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All over Europe, the medieval lower-classes
started doing something absolutely unheard-of:
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They started enjoying themselves!
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Some of them even started washing!
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The reason for all this dynamic activity was because,
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as Europe recovered from the chaos and confusion
of the 10th century,
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prosperity ... [clears throat],
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if I could just have your attention for a moment,
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prosperity encouraged trade,
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and merchants began to travel around
selling anything they could get people to buy.
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Between 1150 and 1300 the population tripled.
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Towns grew up.
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So did the number of craftsmen and professions
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and so did the paperwork
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and the bureaucracy.
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[♪ cheerful ♪]
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If you think about it, these must have been
great days for most of them;
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cash to buy things with,
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paying the landlord rent, instead of forced-labor,
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justice perhaps? at the new village law courts,
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even a little "personalized medical-treatment".
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May have been a bit rough,
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but it was better than nothing!
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Well ... almost...
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Ok so a peasant couldn't get to be a prince
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but he could expect his kids to grow up
to a better life.
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Meanwhile as the rustic-rollicking continued,
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in the King's palace,
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it was "Lead-Balloon Time".
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I mean, here were all these hayseeds committing
the *unforgivable sin* of not doing their duty!
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which was to work till they dropped,
and practice the longbow on Sundays.
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You remember the longbow?
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It took a lot of practice to make a good archer,
who'd go out and get himself slaughtered for you,
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and these idiots weren't getting the practice!
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It began to look, to the Kings and Princes...
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as if you couldn't go out and have yourself
a nice, old-fashioned war anymore!
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And then good-old human ingenuity came out
with a less-demanding way to kill people.
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Now to be fair to the Europeans,
they didn't actually invent it.
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But they took to it's immense, destructive potential
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with all the gay-abandon of an alcoholoc in a brewery.
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And in case you're wondering why I'm telling you all this
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with my pig friends here
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It's because that one of the first places they found
the principle ingreedient for the new terror weapon
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was in a pigsty.
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Why?
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Well, you see a pig's home, is also his toilet.
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And you make gunpowder from urine and dung.
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Using that kind of muck to get to this lethal powder
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involved going through a bit of Chemistry first.
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The urine became "ammonia"
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and the bacteria in the dung,
turned the ammonia into a "nitrate".
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Having mixed the mess with wood-ash
and then filtered water through it all,
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boiling that water produced "saltpeter" crystals.
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This powder is a mixture of saltpeter, sulphur,
and charcoal.
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All you do now
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is apply a flame,
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stand *very far* back,
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and...
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[♪ oriental, ritualistic ♪]
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Gunpowder was a Chinese invention
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and they had it 700 years before we, in the west,
got our hands on it.
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And it's very proabable we only got it,
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because the Arabs picked it up in China
and brought it back with them,
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like they did with so many Chinese ideas.
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It's very likely that whoever it was,
(who invented gunpowder)
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he was one of their "philosopher-chemists",
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actually searching for the secret-recipe for immortality.
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Ironic, isn't it?
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[♪ oriental, ritualistic ♪, fire-crackers exploding]
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[shouting] In the main, apart from the odd
rocket or granade,
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that was how the chinese used their gunpoweder;
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for fireworks in religious rituals.
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[Buddhist chanting]
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Which brings us for a minute or two,
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to the business about the Chinese inventing everything.
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And yet, not using it way we did.
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This is part of the reason:
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Their view of life.
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[♪ oriental, ritualistic, chimes ♪]
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The thing that's surprises us in the "West"
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because we use everything we can get hold of,
to cause change to happen,
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is that the Chinese had so much,
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and changed so little.
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What I mean by "so much",
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is this:
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They had gunpowder, you saw.
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And look what we did with that.
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And then 2000 years ago,
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they used to spin magnetic spoons on
pictures of the earth and sky,
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and, depending which way the spoon pointed,
when it stopped, they made a politcal prediction.
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When we got hold of that,
in the form of the compass needle,
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we used it to conquer the world,
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to set up empires,
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aided in our voyages by a Chinese rudder.
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Chinese looms,
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capeable of making complex patterns like that
helped to set up
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the great 13th century, European textile industries.
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A thousand years before us, the Chinese had
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blast furnaces
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steel
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pistons
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cranks
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and... this:
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Paper.
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Part of the reason why,
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in spite of all this, change didn't come in China
in the way it did when all this came to the West
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was this:
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Not printing,
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although they invented that too...
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no, this word:
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Tao (道)
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道 -
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it means "the universal way",
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the fundamental order of nature.
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The Taoist scholars were a group who
looked for some rational order in things:
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To see how the universe worked.
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And because of their investigations
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gave china what we would call
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"technology".
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[♪ oriental, somber ♪]
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And yet, *explosive change*;
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the kind *we in the west* went through,
when we got hold of what China had invented
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didn't happen here.
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And to explain why I'm going to have to
hit you with a bit more of... uhh
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"inscrutable chinese philosophy".
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You see the Chinese believed that
the universe was filled with "Shen" (神).
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a... a spririt that was in everything.
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And that all you could do was contemplate it.
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Trees, mountains, birds, rivers, were all one,
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and so you couldn't reproduce a model of
*a bit of* the universe, and examine it,
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because you couldn't fill it with Shen.
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Now, in the Christian West, we reckoned that
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the universe was made of rational bits and pieces
by a rational God,
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and if you were a rational human being,
you could make a model of a bit of the universe,
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and then take it apart to see how it worked
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and use what you learned.
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The other fundamental reason why change
didn't happen here in China
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was... that:
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Water.
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You see, about 5000 years ago
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the very first great civilized act of the Chinese...
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was irrigation.
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On a vast scale.
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And that needed centralized planning
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and that needed a bureaucracy.
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And what a bureaucracy!
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They pigeonholed everybody,
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and you stayed in your pigeonhole.
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I mean, you were a merchant,
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you saw a bit of technology and you thought, "ha!
this will give me a lead over the other fellow,"
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"I'll rise in the world"
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No way.
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You were not permitted to rise in the world.
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So you didn't bother.
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No incentive?
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No change.
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Whereas in the medieval West...
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you had a little money, you got ahead;
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profit-motivate, you know?
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And that is why we were able to do,
with technology,
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what the Chinese could never have done.
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Like... for instance,
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putting gunpowder into one of these:
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[bell rings]
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Or, to be more accurate, one of those:
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The fact that bell-making was a peaceful,
religious business,
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didn't stop 13th century Europeans from
grabbing the idea!
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Look how easy it was to adapt:
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And the bell becomes a bombard.
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Instant artillery!
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For the Princes and Generals, happily,
it was business-as-usual once more.
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[♪ church bells ♪]
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This picturesque little town
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called (inaudible), near the Yugoslav border,
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was one of the first places where the exciting
new way of killing people was tried-out (1327)
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by a bunch of passing Germans.
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Now, early on,
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the new guns made...