history of technology – From the Middle Ages to 1750

Medieval advance (500–1500 cerium)

The millennium between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth hundred ce and the begin of the colonial expansion of westerly Europe in the late fifteenth hundred has been known traditionally as the Middle Ages, and the first gear one-half of this period consists of the five centuries of the Dark Ages. We now know that the period was not as socially stagnant as this title suggests. In the first position, many of the institutions of the later empire survived the collapse and profoundly influenced the geological formation of the new culture that developed in western Europe. The christian church was the outstanding institution of this character, but Roman conceptions of police and presidency besides continued to exert an charm long after the departure of the legions from the western provinces. Second, and more important, the Teutonic tribes who moved into a large separate of westerly Europe did not come empty-handed, and in some respects their engineering was lake superior to that of the Romans. It has already been observed that they were people of the Iron Age, and although much about the origins of the heavy plow remains obscure these tribes appear to have been the beginning people with sufficiently strong iron plowshares to undertake the taxonomic village of the forested lowlands of northern and western Europe, the heavy soils of which had frustrated the agricultural techniques of their predecessors.

The invaders came frankincense as colonizers. They may have been regarded as “ barbarians ” by the Romanized inhabitants of western Europe who naturally resented their intrusion, and the effect of their invasion was surely to disrupt trade, diligence, and town life. But the newcomers besides provided an component of invention and energy. About 1000 ce the conditions of comparative political stability necessary for the reestablishment of a vigorous commercial and urban biography had been secured by the success of the kingdoms of the area in either absorbing or keeping out the final of the invaders from the East, and thereafter for 500 years the new civilization grew in strength and began to experiment in all aspects of human attempt. much of this march involved recovering the cognition and achievements of the ancient world. The history of medieval technology is thus largely the report of the preservation, recovery, and alteration of earlier achievements. But by the end of the period western civilization had begun to produce some remarkable technical innovations that were to be of the last meaning.

Innovation

The bible initiation raises a problem of great importance in the history of engineering. rigorously, an invention is something entirely new, but there is no such matter as an unprecedented technical invention because it is impossible for an inventor to work in a void and, however clever his invention, it must arise out of his own previous experience. The task of distinguishing an element of knickknack in an invention remains a trouble of patent law polish to the present day, but the problem is made relatively easily by the self-control of wide documentary records covering former inventions in many countries. For the millennium of the Middle Ages, however, few such records exist, and it is frequently difficult to explain how particular innovations were introduced to western Europe. The problem is particularly complicate because it is known that many inventions of the period had been developed independently and previously in other civilizations, and it is sometimes unmanageable if not impossible to know whether something is spontaneous invention or an invention that had been transmitted by some as so far undiscovered path from those who had originated it in early societies. The problem is significant because it generates a conflict of interpretations about the transmission of technology. On the one hand there is the theory of the diffusionists, according to which all invention has moved westward from the long-established civilizations of the ancient world, with Egypt and Mesopotamia as the two front-runner candidates for the ultimate source of the process. On the other hand is the theory of ad-lib initiation, according to which the chief antigenic determinant of technological initiation is social need. Scholarship is vitamin a so far ineffective to solve the problem so far as technical advances of the Middle Ages are concerned because a lot information is missing. But it does seem likely that at least some of the key inventions of the period—the windmill and gunpowder are adept examples—were developed spontaneously. It is quite certain, however, that others, such as silk working, were transmitted to the West, and, however master the contribution of western civilization to technological invention, there can be no doubt at all that in its early centuries at least it looked to the East for ideas and inspiration.

Byzantium

The immediate eastern neighbor of the new culture of medieval Europe was Byzantium, the surviving bastion of the Roman Empire based in Constantinople ( Istanbul ), which endured for 1,000 years after the crumble of the western half of the conglomerate. There the literature and traditions of Hellenic civilization were perpetuated, becoming increasingly available to the curio and greed of the West through the traders who arrived from Venice and elsewhere. apart from the influence on western architectural style of such Byzantine masterpieces as the great domed social organization of the Hagia Sophia, the technological contribution of Byzantium itself was credibly rebuff, but it served to mediate between the West and other civilizations one or more stages removed, such as the Islamic world, India, and China.

Islam

The Islamic world had become a civilization of colossal expansive energy in the seventh hundred and had imposed a one of religion and culture on a lot of southwest Asia and North Africa. From the compass point of opinion of technical dispersion, the importance of Islam lay in the arabian assimilation of the scientific and technological achievements of Hellenic culture, to which it made significant additions, and the whole became available to the West through the Moors in Spain, the Arabs in Sicily and the Holy Land, and through commercial contacts with the Levant and North Africa.

India

Islam besides provided a transmission swath for some of the engineering of East and South Asia, specially that of India and China. The ancient Hindu and Buddhist cultures of the indian subcontinent had long-established trade connections with the arabian populace to the west and came under solid Muslim determine themselves after the Mughal conquest in the sixteenth hundred. amerind artisans early acquired an expertness in ironworking and enjoyed a wide repute for their metallic artifacts and textile techniques, but there is little evidence that technical invention figured prominently in indian history before the basis of european trading stations in the sixteenth century.

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