How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (14 page)

If this weren’t enough, during the eighth century farmers stopped wearing out their land by constant planting. Instead, they adopted a system that divided their land into three plots—one planted in the fall (grain), one planted in the spring (of legumes such as peas and beans, or vegetables), and the third allowed to lie fallow (unplanted) and kept weed free, often by allowing livestock to graze on it, thus contributing fertilizer. The next year the plot that had been fallow was planted in the fall, the one that had been planted in the fall was planted in the spring, and the one that had been planted in the spring was allowed to be fallow. This, too, resulted in much greater production and more efficient use of labor, since plowing, sowing, and harvesting were spread more evenly around the calendar.

This agricultural revolution meant that most people in the medieval West ate far better than had all but the wealthy Romans. As a result, compared with the average Roman (or the average person elsewhere in the world), the average medieval European was healthier, more energetic, and probably more intelligent, since malnutrition stunts the brain as well
as the body. In addition, the dramatic increase in the food supply sustained a long period of population growth.
⁴³

Wind and Water Power

Only after the fall of Rome did there arise economies that depended primarily on nonhuman power.
⁴⁴
The Romans understood water power but, as noted, could see no reason to exploit it because they had slaves to perform needed tasks. By the ninth century, however, an inventory found that one-third of the estates along the River Seine in the area around Paris had water mills, most of these being on religious estates.
⁴⁵
When William the Conqueror had the
Domesday Book
compiled in 1086, this forerunner of the modern census reported at least 6,500 water-powered mills operating in England, or one for about every fifty families.
⁴⁶
Across the channel in Toulouse, early in the twelfth century a company known as the Société du Bazacle was founded to offer shares in a series of water-powered mills along the River Garonne. Because the shares were freely traded, Gimpel proposed that the Société “may well be the oldest capitalistic company in the world.”
⁴⁷
A century later, water mills had become so important that Paris had sixty-eight mills in one section of the Seine less than a mile long—an average of one mill every
seventy feet
of river.
⁴⁸

Europeans in the Dark Ages dramatically improved the productivity of these early water mills by building dams and developing so-called
overshot
mills. Most early water mills were of the
undershot
variety—that is, the water passed under the wheel, with the river’s current providing all the force. Mills derived much greater power from overshot wheels, in which the water descended by a spillway to approximate a waterfall striking the top of the wheel; in this setup, both the speed and the
weight
of the water generated power. In most cases dams were needed to back up water so as to exploit its weight and pressure to generate power. Some very large dams were constructed at least as early as the twelfth century, including one at Toulouse more than 1,300 feet across.
⁴⁹
There are many references to overshot wheels by the fourteenth century, but given the proliferation of large dams, they must have appeared much sooner.

Using various cranks and gear assemblies to increase the power of waterwheels and convert their motion from rotary to reciprocating action, Europeans were soon exploiting water power for all sorts of productive endeavors—sawing lumber and stones, turning lathes, grinding knives and swords, fulling (pounding) cloth, hammering metal and drawing
wire, and pulping rags to make paper.
⁵⁰
That last use offers a clear illustration of the point that invention per se is not the most critical factor to consider with technologies; more crucial is the extent to which the culture
values
inventions and puts them to use. As Gimpel pointed out, the Chinese had invented paper about a thousand years earlier, and the Arabs had been using it for centuries. Through all those years they continued to manufacture paper by hand (and foot). But almost as soon as paper reached Europe in the thirteenth century, a new production process emerged. “Paper had traveled around the world,” Gimpel wrote, “but no culture or civilization on its route had tried to mechanize its manufacture” until medieval Europeans did so.
⁵¹

Medieval Europeans quickly harnessed the wind as well. In Roman times large areas of what are now Belgium and the Netherlands had been under water. Medieval engineers developed windmills that allowed them to pump water away. Vast tracts of land were reclaimed for agriculture by thousands of windmills that pumped day and night throughout most of the Dark Ages.

Windmills proliferated even more rapidly than waterwheels because wind was everywhere. Engineers learned to take full advantage of the wind even when it shifted direction: the so-called post mill mounted the sails on a massive post that could turn with the wind. By the late twelfth century Europe was so crowded with windmills that owners began to file lawsuits against one another for blocking their wind.
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Transportation

The introduction of the horse collar not only revolutionized agriculture but increased trade as well. Beyond being limited to using oxen to pull heavy loads, the Romans had primitive carts and wagons that had no brakes and whose front axles could not pivot. Not surprisingly, anything of substantial weight seldom moved very far overland.
⁵³

After the fall of Rome, medieval innovators designed wagons with brakes and with front axles that could swivel, and they created harnesses that allowed large teams of horses to pull big wagons. The celebrated Cambridge economist Michael Postan noted the “Roman inefficiency in the use of draught animals. Where the Romans moved themselves and their goods on horseback, medieval men used carts.”
⁵⁴
As the horse became the primary draft animal, medieval Europeans also began to develop much larger, stronger breeds of horses.

Even with large, horse-drawn wagons, transporting goods overland remained expensive. In boat transportation, too, the Germanic peoples substantially improved on Roman technology. The improvements actually began well before the fall of the empire. Despite the long-standing image of the Germanic peoples as barbarians, as early as the first century they possessed sufficient nautical technology to attack Roman shipping in the Mediterranean. These were not Viking raids—those came much later. These attacks were conducted by Chauci, Franks, Saxons, Goths, and Vandals.
⁵⁵
Moreover, whereas the Romans depended entirely on galleys, which were usually rowed, the Germanic boats already relied mainly on sails.
⁵⁶

The post-Roman era brought even greater innovation—most notably, the round ship, a sailing vessel with superior stability and increased cargo space. (It was called round because its hull was far wider relative to its length than had been the case with previous boats.) In many ways the round ship was an extension of the Viking transport ship the
knarr
.
⁵⁷
The first fully developed round ships, called cogs, appeared in the tenth century.
⁵⁸
The cog had no oars but was a true sailing ship, capable of long voyages with large cargoes. Like the Vikings, those possessed of cogs and their successors ventured out during the winter, something Roman galley captains had been loath to do.

Amazingly, for generations the notion of the Dark Ages had such a firm grip on historians that they clung to it despite their awareness that this was an era of remarkable inventiveness. S. C. Gilfillan decided that Marx must have been wrong to claim that invention is the mechanism by which civilizations rise, since during the Dark Ages civilization had declined while inventions “continued and even grew.”
⁵⁹
It did not occur to him that if this was an era rich in inventions, perhaps it wasn’t “dark.”

Manufacturing and Trade

For far too long historians were content to accept Roman claims about the Germanic people who came to dominate Europe. Most influential were the characterizations of Tacitus (AD 55–ca. 120), which shaped conventional thinking about the Germanics for nearly two millennia. Of the Germans, Tacitus wrote:

All have fierce blue eyes, red hair, huge frames.… Whenever they are not fighting, they pass much of their time in … idleness, giving themselves up to sleep.… They … lie buried in sloth.… It is well known that the nations of Germany have no cities, and that they do not even tolerate closely contiguous dwellings. They live scattered and apart.… They all wrap themselves in a cloak which is fastened with a clasp, or, if that is not forthcoming, with a thorn leaving the rest of the person bare.… They care but little to possess or use [gold and silver].… Even iron is not plentiful with them as we infer from the character of their weapons.
⁶⁰

Nonsense. As the distinguished French historian Lucien Musset noted, the so-called barbarians were “admirable goldsmiths,” and their “technological superiority extended also to a sphere of vital importance—metallurgy, and in particular the making of weapons.… They were able to produce a special steel for the cutting edge of their swords or battle-axes which was unequalled until the nineteenth century, and was infinitely superior to that which the imperial [Roman] arms factories were producing.”
⁶¹
Much of this sophisticated metal work was done in the many Germanic cities scattered beyond the Rhine.
⁶²
And not even the Germans were tough enough to go around wearing only a cape in the frozen North.

Nothing refutes these foolish notions about the Germans more fully than archaeological studies of a small Swedish island in Lake Mälaren, eighteen miles west of Stockholm.
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Here an elaborate industrial community known as Helgö flourished from about 250 through 700, turning out what Peter S. Wells characterized as “large quantities of iron tools and weapons, bronze jewelry, gold ornaments, and others products … [including] locks and keys … [and] glass beads.” Moreover, Helgö was closely linked to trading networks “throughout the continent,” as demonstrated by coins found at the site, as well as “a bishop’s crozier from Ireland” and even a “bronze Buddha figure made in India.”
⁶⁴
Nor was Helgö an anomaly: there were numerous industrial centers like it all over northern Europe.
⁶⁵
Many of these trading centers were coastal; many others were situated on rivers, which served as Europe’s main trade arteries until the advent of trains and trucks.
⁶⁶

Scholars such as the famous historian Henri Pirenne, who claimed that trade dwindled in Europe and did not begin to recover until the twelfth century,
⁶⁷
were misled partly by the shift of the center of the
European economy from the old Roman southern area to the Germanic North. They focused on what may have been a decline in trade across the Mediterranean and failed to take account of the increased role of the major rivers linking northern and western Europe with the Black and Caspian Seas. In addition, they based their claims of a trade decline on the lack of imports of a few high-status commodities such as silks and spices without taking into account changes in taste.
⁶⁸
For example, the importation of olive oil fell dramatically because the Germanic groups greatly preferred butter
⁶⁹
—large amounts of which moved over the trade routes from what is now Denmark. As for a decline in the importation of silks, even the most affluent northern Europeans regarded fur as far more luxurious.

Finally, until very recently historians have relied almost entirely on literary evidence for their knowledge of the past. That is, if references to something declined in the written materials from some era, they have taken this as proof that this
something
declined. But that approach can be misleading, for a reason Wells identified: “Trade was an everyday affair and not of major concern to church officials, who were the principle sources of written information about this period.”
⁷⁰
In any event, there is by now abundant archaeological evidence to show that trade expanded rapidly during medieval times,
⁷¹
if for no other reason than that people could now put to personal use wealth that Rome had previously squeezed from them.
⁷²

High Culture

Even if Voltaire, Gibbon, and other proponents of the Dark Ages idea could be excused for being oblivious to engineering achievements and to innovations in agriculture, surely they must be judged severely for ignoring or dismissing medieval Europeans’ remarkable achievements in music, art, and architecture.

The Romans and Greeks sang and played monophonic music: a single musical line sounded by all voices or instruments. It was medieval musicians who developed polyphony, the simultaneous sounding of two or more musical lines—hence, harmonies. Just when this occurred is unknown, but the practice was well established by the time the influential manual
Musica enchiriadis
was published around 900.
⁷³

Similarly, near the end of the eighth century an initial form of musical notation was developed (perhaps in Metz), and within two hundred years a fully adequate system was invented and popularized. These innovations allowed music to be accurately performed by musicians who had never heard it. That’s why modern choirs can sing Gregorian chants.