Part 4: The Return of Astronomy to Europe Or the new light comes.
With the clans of Europe in the chaos that was the Dark Ages, there were only a few places for men of learning to hide. Becoming monks and joining monasteries. Going to Constantinopal or to any King that wanted a Wise Man. Even then you were not safe because of bandits on the roads and the large distances between any place that was safe. However, a lot of the knowledge from the Greeks was not in European hands, it was with the Jewish and the Greek people and by 500 AD had got as far as India. In the Sanskrit writing Siddhanantas had become influenced by Ptolomaic Astronomy.
What Astronomy was left, in what was slowly going to become a Christian world, now was totally dedicated to looking after time. This was the day to day type time of Saint days, Holy days, Christmas and (from the Month of Ester) Easter (that was very important to them). However, Astronomy was looked down on as a bit of black magic by the church and had a bad time from then on. To add to all the hardships of the Dark Ages were Plagues, feuding kings and what would become the great rival of the West, Islam. From Mohammed the time it took to spread the word of the profit across the Arabic World was very short In 635 Moors, or the followers of Mohammed, conquered Persia and in 711 Moors conquered Spain and would remain there until the time of Queen Isabella. Sorry I'm wrong, It sounds bad, but it wasn't all bad though, because Islam became big in the Sciences.
Mathematics, Chemistry, Geometry, Medicine and Astronomy were some of the subjects of Arab Science (mainly from the Greek tradition) . The names of many things we know today still have Arabic names (sim sula bim). In Astronomy most of the names we know the stars by came from Arabic (Mizar, Acheanre, Sirius). From first Arabic reference to sunspots by Abu al ja'far ibn al-Muqtaff, to the most famous of these Astronomers, mathematician and poet was Omar Kiam, they did some great work. Some mathematical ideas from India were picked up again by the Arabs and one of those ideas was ZERO. All of these ideas ended up being picked up much later by Europeans (not before the Crusades though).
Near the then four hundred-year-old wall that Emperor Hadrian (the Hand's-On Emperor) built to stop the pics (now the Scots) raiding Roman Britain, Bede was born and lived all his life. We (us in the 21st Century) would never have heard of him except for the history of England he wrought and his work on the Calendar. The Venerable Bede of Jarrow was responsible for working out that the Solar year and its calculation. He also continued the mistake of not stating the Calendar with a Zero (876 BC Zero concept seen in India).Although the rest of the World was still doing some great and original Astronomy, by 800 AD there was still no real Astronomy going on in Europe (except for Bede) There was no order, laws, large cities, infrastructure or large scale agriculture or peace for anyone, peasants, kings or clerics.
The only glimmer of hope in that time was the barbarian king of the Franks, Charles, son of Pippin the Short (not said to his face though). In 800 Charlamaign (Charles the Great) after saving the then Pope from a rioting crowd in Rome was Crowned Emperor of The (west)(holy) Roman Empire. He collected scholars from all over Europe and had a Library though he himself never learnt to read or write. After the Caliph of Baghdad presented Charlamaign with a Cledsydra (water clock) in 807 he knew how far his empire had fallen behind the rest of the world. As the only Astronomy reference at all from that time, was to Sunspots in "Life of Charlemaign" from 807 AD.
Much to everyone's surprise from the north came the Viking expansion in around 850 AD (after Charlamaign died). However, no one can give a simple answer as to why they started coming out of Norway and Sweden but it was going to have a big effect on Europe for the bad and the good. Besides being ruthless ocean going warriors and raiders of coastal areas of Europe they did a lot of travelling and trading and setting up of Kingdoms and Duchess like Normandy, the Kingdom of Estonia and England. They got favour with the Byzantine Emperors, because of a how many times they had tried to raid Byzantium (it was better having them with them rather than against them). The Vikings really didn’t have time for Astronomy with their only contribution being lenses (from Byzantium) and navigation techniques that they used to get themselves all the way to the Americas.
The real teachers of Astronomy to the Europeans ended up being the Moors. The Islamic Nations had spread to Spain, the Balkans and the Holy Lands, and that got them in to real strife with Christendom (Christians of Europe). So to get the Holy lands back Pope Urban the second started the first Crusades in 1035. They were a messy, nasty and bloody episode in the stories of both sides (they haven't finished yet in a few places) and only one or two good things came out of it. Two things were Astronomy and Mathematics, they both got a good boost, even though it took a few hundred years for this knowledge to filter through. It got through too late to get our Calendar right (we missed the zero and the year had to be fixed by sixteen days), but one thing appears to have broken the ice thanks to Ptolomy. That was his star chart that had been translated from Greek to Arabic hundreds of years before and now was being turned into Latin from Arabic around 1160 (this went on for a long while even, Edmond Halley did some work like this.) It was used in some of the new places of learning that were appearing that would one day turn into Universities. The Algemest (the Arabic name) was the most thorough star chart available at the time and had the Arabic additions and names still used today.
The next contacts with the Moor scientists was the monks from these schools trying to find out what was going on in Astronomy, Geometry, Chemistry and other fields of Arabic Science. This was also an ongoing event in Europe and got to the point that the church felt it had to stop this contact in a few cases. The most famous connection was in Portugal with a Prince now known as Prince Henry the Navigator. He had set up a secret establishment in 1419 at Sarges, South Portugal to study ship building, sailing and navigation (you need Astronomers here) to gain access to the great prize, India. It was the Manhattan Project of its day and would draw the attention of Sir Frances Drake who blew it to bits. Most of the top Scientists at this place were the Moors and Jews. All this nearly ended up on the rocks when the Church of Rome could see some big problems with its control. There was also a monk in Germany around 1517 who was nailing notes on doors and a king in England who had had a run in with the Pope over his wives. So in a dim corner of the Vatican a secret police force was formed and, as with all secret police, their masters lost control of them. That part of the story will wait for later. So as the Jews and the Moors were lifting Europe out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance, the means of unravelling the whole lot was being set up. However, not before some great things started to happened.
Prince Henry's work paid off as the Portuguese sailors found their way to India. The first was Dias who found the passage past the Cape of Good Hope in 1487 and Magellan whose crew did the round trip (Filipino tribesmen killed Magellan in 1521). Others, like an Italian who got his distances wrong, got Queen Isabella of Arogon (now part of Spain) to pay for the equivalent of a space program on his wild idea. A very wild theory he could reach India from the other way. He got his ship and crew and set off in 1492, but he didn't get to India, did he?
The world became a bigger place after these events and so was the sky. As Magellan sailed to an uncertain future in the southern oceans he and his crew saw many strange sights. The two bright patches he saw in the southern sky now have his name, The (Island Galaxies) Magullanic Clouds. All this went on for a while until the great enlightenment took hold and the story of Astronomy with it. From here on in the story is about the great names in Science and Astronomy, the teachers who liked to party and the lone geniuses who thought they could change lead into gold and hear music in the Planets. All this and more in the following chapters of the History of Astronomy, or how people got stuck on stars.
Presented by Jim Dale
