Tag Info

Another simple but important reason besides economic changes starting at this time is the spread of printing technique. A scientific community really only works when scholars can cite each other and share their ideas in a cheap and fast way, thats why internet boosted scientific progress in our time. If you study the link, the Gutenberg printing technique ...

There are many reasons, and I'm going to present the materialistic one championed by the Marxists (collective thud as the audience of History.SE falls off their chairs and faints). One of the requirements for having scientific progress is economic - you need enough surplus to enable the resources devoted to scholarship. This was enabled at the beginning of ...

Partly it's because you are reading the history books of those countries and a certain amount is spin. Islamic countries were the principle source of science between the Romans/Greeks and the 16C - inconvenient if you are a christian country and especially if you are a university that is essentially a religious institution. So you claim that these Arabs ...

I'm afraid any answer to this question must begin by considering what is understood to be the 'Renaissance' and the 'Scientific Revolution'. And that consideration, in turn, inevitably reveals a number of historiographical difficulties. The first of these is that neither of these were 'events', at least, not in the sense of a war or an assassination. They ...

I'm going to add another answer specifically to address a separate part of your question: why didn't the same thing happen in Islamic world? The answer is plausibly Al-Ghazali. Quoting from Wikipedia: Others have cited his movement from science to faith as a detriment to Islamic scientific progress (source: Sawwaf, A. (1962) al-Ghazali: Etude sur la ...

Carnivals with games of chance and skill are mostly an invention of the 19th and 20th centuries. One source credits the 1893 Chicago World's Fair for the start of the traveling carnival. A better choice for the Middle Ages would be tournaments and hastiludes, festivals showcasing various sorts of military-based games. Wikipedia's article on tournaments ...

Wikipedia's page on Japanese swordsmithing provides some information on the time frames involved in the manufacture of good quality blades: The forging of a Japanese blade typically took many days or weeks, and was considered a sacred art, traditionally accompanied by a large panoply of Shinto religious rituals. As with many complex endeavors, rather ...

It was probably pretty much finished by then anyway. The original joust (behourd, melee) was pretty dangerous, knights were expected to get killed. 80 died in one contest in England in 1241. It was really proper 'live-fire' combat training. After Banockburn, second thoughts about the tactic of charging heavy horses into men that had pikes driven into the ...

According to Niall Ferguson in The Ascent of Money, they aren't balls, but coins. (I listened to the audiobook so I can't provide a page citation.) I'm somewhat suspicious because the blazon for the arms is "augmented coat of arms of the Medici, Or, five balls in orle gules, in chief a larger one of the arms of France (viz. Azure, three fleurs-de-lis ...

The Basilica was built next to a bell tower built in 1414. Although the English Wikipedia article states that Alberti's restoration began in 1462, most of the other sources that I found state 1472. Also, Alberti sent a description and a drawing of the proposed site to Gonzago (the patron) in 1470, after 1462. The construction began in June 1472, shortly ...

Two major reasons for this : The introduction of printing through Johannes Gutenberg, and the Reformation which implied that every Christian should be able to read the Bible, which made reading accessible and interesting. The Reformation spread first among craftsmen and merchants who could read. The progressive introduction of paper in the 14th, 15th and ...

The reason you find wildly varied depictions of Faust is because there are quite a few versions of the Faustian legend, Goethe's being fairly recent. Here's a brief and incomplete list: Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587), by Johann Spies, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1604), by Christopher Marlowe, Das Faustbuch Des ...

The Renaissance happened in the Byzantine empire as well, but it was interrupted by the fall of Constantinople. Anyway, Italy remained the most developed and scientifically advanced country throughout the Middle Ages. That is, it was the most scientifically advanced from the times of the Roman empire. It is completely incorrect to claim that the Muslim ...