Main Points

History is Now

Western Europe had a completely different experience of the Medieval Era compared to the East. When Constantine I Magnus ("the Great") moved the capital of the Empire from Rome to Constantinople, it gave a permanent expression to Diocletian's division of the Empire into Eastern and Western halves. His heirs would survive for another thousand years continuing Roman traditions and Roman power.

The East Romans expanded the role of the Church which became a secondary arm of governance at the Emperor's side bestowing God's blessing on all he did. And under the influence of the local Greek population, the East Roman Empire cultivated a very un-Roman love of learning which remolded it into the most advanced civilization in Europe. Through the ups and downs of wars against the Islamic powers, barbarian invasions, and court intrigue, the only Medieval powers which could boast a higher level of culture and power were the Muslim Arabs (630 - 945 AD) and the Tang Dynasty in China (624 - 907 AD). The East Romans would survive until 1453 AD when they were absorbed by the expanding Ottoman Empire.

By contrast, the fall of Rome was not even the triumph of barbarians over civilization because the invasions were not over. The barbarians who carved up Western Europe after the fall of Rome would spend the next 600 years fighting off Vikings, Muslims, Avars, Magyars, and a host of other invaders. Without the unifying power of Rome to secure the borders of Europe, Islamic pirates sailed up rivers in the Mediterranean and ravaged as far as Northern France and Germany, Avars and Magyars invaded from Asia and created states in the middle of Europe, and the Vikings raided and planted states all across the continent, from England to Constantinople, France to Russia.

The Germanic Conquest of Rome

China waged centuries of war with powerful and intractable barbarians, particularly the Xiongnu. In 100 AD, this finally paid off as the last of the tribes fled into Central Asia. These powerful tribes crashed into tribes further west and seized their territory. The losers fled yet further west. The flood of barbarians crashing into Europe was the end of this chain reaction. Europe would experience centuries of barbarian invasions sometimes relatively mild, but other times devastating. The first of the truly horrific invasions began when the Xiongnu themselves smashed into Europe in 372 AD. Europeans, however, would give them a new name, the Huns.

It is hard to express the deep impact the Huns had on the Roman Empire. The Germans that Tiberius had left on the other side of the Danube had now lived across the river and fought with the Romans for centuries. They had settled, ruled kingdoms, made Roman alliances as part of the ever shifting network of Roman – Germanic politics. While still barbarians to the Roman sensibility, the Germans were everyday absorbing more and more Roman culture and participating in a racially charged, yet fundamentally healthy relationship. In contrast, the Huns fell upon Europe like demons out of legend. A short Central Asian people, living on horseback, wearing little to no clothes much less armor, they wiped out cities and killed without regard for soldiers vs. civilians, men vs. women. Their cavalry was the most feared army of its day, and the only structure to their culture was the annual raiding season around which the life of the Huns revolved.

With the rise of the war leader Attila, they raided throughout the lands of the Roman Empire and were poised at one point to wipe out Rome itself. However, Attila inexplicably turned back and never besieged Rome after receiving an embassy from the Pope, one of the most mysterious turning points in Western civilization. The Hun menace would gradually fade, but they slaughtered and raped throughout Eastern and Western Europe with a feral ferocity unknown in Europe for centuries. They were sometimes thrown back by powerful alliances of Roman and German forces, and sometimes completely unchallenged as they sowed death and destruction.

In hindsight, the most important legacy of the Huns turned out to be their first. Rome first heard of these dreaded warriors when news reached them that a new group of barbarians had conquered the powerful Ostrogothic kingdom. The Ostrogoths fled west and in turn conquered the less powerful Visigoths. The Visigothic kingdom thus became a massive band of starving refugees in 376 AD. They desperately petitioned the Roman emperor, Valens, for succor and a place to settle inside the Roman Empire. In exchange they offered to serve the emperor and render military service. This was the largest group of Germans in Roman history to make such a request, but because much of Rome's military strength was derived from similar relationships with Germanic settlers, Valens granted their request.

Unfortunately, when the emperor left for the East to throw back other invasions, the local general betrayed the Emperor's agreements. He stole the Visigoths supplies to sell for his own profit and left the Visigoths to literally starve to death. Predictably, they rioted, slaughtering any Romans they found as vengeance and laid waste to the local region by foraging enough food to survive the winter. In 378 AD, Valens himself returned to put down the Visigoths. At the Battle of Adrianople, Valens fell. His death in battle saved him from seeing his army wiped out. Rome had many times survived the death emperors, survived threats to its borders, even regained Roman territories that had been stripped away. But Adrianople effectively broke the Roman Empire – it was Rome's last major battle.

The Visigoths were eventually appeased into signing a profitable peace treaty by Theodosius I in 382 AD; primarily because they could not be defeated. However, the Visigoths never trusted the Romans and their success against the Romans in battle had not given the Visigoths any respect for Rome; Roman / German relations were generally rocky, however, this was unusual. It was the first time Rome had made peace with a tribe that actively distrusted and hated it; Rome's German allies sensed (correctly) that the new treaty demonstrated Rome's weakness, not her strength or wisdom.

Theodosius I, by various political circumstances became the Emperor of both East and West. He was the last emperor to rule over an undivided Empire, an event long after held to be the last bright spot in Roman history. Sadly, it had nothing to do with his ability to rebuild the Empire, though his peace treaty with the Visigoths was the last calm the Romans would ever enjoy in the West. It was Theodosius I's statement that defending the empire was no longer of primary importance. On the contrary, Theodosius I was too busy earning the name by which Catholics remember his to this day, Theodosius the Great. Rather than put down rebellions, he had Christians to kill, as long as they were the right (or more specifically the wrong) kind of Christians. Theodosius I earned the love of the Church and his subjects by declaring Nicene Christianity the official state religion in 380 AD. The move authorized the Nicenes to violently suppress Arian Christians and other sects. If the unraveling of the Roman Empire was not important to him, here at least was an idea he could get behind. In the future Christians would be on both side of religious persecutions as sects vied against each other for orthodoxy and power.

Theodosius died in 395 AD. His two sons inherited the empire; Aracadius, the senior emperor in the East, literally did nothing with his reign even as Western Europe collapsed. In the West, Honorius ruled little better. He was dependent on his Germanic general (and father-in-law), Stilicho, who had too few troops and too many unruly tribes to contain. Despite successfully throwing back a barbarian invasion in 406 AD, the Vandals and Alans responded by abandoning their post. Assigned to protect Gaul, they decided that Rome was not the Rome of yesteryear; they violated their treaties and decided to seize Spain instead. When they had acquired all the plunder they desired, they settled down erecting their own independent kingdoms. Effectively, 406 AD is the year that the Germanic tribes began carving up the Roman empire.

Stilicho was not idle, however; he was fighting court intrigue and trying to gather a force to put down the rebellion. Like Theodosius I, however, the court considered ruling Rome to be secondary to stamping out the Arian heresy. In 408 AD, they convinced Honorius that Stilicho's support for Arianism marked him as a traitor, and he was executed. It is difficult to imagine how deeply the court believed in their internal religious war. They were not stupid, they knew exactly what Stilicho's death meant; they simply cared about murdering Arians (especially court favorites) even more. With Stilicho's execution, preparations for the campaign to Spain were scrapped almost immediately; everyone knew there were no competent generals to lead it. Thus Spain was lost to the empire for good. It was not lonely for long.

When the Visigoths learned that Stilicho was dead, they decided to take up their grudge against the Romans in open warfare once again. Led by their king, Alaric, they marched on Rome forcing Honorius to seal himself and his army inside the city; despite the intense hatred of Stilicho there was a simultaneous understanding that they had no way of facing the Visigoths in battle without him. The Visigoths accepted a massive ransom to leave the city alone in early 409 AD. However Alaric, like most of his people, hated and despised Rome. In his heart, Alaric and the Visigoths wanted war; they didn't want Rome's money, they wanted to take revenge upon the Romans. So only a few months later, he returned to Rome. Rome knew the threat posed by Alaric, and at first tried to outlast him by accepting Alaric's terms again. This time, however, the Visigoths were not in the mood to keep the peace. It took several uneasy months of "cooperation", but they finally found a way to push the Romans too far, and the truce collapsed.

Thus in 410 AD, the Visigoths laid siege to Rome, a city once considered impregnable because of its walls. Given its history, the siege was over quite quickly. Alaric conquered Rome and plundered it, though the mythical importance of the city was clearly not lost on the Visigoths. There was no mass slaughter, there was no brutal rape. The Visigoths claimed their title as conqueror, and stripped the city of everything they desired, but that was all. Their sack was respectful for the period. Yet, it was the first time Rome had fallen to a conqueror since its sack by the Gauls in 390 BC; its conquest shook the Roman world. Or at least, everyone except the Emperor Arcadius in the East.

The Germanic tribes were responsible for the defense of large sections of the empire. What the Alans and the Vandals had started in 406 AD now became a free for all. The Germans decided that the Roman Empire was theirs to do with as they pleased, and they carved up Western Europe among themselves. Each tribe surged across the continent trying to seize the best territories they could hold. The succeeding Roman emperors did what they could, but order could not be reestablished and chaos reigned as the various armies would raise states in the morning only to see them conquered in the night. A patchwork of states finally started to stabilize around 507 AD. Only the greatest of the states survived, the mightiest of the warriors. And the Roman Empire was not among them.

A Germanic general, Odoacer, deposed the last Emperor of Rome, the boy emperor, Romulus Augustulus. The boy was so agreeable and well liked that he passed the rest of his life on a Roman villa in the countryside and lived to a ripe old age. But while Constantinople would continue to call itself the Roman Empire for centuries, the Roman Empire in Western Europe formally died with his deposition in 476 AD.

All Roads Lead to Rome

When everything finally settled, the Visigoths ruled Spain, the Ostrogoths ruled Italy, and the Franks ruled Gaul. The march of the Franks pushed several of the smaller tribes, the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, out of the European mainland; they invaded and conquered the Celts of Britain and historical records in England vanish for the next two hundred years.

The Germanic tribes who inherited Europe were only somewhat civilized, almost completely illiterate, but were generally impressed with the products of Roman civilization. They had been gradually absorbing Roman traditions for hundreds of years. They also converted to Christianity, and largely accepted the authority of the Pope in Rome. Though only loosely a leader, he had the best claim to ruling Western Europe if anyone did. Part of the Pope's allure was the ability of the church to intercede with God for the spiritual well being of the new rulers. His ability to stop the Huns from sacking a nearly defenseless Rome in 410 AD didn't hurt either.

This is the Low Medieval Period, sometimes called the Low Middle Ages or – influenced by the self-aggrandizing historians of the Renaissance – the Dark Ages. The reason for this characterization is simple; for the next 600 years it was really hard to be a European. Islamic corsairs and slavers raided the Mediterranean far up the rivers attacking settlements in the heart of the continent. Vikings would raid or conquer states along the coasts or striking over land. Nor were the barbarian invasions over, and Asia continued to pour tribes and nations into the chaos raging throughout Europe.

The worst of these invasions came in 607 AD, and even the church could not stop the new terror that invaded Europe. In 551 AD, a confederation of East Asian tribes, the Juan Juan Confederation were expelled from China. By 560 AD, they had invaded the Balkans where they enter European history. They became known as the Avars and they invaded Central Europe. In 607 AD, they founded a brutal central Asian Khanate in the heart of Europe (roughly centered on Germany) and continued to expand it over the next 200 years.

If this was not enough, in 633 AD, the Arabs stormed out of Arabia bringing their dynamic new religion with them, Islam. In 636 AD, the forces of the East Roman empire met them and the two massive armies encamped on opposite sides the the River Yarmuk in Syria, each waiting for some advantage. After two months of stand off, a great sandstorm burst out of the desert and engulfed the armies. The winds blew up over the Arabs, who forded the river en masse. With sand being driven into their eyes, the Romans could only fall before the Arab swords or turn and flee. The Romans would never recover Syria or Palestine and soon after Egypt moved into the Islamic sphere of influence where they remain to this day. For the next hundred years, the Umayyad caliphs would storm across North Africa, invade Anatolia, build the most powerful navy in the Mediterranean and twice lay siege to the walls of Constantinople itself. Constantinople's survival was the first check to the Arab expansion and likely the only thing that prevented the destruction of Christianity.

Then in 713 AD - with the Avars still comfortably ensconced in the middle of Europe and annually raiding their neighbors - the Muslims invaded Spain from North Africa and conquered the Visigoths. With no Constantinople in their way, the Christians united to try to fend off the Muslim advance through Western Europe. The Frankish king's "Mayor of the Palace", Charles, led a coalition against a massive Umayyad army at the Battle of Poitier, France in 732 AD. Charles emerged victorious and was forever after known as Martel "the Hammer". However, they were not able to expel the Umayyads from Spain which would be ruled by Muslims for the next 800 years. In 751 AD, the son of Charles Martel, Pepin III, seized the throne of the Franks, deposing the last Merovingian king with tacit support from the Pope, inaugurating the Carolingian Dynasty.

Pepin's son, Charles, proved to be a fantastic general and war leader whose armies established the first true empire since the fall of Rome. He was called Charles the Great, but even today his name is rendered in the original Latin, Charlemagne. In 791 AD, Charles crushed the Avars, at last putting an end to their devastation of Europe. He conquered recalcitrant barbarians on the Eastern borders of Europe, laid siege to the Muslim cities of Spain, forced Italy to pay homage to the Pope and supported the Church consistently throughout his reign. Despite being illiterate himself, he patronized scholars and artists and helped resurrect an interest in learning and culture for several generations.

And so the Pope decided to push its young defender into the limelight; in Constantinople the previous emperor had died and his wife had ascended the throne. The reign of Irene was not without serious problems; however, in Constantinople she was simply unpopular. On the other hand, to both Charles and the Pope, by her sex alone, no woman could claim the imperial robes. So despite the acceptance of the entire East Roman empire, when Charlemagne knelt to receive the Pope's blessing on Christmas day 800 AD, the Pope surprised Charlemagne by crowning him Holy Roman Emperor. While Charlemagne may have held hopes of marrying Irene and exerting his title in practice, nothing came of it and yet the dream of the Roman Empire lived on as evidenced by the fact that while he did not want it, Charlemagne never rejected the title. However, the difference between the Romans and the Germanic tribes became all too clear on his death.

Among the Germans, the empire was not an institution, not a thing, but merely a piece of property. At the Treaty of Verdun in 840 AD, Charlemagne's grandchildren therefore divided his empire up as their inheritance, Louis inheriting Germany, Charles inheriting France, and Lothar inheriting the border region between. Most of European relations for the next thousand years or more can be understood as the war between France and Germany over this border territory. The collapse of Charles's empire came at exactly the wrong time. In 793 AD, the Vikings conducted their first raids in England. By 825 AD, they had conquered the country only to be stunningly thrown back by the unexpected resurrection of the Saxons. Under Alfred, King of Wessex, afterward known as Alfred the Great, Wessex regained most of England and preserved the Christian culture of the Saxons. Nevertheless, the Vikings continued to raid throughout Europe, the Mediterranean, and even the North Atlantic from Iceland all the way to Vinland which was most likely somewhere in Canada.

In 862 AD, they founded the city of Novogrod in Russia and conquered the local populace. Though they would eventually adopt the local Slavic customs, the state they formed became Kievan Rus, the ancestral seed of modern Russia. The Vikings were such ferocious fighters that they established new kingdoms and principalities in France, Sicily, and the Mediterranean. The East Roman Emperors thereafter formed a new elite personal bodyguard, the Varangian guard, composed entirely of Vikings. By the same token however, Kievan Rus became an implacable enemy to Constantinople, opening a second major front for the East Romans while they were still locked in a life or death struggle with the Abbasid Caliphate of the Middle East. The Magyar invasion of 899 AD added to the turmoil though they were eventually defeated.

For Europe though, the invasions were finally winding down. Though wars were common and barbarians not unknown, more and more the wars the Europeans fought were against each other. Plus, the most implacable of the barbarians were finally growing more sophisticated and settling down. Vikings states emerged from Scandinavia, to Russia, to France, to Sicily. The last great invasion of the Vikings was repulsed by the English in 1066 AD at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. The Magyars finally planted roots, founding the nation of Hungary. The Seljuk Turks conquered the Arabs in 1038 AD and thereafter the Muslim Empires had their own problems. And the worst of the invaders, the Avars, we have already seen were crushed by Charlemagne himself circa 800 AD. The map of Europe looked nothing like it once had, and mighty powers like the West Romans had fallen; but after 800 years of barbarian invasions, Europe was finally getting a rest.

Europe Recovers

The result was the resurgence of Europe as it moved into the High Medieval Period, sometimes called the High Middle Ages. There was no secret to European success, for the first time in almost a millenia they no longer had barbarian invaders ravaging kingdoms and countryside. The old political entities washed away, but linked by Christianity, the continent survived. The dream of Roman empire again reared its head as the emperor of Germany, Otto I, succeeded in having the Pope name him Holy Roman Emperor in 962 AD. The Holy Roman Empire would last until its destruction at the hands of Napoleon in 1806 AD. A new dynasty, the Capetians, was founded in France in 987 AD. And in 1066 AD a descendant of the Vikings, William Duke of Normandy conquered the last Saxon king of England at the Battle of Hastings. These states began to develop in earnest, learning in forms acceptable to the church was again in fashion and kings and nobles were usually educated in reading and writing.

Yet this was hardly a rosy period. Most rulers though more sophisticated than their predecessors, were "educated" primarily in the arts of war. Christianity was put primarily to the use of serving the secular interests of whoever had the local ability to control it. And states were still fledgling entities held together by the personal magnetism and power of their leaders. The Holy Roman Empire was best described by Mark Twain who summed it up thus, "It was neither Holy, nor Roman... nor an empire." The Holy Roman Emperors first battled for status against the Popes for control of Europe and lost; they also divided government control into feudal estates which typically functioned wholly independently except when faced down by the very strongest of emperors. France, Germany, and England were frequently at war with each other, and the Holy Roman Empire was in a constant state of turmoil as its emperors fought (pretty unsuccessfully) to exert authority over their vassals.

The irony of course, is that this warfare was generally much more stable than the barbarian invasions. When cities were attacked they were seized and used to enrich the conqueror, not destroyed. Cities might be traded back and forth and the short term dislocations and damage was significant, but over the long term cities grew larger and more sophisticated. The second great irony is that the cause of the emergence of Western Europe was almost directly attributable to the collapse of Eastern Europe.

The Fall of the East Roman Empire

In 1054 AD, a Papal mission to Constantinople confirmed what everyone had long known – the Eastern and Western churches had grown far apart just as the Eastern and Western emperors fragmented political rule. While the delegation had no formal authority, they were so outraged that they shook the dust of the city off their feet as they left and pronounced it in schism. It is a measure of how far apart the churches had moved that despite lacking any official stamp, no one in either church even bothered to challenge it. Thus 1054 AD marks the Great Schism when the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches (in)formally split. This would have grave consequences and threaten the existence of Western civilization 400 years later.

In 1071 AD, the Emperor's nobles abandoned the field against a massive Turkish army rather than support him at the Battle of Manzikert. More disastrously, they called on the Turks for support in settling their own disputes which allowed independent Turkish war leaders to lay claim to all of Anatolia which passed into the Islamic sphere of influence. As the heartland, breadbasket, and primary recruiting grounds for the army of the East Roman Empire, 1071 AD marked the end of the East Roman Empire as a powerful state in Europe.

Desperate to retake Anatolia, the Emperor called on the West for mercenaries to supplement the armies it was no longer able to recruit. At first the nations of Western Europe refused to send support, but the current Pope was actually more outraged by the Muslim possession of the holy places than of the East Roman Schism. He launched the first Crusade, much to the shock and disapproval of the East Romans; the Crusaders naturally had little interest in Anatolia where Constantinople felt they would be useful. Nor did the Emperor have any interest in religious zealots stirring up anti-Christian feeling among the tolerant Muslims, which is exactly what doomed the Crusades.

Nevertheless, the devastation that the Turks had wrought upon the Arab Middle East became graphically clear. The once united and powerful states built by the Arabs proved unable - and in many cases uninterested - in helping their fellow Turks from attack. Good luck and Islamic disinterest allowed most of the coast of Syria and Palestine to collapse before the armies of the First Crusade in 1095 AD. For the next two hundred years crusaders would launch expedition after expedition in a vain attempt to hold what were already stunning gains and only succeeded in stirring up larger, less tolerant Islamic states which ultimately eliminated them.

On the one hand the Crusades were barbaric, savage, and remorseless attempts by Christians to massacre as many "enemies of God" as they could get within reach of their swords. It was a deeply disturbing episode in European history that demonstrated the difference between the violence wrapped up in Christianity especially when compared to Islam of the same period, or Buddhism in China. Christian and Islamic sources largely agree on the history of the Crusades; the Muslim historians writing with horror while Christian historians wrote with glee. The European's conduct in the Middle East demonstrated clearly that under the influence of religion, their behavior was virtually identical to the Turks or the Mongols who crashed into the Middle East around the same time.

On the other hand, it was also the most graphic display that Europe was ramping up to assume a place in global leadership. During the Renaissance the Indians and Chinese would turn completely inward and focus on themselves - though for different reasons. This simple outlook, unique to Europe, is the fundamental reason why Europe emerged as the dominant global power in later centuries.

In the West too, crusades helped to beat back the Muslims in Spain until only a small stubborn outpost around Granada held out. Disastrously, however, most Christians felt the Muslims were less despicable than their traitorous East Christian cousins. Led by Venice, a group of these nobles launched the Fourth Crusade in 1204 AD against Constantinople, already weakened and now besieged by new sailing ships which were sailed up to the great walls. Using their masts as siege towers, they rained arrows down on the defenders, and took the sea walls of the city. The Europeans finally did what 600 years of Muslim conquests could not... sack and plunder the riches of Constantinople.

The humiliated city suffered under the Latin emperors until the rump of the East Roman empire reclaimed their ancient capital. The days of East Roman glory were already long gone but the sack of Constantinople ended even the vestiges of respectability. The microscopic state that survived lasted for another 250 years. They accepted vassalage to whatever Muslim lord was most powerful at the moment, until Constantinople was finally... almost mercifully, conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 AD. Thus, while the worst of the barbarian invasions of Central Asia were eliminating the Muslims and the Chinese, the East Romans buffered Western Europe from much of the damage.

In 1241 AD, the armies of Eastern Europe were massacred at the hands of the Mongols, but wars over the succession put an end to the campaign. While the Mongols were the worst barbarians ever to invade Europe, the important mark which the Mongols left on Europe is that unlike the Xiongnu or the Juan Juan which devastated Europe, the Mongols were basically absent. Aside from Russia which was conquered, the Mongols never again campaigned against Europe. Thus while the Middle East was devastated, China was conquered, and even India disrupted, the Europeans gained the leadership of world civilization in large measure because the Mongols wiped out all their competition.

The Mongols did have one other traumatic impact on Europe however. Their rule opened the trade routes from East to West, paving the way for the worst plague in world history. It began in China and spread all the way to Europe where it was called the Black Death and shattered European nations, communities, homes, and demographics from 1347-1351 AD. Succeeding rounds of plague continued to recur in different localities for decades. Between the Black Death and the collapse of Christian power at Constantinople in 1453 AD, the confidence of Western Europe was shaken. Yet this proved to be an important step forward for a Europe that was already transforming. And with everyone from kings to commoners questioning the natural order, the Europeans began to work out their issues in art; one of the reasons we can trace the evolution of the ideas which were about to be unleashed, because they are documented in some of the most beautiful statues and paintings in world history.

Emergence of the Renaissance

Medieval artists had raised the great Gothic cathedrals, structures far larger and more complicated than anything attempted by the Rome. Even now they found patronage, but in cosmopolitan Italy a revolutionary artist named Donatello brought the first winds of change by adopting ancient Roman models for his paintings and sculptures in 1411 AD. Soon others were copying his work and his models. This dynamic change in Italian art was the visual arm of a cultural move to reach back and study the classical arts; this included embracing classical models of education in contrast to the Medieval church university training. Buoyed by the extensive urbanization on the peninsula and the dynamic and rich economy that came from facilitating most of the trade throughout Europe, the Italian Renaissance was in full swing developing new artistic rules from classical study and models. Then, at the exact moment that the lost classical past was becoming the fashion for all good Italians, hundreds if not thousands of Greek scholars and all the books they could carry with them poured into Italy following the 1453 AD Ottoman conquest of Constantinople.

Even earlier, much Islamic learning had penetrated Christian Europe. While there were many in Europe who believed Muslims to be unholy devils, a number of rulers disseminated much of Arab learning, including the "Arabic" (actually Indian) numerals. The Italians, as great merchants in international trade, dealt extensively with the Muslims. These were all important signals that things were changing and the learning was once again on the rise. These served as the fuel for one of the greatest flowerings of learning and education in world history, on par with the Warring States period of Ancient China, but even more important in its consequences, because a German bookmaker now struck the match which set Europe ablaze.

For over a millenia, scribal monks and Roman scholars had been writing and copying material by hand, usually on parchments (specially prepared animal skin, basically a thin stiff variation of leather) which were very expensive and in limited supply. In 1455 AD, three critical inventions came together in Germany for the first time in world history. Johannes Gutenberg created his own printing press which allowed him to mass produce copies of a particular page and build up entire books this way - though the Chinese had developed the same technology hundreds of years before.

Second, paper was introduced from the Middle East, a much cheaper material than parchment and it could be produced more easily and in larger quantities; though again, the Chinese had beaten the Europeans to the invention by centuries. Gutenberg now combined these inventions with moveable type made of metal. Chinese has thousands of characters and so when Chinese printed on paper they did so with great wooden blocks into which text or illustrations had to be hand cut. Gutenberg's movable type consisted of metal frame, called forms, which had empty rows of framework. Into each row metal stamps with a particular letter, called type, were inserted to create a line of text. Called movable because they could be removed and reused for other pages, Gutenberg's press effectively mass produced book making. Suddenly books were no longer so expensive that only the wealthy could afford a small library. The growing cities boasted an urbanized middle class that was literate and eager to embrace the power of new knowledge. And so it is 1455 AD that marks the beginning of the Renaissance in Europe.