A Criminal History of Mankind (47 page)

And now we can begin to see what an extraordinary cataclysm was about to occur. Scepticism like Frederick’s was as far as it could be from the total belief of the popes. Absurd as it sounds, Frederick’s guardian during his early years had been Pope Innocent III, one of the most fanatical of the crusading popes. He believed in his spiritual mission with a grim, humourless intensity, and took it for granted that one of his major tasks was to crush all unbelievers. He reserved his deepest loathing for a sect called the Cathars - one of those ‘purist’ reform movements that had sprung up in opposition to the obvious corruption of the Church. Cathars were not unlike the Quakers of a later century; their observances were simple, their lives rather ascetic. Like the Persian prophet Mani, they believed that everything to do with the spirit is good and everything to do with the world is evil. In which case, of course, God could never have created the world; it must be a creation of the Evil One. Jesus could not have had a physical body, and the crucifixion must have been some kind of mirage. These doctrinal differences, which strike us as harmless enough - there are a dozen modern Christian sects with far stranger views - seemed to Innocent III a guarantee of damnation. Toulouse was the centre of this heresy, and the pope excommunicated its ruler, Count Raymond. He sent inquisitors to sniff out heresy, and one of Count Raymond’s men assassinated the papal legate (or ambassador). For two days, the pope was so angry that he could not speak (a sure sign of a Right Man). When he recovered his voice, he shouted for a crusade against the heretics. This was unheard of - a crusade against Christians. The king of France refused to have anything to do with it. But dozens of knights thought it would make excellent sport - especially as it was only to last forty days. They besieged the town of Beziers and massacred its twenty thousand inhabitants, although many were not Cathars. Town after town was reduced in the same way - including Toulouse itself. The ‘crusade’ dragged on for decades, and ended with the siege of the fortress of Montsegur in 1243 and the burning alive of two hundred people who refused to renounce their faith. The Church stamped out Catharism as the Nazis tried to stamp out the Jews - by mass extermination.

So it is one of the ironies of history that Innocent III should have been the guardian of the young Frederick, and no doubt direct contact with that dogmatic and narrow-minded old man convinced Frederick that the Church could not possibly be the only repository of truth. Frederick was the first sign of a new intellectual attitude; he was, in fact, the first of the ‘Renaissance men’. His attitudes and those of the pope were as far apart as fire and ice. Sooner or later, there was bound to be an enormous explosion. It is satisfactory to record that when Frederick came to power he flatly declined to burn heretics, or even to allow priests freedom from taxation and from the jurisdiction of civil courts.

This particular battle ended, of course, with the death of Innocent in 1216, but continued a decade later with equally violent clashes between Frederick and Gregory IX then with his successor Innocent IV. But the real struggle was between two different currents of human evolution: religious authoritarianism and scientific enquiry. There can be no doubt that the great religions - Buddhism, Christianity, Islam - had taken mankind an immense step beyond the kind of mindless materialism that had been the downfall of Rome. But all religions begin like a mountain stream, and slowly turn into a rather muddy river. The ‘crusade’ against the Cathars was a sign of how far Christianity had turned into a kind of ‘closed shop’, a merely authoritarian dogma. Innocent III was the first pope to establish Inquisitors - the Dominicans - to root out heresy and burn the rebels. He was, in effect, screwing down the lid of a pressure-cooker. Sooner or later, it was bound to explode.

Another ‘purist’, St Francis of Assisi, succeeded in remaining within the fold - although it was touch-and-go for a while and some of his followers were later burnt as heretics in Marseilles. But one of the stories concerning St Francis helps to pinpoint precisely what was happening in the final years of the Middle Ages. Francis Bernadone was the son of a rich businessman of Assisi - a member of the newly rising class that would undermine the Church. Legend declares that he fell in love with a beautiful woman, but that when he pressed his suit she pulled down her dress and revealed that one of her breasts was eaten away with cancer. It made him aware of the vanity of human desires and took him a step closer to recognising his mission. We find it easy enough to understand his reaction. He had, in effect, been converted from frivolity to seriousness. He felt an urge to turn his back on his futile life of dandyism and find some purpose into which he could channel his enormous energies. We can also see that his reaction
might
have been to seek out the best physician he could find and study the problem of cancer. (As it was, he spent three years tending lepers.) Instead, he created his movement of ‘poor friars’; he had, in effect, taken a backward step to the hermits in the desert. And this same retrogressive tendency is also symbolised by his positive loathing of money; when his friars brought donations, they had to bring them in their mouths and drop them into a heap of dung, to remind themselves that money was no more than excrement. We can understand his point - his father was probably obsessed by money and he took the opposite stance - and we can also see that he was taking his dislike too far. The circulation of money was the greatest single factor in freeing the mind of man from the stagnation of the Middle Ages. Francis’s heart was in the right place; it was his head that needed examining.

And while popes were hurling excommunications, Dominicans were torturing suspected heretics and Franciscan friars were walking the roads, the really important changes were taking place on another level. Inventions were transforming human existence. The plough of the ancient world was basically a pointed stick, which was attached to some kind of frame behind an ox; then it was pulled along to scratch the surface of the ground. In the Middle Ages, someone realised that a knife would cut much deeper. A deep cut on its own would be of no particular use, but if some kind of twisted board could follow behind the knife, it would split open the cut and turn the earth sideways. And the long furrows that resulted allowed the water to drain away, so that a field could be ploughed even when it was wet.

The chief problem with the new plough, which had wheels on the front, was that the harness - which passed around the ox’s chest -was liable to strangle the animal. Around 900 A.D. someone thought of the answer: a rigid collar or frame that would transfer the strain from the chest to the shoulders. Together, these two inventions revolutionised agriculture, and so provided food for an increasing population. Increasingly large horses were developed - for war as much as agriculture - and this presented another problem: their hoofs tended to split when they were heavily loaded or pulling a great weight. The metal horseshoe provided the answer, at about the same time the horse collar came to Europe.

One of the biggest problems for early sea traders was that they had to wait for the wind to blow in the right direction. In the Mediterranean, the Carthaginians had taken advantage of the fact that the wind blows six months one way and then six months the other, to make their voyages in the proper season. The old sails were, of course, strips of square canvas. Then the Arabs invented a triangular sail that could be fixed to a movable boom; it could be moved around to catch the wind so the ship was no longer forced to sail the way the wind happened to be blowing. Mariners soon made the incredible discovery that they could actually sail into the wind by allowing the wind to strike the back of the sail. The triangular - or lateen - sail arrived at about the same time as the crusades, and it meant a sudden dramatic increase in commerce.

There was still the problem of steering. In the year before the birth of Francis of Assisi - 1180 - a travelling English monk came upon a magnetised needle that floated on a cork, and always pointed the same way. A century later, the Spanish king Alfonso the Wise -who had also commissioned a great chart of the stars - decreed that all his ships should carry the ‘magnetic compass’. Sailors no longer had to rely on the stars to navigate.

In the time of Charlemagne, someone realised that a handle could be attached to a circular grindstone, and that this device greatly assisted the sharpening of knives, scythes and ploughshares. This may have stimulated people in looking for new ways of using wheel-power. The simple watermill had been known since Roman times - the wheel with buckets, or slats of wood, to catch the water that poured down a sluice and turned the wheel. The Romans even knew about gears - that if a wheel had spikes sticking out of its circumference it could be made to interact with the spikes on another wheel. If the wheels were at an angle of ninety degrees, the second wheel could be made to turn a grindstone that would turn corn into flour. And the power could be varied by varying the size of the wheels. Around 900, the new interest in wheels led to the discovery that levers and cams could be attached to the drive-shaft, and that they could work a pump, power a trip-hammer or even drive a saw. So processes such as crushing sugar cane, hammering flax, pounding leather, grinding ore, could all be ‘automated’. It could even drive a bellows for a blast furnace.

Even the Church played its part in the story of invention. Monks had to wake at all hours of the night to say their prayers. One way of telling the time was to make a small hole in the bottom of a bucket and fill it with water; divisions could be marked on the side of the bucket to give a more accurate idea of how much water had dripped away. It was not too difficult to make the empty bucket tilt on a lever and ring an alarm bell. By the time of Marco Polo, there were highly elaborate water clocks with dials and scales. It was only a matter of time before someone realised that water was unnecessary. A heavy lead weight on a string could be made to turn a wheel, and this could be geared to other wheels to control the speed at which the weight fell. By the time Marco Polo’s memoirs were the latest sensation among cultured Italians, this new type of clock was already in use.

Now it is impossible for the human mind to solve a complicated problem and not to feel a certain delight in its own ingenuity and persistence. And this sense of delight, as we all know, is accompanied by a curious ripple of triumph and optimism, an exciting presentiment that obstacles are going to be overcome and that tomorrow will be in every way more interesting than yesterday. This is the feeling that marked the end of the Middle Ages. We call the period that followed the Rebirth - Renaissance - meaning that it was a rebirth of the ancient learning. In a more fundamental sense, it was the birth of the modern era.

So it seems typical that the most influential of the new discoveries - so far as the future of mankind was concerned - was a force of destructiveness: gunpowder. Gunpowder was invented in China some time around the year 1000, and seems to have been used for fireworks, but not, so far as we know, for destructive purposes. It is interesting to speculate how the discovery came about. Its chief ingredient is nitre - saltpetre. And in Europe at least its discovery came about by a rather curious process. Walls of farm buildings were often built with mud in which the hardening ingredient was cattle dung. Men would go and urinate against these walls, with the consequence that white streaks would form on the wall. This was nitre - potassium nitrate. Someone no doubt tried the experiment of tossing some of this crystalline substance on a bonfire, and observed that it made the wood burn with a new fury - it releases oxygen. The next step, which was probably made by some Chinese alchemist - for they had been at work trying to make semi-magical drugs and elixirs since the fifth century B.C. - was to find that, in certain proportions, nitre, sulphur and powdered charcoal will burn with a single bright flash, or - if confined in a tube - explode. (Joseph Needham has a long account of Chinese chemical experiments with saltpetre in Vol. 5 (part 4) of
Science and Civilisation in China
, but does not explain how its discovery came about. He promises more information in the so-far unpublished Volume 6.) So the Chinese made fireworks, and the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan seem to have learned about it from them and brought gunpowder to the west when they invaded the Kharismian Empire in 1218 A.D. By about 1250 the Arabs had invented the first gun, a bamboo tube reinforced with metal bands which would fire an arrow. And so man’s most dangerous invention before the atomic bomb reached Europe around 1300, and helped to blow apart the last remnants of the Middle Ages.

The warrior who was probably responsible for bringing gunpowder to the west has been described by one historian as ‘the mightiest and most bloodthirsty conqueror in all history.’ The Mongol Temujin, known to history as Genghis Khan, was born in 1167 in the wild steppe country to the north of China. The Mongols were not unlike the Red Indians of North America when the whites first encountered them: a large number of separate tribes, usually at war with one another. Temujin was the son of a famous warrior, Yesugei, who was killed by treachery on his way back from arranging his son’s betrothal to a girl called Borte (or Bertha). Yesugei’s tribe took the opportunity to expel the widow - fortunately a woman of strong character - and her children, including the nine-year-old Temujin. For years they lived in the wilderness, and it hardened them and made them ruthless - in his teens Temujin quarrelled with one of his brothers about a fish, and cold-bloodedly murdered him. Then their former tribesmen decided to forestall vengeance by taking him captive; after great hardship Temujin made a daring escape. He emerged from these experiences a formidable warrior whose strength was matched by cunning and foresight.

The steppe was full of feuding kings - or ‘khans’ - and Temujin made an ally of an old friend of his father, Torghril, khan of a tribe called the Kereits (a man who had achieved his position by murdering two of his brothers). And when, one morning, wandering horsemen descended on Temujin’s camp and stole his wife Bertha, Torghril rose to the occasion, and his warriors helped track down the kidnappers, who were surprised by a night attack. When Temujin discovered that Bertha was pregnant, he ordered the massacre of the whole tribe, including women and children. But - typically - he brought up the child as his own son.