The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (32 page)

They had magic, or so it must have seemed.
Their catapults were light and portable, and could hurl metal a full hundred metres from
anywhere in the field; there is no proof they had cannon, but they did not need them.
They had gunpowder to fire rockets and create smoke and confusion, to raise a true fog
of war. They also knew how to pitch burning tar at the enemy, and how to firebomb towns
and armies. In his encyclopaedia, Vincent of Beauvais reckoned they let loose a whole
series of evil spirits. Their courier services kept every part of the army informed and
they had signalling systems by flag and by torch; so they were always connected, and
their tactics could be complicated. Dividing their army into separate sections actually
gave them an advantage. They could swing around and harry and pretend to retreat so the
enemy would fall into traps.
⁷
They were everywhere on the other
side of the smoke, and they had spies all around, and they were ruthlessly disciplined.
Where Europeans worked by weight and mass and force, armies like battering rams made of
men and horses, ‘the Tartar fights more by policy than by main force’.

Or so John of Plano Carpini reported in the
1240s, having seen them at first hand; he considered them ‘like
devils … always watching and devising how to practise mischief’.
‘I deem not any one kingdom or province able to resist them,’ he wrote. The
more they advanced, the more absurd it seemed to imagine that Christendom could ever be
united as the Mongols were, that Church or Emperor or both together could rule as
effectively as the khans. Christendom
was
losing both authority and its identity. Confusingly, some of the Mongols also seemed to
be Christian, even to have chapels in their camps with bells ringing and psalms
chanted;
⁸
and the Mongols looked down on the Westerners not just as dogs but also
as ‘idolaters because they worship wood and stones when the sign of the Cross is
carved on them’.
⁹

It was hard to think straight about the
Mongols, which gave a new use for some very old and abject certainties. There was an old
legend that Alexander the Great had locked away a whole race of people in the mountains
of the Caucasus behind a great wall sealed with bitumen; so maybe these Mongols were
‘those Jews who were enclosed by the great king Alexander’. Mongols were
nomads, which meant they were landless, and Jews ‘had no proper land of their
own’; that was almost evidence. The year 1240 was the year 5000 in the Jewish
calendar, which was the due date for the coming of the Messiah according to some
traditions, which led some Jews in Germany to think that perhaps the Mongols were indeed
the ‘enclosed people’ come to save them at last. The name of King David was
mentioned. The Jews of Prague sold all they had and quit the city in 1235, expecting the
astonishments to come. It is possible the Mongols, who were excellent manipulators and
always prepared the ground before their attacks, were encouraging the rumours; there
were certainly a remarkable number of Mongol spies deployed along the Rhine and in
Bohemia.
¹⁰

Riot followed: Jewish houses burned and Jews
died. There were the usual blood libels, the usual Christian fury at the very idea that
the Jewish community might prevent a Jew converting,
¹¹
but there was also
a wider and terrifying idea: that all the outsiders in the world were conspiring
together against Christendom.

The alarm had practical results: around the
North Sea the rumours stopped the boats from Gotland and Friesland risking their brief,
regular haul across the North Sea to Yarmouth, so that herring was left unsold and
almost worthless in 1237–8, even when it was carted far inland, where people should have
been grateful.

But more than anything, the terror made
people think even more about the end of the world, which was already the usual and
obsessional subject.

The world survived when a comet drew a line of light across
the sky in 1066; all that happened was the Norman invasion of England. Nothing final
happened in 1096 when the Irish expected to be punished for their part in cutting off
the head of John the Baptist (they thought a druid called Mog Roth killed the saint);
there was terrible plague, but not terrible enough to undo all St Patrick’s good
work of conversion.
¹²
But in the 1240s the end seemed
truly and horrifyingly imminent, what with mankind coming close to the end of the sixth
age of the world, so it was calculated, and the unstoppable threat from the East.

The khans made apocalyptic minds think of
the Antichrist. The chronicler Roger of Howden painted him ‘expert in all the
false and wicked and criminal arts’, able to upset the whole natural order and
bring on ‘all the might of his devil’s power’. Men, especially
Franciscan friars, were fascinated by the Calabrian abbot Joachim of Flore, who had
worked out that the Antichrist was arriving in 1260 precisely; some of their associates
reckoned the very fact of a new prophet like Joachim was proof the world was ending,
that mankind was in the
dies formidandi
, the terrible days when evil runs wild
in the world and judgement is close.
¹³

The Franciscan friar Roger Bacon was much
alarmed by the prospect of dark magicians in the East, people with appalling knowledge;
he valued secret things, strange things alongside his respectable experiments, but he
wanted the secrets in the right hands and minds. He was sure the West would need all the
magic of the East to fight back. He wanted everything in the books of the East before it
was turned against the Christian West. In writing to the Pope, he didn’t just
boast about the twenty years he had laboured on such things, the two thousand pounds he
had spent on books, experiments, tables, but mostly on books; he also made promises. He
listed wonders: a flying machine, boats that moved on their own without sails or rowers,
an instrument three fingers long which could lift a man and his companions, even out of
a prison; he was clearly preparing for hostages and war. He said that ‘these
things have been made in our days’.
¹⁴

He proposed them all against the coming of
the Antichrist, the
darkest magician of them
all. He was absolutely sure that science was now an urgent matter.

He could not know that the Mongols did not
only have magic; they had politics. Their Ögedei Khan had long been a famous drinker,
even by Mongol standards, with servants whose only job was to count up his diet of
alcohol and a liver whose survival was almost miraculous. In 1242, just when he seemed
to have decided on moving as hard into Europe as his father had gone into Asia, he died
quite suddenly, so suddenly that there were rumours his wife had poisoned him. Once he
was gone, the Mongol nation was obliged to choose a new khan, and to do that they had to
assemble from the edges of Europe, from the edges of Asia, so the camps near Vienna were
rapidly and surprisingly dismantled, and for the time being the threat moved back east.
Pope and Emperor couldn’t save Europe, but drink did.

When the Mongols withdrew, they left behind
all the alarms and worries they had caused in the first place. Christendom was very
vulnerable, the world was still coming to an end, the Last Judgement was close, there
was magic about that the West did not share and it was an urgent matter to make sense of
all the changes that had happened in people’s minds over the past hundreds of
years. Those changes were coming to a crisis.

The world had not been exactly itself for
the longest time. We think we know the world with our senses, the stars we see, the cold
of a snake or the warmth of a cat, the likelihood of rain from a certain kind of cloud,
and when we think about such things we usually begin from what our senses tell us. We
examine what we know. In the times of the Mongol invasions, people thought rather
differently. They did not see and sense the world in its own terms; they saw it only
through a different dimension, what others had already written about it, what God might
be trying to say.

The world was more like a picture in a
church that had to be read, studied, interpreted and learned, or some set text whose
meanings had to be teased out. Any event might turn out to be a promise, or more likely
a warning, and everything would be clear after the event.
When the Vikings raided Lindisfarne, the great Alcuin
demanded what it had meant when, months before, a rain of blood ‘fell
threateningly on a clear day from the peak of the roof on the North side’ of the
church of St Peter in York, ‘the principal church of the entire kingdom’. He
was sure of the answer, of course; he could find it in his assumptions about how God
would adjust the world to give rewards or warnings. He wrote to the King of
Northumberland: ‘How can it not be thought that a blood price was coming down to
the people from the North?’
¹⁵

The idea of thinking of weather as a
phenomenon in itself, not the expression of some higher power, took another three
hundred years, when William of Conches, grammarian and natural philosopher, discussed
blood rain in his
Philosophia
.
¹⁶
He didn’t deal in miracles or
omens, but in a world that is mechanical and physical, in which the wind raises water in
droplets from the ground, which then fall back as rain; he had noticed that downpours
often follow intense heat, and he reckoned the sun’s warmth turns the coldness of
the earth to moisture just as fire melts ice. He saw that the same process could lift
living things into the air – tadpoles, fish and frogs – so they could rain down later
and look exactly like plagues. As for the colour of blood rain, he put that down to the
bright-red colour of heat, so when rain was hot and condensed it was bound to look very
much like blood.

A change has happened. Alcuin looked about
for meanings that he expected; William looked and thought about his experience of the
immediate world, and how it worked. Once men looked and observed, the next stage was
measuring, calculating, subjecting the world to the rules of logic rather than relying
on God’s interventions, or those of angels, or even demons.

Adelard of Bath, in the twelfth century,
wrote dialogues with an imaginary and inquisitive nephew who asked questions like: why
do green things grow out of the earth? ‘It is the will of the Creator,’
Adelard tells him, ‘that green things grow from the earth. But that doesn’t
mean there is no other explanation.’ He says later: ‘I do not want to take
anything away from God, because everything that is exists for Him and because of Him;
but things are not all random and
muddled.
When human knowledge advances, we should be listening to it.’
¹⁷

Adelard was ready to find things out by
experiments of sorts: to understand how veins and muscles work, he left a corpse in
running water until the flesh was washed away. He got the idea, it seems, from a magic
water jar belonging to some witch. He sometimes used observation rather brilliantly, as
when he claimed to know which part of the brain handled reason and which part did the
imagining; he had seen the changes in a man who had been injured in the front of his
head.
¹⁸
He disapproved of simple wonder, simple terror at natural things; he
dared to disagree with St Augustine’s insistence on feeling awe at the mighty
works of God instead of trying to see how the world worked. His nephew says thunder is
‘an object of wonder to all nations’, but Adelard insists on a simple
explanation: the collision of frozen clouds. ‘Look more closely,’ he writes,
‘consider the circumstances, propose causes and you will not wonder at the
effects.’
¹⁹

He did not find it easy to teach such
things. His nephew asks why he prefers the ‘opinions of the Saracens’, the
texts that were arriving in Arabic and Greek from Spain and the Middle East, to the
Christian ‘schools of God’. Adelard says the present generation is biased
against ‘modern’ discoveries and unfamiliar things; he’s afraid he
would not get a hearing for his own ideas; ‘therefore it is the cause of the Arabs
that I plead, not my own’.
²⁰
The Arabs had conserved
Euclid’s geometry and Aristotle’s will to investigate, and added Arab
astronomers’ sophistication about the irregular movements of the heavens, all of
which were unfamiliar and so ‘modern’ ideas; but their books were easy to
accept because they were still authorities to be studied and interpreted in the old,
familiar ways, as you might with the Church fathers and the Gospels. They were just a
different kind of old.

The bishop, scientist and teacher Robert
Grosseteste grew to believe in the thirteenth century that knowledge came from the mind
facing outwards to the world and making sense of it, and not from some miraculous
illumination from God. Knowledge of this world was worth while in itself. That sounds
startling from a senior priest, but it is not at all what we might think. The process of
investigating
the world, Grosseteste
thought, was also the glimpse of a trace of a glimmer of light, God’s light, so
that asking questions about the world might lead straight on to a sense of God and
Godliness. Science could easily fit into the very heart of a religious view of this
world, and even the next.
²¹

The point of view has changed. What began
with the kind of thinking we call superstitious or dark or plain medieval was beginning
to allow the very start of the modern world.

Take observation, for example: the hunger to
look hard and direct at things. That was needed for the quest to calculate the calendar
of the world, to find out in which age men were living, to work out when the end and the
Last Judgement were coming. The world had to be checked for signs to find out exactly
how much history was left. There is a tenth-century list of the signs of the last days
which went round Christian Europe: the sea flooding the land, earthquakes to make
mountains and valleys disappear, stars falling to earth, mankind going mad, universal
fire and, of course, a rain of blood. The world had to be watched for these things.
²²