What Ended the Middle Ages
Many causes over three centuries opened a new period in world history and ended the Middle Ages: the failure of the Crusades; Europe's growing familiarity with Islam; the fall of Constantinople, which ended Europeans' pleasant dreams; the rebirth of the culture and civilization of the pagan classical peoples; the growth of commerce through the voyages of Henry the Navigator, Columbus and Vasco da Gama; the rise of the merchant class, whose finances strengthened central royal government; the growth of national states that fought the papacy's supranational authority; Luther's triumphant revolt against the popes; and the art of printing.
The World of Manuscripts
Before Gutenberg, education and learning lay almost entirely in the hands of the Church. Books were precious, and copying was a toilsome job, often careless and full of errors. Few authors found many readers before they died. They lived by teaching, joined orders of monks with a stipend from the wealthy, or took posts in monasteries. They received little or nothing from the publishers who copied their works, and even if a publisher paid, the author kept no right in them.
Libraries were many but small. Monasteries, cathedrals, schools and some towns kept small collections that seldom exceeded three hundred volumes. Books were locked in closed rooms, and some were chained to desks or church lecterns. Charles V of France had a library famous for its number of books: nine hundred and ten volumes. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, had six hundred, and the library of Christ Church at Canterbury, the largest outside the Islamic world, had two thousand volumes in 1300 (the book's figures). In England the best-known library was that of Richard de Bury of St. Edmunds, who in his Philobiblon (1345) spoke lovingly of his books.
As schools multiplied and literacy rose, so did the need for books. The commercial class found literacy useful in trade and industry, and middle- and upper-class women found, through reading, the world of romances and thrilling stories. By 1300 the age in which only clergy were literate had ended.
Paper and Ink
The urgent public demand for books, more than anything, along with the growing abundance of paper and the invention of an oil-based ink, opened the way for Gutenberg. Muslims set up papermaking factories in Spain in the tenth century and in Sicily in the twelfth. The industry passed to Italy in the thirteenth century and to France in the fourteenth, so that by the time printing appeared, papermaking in Europe was a hundred years old. As linen cloth became common in the fourteenth century, its cast-off scraps became cheap raw material for paper. The price of paper fell, and its availability, together with rising literacy, set the stage for printed books.
Printing Before Gutenberg: China, Korea and the Islamic World
Printing as stamping and sealing is older than Christianity. Babylonians impressed words or symbols on brick, and Romans and many other peoples on coins. Potters stamped designs on pots, weavers on cloth, and binders on book covers. Rulers of antiquity and the Middle Ages who sealed documents with their seals were in effect printing. The same methods were used to make maps and playing cards. Printing with letters, designs and pictures from wooden or metal blocks goes back in China and Japan to the eighth century A.D. and even earlier. The Chinese printed paper money by this method before the tenth century. Block printing appeared in Tabriz in 1294 and in Egypt about 1300, but Muslims preferred calligraphy to printing and so, like other cultural phenomena that came to the West from the East, did not develop it.
Movable-type printing, that is, printing with separate, transferable characters for each word or letter, existed in China long before, from 1041. In 1314 Wang Zhen used about 60,000 wooden characters to print a book on agriculture. He first tried metal types but found that metal molds did not take ink as well as wooden ones. Movable type was neither suitable nor advantageous for a language that had no alphabet and some 40,000 separate characters. So block printing stayed common in China until the nineteenth century. In 1403 a Korean emperor printed many books with movable metal type. Characters were carved on hard wood, molds were made from them in clay, and the metal for the type was cast in these molds.
Holland or Mainz?
In Europe, movable-type printing may first have developed in Holland. According to Dutch tradition, dating from 1569, Laurens Coster of Haarlem printed a religious calendar with movable metal type in 1430, but this tradition is uncertain. We hear nothing more of movable type in Holland until 1473, when Germans from Cologne set up a press at Utrecht. Those men must have learned the new method at Mainz.
Johann Gutenberg
Johann Gutenberg was born about 1400 at Mainz into a well-to-do family. His father's name was Gensfleisch, but Johann preferred his mother's family name. He spent most of the first forty years of his life in Strasbourg, where he seems to have experimented with cutting and casting metal type. About 1448 he became a citizen of Mainz. On 22 August 1450 he made a contract with Johann Fust, a wealthy goldsmith, pledging his press to Fust for 800 Dutch gold coins, later raised to 1,600. An indulgence issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1451 was probably printed by Gutenberg, and surviving copies bear the earliest printed date, 1454.
In 1455 Fust demanded repayment, and Gutenberg, unable to pay, gave up his press. Fust continued the work through Peter Schoeffer, whom Gutenberg had hired as a typesetter. Some believe it was Schoeffer who, from then on, improved the tools and technique of printing: for each letter, numeral and punctuation mark he made steel punches with the shape cut on the tip, which were struck into a metal matrix, and a larger mold held matrix and types in order.
The Gutenberg Bible and the Spread of the Craft
In 1456 Gutenberg, with borrowed money, set up another press. In it, that year or the next, he printed his first book, the famous and beautiful Gutenberg Bible, an immense work of 1,282 large two-column pages (the book's figure). In 1462 the troops of Adolf of Nassau sacked Mainz. The printers and their workers fled and spread the new art across Germany.
By 1463 there were presses in Strasbourg, Cologne, Basel, Augsburg, Nuremberg and Ulm. Gutenberg, one of the refugees, settled at Eltville and resumed his work. He struggled painfully against one financial crisis after another, until in 1465 Adolf granted him a church pension whose income supported him. About three years later Gutenberg died.
An Invention Whose Time Had Come
Without doubt, had Gutenberg never been born, movable-type printing would have been developed by others, since the age demanded it, and this holds of all inventions. A letter written in 1470 by Guillaume Fichet of Paris shows the people's warm welcome: a wondrous new method of printing books has been invented in Germany, and those who are masters of it, having learned the art at Mainz, are scattered across the world. The light of this invention will soon shine from Germany to every part of the world.
Some disliked it. Scribes protested that printing had taken away their livelihood. Aristocrats opposed it as cheapening the book and feared that the value of libraries, all made of manuscripts, would drop. Rulers and clergy were anxious that the art might spread destructive ideas. Even so, printing won its way. In 1464 two Germans set up a press in Rome; or, before 1469, two Germans opened a press in Venice (the book hedges on this). In 1470 three Germans brought the invention to Paris. It reached Holland in 1471, Switzerland in 1472, Hungary in 1473, Spain in 1474, England in 1476, Denmark in 1482, Sweden in 1483 and Constantinople in 1490.
Book printing flourished in Nuremberg through the Koberger family, in Paris with the Estiennes, in Lyons with Dolet, in Venice with Aldus Manutius, in Basel with Amerbach and Froben, in Zurich with Froschauer, and in Leiden with the Elzevirs. Soon half of Europe was reading, and love of books became one of the exciting elements of the Reformation era. A Basel scholar wrote to a friend that a cartload of classics, in the best Aldine editions, had just arrived from Venice: write at once and send money if you want any, for as soon as the load is emptied thirty buyers will rise up for every book. People only ask the price and will gouge each other's eyes out to get one. So the revolution of movable type went on.
What Printing Changed
To state all the results of this revolution is beyond the scope of this book, since it would require writing half the intellectual history of the modern world. Erasmus considered it the greatest of all inventions, though perhaps in that remark inventions such as language, fire, the wheel, agriculture, writing, law, and even the small invention of the common noun are left out. Printing replaced scarce private manuscripts with cheap and fast-growing numbers of texts. Printed copies were more accurate and legible than manuscripts, and so alike that scholars in different countries could cooperate by referring one another to particular pages of a particular edition. Often quality was sacrificed to quantity, but the first printed books were, in every respect, models for all printing and binding.
By spreading cheap books on religion, literature, history and science, printing made the public acquainted with these subjects and became the greatest and cheapest university, with its doors open to all. It is true that the Renaissance was not born of this noble art, but printing smoothed the way to the Enlightenment and to the liberal revolutions of the United States and France. It put the Bible in everyone's reach and ownership and prepared people to hear Luther's call to follow Scripture rather than the Pope, and afterward allowed rationalists to appeal from the Bible to reason.
Printing ended the clergy's domination over learning and education, and promoted vernacular language and literature, because Latin could not supply the number of readers that the spread of printing required. It eased international communication and the cooperation of scholars. It affected the quantity and quality of literature, since writers came to depend, in taste and in money, more on the middle class than on aristocratic and clerical patrons. And, after speech, it became the easiest means of spreading the nonsense that our world has so far known.