The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [41]
He sent a copy of the chart to an Italian captain, who in 1483 took it to the Lisbon committee for navigation to the Spice Islands. The committee turned it down. The captain then tried others, including the Spanish court. He failed there, too. Then, as he was about to take ship in order to plead his case before the French court, the Spaniards changed their minds and agreed to support him.
With Toscanelli’s map stuck to the flyleaf of his atlas, the captain set sail for Japan. He was never to arrive. On the way west to Japan Captain Columbus discovered America.
Early sixteenth-century examples of the effects of printing. Above, science and technology were enhanced and made more accurate by the comparative work made possible through books. Below, Church authority was strengthened by illustrated Bibles. Here we see the spies returning from Canaan.
Matter of Fact
There is a moment during the acceleration of an aircraft down the runway when the co-pilot calls ‘Rotate!’ The pilot pulls back the control column and a hundred tons of metal carrying over three hundred people at more than 150 miles per hour rotates about its latitudinal axis by a small number of degrees and rises into the sky. The passengers are on board because they believe it to be a fact that this is what will happen.
Like every other fact that underpins our relationship with the technology structuring our lives, we trust it. We are trained to accept the facts of science and technology no matter how frequently the same science and technology renders them obsolete. Yet the concept of the generally accepted ‘fact’ is a relatively new one. It came into existence only five hundred years ago as a result of an event that radically altered Western life because it made possible the standardisation of opinion.
In the world that existed before this occurrence, contemporary references reveal the people of the time to have been excitable, easily led to tears or rage, volatile in mood. Their games and pastimes were simple and repetitive, like nursery rhymes. They were attracted to garish colours. Their gestures were exaggerated. In all but the most personal of relationships they were arbitrarily cruel. They enjoyed watching animals fight and draw blood.
Much of their life was led in a kind of perpetual present: their knowledge of the past was limited to memories of personal experience, and they had little interest in the future. Time as we know it had no meaning. They ate and slept when they felt like it and spent long hours on simple, mindless tasks without appearing to suffer boredom.
The medieval adult was in no way less intelligent than his modern counterpart, however. He merely lived in a different world, which made different demands on him. His was a world without facts. Indeed, the modern concept of a fact would have been an incomprehensible one. Medieval people relied for day to day information solely on what they themselves, or someone they knew, had observed or experienced in the world immediately around them. Their lives were regular, repetitive and unchanging.
The agriculturally based life of the Middle Ages was split into three orders, each dependent on the other: knights for protection, priests for salvation and peasants for food. Note the peasant’s lower status, separated from the conversation.
There was almost no part of this life-without-fact that could be other than local. Virtually no information reached the vast majority of people from the world outside the villages in which they lived. When all information was passed by word of mouth, rumour ruled. Everything other than personal experience was the subject of hearsay, a word which carried little of the pejorative sense