In the course of the fourteenth century, Byzantine society underwent a series of major changes, in some ways similar to those in western Europe, in other ways quite different, and complicated by the presence of external threats that progressively led to the dissolution of the state and the conquest of its territory. While economic, social and cultural developments show considerable vitality, the weakness of the state, radically reducing its ability to provide order and security for its subjects, could not but influence the dynamic of other developments. Innovation, in practice more often than in theory, was not lacking; on the contrary, the responses to new conditions often present interesting if contradictory aspects.

For political history, a new era begins not with the start of the century but rather with the recovery of Constantinople from the Latins by a small expeditionary force of Michael VIII Palaeologus, emperor of Nicaea since 1258. This event, which occurred on 25 July 1261, had been long desired by the leaders of the major Greek splinter states, the emperors of Nicaea and the despots of Epirus, and it had certainly been prepared by Michael VIII. The restoration of a Byzantine emperor in the old capital of the empire had certain important consequences. For one thing, it displaced the focus of interest of the rulers from Asia to Europe, as they had to deal with western claims. The papacy, Charles of Anjou, the house of Valois and the Venetians all became engaged in various efforts to retake Constantinople, so that there was hostility between Byzantium and at least one western power at almost any time between 1261 and 1314; in 1281, as in 1308, powerful coalitions were aligned against Byzantium

the expedition of henry vii

on 23 October 1310, the emperor-elect, Henry of Luxemburg, completed his crossing of the Alps. A principal reason for his expedition was to receive an imperial coronation in Rome; he was also determined to recover his rights within the kingdom of Italy, a constituent part of the western empire whose frontiers encompassed much of the north of the peninsula. Connected to both aims was a desire to achieve a general pacification of his Italian lands. But that task was formidable. The area had no recent tradition of centralised let alone imperial rule. It was composed of a mosaic of lordships (signorie) and communes, protective of their autonomy while generally jealous of their neighbours. Rivalries had economic roots: the control of land and the trade routes within the region which connected it with the rest of Europe and the Mediterranean. They also had a political dimension polarised around allegiances which made up in ferocity and tenacity what they lacked in consistent ideological content. The Ghibellines looked to the empire and its Italian allies for support and justification. The Guelfs allied themselves with the papacy whose leading protagonists in Italy were the commune of Florence and the Angevins, who as well as being counts of Provence and kings of Naples, had lands in Piedmont. And not only did these allegiances express divisions within the region and Italy as a whole; they were also linked to factions struggling for ascendancy within individual cities.

rome or avignon?

seven popes in succession resided at Avignon in the years 1309–76. That the pope, the bishop of Rome, did not live in the Eternal City was neither new nor remarkable by the fourteenth century. In the thirteenth century (and earlier) Rome was a dangerous place because of the riots and tumults there, in which the Roman aristocracy took a leading part. Moreover, the city was unhealthy in summer. The popes habitually spent periods away from Rome in one of the towns of the Papal State, notably Viterbo, Anagni, Orvieto, Perugia and Rieti. It has been calculated that in the years 1198–1304 the popes spent about 60 per cent of their time away from Rome. The one pope in this period who spent his entire pontificate in Rome was Celestine IV, and he was pope for only seventeen days. After 1226 no pope spent the whole summer in Rome. Yet it was quite unprecedented for the popes in the fourteenth century to spend seventy years away from Italy.

Benedict XI (1303–4) established himself at Perugia. In 1305, the cardinals elected Bertrand de Got, archbishop of Bordeaux, as his successor (Clement V, 1305–14). Although Clement on various occasions declared that he intended to journey to Rome, he never managed to leave southern France during his pontificate of almost nine years. There were several reasons for this: Clement’s love of his native land, Gascony, and of his fellow-countrymen, on whom his patronage was lavished; his close relations with Philip the Fair of France; his desire to negotiate a peace between the kings of England and France; his plan to hold a general council at Vienne, which took place in 1311; his poor health; and the chaotic state of northern and central Italy.

this volume replaces the seventh volume of the Cambridge Medieval History, which was seen through the press in 1932 by C.W. Previté-Orton and Z.N. Brooke. That volume, subtitled Decline of the Empire and Papacy, dealt with ‘roughly speaking, the fourteenth century’, though that was interpreted generously – from 1252 in the case of Spain, and from c. 1270 in the accounts of England, France and Germany, while terminal dates for some chapters ran well into the fifteenth century. Moreover, in a significant proportion of the volume, especially in thematic chapters devoted to the Jews, medieval estates, peasant life, the early Renaissance and medieval mysticism, discussion was set in a broader context, often covering the whole period from 1100 to 1500, with a consequent diminution of specific information on the characteristics of the fourteenth century itself, a period recognised by all scholars, then as now, as amongst the most turbulent, even apocalyptic, of the entire Middle Ages or, as one well-informed contemporary, Filippo Villani, starkly put it, ‘this shipwreck of a century which is going from bad to worse’.

Not that there was any lack of information in Decline of the Empire and Papacy in other respects: approximately three-quarters of the volume was devoted to traditional political history within a strong narrative framework, above all the deeds of popes and emperors, kings and princes, parliaments and estates. Some chapters can still be mined with profit although there are many new sources and, in most cases, a huge modern secondary literature now available to reconstruct the sequence of events or to reinterpret the role of individuals.

the premature death of Philip IV on 29 November 1314 proved to be a major turning-point in the fortunes of Capetian France. It coincided with clear signs of an economic crisis, European in scale, that provides a backdrop to the political events which are the main concern of this chapter. Poor harvests, dearth and disease, following several wet summers, caused widespread misery as ‘the Great Famine’ of 1315–17 took its toll of men and animals. Ypres in Flanders lost 10 per cent of its population in these years; losses elsewhere in northern France approached this magnitude. In many regions (Normandy, Forez, Haute Provence) the medieval population peak was passed. Paris, the greatest city and intellectual capital of the west, topped 200, 000 inhabitants before disease, war and political troubles reduced it by two-thirds in the next hundred years. Its hinterland, the Ile-de-France, the ancient heart of the royal domain, which was amongst the most densely settled and richest parts of the kingdom around 1300, was within fifty years devastated by plague and war. In May 1358, partly consequent upon the general economic crisis, partly on short-run political and military factors, the Jacquerie, a violent revolt of rural artisans and craftsmen, broke out in the Beauvaisis and quickly affected an area from Picardy in the north to Orléacute;ans in the south. The particular target of the Jacques was the nobility, blamed for dereliction of duty and recent military defeat.

it is impossible to deny that fourteenth-century towns were profoundly affected by the economic contraction that followed previous expansion, however much historians wish to avoid generalisation and make proper allowance for the very considerable variations between regions. The situation was aggravated by the poor harvests of 1314–17 and the resulting shortages, as well as by the Black Death (1347–50) and subsequent outbreaks of plague. The result was a sharp drop in population levels, barely compensated for by the influx of refugees from the countryside. These factors, combined with high rates of taxation and manipulation of the coinage in some states, hampered commercial and manufacturing activity and exacerbated social tensions.

outline of urban europe, c. 1300

European towns at the beginning of the fourteenth century were the result of many centuries of expansion; they were denser in the southern, Mediterranean regions (Italy, Catalonia, Aquitaine, Provence) and in certain areas of northern and north-western Europe (Flanders, the Rhineland, the valleys of the Seine, Rhône and Loire, the Channel and Atlantic coastlands).

Urban networks were established in most areas. Economic, demographic and cultural expansion had reactivated the great majority of episcopal cities, dating from late antiquity or the early medieval period. Many substantial villages that had grown up near castles, abbeys and priories succeeded in raising themselves to the rank of true towns, while settlement and clearing, as well as the need to defend vulnerable border areas, were responsible for more recent foundations, the deliberate creations of princes, secular or ecclesiastical lords and the pioneering activities of rural immigrants.

the fall of Acre and the other Christian strongholds on the coast of Syria and Palestine to the Mamluk sultan in 1291 marked the end of the western military presence in the Holy Land which had begun at the time of the First Crusade. But the widespread conviction that Jerusalem and the other places associated with Christ’s life on earth ought to be a part of Latin Christendom was by no means dead. The demise of the kingdom of Jerusalem did not signify the end of the crusading movement, though between 1291 and the end of the fourteenth century the question of whether the west should launch crusades to recapture the Holy Land came to be largely overshadowed by the more pressing question of how far the west could prevent the Muslims from occupying other Christian-held territories bordering the eastern Mediterranean. After 1291 the kingdom of Cyprus under its Lusignan dynasty remained as the sole western outpost in the Levant while to the north, in south-eastern Anatolia, the kingdom of Cilician Armenia provided the one Christian-controlled point of access to the Asiatic hinterland. Further west, in the former Byzantine lands in and around the Aegean, there were a number of European possessions, most of which had been won early in the thirteenth century as a result of the Fourth Crusade. The Hospitallers were to add significantly to these territories when between 1306 and 1310 they seized the island of Rhodes from the Byzantine Greeks. The Byzantine empire itself, though buoyed up by the reoccupation of Constantinople in 1261, lacked the resources necessary to defend its territory – now largely limited to Bithynia, Thrace and northern Greece – from the predatory designs of its neighbours, and the fourteenth century was to witness its decline into impotence (see above pp. 795–824).

In Stockholm on 10 December 1930, C. V. Raman received the Nobel Prize for Physics for ‘the discovery of the effect named after him’. The prize had previously been awarded to such renowned physicists as Marie Curie, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, but never before to a non-European. Ronald Ross won the Medicine Prize in 1902, and Rabindranath Tagore, the only other Indian to receive a Nobel Prize before 1947, the Literature Prize in 1913, but it had long been seen as a matter for regret, as one Indian observer put it in 1912, ‘that none of our country’s scientists have up till now been awarded this much coveted prize’. He hoped that in the near future at least one of his compatriots would win ‘this blue ribbon in science’ and so achieve ‘the regard of the world’. That winter’s afternoon in Stockholm in 1930 it seemed Indian science had finally won that ‘regard’.

Along with the acclaim for Bose’s work on electric waves in London in 1896 and the founding of the Indian Science Congress in 1914, Raman’s Nobel Prize in 1930 could be seen as a symbolic milestone in the emergence of national science in India, the point at which it finally broke free from British tutelage and control. Certainly, by the 1920s and 1930s science in India had attained a new maturity and authority and Indian scientists had begun to acquire both international recognition and positions of intellectual and institutional leadership within India. And yet, in many respects, India’s science remained constrained and conditioned by the continuing presence of colonial rule and troubled by uncertainties about status and identity in India’s quest for nationhood and modernity.

The history of science, technology and medicine in India during the colonial period, so often in the past treated as marginal, can be seen in the light of recent scholarship as having a far more central, but also far more complex, role. The more historians take into account the ideological dimensions of science, technology and medicine, the more we move from seeing them as ‘tools of empire’ to explore their social, cultural and political dimensions, the more apparent it becomes that there was no simple, one-directional process of scientific and technological ‘transfer’, but rather a series of cross-cultural exchanges and interactions.

If we take what has been categorised by Basalla and others as ‘colonial science’, we can see at work not only the extension to British India of metropolitan agencies and ideas but, no less powerfully, the strength of the British interaction with India’s culture and environment, and the consequent distancing of colonial from metropolitan science. In part this derived from a sense of the provincialism that divided Calcutta from London, but it also reflected the persistent belief that science, technology and medicine in India could not be identical with metropolitan models but needed to reflect local conditions and circumstances and the political imperatives of the colonial regime itself. Science was about India as much as being in India, as demonstrated by the nineteenth-century emphasis upon natural science and the scientific reconnaissance of the Indian landscape. India was understood and represented through science and medicine as an alien territory inhabited by a foreign race: the monsoon, the Himalayas, India’s tropical diseases, the ‘peculiar geography of Hindoostan’, the manner of Indian pilgrimages, diets, marriage customs and purdah — the physical and cultural idiosyncrasies of India constantly flickered across the imperial vision of India.

The questions that can be asked about science in modern India are essentially those pertaining to the history and sociology of science elsewhere. What is the social character of scientific knowledge? Who produces science and why? How does science exercise authority within a society and across cultural divides? As historians and sociologists have begun to investigate science, less in terms of its self-declared aims and putatively objective interrogation of nature and more in terms of its internal ordering, social construction and cultural authority, it has become clear that science is ‘a highly social activity’, one that cannot be ‘sealed off from the values of the society in which it is practised’. It is increasingly recognised, too, if not yet universally accepted, that science, far from being monolithic, manifests itself across time and cultures in myriad forms, reflecting as much as informing a given society’s cultural, economic and political modalities. Science thus ‘reveals itself as much more contingent and culturally specific’ than it was once assumed to be. Individuals and groups produce scientific knowledge not in isolation but ‘against the back-ground of their culture’s inherited knowledge [and] their collectively situated purposes’ as well as through ‘the information they receive from natural reality’.

The social character and cultural plurality of science has a particular bearing on the history of science, technology and medicine in India, which had a well-established scientific and technological tradition of its own long before being subjected to an extended period of European colonial rule. Although the history of science, technology and medicine continues to be presented in general histories as a record of Western discovery and dissemination, it has become more widely acknowledged than a generation or two ago that not all such histories can be conflated into a single story of European achievement or saga of European enterprise overseas.

It is a well-established convention to see the nineteenth century as an age of innovative steam technologies, developed first in Europe, then diffused to other regions of the globe. In an era characterised in terms of ‘a massive transfer of technology from the West to Africa and Asia’, and with colonialism as a convenient conduit, India has often been taken to exemplify the momentous scale and impact of this process. But although the transfer of technology argument duly highlights the importance of exogenous innovation and the role of technology as a ‘tool of empire’, it can easily become an excessively one dimensional idea, stressing the dynamism of the West but ignoring the context in which new technologies were employed. Technologies are seldom discrete bodies of knowledge, transferable wholesale, without emendation, from one society to another. Technological transfers are more likely to take the form of a ‘dialogue’ rather than a simple process of diffusion or imposition, and this was especially the case in India, which had a wide range of existing technologies and a physical and social environment far removed from that of Europe. Equally, it needs to be recognised that under colonialism the dissemination of new technologies was constrained and conditioned by the partisan nature of political and economic control. Colonial rule interrupted the ‘inventive exchanges’ India had formerly had with its Asian and Indian Ocean neighbours and created instead a near-monopoly of technological dialogue with and through the West, and, primarily, with Britain itself. State power was used to promote technologies that served the regime’s military, economic or ideological needs while restricting Indian access to technologies that might harm metropolitan interests.

General

There have been few general surveys of the history of science, technology and medicine in colonial India and a dearth of interpretative essays. Standard histories of science, technology and medicine written from the perspective of Europe and North America give little coverage to India. At most there might be some initial acknowledgement of the mathematics, medicine, chemistry and astronomy of ancient India, but Joseph Needham’s work on China (unparalleled in range and quality for India) is more often cited by authors in search of non-European comparisons. Of the specifically Indian works, D. M. Bose, S. N. Sen and B. V. Subbarayappa (eds.), A Concise History of Science in India (New Delhi, 1971), provides a convenient overview of a longer period than that covered by this book, but the chapter by Subbarayappa Western Science in India up to the End of the Nineteenth Century AD’(pp. 484-567) is a useful summary across several scientific fields. Unfortunately, no attempt is made to cover the twentieth century or to discuss medicine and technology.

There has been a tendency to partition the study of India’s science, technology and medicine, like much else in the region’s history, along conventional lines into ancient (Hindu), medieval (Muslim) and modern (colonial) periods. Of works that do link the pre-colonial and colonial periods of Indian scientific history, particularly useful are Ahsan Jan Qaisar, The Indian Response to European Technology and Culture (AD 1498–1707) (Delhi, 1982); and two articles by S. N. Sen, ‘Scientific Works in Sanskrit, Translated into Foreign Languages and Vice Versa in the 18th and 19th Century AD’, IJHS, 7, 1972, pp. 44–70, and ‘The Character of the Introduction of Western Science in India during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, IJHS, 1, 1966, pp. 112–22.