1.3.C-technology in the Middle Ages

8/9/2019 1.3.C-technology in the Middle Ages

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TECHNOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES *

by

Lynn White, Jr.

The traditional historical picture of the Middle Ages (roughly from the 5th century A.D. to the mid-15thcentury) has been one of cultural decline, particularly in the early Middle Ages. These centuries, from the5th to the 9th, have therefore sometimes been called the Dark Ages. Yet such a view of the Middle Ages,and even of its early period, is false when viewed from the standpoint of the history of technology.

Medieval technology continued that of the Roman world. In the eastern half of the Roman Empire,Byzantium, the New Rome established in 330 by Constantine, enjoyed an amazing prosperity and vigor for a thousand years and more. Even when, in the 7th century A.D., the Arabs wrested Syria and Egyptfrom Byzantium, there was no "decline and fall": on the contrary, the very creative new Islamic civilizationincorporated and perpetuated the technical achievements of Greece and Rome.

The idea of the so-called Dark Ages is therefore applicable only to the western portion of theRoman Empire, but again, it is not in terms of technology. In the West and the turmoil of the Germanicinvasions led to a technological slump only in a few areas. The Romanized Celts of Britain, for example,were pushed into Wales and Cornwall by the fairly primitive Angles and Sacons (who were, however,superb goldsmiths), where they lived in such difficult circumstances that technical rejuvenation could notbe spontaneous. Eventually it came from the Continent, where culture never sank so low, despiteinstability, depopulation, and economic depression. A symbol of the general maintenance of skills in thebarbarian kingdoms is the tomb of Theodoric the Ostrogoth (d. 526) at Ravenna: it is capped by amonolithic dome weighing 276 tons which was barged some one hundred miles from Istria and loweredwith razor-edge precision onto a masonry drum.

When Roman inventions did pass out of use there was always a good reason. Roman roads wereso costly to maintain that even the wealthy Byzantine and Islamic empires decided that they were notworth the expense. The hypocaust, the Roman system of radiant heating by means of channels throughfloors and walls, used much fuel in proportion to results and did not respond quickly to the rapidtemperature changes typical of Northern Europe; so the Middle Ages invented chimneyed fireplaces andhot -air stoves which were cheaper and more flexible than hypocausts. In Gaul the Roman sometimesused a harvester, pushed by an animal, which chopped off the ears of grain and let them fall into acontainer; this wasted the straw. When medieval peasants developed a more intensive agriculture whichhabitually combined stock-raising with cereal production, the straw became valuable and what looked likea sophisticated machine was made obsolete.

Thus, any decline in technology in the early Middle Ages was more apparent than real. As wehave seen, a technology is responsive to social needs; the needs of the psychologically urbanized andpolitically centralized Roman Empire differed from those of the agrarian and politically decentralizedstates which arose out of the ruins of the Empire in the West. But technical skills seem to havediminished in no significant way. Instead, the changing conditions in the West stimulated technologicaladvance there.

_________________ *REPRINTED FROM: Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr. (eds.) Technology in Western

Civilization, Vol. I (Oxford Univ. Press: New York, 1967), Chapter 5, pp.66-791


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MEDIEVAL EAST AND WEST COMPARED IN TECHNICAL INNOVATIONS

The most curious fact about medieval technology is that while for many centuries both Byzantium andIslam greatly surpassed the West in commerce, political stability, and level of education, nevertheless, itwas the West which produced most of the major technological innovations.

There was, to be sure, a technological spurt in Byzantium during the 6th and 7th centuries: theamazing single-shell dome of St. Sophia was designed by the architect Anthemios of Trales in 532, whileabout 673 a Greek-speaking Syrian refugee from Muslim conquest, Kallinikos, invented Greek fire, apetroleum-based incendiary so efficient in burning enemy ships and siege machinery that its formula wasplaced under strict security by the imperial arsenal. Considering that Greek fire was in great partresponsible for Byzantium's military survival, it is strange that thereafter the medieval Greeks--so vividand sensitive in many areas of life--showed little interest in technological improvements. Similarly, theMuslims, while they borrowed useful skills from other cultures--paper-making from China in 751, for example--did not make notable contributions, so far as we now know, to mankind's technical repertory.

This is the more puzzling to our 20th century minds because Byzantium preserved ancient Greekscience, and from about 800 to 1200 Islam produced the world's greatest scientists. We today think of

technology as applied science, but until the 19th century the connection between science and technologywas slight. Science was for intellectuals trying to understand the nature of things; technology was for workers trying to do things; the notion that knowledge of nature gives us power over nature is old as anaphorism but recent in practice. Medieval Byzantium and Islam produced complex and subtle cultureswhich focused their energies on art, literature, religion, philosophy, and science, but were little concernedwith technical advances.

The contrast with the medieval West is striking and demands explanation. Certainly scientificinterests cannot account for it. The early medieval Occident continued the shocking indifference of paganRome toward Greek science. Not until the 11th century did Greek and Arabic science become availablein Latin, and another 200 years passed before Western Christendom assumed the leadership in sciencewhich Islam had held. The West's preeminence in technology thus precedes its primacy in science by

several centuries.

The victory of Christianity over paganism in the 4th-century Roman Empire had provided animproved psychological basis for technical innovation. The religion of the common man in antiquity wasanimism: every tree, stream, or mountain had its genius or particular spirit which had to be placatedbefore one cut down the tree, dammed the stream, or dug into the mountain for mining. In suchcircumstances, the Christian smashing of animism liberated artisans and peasants for matter-of-factexploitation of their natural environment. This change, however, had occurred throughout the late Romanworld, and while it helps to account for the eventual speed-up of technological development, it does notexplain why the West took the lead.

In Greco-Roman times educated men considered it beneath their dignity to work with their hands.

The Jews, however, were an exception: God on Sinai had commanded "Six days shalt thou labor, and onthe seventh rest"; the injunction to labor was as biding as that to relax on the Sabbath. Even the mostlearned rabbis acquired skills at a trade: St. Paul, who studied for the rabbinate, was also a tent-maker.In the 4th century, when Christianity became the official cult of the Roman Empire, it was so corrupted bythe influx of opportunists and conformists that monasticism arose as an effort to restore its primitive(largely Jewish) principle. The monks insisted that manual labor is an essential part of the spiritual life,and that "work is worship": laborare est orare. Their idealism, intelligence and energy made monasteriesthe chief points of cultural radiation during the next seven centuries. The monks were the first intellectual

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systematically to dirty their hands with physical work, and we cannot doubt that this combination of brainpower and sweat aided technological advance. But since the Greek monks worked as hard as the Latin,this again does not explain the distinctive vigor of technology in the West.

What elements can we identify as peculiar to the Occident? Four things may be suggested.

1. Among the Celts of Roman Gaul there seems to have been somewhat more inventiveness thanis detectable in any other part of the Empire. Perhaps this mood of innovation carried over into theWestern Middle Ages and expanded.

2. The Occident was much more deeply shaken by repeated invasions and chaos than were theByzantine and Islamic regions. There is reason to think that any change aids subsequent change. Thegreater agony of the West during the early Middle Ages, as the folk-wanderings of the Teutonic tribesgave way to the barbarian kingdoms, may well have corroded traditional ways so deeply that people weregenerally more open to change, including technological change, than they were in the more "fortunate"Near East, to the eventual great profit of the West.

3. In Greek Christendom an educated laity continued, whereas in the West culture declined to apoint where literacy was long a monopoly of the clergy. As a result, the Latin monks came to feel far more responsibility for preserving not only Christian but also pagan or secular culture than was felt by the

Greek monks, who could depend on Byzantine laymen to care for the latter. This meant that in LatinChristendom the working monks were closer to worldly concerns than was the case in EasternOrthodoxy. The Oriental monks have left us nothing comparable to On Divers Arts written in 1122-23 byTheophilus, a German Benedictine: this is the earliest European treatise giving specific technologicaldirections for a wide range of complicated processes. Theophilus was not only an expert in metallurgyand glass; he was learned in theology and wrote quite decent Latin. His mentality helps explain theWest's advance in technology.

4. Finally, in an effort to understand the technology of an age so permeated with religiousattitudes, we must note a basic difference between the theologies and pieties of the Greek Church andthe Latin Church. The Greeks have always made right thought , or "illumination," central to salvation,whereas the Latins atleast since the days of St. Augustine have put greater emphasis on right will, or

action. The Eastern Church has praised contemplation; the Western, activity. Technology involves doingthings, and the mood of the Roman Church fostered it by encouraging activism and practicality inOccidental society.

MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL CHANGE

If we consider the chronic physical insecurity of life in the early medieval West, it is not surprising thatmilitary technology made notable advances there. So long as a horseman had to cling to his steed bypressure of his knees, cavalry was used chiefly for bowmen and the movement of soldiers; the lancecould be wielded only at the end of the arm (or with two hands, making use of a shield impossible),because too violent a blow would unseat the rider delivering it. In the early 8th century the stirrup reachedthe Frankish kingdom, established by the Germanic tribes known as the Franks in what had been the

Roman province of Gaul. When combined with a saddle having a high pommel and cantle, stirrups makea single organism of rider and horse. The Franks saw that the lance could now be laid "at rest" under therider's armpit; the hand merely guiding the blow, which was delivered by the combined impetus of acharging stallion and warrior. The new method of mounted shock-combat involved a great increase in theviolence of warfare and indicated a shift from infantry to cavalry as the chief fighting force.While the Franks of the 8th century were very nearly the last horse-riding people to acquire the stirrup--ithad come from India by way of China--they were the first to realize its full implication for battle. There isno absolute determinism in technology: invention is not the mother of necessity. In 732 the Frankish

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leader Charles Martel saw a military potential in the stirrup which others had overlooked, and he actedupon his insight. Cavalry is much more costly than infantry, and circulation of coinage in the Frankishrealm was insufficient to support an enlarged cavalry out of taxes; so Charles confiscated vast reaches of Church lands and distributed them to retainers on condition that they hold themselves ready at hiscommand to fight on horseback in the new and difficult way. These mounted warriors became the basison which Charles Martel's grandson, Charlemagne (Charles the Great), enlarged the Frankish domaininto the Carolingian Empire at the beginning of the 9th century. When, a century later, the CarolingianEmpire disintegrated, this caste of endowed warriors picked up the fragments of political authority andestablished local rule. Thus the revolution in military technology brought about by the stirrup was theseed of feudalism and of the chivalric culture which the secular aristocracy of the later Middle Agesdeveloped.

The violence of mounted shock-combat led to development of heavier armor, heavier horses, newtypes of shields, and (in the 11th century) the crossbow designed to penetrate the new armor. (Thehistory of the crossbow is puzzling: the Chinese had it very early; the Romans used it chiefly for huntingbirds; but at the time of the First Crusade, 1096, the Byzantines considered it a Frankish novelty). Thenew Western military technology was superior to that of the Near East, and elements of it beganspreading to Byzantium and Islam even before the Crusades. One of the chief reasons for the eventualfailure of the Crusades was that the Muslims learned to fight in the European way.

From the later 11th into the early 13th centuries, military architecture was revolutionized in theWest. Often this is credited to Near Eastern influence, but the most careful scholars consider thequestion still open. One stimulus to better fortification was the development by Europeans, probably onthe basis of a Chinese hand-operated rock thrower, of a new and powerful type of counterweight artillery,the trebuchet, which quickly superseded the torsion artillery inherited from the Romans. In the 12thcentury French engineers produced Gothic architecture, an immensely ingenious system of thrusts andbalances using a minimum of masonry to enclose a maximum of space. It was so economical that themost ascetic monastic order to the time, the Cistercians, adopted it and spread it quickly throughoutEurope. The rapid and superb expansion of the art of fortification in the West in exactly this period wouldseem to reflect the same mentality applied to different problems.

THE EXPANSION OF AGRICULTURE

Until very recently agriculture has been the basic form of technology. In antiquity its production of surpluswas very low; it is a safe guess that well over nine-tenths of the population had to work the soil to supporta tiny fraction of humanity engaged in other occupations. Clearly, anything which increased productivitywas of major importance.

In late Roman times there were efforts, particularly in the northern provinces, to improveagriculture, but no coherent new system of cultivation emerged. By the middle of the 6th centuryhowever, some of the Slavic peasants were using a novel kind of plow very efficient for heavy fertilealluvial soils which were hard to handle with the older, two-ox scratch-plow designed for light soils. Theolder plow had merely dug the surface of the soil; in order to turn over the soil for planting, it was

necessary to cross-plow, that is, to plow the soil twice, the second plowing being at right angles to thefirst. The new heavier plow had wheels, a vertical blade (colter) to cut the line of the furrow, a horizontalplowshare, and a mouldboard to turn over the sod. Its friction with the dirt was so great that it had to bepulled, at least on newly cleared land or in sticky soil, by eight oxen. It attacked the earth so violently thatthe cross-plowing required by the scratch-plow was unnecessary, and sqarish fields gave way to longstrip-fields. Since the mouldboard normally turned the sod to the right and the fields were plowedclockwise, the strips tended to become low ridges favorable to field drainage in the wet climate of Northern Europe. Since few peasants owned eight oxen, co-operative plowing became usual. Likewise,

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since the fencing of long strip-fields was impractical, villages using the heavy plow divided the arable landinto fenced "open fields" embracing many strips which, even though individually owned, had to becultivated, planted, and harvested on a unified plan. The adoption of the new plow therefore helps toexplain the communal pattern of manorial life in Northern Europe.

Starting, it would seem, with the Slavs, the new plow and its related agrarian system spreadamong the Germans by the early 8th century, and were presumably taken to Britain in the late 9thcentury by invading Norsemen. Wherever these methods went, their ability to use the heavier and moreproductive river-bottom soils led to a vast cutting of forests and reclaiming of marshes for agriculturalpurposes: the face of Northern Europe was changed.

Paralleling and interlocking with the new pattern of cereal-growing was an improved type of cattle-raising. The Romans had not integrated stock-farming closely with agriculture,but had simply pasturedtheir cattle. Proof of this is the scarcity of Roman scythes. Scythes had been used chiefly for cuttinggrass for hay, which implies an intensive rearing of cattle and sheep, largely in barns, and aconcentration of their manure for later systematic fertilization of fields. In the Frankish age, scythesbecame common, and at the end of the 8th century Charlemagne tried to rename July "Haying Month." Inaddition to the having, after the harvest the village herd was turned into the open fields to browse on thestubble, incidentally leaving their droppings to fatten the next crop. Thus the northern medieval peasants

worked out a new system of food production more balanced and efficient than anything earlier.

By the later 8th century they had taken another stride, at least in the region, between the Loireand the Rhine rivers which was the heart of the Carolingian Empire. Land had normally been left fallowhalf the time to renew its fertility: the cultivated half of the arable was planted in the autumn with wheat,barley, or rye and harvested in the early summer. But now this "two field" rotation began to give way to a"three-field" system in which only a third of the land was left fallow. In the autumn another third wasplanted as before; but in the early spring the remaining third was planted in oats, barley, and legumes tobe harvested the later summer. The peas and beans were particularly important, both because their nitrogen-fixing ability strengthened the soil under the burden of this more intensive rotation, and alsobecause they furnished an increased quantity of vegetable proteins for human consumption.

Since the new spring planting required summer rains, it was generally feasible only north of theAlps and the Loire River. Where it could be adopted, however, it was so advantageous that it does muchto account for the great vitality of the North in the age of Charlemagne. By providing two sets of cropsand two harvests, the three-field rotation much reduced the risk of crop failure and famine. By distributingthe work of plowing better over the year, it enabled the plow team to accomplish more. Depending onwhether the fallow were plowed once or twice, (to turn under the green manure), a community of peasants, with any wasteland to reclaim, by shifting from the two-field to the three-field rotation couldincrease their production by either one-third or one-half.

The surplus of oats which could be grown in the spring planting of the three-field system is relatedto another major change in northern agriculture. In antiquity, oxen were adequately harnessed by meansof yokes, but the yoke applied to horses is extra-ordinarily inefficient, both because it strangles the animal

as soon as he tries to pull and because the point of traction at the withers is so high that the horse cannotthrow his weight into the task of pulling. About 800 A.D. the modern horse harness appeared in theCarolingian realm, consisting of a rigid, padded collar resting on the horse's shoulders and permitting himto breathe, and lateral traces or shafts placed so that the point of traction is effective. With this newharness a team of horses could pull four or five times the load they could draw with a yoke harness.

Hitherto the horse had been valued for its speed; the new harness made horse-power available inconjunction with that speed. The first evidence of habitual plowing with horses, who worked perhaps

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twice as fast as oxen, comes from Norway in the late 9th century. By 1100, horses were customarilydrawing plows, at least in favored regions, all the way from the English Channel to the Ukraine, andthroughout the later Middle Ages the horse steadily displaced the ox for farm labor. But this occurred onlyin Northern Europe, where the three-field rotation made possible, in the spring planting, the surplus of oats needed to feed many horses. The Mediterranean peasants could not shift from oxen to the moreefficient horses because, for climatic reasons, they could not produce enough oats.

The early Middle Ages then, witnessed, in Northern Europe, an agricultural revolution unparalleledsince the first invention of tillage. Its elements--the heavy plow, open fields, three-field rotation, and horseharness--accumulated and consolidated into a new agrarian system from the 6th through the 9th century.More than anything else the increased surplus of food which it produced accounts for the permanentshift, in Carolingian times, of the focus of European culture away from the Mediterranean to the greatplains between the Loire and the Elbe rivers. It accounts for the steady increase of population until thelate 13th century, when, because no further agricultural innovations had been introduced, the point of diminishing returns was reached and overcrowding began to worsen the living conditions of thepeasantry and undercut the boom in the general economy of Europe which had prevailed from the end of the Viking invasions, c. 1000, until 1300. During these three centuries, the surplus of food permitted anunprecedented growth of cities and an accumulation of capital best symbolized by the enormous Gothiccathedrals which towered over them and which were the pride of the burgher capitalists who created the

basic economic and political patterns of the modern West.

TRANSPORTATION DEVELOPMENTS

The Middle Ages likewise revolutionized transport, which made it possible to move the surplus food to thecities where it was needed. Thus technological innovations in agriculture and transportation, along withmore settled political conditions, made possible the renewal of town life from about the 12th century on,and hence the foundations on which modern civilization was ultimately to be constructed.The modern horse-harness, emerging c. 800, was essential to the use of horses not only for plowing butalso for hauling. However, the wear on a horse's hooves was greater in hauling over roads than it was intilling fields, and in moist climates horses' hooves grow softer than those of oxen. In the 890's theproblem was solved by the daring invention of nailed horseshoes, which appear almost simultaneously in

Siberia, Byzantium, and Germany. Iron shoes very quickly became habitual for ridden horses; but therewas another problem to be solved before horses could be used for heavy hauling. A horse could plowwith lateral traces attached directly to the plow because a furrow is straight. But with traces fasteneddirectly to a wagon, a right turn puts all the strain on the left trace, and vice versa, risking breakage of theharness and overturning the load. The solution, which equalizes the pull on the load, was thewhippletree, which appeared in the 11th century. Now, with an efficient horse harness, horseshoes, andthe whippletree, heavy hauling by horses was feasible for the first time; and in the early 12th century thehorse-drawn longa caretta (large cart), holding many people and large quantities of goods, emerged.

About the same time travel was made more comfortable through the development of the springedcarriage. Without springs, prolonged speed over rutted and potholed roads is unendurable; the essenceof the coach is suspension of the carriage body to cushion the jolts. The germ of this innovation appears

among the western Slavs in the 10th century. Four hundred years later this had become a suspendedbody holding at least six persons. That it moved rapidly is indicated by the fact that a man with bagpipeswas perched up on its rear to clear the road ahead; the ancestor of the coach horn and of the modernautomobile horn.

Water transportation has always been cheaper than land haulage, and the Middle Ages did notneglect this mode of transport. The essential invention for inland waterways, the canal-lock chamber

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seems to have been used at Bruges by 1236. But it was in salt-water navigation that the most significantimprovements were made.

As we have seen, man had early harnessed the power of the wind to drive his vessels throughsails. But how to go against the wind? Tacking into the wind was a great problem for square-sailedRoman ships. To be sure, fore-and-aft rigs had been applied to small skiffs since the first century B.C.,but not to large vessels, perhaps because their keels were not sufficiently deep to prevent lateral driftduring tacking. The lateen sail, well adapted to tacking, first appears on merchant ships at Marseilles inthe 6th century. Since lateen comes from the rare Latin word latinus meaning "easy, handy," linguisticevidence would seem to indicate that this new rig was probably developed in the western Mediterranean.

In antiquity, ships were constructed by first building up the shell of the hull out of planks firmlyattached to each other and afterwards inserting the skeleton of ribs. This produced a strong vessel, butthe process was slow and costly. Skin-diving archaeologists have found the wreck of a Byzantine ship inthe Aegean dating from the early 7th century still built in this way. We do not yet know when or whereduring the Middle ages our present system of ship-building, by first constructing the skeleton and thennailing on the planks, was developed. Certainly it reduced the costs of maritime commerce notably.

Another great advance in ship-building was the invention of the modern rudder. Early ships were

steered by lateral oars which were easily broken in storms and which, when large, were so awkward thatthey tended to limit the size of ships. In the early 13th century the North Sea area produced a new rudder hinged to the ship's sternpost and operated by a horizontal lever. This was capable of standing thebuffeting of great waves, and it could be used on vessels of any size.

Vessels could now be constructed strongly enough to venture into the open seas with safety, andthey could be steered against the wind. But how was the navigator to find his way when out of sight of familiar landmarks and when the sky was not clear enough to steer by the stars? Here the East was toprovide a technological aid for the West, for the magnetic compass presumably came from China. Itreached Europe in the 1190's, and within thirty years was in habitual use even as far as Iceland.Strangely, there is no evidence of it in Islam until 1232. The compass so profoundly affected the art of navigation that, for example, two round-trips annually from the Italian ports to the Near East were now

possible, whereas previously only one had been attempted. The returns on capital investment in shipswere greatly improved, and the safety of sea voyages enormously increased. By the end of the 13thcentury, Europe was beginning to contemplate using oceanic sea-routes. In 1291, two members of agreat Genoese merchant family, the Vivaldi, led a well-equipped fleet through the Strait of Gibraltar toopen the path to India around Africa. The expedition perished, but technological advances by that timehad reached such a point that anticipation of Vasco da Gama's historic voyage around Africa in 1498seemed not impractical.

ARTS AND CRAFTS

Warfare, agriculture, and transport then advanced technologically during the Middle Ages; what of industry?

There is no firm evidence that the water mill was applied in Europe (as distinct from China) to anytask save the grinding of grain until about 1000 A.D. The early 9th-century plan of the abbey of St. Gall inSwitzerland may indicate water-powered triphammers, but both their identification and their use isuncertain. About the turn of the millennium, however, it is clear that such devices were being employedfor fulling cloth, forging metal, and several other industrial processes. Thanks to the same inventionswhich facilitated hauling, the horse-mill, in which an animal walking in circles turned a vertical shaft towhich various types of machinery could be attached, also spread widely and with many applications.

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sixty years or more. Once it was accomplished, a technician in Milan immediately built weight-drivengrain mills on the analogy of the new clocks.

As early as 1260 Friar Roger Bacon was looking forward to an age of flying machines, motor boats, submarines, and automobiles. He did not know how all of this was going to be accomplished, buthe was confident that it could be done. Not only in its gadgetry but also in its mentality, the later MiddleAges provided the foundation for the subsequent structure of European technology.

Thus the conventional picture of the Middle Ages as a pause in mankind's struggle to conquer environment is inaccurate. Far from stagnating, medieval technology produced a revolution in man's useof energy resources, through the development of water wheels, windmills, and horse-traction; ittransformed the art of war by the new power it gave to cavalry and by the development of militaryfortifications; it increased man's capacity to wrest a living from nature by the use of the heavy-wheeledplow and the three-field system of agriculture; it enabled man to sail afar on the seas throughimprovements in ships and navigation; and it devised new tools and combinations of tools to make workeasier. Above all, it offered a new outlook toward technological innovation, which prepared the way for

the mechanical devices of the following period of Western history, known as the Renaissance.

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1.3.C-technology in the Middle Ages

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