Hopefully some of you medieval history buffs can help me understand this…
History often portrays Western Europe during the Middle Ages (with perhaps the exception of Moorish Spain) as backward and ignorant. The learned men of the time were mostly the clergy (maybe a few nobles?) So how did these “backward” and “unlearned” people engineer massive castles, catapults, trebuchets, and in later centuries guns and cannon?
“Clergy” doesn’t necessarily mean pacifist!
Some of them were the ‘military engineers’ designing these facilities. Many monasteries were also fortified, almost castles in themself.
Because "History" is bunk..
And yes, learned men were mostly in holy orders - but don’t confuse that with the idea they were all priests.
Although one can find some truth to both suppositions, neither is really true. The content of their education was different, but it was not trivial nor were the people who learned it stupid. Among nobleman, a fluency with classical literature and frequently knowledge of several languages was common. And depending on the era and class, knowledge of several forms of martial arts and/or military tactics would have been expected. Basic mathematics would have been included. This would have been the ordinary and expected education of a lay knight, armed merchant, or nobleman. Note that training was often very hands-on as opposed to classroom-based, but still effective for that. A merchant’s son could easily have been making his own deals in his early teens if not younger, and could have an extensive knowledge of the markets and his customers well beyond what modern-day data-mining can provide.
Ironically, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the above.
Masonry was a very well-respected (and well-paid) profession, and architects able to use it even moreso. Master Masons were among the most privileged of professions, with some spending much of their lives in the construction on a single massive structure. They needed a good feel for the stone, and worked by well-established rules-of-thumb. Experimentation wasn’t particularly unusual since everything was custom-built. Fortunately, castles are actually pretty easy to make in that sense: when it comes down to it, big thick stone walls aren’t all that difficult. The hard part was making sure the foundations were solid and that the wall wouldn’t lean improperly. Additionally, most castles were designed exclusively for defense, and there’s aren’t a lot of ways to do that.
Cathedrals - now those were hard. They really stretched the limit of materials, hence the flying buttress. Bridges, too. There were several famous bridge collapses. Then again, bridges have always been hard and even to this day we have some issues with them.
In any case, it’s easy to conflate the Dark Ages with the Middle Ages, but neither was an era of either ignorance or stupidity, or really even a timer when learning actually stopped or went backwards.
Even cave men had a class of technocrats who were in charge of making flint knaps, needles, animal traps and various balms and salves. You had witch doctors and old crones who held those titles basically because they were the smartest in the village. No reason why you can’t have the same kind of people in the middle ages; revolving around a king or chief, or forming their own guild or order.
But to be more specific, much of the engineering skills in Europe emanated from Egypt, than to Greece and then Rome. You know those countries were somewhat advanced in geometry and applied math. Easy to pick up by someone with smarts, even without formal education.
I knew that there must have been some connection to the Romans, as they also used siege weapons. Does anyone know if the old knowledge was preserved somehow? Maybe by the Church or the Arabs? On that note, does anyone know if the Crusaders obtained some engineering skills from the Arabs (aside from gunpowder, which is fairly obvious)?
Your answers so far are helping me to get a little more of a clearer picture. Keep them coming, please!
The discipline/science that was the most advanced in the Middle Ages was mathematics, which gave birth to its child, engineering–which discipline was the repository of an immense amount of practical knowledge.
When you consider that Isaac Newton lived in the 16th century but that he pretty much was the first modern mathematician, in contrast to the primitive understanding of medicine, biology, physics, and so forth that existed then, you can infer that even in the 13th (say) century, there existed a pretty extensive knowledge of mathematics and (therefore) engineering.
There’s sometimes an assumption that there was some semblance of Church-State separation in that era, and that’s really, really not the case. A bishop might don his armor, levy his troops, and march off to war, wading into the thick of battle and cracking heads in the service of his feudal lord. Indeed, it seems like about the only thing that a bishop couldn’t do in terms of military matters was use a sword: they were supposed to only use a mace, in order to avoid shedding blood. Just because these people were clergy doesn’t mean that they were cloistered, unworldly academics. Some of them were at the very forefront of the political machinations of the day, and then as now, sometimes that included war.
17th and 18th centuries.
Apparently people are very fond of using the Templars in “esoteric mystery” novels, but forget that there was such a thing as Military Orders when talking about history. Smalll wonder, if medieval history is often taught as it was taught to me: we barely scratched its surface locally, the rest of Europe did occasional cameos and… was there such a thing as the rest of the world, back then? Hadn’t it gone away when the Roman Empire broke, to make a comeback at Lepanto?
For an example of a church-fortress, check out Artajona. In distant pictures of the village, you see a church on top (church which has an outlook walk all around its roof, by the way) and what looks like some walls around it. What looks like walls is the hill itself, with towers built along its sides and crenellations on the top (they’re rebuilt, having been used as a source of stone once wars stopped being constant). The walk up that hill is officially not recommended for people in weak health, now imagine tackling it in armor.
During much of the Middle Ages, becoming a bishop, abbot or even priest was a matter of being able to buy the job. That means many were second sons: the Church was one of the feudal lords, and one of the duties of abbots was to protect the people who lived and worked for their monasteries, but also it was possible that one of them would be a secular lord aside from that, having inherited from his elder brother. Ramiro el Monje (Ramiro the Monk) was a King of Aragon who, making a long story short, inherited his crown in this fashion.
It was preserved by the countries themselves. Medieval Europe didn’t supplant the Roman Empire - it evolved from it.
Norvaal, you need to learn a lot more about the Middle Ages. Here are a couple of good books to start on:
Those Terrible Middle Ages!: Debunking the Myths by Régine Pernoud
The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C. S. Lewis
Norvaal writes:
> Does anyone know if the old knowledge was preserved somehow?
The whole notion that most knowledge was lost at the end of the Roman Empire and rediscovered only in the Renaissance is wrong.
Harry Harrison wrote an alternate history trilogy “The Hammer and the Cross”, set in the 9th century.
The protagonist (Shef, a half viking blacksmith) is set against a priest who acts as a military engineer. Shef figures things out, and develops math and logic skills, whereas the priest relies on Roman texts and math tables with little deep understanding of what he is doing. He produces ballistas and onagers, using roman math to calculate range, whereas Shef builds trebuchets and has a more faster, more flexible approach to determining range using mass ratios.
The point was that (certainly in the early Dark Ages) received knowledge was often considered more important than developed knowledge, and this did constrain thinking for a long time.
I’ll admit that I asked a stupid question: ‘Was the old knowledge preserved somehow?’ Of course it was! That’s what the monks did; they preserved knowledge. I should have asked how that knowledge survived the destruction of the Western Roman Empire. Even then, historians often paint the picture that the barbarians who destroyed the empire were all fierce, when in actuality, that wasn’t true. So there must have been knowledge preserved in libraries or monasteries that were untouched by barbarians. (Did I just answer my own question?)
And yes, I knew that the old nations basically evolved from the old Roman Empire and that the Church backed warfare and was deeply involved in politics. That’s nothing new to me. Nevertheless, these books might prove helpful to a guy who never had the time or resources to go to graduate school and get an advanced degree in history (or any degree in history). Thanks.
That’s an interesting idea, but I wonder how realistic it is.
My guess is that the “engineers” of the middle ages were more like modern construction workers, not modern engineers.
Today, an engineer performs calculations. Workers then build according to his specifications.
But a good worker knows as much from hands-on experience as an engineer knows how to calculate from mathematical theory.
(I have personally seen carpenters on a construction site tell the engineer that his columns were too thin and weak to support the roof.. The engineer laughed…but later found a mistake in his calculations.It was the experienced workers whose knowledge was more accurate, and who prevented disaster. )
Before Newton discovered the most basic math formula of all physics and engineering (F=MxA), I am guessing that most engineering projects were done more by practical experience, and trial-and-error, than by theoretical mathematical calculations. For example, how would they know the tensile strength of a beam?
The wisdom of experienced workers was passed down from father to son, and the great cathedrals were built. I assume that a similar process was used to make mechancial devices, too. —catapults and seige engines, or the levers and pulleys in the castle drawbridge, etc.
Am I wrong?
Harrison’s co-author was Tom Shippey - a scholar of medieval literature (and and Tolkien). I suspect that the book was a fair reflection of the situation. My recollection of the book may be somewhat suspect, however 
Another author of historical novels is Ken Follett, (The Pillars of the Earth, World Without End), who covers in some detail the process of knowledge transfer (and talks about how techniques can be lost and recovered), particularly regarding medieval construction. Again, I think the presentation of the historical detail in Folletts’ writing is pretty good. My recollection, less so, but there were some anachronistic elements that took me out of the second book, and I didn’t enjoy the whole thing (maybe not even finished :smack:).
Also, it’s erroneous to suppose that al-Andalus or the rest of the Ummah was somehow separate or isolated from all of Christian Europe. There was knowledge flow back and forth.
Knowledge wasn’t just preserved in monasteries. Knowledge was spread over many sorts of places. For instance, there were many kinds of knowledge passed from generation to generation in guilds. Basically, your whole picture of the Middle Ages is wrong. There was no general loss of knowledge at the end of the Roman Empire and then a sudden regaining of that knowledge during the Renaissance. The idea that there was this total loss and then this general re-awakening in the Renaissance is mostly a myth that the Renaissance scholars created to make themselves feel good. You don’t have to get a degree in history to learn about this. I sure didn’t. I recommended two books to start on. Can anyone else recommend some books that would help Norvaal to learn about the Middle Ages, particularly ones that combat the standard myths about the times?
I enjoyed those two by Follett, but I’d like to know what are the specific anachronisms si is talking about; I know Follett did mix and match things which didn’t happen together in any specific location, and the details of what and where could be interesting. The second book was inspired by a visit to the works in Vitoria’s Old Cathedral, which have rediscovered a lot of information about medieval building and decorating techniques (warning: slow-loading video). (Oh, and FTR, I’m a Chemical Engineer).
Also keep in mind - the castles and many other buildings were grossly over-engineered and pretty simple (to start with). That ws their advantage - the bigger and thicker the walls, the more bombardment you could take (catapult rocks) and the taller you could go. The issue was resources (i.e. money) when everything was done by hand.
A lot of castles are pretty simple - rock walls, thick wood beam floors. You can see the evolution from crude and realtively small to massive constructions as time, experience and learning (and wealth) allowed them to dream of bigger and better.
As mentioned above, the real creativity was in cathedrals. These pushed the limits, but they were a huge combination of passed on lore, trial and error, and experimentation. Heck, even the Bent Pyramid (4500 years ago) they got part-way up and then realized “oops, this won’t hold up” and made the angle much blunter. Salisbury Cathedral (and some others) the pillars bulge noticeably from the weight above.
Don’t forget, too, for the literacy and numerical challenged, scale drawings substituted for numbers… They had the art of scaling up from a drawing to real life.