The Vicious Pope, the Goldsmith, and the Machine That Changed Thought – How Book Printing Changed Europe

There are inventions that have so profoundly changed the course of history that their effect extends to our present, and the invention of movable type printing is undoubtedly one of these revolutionary events. What very few people know, however, is the fact that a highly worldly and vicious pope, with his weak eyes,gave a decisive impetus to the spread of this new technology and that the invention would probably never have come about without the capital, the metal art and the wine culture of the city of Mainz. The following text tells the story of this unusual combination of lord of the church and inventiveness and shows how printing not only affects books, but also thought, the economy and thechanged the entire society of Europe forever. It becomes clear that great innovations never arise in a vacuum, but always arise from the interaction of personalities, places, circumstances and existing technical possibilities.

A pope of worldly stature

According to everything that has been handed down, Pope Pius II was a man of the most worldly cut, a drunkard, an apron hunter and a friend of wine. He fathered at least two children, and one of them was born in Scotland while on a business trip there at a young age. Although he solemnly swore never to return to that Nordic place to which theWinter sun is missing, he spent half a year in Scotland in a very productive and even reproductive way. He threatened to make this behavior a habit when a second child was born in France a few years later, which was also the result of another trip abroad by our energetic young prince of the church.

Poet and prince of the church at the same time

Apart from his keen eye for the ladies’ world, Pius also saw himself as the author of crude comedies, and he is still the only pope who has become known as the author of sensual love poems. His poem about two lovers is truly not what you would expect from a clergyman. Despite his fleshly weaknesses, Pope Pius became a significantWriter of his time and presided over a strong papacy. He never allowed his inner penchant for permissiveness to determine his dogmatic public stance, but supported the Crusades and advocated the primacy of the papacy over the snooty archbishops.

Covenants and nocturnal paperwork

He even managed to forge an alliance with Vlad the Impaler, another epitome of virtue, to protect the Christian Eastern Balkans from the Muslim Ottomans. What were a few skewered heads when European civilization was at stake? When he was not forging alliances with his old companion, the voivode Vlad, Pius wrote with tenseEyes in candlelight on his numerous volumes of notes, a diary of his life and time.

The love of luxury and the transformation of the hometown

Like any self-respecting pope, Pius had a penchant for a little luxury and enjoyed fine wines, paintings, and architecture. As Republican Florence and its merchant bankers set the pace and built the most beautiful city in the world, the papacy had to react so as not to be outdone. So Pius tried his hand as an urban planner, leaving the Tuscan village where hehad grown up, and built a small imitation of Florence in its place, complete with a cathedral, various palaces and some Gothic churches. In an act of humility, he consecrated the city by calling it Pienza, the city of Pius, after his own name. The tireless work with draftsmen, construction workers, builders and artists demandedtogether with all the nightly writing his eyes in addition.

Vanity and the search for the readable Bible

This vain womanizer hated having to wear glasses in public, but when a pope is expected to read to his congregation from a delicately handwritten Bible, such vanity can quickly become delicate. He therefore needed a Bible that he could read without glasses, and Johannes Gutenberg provided the solution. Gutenberg’s training as aGoldsmith had trained him to deal with the finest work and the beauty of design, and he wanted to dazzle his audience with the grandeur of his designs. His printed Bibles should not only be cheaper and faster to produce than the handwritten templates, but also more beautiful.

The new presentation of the books

Recognizing that clear chapter headings and generous spacing would facilitate orientation in the text, Gutenberg set out to completely redesign the presentation of the books. Its page structure should please the reader, because its customers, bishops, cardinals and the Pope himself, were accustomed to pomp and had to be delighted, as the first impression counts.the design trademark was a scarlet chapter heading over two columns with easily readable text that looked shiny and sublime. Through the use of lacquer, Gutenberg gave his Bibles a unique and magnificent appearance, and the two columns of text were beautifully decorated with animals and plants in gold and various other bright colors.

The praise of the short-sighted Pope

The result was wonderfully readable and impressed one of the most influential men of the time, the short-sighted Pope Pius II, who wrote in appreciation of Gutenberg’s pages that they could be read without glasses. God’s printer, Johannes Gutenberg, was thus on the right track, because one of the decisive characteristics of an innovator is the ability to use various previousInventions and to unite them in a new work through a process of trial and error. The art of printing is much praised, not to mention its efficiency, because Gutenberg was able to print several Bibles in the time it took a writer to print a single Bible. The Bibles were also beautiful to look at and touch, his designs were clear, conciseand conspicuous, and whoever had once seen such a Bible never forgot it, for it felt like a jewel.

The Spirit Flash in the Vineyard

The inventor had observed how the locals in the Mainz area made wine, with large presses crushing the grapes in vats and mechanical spindles moving the whole thing down so that all the grapes were pressed at the same time and with the same pressure. This was an ancient Roman technology, and perhaps Gutenberg experienced after a few glasses of wine in aWeinberg am Rhein. Until then, printers had constantly smeared the ink because they didn’t apply the same pressure to all the letters on a page, so he wondered why he shouldn’t adopt wine press technology for his printing press. If Mainz had not been a center of metal processing and wine production, Gutenberg would probably havenever came up with this solution.

The Capital of the City of Mainz

Innovations usually arise from an interplay of different circumstances that determine why and where they arise, and Mainz, like Florence, was an economic centre based above all on its location on the Rhine near the mouths of the Moselle and Main. Mainz had the capital without which the constantly bankrupt Gutenberg could never have financed his machines, because thePrinting press was an expensive device that required deep pockets with its intricate iron casting and moving typeface. A full set of custom letters cost the equivalent of four to ten years’ wages for an average craftsman. In fact, the technique of making the letters was considered so valuable that after the death of one of Gutenberg’sBusiness partners sent a servant to his house to dismantle the press, recover the components and destroy the traces of their cooperation so that these materials did not fall into the hands of the heirs.

No savings, no invention

Without the explosion of pensions and municipal bonds that accumulated savings and made investment capital available to adventurers like Gutenberg, the printing press probably wouldn’t have come from Germany at this point. The printing press then sparked public debates and unleashed an unprecedented thirst for knowledge, because better-informed citizensare talkative citizens. The economic impact of printing was obvious, because the general need for printed reading began to skyrocket, and with increasing demand, prices fell. Rationalization took hold, more demand led to more supply, and the Mainz printers were working at full speed, keeping costs low, making profitsand were able to offer more books cheaper.

The decline in book prices

Within half a century of its invention, book prices fell by two-thirds, and when John printed his first Bible, the price of a book was about three months’ pay. Around four human ages later, a book cost less than a single daily wage. Book printing changed thinking, because educated people could now read for themselves, as lonelyEmployment, and this individual study allowed for deeper reflection and analysis. A revolutionary new design format emerged, the one-page leaflet, which could be read aloud as a quickly digested dispute text by an educated shouter in the marketplace and spread ideas in a population that still consisted largely of illiterate people.

The cradle of industrial production

Book printing not only changed the way of thinking, but also the way of working, because the merchant was perhaps confronted for the first time with the magic of increasing productivity that resulted from the mechanized way of working. The printing works were among the very first beginnings of the later factory model of industrial production, and the merchant was well on his way to becoming aTo become more industrial, while Gutenberg’s workshop wrote the first sentences of the story that was to become the Industrial Revolution. Printing also introduced a third key factor of the economy, capital, because it was one of the first examples of a machine that greatly influenced workers’ productivity and increased profitability per worker, whichSource of all capitalism. The books also transformed the work from sweaty to artisanal and initiated the process of distinguishing between skilled and unskilled industrial workers, and both developments were to have a profound impact on society and politics in the centuries to come.

The growth of cities with printers

The municipalities pooled their resources to buy printing presses, and the link between the construction of such a machine and the subsequent economic growth is clear. European cities, which already had a press in the early decades of printing, then expanded by far more than half faster than comparable cities without such a press.Intellectual and commercial freedom went hand in hand, and once they had a printing press, cities in Germany and other parts of Europe that had previously experienced no industrial, trade, or financial benefits experienced higher economic growth and an increase in literacy. People devoured books, brochures and magazines andshowed a clear preference for new, forward-looking areas of knowledge such as animal science, anatomy and botany.

The Rise of Scholars

This was good news for teachers and all those who worked in education, because the average salary of a university professor rose from the same salary as the average craftsman to double within a human age. People’s interest in the future and the possibilities of science has visibly increased, and this tendency can be attributed tothe salaries of different types of professors in the first decades after the turn of the century. Those who taught science, mathematics and astronomy received larger salary increases than the professors of law, theology, rhetoric, grammar, poetry and Greek.

Germany becomes the centre of inventiveness

Similar to Italy in the heyday of the Renaissance, Germany became the center of European innovation and thought two centuries later, and this line extends from Böhme to Leibniz, Wolff and Kant to Hegel. Germany was ideally suited for the dissemination of information and the early adoption of commercial and technological innovations, as the late HolyRoman Empire was a decentralized network of small towns and territories competing among themselves for prestige. If Germany had been a large, united empire with a vertical power structure, there would probably have been censorship by the central government, and printing with its potential to produce revolutionary texts would probably have been more closely monitored andinspected.

The Advantage of Multi-state

The Chinese had invented printing centuries before Gutenberg, but their mandarin, always on the lookout for technologies that could undermine the authority of the center, immediately stopped the proliferation of printing houses and insisted on the censorship of inflammatory material. In Germany, however, there was no such core, and the multicentric character of the map with itscompeting cities and communities was the perfect breeding ground for intellectual and commercial breakthroughs. The stage was set.