Technology & Innovation

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How Germany became the centre of the most advanced industry of its day

In 1550 Spanish court records show that the Augsburg armorer Kolman Helmschmied was paid an advance of 2,000 ducats for a full armour for king Philipp II. The final price for this piece was 3,000 ducats. At the same time Raphael could charge at max 170 ducats for an altarpiece. Even the Renaissances’ best paid artist, Michelangelo received just 3,000 gold florins for the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Armour, along with tapestries, were the most valuable artworks of the 15th and 16th century.

That was just one set of armour made for the most powerful monarch of the time. But what about the thousands of soldiers he commanded, did they have armour? Oh yes they did. Not quite as sophisticated and certainly not as decorated, but they did. And where did these thousands of helmets and breast and back plates come from? From the same places where their prince’s fancy metalwork came from, from Nürnberg and Augsburg. Their swords came from Passau and Solingen and their firearms from Suhl.

How come these mostly southern Germn cities became the armories of Europe whose output clad the armies that fought the never-ending wars of the 15th, 16th and 17th century? How did they supersede Milan, the centre of weapons production in the preceding century in terms of quality, scale and availability, and create a tradition of metalworking and entrepreneurship that lasts until today?

That is what we will look at in this episode.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 202 – Arms and Armour which is also episode 17 of Season 10 “the Empire in the 15Th Century”.

In 1550 Spanish court records show that the Augsburg armorer Kolman Helmschmied was paid an advance of 2,000 ducats for a full armour for king Philipp II. The final price for this piece was 3,000 ducats. At the same time Raphael could charge at max 170 ducats for an altarpiece. Even the Renaissances’ best paid artist, Michelangelo received just 3,000 gold florins for the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Armour, along with tapestries, were the most valuable artworks of the 15th and 16th century.

That was just one set of armour made for the most powerful monarch of the time. But what about the thousands of soldiers he commanded, did they have armour? Oh yes they did. Not quite as sophisticated and certainly not as decorated, but they did. And where did these thousands of helmets and breast and back plates come from? From the same places where their prince’s fancy metalwork came from, from Nürnberg and Augsburg. Their swords came from Passau and Solingen and their firearms from Suhl.

How come these mostly southern Germn cities became the armories of Europe whose output clad the armies that fought the never-ending wars of the 15th, 16th and 17th century? How did they supersede Milan, the centre of weapons production in the preceding century in terms of quality, scale and availability, and create a tradition of metalworking and entrepreneurship that lasts until today?

That is what we will look at in this episode.

But before we start the usual thanks to our great patrons whose unwavering commitment keeps this show advertising free. And you too could bask in the soft glow of the appreciation of your fellow listeners by signing up on historyofthegermans.com/support. This week we send our warm regards to Pete H., David S., Annette F, Luis, Louis, Daniel, Stephen G. and Christian G., , , who have already done so.ardy, whose upcoming book you can find in the book recommendations, and Eamon M., whose generous help at historyofthegermans.com/support keeps the enjoyment coming.

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And with that back to the show

I am approaching this episode with no small amount of trepidation. I know that several of you have a strong interest in arms, armor and fighting technique. And some are taking their passion so far as to learn and apply these techniques in real life as y kids would say. In other words, there are some serious experts here who will catch me out mercilessly when I am getting things wrong.

I on the other hand cannot really distinguish between a rapier and a broadsword. My interest in the topic of arms and armor is purely from a history and economic history perspective. So. if you are looking for a deep dive into the different types of armor and weapons, how exactly they are used, you will be disappointed. I did look for a podcast that I could direct you to if that is what you were seeking, but am afraid I could not find it. There is however a whole world of YouTube videos out there that do a brilliant job at explaining things.

What I can do though is give you an idea how the economics of this business worked and why this amazing industry cluster in southern Germany came to be.

That being said, I will start with a very brief rundown of the development of arms and armor in europe before we go into the question why Nurnberg, Augsburg, Passau and later Suhl and Solingen became the dominant manufacturing hubs for land-based arms and armor.

Armor is as old as human combat. To win a fight you first have to survive it. Hence every time a new weapon was developed, it was immediately followed by the invention of a way to deflect it. And every deflective tool was immediately followed by the development of a new offensive weapon, which created a new tactic to diffuse it and so forth and so forth. Knightly amour as we find it in every half decent museum had its predecessors in ancient Greek helmets, the ornate breastplates of roman emperors and the scale armour of the Persian cataphract.

What interests us here is the armour and arms in europe since the Middle Ages, which followed the same pattern. Every new form of arms and armour is a reaction to a new threat posed by an enemy with a superior technology.

When this podcast started in 919, that threat were first and foremost the Magyars, horse archers who could attack swiftly and release their composite bows on their enemies. And the response of in particular Henry the Fowler, king of East Francia was armored knight on horseback.

This armour consisted mainly of chainmail, rather than plate. This was helpful against Magyar arrows and even more against swords. Swords at the time were too brittle to be used for stabbing. Instead, early medieval warriors were slashing at their enemies, a move chainmail could deflect.

Chainmail never went away and was used for centuries thereafter. However, as external enemies had been defeated and the Europeans moved on to fight each other, military tactics changed.

The preferred weapon alongside the sword was the spear or lance. Up until the 12th century European warriors used their spears in the same way as we see Native Americans using them in Westerns, i.e, overhand or by thrusting them forward.

The first shift in fighting technique was implemented by the Normans. These guys were, to use a technical term, nutters. So far, armored cavalry had used horses as transport to get close to the enemy where they would be lobbing their spears or slashing their swords before returning back to the line to get a new spear. The Normans came up with the idea to use the horse as a weapon. So, instead of turning around after the spear had been launched, they simply kept going at full tilt into the midst of the enemy forces.

I might have told this story before, but a few years ago I went to see the Palio in Siena. And before the actual race, the carabinieri stage a full-on cavalry attack with swords drawn around the course. I do not think I have ever seen anything more terrifying. Anna Komnene, the daughter of the Byzantine emperor Alexios Komnenos said about these nutters in 1148: “A mounted Frank is unstoppable – he could smash through the walls of Babylon”. End quote.

And that was before they employed the couched lance, aka the kind of fighting with lances we know from medieval tournaments. That came in the very late 12th and early 13th century. Fighting with a couched lance means that the lance is held under the Achsel and retained by various kinds of contraptions. The impact of a couched lance on an opponent is roughly factor four of the impact of a lance thrusted or thrown.

This shift in tactics drove a vast number of changes. The focus is now not just on get close to the enemy and then apply whatever weapon one has at hand, but it is all about the speed and the force of the clash between opponents. Getting this right is tricky, seriously tricky. It requires years and years of training. Which is why they invented tournaments at exactly this time. It is to hone their skills in a comparatively safe environment.

When attacking, the knight will aim his lance at three potential targets, the head, which is extremely hard to hit, but would have a catastrophic impact on the adversary. The shield or body, which is a bigger target, but is a lot less likely to do catastrophic damage, or the horse, which leaves the enemy unharmed but would result in an immediate removal of combat capacity.

Chainmail provides very limited protection in this kind of warfare. As we go through the 12th into the 13th and 14th century, new forms of protection emerge. The head is the first to get covered in more sophisticated helmets of varying construction. Breastplates are developed that are supposed to deflect the impact of the lance and finally the horses are getting covered in iron.

The efficacy of a couched lance can be improved if the butt is attached to some form of rest. That rest could be integrated into the breastplate, allowing the rider to use more of his body to deliver the impact. Hence, we find all sorts of attachments to the breastplate that holds the lance.

Couched lance combat has a couple of drawbacks. It is quite inaccurate and a knight who has missed his target will find himself in the midst of the enemy forces, or worse, is unhorsed and needs to continue fighting on foot.

By the 15th century that has become seriously dangerous, but in line with improvements to armor, sword technology had also advanced. They are now often made of steel, which is harder and less brittle than iron. Swordsmen can now not only cut, but they can also thrust without having to fear their sword will break in two. Which is another nail in the coffin of armour purely made of chainmail.

Gradually plate armour covers more and more of the body. Legs and the back are getting covered and by the mid to late 15th century we arrive at the kind of armour we can see displayed in all their grandeur in the Metropolitan Museum, the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna, the Royal Armouries or one of my favourites, the Wallace Collection.

Even though infantry becomes more important on the battlefield during the Hundred years’ War and firearms show their enormous power in the Hussite Wars, plate armour is still produced and used in vast quantities for almost 300 years thereafter. Because it was still effective.

For one, the absolute top end quality plate armour could sustain the impact of a musketshot, but more importantly, firearms remained one shot weapons well into the 19th century. Hence a phalanx on armoured riders could still run down a line of arkebusiers busy reloading their weapons. Therefore, military tactics developed that combined firearms with pikemen and heavy as well as light cavalry well into the 17th century.

The other important factor is that armour is not just a military tool, but also fashion. I took part in the Wallace Collection’s summer school about arms and armour this year and the curator Keith Dowen and the armourer David Edge compared renaissance armour to modern day cars. A spectacular armour, like the one OttHeinrich of the Palatinate or emperor Maximilian would wear, was like driving a customised Ferrari or McLaren. These were status symbols that combined performance at the outer edge of what was technically possible with beauty and bling. These were, along with tapestries, the by far most expensive luxury goods in any princely household.

This is an audio show, so it is simply impossible to describe some of the most astounding pieces made in the 15th and 16th century, but I can completely see why some people put Helmschmied, Lochner, Negroli, Wilhelm von Worms and Konrad Seusenhofer on par with some of the great renaissance painters. And that is at least what their contemporaries believed. As I mentioned, in 1550 Colman Helmschmied  charged the Spanish court 3,000 dukats for a full armour, whilst Raphael at the absolute height of his fame commanded 177 dukats for an altarpiece. In other words, you could get 15 Raphaels for one Helmschmied.  

There would be lots and lots more to be said about the functionality and decoration of armour in the 15th and 16th century, but this is not what we are here for. The question we want to answer is why the most magnificent machines or war and masterpieces of art were produced in Nurnberg, Augsburg and Innsbruck and at the same time, why these, together with Passau and later Suhl and Solingen, became the Arsenal of Europe, the place you went to when you needed to equip 5,000 cavalry in a hurry.

Each of their stories is slightly different, and since we have done Augsburg recently, let’s focus on Nurnberg first.

To make armour, in particular to produce it at scale and at the desired level of quality, there are a couple of basic things that are needed.

Water is crucial. To hammer a sheet of metal into shape was extremely labour intensive. Armourers used water mills to drive hammers to first grind the metal ore and then to flatten the steel. Watermills also drove polishing wheels used to smooth and polish armour and to sharpen swords. But crucially, to produce high quality is steel is all about heating the metal to the right temperature. Watermills drove bellows that pushed a consistent level of oxygen into the forge, keeping the temperature steady, In the case of Nurnberg, the Pregnitz was diverted across multiple mill canals that powered water mills throughout the city, not only for armourers but for all sorts of other trades as well.

The next thing an armourer needs is charcoal for the forge, and again it has to be charcoal of consistent quality to keep the temperature steady. . Nurnberg was famously surrounded by poor soil, one of the reasons Barbarossa had granted them free imperial status in the first place. And that soil was therefore still covered in forests, ideal for producing the valuable charcoal.

Then they need iron ore. Thanks to the rapid expansion of all sorts of mining activities during the 14th and 15th century, there were multiple sources of iron ore or iron ingots accessible to Nurnberg artisans. But one mountain held and still holds Europe’s largest deposit of the most valuable iron ore, an iron ore that was already marginally carbonized called Siderite or FECO3 to give it its scientific name. That mountain is the Erzberg in Styria, the ore mountain. Do not get that confused with the Erzgebirge, the Ore Montains on the border between Saxony and Bohemia. This is the Erzberg in Styria. Styria was under Habsburg control and once the Habsburgs became emperors, the empire’s foremost cities, like Nurnberg, Augsburg and Passau had ready access to this valuable ore. And mining was and is a capital intensive business. Where could capital to run an open cast iron ore mine come from – correct, the bankers of Augsburg and Nurnberg, who happened to also be the guys who bankrolled the armourers.

Transport infrastructure was crucial. There is no point making vast quantities of helmets, breast plates and gauntlets and then not being able to deliver them to the customer who is readying for war. When Nurnberg was founded, it was not at the crossroads of any major roads. But by the 15th century, the city had bent Europes flow of goods to its will. New routes have been established that all went through Nurnberg. The Via Imperii that comes down from Stettin on the Baltic then through Leipzig goes all the way to Rome via Venice intersects here with the Via Regia that links Krakow with Paris. Other routes link Nurnberg to other key nodes like Prague, Augsburg, Vienna and Regensburg. By 1500 the city on the Pregnitz sits like a spider in the middle of central Europe’s trade routes. On top of that, Nurnberg merchants held trading privileges with 70 cities across the empire and beyond, making their wares materially cheaper than their competition.

To speak business strategy for a moment, another factor that leads to the development of industry clusters are demand conditions. In an ideal scenario, there is already some major local demand for the product that gets the industry to enough scale to compete internationally. This why a lot of the latest tech is developed in larger domestic markets like the US and China, rather than say, Belgium.

I guess you know where we are going with this. These last 15 episodes have introduced you to a veritable plethora of local conflicts, the Mainzer Stiftstfehde, the seemingly never-ending Bavarian wars of succession, the fight for the Low countries and these are only the ones I selected for being the more juicy and meaningful ones. The Holy Roman Empire in the 15th century was a never-ending rigmarole of armed conflicts between princes, princes and cities, cities and emperors and any other combination thereof, plus there were the larger wars, the ones against the Hussites and ever more importantly those against the Ottomans.

So, domestic demand was not a problem armourers needed to worry about unduly.

Nurnberg’s lead in arms and armour manufacturing kicked off with a rather mundane-sounding invention, mechanised wire drawing. The very first wire-drawing mills in europe opened in the city in 1368. Long, uniform metal wire is produced by pulling metal rods through successively smaller dies. As you can imagine, this was brutally hard to do by hand. Using waterpower to deliver a consistent amount of pull made the process infinitely faster, cheaper and delivered a much higher quality product.

The wire drawing process was one of Nurnberg’s most closely guarded secret. Master wiredrawers had to be Nurnberg citizens, they weren’t allowed to leave the city or take apprentices from abroad. The secrecy around this process was materially tighter than it was on the armourers themselves.

Having access to large quantities of cheap, uniform wire gave Nurnberg an initial leg up in the armourers’ business, since chain mail consists, yes of wire. The Nurnberg chainmail became famous for its strength and durability, it gained its own brand name, the Nürnberg Ringpanzer. Yes, I know you have been waiting for me to say the word Panzer on the podcast for ages, and here it is.

Wire drawers were not the only metalworkers in Nurnberg. One of the city’s main exports were on the one hand rather mundane things like knives, scissors, spoons, basins and funnels, but on the other side there was also a long tradition of producing high-end mechanical works. Regiomontanus, who we met last week, alongside his theoretical mathematics and astrology tables, also produced precision instruments for astrology and navigation. And he was by no means the only one. Nurnberg became famous for the compass or is it compasses they produced. Reading glasses were another speciality. And then, further up the artisanal food chain were the various kinds of gold and silversmiths.

But what of the armourers themselves. How did they become – together with those in Augsburg and later Innsbruck and Greenwich – the foremost producers in Europe.

I think three factors were crucial here, competition, specialisation and co-ordination.

Master armourers in Nurnberg were only allowed to employ two assistants and one apprentice. That prevented the establishment of large, dominant producers. These small producers were in constant competition with each other for lucrative orders. Other than in most cities, large orders did not have to be passed through the guild who would distribute them equally amongst the different masters, but would be given to merchants. The merchants would choose who to subcontract to, based on their reputation for quality, reliability, speed and price.

This competitive pressure spurred the armourers on to constantly strive for improvement. One of the key criteria for the quality of armour and swords was the balance between hardness and flexibility. Steel could be hardened by quenching, aka first heating it up to a high temperature and then rapidly cooling it in cold water followed by tempering, a second round of heating but followed by a very slow cooling process. The trick was to find the right balance between initial temperature and length of the quenching and tempering that hardened the steel but not letting it become brittle. Getting this right involved a whole lot of experimentation and required to improve temperature control of the forge. The latter depended on the quality of the charcoal and the consistency of the air blown into the fire. The German armourers kept tinkering and tinkering with this process until they got it right. Their main competition, the armourers of Milan had chosen to protect flexibility by quenching their steel in less conductive liquid, like oils. That prevented brittleness but failed to achieve the hardness desired.

Alan Williams from the university of Reading did analyse two pieces of late medieval and early modern armour made from similar steel for its metallurgical properties. He concluded that the Italian armour from 1570 scored 183 on the Vickers hardness scale, whilst the German piece scored 514 on the same scale. In other words, by the 16th century, German armourers were producing armour 3 times harder than the North Italians who had dominated the market in the early 15th century.

The other thing that made armour great were the mechanics of it. A full armour was supposed to weigh no ore than 25kg to ensure the knight could get up and continue to fight once unhorsed. So, the harder the steel got, the thinner and lighter it could be, which in turn meant more and more of the body could be protected without exceeding the weight limit. And these parts of the body that could now be covered, the legs and arms are full of these complicated connecting bits we call joints. And to be able to fight, the joints need to remain able to move. The German armourers developed sliding rivets and ingenious articulations that let a knight move freely inside what was essentially a metal exoskeleton. Again, master armourers constantly competed with each other to produce ever more elaborate versions of these complex mechanics.

Apart from competition, the other reason German armourers got so good was specialisation. To become a master armourer, the apprentice had to produce his masterpiece, i.e., a piece of armour that showcased his skills and that was of such quality it passed muster with his fellow armourers or the authorities. And depending what kind of piece it was, a helmet, gauntlet, sword or breastplate, this became the only product the newly minted master armourer would be licensed to produce. Those who made helmets were not allowed to branch out into breastplates and vice versa. So the new master would make say helmets on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, He would make helmets In January, February, March, April May, June, July, August September, October, November and December, Helmets this year, next year, the year thereafter and from then on to the day they either died or got bored and left. Dead or bored, he would get better and better and better at it. This is what business people call the economics of experience. And economics of experience are so much more powerful than the better-known economics of scale. Any, even the smallest improvement in the way helmets are made apply to all subsequent helmets until the next round of improvements appears, which again brings the process up again further, and so on and so on.

Radical specialisation was something happened across all kinds of trades in Nurnberg. Nurnberg registered 114 individual artisan guilds. They for instance differentiated between makers of “rough” wire, makers of fine wire and makers of silver-plated wire.

Which gets us to the third reason artisans from Nurnberg and Augsburg churned out such astonishing product, co-operation.  A full suit of armour consists of dozens of components, helmets, plates, mail, gauntlets, swords and so forth. Each of these were made by different master artisans. And when it came to the top end luxury armour, the kind of stuff emperor Maximilian paid almost as much for as pope Leo X paid Michelangelo to paint the Sistine chapel ceiling, a whole lot more trades got involved. There were the silver and goldsmiths doing the decorations. When we see armour today, it is mostly polished into a bright shining silvery colour. And quite a lot of armour was indeed polished to that colour, requiring a polisher to do that work. But some, maybe even most armour, was colourful. One process was called blueing, where the metal was burnished until it achieved a peacock blue colour. The Wallace collection holds a piece of armour they believe was originally blue with contrasting shining silver-coloured elements. Other may have been straight up painted. What exactly they painted on this armour is largely lost because the Victorians decided that all and every knight was one in shining armour – no space for fancy-coloured fighters.

The great artists of the time, Albrecht Durer and Hans Burgckmaier too got involved. They designed armour for their clients and painted them wearing it afterwards. 

So, who co-ordinated all these trades. It seems that for the top, top end armour the superstars of the industry, the Helmschmieds, Lochners and Seusenhofer most likely had control of the project and chose their suppliers and decorators.

When it came to the commissioning of vast quantities of what is called munitions armour, i.e., armour designed to be worn by simple soldiers on campaign, the coordinators were usually the great merchants. This again was one of the unique advantages of places like Augsburg and Nurnberg. The great mercantile  houses, the Fuggers, Welsers, Imhofs and Tuchers had the contacts to the imperial and princely courts to secure orders of such magnitude. And not only that, they would also offer to provide financing to the prince and emperor. And on the other side of the bargain they would also provide finance for master armourers to build up stock after having financed their suppliers as well.

Holding stock was extremely capital intensive. But it could come off spectacularly. Having 500 helmets in stock when the duke of God knows where is finding himself in a bit of a pickle, commanded a massive premium over helmets that arrive when the duke’s capital is already burning. Which is why having five hundred helmets available for pick-up wasn’t something unusual in Nurnberg in the 16th century.

And these helmets were not just available, they were also of predictable quality. Nurnberg was somewhat unique amongst the free imperial cities in as much as the patricians had broken the power of the guilds. After a failed uprising, the council had taken over much of the guild’s role, including the supervision of quality standards and the branding. Wares that met the standard set by the city council, i.e, the merchants who bought and sold the merchandise,  were branded with the letter N.

Quality control is what saved the German makers of arms and armour from the fate of the much more famous makers of Damascus steel. True Damascus Steel was undoubtably superior to the European product. Still the Mughal emperors on the 17th century preferred European blades from Solingen. Why? Damascus steel is hard to get right. Abd it did not come from Damascus or any other specific place, but from all kinds of places all over the East. There was no central authority that controlled the quality of the end product. So lots and lots of producers were manufacturing what they called Damascus Steel, some of it was of stounding quality, but much of it was not. And nobody could tell which was which. The brand deteriorated.

At the same time the town of Solingen developed its own steel making process and kept such tight control over the quality, that the name Solingen until today stands for top quality knifes, worldwide.

This combination of skill, branding and finance is what made in particular Nurnberg the go-to place for massive orders. The only place to that could match it in terms of mass output were the Habsburg armouries emperor Maximilian established in Innsbruck. He had brought several famous armourers from Augsburg and Nurnberg to Innsbruck. What these artisans did there was on the one hand create spectacular luxury armours for the emperors, but the other, more important function was to arm the imperial armies. And free from the shackles of the guild regulations in Augsburg and Nurnberg, huge workshops could be set up that exploited the resulting economics of scale.

Whilst Nurnberg focused more on volume production, Augsburg took an almost unassailable lead in making the world’s finest luxury armour. Augsburg had already established itself as the home of Europe’s foremost silver and goldsmiths. These guys now brought their skills into the world or armour. Go into any museum of armour and look at the star piece in their collection, it will almost inevitably come from Augsburg.

Ok, that is not 100% right. The museum will likely also hold a astounding looking Italian armour from Milan or Brescia, from masters like the Negrolis or the Messaglias. These are wonderous contraptions covered in elaborate decorations mimicking mythical animals or modelled on ancient Greek or Roman styles. They sparkle in the sun and look fantastic when the emperor enters a city on triumph. What they are pretty useless at, is protecting the wearer against even the most feeble blow from a sword.

Which gets us to the last reason why the centre of armour production shifted from Milan to Southern Germany. And the answer is the third most powerful force on the known universe after compounding and human stupidity, pot luck. Arms manufacturing needs war, but it is important that it is the right amount of war. And Northern Italy in the late fifteenth century got the wrong amount of war. The so-called Italian wars that pitted France against the Habsburgs, the Italian states against each other and the papacy pitching in at various points, these Italian wars were a disaster for Italy.

Machiavelli in the last chapter of the prince appeals to Lorenzo de Medici quote “Italy, left almost lifeless, waits for someone to heal her wounds, to put an end to the sackings of Lombardy, the extortions and plunderings of the Kingdom [of Naples] and of Tuscany, and to cleanse the sores that have festered for so long.”. Whilst Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo created the greatest artworks the world had ever seen, the Italian cities they worked were regularly sacked and their industries smashed. And one of these industries that could not keep up in these conditions was the Milanese armourers.

The success of the German armourers did not just produce their own industry cluster. The metalworking industries in general were all cousins. A city known for armor often produced other metal goods: cutlery, tools, machinery, clocks, scientific instruments, you name it. In 1621, of the 3,700 master craftsmen in Nuremberg, about 600 worked in ironwares. The techniques used for one product often fertilized another. The skill to draw fine wire (for mail armor or for strings and cables) helped in making mechanical clock springs. The ability to cast cannon and mix alloys informed bell-making (Nuremberg and Augsburg both cast huge church bells). And the presence of gunsmiths and metal engravers in the same city led to some cross-pollination – for instance, the beautiful engraving and etching seen on luxury firearms and armor was often done by artists who also worked on printing plates and fine art. It’s not a stretch to note that the city that printed the Nuremberg Chronicle and built the first pocket watches (the famous “Nuremberg eggs” by Peter Henlein) was the same city exporting the best mail shirts and muskets. The cultural flowering of Nuremberg in that era – the “centre of the German Renaissance” – was enabled by its prosperous crafts economy of which arms-making was just one pillar.

Nothing lasts forever though. The downfall of the great southern German cities did not come with the gradual decline of the use of armour. That was compensated by their equal prowess in the production of firearms, both handguns and cannon and all kinds of sophisticated instruments.

What broke them was the wrong amount of war, aka the 30 years war. Nurnberg stayed neutral  and was protected by powerful fortifications, but their markets had been wiped out by the end. Moreover, their customers, the emperors and princes began introducing standing armies using standard equipment. State-owned arsenals were able to deliver these cheaper and more efficiently than the fragmented master armourers. Nurnberg and Augsburg declined and it took until the industrial revolution before they gradually came back to life.

Nevertheless, some elements of the early success of German industry in Nurnberg and Augsburg survive to this day. The Mittelstand, the backbone of the German economy consists of comparatively small, family-owned businesses that have risen to global leadership in their field through fierce competition, extreme specialisation, co-ordination and quality control.  

And this seems to me a good point to end our journey across the empire in the 15th century. There are many more topics we could have explored, the dukes of Brunswick and those of Pomerania, the involvement of Brandenburg in the wars between Poland and the Teutonic Knights, the silversmiths of Augsburg, the sword makers of Cologne and Passau. But 15 episodes in, it is time to move on. The next season will pick up when we last had a closer look at the Habsburgs, i.e., when Rudolf the Stifter invented the title of archduke. And take the story all the way to Charles V. I hope you will join us again when that kicks off in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime I will drop episodes from other podcasts I admire into the feed. Give them a chance. They are really good in their own way.

And do not forget, you can support the show by going to historyofthegermans.com/support and make a contribution. I have not much to offer, other than my heartfelt and for the most generous, eternal gratitude which should make you feel even more generous.

See you soon!

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How two Germans invented America

When you enter the great hall of the Thomas Jefferson building at the Library of Congress in Washington, the first exhibit you will be facing is their Gutenberg Bible. And it is one of the finest Gutenberg bibles around, one of only three surviving pristine copies on vellum. This was the kind of bible that was so expensive to produce, it bankrupted Gutenberg. When the Library of Congress bought it in 1930, they paid $375,000, roughly $7.5m in today’s money.

But this is not the most expensive piece in the library’s collection. That would a work by two Germans, Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann. And it is not even a book, but a map. Not a small map, it is 2.3m or 91 inches wide and 1.3m or 50 inches tall. And this map, printed in 1507 claimed to be:

A DESCRIPTION OF THE WHOLE WORLD ON BOTH
A GLOBE AND A FLAT SURFACE WITH THE INSERTION
OF THOSE LANDS UNKNOWN TO PTOLEMY
DISCOVERED BY RECENT MEN

And the authors wrote that the three continents known since antiquity, Europe, Africa and Asis, quote “have in fact now been more widely explored, and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be heard in what follows). Since both Asia and Africa received their names from women, I do not see why anyone should rightly prevent this [new part] from being called Amerigen—the land of Amerigo, as it were—or America, after its discoverer, Americus, a man of perceptive character.” End quote.

This fourth part, they said was “surrounded on all sides by the ocean”. And indeed, in the left lower corner we find a fourth continent, a thin, stretched thing, with few place names and a western shore that hints at the Peruvian bulge, unmistakably, South America and then to north of it a very indistinguishable blob of land.

This map, proudly displayed as America’s Birth Certificate, is full of the most intriguing mysteries. How did Waldseemüller and Ringmann know that the Americas had a western shore, when it was only in 1513, 6 years later, that a European first glanced the Pacific?

How did the name America stick though Amerigo Vespucci had never led an expedition, not even commanded a ship? But most of all, why was this first map of America drawn not by a Spanish or Portuguese navigator, but by two Germans in the employ of the duke of Lorraine, working in St. Die, which is as far away from the sea as one can get in Western Europe.

And then, more generally, what did the Germans have to do with the discoveries, the maps and globes that told the world about them? That is what we will explore in this episode.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 201 – Mapping the World, or how two Germans invented America, which is also episode 16 of season 10 “The Empire in the 15th century”.

When you enter the great hall of the Thomas Jefferson building at the Library of Congress in Washington, the first exhibit you will be facing is their Gutenberg Bible. And it is one of the finest Gutenberg bibles around, one of only three surviving pristine copies on vellum. This was the kind of bible that was so expensive to produce, it bankrupted Gutenberg. When the Library of Congress bought it in 1930, they paid $375,000, roughly $7.5m in today’s money.

But this is not the most expensive piece in the library’s collection. That would a work by two Germans, Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann. And it is not even a book, but a map. Not a small map, it is 2.3m or 91 inches wide and 1.3m or 50 inches tall. And this map, printed in 1507 claimed to be:

A DESCRIPTION OF THE WHOLE WORLD ON BOTH
A GLOBE AND A FLAT SURFACE WITH THE INSERTION
OF THOSE LANDS UNKNOWN TO PTOLEMY
DISCOVERED BY RECENT MEN

And the authors wrote that the three continents known since antiquity, Europe, Africa and Asis, quote “have in fact now been more widely explored, and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be heard in what follows). Since both Asia and Africa received their names from women, I do not see why anyone should rightly prevent this [new part] from being called Amerigen—the land of Amerigo, as it were—or America, after its discoverer, Americus, a man of perceptive character.” End quote.

This fourth part, they said was “surrounded on all sides by the ocean”. And indeed, in the left lower corner we find a fourth continent, a thin, stretched thing, with few place names and a western shore that hints at the Peruvian bulge, unmistakably, South America and then to north of it a very indistinguishable blob of land.

This map, proudly displayed as America’s Birth Certificate, is full of the most intriguing mysteries. How did Waldseemüller and Ringmann know that the Americas had a western shore, when it was only in 1513, 6 years later, that a European first glanced the Pacific?

How did the name America stick though Amerigo Vespucci had never led an expedition, not even commanded a ship? But most of all, why was this first map of America drawn not by a Spanish or Portuguese navigator, but by two Germans in the employ of the duke of Lorraine, working in St. Die, which is as far away from the sea as one can get in Western Europe.

And then, more generally, what did the Germans have to do with the discoveries, the maps and globes that told the world about them? That is what we will explore in this episode.

But before we start another big, big thank you to all of you supporting the show. Not only financially, but also with your emails and messages of encouragement. As you can imagine, solo podcasting can be a bit of a lonely pursuit and feedback, in particular your incredibly nice feedback, makes this so much more enjoyable.

And today we should appreciate Gijs C., Gary W., James M., Vincent V., Fabian S., Mike K., Joseph C., Duncan Hardy, whose upcoming book you can find in the book recommendations, and Eamon M., whose generous help at historyofthegermans.com/support keeps the enjoyment coming.

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And with that, back to the show

Maps have always exerted a huge influence on the human mind. I know that if I publish a post on social media with a map in it, it attracts two or three times the audience of my usual posts.

Mapmaking might go as far back as 7000 BC when the neolithic inhabitants of Chatalhoyuk in Turkey painted a plan of their town and two distant volcanos onto the walls of a house. The British museum holds the oldest known world map, the Babylonian world, a map that dates back to 600 BC. The story on how that had been identified as a map is one of the BM’s best tales by the way.

Maps are not created equal. They do differ by accuracy, depth of information and most importantly, purpose. Political maps emphasise the borders of countries, states, counties, constituencies etc, geographical maps may look at features like mountain ranges and rivers, the distribution of mineral deposits or fertility of the soil. Sailor’s charts care about depth and maritime hazards and give no heed to what is on the land, unless it is a church tower or a lighthouse, whilst the Michelin guide divides the world up into places to eat, and those where better not to.

I guess after 200 episodes observing our protagonists, not just the kings and emperors, but also the monks, merchants and mercenaries criss-crossing the known world, I do not have to tell you that medieval people were anything but static.

Hence it is not surprising that they made maps. How many is hard to say, but there are several that have come down to us. Amongst Anglo-Saxons the mappamundi of Hereford cathedral is probably the best known, whilst the German equivalent, the Ebstorf map is the more famous here.

Being the History of the Germans, we obviously focus on the Ebstorf map. First up, it is huge, a circular image of the known world, 3.5m by 3.5m. Created around 1240, the original was lost in an air raid on Hannover in 1943, but we have several very detailed facsimiles.

For modern observers it is extremely difficult to get one’s bearings on this map. For one it is oriented towards the east, not the north. Then at the centre of the map sits Jerusalem. Asia makes up the top half, europe the bottom left and Africa the bottom right.  The mediterranean is a giant Tin the centre with Sicily in the shape of a heart. The three continents are surrounded by a thin band of one continuous ocean.

Where it gets even more confusing is when you look closer. The map is extraordinarily detailed. It comprises 2,345 entries, 845 pictures, 500 of which are buildings, the rest rivers, waterways, islands, but also 45 persons and 60 animals. And these are on the one hand comparatively modern cities and features like Antwerp, Riga and the Brunswick Lion. But then it also depicts buildings and cities that are known to be long gone, like the tower of babel, the lighthouse of Alexandria and Carthage. And then there are missing elements, like Cairo, the largest city Europeans regularly travelled to at the time, and instead it features entirely mythical locations, like the place where Alexander had imprisoned Gog and Magog and the earthly paradise, complete with serpent and apple.

So, what was this map for?

The map reflected the sum total of the historical, scientific and theological knowledge of the time, which meant whatever knowledge of the ancients had made it through. Pliny the elder was a particular favourite whose odd notions about the impact of the phases of the moon on the mental state of Monkeys and the like were perennial favourites. Biblical stories were of such great importance to the pious, they were considered contemporaneous, even if they had happened thousands of years earlier.

There was a major devotional element here. The map shows that the world is a confined space, held together by Jesus Christ, who sees and hears everything from his vantage point at the top of the map.

What this kind of maps, the mappamundi, were utterly useless at was to guide a sailor from Venice to Constantinople and further on to the Holy Land. But we know that at the same time these were made, Venetian, Genoese, Pisan and Amalfitani sea captains carried crusaders and trading goods to the east and back. To achieve that they had what we have today, compass, maritime charts and pilot books. No, seriously. There are three maritime charts still in existence that were most likely produced around the same time as the Ebstorf and the Hereford Mappamundi, in the 13th century.

These maritime charts have no pictures of saints or exotic animals on them, nor do they share the wisdom of Pliny the Elder. These are utilitarian charts that tell you what course to steer and how far you have to sail to get from Palma de Mallorca to Palermo or from Ancona to Alexandria. It tells you where the submerged reefs and rocks are and where dangerous currents run. And they are pretty accurate, which is truly astounding as they did not use latitude or longitude to pinpoint locations.

And then there is the scale of the effort. The so-called Pisan map covers the whole Mediterranean and the Black Sea plus bits of the Atlantic. There are roughly 1,000 topographic sites named in the mediterranean part alone, and all of these are on the coast or in the water, making this an incredibly dense map.

Which begs the question how this information could have been gathered.

One option is that it was a compilation of regional charts, but given every region had different measurements for miles and feet, it would have required a standardisation down to the map’s reference mile, which was 1.25km. Not an easy task.

Some have argued that these charts were originally developed by Greek or Roman sailors and then copied and adjusted as trade routes changed and cities rose and fell. But there is no mention of maritime charts in Roman or Greek sources at all.

So, in all likelihood the makers of these maritime charts gathered the information from the ship’s captains who came in and out of their hometowns. Most cartographers were themselves retired seafarers which must have helped.

What bewildered me is that according to the almost unanimous opinion in the literature, the medieval navigators did not use a logbook or other form of noting down the position, course and speed throughout a voyage. This only came in during the 15th century when explorers ventured out to find the route to India. I find that incredibly hard to believe. The maritime charts did not feature latitude and longitude, meaning to determine a position the skipper would have to constantly check the angle and distance to at least two landmarks, which changed all the time. And once on the open sea, he would have to remember exactly for how long he had stayed on which course at which speed. Not impossible but just hard to believe. If there had been logbooks, they would have been a huge help to cartographers confirming the accuracy of their charts. But apparently, they could keep all of that in their heads.

Accompanying these charts were Portolans, something we would call today a pilot book. These are books guiding sailors through the entrance to ports, tell them what they will find there in terms of fresh water, provisions, facilities to make repairs etc.

They even new about compass variation, i.e., the fact that magnetic north and geographic north are not identical, and that this variation was not the same everywhere, and that it changed over time.

It is just mindboggling to think that they knew that but believed that bears cups would have to be licked into shape by the mothers.

As one can imagine, these two traditions of mapping the world started to coalesce in the great maritime republics, in Venice, Genoa and Pisa and the seafaring Iberian kingdoms. One of the most famous of these hybrid maps that combine the historic and theological content of a mappamundi with the accuracy of the maritime charts is the so-called Catalan Atlas, produced in Barcelona as a present for king Charles VI of France.

This map, created in 1375 not only incorporated the maritime charts of the mediterranean, but also new information about places, the ancients knew little about. Marco Polo had travelled to China in the late 13th century and a trade in Chinese silks developed rapidly thereafter that brought Genoese traders to the courts of the Mongol rulers and further into Mainland China. Their reports are included in the Catalan Atlas. The Canary Islands had been discovered in 1339 and its original population wiped out by disease and slaughter. So, they, i.e., the islands, not their inhabitants, too make it onto the map.

So far we have two mapping traditions that fused into one in the 14th century, the medieval Mappamundi that tries to educate about the way the world is or should be and the maritime charting tradition that cares about where exactly places are and how to get there.

And in 1397 a third technique for mapmaking appeared, or more precisely, re-appeared. In 1397 the emperor of Constantinople, Manuel II Palaiologos sent an ambassador to Venice, asking the western Christians for help in the defence against Ottoman attack. This ambassador, Manuel Chrysoloras would become one of the catalysts of the Renaissance. Chrysoloras was not just a diplomat, but a classical scholar, philosopher and teacher as well. Whilst his ambassadorship was a failure, and no soldiers came to Manuel’s aid, his cultural mission was a huge success.

He had brought with him copies of classical Greek works that had been lost to the west for centuries which he translated into Latin. He taught the intellectuals of Florence and Bologna to read Greek and published textbooks that were enthusiastically received. Within less than 100 years Greek, which had largely been forgotten, returned to the curriculum of the educated classes all across the continent.

Chrysoloras never returned to Constantinople but established a constant flow of Greek books going west. He died in 1413 en route to see the emperor Sigismund to discuss a suitable location for the Great Church council, that would ultimately be held in Constance (episodes 171-174).

Amongst the treasures he carried in his luggage was a work by Ptolemy, the 2nd century Greek mathematician. This work, the Geography would revolutionise the way maps were drawn.

If you put Ptolemy’s Geography into a search engine, it will inevitably show you a map. But there are no maps by Ptolemy that survived from antiquity. What was found in 13th century was a book with instructions on how to create a map of the world and 26 regional maps. And so in around 1295 Byzantine scholars created a world map from the instructions Ptolemy had left a 1000 years earlier.

The reason this worked was down to Ptolemy’s great invention, longitude and latitude. The medieval maritime charts did not show a long-lat grid that almost every modern map now features. What they showed were rump lines, connecting lines between points on the map that showed the course to steer if you wanted to get from A to B. These rump lines criss-crossed the map as commerce, not geography demanded.

Ptolemy’s genius lay in his realisation that to convey a three-dimensional object, aka Planet Earth on to a two-dimensional surface, aka a map, it required some form of projection. This was a minor problem when designing regional charts but became a huge one trying to depict the entirety of the known world.

And in this context, we need to clear up one constant misunderstanding. Very few people in the Middle Ages believe the earth was flat. From the days of the ancient Greeks, people knew that the Earth was spherical. The first globe was produced by Cratos of Mallos in the 2nd century BC and Erotosthenes had accurately calculated the circumference of the earth based on the difference in the angle of the sun between Aswan and Alexandria.

Fun fact, the term Antarctica goes back to the ancient Greeks. It means literally, land of no bears, being the opposite of the Arctic, which translates as “land of the bears”. Sadly, that had less to do with intrepid travellers checking out the fauna on the North Pole, but with the star sign of Ursus Major that hovers over the north.

Going back to medieval understanding of the spherical structure of the earth; emperors from Charlemagne onwards received an orb as a sign of their power over the entire earth, not a flat plate but. Medieval maps were circular, and for instance the one Al Idrisi produced for king Roger of Sicily in 1154 mentioned that the earth was a sphere as something that was common knowledge.

So, when Columbus set off to seek a route to India by going west, the concern was less that his ships would fall off the edge of the world, but that the journey would simply be too long to be survivable. Given the circumference of the earth was known, as was the eastward extent of Asia thanks to Marco Polo and other Italian travellers, one could estimate the distance from Seville to the Philippines or Japan at ~20,000 km or ~13,000 miles. Given Columbus ships were averaging 90 to 100 miles a day, the whole journey would be 150 days, well beyond the capacity to carry water and food of contemporary ships. Columbus got around that problem by mixing up Roman and Italian miles hence pretending the world was 25% smaller and by stretching China and Japan out further east than the reports warranted. In his pitch to Ferdinand and Isabella he claimed the distance was just 2-3000 miles. Some historians believe he did that deliberately. How he thought he would survive is then unclear. He may have hoped there would be islands along the way where he could find food, water and timber.

Ok, back to Ptolemy. Thanks to the curvature of the earth, two-dimensional maps will always get some dimension wrong, be it the surface area, the shapes, distances or direction. Which is why Ptolemy suggested to create globes, rather than maps. But he also recognised that Globes are difficult to produce and awkward to handle. So, he offered three types of projections, each with advantages and disadvantages. That question of projections is the content of Book I of Ptolemy’s geography.

The next 6 books contain 8,000 place names with their longitude and latitude, covering the whole known world from China to the mythical island of Thule, in the far, far north.

Ptolemy’s maps were a revolution, and copies were produced at a rapid pace. In 1409 the Geography was translated into Latin and as we heard in episode 172, was one of the central intellectual debates at the Council of Constance.

What is interesting is how little the early copyist and publishers changed on these ancient maps. They showed the world, its roads and cities as it was in around 200 AD. Little heed was given to fact that in the intervening 1200 years many lands have been discovered or at least better understood, cities had vanished and new ones had emerged. Germany, an empty forested swamp in the 2nd century AD was now a thriving place full of cities and roads, as was Poland, the Baltic and Scandinavia.

In 1427 the Cardinal Fillastre, an important protagonist at the Council asked the Danish traveller Conradus Clavus to create and then add a map of Scandinavia using the Ptolemy’s system of longitudes and latitudes, which he did, adding Greenland and Iceland as a bonus. But that was the exception. Mostly people just copied the ancient maps and left them as they were.

So we end up with the scenario where we have on the one hand maps based on the medieval mappamundi concept but containing some very accurate maritime charts , the information gathered from the intensifying trade with the East, the Canaries, the Azores the Cape Verde Islands and the coast of Africa, whilst at the same time the leading intellectual lights used a hugely advanced mapping methodology to present even more massively outdated information.

It was a German, Donnus Nicolaus Germanus who was the first to fundamentally revise and improve Ptolemy in 1466. He translated or replaced the antique place names in Italy and Spain with modern names and a more accurate view of northern Europe. We know little about him apart from the fact that he was likely German given his name and that he worked in Florence and Rome.

In 1477 pope Sixtus IV ordered two globes to be produced by Nicolaus Germanus, one a celestial globe and one a terrestrial globe. We know that these globes were produced because there are bills preserved in the Vatican library and the marquise of Mantua asked for a copy to be produced in 1507. They were probably destroyed in the 1527 sack of Rome.

That made Donnus Nicolaus Germanus the first person we know for certain to have produced a globe since antiquity.

By now Gutenberg’s printing press had radically changed the way information was distributed. Maps became an important product for printers. Several Ptolemy-based maps were published in Italy and Germany in the 1480s. But as people compared them to the information contained in the maritime charts it became clear that Ptolemy, for all his innovative mathematics, was full of inaccuracies.

In 1489 Henricus Martellus, another German, produced a world map that applied the longitude and latitude system of Ptolemy on the latest geographic information available. And latest really means latest. Barthomeu Diaz had rounded the Cape of Good Hope in March 1488 and returned to Lisbon in December 1488. Less than 2 years later Martellus map shows Africa as being circumnavigable and even some shapes in the Indian ocean that were previously unknown.

Before we go further down the route of German mapmakers, we have to mention someone else, Johannes Müller from Königsberg, not Konigsberg in Prussia but Konigsberg in Franconia. Since Müller was already extremely common, he called himself Regiomontanus, the latinised form of his hometown. He was probably the most influential astrologer and mathematician in the generation before Copernicus. As you know I dabble in all sorts of topics, literature, art, architecture, theology, philosophy etc., but I draw the line at mathematics and linguistics. That is not something I know anything about, nor do I feel capable of talking about it. So, if you want to know about the Regiomontanus Paradox and his contribution to the development of calculus you will need to find another podcast.

But what I can talk about and what matters for our subject here is that Regiomontanus, alongside his mathematical works, produced a practical guide, the Ephemerides. These are tables showing the trajectory of astronomical objects, in particular the planets, their position, speed and direction of movement at specific time intervals. These tables are naturally useful to Astronomers, even more to astrologers, but absolutely crucial to navigators sailing into the Southern Hemisphere.

One of the features of the Southern hemisphere is that you cannot see the polestar anymore. The Southern Cross and Sigma Octantis are reasonable replacements, indicating South, but the Portuguese sailors following the African coast did not know that. What they could do instead is use the angles of the planets from their current location and time to determine where they were. And for that, they needed a reliable table telling them where the planets should be on that specific day and time. And that is where Regiomontanus came in. His tables, called the Ephimerides were more accurate and more detailed than anything else contemporaries had access to.

Regiomontanus developed and compiled these tables when he lived in Nurnberg in 1474. Nurnberg may not have a university that funded this kind of research, but what it had was a large number of rich merchants who combined commercial acumen with scientific curiosity. These men were happy to finance Regiomontanus’ efforts and the publication of his tables in 1474. These tables were a huge success and were still reprinted 300 years later. At least one copy made it to the university of Krakow, where a certain N. Copernicus drew some literally earthshattering conclusions using this data.

In the last third of the 15th century astronomy and geography were considered two sides of the same medal. They called it Cosmology. Regiomontanus did consider making maps and as we have seen some of the terrestrial mapmakers worked on celestial globes.

Add to that scientific endeavour the rise of the printing press and we can see why the great free imperial cities of the Holy Roman empire became a key node in the distribution of knowledge about the planet. Nicolaus Germannus modified atlas was printed in a luxury edition in Ulm in 1482, in 1486 Johannes Reger published a set of maps together with what he called a Registrum, which allowed to cross-reference all of Ptolemy’s placenames with the modern notations.

Over in Nurnberg, Hartmann Schedel compiled his famous Nürnberg chronicle which included two maps. One was a world map, a combination of Ptolemy’s geography and the weird and wonderful elements of the medieval mappamundi. The second map was something completely different. This was a map of Germany and central Europe, the very first ever printed. It used the longitude and latitude now familiar to cartographers, but where Ptolemy had shown just empty space and swampy forest, it presented the magnificent Hanseatic cities, the trading centres of southern Germany, Krakow, Warsaw and Gdansk, the capitals of the Baltic states and even Moscow and Lviv, but strangely not Kiev.

The man who produced that, Hieronymus Münzer, was another one of that circle of intellectuals that emerged in Nürnberg. He undertook a journey to Spain and Portugal on behalf of the emperor Maximilian to find out more about these new discoveries. This produced one of the most detailed descriptions of the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century.

Because of the quaint half-timbered houses and the lack of an overseas empire, the idea has taken hold that 15th, 16th and 17th century Germans spent most of their time at home whilst Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch and English set out to conquer the world. But nothing could be further from the truth. As we heard in the season about the Hanseatic league and about the Fuggers, German merchants were going almost everywhere. They connected east and west and north and south. They had representatives in Lisbon, Antwerp, London, Bergen, Riga, Novgorod, Cracow, Budapest and Venice. Much of the timber the Portuguese caravels were made of came from the forests of Prussia, their design a development based on the cog. The copper and silver they traded into India and China came from the mines and smelters of the Fuggers, Welsers, Hirschvogels etc. In fact, these metals were pretty much the only European exports the much more advanced societies of India, China and Japan were interested in.

Amongst the crews of the Portugues explorers who set out into the unknown in the 15th century were almost always Germans. They were hired to operate the artillery. Germany had become highly regarded for the guns they produced and the gunners who had trained to operate them. The Portuguese called them Bombardeiros Alemaes and hired them for most expeditions. In 1489 the Portuguese crown standardised its naval artillery to German-made bronze guns and their experienced gun teams. Of the 18 men who survived Magellan’s circumnavigation, one was a German, Hans de Plank or Juan Aleman.

Which gets us to the most controversial figure in the history of German cartography, Martin Behaim. So, before we go into who he was and what he did, there is one undeniable thing that is associated with him, the Erdapfel, the oldest terrestrial globe in existence today. As we know it is not the oldest globe ever made, that was the one created in the 2nd century BC by Cratos of Mallos. And it was not even the first one made after antiquity, that was the globe of Nicolaus Germanus in Rome.

All that being said, it is still the oldest Globe in existence. And it is intriguing in as much as it was produced in 1492, in other words just as Columbus was stepping ashore in the Bahamas.

Given timing this globe does not show the Americas and obviously neither does it show Australia or Antarctica. So, what did Behaim put in the space where America is? Islands, lots of them, some known, others invented. The Canaries and the Cape Verde islands, today the jumping off points for an Atlantic crossing west and the Azores, the staging post 2/3rds on the way back east were already known. But then he put dozens, even very large blobs all over the surface and gave them names like the Antilles and the island of St. Brandan. Japan ends up being more or less where Florida is.

The Germanische Nationalmuseum in Nurnberg that holds the globe says in its description; the continents are too big. But it would be more accurate to say the planet is too small. Which may be down to Behaim subscribing to Columbus’ view that the planet was a lot smaller than it actually is and hence sailing to China or Japan was feasible in one go.

Which also ties in with the purpose of the globe. It was obviously not something one was supposed to take on a voyage. It was certainly meant as a piece of decoration, ordered by the city council of Nurnberg to adorn their city hall. It conveyed the message that Nurnberg was at the forefront of intellectual developments, was plugged into the worldwide flow of information and had extraordinary artistic and mechanical skills. None of which was actually an exaggeration.

But its main purpose was commercial. Like the Mapppamundis the globe is covered in text, but this text does not contain biblical events or spurious facts about exotic animals, it is about business opportunities. Where best to acquire rare materials, like pearls, precious stones, spices and luxury woods. It is here to entice the Nurnberg bankers and merchants to get involved in the financing of these journeys. It is first and foremost a spherical pitchbook.

So far, so good. A fascinating object from literally the year that changed history, and maybe a depiction of what Columbus expected to find when he sailed west, but why does it get almost everyone who writes about it so hot under the collar.

David Blackbourn in his excellent book “Germany in the World” describes the maker of the globe, Martin Behaim, as a “slightly raffish man of affairs” whose exploits are almost “grotesquely exaggerated”.

On the other end of the spectrum sits the polish historian Wojciech Iwanczak, who entertains the idea that Behaim held an important role at court and in the commercial world of Lisbon during the time of the discoveries. According to him, Behaim introduced Regiomontanus’ Ephimerides to the Portuguese and was appointed to the Royal council of navigational experts. Behaim might have participated in at least 2 journeys down south, one leading to the discovery of the Congo. Iwanczak even suggests Behaim may have known Columbus and might have shared his views on a journey west.

I initially wanted to design this whole episode around Martin Behaim, the great explorer, scientist and cartographer, a bit like I did with Johannes Gutenberg. But in the end, the evidence was all a bit too flimsy. It is a typical German story in as much that Behaim was pumped up relentlessly in the 19th century, streets and schools named after him, statues erected and even one of the oldest locomotives was named after him. The Nazis then went stratospheric, claiming Behaim had been the one convincing Columbus to sail west, then he had discovered Brazil before Cabral and had sailed around cap Hoorn before Magallan.

Which created the typical post-war backlash, where any claim to fame was dismissed on the basis of a lack of explicit contemporary sources until nothing was left than the story of a conman who died a pauper in Lisbon in 1507. And now everything is so convoluted and vague that even the Germanische Nationalmuseum, treads a careful balance not dismissing the previous storylines but being sufficiently vague not to get caught out. So here you go, Martin Beheim, explorer of far-flung lands and master cartographer, or exploiter of gullible city fathers, God only knows….

Which gets us now to the final piece, the map in the Library of Congress they call the Waldseemüller map and America’s Birth Certificate. At first glance it is just another world map, a larger one at 2.3m by 1,3m where Europe is based on the Ptolemy maps and the rest is based on maritime charts, Portugues and Spanish discoverer’s logs and reports of travellers to the east.

Where it differs is in the long stretchy landmass in the bottom left-hand corner that is surrounded by water and that bears a name that became familiar to all of us, America. In the copious notes the authors explain that they named America after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian navigator who went along on four or maybe only two voyages along the South American Coast, and wrote two letters home about it, letters that had been massively bigged up by publishers and had become early bestsellers.

What has confused scholars for centuries is how Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, the two makers of the map, could have known or could have guessed that America was a continent when most authorities, including Columbus himself, believed the lands re-discovered in the west were part of Asia. And to rule one thing out, Amerigo Vespucci had never claimed that America was a continent. He might have called it Novo Mundus, New World, but that is not the same thing.

And then comes the even more bewildering part. Not only is the positioning of South America fairly accurate, the map also shows the Pacific coast of South America with its characteristic bulge north of Chile. All that 6 years before Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the isthmus of Panama and became the first European to officially report the existence of the Pacific Ocean.

How this was possible is the kind of question that sells books by the wagonload and got the Library of Congress to pay $10million for a map.

So let’s take a look at some of the theories – I cannot do all of them because at some point I want to go to bed today, and so might you.

The simplest idea is that Waldseemüller and Ringmann had made it all up. They had Vespucci’s exaggerated reports of the discoveries along the Atlantic coast of South America and spiced it up by showing the continent surrounded by water. The key witness for this theory is Waldseemüller himself. In 1513 he produced another map that did not show a new continent in the West and did not call it America. In the explanatory note he said quote: “As we have lately come to understand, our previous representation pleased very few people. Therefore, since true seekers of knowledge rarely colour their words in confusing rhetoric, and do not embellish facts with charm but instead with a venerable abundance of simplicity, we must say that we cover our heads with a humble hood.” end quote.

But this admission does not mean they had just willy-nilly made up an ocean that nobody had even thought of. That would be very much out of character. Waldseemüller and Ringmann provide references for much of what they show, quoting sources, ancient and modern for the better-known regions and the records of travellers for the parts of Africa, eastern europe and Asia not well known to the ancients.

And there is a further aspect. The two mapmakers had been hired by duke Rene II of Lorraine to create these maps as a prestige project. The duke wanted to impress his peers by setting up a humanist school in his duchy, and that humanist school had to produce something that would be widely respected as a great piece of scholarship. If Waldseemüller and Ringmann had consciously been making things up, they would have made their duke the laughingstock of europe, which could get very uncomfortable.

There is a variation of that theory which has to do with the size of the world they show. Waldseemüller and Ringmann’s map is in the main based on Ptolemy’s geography. In fact, both authors had initially been hired to produce a revised version of the book, rather than to draw up maps. It was only when the fake letters by Vespucci circulated in Europe that they decided to create a map instead.

But where their map differs dramatically from other maps based on Ptolemy is in scale. This is one of the earliest maps that assumes 360 degrees for the circumference of the earth, rather than the 270 degrees for instance Behaim showed. In other words, Waldseemüller and Ringmann believed or knew that the Earth had a circumference of 40,000km. And they knew the distance from Europe to the Caribbean and South America. At which point the cartographers had to make a choice. Either they assume that Asia stretches all of the way to the Caribbean and east coast of South America. That would make it a landmass that covers 50% of the Planet. A continent of that size did not match up with what Marco Polo and other travellers had reported. So, the only logical conclusion was that there must be an ocean between Asia and the newly discovered lands; admittedly a very bold assumption, but a justifiable one.

Dr. Martin Lehmann from the University of Freiburg took a closer look at the political environment in which the map was created.

As I mentioned, Waldseemüller and Ringmann worked for duke Rene II of Lorraine, a prince on the western edge of the Holy Roman empire at a place called St. Die. St. Die is roughly 100km from Strasburg and 80km from Nancy, in other words, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, hundreds of miles from the Sea and even further away from Lisbon, Cadiz and Seville.

Since the map is correct in many respects, there is at least a theoretical option that it was based on information from voyages that had been kept secret. Which leads straight to the question how such incredibly valuable secrets could end up in the hands of two guys hired by a mid-level prince in a dark forest? Makes no sense, or does it?

Spain and Portugal were in a fierce competition, not over who could find America, that was not interesting at the time, but over the route to India and even more important, the route to the Spice islands of Indonesia and the Philippines. Being able to obtain these spices at source would cut out the middlemen, aka, India, the Silk Road and Venice, and the enormous margins that paid for the palazzi on the Canale Grande. In this race to get to the Malaka islands, the Portuguese travelled eastwards, whilst the Spaniards, who were a lot later to the game, travelled westwards. In 1494 the two sides agreed the treaty of Tordesillas that is often described as Spain and Portugal dividing the world between themselves. But that is not quite true. What Tordesillas said is that Portugal had the exclusive right to sail eastwards and Spain was free to seek their fortune in the west. May the best man win.

So, both sides were racing to the same spot, roughly 1200km north of Australia. Which means neither side wanted the other side to know what they were up to. That is why very few maps were published in Seville, Lisbon or Cadiz where the explorers made landfall and the best information about the new discoveries could be obtained. Both the Spanish and the Portugues surely produced maps, but they were only made accessible to the select few. And they kept voyages secret. For instance, it is widely believed the Portuguese knew about Brazil before the official discovery in 1500.

But all that secrecy had its drawbacks. This was a winner takes all race. Both sides wanted to send as many fleets as possible in the hope that at least one of them makes it through. It was a venture capital approach which needed venture capitalists willing to share some of the costs and risks of the voyages. This was the 15th century equivalent of the streaming wars, the race for AI leadership or the rush to dominate the ride sharing industry.

And where were these financiers? With the Italian banking houses in decline, it was the Southern German mercantile firms, the Fuggers, Welsers, Imhoffs, Tuchers etc., that were the obvious business partners for the Iberian kings. But if you wanted to get them on board, you needed to lift up the skirt a bit. That is the reason Martin Behaim was allowed to put a fairly detailed map of West Africa on to his globe, information that almost certainly came from Portugal.

And that could also explain the astounding accuracy of the Waldseemüller Map. If the Portugues had information about the West coast of South America and would have wanted to share it, they would probably have used someone in the German lands. But I personally find it hard to believe they had managed to sail up the whole of the west coast of South America to Panama and then made it back, all before 1507. And what for, this was the route they had ceded to the Spanish. And the Spanish are unlikely to have furnished the information, since they would have insisted on naming the continent after Columbus, not Vespucci.

Which gets to the next twist in the theory. Let’s put yourself into the shoes of a Portuguese strategist in 1505/6. You cannot know whether or not the Spaniards are in with a chance to make the race. But if you could find a way to slow them down, that would certainly be worth something. What if you could convince the Spaniards that there was an enormous landmass and another Ocean between them and the spice islands. Maybe that could discourage them from sending lots of ships, and more importantly it could hold their investors up from funding these efforts.

And who could be a better vehicle to convey this message than a group of humanists locked up in a village in the Vosges mountains trying to impress their ducal sponsor. Like journalists at a minor newspaper, they were looking for the great scoop that would put them on the national news. So it may be that the Portuguese suggested to Waldseemüller and Ringmann that South America was surrounded by water, even though they did not know that for a fact. That may also explain why the letters published in 1503 and 1504 and attributed to Vespucci are unlikely to be by his own hand and are full of exaggerations and inaccuracies. It could be part of a larger sting operation.

But, as my father-in-law used to say, if it is a choice between cockup and conspiracy, 9 out of 10 times, it is just cockup.

Irrespective of whether Waldseemüller and Ringmann were duped or dupers, the name America went around the world. The original print run of their map was for 1,000 copies. The name America then shows up on the so-called green globe in Paris from that same year. Then again on the Jagiellonian globe of 1510 produced in Krakow. Johanns Schöner who was the owner of the only surviving copy of Waldseemüller’s 1507 map, includes America in his two globes. From there it meanders across Europe;  between 1520 and 1540 reprints and slightly revised versions of Waldseemüller’s map are published in Vienna, Paris, Strasburg, Basel and Zurich. Finally in 1538 Gerard Mercator, he of the Mercator projection, published a world map where he was the first to declare the existence of two continents, South America and North America. Once the term had been embraced by the foremost geographer of the time, despite vigorous objections from the Spanish side, the naming had become irrevocable.

There you have it; the name America came about because a bunch of German humanists stuck in the back of beyond either made up or were made to make up a continent that then actually turned out to be real. And people say that Bielefeld does not exist….

Thanks for listening. This was a bit of a long one and I apologize. I was carried away by far too many fascinating facts. But if you have listened all the way I guess you liked it too.

Next week will be the last of our deviations around the Holy Roman empire in the 15th century. What we will be talking about is Arms and Armor, the greatest of the German exports in the 15th and 16th century and beyond. Shah Jahan, the great Mughal emperor and the man who commissioned the Taj Mahal, counted 200 Firangi swords amongst his most valuable possessions. Firangi means foreigner, but originally Franks, meaning Franconians -not Frenchmen – since most of his steel blades came from Solingen. How Germany gained its reputation as the source of the finest weapons and amour around is what we will discuss next week.

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How germany became the world’s foremost centre of learning

Between the time the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901 and 1933, a total of 31 were awarded to German scientists and politicians. To name just a few, Wilhelm Röntgen (1901), Max Planck (1918), Albert Einstein (1921) and Werner Heisenberg (1932) for Physics, Emil Fischer (1902), Fritz Haber (1918), Walther Nernst (1920) and Hans Fischer (1930) for chemistry, Emil von Behring (1901), Robert Koch (1905) and Otto Warburg (1931) for medicine, Theodor Mommsen (1902), Gerhart Hauptmann (1912) and Thomas Mann (1929) for literature and Gustav Stresemann for peace. The UK and France received 17 and 15 respectively, whilst the US picked up just 6 during that same period.

How could German universities rise to such dominance during the 19th and early 20th century from very humble beginnings? That is what we will look at in this episode.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 190 – A (very) brief History of the German Universities, which is also episode 6 of season 10: The Empire in the 15th Century.

Between the time the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901 and 1933, a total of 31 were awarded to German scientists and politicians. To name just a few, Wilhelm Röntgen (1901), Max Planck (1918), Albert Einstein (1921) and Werner Heisenberg (1932) for Physics, Emil Fischer (1902), Fritz Haber (1918), Walther Nernst (1920) and Hans Fischer (1930) for chemistry, Emil von Behring (1901), Robert Koch (1905) and Otto Warburg (1931) for medicine, Theodor Mommsen (1902), Gerhart Hauptmann (1912) and Thomas Mann (1929) for literature and Gustav Stresemann for peace. The UK and France received 17 and 15 respectively, whilst the US picked up just 6 during that same period.

How could German universities rise to such dominance during the 19th and early 20th century from very humble beginnings? That is what we will look at in this episode.

But before we start, let me say that this is likely to be an episode that may ruffle some feathers. That is not intentional, I had planned this episode long before the events of last week (we are recording this on April 16th, 2025). But it is one of the privileges of running a patron-sponsored podcast to be able to say whatever I believe to be factually correct, and for that I am extremely grateful to all of you, even if I cannot mention you all today. But I can mention Brock H., Mato Stun, Maurice S., Ian P., Edouard L., Daniel S, Colin B. and Martin L. who have committed to support the show on historyofthegermans.com/support.

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And with that, back to the show

Last week we strolled through Heidelberg on our way to the Schloss and the history of the Counts Palatine on the Rhine. Just by the way, today someone kindly pointed out that the correct English term is Count Palatine not count palatinate. But then it is Elector Palatinate. Go figure, and thanks Peter K. for letting me know.

And on our way to the Schloss of the Count Palatine we passed the university square, and I promised to dive deeper into the history of German universities. I must say, I am not exactly regretting this, but I have to admit that I might have bitten off a bit more than I can chew.

To give you an idea, the most recent work on the topic, Peter Watson’s German Genius is a mere 850 pages excl. notes and references. The key reference book is “The history of the European University” edited by Hilde de Ridder-Symoens and Walter Ruegg, which comes in 4 volumes, each at 800 pages. Literally too heavy for me to take home from the ever-impressive London Library, let alone read it. And then I am aware that some of you work in academia and are much closer to the subject than I am.

We have only 40 minutes to cover all this, which means I will rush over important events, miss out crucial incidents and personalities and remorselessly simplify. And for that I beg your forgiveness. We will almost certainly come across Melanchthon, the brothers Grimm, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Winckelmann, Helmholtz, Ranke and all the others again and they will get the space on the show that they deserve. What I want to achieve here is to provide a story arch we can go back to later.

Enough on the preliminaries.

The first German university was founded in 1386 in Heidelberg by Ruprecht, at the time Elector Palatinate and later King of the Romans. Well, not exactly.

The university of Prague, as we know, had been founded in 1348 and there the German-speaking nations had the majority, so arguably the first German university opened there. And then there was the university of Erfurt that received its charter in 1379, 7 years before Heidelberg. But actual teaching started only in 1392. Vienna was even earlier in 1365, but that is Austria, so it does not count, or does it.

All these squabbles over which one is the oldest university is not only nitpicky but emanate the whiff of relegation battles. Because whether it was 1348, 1365, 1379 or 1386, it was shockingly late.

By that time the universities of Bologna, Paris and Oxford were already 300 years in operation. And by the time Heidelberg was founded, there were already 39 other universities in Europe, not just in Italy, France and England but also in Serbia, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary and Albania.

Does that mean the German lands were an intellectual backwater. Not necessarily. Whilst there were no universities in the High Middle Ages, the monasteries and episcopal schools attracted eminent scholars, including Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. We did hear about the great Franciscan intellectuals, William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua and Michael of Cesena who lived and worked in Munich. (episode 151 if you are interested).

Part of the reason that it took so long for a university to be established in the German lands was that Paris and Italy weren’t that far away. And as anyone knows who attended university, degrees have a lot in common with luxury handbags. The label matters a lot more than the content. Therefore, opening a university in a mid-sized German town made no sense as long as students could go to Paris or Bologna and come back to a hero’s welcome.

So, why did we suddenly see a whole wave of university foundations in the late 14th, early 15th century, Heidelberg 1386, Cologne 1388, Erfurt 1392, Leipzig 1409, Rostock 1419, Greifswald 1457, Basel in 1460, Ingolstadt/Munich 1472, Trier in 1473, Tubingen 1477, Wittenberg 1502 and Frankfurt an der Oder in 1506.

One important factor was the Great Western Schism. Heidelberg’s first rector came from the university of Paris where the debates over ways to resolve the schism had shifted from the scholarly to the political. Moreover, France stuck with the Avignon popes whilst the empire in the main looked to the Roman pontiff. Professors and students who were either convinced one way or the other, or who were looking for careers at the princely courts needed alternatives to Paris, creating an opening for new universities.

Many had gone to Prague, lured by the size of the great city and its splendid court. But when in 1409 the Bohemians, including our friend Jan Hus agitated for the reorganization of the university, breaking the monopoly of the German speakers, many of the leading lights of Karl IV’s great creation left for Heidelberg, Leipzig, Erfurt or Cologne.

Despite these supportive events, these new schools could not stand alone. Which brings in one distinctive feature of German universities, they are in the main funded by the state.

The very first university, the one in Bologna, that received its charter from Frederick Barbarossa in 1158 had been a self-sufficient community of teachers and students.  The lecturers had established their own organization, usually with a rector, supported by deans of the faculties and the senate as the rule-making body. The whole structure was funded by the students, who often paid separately for each lecture.

These new universities could not attract enough students to pay for the lecturers. That is where the state came in. State in this context would be the local prince in the case of Heidelberg, Tubingen or Freiburg, or the city, in the case of Cologne, Leipzig and Erfurt.

Funding usually involved taking a monastery and giving the benefices of the monks to the lecturers. Hence a professor at the university in Tubingen would receive an income from the monastery of Sindelfingen that covered his expenses. And where did these monasteries come from? One case involves Mechthild of the Palatinate, granddaughter of the founder of Heidelberg University. She had a thing about higher learning and convinced her husband, Albrecht von Habsburg, to found the university in Freiburg. 20 years later she leant on her son, Eberhard im Barte, the duke of Württemberg, to found the university of Tübingen. One of her strongest arguments was that she would cover the costs, i.e., hand over the benefices of monasteries she controlled to pay the professors. Mechthild is therefore arguably godmother to two of Southern Germany’s most eminent universities. Do I need to mention that the official name of Freiburg University is Albrecht-Ludwigs Universität and the Tübingen one is named after Eberhard and Karl, no Mechthilds anywhere.

Despite being state funded, the universities nevertheless enjoyed far reaching autonomy in their organization and legal status. Like the medieval universities of Paris and Bologna, there were a senate, deans and a rector. The university was outside the jurisdiction of the city, same as in Oxford. When you come to Heidelberg and you do the full tourist tour, you will be shown the Karzer, the university prison, where unruly students were held at the Rector Magnificus pleasure, rather than in a police cell. This was presumably not something the princes and cities did voluntarily, but something they had to do in order to attract lecturers.

And why would these princes and Burgermeisters bear undergraduates spewing snakebite at the freshly painted walls of their palaces and town halls? One part is certainly bragging rights, but as we have seen last week with Friedrich der Siegreiche, the graduates, the law graduates in particular were extremely useful as civil servants, administrating outlying areas, organizing tax collection or swerving as ambassadors to other courts. Up until then this job had been done by clergymen who tended to blab to their bishop or archbishop. Having their own lawyers gave the temporal authorities the upper hand over the church.

To be a university, a studium generale, these new German universities had to be approved by the papacy. That in turn meant they had to follow a unified curriculum established by the church and applied all throughout Christendom.

Students would arrive very young, often just 15 or 16. They would spend the first two years learning the basics of what was called the trivium, i.e., grammar, rhetoric and logic, essentially learning to communicate in Latin. This was followed by an examination that awarded the title of bachelor. The next several years were dedicated to the Quadrivium, which comprised arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, though it could also often include ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy. If one managed to pass this exam, one was advanced to the title of magister artium, a Master of Arts. Only then would the student be invited into the higher faculties, namely theology, law and medicine. Medicine was always the smallest faculty; theology was the most prestigious and law the most practical. The title awarded to a magister who passed this course was the title of doctor.

And because this curriculum was the same across the medieval universities, people could move between universities and previous examinations would be mutually recognized. Someone like Ulrich von Hutten, the 16th century poet and knight, moved between Cologne, Erfurt, Frankfurt an der Oder, Greifswald, Wittenberg, Rostock, Vienna, Pavia and Bologna as he was completing his studies. This may sound bewildering for Anglo-Saxons, but switching universities is not unusual in the German system, in fact it is often regarded as de rigeur. So, I studied in Freiburg, Münster and Kiel, my father in Würzburg, Bonn, Münster and Tübingen, my grandmother in Freiburg, Danzig, Innsbruck and somewhere else I cannot remember exactly.

Back in the 15th century, a university was first and foremost a vehicle to disseminate knowledge. And that knowledge was derived from authorities, from Aristotle, the commentators like Averroes, the church fathers, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose and Gregory the Great and the great scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, Abaelard, Albertis Magnus. That does not mean that there was no debate. In fact, it was the exact opposite. A medieval university was built on debate. The disputation was at its core. These were almost gladiatorial fights between two scholars over a set topic, each fiercely defending their case. A bit like the Oxford debating society today.

But where the medieval university differed was in the weighing of arguments. Being able to reference an authority, ideally the Holy Scripture itself would in principle override factual evidence. I say – in principle – because there were medieval scholars, Albertus Magnus and the members of the court of Frederick II who engaged in experimentation and observation of nature. Just look at Frederick II’s book on falconry (episode 84 if you are interested). But when it came to examinations and progression inside the university, these skills were not regarded as important. The point of it was to be able to argue points of theology or law with reference to established truths, not to discover new truths.

As you can imagine, these new universities in the German lands had a bit of a slow start. They were new, the greatest lecturers and most admired theologians were teaching elsewhere. So, these were what the brits call red brick universities, places where you get a solid degree, but not a label you wear on your t-shirt 20 years after leaving. Sometimes the prince had to ban his subjects from going to universities abroad to fill the places.

That changed fundamentally with the reformation. Students from all over europe flocked to Wittenberg to hear Martin Luther speak. And not only students, but some of the great minds of the time wanted to be there too. Most famous amongst them is Philipp Melanchthon. Melanchthon would teach in Wittenberg until his death in 1560. In this time, he reformed the system of education in much of Germany. He helped setting up secondary schools where students were to learn Latin, not by rote, but by speaking and formulating their own sentences. He invented forms, i.e., separated students by their level of attainment, meaning one could only move from one level to the next by achieving certain academic milestones. For our German listeners, he invented sitzenbleiben.

At the university he replaced the medieval church Latin with classic Latin and Greek, opened up the rigid curriculum of trivium and quadrivium and placed more and more emphasis on philosophy, including natural sciences. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Reformation, which correlated with a lot of ideas he already had before Luther made his public.

Melanchthon, the Praeceptor Germaniae, Germany’s teacher was not only the high point of the early history of German universities, but also its end point. When he died in 1560, the movement to reform the church that Luther had kicked off had turned into permanent religious divisions. Universities became separated by confession. Where the local ruler was catholic, they became catholic universities, where he was protestant, they became either Lutheran or Calvinist. Many more schools were established, but Melanchthon’s push towards openness and natural sciences was forgotten and the organizations atrophied. There was no exchange of scholars between these confessional blocks. And even within the blocks mobility dwindled. Universities became local places of higher learning. In Heidelberg and elsewhere whole dynasties emerged where the professorship was passed from father to son. Students became more and more of a nuisance, the curriculum was simplified and rigidly tied to whichever was the prevailing religious orthodoxy. Examinations were lax and university degrees were no longer seen as a ticket to higher office.

This decline of the university may have been more severe in Germany due to the confessional fragmentation of the country, the minuscule size of some of these universities and the economic devastation following the 30-years war as well as the near incessant conflicts that followed. But it was something that happened all throughout europe. Universities simply weren’t where progress was happening. But progress did happen in the 17th, 18th and 19th century, in particular in France and England.

In France king Louis XIII and his chief minister, the cardinal Richelieu had established the Academie Francaise in 1635 to protect and preserve the French language. Over the next 50 years a number of Academies were established looking after painting and sculpture, dance, literature, humanities in general, opera, architecture and of course science.  These were established deliberately as research institutes. For instance, the Academy of Sciences publishes an annual document showcasing its latest discoveries. Being a member of an academy is and was a great honor that comes with a generous salary and a lot freedom to pursue enquiries in their respective field. Famous members include d’Alembert, Laplace, Lavoisier and Condorcet.

In England, intellectual and scientific progress happened outside the universities too. The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, otherwise known as the Royal Society, was founded in 1660. Other than the French Academies, this was a private initiative endorsed by a royal warrant but not controlled by the government. It is here that people like Isaac Newton, Hans Sloane, Charles Babbage, Sir Joseph Banks, Stephen Maturin, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Joseph Lister and so forth presented their ideas and published their research,

The German princely courts copied the academy model along French lines. For instance, the Preussische Academie der Wissenschaften was founded in 1700. Bavaria had one since 1759 and the Leopoldina, founded in 1652 in Schweinfurt and today the German Academy of the Sciences can claim to be the oldest continuously operating academy of science in the world.

Then and now these academies and societies are fantastic organizations, its members are often awe-inspiring scholars and researchers. But they also have their flaws.

Take the Royal Society and the list of eminent scholars I just recited. Many of them had to fund their research themselves. The Royal Society did not have the means to support actual research. That meant most of these men were independently wealthy. For instance, Charles Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle was funded by his father and his cousin Josiah Wedgwood II. Many made their living as country parsons, like William Stukeley who rescued Stonehenge and the chemist Joseph Priestly, who discovered oxygen.

The French Academicians did not have that problem. Academicians receive a generous salary and support for their research. But on the flipside, there are only very few of them. The French Academy of Sciences had always less than a 100 members, and it did not help that members were appointed for life, leaving young researchers high and dry.

But the really fundamental flaw was that to become a member of an Academie or a Royal Society, one had to already be a highly recognized scholar. What about all these 19-year-olds with dreams of great discoveries, where were they supposed to learn the methods and techniques of research?

That is where the German university model came in.

But I am jumping ahead.

The story starts with the foundation of four new universities, Halle in 1694, Breslau in 1702, Goettingen in 1737 and Erlangen in 1743. Why on god’s wide earth would anyone open up another university in Germany in the 18th century? There were already 50 of them around and some, like Rostock with barely 500 and Paderborn, a shocking 45 students. Moreover, these last 100 years tertiary education had migrated from universities to Ritterakademien, knightly High Schools where the sons of minor aristocrats were trained in practical things like fencing, riding, mathematics, military tactics, law, administration and French conversation. Sensible stuff, useful for managing an absolutists state.

Still, a man I honesty have never heard of before, Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen. No, not that Munchausen, another one. He was a lawyer who had made his career in the service of the Elector of Hannover. Well educated people that you all are, you will know that since 1714 the Elector of Hannover was also the king of England, Scotland and Ireland.

So Gerlach von Munchhausen rose up through the ranks and when King George II ascended both the English and the Hannover thrones, he found himself elevated into the Inner council, effectively the government of Hannover. He would later rise to be prime minister of the Electorate.

Munchhausen had studied in Halle and Utrecht before going on a Grand Tour to gain the polish necessary for a career as a courtier. When he came back, he was convinced that Germany deserved better. He lobbied Georg II and the estates of Hannover to let him open a university. But not one like the atrophied husks that were littering the academic landscape, but a new model.

One where theology was no longer the most desirable and most influential faculty. In particular he removed the right of censorship the theologians enjoyed in most German universities at the time. He expanded the faculty of philosophy to include the laws of nature, physics, politics, natural history, pure and applied mathematics, history, geography, art and modern languages. To make his new establishment at Göttingen even more attractive for ambitious young man keen to make their way in the world, university education included fencing, dancing, drawing, riding, music and French conversation.

He insisted that instead of conveying static knowledge, the purpose of study was to equip students with taste, judgement and intellect. I love the aspiration, in particular the idea of teaching 19-year-olds taste.

But Munhchausen, who did chair the university of Goettingen for 40 years did not just pronounce lofty aspirations. He also developed the vehicle to facilitate this change, the seminar. The seminar, as opposed to a lecture and a disputation, was a more intimate, smaller setting. Moreover, it did away with the Aristotelian, scholastic idea that there was one right way to think about something. Up until then universities taught students that they could understand and resolve any question if they only applied the correct logical sequence of arguments.

In Göttingen, they did away with that. Instead, they encouraged students to come up with new ideas, and new approaches to questions and to experiment. The role of the professor became to encourage and guide the student’s thinking rather than make him regurgitate a “correct” answer. Seminars quickly developed their own processes and structures. Students were asked to send in their essays a week beforehand, giving the lecturer and the other students time to come up with questions and challenges. Essays in the seminars were graded not on regurgitating the existing orthodoxy, but were rewarded for novelty, for breaking new ground. Outstanding contributions were rewarded with prizes and then published. Publications were reviewed and criticized by scholars at other universities. From that developed scientific journals overseen and edited by eminent researchers. And finally emerged the PhD that was more than an erudite reflection of all existing knowledge on a subject, but contained a thesis, a piece of research that led to a hypothesis.

And as we progress through time, more and more of that concept of a unified Aristotelian logic crumbled into dust. Different subjects required different approaches, different techniques and their unique way of presenting and debating results. As a consequence, the university faculties began to separate out into their specializations.

Whilst Göttingen flourished and many of Münchhausen’s ideas spread around the other German universities, to arrive at a new system of higher learning that would sweep the world, one more push was needed.

And that push came from the all towering figure of the 19th century, Napoleon Bonaparte. Thomas Nipperdey opened his magistral history of 19th century Germany with the words “And at the beginning there was Napoleon”.

The catastrophic defeat at Jena-Auerstedt and the subsequent rearranging of the German lands to suit French Imperial requirements had a profoundly shocking effect on all aspects of German life.  And it opened the way for reforms that had been otherwise unthinkable.

And one of these was the reform of education, associated with the name of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt himself had never attended university but had become an accomplished linguist. He was also the brother of the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, he of the famous penguins

Wilhem von Humboldt was asked in 1809 to put together a fundamental reform of the Prussian education system. The defeat had shown that the existing system of knightly academies and military schools had failed to produce the kind of abilities required to defeat a revolutionary army.

At the heart of Humboldt’s concept lay the understanding that the world is constantly changing. Hence to be successful, be it as a carpenter or as philosopher, one needs not just the technical knowledge but also the ability to learn new things and adapt. He said that students should learn how to learn.

Further he believed that to be able to learn how to learn, one needed to have a certain degree of freedom, freedom to choose what to learn and from whom.

He devised the German education system that in much adapted form still exists today. And to understand it, one has to start at the top, the university level.

Humboldt, with support from King Friedrich Wilhelm III, founded the university of Berlin, today called the Humboldt university in his and his brother’s honour. As one would expect for a new establishment in the capital, he brought in all the greatest academics in Prussia. He even plundered the state academies and Prussia’s leading university at the time, the university of Halle.

Humboldt Universitaet

And then he lets the academics shape the new university. These men, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher and lots more had grown up in the system of seminars, of rating new ideas over ancient authorities.

And so, they flipped the script. The faculties that had held sway over the medieval university, Theology, Law and Medicine were relegated, to be on par with Philosophy. Philosophy, which included the natural sciences, philology, politics, physics, mathematics etc. were all subjects where the mind could roam free, experiment, develop new ideas and approaches unfettered from ancient authorities. Law and Theology on the other hand were subjects that dealt with ancient texts and authorities. They were Brotstudien, degrees that led to employment as vicars, surgeons, lawyers, judges and civil servants, whilst philosophy boldly goes where no man has gone before.

And this distinction is still in place. The degrees in Law, Theology and Medicine are awarded not by the university, but by the state. They are seen closer to vocational qualifications than true academic degrees. Which may also explain the relative leniency when it comes to awarding PhDs like the rather embarrassing slim tome that bears my name and is covering dust in the library of congress.

But pure research – unconnected to practical use – happened only in the philosophical faculty where PhD’s take years and years to complete, followed by the Habilitation, the German speciality of a second PhD that awards the right to teach as a full professor.

But despite the emphasis on research, Humboldt and his advisers are aware that this new university cannot be just another academy of science, that it needs to teach young men and later on women as well.

The question is now what to teach the students. If the ethos of the German university was to seek new knowledge, rather than disseminate old knowledge, how can that be reflected in teaching. The concept they came up with was Lehrfreiheit, which means the freedom to teach. Rather than delivering pre-determined content as had been the case in the past, the professor could choose to teach on topics that he was particularly interested in. And guess what, the things professors are most interested in are the things they are researching at the time. Students were hence not only given access to the very latest in academic research during lectures, but through the seminars they were also involved in testing and challenging the lecturer’s thesis whilst developing their own ideas.

The risk that comes with Lehrfreiheit, is that it grants the professors the right to drone on and on about whatever takes their fancy, boring their students to death. To avoid that, and hence to balance out Lehrfreiheit, the academic freedom to teach, they granted the students Lernfreiheit, i.e, the academic freedom to choose their lecturers. That meant the professor who set up a 12-part lecture series about his research into the nocturnal habits of the Hypogeomys Antimena, the Malagasy giant jumping rat, might find himself confronted with empty benches and pitying looks from his colleagues. And therefore, next term he may discover his inner David Attenborough to fill the auditorium.

Ok, that sounds great. The perfect power balance between academics wanting to teach something they like and students forcing content they want to hear about. But granting such a degree of freedom to students could also backfire. I can think of scenarios where literally no students would show up for lectures at all, even if they are interesting. For this system to work we need students that display a certain degree of maturity and have prior knowledge to be able to follow a lecture on the frontier of contemporary science. So, students needed to already have a grounding in a range of subjects before they show up at Uni and must have learned to learn.

Which is where the Gymnasium comes in. In Humboldt’s concept the Gymnasium was the place where the student gains the hard knowledge required to follow the lectures and develops the ability and desire to learn, to become a scholar. It is these two things the Gymnasium is to foster, curiosity and understanding.

If that is the objective than the teacher at the gymnasium has to be more than a disseminator of knowledge, but someone who can convey the basic techniques needed to develop a thesis, to test it and to defend it. And hence a teacher must have attended university himself to be able to impart these skills. Hence Humboldt established the requirement for schoolteachers to have a university degree and to have passed a state examination. That was in 1809, the UK introduced the graduate teacher requirement in 1972.

One thing Humboldt did not need to introduce was compulsory schooling, that had already happened in Prussia in 1763. Both Girls and Boys were supposed to go to school from age 5 to 13. And Prussia was by no means the first of the princely states in the empire to do that. The tiny principality of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, can claim to be the very first place in the world to introduce compulsory schooling for boys and girls in 1592. The UK waited until 1880 to make sure everybody in the country could read and write, whilst the US states introduced it between 1852 and 1918.

The next important point to make is that schools, gymnasium and university were state funded, meaning access to them was and by and large still is free. That created a huge funnel for talent. During the 19th century, more children of underprivileged backgrounds were able to go to school, to Gymnasium and to university than in any other country in Europe.

And there were a lot more universities. Germany had about fifty in 1809, whilst England had two. Students had a choice, and because they had a choice, universities began to compete ferociously, by having the best libraries, laboratories, range of faculties, research output, eminent academics, scientific journals etc. That brought in the lecturers and students, who should the university administrators drop the ball, could move to another university halfway through their degrees without losing pace.

And it wasn’t that each state had its own elite university, Prussia for example had Berlin, Halle and then built out Breslau and created the huge university of Bonn from scratch. All of these competed then with Goettingen, Munich, Heidelberg, Freiburg, Tübingen and so forth and so forth.

Ok, now let me put on my banker’s hat. Where does all the money come from? This is expensive.

Sure, King Friedrich Wilhem III supported Humboldt and saw his project as a crucial stepping stone to rebuild Prussia. But he did not live forever, Napoleon disappeared to St. Helena, but the University revolution kept motoring along at ever higher revs.

Part of it was certainly its success. In 1892 the eminent French historian and educator Ferdinand Lot wrote quote; “The scientific leadership of Germany in all fields without exception is now acknowledged by all nations. It is a settled fact that Germany alone produces more than all the rest of the world put together; her supremacy in science forms the pendant to England’s supremacy in commerce and on the sea; and it is perhaps even greater.” End quote.

But it also spoke to German culture in the 19th century. I think many nations have an aspirational avatar, a sort of personality they would like to be seen as. The most clearly discernible avatar is the English gentleman. If you have seen the first Kingsman film, you may remember Colin Firth playing the ultimate English gentleman. His catchphrase is “manners maketh man”. In the film he takes a young man, Eggsy, from a lower-class background and of modest education and turns him into a gentleman, a male sort of Eliza Doolittle story. And what makes Eggsy into a gentleman is not just the exquisitely tailored suits and upgrade in table manners, but the moral fibre, physical strength, and willingness to self-sacrifice for the greater good.

The German ideal, in particular in the 19th century is “der gebildete Mensch”, someone who has Bildung. And Bildung is not just education in the sense of knowing lots of stuff, but being able to truly appreciate art, architecture, music, to constantly strive to improve oneself through reading philosophy and high literature aiming for a higher moral plane.

Where the gentleman is all about the interaction with the outside world, which explains the prevalence of team sports and debating in the traditional English education, Bildung is very much internal. It is not about improving society through action but about elevating the individual which then makes the world a better place. Bildung is such a vast subject that we will almost certainly get back to it at some point, most likely the point when I have found a way to better express it than I have just done.

But for the purposes of explaining why Germans were happy to see so much of their taxes being spent on education, Bildung is not a bad place to start. In the same way that British middle class families cough up tens of thousands of pounds in the hope the private school education would turn their kids into true gentlemen and ladies, 19th century Germans saw their universities and general education system as a manifestation of their culture, giving Bildung to their children.

The German education system reached its high point just before the first World War. It was copied all over the world and today’s universities that combine research and teaching, that invention of Humboldt became the standard from Cape Town to Tromso and from Tokyo to CalTech.

Today, the German education system is however no longer the envy of the world. The place that “produces more than all the rest of the world put together” is the United States. Reasons are many, but one was seminal.

In the first two years the Nazis were in power, 1,600 scholars, about 32% of the total of 5,000 university teachers were dismissed. That rose to 39% after the Anschluss of Austria.

In 1936 the University of Heidelberg was 550 years old. At the celebrations Philipp Lenard, Nobel prize winner and party members since before 1933, unveiled Aryan Physics, which was set against Jewish Physics, the latter being marked by excessive theorising and relying on abstract mathematical constructions, like the theory of relativity.

By then Albert Einstein who had been a professor in Berlin and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm institute for Physics, today the Max Planck institute, had already fled to the United States. I initially wanted to recite a list of the most eminent German emigrees to the US that Peter Watson had put together, but it is too long and does not work well in a podcast format. If I have time later on, I will write it up and add it to the show notes.

That is now almost to the day 80 years ago. Sure, Aryan physics have long ago collapsed under its own weight – that is actual physic. And German scientists are again winning Nobel prizes (109 since 1945) and make important breakthroughs, like the mRNA based Covid vaccine. But it took Germany decades to climb out of the hole the wanton destruction of its’ universities has dug. Because a university is not just libraries, laboratories, faculties and journals. It is the people, the passing on, not just of knowledge, but of the joy of learning, the encouragement that a good teacher can bring. The common saying is that most great discoveries are made by people standing on the shoulders of giants, but the more appropriate metaphor is that they are holding the baton in an eternal relay race where every runner has made gains and passed them on to the next, encouraged by those who have run before and encouraging those that will run after them.  Once the baton has been dropped it takes a very long time before that team comes back into contention.

When I went to university, there were hardly any foreign students felt attracted to come there. By 1998/99 that had improved to 9.2% foreigners, i.e. people without German passport, and that number has now risen to 16.4%, which is very reassuring, but still a long way from the UK, where 30% of the student body has come from abroad to get an education they presumably do not get at home.

In March 1945, the US 44th infantry division received orders to shell the city of Heidelberg in order to dislodge German forces.  The artillery commander, Brigadier general William A. Beiderlinden and his commanding officer major general William F. Dean took the decision to spare the city if they could. They contacted the city mayor, Dr. Karl Neinhaus, who, at significant risk for his own life, negotiated the withdrawal of the German troops in exchange for sparing them the bombardment.

When I lived in Heidelberg the story was that Beiderlinden and Dean had studied in Heidelberg, but that is not accurate. But still the name of the city and the fame of its university was so far reaching even amongst Americans who had not studied there, that they defied an explicit order to avoid its destruction.

That is it, our run through of the history of the German universities. Even though this is the longest episode to date, it is also the one that left me with more questions than answers. Next week we are back to our usual fare and continue the trip, going up the Rhine to Freiburg, cross the Black Forest and then turn north again to Tubingen and Stuttgart. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, if you are so inclined, check out historyofthegermans.com/support to lend the show a hand.

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How Printing Changed the World

“We should note the force, effect, and consequences of inventions which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, namely printing, gunpowder and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and the state of the world.” wrote Francis Bacon in 1620. And almost everybody agreed.

Printing changed everything, but how exactly did it change everything? That is a question nobody posed properly until Elisabeth L. Eisenstein got on the academic stage in the 1970s and the debate has not yet stopped.

In this episode I will try to take you through some of Eisenstein’s ideas on the how of the change and, in the end, attempt a raincheck on what we can learn from it for the information revolution we are living through right now. No worries, this is still the History of the Germans, so we will talk facts and dates and processes, with only occasional attempts at breaking into the ivory tower…

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 188 – What Has Printing Ever Done For Us?, which is also episode 4 of season 11 – The Empire in the 15th Century.

Quote: “We should note the force, effect, and consequences of inventions which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, namely printing, gunpowder and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and the state of the world.” wrote Francis Bacon in 1620. And almost everybody agreed.

Printing changed everything, but how exactly did it change everything? That is a question nobody posed properly until Elisabeth L. Eisenstein got on the academic stage in the 1970s and the debate has not yet stopped.

In this episode I will try to take you through some of Eisenstein’s ideas on the how of the change and, in the end, attempt a raincheck on what we can learn from it for the information revolution we are living through right now. No worries, this is still the History of the Germans, so we will talk facts and dates and processes, with only occasional attempts at breaking into the ivory tower…

But before we start, let me again press the point that the History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free, thanks to the support of our patrons. And you can become a patron too by signing up on my website HistoryoftheGermans.com/support and enjoy the warm glow of your fellow listeners appreciation. And special thanks go to: Christina K., Court Burkhart, James L., Mark Pearson, Dave G. and Dr. Volker Schulte who have already taken the plunge.

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And with that, back to the show

Last week we ended on Gutenberg having published his famous bible in 42 lines of beautifully accurate letters. And we also heard that at that same point he lost his workshop to his financial backer, Johann Fust who hired Peter Schöffer, a former calligrapher and Gutenberg’s apprentice to run the print shop.

Gutenberg himself kept printing, though scholars keep getting into fierce debates about which book was printed by him, how and where it was printed. But what is undisputed is that the next really ground breaking book was published by Fust and Schöffer, The Mainz Psalter. Another exquisitely printed book that saw the first use of multiple colours, decorative initials and a colophon, the printer’s mark declaring who made it, when and sometimes why.

But Mainz was not the only place to boast a printing press. Already by 1457 Heinrich Eggerstein and Johannes Mentelin, apprentices of Gutenberg, opened a printing press in Strasburg. In 1458 a Frenchmen showed up in Mainz, sent by his king to do a bit of commercial espionage. In 1461 the Mainzer Stiftsfehde, the archbishops war, broke out and a year later the city was sacked. As a consequence, Gutenberg fled and opened up a new shop in Eltville, whilst Fust and Schöffer remained and after things had calmed down, continued printing.

But in the meantime, their associates and apprentices had set out to seek their fortunes elsewhere. There was already a printing workshop in Bamberg by 1459, in 1465 there is one in Cologne, Basel and Augsburg opened in 1468, Nurnberg in 1470 and by 1500 there were printers in 60 different German cities. And many cities had more than one printer, Strasburg for instance housed 50 printers by 1500.

And these German printing apprentices did not stay just in Germany. They spread all across Europe, founding workshops in Rome in 1460, Venice in 1469, Paris in 1470, Segovia in 1472, Budapest and Krakow in 1473, Leuven in 1474, London comparatively late in 1476, Odense in Denmark in 1482. The first printing shop in Africa was opened in Sao Tome and Principe in 1494 by a certain Valentin of Moravia.

Within 50 years a 1,000 printing businesses had opened all across Europe and had produced 15-20 million books, as many as had been produced by scribes in all the preceding centuries – not that anyone can prove that statement, but it sounds cool.

So it is boomtime and printing is going to grow in a straight line to today, when in the US alone about 700 million books are printed every year. No, nothing in the world grows in a straight line, not even new technologies. By 1500, the printing industry experienced a terrible bust.

Why?

Gutenberg’s ambition had been to print the best possible bible. What he meant by that was a bible that looked and felt very much like a medieval manuscript, just infinitely more consistent, precise and legible than any monk in his scriptorium could ever achieve.

And who were these books made for? Well, the same clientele who bought books before, the church and the great princes. A bible, like the Gutenberg Bible of 1454 or the Mainz Psalter of 1457 were far too expensive to be bought by a country parson. They were made for bishops and abbots. And then we have the huge bibliophiles of the 14th and 15th century, king Wencelaus the Lazy and the duke of Berry, brother of the French king. These collectors had commissioned some of the most breathtaking illuminated manuscripts, like a spectacular copy of the Golden Bull complete with birds and bathing girls.

And then you have the Tres riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, probably the apotheosis of illuminated manuscripts, images you will recognise instantly. There was no way printers could match this kind of mastery, and in fact they haven’t even ‘til today.  

©Photo. R.M.N. / R.-G. OjŽda

Books like these were luxury objects and their owners used them as status symbols. But owning a full bible or psalter stopped being such a status symbol when there are not just thousands, but tens of  thousands or hundreds of thousands of such books out there. Sure, not as lavishly decorated, but in terms of content, the same.

So these great collectors diverted their cash to roman statues for their gardens, lions and rhinoceros for their menageries and tapestries and pictures for their state rooms.

Printers had made the mistake of asking their clients what they wanted and then produced that. And as Henry Ford once said, if I asked my clients what they want, they would say “A faster horse”. Printing became a solution in search of a problem.

As demand dwindled printing became concentrated in the major commercial centres, in Strasburg, Nürnberg, Augsburg as well as Venice and Paris. What kept printers alive weren’t the great, beautiful editions that are now gathered in the Morgan Library in New York, but very pedestrian, simple documents, most of which ended up as waste paper. The largest print runs were the same that helped Gutenberg in the beginning, schoolbooks and indulgences. In 1515 pope Leo X asked printers in Germany to produce 200,000 indulgences forms. Some presses survived in places where a local ruler sponsored them, for instance to produce their ordinances and political pronouncements, or to serve a newly founded university, like, say, Wittenberg.

This commercial malaise ended with the appearance of Martin Luther. The printing of his 95 theses and subsequent pamphlets did not only change the world of religion and politics, but also the world of printing. Wherever there was a printing press, his tracts and those of his adversaries were produced in the hundreds of thousands, not on behalf of the church or a prince, but to satisfy customer demand.

But to say that Luther singlehandedly saved printing does not sound convincing. Like all of us will ultimately do, Martin Luther shuffled off this mortal coil in 1546, ending the flood of letters, tracts and books. Still, printing has continued ever since.

Hence printing must have provided something to its consumers that they cherished and were willing to pay for. Was it simply the mass availability of books, or was there more to it?

Whilst pretty much everyone almost from Gutenberg’s day onwards agreed that printing fundamentally changed the world, nobody really dug into the question of what exactly it was that the use of moveable type changed; until the 1970s when the American Historian Elisabeth Eisenstein developed her groundbreaking thesis: “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change”.

Eisenstein began to break down the differences between manuscript culture before Gutenberg and printing culture after 1450. Much of what she identified is still not fully explored in detail, nor is it neatly organised into lists and frameworks. But enough to make a subjective list of what the printing press has ever done for us.

The first thing that the invention of moveable type changed was the accuracy of content. In a world where each and every book was a handwritten copy of a handwritten copy, the question whether the words on the page were in any way related to the original text depended on the diligence of every single scribe in the long line of scribes stretching back to when Aristotle dropped his pen in 322 BC. There is no reason to believe that master printers and compositors in the 16th century were any more diligent than monks in their scriptoria. A bible printed in 1631 posited “thou shalt commit Adultery” and revealed in Deuteronomy 5 that “the LORD our God hath shewed us his glory and his great-asse”.

But what made printed books more accurate were three things. First, most print shops employed a corrector who would read through the preprint and seek out errors. These men were often learned scholars or the authors themselves. Then there was the scrutiny of readers. If a book was printed in an edition of 1,000 copies, at least a thousand, if not more, people would read it and see logical or grammatical errors or find deviations from other editions of the same work. These errors they would report back to the printer.

Meanwhile, a hand written manuscript would only be read by a handful people, and in the case of the magnificently illuminated copies, probably even fewer. And it was most unlikely that two copies of the same book were in the same library, making it hard to identify different versions. And once an error had been identified, it would only be corrected in the margins of this copy, not the ones further up the chain.

And then there was the question what a printer could do once an error was spotted. He could and would regularly issue errata, alerting readers to mistakes made. And by the next edition, the errors would be eradicated. So over time, definitive versions of the Greek philosophers, the doctors of the church, the Roman poets and historians and so much more were created through these iterations. These more accurate versions of existing texts then became the foundation on which to expand knowledge further.

One example how this worked was the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first true modern Atlas being published from 1570 onwards in Antwerp by Abraham Ortelius. This work comprised 70 maps in its first edition. Ortelius invited readers and cartographers to highlight errors, suggest edits and send in their own maps. Some, not all of the suggestions were then incorporated in the next edition. By the 25th edition in 1598 the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum had grown to 167 maps and Ortelius cited 183 cartographers who have contributed to the work. Such collaborative effort would not have been possible without the ability to produce editions of several hundreds of thousands copies for interested readers to check and review.

That being said, printers also published a whole lot of nonsense. Gutenberg himself had brought out the prophecies of the sybil, some weird predictions that trace back to a member of the Flagellants, these men and women who staged processions during the Black Death, whipping themselves as a means to fend off evil, whilst probably adding to the spread of the disease.

One of the most popular of these nonsense books were the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, a combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. These books allegedly contained all the world’s wisdom that God had shared with Adam just before the expulsion from Paradise. Adam then passed it to this Greco-Egyptian god who compiled all that could ever be known about philosophy, the natural science and everything else in one great book to be shared amongst the people. In the process of copying through the millennia much content was lost or became garbled. Astrologers and alchemists in particular took the text as a starting point to recover the wisdom of the ancients and find the Philosopher’s stone.

Now before we laugh about the foolishness of our ancestors we should remember that 15th century society had not caught up with ancient Greece and Rome. Hence researching how the ancients did build their houses and temples, healed their sick or organised their state were ways to progress society. And by 1500 who knew which of these ancient texts contained groundbreaking insights and which ones were nonsense – well, nobody knew. This information needed to be reviewed and experimented with. In the case of these so-called Hermetic writings, it took until 1614 before they were debunked. But, and that is the important point, they were debunked through investigation and experiment, the modern way we split fact from fiction.

The next feature that printing added to books was permanence. Not permanence of the physical book, which was printed on paper, a material much less durable than parchment. But the continuation of the content. Before printing, books simply disappeared because abbots or university deans decided a particular work was not worth to be copied again. After Gutenberg it was the printer, and that meant ultimately the market, the interested public, who determined what was to survive. And given the lower cost of printing, even a comparatively small number of readers could ensure the continued existence of a piece of writing.

Having increasingly more accurate and more permanent and just simply more content was a huge step forward, but all of it would have been useless without the ability to locate and consume that information.

Let me explain this with the book I hold in my hand right now. Its title is “The Gutenberg Parenthesis”.  The title is intriguing and at least points towards what the book is likely to contain, which is why I borrowed it from the library. Before printing, books were usually referred to by the first two or three words of the actual text. A bit like papal bulls. The most recent one, from May 9, 2024 is entitled “Spes Non Confundit” meaning “Hope does not disappoint”. 10 points to Gryffindor if you can tell from the title what that bulle is about.

Then I look look at the title page of my book, where it says “The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Internet” and gives me the name of the author, Jeff Jarvis and the publisher. By now I have a pretty decent idea what this book is about. Most medieval manuscript’s did not have a front pages, text starts immediately with a nicely drawn initial. Sill no clues what it will be about.

Then we come to the contents pages. Each chapter has its own title which conveys even more information, like chapter 2 “How to print”, again quite clear what this will be about. Plus a page number, so I can go straight there and read that particular chapter.

Manuscript – no table of contents. No page numbers.

At the back of my book, there is an index. If I want to check back on what this author says about Ortelius’ Theatrum, the index directs me to page 73.

Now imagine you are a scholastic scholar and you are debating a point of theology with another scholar in a disputation. Your opponent makes the point that Thomas Aquinas said in his Summa Theologica that “Jesus avoided extreme poverty” You doubt that. So where in the Summa Theologica of Aquinas is that statement? These words appear in Part III, Question 40, Article 3. In the internet copy I found of it, it is on page 5051. How could you find this quotation in a huge book with no page numbers, no list of contents and no index, and all that whilst you are in the midst of a debate.

Just imagine how much time medieval scholars must have spent trying to find the right quotation in their hand written books. What made that even harder was the layout of sentences and pages. You remember how hard Gutenberg worked to make sure both columns of his bible were perfectly symmetrical and justified on the right. That looks beautiful, but does not aid legibility. No paragraphs, limited punctuation, gothic script…just very hard.

And then there is the problem of finding the books. As the age of print progressed, libraries began organising their books in systems, alphabetically or by topic, but within opic, again, alphabetically. And they would create catalogues, first as lists, but then the card catalogue allowing readers to search by author or by topic. Bibliographies told scholars what books existed and where to find them, and book sellers produced list of titles they either had available or knew how to procure.

These somewhat mundane additions and processes were of incredible importance. As you most probably know, it wasn’t the fall of Constantinople in 1453 that suddenly released Greek and Roman literature into western Europe. As we discussed in episode 172 the participants of the Council of Constance set out in search of lost books amongst the German monasteries, because the Italian and Greek ones had already been thoroughly searched for ancient writings. In other words, the information was already there. The problem had been accessibility. Now with editions of hundreds or thousands of copies, title pages, page numbers, agreed titles the connections began to form, like neurons starting to fire together in the brain, wiring distant areas of learning and understanding together. And as these networks expanded they became able to perform ever more complex functions, propelling what we call the Renaissance to a higher level, initiating the Reformation and facilitating the rise of modern Science.

The emergence of the printed book changed the way information was consumed. Before printing books were most often read aloud. University professors would read the works to students, hence the term lecture. Monks and priests read the gospel aloud during services. Private, silent reading was unusual, in part because very few people privately owned books. They went into libraries or universities to hear them being read. But now, as the number s of available books had grown thousandfold, individuals owned their own books and could read them in private. And when you read silently, thoughts can penetrate your head more easily, you can stop mid-sentence and check back, more connections are made, and more ideas, more questions occupy the reader.

Eisenstein was fascinated with the early printer workshops. This was a place where artisans of various kinds, type cutters, compositors, printers came together with writers and intellectuals in an environment overseen by the master printer, himself often writer, translator, editor and entrepreneur. Erasmus famously proofread his works at the Basel workshop of Johann Froben. These places were places of secular intellectual exchange not seen in Europe since the Roman baths closed in the fifth century. And this link between printing and intellectual gatherings continued into the London coffeehouses of the 17th and 18th century whose proprietors issued newspapers to their patrons keen to discuss the latest inventions, political shenanigans, society gossips as well as maritime insurance.

Which gets to the next point. In the Middle Ages, the ultimate decision which book was replicated and thereby disseminated lay with the abbot who ran the scriptorium. That monopoly had already softened as commercial copyists set up shop in the major cities and universities, producing whatever their customers asked for. But these customers tended to be either members of the church or aspiring to a career in theology or law.

Master Printers were first and foremost entrepreneurs. For their business model to work, they needed to find buyers for their print runs that quickly went from a few hundred to 1,000 and then ever more. The church was a huge customer and as we have seen with Gutenberg, Fust and Schöffer remained so for a long time. But the church was not the sole customer. Printers famously produced Luther’s writings, but also more and more works that had less to do with religious education. One early bestseller was “the Ship of Fools” from 1494. In it Sebastian Brant tells of a whole fleet of silly, coarse and vulgar people setting off from Basel to Narragonien, the paradise of fools. It is a satire about the late medieval/early renaissance society. And it featured as the first of the fools, the book fool, a man who is immensely proud of the large number of books he had acquired, but which he has never read. The fact that by 1494 someone like a book fool could exist says a lot about the proliferation of printing and the taste of its readers.

Wen we talk about printing, it is important to remember that printed books sometimes contain more than just text. They also contained images, initially woodcuts and later engravings. These techniques predate printing, but found a new and important application in books.

The Ship of Fools was decorated with 103 woodcuts, according to some the work of Albrecht Dürer. But there is one book you will almost immediately recognise, not for its text, but for its magnificent woodcuts. The Schedel’sche Weltchronik or Nuremberg Chronicle as it is known in the Anglo-Saxon world. This enormous undertaking was initiated by two Nurnberg merchants in 1491 as a commercial venture. On 656 pages in the Latin version and 596 in the German one, Hartmann Schedel drones on about the history of the world from the day of creation until 1493. The writing is in the main plagiarised from existing authors, including works by the inevitable Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini, and where it is by the man himself, apparently very dull. But nobody cared about that. The 1809 printed images, in particular the 31 double-sided views of major European cities are instantly recognisable. Sure, some woodcuts were used several times, giving Naples and Florence as well as Strasbourg and Mainz an uncanny similarity. But what a masterpiece of the art of the woodcut.

Commercially, it was a disaster. Anton Koberger, by then Europe’s first media tycoon operating 12 presses with agents all across europe had printed around 2,500 copies, of which more than 500 had remained unsold by 1509.

Anton Koberger’s financial hardship were however not the only downsides the rise of printing brought into the world. The drive towards definitive versions that had made books more accurate and more permanent led at the same time to standardisation, crowding out diversity.

Printers in the 16th century produced costume books, giving an idea what people in different countries were wearing. These images were pored over by artists who included them in their paintings, from where they returned back into woodcuts and engravings, developing into stereotypes with a life of their own. Not every Spanish lady wears a flamenco dress, nor would you see a pair of Lederhosen in Hamburg or Düsseldorf. Actually I take this back, there are enough pseudo Bavarians in Düsseldorf that you may see them occasionally.

Once copies of Vitruvius book on architecture, complete with exquisite engravings appeared everywhere from Stockholm to Seville, its stringent rules about the order of columns, proportions, symmetry etc. spread with it. Not that European architecture becomes uniform overnight, but distinct local styles became regional and by the 19th century national and international in the 20th.

Whilst architecture moves slowly, the standardisation of language moved much faster. Bible translations, like Luther’s set the standard for a unified language for the German lands, relegating for example low German to a dialect. This process at different times and triggered by different books took place all across Europe. For me the most confusing of these standardisations is the Germanic part of Switzerland where the language that people speak, Swiss German, is not the language they write in. Swiss Newspapers, novels and even poems are in High German, easy to understand for me, whilst I am completely lost when listening to locals on the Bahnhofstrasse.

But it is not just language. In 1542 the historian Johann Sleidan wrote: quote: “As if to offer proof that god had chosen to accomplish a special mission, there was invented in our land a marvellous new and subtle art, the art of printing. This opened German eyes, even as it is now bringing enlightenment to other countries” end quote.

Gutenberg’s invention came in the midst of all the chaos of the empire and the ever more persistent realisation that the country was falling behind its neighbours, politically and economically. In this time and the centuries that followed, German national pride could not attach to great battles and far-flung lands conquered, but it focused on culture, language and ingenuity. Gutenberg’s printing press was the first of a long list of engineering achievements that formed part of the self-image of Germans then and still today.

This brings us now almost to modern times where we may be facing another shift on the scale of Gutenberg’s printing press, the internet and all its offshoots from search engines to social media and artificial intelligence.

I will not pretend that I could predict the future. I did that for a decade and I could never figure out which of my many predictions would come true. But there is an interesting theory making the rounds in media studies, called the Gutenberg Parenthesis.

The idea is that there were modes of communication and interaction that existed before the printed book, that went into some sort of hibernation between 1600 and 2000, and are now returning via social media.

Specifically the idea is that before Gutenberg information gathering and dissemination was a collaborative, largely oral process. For instance the Hanseatic merchants were receiving information from their correspondents in the other Hanse cities whilst simultaneously disseminating information to their friends at home and recipients elsewhere. This kind of information gathering and dissemination was largely replaced by newspapers from the 17th century onwards. People no longer needed a friend telling them the prices for copper in London were, they could look it up in the back pages of the precursors of the Financial Times.

Print created a world in which certain institutions acquired the credibility and later the monopoly to disseminate information. And this did not just apply to hard facts. In pre Gutenberg times, narratives like the chivalric romances, the tales of King Arthur were altered and added to first by oral storytellers and then by writers. There was no single author of the definitive version of the legends of Parzival. Sebastian Brandt was ranting about editions of his Ship of Fools containing new text he had never written. By the 18th century copyright allowed authors to keep control over their creations, which is why Goethe’s Faust has a final approved version whilst Shakespeare’s Hamlet has competing versions.

The Information age has revived some of these pre-Gutenberg ways of producing and sharing content. When important news break, journalists go to social media looking for videos made by bystanders, rather than wait for their correspondent to make his or her way to the scene. And since we can all access these same videos, we receive information at the same time and in the same way as the professionals.

And not only that. We pass this information on to our contacts, usually with a comment giving our assessment of what we think it meant. And this comment is then passed through the chain again, very much like our Hanseatic merchants shared information and comment with their friends and colleagues.

And as information gathering and dissemination is democratised, organisations like Wikipedia can become the repository of knowledge superior to any Encyclopaedia and Bellingcat can investigate events more thoroughly and more effectively than intelligence agencies.

As for fiction, I guess some of you are familiar with apps like Wattpad, fanfiction.Net or Ao3, where anyone can publish their own stories, some genuine new creations, but many as variants of existing novels or universes. There are at least 810,000 fan fiction extensions of the Harry Potter Universe, a very modern version of the retelling and embellishing of the Knights of the Round Table.

3 of the top 10 books in the US YTD are from authors who started out as self-published writers, without the support of editors and marketing budgets. Some of these authors have risen to success via BookTok where 730 million monthly active users swap tips about books to read.

And this podcast too owes its existence to the replacement of the monopoly of publishers by collaborative tech. Yes, podcasts are probably the most linear of modern media with a host or hosts droning on about whatever they want to talk about. Nevertheless, when I listen to a podcast, I feel part of a community, much like listening to a storyteller on a medieval market square. It is a very different, more ancient experience than watching a documentary on television.

Sure there are huge problems with social media, I guess you all know them so there is no need to list them here, but at the same time we should not forget that there are huge upsides. And in the same way that printing of Luther’s theses drowned europe in a tsunami of death and destruction hitherto unknown to humanity, printing also replaced Hermes Trismegistus with Newton, Einstein and Stephen Hawking. It took a while and pain came before gain, but gain came in the end.

And that is it with armchair philosophy and its cousin, media studies. Next week we will go back to our usual fare of princely pursuits, of harassed heiresses and battled bishops. We will drop further south from the city of Mainz and meet the next elector, the Count Palatinate on the Rhine. I hope you will join us again.

As you may have noticed, all the positive changes in the world of information gathering and dissemination, Wikipedia, Bellingcat and new fiction rely in the main on users voluntarily contributing to what they perceive as valuable, rather than advertising.  Hence if you are inclined to support this next revolution in human communication in its grass roots, go to historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up as a patron.

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The Invention of printing

This podcast is now well into its fourth year and I have established my process for research, script writing and recording. As for research, that usually means going to the London Library and bend down to the lowest shelf to dig up some age-old copy of a German language book that happens to be the one and only works that goes into the kind of detail on the topic at hand you guys have gotten used to.

Imagine my confusion when I started looking into Johannes Gutenberg and found not just a few books, but whole shelves of books in English, German, French, Italian and dozens more talking about even the most intricate details of the life and works of the inventor of the printing press.

Drowning in this avalanche of material, I realized that at a minimum this story requires two episodes, one about how Gutenberg came to achieve this breakthrough and then the impact his invention had on the world and on the Germans in particular.  

Hence today’s episode is about the man and his invention, though about the man we know so very little….

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 187 – Gutenberg’s Pressing Matters, which is also episode 3 of Season 10 – the Empire in the 15th century.

This podcast is now well into its fourth year and I have established my process for research, script writing and recording. As for research, that usually means going to the London Library and bend down to the lowest shelf to dig up some age-old copy of a German language book that happens to be the one and only works that goes into the kind of detail on the topic at hand you guys have gotten used to.

Imagine my confusion when I started looking into Johannes Gutenberg and found not just a few books, but whole shelves of books in English, German, French, Italian and dozens more talking about even the most intricate details of the life and works of the inventor of the printing press.

Drowning in this avalanche of material, I realized that at a minimum this story requires two episodes, one about how Gutenberg came to achieve this breakthrough and then the impact his invention had on the world and on the Germans in particular.  

Hence today’s episode is about the man and his invention, though about the man we know so very little….

But before we start just another reminder that the History of the Germans is advertising free and for good reason. It does not take a genius to notice that the way we communicate as a society has changed. We do spend a lot of time on electronic media of all kinds, not just social media, but podcasts, streaming, youtube etc. Most of this content is paid for by advertising. Advertisers, in the absence of better metrics, pay the platforms and creators on the basis of eyeballs or ear canals. And since our crocodile brains are still dominating the cerebellum, our eyeballs and ear canals  always turn to the loudest and most eye catching. But that is not aways the information our frontal cortex wants and should feed on.  We need stuff that may be less exciting, but more thoughtful. And that is not what advertisers can pay for. So we need at least a part of our information world that is funded by its users. That is why I have subscriptions to newspapers and libraries, am happy to pay for the BBC and for Netflix. And for some podcasts and Substacks too. And if you want to do the same and for some reason feel the History of the Germans is deserving your support, go to historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up as a patron.  And thanks a lot to Marko P., James Zapf, Kenneth H., MarkV, Mark Young, Swin Purple and Jeff N. who have already done that.

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And with that, back to the show

Johannes Gutenberg was born sometime between 1393 and 1400 in Mainz. His family was comparatively well off, part of the 100 ancient families of the city, what we call today a patrician. The family lived mainly off annuities, financial instruments issued by the city that generated a solid and predictable income. We also know that his father was a companion of the mint, meaning he was on some sort of supervisory board of the archepiscopal mint  that struck the Rhenisch Gulden, the most common currency in the Holy Roman Empire.

His name, Gutenberg, derived -as was customary – from his family home, the Hof zum Gutenberg in the city centre, next to St. Christopherus church.  Gutenberg translates as “hill of the good people” but that was not its origin. Where it stood had once been the home of one of the largest Jewish communities in europe. That community had been subjected to pogroms ever since 1096, as we discussed in episode 38, but the great expulsion had come in 1349 when the Black Death struck. Allegedly 6,000 men, women and children chose to commit suicide by setting light to their synagogue rather than convert. Where they once lived, the Judenberg, was given to the city council and a patrician family built a house on the site. As memory of the atrocities faded, that house turned from Judenberg to Gutenberg, which in 1419 the family adopted as their family name.

Hof zum Gutenberg in 1835 (a baroque palais built after the original house was burned down in the 17th cnetury)

And that is all we know about his first 30 plus years. He may have gone to university, he may have trained as a goldsmith, or he may have just hung out in in bars and nightclubs for all we know.

In 1434 he moved to Strasbourg, a city that at that time was much larger and much richer than Mainz. Mainz had been going downhill due to mismanagement by the city council, internal conflicts, the endless fighting between the archbishops and their neighbours and the regular schisms between two contenders for the archepiscopal throne. It had not recovered its population from before the Black Death. Strasbourg on the other hand was thriving, reaching 25,000 inhabitants, a major hub in the wine trade that stretched all the way to Norway and Scotland. Its cathedral, one of the greatest achievements of gothic art was still rising up and the streets were lined with impressive stone houses of prosperous merchants and artisans.

What Gutenberg did in Strasbourg for the following 10 years is shrouded in mystery. Some argue he did already begin printing there in 1440, but no proof of such activity can be found. All we do know about this time is from court records, according to which he was engaged in the production of mirrors and some “adventure and art” that was kept secret.

He left Strasbourg in 1444, then disappears from the records before he returned to Mainz in 1448. Seemingly flush with cash he buys out his siblings and moves in the old family home. And that is where he starts his printing business for real. In 1454 he published his masterpiece, the Gutenberg bible.

That is it. He never wrote down what inspired him, how he developed the technology or what he wanted to achieve with it. All these books that have been written about Gutenberg’s life, and there are at least three available in English, are all conjecture. Well-argued and meticulously researched, but in the end more suitable for a true crime than for a history podcast.

But what we have is his magnificent innovation, according to Luther, “Gods ultimate and greatest gift”.

Johannes Gutenberg stands in a line with the world’s great inventors, the James Watts, the Thomas Alva Edisons, the Carl Benz and Louis Pasteurs. But as much as we would all love to read the story of the lone genius  who had that one brilliant idea that propelled the world forward, we have to acknowledge that boring academic research has proven again and again, that there are very few if any instances where innovation happened that way. All these great advances were usually the culmination of multiple strands of developments that came together at a particular time and a particular place to be picked up by some determined individual who happened to be at the right place at the right time.

Let’s see whether printing with moveable letter was the same..

First up, Gutenberg did not invent printing. People have been printing things for hundreds if not thousands of years using wooden stamps. And since the late 14th century the art of the woodcut was spreading cross europe, a technique that allowed to print images or a page of text multiple times.

Madonna del Fuoco (Madonna of the Fire,woodcut  c. 1425), Cathedral of Forlì, in Italy

Gutenberg’s technology deviated from this technique first by using metal rather than wood. Metal is much more durable, allowing the production of a much larger number of copies before the stamps wear out.

The second downside of the woodcut was that to create a whole book would require to carve every single page first in wood, as a mirror image and then making an imprint. That was not only time consuming, but also left no room for error. If say only one letter was wrong, the whole woodcut had to be made from scratch again. Which is why nobody did that.

Gutenberg’s press used moveable type. So there would be a stamp for each letter and they would be assembled to form the respective words and sentences. If there was an error, all you need to do, was replace the letter and restart the printing.

That’s it. Genius! That is the invention. Let’s just go and start printing.

But hold on. Let’s think about that. If you want to print a book, you will need a lot of these individual letter stamps, called punches. And I mean a lot. For example in my scripts I use about 3,500 characters per page. The Gutenberg bible was a bit more generous with space and used only 2,400. But then he printed at least two pages on the same sheet of paper. That is 4,800  punches minimum per print run.

So, let’s take a look at how these punches could be made. Punches were originally created in coin making. Up until the modern days coins were made by creating a metal disk usually containing some gold, silver or copper. This disk is then struck with a punch to imprint the desired image, say heads or tails on to the disk. The punch consists of a handle like that of a chisel, a steel shank of a few centimetres’ length into which the punch maker had engraved an image. The coin maker would then carefully place this punch over the metal disk and strike it with a hammer. In a sophisticated mint, such as the mint in Mainz, there would be another die underneath the disk, called an anvil, so that both sides of the coin would be struck at the same time.

Now here is the rub. The anvil lasted about 36,000 strikes and the punch only about 20,000 strikes, A very large mint like Venice would produce about 20,000 coins a day, meaning the punch needed to be replaced every day. Mainz was certainly smaller, but still, the punches only functioned for a limited period of time.

So every day or every couple of days a punch maker needed to engrave a new punch. And this punch had to look exactly the same as the previous punch to make sure the coins looked identical. Then the coins were quite small the images however quite intricate. These minute images had to be engraved into a steel punch that had to be heated and cooled several times to harden it, but without becoming brittle. Then the engraving had to be done into the steel, with steel. There was no way you could get hold of a diamond cutter. So steel was used on steel to scrape off some minuscule curls of steel. I have no way of checking this, but according to John Man’s book The Gutenberg Revolution, a good punch maker could create letter on a scale of 0.01 millimetres, which is 6 times the resolution of a modern laser printer.

And a punch maker needs about a day to make one punch. So to make our 4,800 punches needed to print two pages would take, well 4,800 days, which given feast days and holidays meant it would take one punch maker 20 years to make all the punches  needed for these 2 pages, or 20 punch makers a year. And Gutenberg did neither have 20 years nor the funds to employ 20 punch makers. Plus each letter would end up being just that tiny bit different.

So he needed a more efficient solution to make metal punches. And that solution was the hand mould. Now I have been warned to try to describe the hand mould. Someone called Joseph Moxton tried 200 years ago and when his 13 page description was reprinted, the editors wrote in the comments that “nobody should try to understand the hand mould by reference to this description”.

Type Foundry – Druckkunst-Museum Leipzig

Printing Like Gutenberg and Hand Casting Type

But the idea is the following. You create one punch for each letter. Then you use the punch to create an imprint, called the matrix. The matrix is then inserted and fixed at the bottom of the hand mould. And then you pour metal into the mould which then creates a little rectangular stick with the letter at the top. Repeat again and again and hey presto one punch is turned into lots and lots of cloned punches. But there is still a problem, if you were to make these from say steel, it would take a few hours to cool naturally or you could cool it down rapidly using water or oil, which would add another step in the process.

Which gets us to the next bit of alchemy, the metal he used for these cloned punches. It was an amalgam of lead, tin and antimony. This alloy is not only liquid but has a habit of cooling extremely quickly. So, you can pour in the molten metal that was heated to 327 degrees Celsius and take out the new punch almost immediately, already cool enough to be handled. And bang, you take out the letter punch and you can use the hand mould again to make the next, and the next and the next.

Ok, great. Now you can make lots and lots of the 24 or 26 letters of the alphabet. But there is another problem. Gutenberg wanted to create a print that looked like a handwritten manuscript, just better. And that meant he needed a lot more than 26 types. There were various special signs that were used as abbreviations in the handwritten manuscripts around at the time. He needed these. And he wanted the flow from one letter to the next – again – like in a handwritten manuscript, which meant having to create multiple versions of each letter with different attachment points. In the end, his typefaces had between 220 and 290 different characters. All of which had to be cut into a punch and then moulded dozens, if not hundreds of times.

Great, now you have a pile of letters, but how do you turn this into a page of text? You need to fix them into something. Gutenberg’s solution was to create a frame into which the type setter would place the individual letters. To stop them from wiggling about they were placed into a frame. Sounds straightforward, but let’s think again. First up, not all sentences are the same length, whilst the frame is rectangular. Well, you can fill in the gaps with punch that have no letter, effectively creating a void. Or, you could create various versions of the same letters with just marginally larger or smaller width to end up with a perfectly justified edge to the text. And finally you could play around with little fillers to widen the gap between different letters. And all that has to be done in a way that does not make the text jerky, but flowing naturally, easy to read.

Then you have to make sure that all the letters are absolutely, 100% the same height. If not, you end up with one letter being bold and the next one faint. And we are talking of precision levels in the sub millimetre level.

So now you got your frame with all the letters firmly held in place, something called a “Forme”.  The next question is what material you want to print on. The traditional material to write on in the Middle ages was vellum, made from calf skin. One calf skin produced about 3 pages of the highest quality or 6 pages if stretched out. Hugely expensive. It was a fairly easy to print on material, but if printing was to become as wide spread as it did, it needed another, a cheaper material.

Willkommen | Gutenberg-Museum

Paper had been around in Western Europe since the 11th century as it spread from China via the Islamic world. But in europe large scale production only began in the 14th century. One reason was that Chinese paper was fairly soft and absorbent, perfectly suited for Chinese calligraphy, but not ideal for illuminated manuscripts. The Europeans added animal glue to the mix, which hardened it, so it could take ink and paint. The first German papermill opened in 1390 in Nurnberg, but the most desirable paper came from Italy.

The next question was what ink to use. Handwritten manuscripts were written using Iron-gall ink, a black or brown mixture made from iron sulphate, tannic acid and gum arabicum. This ink was too watery, it ran off the types and smeared all over the pages. It was also acidic, so often faded through the paper to the opposite side.

Gutenberg therefore had to develop a new kind of ink, that, since he wanted his books to look like manuscripts, had to have a similar colour to Iron-Gall ink but was more viscous and sticky. Printer’s ink was based on oil paint a material only recently made popular by the early Netherlandish painters, the Jan van Eycks, Rogier van the Weyden and Robert Campin. During the 1440 and 1450s this technique was gradually coming up the Rhine river, finding an important centre in Alsace. In all likelihood it was there, in the workshops of one of these pioneers of oil painting in the Rhineland that Gutenberg first encountered oil-based paint, without which printing with moveable type was simply impossible.

Then we get to the last major technological component, the actual printing press. Woodcuts and other prints had been made by rubbing the paper onto the carved piece. That did work to a  degree, but often left smudges of paint on the page. And Gutenberg needed to print both sides of the page, which meant he needed to fix the paper in exactly the same place twice. Which means we needed a way to fix both the frame with the letter and the paper into place and then apply the exactly accurate level of force on to it.

The solution for that was – the wine press. Mainz is in the midst of a wine growing region. The Gutenberg family owned a farm near Eltville, right in the centre of the Rheingau, source of some of Germany’s finest white wines. Wine presses work with screws and are calibrated to exert exactly the right amount of pressure to squeeze the liquid out of the grapes, but not smash them into pulp. Ideal for printing, where again precision was key.

That is the hardware, the letter types moulded in the hand mould, the frame they are fixed in, called the forme, the ink and the printing press. But that still does not make a book. We also need a process.

The first step is to carve the type, a job usually done by a gold or silversmith, ideally one with experience working in making coin punches. Then we have someone making the types by punching the matrix, fixing it inside the hand mould, first creating the special alloy and then pouring it into the mould.

Once we have the typefaces, they go to the setter who puts together the actual text by placing the respective letters inside the frame. He or she would usually have arranged the punches in two cases, one for the larger and one for the smaller letters, where we got our terms upper case and lower case from. This is a truly sophisticated job. For one, all the letters the setter sees are mirror image. And then he or she has to work out all the gaps and widths to fit the text on to the frame.

The frame is then taken to make a first simple imprint which is given to the corrector. That person will read through the first imprint and check for errors. This is again hugely important because the advantage of printing over handwritten manuscripts was not only cost, but even more, accuracy. Copyists made mistakes and these mistakes then compounded through the line of distribution, from one writer to the next. A printed copy was exactly the same as the next one, making sure only the accurate information is transmitted. But for that the information had to be accurate to start with.

Once approved, the forme then goes to the actual printer. Each printing press is operated by two people. One handles the formes and applies the ink. Application was done with two large leather balls which are covered with a film of oil paint and then banged vertically on to the forme. You do not want to rub it side to side because it would seep in between the letters and smear across the page. Doing that meant the banger often got the sticky oil paint on his fingers that was difficult to wash off. Hence you needed another person to handle the clean sheets of paper. The paper needed to be a bit moist to better absorb the paint, which was one part of the job. Then he had to fix it in place on the paper holder, then lower it over the forme. And finally he slid the forme and paper under the press, turned the screw, released it and slid everything back out. I put a link in the show notes for a video where you can see how that worked.

How a Gutenberg Printing Press Works

Then the paper and paint needed to dry, which meant it was brought up to the loft where it was hung up like washing.

Then the whole process was repeated, to print the back of the page. To make sure that the back and front aligned perfectly, the paper frame had two little pins that pricked the paper. When it came back down having dried in the loft, you put the paper through the same pricks when fixing it, and hey presto, perfection.

I hope you get what I am telling you here. The invention of printing was not some eureka moment where Gutenberg jumped up in his bathtub and went – that is how it works.

This was likely a decades long process of trial and error, developing each one of these specific instruments, the hand mould, the forme, the ink, the paper, the printing press and then going through hundreds or thousands of iterations to figure out which combination of materials and pressure worked best. Since Gutenberg left no records of his life apart from legal documents, we do not know how many iterations he went through. But to give you an idea, James Dyson went through 5,127 prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner before he finally released DC01, the product that would make him a billionaire. Elon Musk, not my favourite person, took 6 years before his rockets first reached orbit, after several exploded, and that was based on a technology that had already existed since the 1940s. The first reusable rocket, his true innovation, took another 7 years to develop. In other words, innovation is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, that was the case in the 15th century and it still is the case today.

And it is also most unlikely Gutenberg did develop each of these tools and processes all by himself. Even if he had some goldsmith skills, for which there is no evidence, it is unlikely he could operate at the level of precision required to make the punches. We know he hired a goldsmith, Hans Dunne in Strasburg and kept him on when he moved to Mainz. As for all the other tools, let’s remember that from his days in Strasburg onwards, he had a team of 6 to 8 people working with him, many great artisans in their own right and staying with him throughout.

And then we have the time and place. Mainz and Strasburg in the first half of the 15th century. Both cities lay on the Rhine river, at the time the trading super highway connecting north and south. There was a mint in Mainz and with it the specialists skills to make high precision punches. And Gutenberg knew about those given his father had been one of the board members of the Mint. It was right around that time that oil painting spread southwards along the rhine from Flanders to Alsace and then Italy.  Paper had gained popularity and was making the same journey in the opposite direction. And Mainz lay in a wine making region with wine presses galore.

It is unlikely that Mainz in 1450 was the only place in the world where printing with moveable type could be invented, in large part because it was invented a few decades earlier in Korea and other forms of printing had been used in China for centuries.

But what moveable type printing did in the 1450s in Mainz was to catch on, which is something it did not do in Korea. And that had to do with two crucial elements every innovation needs, funding and willing customers.

If you look back at the history of Silicon Valley, it is quite obvious that this outburst of innovation and creativity did not come out of nothing. It was a combination of pentagon, mainly navy funded research in Northern California, Stanford university, and then starting in 1972, venture capital firms providing the funding for all that makes up our modern world, including the pinnacle of technological and creative achievement, podcasts.

Gutenberg too was dependent upon financial backers.

He found a first group of them when he moved to Strasbourg in 1434. He himself had about 350 gulden, enough to buy a substantial house, but not enough to create a business on the scale we are talking about here. So he invited three partners to join him.

And at that point he did not invite them to join them in a decades long chase to develop the printing press. The idea he brought them was to make mirrors. 

Not posh glass mirrors, but small handheld mirrors. How do you get rich with mirrors? Well, that is something that could only have worked in the madness of the 15th century. The black death and the recurring outbreaks of the Plague, the huge uncertainty caused by endless feuds, the absence of a central authority, the split of the church during the schism, the Hussite revolt, the threat of a Turkish invasion, all that left people utterly unsettled. They sought refuge in their faith, and in particular in the support they hoped saintly interventions could bring. This is a century of enormous pilgrimages, and one of the most significant ones was the pilgrimage to Aachen. Aachen cathedral does not only hold the bones of Charlemagne, a saint at least in the eyes of many, but some of the most revered of relics, relics that had touched Jesus himself and members of his family. These include the robe of the Virgin Mary, the swaddling clothes of the infant Jesus, the cloth in which the head of John the Baptist was wrapped, and the loincloth worn by Christ on the cross. Touching these sacred relics would transfer so much holiness, any illness, sadness or affliction would instantly dissolve.

Every 7 years these saintly objects would be taken outside the cathedral and shown to the people. Each of these 10 days would see 10,000 pilgrims descending on Aachen trying to catch a glimpse of Jesus’ loincloth. No way the canons would allow anyone to touch the precious objects, but they were so imbued with sanctity, they radiated goodness. So simply being in the presence and catching some of these rays would bring salvation from troubles.

But even though Aachen may see a 100,000 visitors over the 10 days of the festival, this was not enough to satisfy the demand. All those who stayed home, be it due to lack of funds or illness, were in dire need of deliverance. And there was a way to collect these rays of holiness and bring them back home to your loved ones. All you needed was a hand mirror that would capture the  rays emanating from the sacred relics and contain them.

That is what these mirrors may have looked like

And these were the kinds of mirrors that Johannes Gutenberg intended to produce. And now take a breath, guess how many mirrors he intended to make? 500? A 1000? 10,000? No, 32,000 was the intended production run. Selling those at half a guilder each that would bring in revenues of 16,000 guilders. Production cost were – hold on – 600 guilders. A gross profit margin of 96% or a profit of 26x. That is more than say Facebook or Google Search, albeit not by much. Just to put all this into perspective. Gutenberg’s income was about 30 guilders and his net worth was about 300 guilders.

We do not know how Gutenberg intended to make these magic mirrors, in particular we do not know how he would produce them in such quantities. What he did find though was investors who were willing to support this venture with what turned out to be a lot more than 600 guilders.

At which point we hit on one of the greatest Gutenberg mysteries. What was it he did during his years in Strasburg. Sure, there were the mirrors, but his partners and he himself poured a lot more than the initially intended 600 guilders into this venture. And then there is the court case. Because, surprise, surprise, the scheme did not work out as planned. There was a court case at the end of it where the son of one of the partners demanded his father’s money back.

And what is weird about this court case is that no one, not the claimant, not the witnesses and certainly not the defendant Gutenberg was prepared to explain what exactly the venture was. They talk about an “aventur und kunst”, best translated as a venture and an art. And then they go on about presses and formes and secret arts. Something else beyond the making of mirrors had been going on.

 Given all we heard about the complexity of printing and all the different technologies and processes that had to be developed, it is fair to assume that much of the money intended to make mirrors went into the R&D of printing. And then there is the fact that when he arrives in Mainz in 1348, he immediately sets out to print things using his printing press.

Having left Strasburg and his old business partners behind what he now needed was financing to scale up his business. And he found this financing from a man called Johann Fust. Fust was an important citizen of Mainz and a very wealthy man. He lent Gutenberg 800 gulden in 1449 to set up a printing workshop and would provide funding over the next five years to the tune of 4,500 gulden, the same as 12 substantial houses in the city.

Everything is now in place. Gutenberg has a technology and a process. He had brought along some members of his old team from Strasbourg and hired more. And he had financing.

All he now needed was customers. Who would want to own a printed book, or any printed material?

What he had going for him was a veritable explosion in literacy during the previous hundred years. Knowledge was no longer confined to within the walls of monasteries. By 1440 the German lands boasted 9 universities, up from none in 1370. Running a trading business had become more and more reliant on writing, on the exchange of letters and the drafting of contracts, hence the sons and sometimes the daughters of the city merchants went to newly opened schools. And even artisans and labourers keen to expand their horizons learned to read.

And what did they read, manuscripts. Along with the growth in literacy a whole industry of scribes had developed. Paper had been the killer application. Costing a10th of vellum and parchment, the material itself had become accessible. Entrepreneurs set up writing businesses where scribes would copy books, pamphlets, missals and breviers by the dozen.

In other words, books were more and more accessible.

But these handwritten books and documents had a serious weakness. They were written in haste and hence prone to errors. And for some books, errors were unacceptable.

A copy of a major theological treatise must not carry mistakes – imagine what happened if you misinterpret St. Augustine. Same goes even more for missals, the books that lay down in detail how each mass throughout the year is supposed to be celebrated. Any error there and the whole of the congregation may find itself falsely instructed.

But even more practical things needed to be accurate, like schoolbooks. The most widely used schoolbook of the 15th century was the so-called Donatus, a 4th century Latin grammar, a concise book aimed at young students. Again, it is self-evident that a student buying this book would be very badly served did he pick up a version with lots of errors.

 So, this is how the history of printing begins, with a school book. The Donatus by Gutenberg probably came out in 1450 and remained a mainstay of his workshop throughout.

Another line of business came out of the political situation. The Ottomans kept progressing up the Balkans whilst at the same time threatening Cyprus and Constantinople. Pope Nikolaus V called for a crusade and to fund the endeavour offered full indulgences against pay.

Indulgences were not only spiritual offers, but they were also physical objects. About one page of dense text recording the exact wording of the papal bull granting the indulgence, its conditions and application. It also featured, of course, the name of the sinner, the name of the priest granting the indulgence and his signature on the receipt.

These pieces of paper could be presented at the next confession and led to automatic absolution of sins and reduction of time in purgatory. Again, this was not a document where  spelling mistakes or – worse – the omission of whole lines of text was acceptable.

Coming to the rescue, Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press. Hence the second key output of the printing press were forms for indulgences, faithfully recording the papal bull, leaving space to add the names of sinner and priest and the signature.

Other products were more for daily use. One was the so-called Turk calendar, a calendar for the year with woodcuts and statements encouraging the reader to take up arms against the Turks, or even better, give money to those who wanted to fight. I will not go into another product, the so called sibylline prophecies that he may or may not have printed and what they meant. That is the kind of rabbit whole that has swallowed many a Gutenberg scholar.

An Admonition to Christendom against the Turks. | Library of Congress

So far , so seriously underwhelming. School books, calendars, indulgences – clearly not the kind of output that propels one to the European Pantheon of greats.

What Gutenberg needed was a best seller, a book that would display the absolute superiority of his innovative production process and that would hopefully make him rich.

Talking about rich, the print runs were going well, but cash flow was still a bit tight. The problem was the same that had felled so many innovative companies – payment terms.

By the time the first little scholar handed over his 2 shillings for the Donatus, Gutenberg had already paid all his suppliers of paper, metal and ink, his employees, his rent and the interest on his loans. And as demand for his print runs went up, so did his upfront expenditure, meaning he had a thriving business but every money that came in went straight out the door to pay from materials for the next print run. And that meant he did not have the money to make that one killer app, the kind of book that would divide world history into before and after.

So he went back to Johann Fust and asked for another loan, a loan needed to set up another, a second print workshop where he would produce that killer app.

And what was this killer app. Initially he had wanted to piggy back on an initiative to issue a new, revised missal for the whole of the enormous archdiocese of Mainz and all its suffragan bishoprics. If that had gone through, it would have been a gold mine. Gutenberg’s printing press was the only device that could guarantee that every single copy of the missal was identical. And every one of the thousands of parishes in the diocese would have needed to buy one.

But it did not come off. Both the archbishop and the Roman curia had sponsored the development of missals and neither could force the other to sanction their product. So no missal was agreed and betting on one winning out in the end would have been utter madness.

Exhausted with waiting for the missal, in 1452, Gutenberg decided to go for the big one, the whole bible. 

To get an idea of the scale of the undertaking, the Gutenberg bible comprised 1,275 pages of text mostly in 42 lines. It was produced in an edition of 180 copies, some of them on vellum, but most on paper. Not any odd paper, but special, expensive Italian paper.

It was not just an accurate copy of the at the time most accurate copy of the vulgate, the Latin bible, it was also and still remains, one of the most beautiful books ever printed. Each letter is printed as sharp and as accurate as humanly possible. The entire text, in two columns is justified on the end, requiring an incredibly fiddly adjustment of individual letters until they all match.

In 1455 probably Fust, not Gutenberg, brought the bible to the Frankfurt fair, then and now the greatest trade fair in the German lands. And already at the time it had a section dedicated to books. And who would come to poke around the latest issues, than our friend, legendary composer of bestselling erotica and future pope Pius II, Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini.

And he got very excited, so excited he wrote back to his then boss, the Spanish cardinal de Caravjal: quote: “I did not see complete bibles, but quinternions [those five sheet, twenty page sections] of different books, written in extremely elegant and correct letter, without error, which your eminence could read with no difficulty and without glasses” end quote.

Piccolomini tried to buy a copy but was told that all copies had been pre-ordered.

Gutenberg had his best seller. He had produced a book that was not cheaper than a manuscript, but infinitely better, its letters sharper, its layout more beautiful and most importantly – error free.

Gutenberg stood on the verge of becoming immensely rich and celebrated as the man who invented the world’s most important new technology for a 1000 years. But as he stood there, Johann Fust pulled the rug from under his feet.

Gutenberg had never paid any of the interest he owed on all the various loans he had taken out. And right now, in 1455, with the bibles almost completed, but not sold for cash, he had no money, just debt. Sure, he knew that as soon as he dispatched the books, the funds, maybe as much as 9,000 gulden would be flooding in, but right now, he did not have a penny. And Johann Fust knew that too.  He sued Gutenberg, Gutenberg was forced to hand over both his workshops with all the presses, the nearly finished bibles, the materials and everything else he had worked on for nearly two decades.

Johann Fust and his son-in-law, Gutenberg’s former assistant, Peter Schoeffer sold the bibles, made a Fortune, continued the workshop, and rapidly became the largest printing business in the Rhineland and publishing books almost as magnificent as the Gutenberg bible. Gutenberg himself kept going on a smaller scale, but would never have the resources to ever produce anything on the scale of the Gutenberg bible.

And that is where we will stop for today. Next week I will try to assess the impact of Gutenberg’s invention, a task that has defeated many a better man, but – like Gutenberg – I have embarked on this path and cannot stop.

And as usual my closing plea to support the show at historyofthegermans.com/support. All your help is very much appreciated.

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