We have set forth the causes and principal effects of the great wave of civilisation poured forth in the Middle Ages by the Arabs, which rolled from the columns of Hercules to the confines of Asia. It remains, to complete this vast picture, only to say a few words on certain Arabian discoveries, which altered the literary, political, and military conditions of the entire world. These were paper, the compass, and gunpowder.
PAPER, COMPASS, AND GUNPOWDER
One has already seen how many useful and important inventions have been transmitted to us by the Arabs, and even although they were not perhaps the originators they must not be refused the glory of having brought them to the light and of having propagated them from one end of the world to the other. This is really what they did with paper, the compass, and gunpowder.
A belief, founded on certain apocryphal writing, that the Chinese knew the use thereof at a far distant epoch, has been considered sufficient to rob the Arabs of the honour of having bequeathed these inventions to Europe, but this is an injustice. It might be said that printing existed in China from the eighth century; yet the names of Gutenberg, Faust, and Schoeffer are not less illustrious. Would not the Arabs, if they had taken tissue paper from them, have also borrowed the art of printing had it then been known? Would those of the Celestial Empire ever practically have used chance discoveries? What use have they made of the compass, they who still believed in 1850 that there was a burning furnace at the South Pole; and have they ever applied gunpowder and utilized its power in as many ways as the Arabs?
It must be remembered that at the siege of Mecca in 690 a kind of bomb was already in use, and that in Egypt in the thirteenth century powdered nitre was used to throw projectiles to a great distance with a noise like thunder. It is also mentioned on the occasion of a naval battle between the king of Tunis and the emir of Seville in the eleventh century, in 1308 at the siege of Gibraltar, in 1324 at that of Baeza; also as used by Ismail, king of Granada in 1340 and by Algeciras in 1342, and Ferreras says positively that the balls were shot by means of powder. The Spanish thenceforth made use of it, and one sees the European armies little by little provided with cannon, while no mention is made of their trials and attempts which would necessarily have preceded the organisation of artillery if the actual invention of gunpowder had originated with Christian nations as some writers and historians have long claimed.
Early Bronze Cannon
With regard to the compass, nothing proves that the Chinese used it for navigation, while we find the Arabs using it in the eleventh century, not only for sea voyages, but in caravan journeys through the desert, and to determine the azimuth of the Kiblah, that is the direction of the Moslem oratories towards Mecca. It was the same with paper. Towards the year 650 silk paper was already being made at Samarcand and Bokhara. In 706 Jusuf Amron at Mecca thought of substituting cotton for silk; hence the “damask paper,” of which Greek historians speak. In Spain, where linen and hemp were more common, arose factories for linen paper. “The Xativa paper,” says the geographer Edrisi, “is excellent and incomparable.” Valencia and Catalonia soon afterwards proved formidable rivals to Xativa (Jativa). In the thirteenth century Arabian paper was used at Castile, whence it penetrated into France, Italy, England, and Germany. But Arabian manuscripts always led in the fineness and glossiness of their paper, as well as in the choice of ornamentation in lively and brilliant colours.
It was thus that the influence exercised by the Arabs manifested itself in every branch of modern civilisation. From the ninth to the fifteenth century the most voluminous literature extant was formed, productions were multiplied; valuable inventions attested the wonderful activity of men’s minds at this epoch; and their influence, felt throughout Christian Europe, justified the opinion that the Arabs have led us in all things. On the one hand we find inestimable material for a history of the Middle Ages—narratives of voyages, the happy idea of the biographical dictionary; on the other, unequalled industry, buildings grandiose in thought and execution, important discoveries in the arts. Does not all this reveal the work of a people too long disdained?[g]