We also learn how cities developed from fortresses into centers of commerce and watch the growth of handicrafts, gothic architecture, universities, mass production, the printing press and more. An important chapter is devoted to the influence of China, via the Silk Road, and Islam. The Gieses work century by century through the Middle Ages (from 500 to 1500), listing new tools and methods, each page full of attractive detail and anecdote. They describe the above-ground reduction furnace that was feeding iron to local forges where smiths shaped it into parts for the new heavy ploughs, spades, and shoes for horses now beginning to pull with the aid of the padded collar the triangular lateen sail that could drive Viking ships to trading posts on the Volga and the considerable extension of the use of the waterwheel. The authors show that by the year 900 the new Europe, for all its political chaos, had already surpassed the ancient Mediterranean world in technology. The political and military facade of Imperial Rome masked a largely stagnant peasant economy-along with a mentality that had little incentive to explore labor-saving technology and dismissed the ``useful arts'' as unworthy of a free man. In their latest medieval study, the Gieses (Life in a Medieval Village, 1990, etc.) explode the myth that the Middle Ages were unconcerned with the empirical and demonstrate that the Renaissance itself was the outcome of gradual progress made over the previous thousand years.
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