1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (26 page)

The expedition ended with John on tense terms with the two most enterprising Irish kings, Cathal Crobderg Ua Conchobair of Connacht and Aedh Ua Neill, king of Cenel Eogain in Ulster. The latter’s refusal to hand over hostages was applauded by the Irish chronicler of Inisfallen, who commented, ‘The king of England came to Ireland and accomplished little’. By contrast English contemporaries were much impressed – even the king’s harshest critics – by his achievement. According to Roger of Wendover, John introduced English law and currency into Ireland, while the forfeiture of the Briouze and Lacy estates, Limerick, Meath and Ulster, added greatly to royal lands in Ireland. The process of transferring English governmental and legal institutions
en bloc
into a conquered country gathered pace.

Next year John launched two invasions of Gwynedd, the first invasion of Wales by a king of England since 1165. He had become alarmed by the growing authority of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, although it had been John’s own action in humiliating Gwenwynwyn of Powys that had given Llywelyn the opportunity to annex southern Powys and Ceredigion. The Welsh retreated into Snowdonia taking their livestock with them; in consequence the English army soon ran out of supplies and John was forced to call off his first invasion. The second was much better prepared and devastatingly successful. Llywelyn was forced to surrender the whole of Gwynedd east of Conwy ‘for ever’, pay a tribute of twenty thousand head of cattle and agree that if he died without any children born to his wife Joan, all his lands would revert to the king of England. As a guarantee that he would abide by these terms he had to hand over 30 hostages, including an illegitimate son of his own. This, too, was reversed in Magna Carta.

In 1211 one of John’s mercenary captains, Fawkes de Bréauté, occupied northern Ceredigion for the Crown, and began to build a new castle at Aberystwyth. John was now in a much stronger position in both Wales and Ireland than any previous king of England. In the judgement of the Barnwell chronicler, there was ‘no one in Ireland, Scotland and Wales who did not obey his nod – something which, as is well-known, none of his predecessors had ever achieved’. But his apparent mastery of the British Isles was soon shown to be illusory. The oppressive programme of castle-building with which John followed up his victorious 1211 campaign provoked nearly all of the Welsh into uniting behind Llywelyn – although previously many of them had been jealous of him. John’s reaction to Welsh revolt was similar to his father’s, although where Henry had mutilated hostages, his son hanged them: no less than twenty-eight met this fate on 14 August 1212.

Measures such as these inspired yet more determined resistance. Llywelyn ap Iorwerth took advantage of the baronial rebellion against John to capture even such traditional strong-points of the English Crown in Wales as Carmarthen, making himself
de facto
prince of Wales. Soon after his death in 1240 men were calling him Llywelyn the Great. His grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, even made the English government recognise him as prince of Wales. It took a massive display of armed power and castle-building (Harlech, Conwy, Caernarfon, Beaumaris, Flint, Rhuddlan, Aberystwyth) by Edward I (1272–1307) to conquer Wales. In 1301 the first English prince of Wales was created when Edward I bestowed that title upon his son, known from his birthplace as Edward of Caernarfon. But the policy of reducing the Welsh to the position of being second-class subjects in their own country ignited one further major revolt, that of Owain Glyn Dwr in the early fifteenth century.

In Ireland the struggle went on for much longer even than it had in Wales, partly because the English government almost always gave its claims and ambitions in France a much higher priority than it did Irish affairs. Between 1210 (John’s second expedition to Ireland) and 1395 (Richard II’s first expedition) no king of England troubled to go to the island of which he claimed to be lord. After the catastrophe of the Black Death, when up to a third of the English population died, no new English settlers came to Ireland; indeed, many crossed the Irish Sea in the other direction, returning to the relative security and job opportunities of England. In the event it would be more than four hundred years before the English could boast that they had completed the conquest begun by Henry II and John in the twelfth century.

All merchants are to be safe and secure in leaving and entering England both by land and by water
.

Magna Carta, Clause 41

I
n 1537 a book on the shape of the earth was printed in Lisbon. By then Columbus had crossed the Atlantic four times and Magellan’s fleet had circumnavigated the world. Yet for instruction in the theory of the shape of the world, Europe’s most advanced seafaring nation, the Portuguese, turned not to a work of recent Iberian or Italian scholarship but to one written in the early thirteenth century and by an Englishman. This was John Holywood’s
De Sphaera Mundi
, On the Spherical Shape of the Earth. The Portuguese translated Holywood’s Latin into their own language so that seamen could read it.

In
De Sphaera Mundi
John Holywood set out in scholarly fashion the arguments for the spherical shape of the earth. The concept seems to have been accepted by almost everyone who had given any thought to the subject since classical Greek times. In eighth-century Northumbria, for example, the Venerable Bede described the earth as not round like a shield but like a ball. The same line of thought led Gervase of Tilbury, the author of
Recreation for an Emperor
, a book dedicated to John’s nephew, Emperor Otto IV, to compare the earth to an item of royal regalia, the orb. In a work dedicated to John’s grandfather, Count Geoffrey Plantagenet, William of Conches pointed out that the earth could not be flat because if it were it would be day at the same time in both the far east and the far west. All that John Holywood did was to add some fashionable sophistication to a position that everyone took for granted. He did this by making heavy use of material from the
Encyclopaedia of Astronomy
written in Arabic by the ninth-century geographer al-Farghani, which had been translated into Latin in the mid-twelfth century. This learned gloss ensured that Holywood’s book remained the standard textbook on the subject until well into the sixteenth century. It was still recommended reading in Elizabethan England.

In 1215 people knew that there were three continents, Europe, Asia and Africa, and that they were surrounded by ocean. What they did not know was how many islands also lay in the ocean. The Vikings had discovered Iceland, Greenland and, in North America, Vinland, where, wrote Adam of Bremen in his
History of the Archbishops of Hamburg
, ‘vines producing excellent wine grow wild’. ‘But,’ Adam continued, ‘beyond that island no habitable land is found in the ocean, every place beyond it is full of impenetrable ice and intense darkness.’ Further south there were rumours of islands such as the isles of Brazil; when Columbus sailed he kept his eyes open for them. Neither did they know if there were any undiscovered continents. Where the greatest uncertainty reigned was over the Antipodes. Was there land, even another continent, there? Could such a land be inhabited? Some thought not, but the English scholar Alexander Nequam, the son of Richard I’s wet-nurse Hodierna, in his book
On the Nature of Things
, noted that although people commonly talked about the Antipodeans being beneath our feet, ‘scientifically speaking we might just as well say that
we
are beneath
their
feet.’ Were the Antipodes accessible from the north? Or was there a great belt of ocean at the equator impossible to sail across because of the unbearable heat of the sun? This had been the opinion of Aristotle, and he was the great authority. It was, wrote Nequam, ‘as superfluous to praise his genius as to use torches in order to add to the brightness of the sun’. But, despite their veneration for Aristotle, some thirteenth-century scholars came to believe that the equator was in fact habitable, and by the early fourteenth century European travellers to India had shown that it was.

It was not easy to make accurate calculations of size. How big were the continents? The dimensions of Europe were fairly well known, but what about Africa and Asia? How big, indeed, was the earth? In a discussion of the universe, Alexander Nequam stated that Venus, the Moon and Mercury were smaller than the earth, while the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars were all bigger, and the biggest of all was the Sun at rather more than 166 times the size of the earth. In
De Sphaera Mundi
, John Holywood gave a figure for the circumference of the earth which came, via al-Farghani, from Eratosthenes, the head of the great library at Alexandria around 200 BC. Eratosthenes had calculated the earth’s circumference at 28,000 miles. Holywood had a much more accurate picture of the Earth’s size than Christopher Columbus had when he set sail in 1492. Although Columbus also used al-Farghani’s calculation that a degree of longitude measured 56
⅔
miles, he made the mistake of assuming that al-Farghani’s mile was the mile he knew, the Italian mile of 1480 metres, whereas it was in fact the Arab mile of 2165 metres. So Columbus reckoned there were only 45 nautical miles to a degree of longitude, whereas in fact there are 60. And he made another colossal error by believing – or hoping – that Asia stretched much further east than it actually does. Since he planned to start his epoch-making voyage from the Canary Islands, 9 degrees west of Cape St Vincent, he reckoned that if he sailed 2,400 nautical miles west he would reach Japan. The real distance from there to Japan is 10,600 nautical miles. Had he been right Tokyo would be in the Sargasso Sea.

It had long been known that, theoretically, it was possible to travel around the earth and arrive back at your starting point. In the 1370s a French scholar, Nicholas Oresme, calculated that it would take four years, sixteen weeks and two days. This was unduly pessimistic, but more optimistic calculations still left the mariners with an insoluble practical problem. Unless, by sheer good luck, they discovered unknown lands of which no evidence existed, it would be impossible to carry food and drink in quantities sufficient to keep the crews alive during a lengthy voyage. This is why, on 9 October 1492, having sailed west for one month, Columbus was forced to agree to turn back if land were not found within three days. As it happened they sighted land on 12 October. On all these matters the old-fashioned experts who had been sceptical of Columbus’s claims had been right, and the discoverer of America hopelessly wrong. The more influential America became in shaping the fortunes of the whole world, the more heroic seemed to be the achievement of the man who first discovered a
convenient
way of getting there from Europe (which the Vikings had not done). Heroically brave Columbus undoubtedly was, but as one of the scholars at the Spanish court was quick to point out, whatever he had discovered, it could not possibly be the eastern shore of Asia.

There was nothing original in what medieval scientists wrote about the size and shape of the earth and its continents; they were merely following where the Greeks had led. Originality came in the nineteenth century when historians decided that in the Middle Ages people had been ‘flat-earthers’, probably because they considered that the centuries between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance had been a time of barbarism, superstition and ignorance: the Dark Ages. Even today many people still believe that in the Middle Ages everyone thought the earth was flat; we live in our own age of faith, the faith that ‘we’ are superior, more rational than the superstitious people of the past.

Holywood’s textbook was a typical product of the massive transfer of Greco-Arabic science into western Europe during the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The most striking outcome of this process was the spread of what we call ‘Arabic numerals’ – although they were devised in India and in the Middle Ages were known as ‘Indian numerals’. Some names from mathematics and astronomy still reflect the fact that they came to us from Arabic, in which ‘al’ means ‘the’. Algorithm, for instance, comes from the name of a ninth-century Baghdad mathematician, al-Khwarizmi; algebra, more poetically, from ‘al-Jabar’, meaning the restitution of broken bones. Before the twelfth century western Europe seems to have been a closed society in the sense that its inhabitants shut their eyes and ears to the cultures of their Greek and Muslim neighbours. The few who investigated Greco-Arabic science acquired the reputation of dabbling in the black arts. Not even the fact that one such western scholar, Gerbert of Aurillac, became pope, as Sylvester II (997–1002), prevented him from coming under suspicion of being a magician. Not until western forces won the military initiative that led to them conquering territory from Greeks and Arabs in south Italy, Sicily, Spain, Syria and Palestine did significant numbers of western scholars show a real and sustained interest in Greco-Arabic learning. Not surprisingly it was within or on the edges of these newly conquered territories that the key stages in the transmission of Greco-Arabic science to the Latin West occurred. Spain, with its population of Muslims, Jews and Arabic-speaking Christians, played an important role in this, especially after the conquest of Toledo by the Christian kings of Castile in 1085.

The late twelfth-century English astronomer Daniel of Morley spoke for many of his generation when he wrote, ‘I hurried to Toledo, that celebrated centre where the world’s distinguished scientists were to be found.’ One of the attractions of the new astronomy was that it seemed to offer a better way of forecasting the future. In Daniel’s opinion, those who dismissed the notion that the movement of the stars could have an effect on the affairs of this world were the sorts of brainless idiots who condemned things before they had taken the trouble to acquire a thorough knowledge of them.