welcome to this lecture on blouse stirrups guns and plagues that's a lot chapter 10. so then we're going to talk about today's plows and stirrups and guns and plagues and everything else so let's do it whoops now we're going to start by talking about the great chain of being i stole this from uh great courses i really like great courses because while you're driving you can uh listen to them by the way you can get them from your library if you want you just gotta get a library card and then it's online and then you just download them and listen to them while you're driving anyway that's beside the point in this one he he had this really good um diagram that i borrowed uh in which he argued that there's gods on top than angels than man than animals plants and stones of course these here can be further divided uh man angels too and animals plant systems they can all be further divided into greater or lesser and it's a great chain from the very top to the very bottom and on these rungs of ladders so to speak right or chain or links to the chain even though they can be further divided here much more complicated they cannot be changed no matter what you do that's a chain uh here one of the things for the scientific revolution that i'm building up to is that there could be no new species this is the way god developed it there'll be no new creations there'll be no extinctions which was adding to or removing from the chain and above all else the closer to the top of this chain the more godly you were god is godly right angels are more godly than man man here and then plants animals and stones that includes buildings the taller the building the more christ-like it is more godly the shorter the building the less so so like a hubble right so you want to have for example they used to have lots of laws stating that the tallest building in each town had to be the church and because it is the most godly something like that okay we got that uh here is a book that i thought about making us uh read but i didn't for lots of reasons but it says uh way down here everywhere the church and religious sentiments sanctified this organic social structure indeed the social structure paralleled what westerners saw as a larger hierarchic order of the universe the great chain of being in the great chain everything from gods to angels humans animals and plants existed in an ordered permanent arrangement during the 17th century new forces tested the smooth running of this traditional society okay so that's a great chain of being i'm going to skip this part although this is a good book if you're looking for a good book to read by lars and principe the scientific revolution right but i'm gonna explain this instead of showing you that the roman empire is going to collapse uh and in the west is going to be called europe the east the roman empire continues until it's overrun by the ottomans in the 15th century constantinople becomes istanbul in fact today in the news yesterday in the news they were talking about uh how the mosque that used to be the christian church sophia that then became the um uh a mosque and then became a museum is now going to become a mosque once again i find it very fascinating nonetheless uh the first major empire to develop after the cloud for the roman empire was by charles the great known as charlemagne which means charles the great and um this empire is going to call the holy roman empire although of course lots of tongue-in-cheek people in the um 1700s are going to say uh it was not a holy nor roman nor truly an empire and it's going to be uh defeated in 1805 or collapsed or it's going to fall apart in 1805 uh thanks to napoleon bonaparte nonetheless so that's the holy roman empire right here which is uh the uh empire of charlemagne charles the great and the capital is going to really be akin that's where he's going to create his essential stuff well charles his name in latin is called careless so it's going to be called a carolingian revival revolver means that they're super interested in greek and roman stuff the classical civilization so if i went back here to the part that i skipped over i said that this scientific revolution history book argues that this is the first renaissance usually when you say early renaissance you say the 12th century but he's arguing that it is way back to the 5th century with the beginnings of the holy well with the collapse of the roman empire and then in the uh late 8th early 9th century at the beginning of the holy roman empire this thousand-year empire or thousand year reich as uh it's going to be referred to later on okay so the carolingian revival is very important because this guy charles there's a picture never learn how to write at this time you didn't read and write together you learn to read or you learn to write or you learn to read and then you learn to write he learned to read but he never could figure out how to write but books were very important to him books are very expensive people could not afford books back then so he hired people to come to his capital in akin and to translate books copy books not translate maybe translate to copy books into um a language in which um they could read so they have copies of books uh let's skip this part uh one of the most famous of course is gonna be this guy who's i don't know what his real name was but he's always referred to as the venerable bead great as a good example that's what we get a lot of our information such as the ecclesiastical history of the british nation and i use this in here because i wanted to which is important but if you were to take the writing where'd it go where to go ah right here you'll notice that the writing here starts in a capital letter and lowercase so the carol engine revival was at his court at accident charlemagne assembled learned men from all over europe and what did they do this next one here they copied books and manuscripts and built up libraries but how do they copy them because books are so expensive you need to learn to write smaller and so they invented this third one carol engine minuscule and it's called that because it has lower case as well as uppercase letters that allows you to have more words per square inch so if you look here you have a capital i then a lowercase a lowercase has never existed before they invented a whole new writing system uh so that you could actually put more words here i've never tried this really i've played around a little bit but if you write a letter all in capital letters then you write the same letter in capital letters and lowercase letters you'll be able to put more words on with capital and lowercase yay that's why you invented but in order to learn this you have to go to school and you could have a mom and dad that could teach you how to write you don't have to but generally people go to school to learn how to write like when i was i think i said this somewhere when i was in third grade i learned how to write in cursive and all of a sudden i learned that at school my mom could have taught me she was very busy because i had five brothers but uh really i learned at school i also learned my abcs in school right the alphabet that's what i'm talking about you go to schools so schools are going to develop i'm going to uh emphasize something that the book emphasizes that i don't emphasize as much and that is that if you look at this the population of europe only had 22 million people 60 million in china 79 million in india and 40 million in this overall islamic civilization meaning that they're pretty they don't have a lot of population they don't have a lot of population but they did have the carolingian uh revival but who cares about if you can read and write if you're hungry so they have a large population because they're hungry because they don't have enough food you know what they need they need more food your book says contemporary europe was a cultural intellectual economic technological and demographic backwater that paled before the technological and scientific vitality of contemporary centers of civilization in islam byzantium india china miss america and south america it was a backwater that's not it how are you going to one of the things kim is leading up to is talking about the development of science the scientific revolution and they started on that path pretty darn good by developing a writing and bringing people together to transcribe books but at the same time they're very hungry and most people don't care about that they care about eating every day so what they need is an increase in agriculture and in the rest of the world their populations grew because they're able to grow more food so that's what we need here but how are we going to i'm going to skip this and skip skip skip i'll come back to another time how are we going to grow more food aha the answer is technology i skipped a bunch of stuff i'm sorry but the answer is technology that's the answer so are we going to have european technological innovations which are going to allow them to grow more food growing more food allows them to eat better so they can have free time free time will allow them to say hey i could attend that school and learn how to write this is a nib a nib holder that you put the nib in i don't know why i'm showing you that but anyway so you can learn to write aha the first one is going to be heavy plow the first technological innovations which allow them to eat better is the heavy plow if you look down here this is a plow that's so heavy that it has wheels on it and it's going to be in this case pulled by an oxen now the oxen is going to be a pain in the neck because they are not they don't move very good and they move forward great but they don't turn on a dime they're like a semi truck they don't turn very good but they can pull this up a plow so this was improved in the 10th century 80 onward debates are where were they invented we know they're invented in china we also know that there were some invented in east uh eastern europe but i don't know the answer but i know that they uh are improving a plow by the 10th century in fact before this time they were actually using plows in the roman empire of course but these are different these are so heavy they could really get down into the ground and turn it around and that's good and i put a little box right here it because it increased cultural agricultural production by allowing farmers to cultivate wet lowlands of europe in other words there are many areas that are like clay soil clay e soil like outside you just can't turn them over with a garden tiller what you really need is a heavy plow to really turn it over so that by developing this plow they can move two places let me jump ahead a little bit uh in which they could actually turn it over for example in the south they use these roman plows which are not very good but that's okay because you didn't need to get very far down because there's lots of rain and everything but not too much but now because you have this heavy plow it leads people to move all the way up north where it rains a lot the soil is more clay i don't know that's really a word you know so people move if you were to take your genealogy or family history many of you would find that 2 000 years ago your family is living in southern europe one thousand years ago they were living in northern europe that transition to the from the south to the north is largely because of the heavy plow okay so all the way back to what i was talking about the heavy plow it very important allows you to plow the grounds appropriately the second thing is replacing that auction that was very cumbersome with a horse of course always of course i just like the rhyme as a principal draft animal that doesn't mean you don't use didn't mean you don't use the draft animal you still use i mean the oxen you still use it but then when it comes time to replace it you might buy a horse instead and a horse is excellent because they turn around and they actually it leads to a changing the fields so instead of having a long field you could have a square rectangular or square or weird shape field in which the horses will go back and forth so much easier if you were to take the horse an invention needed technological invention for the hey is it already time uh is going to be the horse collar you know what you say if you want the horse to come oh i slaughtered this joke you know what you do you call her you call her oh i messed it up and a horseshoe these two great inventions let me pause this video and come back for the second part in just a minute