A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

turned into a kind of ‘closed shop’, a merely authoritarian dogma. Innocent III was the first pope to
establish Inquisitors - the Dominicans - to root out heresy and burn the rebels. He was, in effect,
screwing down the lid of a pressure-cooker. Sooner or later, it was bound to explode.
Another ‘purist’, St Francis of Assisi, succeeded in remaining within the fold - although it was
touch-and-go for a while and some of his followers were later burnt as heretics in Marseilles. But
one of the stories concerning St Francis helps to pinpoint precisely what was happening in the final
years of the Middle Ages. Francis Bernadone was the son of a rich businessman of Assisi - a
member of the newly rising class that would undermine the Church. Legend declares that he fell in
love with a beautiful woman, but that when he pressed his suit she pulled down her dress and
revealed that one of her breasts was eaten away with cancer. It made him aware of the vanity of
human desires and took him a step closer to recognising his mission. We find it easy enough to
understand his reaction. He had, in effect, been converted from frivolity to seriousness. He felt an
urge to turn his back on his futile life of dandyism and find some purpose into which he could
channel his enormous energies. We can also see that his reaction might have been to seek out the
best physician he could find and study the problem of cancer. (As it was, he spent three years
tending lepers.) Instead, he created his movement of ‘poor friars’; he had, in effect, taken a
backward step to the hermits in the desert. And this same retrogressive tendency is also symbolised
by his positive loathing of money; when his friars brought donations, they had to bring them in
their mouths and drop them into a heap of dung, to remind themselves that money was no more
than excrement. We can understand his point - his father was probably obsessed by money and he
took the opposite stance - and we can also see that he was taking his dislike too far. The circulation
of money was the greatest single factor in freeing the mind of man from the stagnation of the
Middle Ages. Francis’s heart was in the right place; it was his head that needed examining.
And while popes were hurling excommunications, Dominicans were torturing suspected heretics
and Franciscan friars were walking the roads, the really important changes were taking place on
another level. Inventions were transforming human existence. The plough of the ancient world was
basically a pointed stick, which was attached to some kind of frame behind an ox; then it was
pulled along to scratch the surface of the ground. In the Middle Ages, someone realised that a knife
would cut much deeper. A deep cut on its own would be of no particular use, but if some kind of
twisted board could follow behind the knife, it would split open the cut and turn the earth sideways.
And the long furrows that resulted allowed the water to drain away, so that a field could be
ploughed even when it was wet.
The chief problem with the new plough, which had wheels on the front, was that the harness -
which passed around the ox’s chest -was liable to strangle the animal. Around 900 A.D. someone
thought of the answer: a rigid collar or frame that would transfer the strain from the chest to the
shoulders. Together, these two inventions revolutionised agriculture, and so provided food for an
increasing population. Increasingly large horses were developed - for war as much as agriculture -
and this presented another problem: their hoofs tended to split when they were heavily loaded or
pulling a great weight. The metal horseshoe provided the answer, at about the same time the horse
collar came to Europe.
One of the biggest problems for early sea traders was that they had to wait for the wind to blow in
the right direction. In the Mediterranean, the Carthaginians had taken advantage of the fact that the
wind blows six months one way and then six months the other, to make their voyages in the proper
season. The old sails were, of course, strips of square canvas. Then the Arabs invented a triangular
sail that could be fixed to a movable boom; it could be moved around to catch the wind so the ship