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Old 01-08-2016, 10:58 PM   #36
William Cloud Hicklin
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Oh, yes, the 14th Century was calamitous, no question about it; but that's after the proto "renaissance" of the 13th-- and, really, the 16th was hardly better. Religious wars and schisms? Sectarian persecution? Mass invasions with attendant slaughters? Epidemics? Famines? The 1500s produced great art, but would have s*cked to live in.

But I find your particular responses interesting, to say the least.

Here goes:

The windmill, invented in China.
The Chinese by about 1300 or so had got from the Persians the panemone, a simple, ungeared vertical-axis windmill, of very limited power and utility The horizontal-axis rotating tower or post-mill, capable of pumping water and grinding grain in useful quantities, developed in the late 12th century in NW France and/or Flanders
Moldboard plow, also a Chinese invention.
Nope. The Chinese invented the iron ploughshare, but the turnplough arose in post-Roman or early Saxon Britain ca. 600
Horse Collar? Chinese.
While the Chinese had developed it by the sixth century, its development in Europe (first, it seems, in Scandinavia) was apparently independent, since it was unknown in the Middle East
Hammer Mill? 4th Century China.
Again, independently invented in medieval Europe
Blast furnace? Yawn. Extant in China 100 A.D.
A bloomery is not a blast furnace. Switzerland ca 1150-1200
Crop rotation? Two field rotation was being used since 6000 BC in the Middle-east, three field rotation around the time of Charlemagne in Europe.
Okay, so ca 800 is a little earlier than my period
Artesian wells? Imported from China according to the sources I drilled into.
Interesting how any technology of the sort might have been imported from China in the early 1100's, when they appeared in Artois (hence the name)
The mariner's quadrant? Rudimentary quadrants were introduced by the Greeks, and, again, improved by medieval Muslims.
A cross-staff is not even remotely a quadrant
Mechanical clocks? China, circa 723 A.D.
Hybrid water-clock with mechanical elements; the Chinese developed the escapement (sill powered by water) around 1100; Europe was little if any behind and using weights.
Chimneys? They've been around since Roman times. The first in England was in 1185.
Roman wall-tubes were not "chimneys;" northern Europe, probably England. 1185 is the date of the oldest surviving chimney, not the first.

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While there is no doubt that ca 1400 China was the most advanced civilization on the planet, that was about to change, in large part because of the Ming revolt. The Polos were lucky to visit when they did! Ming China became reactionary, inward looking, philosophically stagnant (no deviation from Confucianism was tolerated) while at the same time attaining even higher glories in art, architecture, textiles, ceramics and literature (and ever more elaborate etiquette). The tragic exemplar of this trend, which continued largely unabated for 600 years, was the senseless disbandment of the Great Fleet in 1424.

But the extent to which China directly influenced Europe during this period is rather more tenuous; after all there was no direct contact other than the Polos and a handful of missionaries (who rarely came back). Certain things like gunpowder and the trebuchet made their way along the Silk Road (or more likely army-to-army) to Byzantium, but nothing as mundane and non-violent as a plough or a well.

The Islamic world, in the meantime, was going nowhere. Its Abbasid glories were behind it as its own calamitous century saw the Mongol devastation and then the Black Death; what came out was either po-faced Asharist puritanism, or the perfumed, gilded and essentially ornamental sybarism of the Ottomans. From roughly 1300 onward Europe had a greater number of significant scholars than the Islamic world, a trend which would only accelerate with time.

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What I'm trying to get across in all this is that while the period 1430 or so onward saw a huge shift in style and technique in art, architecture and to a lesser extent poetry, European intellectual and technological development in other fields represented rather a continuous development from ca 1100 right through the Middle Ages; one can't really point to any huge acceleration of invention or revolution in thought in Medici Florence, but rather a continuing evolution which saw, e.g., the first masonry dome since the Romans parked atop a Gothic cathedral-- and that represented Brunelleschi at the 'dawn of the Renaissance' figuring out how to execute Neri's engineering concept from the 1360s.
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Last edited by William Cloud Hicklin; 01-09-2016 at 12:09 AM.
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