英文中文
61
Print and Powder
印刷术和火药--新旧时代的交替
UP to this time there was not a printed book anywhere in Europe. There was not a newspaper. There was not a magazine. All books had to be written by hand. This, of course, was extremely slow and expensive, so there were very few of even these handwritten books. Only kings and very wealthy people had any books at all. Such a book as the Bible, for instance, cost almost as much as a house, and so no poor people could own such a thing. Even when there was a Bible in a church, it was so valuable that it had to be chained to keep it from being stolen. Think of stealing a Bible!
Actually, if you remember, the Chinese invented printing. Later, people began to print books in a new way. First the printer put together wooden letters called type, and then smeared them with ink. Then he pressed paper against this inky type and made a copy. After the type was once set up, thousands of copies could be made quickly and easily. Then he could take the letters apart and use them to make the next page. This, as you of course know, was printing. It was printing with movable type. It all seems so simple, the wonder is that no one had thought of this type of printing thousands of years before.
Gutenberg at his press, comparing a printed sheet with a manuscript
古腾堡在印刷机旁，正在比较印刷稿和手写稿
It is generally believed that a German named Gutenberg made the first printed book in Europe. And what book do you suppose it was that he printed? Why, the book that people thought to be the most important book in the world-the Bible. It took Gutenberg five years to make such a big book, and he finished it in 1456.The first dated book printed in England was made by an Englishman named Caxton. It was called Sayings of the Philosophers, and was printed in 1477.
Before this time few people, even though they were kings or princes, knew how to read. There were no books to teach them how to read and few books for them to read if they had learned. So what was the use of learning?
You can see how difficult it must have been for people throughout the Middle Ages, without books or newspapers or anything printed, to learn what was going on in the world, or to learn about anything that one wanted to know.
Now that printing had been invented, all that was changed. Storybooks, schoolbooks, and other books could be made in large numbers and more cheaply. People who never before were able to have any books could now own them. People could now read all the famous stories of the world and learn about geography, about history, about anything they wanted to know. The invention of movable type was soon to change everything.
The Hundred Years' War had at last come to an end soon after the invention of printing.
At the same time something else that was a thousand years old came to an end.
The Muslims, whom we haven't heard of for a long time, had tried to capture Constantinople in the seventh century but had been stopped, as I told you, by tar and pitch that the Christians poured down on them.
Now in 1453 the Muslims once again attacked Constantinople. This time, however, the Muslims were Turks, and they didn't try to batter down the walls of the city with arrows. They used gunpowder and cannon. Against the power of this new invention the walls of Constantinople could not stand, and finally the city fell. Constantinople became Turkish and the magnificent Church of Santa Sophia, which Justinian had built a thousand years before, was turned into a mosque for Muslim worship. This was the end of all that was left of the old Roman Empire-the other half of which had fallen in 476.
Ever after the downfall of Constantinople in 1453, wars were fought with gunpowder. No longer were castles of any use. No longer were knights in armor of any use. No longer were bows and arrows of any use-against this new kind of fighting. There was a new sound in the world, the sound of cannon-firing: "Boom! boom! boom!" Before this, battles had not been very noisy except for shouts of the victors and the moans of the dying. So some people call 1453 the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of Modern History.
Gunpowder had put an end to the Middle Ages. The invention of printing and that little magic needle, the compass, did a great deal to start what we call Modern History.
