Greek-speaking Syrian refugee from Muslim conquest, Kallinikos, invented Greek fire, a
petroleum-based incendiary so efficient in burning enemy ships and siege machinery that its formula was
placed under strict security by the imperial arsenal. Considering that Greek fire was in great part
responsible for Byzantium's military survival, it is strange that thereafter the medieval Greeks--so vivid and
sensitive in many areas of life--showed little interest in technological improvements. Similarly, the
Muslims, while they borrowed useful skills from other cultures--paper-making from China in 751, for
example--did not make notable contributions, so far as we now know, to mankind's technical repertory.

This is the more puzzling to our 20th century minds because Byzantium preserved ancient Greek
science, and from about 800 to 1200 Islam produced the world's greatest scientists. We today think of
technology as applied science, but until the 19th century the connection between science and technology
was slight. Science was for intellectuals trying to understand the nature of things; technology was for
workers trying to do things; the notion that knowledge of nature gives us power over nature is old as an
aphorism but recent in practice. Medieval Byzantium and Islam produced complex and subtle cultures
which focused their energies on art, literature, religion, philosophy, and science, but were little concerned
with technical advances.

The contrast with the medieval West is striking and demands explanation. Certainly scientific
interests cannot account for it. The early medieval Occident continued the shocking indifference of pagan
Rome toward Greek science. Not until the 11th century did Greek and Arabic science become available in
Latin, and another 200 years passed before Western Christendom assumed the leadership in science
which Islam had held. The West's preeminence in technology thus precedes its primacy in science by
several centuries.

The victory of Christianity over paganism in the 4th-century Roman Empire had provided an
improved psychological basis for technical innovation. The religion of the common man in antiquity was
animism: every tree, stream, or mountain had its genius or particular spirit which had to be placated before
one cut down the tree, dammed the stream, or dug into the mountain for mining. In such circumstances,
the Christian smashing of animism liberated artisans and peasants for matter-of-fact exploitation of their
natural environment. This change, however, had occurred throughout the late Roman world, and while it
helps to account for the eventual speed-up of technological development, it does not explain why the West
took the lead.

In Greco-Roman times educated men considered it beneath their dignity to work with their hands.
The Jews, however, were an exception: God on Sinai had commanded "Six days shalt thou labor, and on
the seventh rest"; the injunction to labor was as biding as that to relax on the Sabbath. Even the most
learned rabbis acquired skills at a trade: St. Paul, who studied for the rabbinate, was also a tent-maker. In
the 4th century, when Christianity became the official cult of the Roman Empire, it was so corrupted by the
influx of opportunists and conformists that monasticism arose as an effort to restore its primitive (largely
Jewish) principle. The monks insisted that manual labor is an essential part of the spiritual life, and that
"work is worship": laborare est orare. Their idealism, intelligence and energy made monasteries the chief
points of cultural radiation during the next seven centuries. The monks were the first intellectual
systematically to dirty their hands with physical work, and we cannot doubt that this combination of brain

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power and sweat aided technological advance. But since the Greek monks worked as hard as the Latin,
this again does not explain the distinctive vigor of technology in the West.
What elements can we identify as peculiar to the Occident? Four things may be suggested.

1. Among the Celts of Roman Gaul there seems to have been somewhat more inventiveness than
is detectable in any other part of the Empire. Perhaps this mood of innovation carried over into the
Western Middle Ages and expanded.

2. The Occident was much more deeply shaken by repeated invasions and chaos than were the
Byzantine and Islamic regions. There is reason to think that any change aids subsequent change. The
greater agony of the West during the early Middle Ages, as the folk-wanderings of the Teutonic tribes
gave way to the barbarian kingdoms, may well have corroded traditional ways so deeply that people were
generally more open to change, including technological change, than they were in the more "fortunate"
Near East, to the eventual great profit of the West.

3. In Greek Christendom an educated laity continued, whereas in the West culture declined to a
point where literacy was long a monopoly of the clergy. As a result, the Latin monks came to feel far more
responsibility for preserving not only Christian but also pagan or secular culture than was felt by the Greek
monks, who could depend on Byzantine laymen to care for the latter. This meant that in Latin Christendom
the working monks were closer to worldly concerns than was the case in Eastern Orthodoxy. The Oriental
monks have left us nothing comparable to On Divers Arts written in 1122-23 by Theophilus, a German
Benedictine: this is the earliest European treatise giving specific technological directions for a wide range
of complicated processes. Theophilus was not only an expert in metallurgy and glass; he was learned in
theology and wrote quite decent Latin. His mentality helps explain the West's advance in technology.

4. Finally, in an effort to understand the technology of an age so permeated with religious attitudes,
we must note a basic difference between the theologies and pieties of the Greek Church and the Latin
Church. The Greeks have always made right thought, or "illumination," central to salvation, whereas the
Latins atleast since the days of St. Augustine have put greater emphasis on right will, or action. The
Eastern Church has praised contemplation; the Western, activity. Technology involves doing things, and
the mood of the Roman Church fostered it by encouraging activism and practicality in Occidental society.

MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL CHANGE

If we consider the chronic physical insecurity of life in the early medieval West, it is not surprising that
military technology made notable advances there. So long as a horseman had to cling to his steed by
pressure of his knees, cavalry was used chiefly for bowmen and the movement of soldiers; the lance could
be wielded only at the end of the arm (or with two hands, making use of a shield impossible), because too
violent a blow would unseat the rider delivering it. In the early 8th century the stirrup reached the Frankish
kingdom, established by the Germanic tribes known as the Franks in what had been the Roman province
of Gaul. When combined with a saddle having a high pommel and cantle, stirrups make a single organism
of rider and horse. The Franks saw that the lance could now be laid "at rest" under the rider's armpit; the
hand merely guiding the blow, which was delivered by the combined impetus of a charging stallion and
warrior. The new method of mounted shock-combat involved a great increase in the violence of warfare
and indicated a shift from infantry to cavalry as the chief fighting force.
While the Franks of the 8th century were very nearly the last horse-riding people to acquire the stirrup--it
had come from India by way of China--they were the first to realize its full implication for battle. There is no
absolute determinism in technology: invention is not the mother of necessity. In 732 the Frankish leader
Charles Martel saw a military potential in the stirrup which others had overlooked, and he acted upon his
insight. Cavalry is much more costly than infantry, and circulation of coinage in the Frankish realm was
insufficient to support an enlarged cavalry out of taxes; so Charles confiscated vast reaches of Church
lands and distributed them to retainers on condition that they hold themselves ready at his command to
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fight on horseback in the new and difficult way. These mounted warriors became the basis on which
Charles Martel's grandson, Charlemagne (Charles the Great), enlarged the Frankish domain into the
Carolingian Empire at the beginning of the 9th century. When, a century later, the Carolingian Empire
disintegrated, this caste of endowed warriors picked up the fragments of political authority and established
local rule. Thus the revolution in military technology brought about by the stirrup was the seed of feudalism
and of the chivalric culture which the secular aristocracy of the later Middle Ages developed.

The violence of mounted shock-combat led to development of heavier armor, heavier horses, new
types of shields, and (in the 11th century) the crossbow designed to penetrate the new armor. (The history
of the crossbow is puzzling: the Chinese had it very early; the Romans used it chiefly for hunting birds; but
at the time of the First Crusade, 1096, the Byzantines considered it a Frankish novelty). The new Western
military technology was superior to that of the Near East, and elements of it began spreading to Byzantium
and Islam even before the Crusades. One of the chief reasons for the eventual failure of the Crusades
was that the Muslims learned to fight in the European way.

From the later 11th into the early 13th centuries, military architecture was revolutionized in the
West. Often this is credited to Near Eastern influence, but the most careful scholars consider the question
still open. One stimulus to better fortification was the development by Europeans, probably on the basis of
a Chinese hand-operated rock thrower, of a new and powerful type of counterweight artillery, the
trebuchet, which quickly superseded the torsion artillery inherited from the Romans. In the 12th century
French engineers produced Gothic architecture, an immensely ingenious system of thrusts and balances
using a minimum of masonry to enclose a maximum of space. It was so economical that the most ascetic
monastic order to the time, the Cistercians, adopted it and spread it quickly throughout Europe. The rapid
and superb expansion of the art of fortification in the West in exactly this period would seem to reflect the
same mentality applied to different problems.

THE EXPANSION OF AGRICULTURE

Until very recently agriculture has been the basic form of technology. In antiquity its production of surplus
was very low; it is a safe guess that well over nine-tenths of the population had to work the soil to support
a tiny fraction of humanity engaged in other occupations. Clearly, anything which increased productivity
was of major importance.

In late Roman times there were efforts, particularly in the northern provinces, to improve
agriculture, but no coherent new system of cultivation emerged. By the middle of the 6th century however,
some of the Slavic peasants were using a novel kind of plow very efficient for heavy fertile alluvial soils
which were hard to handle with the older, two-ox scratch-plow designed for light soils. The older plow had
merely dug the surface of the soil; in order to turn over the soil for planting, it was necessary to cross-
plow, that is, to plow the soil twice, the second plowing being at right angles to the first. The new heavier
plow had wheels, a vertical blade (colter) to cut the line of the furrow, a horizontal plowshare, and a
mouldboard to turn over the sod. Its friction with the dirt was so great that it had to be pulled, at least on
newly cleared land or in sticky soil, by eight oxen. It attacked the earth so violently that the cross-plowing
required by the scratch-plow was unnecessary, and sqarish fields gave way to long strip-fields. Since the
mouldboard normally turned the sod to the right and the fields were plowed clockwise, the strips tended to
become low ridges favorable to field drainage in the wet climate of Northern Europe. Since few peasants
owned eight oxen, co-operative plowing became usual. Likewise, since the fencing of long strip-fields was
impractical, villages using the heavy plow divided the arable land into fenced "open fields" embracing
many strips which, even though individually owned, had to be cultivated, planted, and harvested on a
unified plan. The adoption of the new plow therefore helps to explain the communal pattern of manorial life
in Northern Europe.

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 Starting, it would seem, with the Slavs, the new plow and its related agrarian system spread
among the Germans by the early 8th century, and were presumably taken to Britain in the late 9th century
by invading Norsemen. Wherever these methods went, their ability to use the heavier and more productive
river-bottom soils led to a vast cutting of forests and reclaiming of marshes for agricultural purposes: the
face of Northern Europe was changed.

Paralleling and interlocking with the new pattern of cereal-growing was an improved type of cattle-
raising. The Romans had not integrated stock-farming closely with agriculture,but had simply pastured
their cattle. Proof of this is the scarcity of Roman scythes. Scythes had been used chiefly for cutting grass
for hay, which implies an intensive rearing of cattle and sheep, largely in barns, and a concentration of
their manure for later systematic fertilization of fields. In the Frankish age, scythes became common, and
at the end of the 8th century Charlemagne tried to rename July "Haying Month." In addition to the having,
after the harvest the village herd was turned into the open fields to browse on the stubble, incidentally
leaving their droppings to fatten the next crop. Thus the northern medieval peasants worked out a new
system of food production more balanced and efficient than anything earlier.

By the later 8th century they had taken another stride, at least in the region, between the Loire and
the Rhine rivers which was the heart of the Carolingian Empire. Land had normally been left fallow half the
time to renew its fertility: the cultivated half of the arable was planted in the autumn with wheat, barley, or
rye and harvested in the early summer. But now this "two field" rotation began to give way to a "three-
field" system in which only a third of the land was left fallow. In the autumn another third was planted as
before; but in the early spring the remaining third was planted in oats, barley, and legumes to be
harvested the later summer. The peas and beans were particularly important, both because their nitrogen-
fixing ability strengthened the soil under the burden of this more intensive rotation, and also because they
furnished an increased quantity of vegetable proteins for human consumption.

Since the new spring planting required summer rains, it was generally feasible only north of the
Alps and the Loire River. Where it could be adopted, however, it was so advantageous that it does much
to account for the great vitality of the North in the age of Charlemagne. By providing two sets of crops and
two harvests, the three-field rotation much reduced the risk of crop failure and famine. By distributing the
work of plowing better over the year, it enabled the plow team to accomplish more. Depending on whether
the fallow were plowed once or twice, (to turn under the green manure), a community of peasants, with
any wasteland to reclaim, by shifting from the two-field to the three-field rotation could increase their
production by either one-third or one-half.

The surplus of oats which could be grown in the spring planting of the three-field system is related
to another major change in northern agriculture. In antiquity, oxen were adequately harnessed by means
of yokes, but the yoke applied to horses is extra-ordinarily inefficient, both because it strangles the animal
as soon as he tries to pull and because the point of traction at the withers is so high that the horse cannot
throw his weight into the task of pulling. About 800 A.D. the modern horse harness appeared in the
Carolingian realm, consisting of a rigid, padded collar resting on the horse's shoulders and permitting him
to breathe, and lateral traces or shafts placed so that the point of traction is effective. With this new
harness a team of horses could pull four or five times the load they could draw with a yoke harness.

Hitherto the horse had been valued for its speed; the new harness made horse-power available in
conjunction with that speed. The first evidence of habitual plowing with horses, who worked perhaps twice
as fast as oxen, comes from Norway in the late 9th century. By 1100, horses were customarily drawing
plows, at least in favored regions, all the way from the English Channel to the Ukraine, and throughout the
later Middle Ages the horse steadily displaced the ox for farm labor. But this occurred only in Northern
Europe, where the three-field rotation made possible, in the spring planting, the surplus of oats needed to
feed many horses. The Mediterranean peasants could not shift from oxen to the more efficient horses
because, for climatic reasons, they could not produce enough oats.
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 The early Middle Ages then, witnessed, in Northern Europe, an agricultural revolution unparalleled
since the first invention of tillage. Its elements--the heavy plow, open fields, three-field rotation, and horse
harness--accumulated and consolidated into a new agrarian system from the 6th through the 9th century.
More than anything else the increased surplus of food which it produced accounts for the permanent shift,
in Carolingian times, of the focus of European culture away from the Mediterranean to the great plains
between the Loire and the Elbe rivers. It accounts for the steady increase of population until the late 13th
century, when, because no further agricultural innovations had been introduced, the point of diminishing
returns was reached and overcrowding began to worsen the living conditions of the peasantry and
undercut the boom in the general economy of Europe which had prevailed from the end of the Viking
invasions, c. 1000, until 1300. During these three centuries, the surplus of food permitted an
unprecedented growth of cities and an accumulation of capital best symbolized by the enormous Gothic
cathedrals which towered over them and which were the pride of the burgher capitalists who created the
basic economic and political patterns of the modern West.

TRANSPORTATION DEVELOPMENTS

The Middle Ages likewise revolutionized transport, which made it possible to move the surplus food to the
cities where it was needed. Thus technological innovations in agriculture and transportation, along with
more settled political conditions, made possible the renewal of town life from about the 12th century on,
and hence the foundations on which modern civilization was ultimately to be constructed.
The modern horse-harness, emerging c. 800, was essential to the use of horses not only for plowing but
also for hauling. However, the wear on a horse's hooves was greater in hauling over roads than it was in
tilling fields, and in moist climates horses' hooves grow softer than those of oxen. In the 890's the problem
was solved by the daring invention of nailed horseshoes, which appear almost simultaneously in Siberia,
Byzantium, and Germany. Iron shoes very quickly became habitual for ridden horses; but there was
another problem to be solved before horses could be used for heavy hauling. A horse could plow with
lateral traces attached directly to the plow because a furrow is straight. But with traces fastened directly to
a wagon, a right turn puts all the strain on the left trace, and vice versa, risking breakage of the harness
and overturning the load. The solution, which equalizes the pull on the load, was the whippletree, which
appeared in the 11th century. Now, with an efficient horse harness, horseshoes, and the whippletree,
heavy hauling by horses was feasible for the first time; and in the early 12th century the horse-drawn
longa caretta (large cart), holding many people and large quantities of goods, emerged.

About the same time travel was made more comfortable through the development of the springed
carriage. Without springs, prolonged speed over rutted and potholed roads is unendurable; the essence of
the coach is suspension of the carriage body to cushion the jolts. The germ of this innovation appears
among the western Slavs in the 10th century. Four hundred years later this had become a suspended
body holding at least six persons. That it moved rapidly is indicated by the fact that a man with bagpipes
was perched up on its rear to clear the road ahead; the ancestor of the coach horn and of the modern
automobile horn.

Water transportation has always been cheaper than land haulage, and the Middle Ages did not
neglect this mode of transport. The essential invention for inland waterways, the canal-lock chamber
seems to have been used at Bruges by 1236. But it was in salt-water navigation that the most significant
improvements were made.

As we have seen, man had early harnessed the power of the wind to drive his vessels through
sails. But how to go against the wind? Tacking into the wind was a great problem for square-sailed Roman
ships. To be sure, fore-and-aft rigs had been applied to small skiffs since the first century B.C., but not to
large vessels, perhaps because their keels were not sufficiently deep to prevent lateral drift during tacking.
The lateen sail, well adapted to tacking, first appears on merchant ships at Marseilles in the 6th century.
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Since lateen comes from the rare Latin word latinus meaning "easy, handy," linguistic evidence would
seem to indicate that this new rig was probably developed in the western Mediterranean.

In antiquity, ships were constructed by first building up the shell of the hull out of planks firmly
attached to each other and afterwards inserting the skeleton of ribs. This produced a strong vessel, but
the process was slow and costly. Skin-diving archaeologists have found the wreck of a Byzantine ship in
the Aegean dating from the early 7th century still built in this way. We do not yet know when or where
during the Middle ages our present system of ship-building, by first constructing the skeleton and then
nailing on the planks, was developed. Certainly it reduced the costs of maritime commerce notably.

Another great advance in ship-building was the invention of the modern rudder. Early ships were
steered by lateral oars which were easily broken in storms and which, when large, were so awkward that
they tended to limit the size of ships. In the early 13th century the North Sea area produced a new rudder
hinged to the ship's sternpost and operated by a horizontal lever. This was capable of standing the
buffeting of great waves, and it could be used on vessels of any size.

Vessels could now be constructed strongly enough to venture into the open seas with safety, and
they could be steered against the wind. But how was the navigator to find his way when out of sight of
familiar landmarks and when the sky was not clear enough to steer by the stars? Here the East was to
provide a technological aid for the West, for the magnetic compass presumably came from China. It
reached Europe in the 1190's, and within thirty years was in habitual use even as far as Iceland.
Strangely, there is no evidence of it in Islam until 1232. The compass so profoundly affected the art of
navigation that, for example, two round-trips annually from the Italian ports to the Near East were now
possible, whereas previously only one had been attempted. The returns on capital investment in ships
were greatly improved, and the safety of sea voyages enormously increased. By the end of the 13th
century, Europe was beginning to contemplate using oceanic sea-routes. In 1291, two members of a great
Genoese merchant family, the Vivaldi, led a well-equipped fleet through the Strait of Gibraltar to open the
path to India around Africa. The expedition perished, but technological advances by that time had reached
such a point that anticipation of Vasco da Gama's historic voyage around Africa in 1498 seemed not
impractical.

ARTS AND CRAFTS

Warfare, agriculture, and transport then advanced technologically during the Middle Ages; what of
industry?

There is no firm evidence that the water mill was applied in Europe (as distinct from China) to any
task save the grinding of grain until about 1000 A.D. The early 9th-century plan of the abbey of St. Gall in
Switzerland may indicate water-powered triphammers, but both their identification and their use is
uncertain. About the turn of the millennium, however, it is clear that such devices were being employed for
fulling cloth, forging metal, and several other industrial processes. Thanks to the same inventions which
facilitated hauling, the horse-mill, in which an animal walking in circles turned a vertical shaft to which
various types of machinery could be attached, also spread widely and with many applications. Shortly
before 1185 the horizontal-axle windmill was invented in the North Sea region, and within seven years it
had spread as far as Syria. In the 10th century, vertical-axle windmills, perhaps inspired by Tibetan wind-
driven prayer cylinders, had been used in Afghanistan, but these were never diffused in Islam. The
windmill was particularly useful in those regions where the flow of streams was so sluggish that water mills
were unsatisfactory, or where rainfall was so scanty that streams were scarce. In the 1320's a monk
complained that England was being deforested partly because of the search for long timbers for windmill
vanes: clearly he lived in a society vividly exploiting power machinery and labor saving devices.

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 Machine design was also progressing. While the crank had been known in China since the Han
dynasty, it first appeared in Europe in the early 9th century, and by the 12th it had wide application. The
compound crank, a combination of the crank and connecting-rod which allows the conversion of
continuous rotary motion to reciprocating motion, and vice versa, appeared in 1335. Cams, although
known in antiquity, were first generally used in the triphammer machines of the 11th century; the groove
cam is first found in the 1480's. The flywheel as a regulator of rotary motion in machines is recorded in the
12th century, but, strangely, the pendulum to regulate reciprocating motion is not observable for another
300 years. The earliest machine having two correlated motion is shown c. 1235 in a notebook of the
French engineer Villard de Honnecourt: a water-driven sawmill which, in addition to the reciprocating
action of the saw, provides a rotary feed to keep the log pressed against the saw. The first belt-
transmission of power came about 1280 in the earliest spinning wheel, at Speyer, Germany. The 14th
century saw an astonishing development of gearing, culminating in 1364 in Giovanni de' Dondi's great
planetarium clock. The five centuries following 1000 A.D. greatly elaborated the methods of harnessing
and utilizing mechanical power.

THE DIFFUSION OF TECHNOLOGY

The spread of technology in the Middle Ages, as in modern times, knew no geographical barriers. There
was nothing self-contained about medieval technology. Norsemen who settled in Greenland taught the
Eskimos to make cooperage, and European merchants in the Far East--in the early 14th century the
Franciscans maintained a hospice for them in Amoy--showed the Chinese how to distill liquor, an Italian
invention of the 12th century. On the western coast of India the crossbow was considered a Frankish
weapon and even in the 15th century a Persian poet knew that eyeglasses--discovered in Tuscany in the
1280's--were European in origin. On their part the Westerners avidly absorbed every item which seemed
useful. From sub-Saharan Africa they took sorghum for their fields and the Guinea fowl for their barnyards;
buckwheat was brought in from Central Asia by 1396.

Even the distant East Indies made their contribution, thanks to the perennial spice trade. During
the 10th century the Javanese fiddle bow reached Europe and eventually became the most important item
in Western instrumental music. In the early 15th century the blow-gun arrived, bringing its Malay name
with it. Shortly it stimulated interest in air guns, and the air gun, together with the suction pump (an early
15th-century invention), was the chief stimulus to the scientific study of air pressures and vacua .

THE TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS OF THE MIDDLE AGES

It has often been said that the greatest of inventions is the idea of invention itself. The European mind first
grasped invention as a total project in the later 13th century. For example, at that time the idea of
perpetual motion reached Europe from India, and we know that at least two groups were struggling to
make perpetual-motion machines. A contemporary Italian surgeon remarks that for the extraction of
arrows "every day a new instrument and a new method is invented." The program for producing a weight-
driven clock was clearly formulated by about 1271, although the task seems to have required another sixty
years or more. Once it was accomplished, a technician in Milan immediately built weight-driven grain mills
on the analogy of the new clocks.

As early as 1260 Friar Roger Bacon was looking forward to an age of flying machines, motor
boats, submarines, and automobiles. He did not know how all of this was going to be accomplished, but
he was confident that it could be done. Not only in its gadgetry but also in its mentality, the later Middle
Ages provided the foundation for the subsequent structure of European technology.

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 Thus the conventional picture of the Middle Ages as a pause in mankind's struggle to conquer
environment is inaccurate. Far from stagnating, medieval technology produced a revolution in man's use
of energy resources, through the development of water wheels, windmills, and horse-traction; it
transformed the art of war by the new power it gave to cavalry and by the development of military
fortifications; it increased man's capacity to wrest a living from nature by the use of the heavy-wheeled
plow and the three-field system of agriculture; it enabled man to sail afar on the seas through
improvements in ships and navigation; and it devised new tools and combinations of tools to make work
easier. Above all, it offered a new outlook toward technological innovation, which prepared the way for the
mechanical devices of the following period of Western history, known as the Renaissance.

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