by Val Ross
He commanded his old tutor and two young scholars to consult writers of other languages and develop a new, simple system. In the twenty-fifth year of Sejong’s reign, the king proclaimed that Korea had a new alphabet. As well, he wrote a book, The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People, in which he explained that those who cannot put things into words cannot express their feelings. “I have been distressed by this and have newly designed a script… which I wish everyone to practice. … A wise man can learn it in a morning.”
King Sejong called this alphabet Hangul. Its twenty-eight letters (later simplified to twenty-four) were designed to show the position of the tongue when producing the sounds. The alphabet was easy to learn and easily cast in individual bronze letters. But how could the bronze letters be lined up and fixed in place to produce neat pages? According to legend, the king himself solved the problem; in a dream he saw that the edges of the metal letters could simply be fitted into one another. No more sloppy beeswax. On waking, he explained his vision to his printers.
Among the first books to be printed in Hangul and in movable type were The Ode to the Flying Dragon in Heaven (a royal family history) and Moon Shines on a Thousand Rivers – a poem King Sejong wrote in honor of his wife Sohun, who had just died.
The scholars in the Jade Hall did not like what the king was choosing to print. Sejong’s poem was also a Buddhist prayer – this from a king who had earlier taken their advice and banned Buddhists. Nor did the scholars like the idea of printing books in the Hangul alphabet. Led by the respected, stubborn senior scholar Choe Mal-li, they presented their objections to the king. They said: Abandoning Chinese characters is a political error because it will offend our huge and powerful neighbor China. They said: Abandoning Chinese letters is in bad taste because it means we are behaving like Manchurians, Mongolians, and Japanese, who are barbarians. Besides, they said, if everyone studies this new alphabet, within a generation there will be no more scholars who can read the old Chinese classics.
What all these objections added up to was: If you bring in this simple new system that anyone can learn, then we, with all our years of study, may be out of a job.
Over the years, Sejong had grown old and half-blind from a life of reading. Since his beloved wife had died, he had found more comfort among Zen Buddhist monks than among his quarreling Confucian scholars. When he built himself a small Buddhist chapel, the scholars staged a strike and walked out of the Jade Hall.
King Sejong died in 1450. After his death, little by little, the pro-Chinese Confucian traditionalists forced Korea back to the old ways. As the court slipped once more into intrigues and civil wars, Sejong’s descendants were driven into exile. Within a hundred years, Hangul had been downgraded to an alphabet used mainly by women for household lists. For the next four hundred years, Korea’s printers used only Chinese characters. Until the 1800s, when Hangul was readopted for official use by Korean nationalists, Sejong’s idea of mass copies of easy-to-print, easy-to-read books in the Korean language was a lost dream.
But on the other side of the world, in Germany, it was a different story.
In 1418 – the year Prince Sejong became king of Korea – Johannes Gensfleisch Gutenberg was still studying at university. He was from a family connected with the mint (coin-making operation) in the German city of Mainz. It was probably hard for scholars to concentrate on Latin and religious training at that time, for the Christian Church was in chaos. There were three “popes” claiming to be the true Pope, and everyone was quarreling. If only there was a way to unify all Christians, and bring people back to the Word of God!
In the 1430s – as King Sejong was sending his team out to investigate alphabets – Gutenberg was still trying to figure out what to do for a living. Because Mainz was on a route through which pilgrims passed on their way to Rome and the Holy Land, and because his family worked at casting metal coins, he came up with the idea of manufacturing pilgrimage badges of stamped metal, with mirrors encased in them. Legal papers from 1438 show that Gutenberg went into business with two partners to corner the pilgrim souvenir-mirror market.
Bad luck; that year there was an outbreak of the plague, and the 1439 pilgrimage was called off. The partners took him to court, according to Mainz city documents. However, Gutenberg convinced his investors to stay with him for something really big, a mysterious project he was working on at a foundry (metal-molding factory) just outside of town. He not only got these partners to agree to lend him more money; they also promised in writing to keep this unknown project a secret.
When one of the partners died, his heirs said Gutenberg had to take them on as new partners. Gutenberg refused, so they all went to court once more. The heirs claimed that Gutenberg was so afraid the court would force him to reveal his secret project that he had ordered the destruction of equipment at his foundry “so that none shall see it.”
What was going on at the foundry? What was the “it” he wanted no one to see? We can guess. Late into the night, sweating in the glow of his metal furnaces, Gutenberg was trying to use his skill in casting metal to cast letters of the alphabet.
First, he figured out how to make multiple copies of the most frequently used letters. That way the printer would always have enough Es and Os. Next, he designed several versions of these letters, so that when fat letters like W and E occurred next to thin letters like I, the spacing would not be weird. Once the letters were lined up into a block of text, he figured out what kind of ink should be applied so that when the letters were pressed against paper, the ink neither spread out nor smeared but stuck to the paper evenly.
By 1448 – well after King Sejong started to publish Hangul books – Gutenberg was still experimenting. Records in Mainz show that he was borrowing money from more people just to keep going. In 1449, he borrowed 800 guilders at 6 percent interest from a businessman named Johannes Fust.
As partners go, Herr Fust was pretty patient. Gutenberg’s project made no money in 1449, or the next year or the next. Impressed by Gutenberg’s work, Fust kept investing more money. By 1455, though, he decided that matters weren’t moving ahead fast enough. He convinced Gutenberg to take his son-in-law, Peter Schoeffer, into the business as an apprentice. Once Schoeffer knew how the invention worked, Fust was ready.
With Schoeffer as his witness, Fust took Gutenberg to court and sued for the total he had invested, about 2,000 guilders (more than $250,000 in today’s money). In court, Gutenberg finally revealed what he was up to. He explained to the judge that he had not been stealing his investors’ money; he had simply been plowing it back into das Wercke der Bücher (the work of the book).
In Europe, mass-producing books was an idea whose time had come. In 1453 the Muslim Turks had taken over Constantinople, the stronghold of Eastern Christendom. In fear, Constantinople’s Christian scholars had grabbed their books – from Greek classics to Armenian Bibles – and had fled to the West. Suddenly, all over Europe, people wanted to read about ideas that would save Christianity and Western civilization.
But although there was a growing market for books, there was no way to produce them quickly. It took two scribes five years to do one edition of a 1,200-page book. Fust and Schoeffer correctly judged that mass-producing books was a good way of getting rich. When Fust won the court case against Gutenberg, he must have thought his fortune was made. He was named sole owner of the print shop and what Gutenberg was manufacturing there: the world’s first printed Bible, manufactured by means of movable type.
This 1676 engraving by Abraham von Werdt (you can see his initials at the center top and bottom left) shows how large and complex early printing-publishing operations were, and how much space was devoted to storing pieces of type.
The Gutenberg Bible finally appeared in 1456. Johannes Gutenberg’s name is not on it, because of the court case, but it was created by his process and to his design – and what a thing of beauty it was. There were 35 copies printed on vellum (white calfskin), and 150 on imported Italian paper. Each page
displayed two rectangles in Gothic typeface. The letters of the Latin text were crisp, and so carefully spaced that whether there were as few as twelve words in a line or as many as fifteen, the lines always ended as evenly on the right margin as on the left. Gutenberg Bibles, now valued at tens of millions of dollars, are collected by the world’s greatest museums.
By the 1460s, the problems between Gutenberg and Fust were dwarfed by a bigger concern: war. The Church wanted to recapture Constantinople from the Turks, and the Pope demanded a huge tax to pay for this adventure. Then he doubled the tax. The Archbishop of Mainz refused to pay, and issued a printed pamphlet – possibly produced by Gutenberg – explaining why. The archbishop’s act of rebellion enraged local nobles who were loyal to the Pope. By 1462 Mainz was encircled by soldiers calling out for the blood of heretics – that is, anyone who didn’t support the Pope and the Catholic Church.
The leader of the siege, a nobleman named Count Adolf, sacked the city, seizing the property of those who had resisted. Gutenberg escaped to nearby Eltville and started a new printing operation. Three years later, Count Adolf decided that he needed Gutenberg’s skills, and tried to make peace. The count offered “our dear, faithful Johannes Gutenberg” a pension, an annual allowance of two thousand liters of wine, and the promise to “clothe him … like one of our noblemen.” So Gutenberg was able to work in comfort for the last three years of his life. When the master printer died in 1468, his body was taken back to Mainz and buried with honor.
For the next generation or two, some Europeans still resisted Gutenberg’s invention. Realizing that printing presses would put them out of business, a group of scribes convinced the King of France to ban printing presses from Paris. But the ban was never enforced. The European publishing industry had taken off too fast.
Why did the idea of printing stall in Sejong’s world and move ahead in Gutenberg’s?
Because in Korea the invention had come from the top down. When later kings came to power in Seoul, they suppressed Sejong’s idea of teaching ordinary people to read. Instead, they went back to tradition: elite scholars, ignorant peasants.
In Europe, though, the dream grew from the bottom up, starting with entrepreneurs and businessmen. If one business disappeared, there were more to take its place. In Korea, the people who most loved books wanted their ranks to stay small and special. By contrast, the learned men and leaders of Europe were horrified by the loss of Christian lands to the Muslims. They thought it was a good idea to have multiple copies of the Bible, in Latin, in everyone’s hands, so everyone could cherish and protect the Word of God.
By the time church and political leaders realized how dangerous mass-produced books could be, it was too late – much too late – to put a stop to them.
Darkness upon the Deep
READING HELPS PEOPLE think for themselves. After printers started producing copies of the Bible, people started thinking more about religion. But some of their ideas were different from what the Church expected.
eter Schoeffer Jr. looked carefully at the man who had just entered his shop, in the German town of Worms. It was 1525, and anyone who worked in the politically charged business of printing could not be too careful. People were always trying to control what was being printed, and printers were being thrown in jail, or executed.
The man at the door was short, slight, English, with a worn but intelligent face. He looked like a priest, which in fact he was. But he was also a fugitive, on the run from the agents of Henry VIII, King of England. Although Schoeffer realized that letting this small man into his shop would put himself in danger, he let him in.
In 1525 the printing business was still young. Schoeffer’s father, Peter Schoeffer the elder, had been Gutenberg’s apprentice, and his grandfather had been Gutenberg’s partner, Johannes Fust. Yet the industry those men had started was already tangled up in Europe’s angriest religious and political battles A German priest named Martin Luther was writing books challenging the corruption of the Catholic Church, and the authority of the Pope in Rome, Luther’s books were banned and burned across Europe and England, But they were also being read. Some estimates are that, by 1521, as many as 300,000 copies of Luther’s work had been sold across Europe.
The little English priest told Schoeffer that his name was William Tyndale. He spoke German well – he’d studied at the university in Hamburg, and heard Martin Luther there. Was he a follower of Luther? Tyndale denied it. But he had the same basic mission: to open religion up to ordinary people; to let them read the Bible in their own language and think for themselves about its message.
Of course, there had been Bibles in languages other than Latin for centuries – the Armenians had produced a Bible over a thousand years earlier. But in Europe, popes and kings rightly suspected that if you put easy-to-read Bibles in the hands of ordinary people – including women and peasants – they might notice that the Good Book never said that popes and cardinals and kings should be able to tax the peasants in order to live in palaces. Reading and thinking about the Bible might cause people to challenge authority – to go the way of Martin Luther, and break with Rome. And now this Tyndale was saying that he had translated the Bible into English. No wonder powerful people wanted him dead!
Tyndale told Schoeffer that his translation was already half printed. The job was being done by a printer named Peter Quentel in the city of Cologne. Unfortunately, Quentel was also printing church propaganda (the word “propaganda” comes from the Latin phrase propaganda fide, “promoting the faith”) for a man called Cochlaeus, who’d turned up in Quentel’s printing shop to supervise the work. There, Cochlaeus overheard two drunken printers boasting that England – Catholic for so many centuries – would soon be Protestant.
Just four editions of William Tyndale’s New Testament survived the bonfires of English censors and the ravages of time. This title page of one edition shows how spelling used to be more variable (note the name Willyam Tindale).
What’s this? thought Cochlaeus.
Pouring the printers more wine, he asked them what they were talking about. The printers blabbered that they were preparing three thousand copies of the New Testament in English. They said the money for the job was coming from English merchants, who would be smuggling the finished Bibles back into England. Cochlaeus took this alarming news and went straight to Cologne city hall In short order, armed guards raided the print shop – but someone must have warned Tyndale, for he had already slipped away with his half-printed book.
And here he was at Schoeffer’s door in Worms. Would Schoeffer complete the job? Schoeffer said yes. The money was good. So was the quality of the work; Tyndale, who’d studied Greek and Latin and theology (religion) at Oxford and Cambridge, had translated the New Testament into graceful, simple English. And he wasn’t finished; he told Schoeffer that his next project was to learn Hebrew so he could translate the Old Testament as well.
You’ve come to the right town, said Schoeffer. There was a lively Jewish community in Worms, where Tyndale could probably find a Hebrew tutor.
Thanks to movable-type technology, the job went quickly. Some of Tyndale’s New Testaments reached England by the spring of 1525. By Christmas of that year, English people were being thrown in jail for owning them.
Among all those in England’s church and political leadership who wanted to crush Tyndale’s translation, the most ferocious was Sir Thomas More, a devout Catholic and one of the country’s most learned men. Like Tyndale, More was a writer. His novel, Utopia, is about a traveler who stumbles into a wonderful society of tolerance and co-operation. But More also wrote church propaganda and, like many writers, he believed that he should stand by what he wrote – not, alas, Utopia, but these stern religious tracts. Normally a sane and humane man, More wrote that Tyndale was “a hellhound in the kennel of the Devil.” By 1529, More was Lord Chancellor of England – the highest-ranking official in the country.
Henry VIII found it useful to let Sir Thomas More attack heretics. The king
needed to please the church authorities, because he was in the process of asking them for a major favor – a divorce from Queen Catherine of Aragón, who had failed to give him a son, and permission to marry Lady Anne Boleyn. The Church did not recognize divorce – but surely, for a king, a way could be found?
Lady Anne, the king’s new favorite, read what she liked. She liked Tyndale’s book The Obedience of a Christian Man and recommended it to King Henry, who announced, “Why, this is a book for me and all kings to read.” In 1531 the king sent a secret agent, Stephen Vaughan, to Germany to find Tyndale and beg the fugitive priest to return to England.
Hunting down Tyndale took some doing; he’d been living in hiding, dodging the agents of the Church since 1525. But finally Vaughan was able to convince Tyndale to meet with him to hear the king’s offer of safe passage back to England. Tyndale’s response was skeptical. He understood that Henry VIII might like his books, but the king might like even more the idea of using Tyndale as a pawn in his game with the Church over questions of divorce and remarriage. Tyndale also knew that men like Sir Thomas More hated him. He told Vaughan that he appreciated Henry’s promise but feared that his enemies would advise the king, “Promises made to heretics need not be kept.”
Annoyed by Tyndale’s refusal to return, Henry hardened his heart against him. He was used to getting his own way. In 1533 – the year he married Anne Boleyn – he sent out secret agents to kidnap Tyndale and bring him back to London. The next year, Henry VIII declared the Act of Supremacy, rejecting the Pope and making himself head of the Church of England.
