Within ten years of the issue of the Indulgence mentioned above, printing by movable type was going on in several German cities other than Mainz and Strasbourg. German printers brought the art to Rome in 1467, and two years later John of Spire, like Fust a goldsmith, had started work in Venice. In Switzerland, says McMurtrie, it seems likely that "the first printing office in Basle began work about 1467." Printing in Paris starts about a year later. In 1469, Caxton, a Kentishman, who had occupied consular status to the English Merchant Adventurers at Bruges, began translating into his own tongue for the press the Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, printed there in 1475. A year later, he returned to England, set up business with Colard Mansion in the Almonry near Westminster Abbey, and from that office produced The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophers. This, states McMurtrie,
was the first dated book printed in England, the Epilogue being dated 1477 and in one copy November 18. Though this was the first dated book, it was not certainly the first issue of the press, Caxton's translation of Jason and a few other publications of slight extent having probably preceded it.
Within twenty years from the start, on the threshold of the discovery of the New World, printing from movable type is thus in full swing throughout Europe. The speedy and consequent intellectual ferment is an oft-told tale, scarcely worth further comment, if it were not too customary to dwell on the alleged impact on natural knowledge, as on biblical criticism and political theory, of Greek scholarship imported into Europe by Byzantine immigrants in flight from the victorious Turks. The fact is that the positive outcome of Alexandrian mathematics, astronomy, medicine and mechanics had long ago penetrated north-western Europe through visits of students to the Moorish universities in Spain, where positive knowledge had attained a higher level than ever before through the marriage of Alexandrian science to Hindu number-lore. Equally indisputable is the fact that the universities of Toledo, Cordova and Seville were midwives of the cartography which Jewish pilots put at the service of Henry the Navigator. That the new technique of printing made available for the great explorations of the fifteenth century a new scientific amenity for which there was a pre-existing and insistent demand is evident from the mounting number of nautical almanacks published between Gutenberg's first productions and the project of Columbus. Soon there were to follow manuals of military science propounding problems of ballistics created by the introduction of gunpowder into warfare—like paper, from Chinese sources by way of the Moslem world.
Why monks, such as Adelard of Bath, should disguise themselves as Moslems to study in the Moorish universities during the twelfth century is easy to understand. The Church had assumed the responsibilities of the ancient priesthoods as custodians of the calendar, and hence of astronomical lore, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. As founders of hospitals in conformity with the beatitude of the sick visitor, they were prohibited from active participation in the advancement of medicine as a science by Papal bulls against dissection of the human body, but on that account the more well-disposed to Jewish missionaries of the Moorish culture, when the latter set up schools of medicine on the campuses of the mediaeval universities....
That Ionian scientific speculations exerted a salutary influence on Newtonian science, when the atomic concept invaded modern European thought after the seventeenth-century translations of Gassendi and others, is not open to dispute. Nor need we rob the fugitive scholars of Constantinople of the credit for playing a minor part in this climax off-stage; but the efflorescence of science in the seventeenth century was the immediate consequence of technological advances made in the preceding century, and put into circulation through a commercial undertaking which had to sell science to a reading public of master pilots, mining engineers, artillery commanders and spectacle-makers before naturalistic science had paid its way into university cloisters under a more accommodating sobriquet as natural philosophy.
With this overdue obituary on the immigrants from the fall of Constantinople in the year preceding the first dated product of the new printing technique let us leave them; and again get into focus the astonishing speed of its spread in an age when the craft guilds jealously guarded their secrets. Here is a technical revolution of the first magnitude at a time when technical innovations diffused leisurely against menacing obstacles of custom thought and of legal sanctions. As such, its tempo is a challenge to curiosity; and part of the answer to the enigma is that there was already a flourishing craft of printing to take advantage of the economy of movable type, when Gutenberg and Fust began their partnership.
Again, we must pause to pay a debt of gratitude to China, and to civilisations far older than the Chinese. We have seen that the seal is the oldest form of signature; and that all our knowledge of one of the earliest literatures of the world comes from clay tablets on which the Sumerian priesthoods engraved their sign-language with a punch to which it owes the characteristic style called cuneiform. The same impulse to impose the signature of a sky-sign on the clay tablet had led men to impress symbols of ownership or good omen on the soft clay products of the potter's wheel before the baking began. A stamp is, after all, a seal to carry a pigment; and the practice of stamping pottery with coloured patterns is of great antiquity. The next step is intelligible in its own territory. In China, whence the silkworm made its lethargic way across the great trade routes of Asia, stamping patterns on silk was probably a practice before the Christian era began; and it was China which produced the first paper. Probably about A.D. 700, though it may well be earlier, the practice of stamping charms by wood blocks on paper began there. In A.D. 767 the Empress Shotoku of Japan ordered a million Buddhist charms to be printed from wood blocks on paper for placing in miniature pagodas.
The Chinese predilection for games such as Mah Jongg is an ancient tradition; and an early use of block printing—long before it came into Europe—is the production of sheet dice or, as we should say, playing cards. As charms—pictures of saints—and as playing cards, wood-block printing established a market in Europe at least a century before Gutenberg's Bible. Fortunately, we know some facts about this, as often by a happy dispensation. For the age-long obstruction of the legal mind to progress conspires with its obsessional drive to record its own ineptitudes and us to perpetuate milestones of progress by the resistance it offers to innovation. Thus we have the record of a prohibition issued by the Provost of Paris in A.D. 1397 against working men playing cards on working days; and there were many such prohibitions in German towns about this time. We have also originals of contemporaneous wood-block prints portraying saints for sale at shrines by travelling pedlars and palmers, encouraged to foregather by papal indulgences for the pilgrims.
Like Snap and other children's card games of today, the first playing cards were wholly pictorial, in suits exhibiting the feudal hierarchy, starting with the king and queen. The joker is a relic. Sometimes, the wood block of the picture card accommodated a title or epithet, and often the Heiligen, or shrine charms promoted by the clergy as an antidote to the carnal indulgence of card-playing, would carry the name of the saint. Either way, the next step was inevitable. We are now in sight of printing as a medium for the rapid circulation of knowledge; but we have to take stock of several features of the folk ways of Europe in the Middle Ages before we take the next hurdle.
When we reach the threshold of the fifteenth century, writing is no longer the prerogative of a priestly caste. There are merchants with big balances in the wool trade, the herring trade and the spice trade. There are pilots who have to rely on their rutter books to navigate cargoes of the spice trade over long ocean routes. There is a mounting volume of manorial accountancy and litigation connected with the exchange of produce between the countryside and the boroughs where master-craftsmen and merchants are now aspiring to domestic conveniences heretofore inaccessible to the landed gentry. All this signifies the pre-existence of considerable semi-literate personnel to provide a market for the products of Gutenberg's trade. It is necessary to say this, because school history too often exhibits the Church and the Law as the custodians of literacy.