Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

the fifteenth century as more and more teachers chose them as the

places where their lectures would draw the largest attendance. Classes

began at six in the morning, and continued till five in the afternoon.

Meanwhile Scotland and Ireland, out of their poverty, founded the

universities of St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, and Trinity

College, Dublin- four institutions destined to pour genius, generation

after generation, into the intellectual life of the British Isles.

In France, education, like almost everything else, suffered from the

Hundred Years' War. Nevertheless the rising demand for lawyers and

physicians, added to the traditional attractions of an

ecclesiastical career, encouraged the establishment of new

universities at Avignon, Orleans, Cahors, Grenoble, Orange,

Aix-en-Provence, Poitiers, Caen, Bordeaux, Valence, Nantes, and

Bourges. The University of Paris, perhaps because the monarchy was

near collapse, became in the fourteenth century a national power,

challenging the Parlement, advising the king, serving as a court

of appeals in French theology, and recognized by most continental

educators as universitas universitatum. The rise of provincial and

foreign universities reduced registration at Paris; even so the

faculty of arts alone was reputed to have a thousand teachers and

ten thousand pupils in 1406; `061226 and in 1490 the entire university

had nearly twenty thousand. `061227 Some fifty "colleges" helped to

house them. Discipline was laxer than at Oxford, and the morals of the

students complimented their virility rather than their religion.

Courses in Greek, Arabic, Chaldaic, and Hebrew were added to the

curriculum.

Spain had founded its leading universities in the thirteenth

century- at Palencia, Salamanca, and Lerida; others now rose at

Perpignan, Huesca, Valladolid, Barcelona, Saragossa, Palma,

Siguenza, Valencia, Alcala, and Seville. In these institutions

ecclesiastical control was complete, and theology predominated;

however, at Alcala, fourteen chairs were given to grammar, literature,

and rhetoric, twelve to divinity and canon law. Alcala became for a

time the greatest educational center in Spain; in 1525 it had an

enrollment of seven thousand. Scholarships were provided for needy

students. The salary of a professor was regulated by the number of his

pupils; and every professor was required to resign quadrennially,

being eligible for reappointment if he had proved satisfactory. At

Lisbon King Diniz had founded a university in 1300, but the turbulence

of the students led him to remove it to Coimbra, whose pride it is

today.

Mental activity was in this period more vigorous in Central Europe

than in France or Spain. In 1347 Charles IV founded the University

of Prague, which soon became the intellectual head and voice of the

Bohemian people. Other universities appeared at Cracow, Vienna,

Pecs, Geneva, Erfurt, Heidelberg, Cologne, Buda, Wurzburg, Leipzig,

Rostock, Louvain, Trier, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Greifswald, Basel,

Ingolstadt, Pressburg, Mainz, Tubingen, Copenhagen, Uppsala,

Frankfurt-an-Oder, and Wittenberg. In the second half of the fifteenth

century these institutions seethed with students and debates. Cracow

alone had 18,338 pupils at one time. `061228 The Church provided

most of the funds, and naturally called the tune of thought; but

princes, nobles, cities, and businessmen shared in endowing colleges

and scholarships. The Elector Frederick of Saxony financed the

University of Wittenberg partly from money that came from the sale

of indulgences, but which he refused to remit to Rome. `061229

Scholasticism sat in the chairs of philosophy, while humanism grew

outside the university walls. Hence most of the universities of

Germany adhered to the Church during the Reformation, with two

significant exceptions: Erfurt, where Luther studied, and

Wittenberg, where he taught.

III. THE SCIENTISTS

-

The scientific mood was hardly more popular with the pundits than

with the people. The spirit of the age inclined to the "humanities";

even the revival of Greek studies ignored Greek science. In

mathematics the Roman numerals obstructed progress; they seemed

inseparable from Latin culture; the Hindu-Arabic numerals seemed

heretically Mohammedan, and were coldly received, especially north

of the Alps; the Cour des Comptes- the French Bureau of Audit- used

the clumsy Roman figures till the eighteenth century. Nevertheless

Thomas Bradwardine, who died of the plague (1349) a month after

being consecrated archbishop of Canterbury, introduced into England

several Arabic theorems in trigonometry. His pupil, Richard

Wallingford, Abbot of St. Albans, was the leading mathematician of the

fourteenth century; his Quadripartitum de sinibus demonstratis was

the first major work on trigonometry in Western Europe. He died of

leprosy at forty-three, mourning the time he had taken from theology

for science.

Nicole Oresme led an active ecclesiastical career, and yet invaded a

dozen sciences successfully. He paved the way for analytical

geometry by developing the systematic use of co-ordinates, and by

employing graphs to show the growth of a function. He played with

the idea of a fourth dimension, but rejected it. Like several of his

contemporaries he adumbrated Galileo's law that the speed of a falling

body increases regularly with the duration of its fall. `061230 In a

commentary on Aristotle's De caelo et mundo he wrote: "We cannot

prove by any experiment that the heavens undergo a daily movement

and the earth does not"; there are "good reasons indicating that the

earth, and not the sky, undergoes a daily motion." `061231 Oresme fell

back upon the Ptolemaic system, but he had helped to prepare for

Copernicus.

When we consider that no telescope or camera existed as yet to watch

or record the sky, it is encouraging to note the energy and

intelligence of medieval astronomers, Moslem, Jewish, and Christian.

Jean de Liniers, after years of personal observations, described the

positions of forty-eight stars with an accuracy then rivaled only by

Moslems; and he calculated the obliquity of the ecliptic to within

seven seconds of the most modern estimate. Jean de Meurs and Firmin de

Beauval (1344) proposed to reform the Julian calendar- which was

outstripping the sun- by omitting the quadrennial February 29 for

the next forty years (which would have erred by excess); the reform

had to wait till 1582, and still awaits international and interfaith

understandings. William Merle of Oxford rescued meteorology from

astrology by keeping record of the weather through 2,556 days. Unknown

observers or navigators discovered in the fifteenth century the

declination of the magnetic needle: the needle does not point due

north, but inclines toward the astronomic meridian at a small but

important angle, which, as Columbus noted, varies from place to place.

The peak figure in the mathematics and astronomy of this epoch was

Johann Muller, known to history as Regiomontanus from his birth (1436)

near Konigsberg in Lower Franconia. At fourteen he entered the

University of Vienna, where Georg von Purbach was introducing humanism

and the latest Italian advances in mathematics and astronomy. Both men

matured early and died soon: Purbach at thirty-eight, Muller at forty.

Resolved to learn Greek in order to read Ptolemy's Almagest in the

original, Muller went to Italy, studied Greek with Guarino da

Verona, and devoured all available texts, Greek or Latin, on astronomy

and mathematics. Returning to Vienna, he taught these sciences

there, and with such success that he was called to Buda by Matthias

Corvinus, and then to Nuremberg, where a rich burgher built for him

the first European observatory. Muller equipped it with instruments

built or improved by himself. We feel the pure breeze of science in

a letter that he wrote to a fellow mathematician in 1464: "I do not

know whither my pen will run; it will use up all my paper if I don't

stop it. One problem after another occurs to me, and there are so many

beautiful ones that I hesitate as to which I should submit to

you." `061232 In 1475 Sixtus IV summoned him to Rome to reform the

calendar. There, a year later, Regiomontanus died.

The short span of his life limited his achievement. He had planned

treatises on mathematics, physics, astrology, and astronomy, and had

hoped to edit the classics in those sciences; only fragments of

these works found form and survival. He completed Purbach's

Epitome of the Almagest. He composed an essay De triangulis - the

first book devoted solely to trigonometry. He was apparently the first

to suggest the use of tangents in astronomic calculations, and his

tables of sines and tangents facilitated the calculations of

Copernicus. He formulated astronomical tables more accurate than any

drawn up before. His method of calculating latitude and longitude

proved a boon to mariners. Under the title of Ephemerides he

issued (1474) an almanac showing the daily position of the planets for

the next thirty-two years; from this book Columbus would predict the

lunar eclipse that would fill the stomachs of his starving men on

February 29, 1504. The observations made of Halley's comet by

Regiomontanus laid the bases of modern cometary astronomy. But his

personal and living influence was greater than that of his books.

His popular lectures in science helped to raise an intellectual

exhilaration in Nuremberg in Durer's youth; and he made the city

famous for its nautical instruments and maps. One of his pupils,

Martin Behaim, drew in color on vellum the oldest known terrestrial

globe (1492), still preserved in the Germanisches Museum in Nuremberg.

Modern geography was created not by geographers but by sailors,

merchants, missionaries, envoys, soldiers, and pilgrims. Catalonian

skippers made or used excellent maps; their portolani - pilot

guides to Mediterranean ports- were in the fourteenth century almost

as accurate as the navigation charts of our time. `061233 Old trade

routes to the East having fallen into Turkish hands, European

importers developed new overland routes through Mongol territory.

The Franciscan friar Oderic of Pordenone, after spending three years

in Peking (c. 1323-26), wrote an illuminating record of his trip to

China via India and Sumatra, and of his return via Tibet and Persia.

Clavijo, as we shall see, gave a fascinating account of his embassy to

Timur. Johann Schnittberger of Bavaria, captured by the Turks at

Nicopolis (1396), wandered for thirty years in Turkey, Armenia,

Georgia, Russia, and Siberia, and wrote in his Reisebuch the first

West-European description of Siberia. In 1500 Juan de la Cosa, one

of Columbus' pilots, issued an extensive map of the world, showing for

the first time in cartography the explorations of his master, of Vasco

da Gama, and others. Geography was a moving drama in the fifteenth

century.

In one particular the most influential medieval treatise on

geography was the Imago mundi (1410) of Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly,

which encouraged Columbus by describing the Atlantic as traversable

"in a very few days if the wind be fair." `061234 It was but one of

half a dozen works that this alert ecclesiastic wrote on astronomy,

geography, meteorology, mathematics, logic, metaphysics, psychology,

and the reform of the calendar and the Church. Reproached for giving

so much time to secular studies, he replied that a theologian should

keep abreast of science. `061235 He saw some science even in

astrology; and on astrological grounds he predicted a great change

in Christianity within a hundred years, and world-shaking events in

1789. `061236

The best scientific thought of the fourteenth century was in

physics. Dietrich of Freiburg (d. 1311) gave essentially our modern

explanation of the rainbow as due to two refractions, and one

reflection, of the sun's rays in drops of water. Jean Buridan did

excellent work in theoretical physics; it is a pity that he is

famous only for his ass, which may not have been his. *06032 Born near

Arras before 1300, Buridan studied and taught at the University of

Paris. He not only argued for the daily rotation of the earth, but

he eliminated from astronomy the angelic intelligences to which

Aristotle and Aquinas had ascribed the guidance and motion of the

heavenly bodies. Nothing more is needed to explain their movements,

said Buridan, than a start originally given them by God, and the law

of impetus- that a body in motion continues its motion except as

hindered by some existing force; here Buridan anticipated Galileo,

Descartes, and Newton. The motions of planets and stars, he added, are

governed by the same mechanical laws that operate on earth. `061237

These propositions, now so trite, were deeply damaging to the medieval

world view. They almost date the beginning of astronomical physics.

Buridan's ideas were taken to Germany and Italy by his pupils, and

influenced Leonardo, Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo. `061238 Albert of

Saxony carried them to the university that he founded at Vienna

(1364), Marsilius von Inghen to the university that he founded at

Heidelberg (1386). Albert was one of the first to reject the

Aristotelian notion that a vacuum is impossible; he developed the idea

of a center of gravity in every body; he anticipated Galileo's

principles of static equilibrium and the uniform acceleration of

falling bodies; and he held that the erosion of mountains by water,

and the gradual or volcanic elevation of the land, are compensating

forces in geology- `061239 an idea that fascinated Leonardo.

Practical mechanics made some modest advances. Complicated windmills

were used to pump water, drain soil, grind grain, and do other chores.

Water power was employed in smelting and sawing, in driving furnace

bellows, tilt hammers, silk-spinning machines. Cannon were cast and

bored. Steel was made in sizable quantities; large blast furnaces were

set up in northern Europe in the fourteenth century. Well boring is

mentioned in 1373; wiredrawing was practiced at Nuremberg in the

fifteenth century; a pump composed of buckets on an endless chain is

pictured in a manuscript of 1438. `061240 In a drawing by the

Hussite engineer Conrad Keyser (c. 1405) occurs the earliest known

representation of reciprocating motion converted into rotary motion:

two arms, moving in alternation, revolve a shaft precisely as the

pistons turn the crankshaft of an automobile. `061241

Better mechanisms for measuring time were demanded as commerce and

industry grew. Monks and farmers had divided the daylight into the

same number of periods in all seasons, making the periods longer in

summer than in winter. City life required more uniform divisions of

time, and in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries clocks and

watches were made that divided the day into equal parts throughout the

year. In some places the hours were numbered from one to

twenty-four, as in the military chronometry of our time; and as late

as 1370 some clocks, like that of San Gotardo in Milan, struck the

full number. This proved to be a noisy extravagance. By 1375 the day

was regularly divided into two halves of twelve hours each.

The essential principle of the mechanical clock was a weight

slowly turning a wheel, whose revolution was checked by an

escapement tooth sufficiently resistant to allow the wheel to turn

by only one cog in a given interval of time. Such a timepiece had been

described about 1271. The first mechanical clocks were set up in

church towers or belfries visible through large areas of a town. One

of the earliest was installed (1326-35) in the abbey of St. Albans

by Richard Wallingford; it showed not only the hours and minutes of

the day but the ebb and flow of the tide, and the motions of the sun

and moon. Later clocks added a medley of gadgets. The clock (1352)

in Strasbourg Cathedral showed a crowing cock, the three Magi, and a

human figure on which were indicated, for each part of the body, the

proper time for bloodletting. The cathedral clock at Wells used a

moving image of the sun to point the hour, and a small star, moving on

an inner circle, to indicate the minute; a third circle gave the day

of the month; and on a platform above the dial four horsemen emerged

and charged as each hour struck. On a fifteenth-century clock at

Jena a buffoon's head opened its monstrous mouth to receive a golden

apple from a pilgrim, only to have the apple snatched away as his

mouth began to close upon it; this comedy was performed every hour

of every day for hundreds of years; and the clock still exists. A

similar clock at Nuremberg, set up in 1506 and rudely interrupted by

the second World War, resumed its theatrical performances in 1953.

To make watches a spiral spring was substituted (c. 1450) for the

hanging weight: a band of fine steel, rolled up into a small circle or

drum, produced, by its gradual unwinding, the effect of the weight

on the retarded wheel. By the end of the fifteenth century watches

were numerous, some as large as a hand, some as small as an almond,

many ovoid like the "Nuremberg eggs" made by Peter Hele (1510). The

principle of weight, escapement, and wheel was applied to other

purposes, so that the mechanical clock became the parent of a myriad

diverse machines.

While physics thus foreshadowed the Industrial Revolution, alchemy

slowly grew into chemistry. By the close of this age the alchemists

had discovered and described zinc, bismuth, liver of sulfur, regulus

of antimony, volatile fluorine of alkali, and many other substances.

They distilled alcohol, volatilized mercury, and made sulfuric acid by

the sublimation of sulfur. They prepared ether and aqua regia, and a

scarlet dye superior to those now used. `061242 They bequeathed to

chemistry the experimental method that would prove the greatest gift

of medieval science to the modern mind.

Botany was still mostly confined to manuals of husbandry or to

herbals describing medicinal plants. Henry of Hesse (1325-97)

suggested that new species, especially among plants, might evolve

naturally from old ones; `061243 this 500 years before Darwin. Royal

or papal menageries, animal breeding, veterinary medicine, treatises

on hunting or fishing or the culture of bees or silkworms,

bestiaries that told animal stories to insinuate morality, and books

on falconry, like the Miroir de Phoebus (1387) of Gaston III Count

of Foix, half unwittingly gathered material for a science of zoology.

Anatomy and physiology had for the most part to depend upon the

dissection of animals, the wounds of soldiers, and occasional cases

where the law required post-mortem autopsy. Honest Christians felt

reasonable objections to the dissection of human bodies which, however

dead, were supposed to rise intact from the grave at the Last

Judgment. All through the fourteenth century it was difficult to get

cadavers for anatomical study; north of the Alps very few

physicians, before 1450, had ever seen a dissected human corpse.

Nevertheless, about 1360, Guy de Chauliac persuaded the authorities at

Avignon (then ruled by the papal court) to turn over to medical

schools, for dissection, the bodies of executed criminals. `061244

Dissections were performed before medical students at Venice in

1368, Montpelier in 1377, Florence in 1388, Lerida in 1391, Vienna

in 1404; and in 1445 the university of Padua built the first known

anatomical theater. The results for medicine were endless.

IV. THE HEALERS

-

In the science and practice of medicine, as in literature and art,

northern Europe was half a century or more behind Italy; and even

Italy had by 1300 barely regained the medical knowledge reached by

Galen and Soranus a thousand years before. But the medical schools

at Montpelier, Paris, and Oxford were making good progress, and the

greatest surgeons of this age were French. The profession was now well

organized, and defended its privileges lustily; but as the demand

for health always exceeded the supply, herbalists, apothecaries,

midwives, wandering leeches, and barber surgeons- not to mention

quacks- everywhere competed with trained practitioners. The public,

inviting disease by wrong living, and then seeking infallible

diagnoses and cheap overnight cures, made the usual complaints about

mercenary or murderous doctors. Froissart considered it "the object of

all medical men to gain large salaries"- `061245 as if this were not a

disease endemic to all civilization.

The most interesting medical men of the age were the surgeons.

They had not yet persuaded the physicians to recognize them as equals;

indeed, the University of Paris would admit no student to its school

of medicine in the fourteenth century except on his oath never to

perform a surgical operation. Even bloodletting, which had already

become a panacea, was forbidden to physicians, and had to be left to

their underlings. Barbers were still used by the people for many

operations; but the barber surgeons were now abandoning tonsorial

practice, and were specializing in surgery; in 1365 there were forty

such barber surgeons in Paris; in England they continued till 1540. An

ordinance of 1372 restricted them in France to the treatment of

"wounds not of a character likely to cause death"; and thereafter

major operations could be legally performed only by "master

surgeons" dedicated to their specialty. A Royal College of Surgeons

was chartered at Edinburgh in 1505.

The great names in surgery, in the first half of the fourteenth

century, were Henri de Mondeville and Guy de Chauliac. Froissart might

have noted that Mondeville, though always in great demand, remained

poor to the end of his days, and carried on his work despite his own

asthma and tuberculosis. His Chirurgia (1306-20), the first work

on surgery by a Frenchman, covered the whole field with a thoroughness

and competence that earned a new standing for surgeons. His

distinctive contribution was the application and development of a

method which he had learned from Theodoric Borgognoni at Bologna for

treating wounds by complete cleansing, prevention of suppuration,

exclusion of air, and dressings with wine. He defended his innovations

by warning against a supine acceptance of Galen or other classic

authorities. "Modern authors," he wrote, using a favorite medieval

adjective, "are to the ancient like a dwarf placed upon the

shoulders of a giant; he sees all that the giant sees, and farther

still." `061246

The generation after him produced the most famous of medieval

surgeons. Born of peasant stock in the French village that gave him

its name, Guy de Chauliac so impressed the lords of the manor that

they paid his tuition at Toulouse, Montpelier, Bologna, and Paris.

In 1342 he became papal physician at Avignon, and held that

difficult position for twenty-eight years. When the Black Death struck

Avignon he stayed at his post, ministered to the victims, contracted

the pestilence, and barely survived. Like any man, he committed

serious errors: he blamed the plague now on an unfortunate conjunction

of planets, now on Jews aiming to poison all Christendom; and he

retarded the surgery of wounds by rejecting Mondeville's simple

cleansing method and returning to the use of plasters and salves.

But for the most part he lived up to the finest traditions of his

great profession. His Chirurgia magna (1363) was the most

thorough, systematic, and learned treatise on surgery produced

before the sixteenth century.

Social and individual hygiene hardly kept pace with the advances

of medicine. Personal cleanliness was not a fetish; even the King of

England bathed only once a week, and sometimes skipped. The Germans

had public baths- large vats in which the bathers stood or sat

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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