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By Root 1636 0

Puritans won in England, thereby allowing Oliver Cromwell to establish a virtual military dictatorship as “lord protector” (after beheading Charles I in 1649). These wars and beheadings failed to endear Catholics and Protestants to one another, so the fighting just went endlessly on. Cromwell died in 1658, followed in 1660 by the Restoration of the monarchy when Charles II became King of England. His son, James II, after losing a war with the Parliamentarians, lost his kingship which was assumed by the Protestant William of Orange, who became King in 1688. It was after this so-called Glorious Revolution that he took the crown as William III of England. Unknown to James II, he was the last Catholic monarch of England.

Another subtle, but extremely powerful, change was spreading in Europe. Land, the measure of wealth for probably 5,000 years, was becoming something less. Money—cash that is—created by trade and commerce was becoming the something more. Quickly, it seems from the record, the people at the pinnacle now longer held land. They had cash in the bank, ships for commerce, storehouses of goods, and other trappings of capitalist wealth. Landholders typically hold little cash. In feudal times land equaled power because people with land controlled commerce. Commerce was now flowing from fast growing cities where landholders had no say. As the merchants accumulated money and expanded their power, land was less valuable. Hard money was the language of the new era. This decreased the power of the landholding nobility somewhat, and it caused the monarchs pause, because their power was land based; after all, taxes came from land. Monarchs and parliaments learned to tax commerce to increase their wealth, but the nobility lacked that taxing power, so the landholders watched their power melt away into the cities of a new epoch.

While religious wars snuffed people out at a fantastic rate, something else was having a profound influence on religion and human endeavors of all types. Science was coming of age, and with the invention of the printing press the spread of experimentally confirmed knowledge was assured.

Science and the Printing Press (The Road to Tomorrow)

1430

One of the greatest inventions since the advent of language and agriculture, the PRINTING PRESS is a key reason the modern world exists as it does today.

Our modern world exists because of the printing press. In about 1430, Johann Gutenberg, a goldsmith in Germany, invented a method of printing using movable type, the precursor of the modern printing press. His press was so good it spread all over Europe and the world very quickly. At the same time the printing press was producing books and pamphlets in large numbers, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of science, and new political ideas were emerging and changing the world. Without the printing press such ideas may not have spread as quickly or might fail to spread at all. The printing press was so powerful that Muslim countries banned it in 1515 because it might spread Western learning.

Large numbers of people began reading as books and tracts became widely available. They included: the Bible as translated by Luther, the King James Bible (1611), the tracts on science by Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, the political thoughts of Moore (Utopia 1516), Machiavelli (The Prince 1513), philosophers like John Locke, and literature by Shakespeare (1553 to1616). Once these ideas moved off the press their power was limitless. Efforts by churches and traditionalist to thwart the growth of new ideas about the earth, the universe, and mankind were condemned to failure once the concepts hit the printing presses and a literate public.[106]

The first book off the new printing press was the Gutenberg Bible in 1455. This book held the words of a man scourged and crucified in about AD 33 in the backwater Roman province of Palestine (modern day Israel). This poor fellow died crucified between two criminals, was not of noble birth or any kind of government official. His burial place was a cave with a rock rolled over