STS 121: Science, Technology and

Lesson 5
Middle Ages

Objective • Discuss the events during the Middle Ages

s:
• Relate the important events of the Middle Ages to current events.

A knights shield during the Middle Ages tells people his or her characteristics. Draw
Activity:

your shield and what does it say about you?

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TECHNOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES

by Lynn White, Jr.
White Jr. L. TECHNOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES In 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

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

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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.

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

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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 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.

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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

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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 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

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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.
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

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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

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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.
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

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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. Since lateen comes from the rare Latin word latinus

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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?

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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.
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.

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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.

Sketch a castle below as if you were looking down on it from above. Label all the
rooms and key parts. Think about what you’d need in it to survive.

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 STS 121: Science, Technology and

Draw the front gate of your castle below

Describe your castle’s defenses. Include where it is located. Explain any unique defenses or traps.
Explain anything that isn’t shown clearly in your sketch.

Explain how an attack by an army of 1000 knights and 100 archers would be stopped by your
defenses.

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