Nonetheless, the case for seeing the Renaissance as an event severed from extra-European sources of influence is, on the face of it, strong.13 Trans-Eurasian contacts collapsed just as the Renaissance was becoming discernible in the work of Petrarch and Boccaccio and in the art of Sienese and Florentine successors of Giotto and Duccio. In the 1340s, Ambrogio Lorenzetti included Chinese onlookers in a scene of Franciscan martyrdom. At about the same time, Francesco Balducci Pegolotti wrote a guidebook for Italian merchants along the Silk Roads. An Italian miniature of the same period in the British Library shows a plausible Mongol khan banqueting while musicians play and dogs beg. Less than a generation later, Andrea da Ferrara depicted the Dominican order spreading the Gospel over what Westerners then knew of the world, with what seem to have been intended for Chinese and Indian participants in the scene. Then, however, the collapse of the Yuan dynasty in 1368 ended the Mongol Peace, or at least shortened the routes it policed. Rome lost touch with the Franciscan mission in China, which seems to have withered by the 1390s, as its existing staff died out. The West was largely isolated during the formative period of the Renaissance, with few or none of the enriching contacts with China, Central Asia, and India that had inseminated earlier movements with exotic notions and representations or equipped them with useful knowledge and technology or inspiring ideas. When Columbus set out for China in 1492, his royal masters’ information about that country was so out of date that they furnished him with diplomatic credentials addressed to the Grand Khan, who had not ruled in China for a century and a quarter.
Despite the interruption of former trans-Eurasian contacts, some transmissions did happen across Eurasia, or substantial parts of it, in the fifteenth century by credible, documented means, via Islam. The Muslim world filled and to some degree bridged the gap between Europe and South and East Asia. Chinese and Indian artefacts, which became models for European imitators, arrived in European courts as diplomatic gifts with embassies from Muslim potentates. Qait Bey, the late-fifteenth-century ruler of Egypt, was prolific with gifts of porcelain. So a few, privileged Europeans could behold Chinese scenes. Islamic ceramics transmitted some images vicariously. And without influence from Islam generally, in the transmission of classical texts, in the communication of scientific knowledge and practice, especially in astronomy, in introducing Western artists to Islamic art through textiles, carpets, glassware, and pottery, and in the exchange of craftsmen, the arts and books of Renaissance Europe would have looked and read very differently and been less rich.
Spreading the Renaissance: Exploration and Ideas
However much or little the Renaissance owed to influences from outside Christendom, we can say unequivocally that, in its effects, it was the first global intellectual movement in the history of ideas: the first, that is, to resonate effects on both hemispheres and to penetrate deep into continental interiors on both sides of the equator. The Renaissance could be borne – like the biota of the Columbian Exchange – to new destinations. Derived from the study of or the desire to imitate classical antiquity, Westerners’ ways of understanding language, representing reality, and modelling life accompanied the humanist curriculum around the world. Ancient Greek and Roman values and aesthetics became more widely available than any previously devised repertoire of texts, objects, and images.
On the flyleaf of his copy of Vitruvius’s work on architecture – a text that taught Renaissance architects most of what they knew about classical models – Antonio de Mendoza, first viceroy of New Spain, recorded that he ‘read this book in the city of Mexico’ in April 1539. At the time, Franciscan professors in the nearby College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco were teaching young Aztec nobles to write like Cicero, and Mexico City was taking shape around the viceroy as a grid-planned exemplum of Vitruvius’s principles of urban planning. Later in the same century, Jesuits presented Akbar the Great with prints by Albrecht Dürer for Mogul court artists to copy. Within little more than a generation’s span, the Italian missionary Matteo Ricci introduced Chinese mandarins to Renaissance rhetoric, philosophy, astronomy, geography, and mnemotechnics as well as to the Christian message. The Renaissance, a headline writer might say, ‘went global’. Nowadays, we are used to cultural globalization. Fashion, food, games, images, thoughts, and even gestures cross frontiers with the speed of light. At the time, however, the success of the Renaissance in penetrating remote parts of the world was strictly without precedent.
Exploration made possible the projection of European influence across the world. Explorers also laid out the routes along which the global ecological exchange happened. The way Columbus imagined the world – small and therefore comprehensively navigable with the technology at his disposal – therefore has some claim to be an exceptionally influential idea. Until then, knowledge of how big the world was deterred exploration. By imagining a small world, Columbus inspired efforts to put a girdle round the Earth. ‘The world is small’, he insisted in one of his late retrospects on his life. ‘Experience has now proved it. And I have written the proof down … with citations from Holy Scripture … I say the world is not as big as commonly supposed … as sure as I stand here.’14 But his was the most productive example ever of how a wrong idea changed the world. Eratosthenes, a librarian in Alexandria, had worked out the size of the globe with remarkable accuracy in around 200 bce, using a mixture of trigonometry, which was infallible, and measurement, which left room for doubt. Controversy remained academic until Columbus proposed new calculations, according to which the world seemed about twenty-five per cent smaller than it really is. His figures were all hopelessly wrong but they convinced him that the ocean that lapped western Europe must be narrower than was generally believed. This was the basis of his belief that he could cross it.
He was saved from disaster only because an unexpected hemisphere lay in his way: if America had not been there, he would have faced an unnavigably long journey. His miscalculation led to the exploration of a previously untravelled route linking the New World to Europe. Previously, Europeans had been unable to reach the western hemisphere, except by the unprofitable Viking seaway, current-assisted, around the edge of the Arctic, from Norway or Iceland to Newfoundland. Columbus’s route was wind-assisted, therefore fast, and it linked economically exploitable regions that had large populations, ample resources, and big markets. The consequences, which of course included the beginnings of intercontinental ecological exchange, reversed other great historical trends, too. The world balance of economic power, which had long favoured China, began gradually to shift in favour of western Europeans, once they got their hands on the resources and opportunities of the Americas. Missionaries and migrants revolutionized the world balance of religious allegiance by making the New World largely Christian. Before, Christendom was a beleaguered corner; henceforth, Christianity became the biggest religion. Vast migrations occurred – some forced, like those of black slaves from Africa, some voluntary, like those of the settlers whose descendants founded and fought for the states of the modern Americas. A false idea about the size of the globe was the starting point for all these processes. The effects are still resonating as the influence of the New World on the Old becomes ever more thorough and profound.15
Historians, who tend to overrate academic pursuits, have exaggerated the extent to which Columbus was a scholar and even a humanist. He did read some of the classical geographical texts that the Renaissance discovered or diffused – but there is no evidence that he got round to most of them until after he had made his first transatlantic voyage and he needed learned support for his claim to have proved his theories. The reading that really influenced him was old-fashioned enough: the Bible, hagiography, and the equivalent of station-bookstall pulp fiction in his day: adventure stories of seaborne derring-do, in which, typically, a noble or royal hero, cheated of his birthright, takes to the sea, discovers islands, wrests them from monsters or ogres, and achieves exalted rank. That was the very trajectory Columbus sought in his own life.
His indifference to textual authority made him, in effect, a harbinger of the Scientific Revolution, because, like modern scientists, he preferred observed evidence over written authority. He was always exclaiming with pride how he had proved Ptolemy wrong. Humanism impelled some scholars toward science by encouraging a critical approach to textual work, but that was not enough to provoke a scientific revolution.16 Further inducement came, in part, in the form of knowledge that accumulated from the extended reach of exploration in Columbus’s wake. Explorers brought home reports of previously unknown regions and unexperienced environments, cratefuls of samples of flora and fauna, and ethnographic specimens and data: from Columbus’s first transatlantic voyage onward, explorers kidnapped human exhibits to parade at home. By the seventeenth century, it became normal for explorers to make maps of the lands they visited and drawings of the landscape. Two vivid kinds of evidence display the effects: world maps, transformed in the period from devotional objects, designed not to convey what the world is really like, but to evoke awe at creation; and Wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities – the rooms where elite collectors gathered samples explorers brought home, and where the idea of the museum was born. So we come to science – the field or group of fields in which Western thinkers made their most conspicuous great leap forward in the seventeenth century, first to parity with and then, in some respects, to preponderance over their counterparts in Asia, who had so long exercised their superiority.
Scientific Revolution
The extraordinary acceleration of scientific activity in the West in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – roughly, say, from Copernicus’s publication of the heliocentric theory of the universe in 1543 to the death of Newton in 1727 – raises a problem similar to that of the Renaissance. Was the scientific revolution a home-grown Western achievement? It depended on access to a wider world: it was precisely owing to the contents of Wunderkammern and the records and maps of long-range expeditions that Western scientists were uniquely advantaged at the time. But Europeans inspired and led the voyages in question. The ‘curiosities’ and observations that constituted the raw material of scientific enquiry in the West were identified by Western minds and gathered by Western hands. The revolution occurred at a time of renewed trans-Eurasian contacts: indeed, the opening of direct seaborne communications between Europe and China in the second decade of the sixteenth century greatly increased the scope of potential exchange. Efforts to demonstrate that such contacts informed Western science in any important measure have failed. There were some exchanges where the fringes of Islam and Christendom brushed against each other, in the Levant, where Christian scholars sought the Ur-text of the Book of Job or lost texts of Pythagoras and picked up Arabic learning on medicine or astronomy.17 Copernicus may have been aware of and probably adapted earlier Muslim astronomers’ speculations about the shape of the cosmos.18 Western optics also benefited from the incorporation of Muslims’ work.19 But the input is conspicuous by its paucity. And though Leibniz thought he detected Chinese parallels with his work on binomial theory, the evidence of Chinese or other far-flung oriental influence on Western science is utterly lacking.20 The Scientific Revolution was remarkable not only for the accelerated accumulation of useful and reliable knowledge but also for the shift of initiative it represented in the balance of potential power and wealth across Eurasia: the seventeenth century was a kind of ‘tipping point’ in the relationship of China and Europe. The previously complacent giant of the East had to take notice of the formerly despised barbarians who, like climbers up a beanstalk, arose to demonstrate unsuspected superiority: in 1674 the Chinese emperor turned the imperial astronomical observatory over to Jesuits. Five years later, when Leibniz summarized the evidence of Chinese learning that Jesuit scholars had reported, the great polymath concluded that China and Latin Christendom were equipollent civilizations, with much to learn from each other, but that the West was ahead in physics and mathematics.21
Social changes, which increased the amount of leisure, investment, and learned manpower available for science, were a further part of the background in the West.22 Most medieval practitioners, as we have seen, were clergy. Others were artisans (or artists, whose social status was not much better). In the seventeenth century, however, science became a respectable occupation for lay gentlemen, as the economic activities of aristocracies diversified. As we saw in the previous chapter, war no longer occupied them, partly thanks to the development of firepower, which anyone could wield effectively with a little training: the need to keep a costly class available for the lifelong exercise of arms vanished. Education became a route to ennoblement. The multiplication of commercial means to wealth, as explorers opened global trade routes, liberated bourgeois generations for the kinds of service in which aristocrats had formerly specialized and therefore, indirectly, aristocrats for science. Robert Boyle, a nobleman, could devote his life to science without derogation. For Isaac Newton, a tenant farmer’s son, the same vocation could become a stepway to a knighthood.
The strictly intellectual origins of the Scientific Revolution lay partly in a tradition of empirical thinking that accumulated gradually or fitfully after its re-emergence in the high-medieval West (see here). Of at least equal importance was growing interest in and practice of magic. We have already seen plenty of links between the science and magic of earlier eras. Those links were still strong. Astronomy overlapped with astrology, chemistry with alchemy. Dr Faustus was a fictional character, but a representative case of how yearners after learning were exposed to temptation. He sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for magical access to knowledge. If wisdom was God’s gift to Solomon, occult knowledge was Satan’s gift to Faust. More brainpower was expended on magic in the Renaissance than perhaps ever before or since.
Unearthing magical texts of late antiquity, scholars thought they could discover a great age of sorcerers in the pre-classical – but perhaps retrievable – past: incantations of Orpheus for the cure of the sick; talismans from pharaonic Egypt to bring statues to life or resuscitate mummies in a style later popularized by Hollywood; methods ancient Jewish cabbalists devised to invoke powers normally reserved to God. Ficino was the foremost of the many Renaissance writers who argued that magic was good if it served the needs of the sick or contributed to knowledge of nature. Ancient magical texts, formerly condemned as nonsensical or impious, became lawful reading for Christians.
In the search for wisdom more ancient than that of the Greeks, Egypt’s lure was irresistible and its lore unverifiable. Hieroglyphics were indecipherable; archaeology was jejune. With no reliable source of knowledge, students did, however, have a bogus and beguiling source of insights: the corpus under the name of Hermes Trismegistos, claimed as ancient Egyptian but actually the work of an unidentified Byzantine forger. Ficino found it in a consignment of books bought from Macedonia for the Medici Library in 1460. As an alternative to the austere rationalism of classical learning it provoked a sensation.
In the last years of the sixteenth century and early in the seventeenth, the ‘New Hermes’ was the title magi bestowed on the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), who patronized esoteric arts in his castle in Prague. Here astrologers and alchemists and cabbalists gathered to elicit secrets from nature and to practise what they called pansophy – the attempt to classify knowledge and so unlock access to mastery of the universe.23 The distinction between magic and science as means of attempting to control nature almost vanished. Many of the great figures of the Scientific Revolution in the Western world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries either started with magic or maintained an interest in it. Johannes Kepler was one of Rudolf’s protégés. Newton was a part-time alchemist. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a student of hieroglyphs and cabbalistic notation. Historians used to think that Western science grew out of the rationalism and empiricism of the Western tradition. That may be, but it also owed a lot to Renaissance magic.24
None of the magic worked, but the effort to manipulate it w
as not wasted. Alchemy spilled into chemistry, astrology into astronomy, cabbalism into mathematics, and pansophy into the classification of nature. The magi constructed what they called ‘theatres of the world’, in which all knowledge could be compartmentalized, along with Wunderkammern for the display of everything in nature – or as much, at least, as explorers could furnish: the outcome included methods of classification for life forms and languages that we still use today.
After magic, or alongside it, the work of Aristotle – who remained hors de pair among the objects of Western intellectuals’ respect – encouraged confidence in observation and experiment as means to truth. Aristotle’s effect was paradoxical: by inspiring attempts to outflank authority he encouraged experimenters to try to prove him wrong. Francis Bacon, in most accounts, represented this strand in scientific thinking and perfectly expressed the scientific temper of the early seventeenth century. He was an unlikely revolutionary: a lawyer who rose to be Lord Chancellor of England. His life was mired in bureaucracy, from which his philosophical enquiries were a brilliant diversion, until at the age of sixty he was arraigned for corruption. His defence – that he was uninfluenced by the bribes he took – was typical of his robust, uncluttered mind. He is credited with the phrase ‘Knowledge is power’, and his contributions to science reflect a magician’s ambition to seize nature’s keys as well as a lord chancellor’s natural desire to know her laws. He prized observation above tradition and was said to have died a martyr to science when he caught a chill while testing the effects of low-temperature ‘induration’ on a chicken. This seemed an appropriate end for a scientist who recommended that ‘instances of cold should be collected with all diligence’.25
Out of Our Minds Page 27
