1434 (24 page)
Authors: Gavin Menzies
After 1461, locks were built on the canal between Milan and the Adda River, which was later called the Martesana. Bertola was engaged in the construction of at least five canals of major navigable importance, all requiring locks. He constructed no fewer than eighteen locks on the Bereguardo Canal and five more near Parma. Chinese canal-and lock-building techniques had been imported into Lombardy through Taccola Francesco di Giorgio and the
Nung Shu.
An examination of the history of canals in Lombardy also illustrates the close connection between Taccola, Francesco di Giorgio, Leon Battista Alberti, and Leonardo da Vinci. Alberti, who was the notary to Pope Eugenius IV and would have likely attended the meeting between Eugenius and the Chinese ambassador, also designed locks. William Parsons said of Alberti:
The year 1446 saw him re-established in Rome, a friend of Nicholas V, and started on his engineering workâan attempt to recover the sunken galley in Lake Nemi [Alberti used a drawing virtually identical to that of Taccola and Francesco], which only lately has been accomplishedâ¦. This was followed by the work on which his fame depends,
De re aedificatoria
(written about 1452). From several references to it by other writers, it is certain that the contents were made available to scholars then or soon after. This fact is important because it fixes the date when the canal lock was first describedâ¦. Leon Batista continued thus: “Also, if you wish you can make two gates cutting the river in two placesâ¦that a boat can lie for its full length between the two: and if the said boat desires to ascend when it arrives at the place, close the lower barrier and open the upper one, and conversely, when it is descending, close the upper and open the lower one. Thus the said boat shall have enough water to float it easily to the main canal, because the closing of the upper gate restrains the water from pushing it too violently, with fear of grounding.”â¦We are sure that Bastista's
Aedificatoria
was written about 1452, and that its contents were known to many engineers.
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In other words, both Francesco and Alberti have described the same lock systems that are described in the
Nung Shu
.
It is therefore incorrect to credit Leonardo da Vinci with the invention of locks. As we know, his handwriting appears on the Laurenziano Codex of Francesco (as described in chapter 16). We also know that Leonardo learned much about waterways from his meeting in Pavia with di Giorgio. It is fair to say that Leonardo's drawings of canals are the most elegant by far, but Leonardo did not invent locks, despite centuries of credit for the breakthrough.
Nevertheless, the introduction of locks, which enabled an all-weather, all-season system of navigable canals to be constructed in northern Italy, was of immense importance to the economic development of Lombardy. The introduction of Chinese rice, mulberry trees, and silk was all the more valuable once the rice could be carried downriver on the Po. Marble, too, could be transported from the mountains to the new cities of northern Italy. Italy now possessed an array of Chinese inventionsâwater-powered machines such as mills and
pumps to grind corn and spin silk. After 1434, Italy was on her way to becoming Europe's first industrial nation.
Europe's First Industrial Nation
The wonderful rich legacy based on rice and silk, canals and steel, is visible today. During most summers of the past forty-two years Marcella and I have driven through Burgundy across the Col de Larche to her home in the Piedmont to stay with her family in the foothills of the Alps. We would drive eastward to Venice across the Po Valley through miles upon miles of golden rice fields irrigated by the famous canals fed by alpine snowmelt.
We would start our journey at dawn, the lanes full of puttering tractors. After four hours, Mantua would appear, a ghostly silhouette suspended from the sky, a light fog sitting on the lakes that surround the town. Medieval town builders exploited the loops of the Po and her tributary the Mincio to create a series of lakes that form Mantua's defenses. Cremona, Pavia, Verona, and Milan were also built on loops of the Po tributaries that wound their way across the fields of Lombardy. Mantua's historic town center is typical of these medieval cities. The Piazza Erbe is an ensemble of enchanting pastel buildings. It leads to the equally beautiful Mantegna and Sordello Squares, each more imposing than the last, each surrounded by superb medieval and Renaissance buildings. At the east side of Sordello Square stands the ducal palace of the Gonzagas,
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the princely family who ruled this town in the Middle Ages. One great hall leads to another, each covered from floor to ceiling with frescoes, fantastic Renaissance masterpiecesâfables by Pisanello and Mantegna, portraits of the Gonzaga family, tapestries depicting the lives of the apostles. The most astonishing impact comes from differing styles being linked to form a harmonious single ensemble. The Gonzagas were clearly a family of enormous wealth and great discernment.
In Verona the Scaglieri
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ruling family, like the Gonzagas, patronized brilliant artists. This comes as a surprise, for Verona, Mantua, Milan, Urbino, and Ferrara had a different lifestyle than that of republican
Florence and Venice. Instead of a wealthy mercantile class engaged in international trade, rulers and aristocracy in these northern cities lived on their wits, often acting as mercenaries to Venice. However, these ministates lay on trade routes. Milan and Verona controlled the approach to the principal alpine passes and were in a position to gather taxes and tolls from overland traffic between Venice and northern Europe. Each had a little army. The money the rulers lavished on Renaissance artists was undoubtedly part of their foreign policyâto appear wealthier and more important than they really were so as to impress their powerful neighbors, Venice and Florence. Today we are the beneficiaries of this largesse. These sumptuous Italian cities are stuffed with Renaissance masterpieces; one could spend a lifetime in each.
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The wealth of modern Italy remains visible in the houses of farmers and middle-class peopleâhuge by the standards of northern Europe, and superbly finished. People wear expensive clothes, and the women exquisitely turned out, presenting the renowned
bella figura.
To me, the wealth of northern Italy, particularly that of Piedmont, is epitomized in the food. One enters what appears to be a farmhouse; often no name discloses the restaurant within. The place is packed; there are no menus and no price listsâone just chooses a table and sits down. Our favorite is the Nonna, in the foothills of the Alps near Pian Fei. A bottle of slightly sparkling dry deep red wine made from Nebbiolo grapes is brought, together with a plate of Parma ham and salami. Then come crudités with
bagna cauda
, a sauce of garlic, anchovies, tuna, and olive oil, followed by pasta. Several coursesâroast kid, guinea fowl, wild boar, suckling pig, and wild rabbit with chestnuts follow. Dessert is frequently the local raspberries and the famous chestnuts boiled with white
vino
and mixed with cream. One is handed the bill, usually about twenty euros a head for twelve courses.
To me there is no place on earth with a higher standard of living than the Piedmont with her huge houses, wonderful food, historic cities, good-natured and charming peopleâa life based upon natural wealth in a region whose advanced methods of farming and industrialization came six hundred years ago.
T
here is substantial evidence that an illustration of a blast furnace in the
Nung Shu
was copied by Taccola and Alberti and built in northern Italy. As a result, for the first time Europeans had the capacity to produce sufficient quantities of high-quality iron and steel to make reliable modern firearms.
1
One of the first descriptions of an Italian steel-making furnace comes from the Florentine architect Antonio di Piero Averlino, who was called “Filarete.”
2
Filarete was born in Florence around 1400. His major work was
Ospedale Maggiore,
a treatise on the reorganization of hospitals and sanitary engineering. Fearing that his readers might find this tome a little too heavy, he provided a series of diversions for relief. One such diversion is his account of a visit to a hammer mill and smelter in Ferriere.
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Dr. John Spencer
4
, chairman of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, asserts that
the technique of smelting iron in the fifteenth century as described by Filarete does not differ markedly from the standard method of extraction that obtains from his own day until the eighteenth century. In barest outline he informs us that the ore was first improved by roasting it with lime, perhaps in an attempt to reduce the high sulphur content, which he notes at various points in the process. The resulting product was ground, sifted and prepared for the chargeâ¦clear layers of charcoal were alternated in
the [smelter] stack with layers of ore-lime mixture. The air blast necessary for efficient reduction was provided by an ingenious arrangement of bellows blowing alternatively through a common tuyèreâ¦. When the molten pig iron had cooled it was melted again and carried to a finery where it was shaped.
Filarete's description of the smelter raises several significant points and poses several problems. His description of the hammer mill at Grotta Ferrata records one of the earliest instances of fining which was already, apparently, well developed. The bellows seem to be quite unique and again a very early example of a sophisticated innovationâ¦.
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The harnessing of water power could raise and drop these triangulated tilt hammers with great force.
An illustration of a water-powered smithy bellows, forge and hammermill at Grottaferrata near Rome.
This smelter was not the only Chinese contribution to making iron and steel in northern Italy in the 1450s. Theodore A. Wertime, author
of
The Coming of the Age of Steel,
explored this “oriental influence” in his paper “Asian Influences on European Metallurgy”:
The ingenious water-powered bellows enabled higher temperatures to facilitate iron smelting.
Taccola's similar water-powered bellows are found in his Codex Latinus Monacensis, Munich.
There is no question that Filarete, a trained observer, found here [at Ferriere] an unusual furnace assemblage. But what it was we shall never precisely know, although one suspects oriental influence from the technological context of Filarete's impressionsâ¦.
Needham is quite right in speaking of the “clustering” of technology, particularly at such moments of technical invention and interchange as the tenth to fifteenth centuries
A.D.
As noted in
The Coming of the Age of Steel
âwith quite conservative interpretationsâfifteenth century Italy exhibited an unusual number of metallurgical traits associated with non-European techniques of making cast iron:
1. The employment of the molten bath of cast iron for carburising wrought iron to steel, identified by Needham as an early Chinese process, which in Europe came to be known as the “Brescian” or “Bergamasque” process
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2. The early and continued casting of cooking ware and cannons of iron;
3. The Cannechio, a distinctive inverted conical shape in European blast furnaces, with antecedents more probably Chinese than Persian;
4. The granulation of new cast iron for shot or for making iron suitable for fining, not unlike north Persian traditions;
5. Iron filings as an ingredient in fire works, reflecting the heritage of “Chinese fire.”â¦
In Italy the evidences of clustering are impressive and force one to ponder most deeply on the course by which societies came to reshape both their mechanisms and their techniques to new purposesâ¦.
â¦Filarete may indeed have seen the last vestiges of a large and varied cluster of practices in the Asian manner, associated with the new product “cast iron.”
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The Medicis financed technical improvements in hardening steel. Suzanne Butters, in “The Triumph of Vulcan: Sculptors' Tools, Porphyry, and the Prince in Ducal Florence,” describes a Medici stoneworker, Tadda, experimenting with procedures for tempering steel in order to make chisels hard enough to cut porphyryâthe hardest material then used in art.
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Having devised cast iron and steel of sufficient hardness and strength to enable them to make firearms, the Florentines next needed better gunpowder.
Gunpowder, muskets, and cannons were all Chinese inventions. Gunpowder was first made in the Tang dynasty and improved in the Song.
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Its main ingredients were sulphur, saltpeter, and charcoal. The Chinese term
huo yao
means “the drug that fires.” (Chinese alchemists had originally thought that sulphur and saltpeter were drugs and that gunpowder could treat skin infections.) In their search for an elixir, the alchemists had found that sulphur was flammable. They mixed it with saltpeter to control its volatility by causing partial combustion, a process called “controlling sulphur.”
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They found that by adding charcoal
to the saltpeter-sulphur mix, they could cause an explosion. Armorers then worked on the proportions to obtain the most explosive mixture.
The Wei Yuan Cannon and a similar mountable mobile cannon.
Drawings of cannon balls and petards featured in the Sienese engineers' treatises on warfare.
The development of gunpowder in China went hand in hand with the development of firearms. During the Northern Song (
A.D.
960â1127), Emperor Zhanzon (also known as Chao Heng) set up China's first arms factory, employing some forty thousand workers. Three different types of gunpowder were perfected: one for cannon, another for fireballs, and another for poisoned smoke bombs.
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The ratio of saltpeter to sulfur and charcoal varied for each type. Perhaps the most famous weapon developed during the Northern Song was the fire gun, the precursor of modern firearms. The Yuan emperors deployed these weapons in the thirteenth century in central Asia.
China had invented flamethrowers by
A.D.
975. Here is a description of a battle on the Yangtze presented by Shih Hsu Pai in his book
Talks at Fisherman's Rock
:
Chu Lung-Pin as Admiral was attacked by the Sung emperor's forces in strength. Chu was in command of a large warship more than ten decks high, with flags flying and drums beating. The imperial ships were smaller but they came down the river attacking fiercely, and the arrows flew so fast that the ships under Admiral Chu were like porcupines. Chu hardly knew what to do. So he quickly projected petrol from flame-throwers to destroy the enemy. The Sung forces could not have withstood this, but all of a sudden a north wind sprang up and swept the smoke and flames over the sky towards his own ships and men. As many as 150,000 soldiers and sailors caught in this are overwhelmed, whereupon Chu, being overcome with grief, flung himself into the flames and died.
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Excavations of Kublai Khan's fleet, which was wrecked in 1281 by a
kamikaze
wind off Takashima, Japan, have revealed that the fleet was armed with exploding mortar bombs. The Chinese used this weapon against the Mongols in 1232 in the siege of the northern capital, Kaifeng. Chinese history tells us:
Among the weapons of the defenders there was the heaven-shaking thunder crash bomb. It consisted of gunpowder put into an iron container; then when the fuse was lit and the projectile shot off there was a great explosion the noise whereof was like thunder, audible for more than a hundred li [about forty miles] and the vegetation was scorched and blasted by the heat over an area of more than half a mou [many acres]. When hit, even iron armour was quite pierced through.
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