The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [24]
Shining sunlight through the pinhole on to the droplet of his container of water and raising and lowering them, and measuring the effects he observed, Theodoric saw that the colour of the rainbow spectrum depended on the angle at which the light entered the droplet and on the position of the observer. Calculating the rainbow mechanism thus, Theodoric was conducting the first properly scientific experiment in Western European history and completing a change in thinking that had begun with the fall of Toledo.
Where men had once said, ‘Credo ut intelligam’ (understanding can come only through belief), they now said, ‘Intelligo ut credam’ (belief can come only through understanding). In 1277, Roger Bacon was imprisoned for an indefinite period for holding these opinions. Free and rational investigation of nature was to come hard in the clash between reason and faith which would echo down to our own time.
Two views of the same city, Florence: above, fourteenth-century, below, sixteenth-century. They reveal two different attitudes to the world, coming as they did before and after the rediscovery of a method of painting that revolutionised mankind’s view of the entire universe.
Point of View
The right of each person to express his individuality is perhaps the most jealously guarded prerogative in modern Western society. We exercise this right in various ways: in the vote, in freedom of expression and movement, and in more personal forms such as our career, home and appearance. In each of these manifestations we express our difference one from the other, our uniqueness. Concern for privacy, and the need to ensure protection for what information may exist at large about us, is a major determinant in the way we live. We maintain the correct personal distance from each other, we regard physical assault as a major crime. We allow the state to have many rights over us, but never to invade or detract from our own rights as individuals.
Most of us regard these rights as primarily political, sprung from the great democratic reforms of the eighteenth century. But those reforms might not have been possible without an intellectual revolution in thinking which occurred three hundred years earlier, in northern Italy. It was a revolution based on two events: the greatest holocaust the West has ever known, and a new way of painting.
In the summer of 1347 a merchant ship returning from the Black Sea entered the Sicilian port of Messina bringing with it the horrifying disease that came to be known as the Black Death. It struck rapidly. Within twenty-four hours of infection and the appearance of the first small black pustule, came an agonising death. The effect of the Black Death was appalling. In less than twenty years half the population of Europe had been killed, the countryside was devastated, and a period of optimism and growing economic welfare had been brought to a sudden and catastrophic end.
As the plague struck indiscriminately at rich and poor, those like the poet Boccaccio who could afford to do so fled the stink and terror of the cit ies for isolated retreats. The packed and insanitary towns suffered most. Some lost as many as three-quarters of their inhabitants. As the disease spread, there were not enough survivors remaining to bury the dead in the mass graves opened for the purpose outside the town walls.
In the countryside too the effect was immediately evident. Without farmworkers to husband it the land went to waste. Livestock died in thousands. Villages were abandoned as wild dogs and bandits scavenged and looted the ruins. In Germany up to 60 per cent of the land went uncultivated. In Castile conditions in the countryside became so bad that it was dangerous to venture outside the towns. As the wayside inns closed, travellers were obliged to camp in the open like gypsies, catching and cooking their own food.
This was no ordinary widespread epidemic. To those at the time it seemed like the end of the world. With the entire economy dependent on agriculture for survival, and a population