Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [169]
It was paper more than print that revolutionized the world. Take another counterfactual: what if Johann Gutenberg had had to print his great Bible on the only material available in 1455: sheep, cow, and goat skins? What would have happened to his great invention if there had been no paper in western Europe? The role of paper in the printing revolution has been strangely passed over.9 Yet without paper, transmitted from China to the Muslim world, and thence to Europe, the development of publishing in Europe is virtually unimaginable.
The production of paper in Europe began in Italy in the thirteenth century, at Amalfi, southeast of Naples, and at Fabriano, north of Assisi. It was said that here they had learned the secrets of papermaking from the Moors of Xativa, near Valencia. Both Italian towns managed to make a paper of high quality, which they then shipped back to the Islamic world, still the main market for this product. It was not until 1390 that papermaking moved north of the Alps, with a Nuremberg city official, Ulmann Stromeir, converting his flour mill outside the city into a paper mill, worked by skilled Italians.10 But Italian papers were superior to all others, both in the quality of the writing surface and in durability. Sultan Mehmed II bought paper from Italy for his scribes, but also set up his own paper mill beside the stream called the Kagithane at the head of the Golden Horn.11 Although papermaking rose and declined in the various centers of production in the Islamic lands, it never failed entirely, despite the competition from Italy and later from other parts of Europe. Muslim papermakers continued to experiment and develop new types of paper for different needs certainly until the nineteenth century and, I believe, up to the present.
Contrast this spirit of enterprise with the Islamic obscurantism that supposedly prevented the introduction of Gutenberg’s press. Or perhaps we should think of it as a double dose of conservatism, since the Islamic culture that had adopted Chinese paper evidently failed to adopt Chinese printing from the same source, centuries before Gutenberg. If this were true, it might constitute clear evidence of some innate fear of innovation. But it does not. The prohibition on printing and the printed book is a topic shrouded in mystery, oddly so given the importance that has been attached to it in the West.12 The same story is repeated by a number of visitors to the Ottoman Empire. A prime source was the sixteenth-century French traveler and historiographer to the court of Catherine de’ Medici, André Thevet. He was told that
Greeks, Armenians, Mingrelians, Abyssinians, Turks, Moors, Arabs and Tartars only write their books by hand. Among the Turks they follow the decree of Bajezid, the second of that name their Emperor, proclaimed in 1483, on pain of death, not to read printed books, which ordinance was confirmed by Selim the first of that name his son, in 1515.13
But Walid Gdoura, author of the major study on the slow development of printing in the Middle East, is rightly skeptical about these secondhand accounts. I suspect the ideas about an Islamic prohibition on printing emerged from an Islamic anathema on images.14
Here we might seem to be on more solid ground. The prohibition on images has been held to be a total, permanent, and unalterable distinction between East and West. It was commented upon from the first centuries of contact, and was confirmed by Muslim disgust at the use of religious images in the Crusader states. But it is not true in these absolute terms. There had been a long tradition of human and animal depiction in the Muslim East, which proliferated under the Ummayad caliphates in both the Levant and in Spain, and which can still be seen in the objects