The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

The chief problem with the new plough, which had wheels on the front, was that the harness – which passed around the ox’s chest -was liable to strangle the animal. Around 900 A.D. someone thought of the answer: a rigid collar or frame that would transfer the strain from the chest to the shoulders. Together, these two inventions revolutionised agriculture, and so provided food for an increasing population. Increasingly large horses were developed – for war as much as agriculture – and this presented another problem: their hoofs tended to split when they were heavily loaded or pulling a great weight. The metal horseshoe provided the answer, at about the same time the horse collar came to Europe.

One of the biggest problems for early sea traders was that they had to wait for the wind to blow in the right direction. In the Mediterranean, the Carthaginians had taken advantage of the fact that the wind blows six months one way and then six months the other, to make their voyages in the proper season. The old sails were, of course, strips of square canvas. Then the Arabs invented a triangular sail that could be fixed to a movable boom; it could be moved around to catch the wind so the ship was no longer forced to sail the way the wind happened to be blowing. Mariners soon made the incredible discovery that they could actually sail into the wind by allowing the wind to strike the back of the sail. The triangular – or lateen – sail arrived at about the same time as the crusades, and it meant a sudden dramatic increase in commerce.

There was still the problem of steering. In the year before the birth of Francis of Assisi – 1180 – a travelling English monk came upon a magnetised needle that floated on a cork, and always pointed the same way. A century later, the Spanish king Alfonso the Wise -who had also commissioned a great chart of the stars – decreed that all his ships should carry the ‘magnetic compass’. Sailors no longer had to rely on the stars to navigate.

In the time of Charlemagne, someone realised that a handle could be attached to a circular grindstone, and that this device greatly assisted the sharpening of knives, scythes and ploughshares. This may have stimulated people in looking for new ways of using wheel-power. The simple watermill had been known since Roman times – the wheel with buckets, or slats of wood, to catch the water that poured down a sluice and turned the wheel. The Romans even knew about gears – that if a wheel had spikes sticking out of its circumference it could be made to interact with the spikes on another wheel. If the wheels were at an angle of ninety degrees, the second wheel could be made to turn a grindstone that would turn corn into flour. And the power could be varied by varying the size of the wheels. Around 900, the new interest in wheels led to the discovery that levers and cams could be attached to the drive-shaft, and that they could work a pump, power a trip-hammer or even drive a saw. So processes such as crushing sugar cane, hammering flax, pounding leather, grinding ore, could all be ‘automated’. It could even drive a bellows for a blast furnace.

Even the Church played its part in the story of invention. Monks had to wake at all hours of the night to say their prayers. One way of telling the time was to make a small hole in the bottom of a bucket and fill it with water; divisions could be marked on the side of the bucket to give a more accurate idea of how much water had dripped away. It was not too difficult to make the empty bucket tilt on a lever and ring an alarm bell. By the time of Marco Polo, there were highly elaborate water clocks with dials and scales. It was only a matter of time before someone realised that water was unnecessary. A heavy lead weight on a string could be made to turn a wheel, and this could be geared to other wheels to control the speed at which the weight fell. By the time Marco Polo’s memoirs were the latest sensation among cultured Italians, this new type of clock was already in use.

Now it is impossible for the human mind to solve a complicated problem and not to feel a certain delight in its own ingenuity and persistence. And this sense of delight, as we all know, is accompanied by a curious ripple of triumph and optimism, an exciting presentiment that obstacles are going to be overcome and that tomorrow will be in every way more interesting than yesterday. This is the feeling that marked the end of the Middle Ages. We call the period that followed the Rebirth – Renaissance – meaning that it was a rebirth of the ancient learning. In a more fundamental sense, it was the birth of the modern era.

So it seems typical that the most influential of the new discoveries – so far as the future of mankind was concerned – was a force of destructiveness: gunpowder. Gunpowder was invented in China some time around the year 1000, and seems to have been used for fireworks, but not, so far as we know, for destructive purposes. It is interesting to speculate how the discovery came about. Its chief ingredient is nitre – saltpetre. And in Europe at least its discovery came about by a rather curious process. Walls of farm buildings were often built with mud in which the hardening ingredient was cattle dung. Men would go and urinate against these walls, with the consequence that white streaks would form on the wall. This was nitre – potassium nitrate. Someone no doubt tried the experiment of tossing some of this crystalline substance on a bonfire, and observed that it made the wood burn with a new fury – it releases oxygen. The next step, which was probably made by some Chinese alchemist – for they had been at work trying to make semi-magical drugs and elixirs since the fifth century B.C. – was to find that, in certain proportions, nitre, sulphur and powdered charcoal will burn with a single bright flash, or – if confined in a tube – explode. (Joseph Needham has a long account of Chinese chemical experiments with saltpetre in Vol. 5 (part 4) of Science and Civilisation in China, but does not explain how its discovery came about. He promises more information in the so-far unpublished Volume 6.) So the Chinese made fireworks, and the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan seem to have learned about it from them and brought gunpowder to the west when they invaded the Kharismian Empire in 1218 A.D. By about 1250 the Arabs had invented the first gun, a bamboo tube reinforced with metal bands which would fire an arrow. And so man’s most dangerous invention before the atomic bomb reached Europe around 1300, and helped to blow apart the last remnants of the Middle Ages.

The warrior who was probably responsible for bringing gunpowder to the west has been described by one historian as ‘the mightiest and most bloodthirsty conqueror in all history.’ The Mongol Temujin, known to history as Genghis Khan, was born in 1167 in the wild steppe country to the north of China. The Mongols were not unlike the Red Indians of North America when the whites first encountered them: a large number of separate tribes, usually at war with one another. Temujin was the son of a famous warrior, Yesugei, who was killed by treachery on his way back from arranging his son’s betrothal to a girl called Borte (or Bertha). Yesugei’s tribe took the opportunity to expel the widow – fortunately a woman of strong character – and her children, including the nine-year-old Temujin. For years they lived in the wilderness, and it hardened them and made them ruthless – in his teens Temujin quarrelled with one of his brothers about a fish, and cold-bloodedly murdered him. Then their former tribesmen decided to forestall vengeance by taking him captive; after great hardship Temujin made a daring escape. He emerged from these experiences a formidable warrior whose strength was matched by cunning and foresight.

The steppe was full of feuding kings – or ‘khans’ – and Temujin made an ally of an old friend of his father, Torghril, khan of a tribe called the Kereits (a man who had achieved his position by murdering two of his brothers). And when, one morning, wandering horsemen descended on Temujin’s camp and stole his wife Bertha, Torghril rose to the occasion, and his warriors helped track down the kidnappers, who were surprised by a night attack. When Temujin discovered that Bertha was pregnant, he ordered the massacre of the whole tribe, including women and children. But – typically – he brought up the child as his own son.