The post-Caesarean Renaissance was clearly not limited to Arabia.  Everywhere Caesar once imposed slavery, now flourished in the light.  One wave after another of innovation and invention resulted.  Why Europe’s renaissance was delayed by nearly five hundred years, scholars may never know, but better late than never, as the saying goes.

 

If and when the truth is told about the Renaissance in Europe, scholars will agree the Renaissance began, almost exclusively, among Europe’s monastic orders.  Even historians agree that, by at least 1250 AD, the “early renaissance” in Europe was well underway.  Personally, I believe the distinction between the early and later renaissance periods are found in academic revisionism, an occupational hazard of a discipline which is constantly adjusting its previous errors.

 

The more scholars studied authoritative sources, such as municipal records and monastic archives of the Middle Ages, the clearer it became that many, if not most of the academic initiatives characterizing the renaissance proper, where in evidence early in the eleventh century AD.

 

What actually occurred was a prolonged period of academic growth and innovation between the reign of Charlemagne and the thirteenth century.  Progress, as the Middle Ages approached, was almost exclusive to ecclesiastical communities and institutions.

 

The renaissance, as I have come to understand it in the history books, is that period where scholarship and innovation at long last overflowed the boundaries of the church.  From the perspective of the monks and nuns responsible for laying the foundation of classical culture in Europe, that was to be expected.  The Lord, after all, filled the Church’s cup, and it flowed over.

 

The capacity, indeed the very facility for the laity to take up of the torch of progress and extend the blessings of the Church are to be found in the libraries amassed by the Church between 940 AD and 1250 AD.  For this reason, it was good that Galileo Galilei was not born a century earlier.  Galileo in any age would have been a brilliant thinker, but, in the absence of the intellectual resources available to thirteenth century Europe, it is unlikely that Galileo’s thoughts could have ranged as far as they did two centuries later.

 

Ibn Sahl’s intellectual blessing became Galileo’s fascination.

 

Mind you, if you paid attention in school you likely already know that Galileo Galilei was the scholar attributed with discovering that the earth was a sphere not flat.  If you did, you will be disappointed to know that is a terrific lie.

 

Allow me to venture a guess.  Everyone who was instructed Galileo Galilei discovered the planet was a sphere was educated in public school.  Correct?  I thought so.

 

Forgive me for bursting the bubble you have been conditioned to live within, but you were educated by the lowest bidder.

 

I will not even attempt to challenge the veracity of what passes as primary school curriculum.  I know how attached people are to their beliefs, regardless of how wrong they are. 

 

Gratefully, I will not even have to argue at all.

 

As the globe depicted on the left establishes for all who care to listen, it is Martin Behaim of Deutschland who deserves the credit for this discovery.

 

Behaim’s “earth apple”, as he called it, was made sometime between 1490 and 1492.  Behaim himself was born in 1459 and died in 1507, meaning he and Galileo obviously never met. 

 

But even Behaim will agree that his “earth apple” was derivative of ideas circulating widely about the shape of our planet.  Of course, a physical globe is one matter, but anecdotal evidence of an earlier example from Greece dashes even Behaim’s claim on the rocks.

 

According to Strabo, a man named Crates of ancient Greece first depicted the earth as a globe around the year 150 BC, but there is no physical evidence the globe ever existed.  To academics living and working in the post-War world, the absence of evidence is grounds for outright dismissal of the claim.  I insist that is a foolish tact to take, since anecdotal evidence of a concepts, like spherical planets or a system for measuring latitude and longitude are, after all, evidence adequate to a purpose.

 

That purpose is not to establish, beyond all argument, who was first to suggest planets were spheres, but to determine when the concept of a spherical planet was first broached in academic circles.

 

Clearly the concept existed, if not in Rome, then in Greece nearly 1,714 years before Galileo Galilei was born.

 

Galileo Galilei’s contribution to the sciences is not found in the proposal that planets are spherical.  Like Einstein centuries later, Galileo Galilei’s contribution to the sciences is found in his proving the planet was a sphere.   And Galileo Galilei proved the ideas of others with Ibn Sahl’s telescope.

 

But even Galileo’s proof was not the source of the controversy which surrounded the man.  If Galileo Galilei sinned, it was in proving another suggestion entirely.  Galileo proved what Copernicus proposed, a heliocentric model of the cosmos, that which explicitly contradicted the consensus which accepted a terra-centric model of the cosmos.

 

Mind you, Galileo did not suggest the hypothesis which contradicted the consensus held by the Church.  Galileo just proved it.  Suggesting the Church was wrong was altogether different from proving the Church was wrong.  But I remain convinced that even this was not what nearly brought Galileo Galilei to the gallows.

 

Galileo Galilei was brought down by his hubris.  Galileo Galilei began naming newly observed stars after his patrons, principally the powerful Medici Family of Vienna.  The Medici Stars, as Galileo Galilei named them, were actually the moons of Jupiter, but that was enough to cross a red line among the clergy destined to judge Galileo Galilei at his inquest.

 

To the keepers of the established order of the day, it very much appeared Galileo Galilei was assuming near god-like authority in ascribing to Caesar what clearly belonged to God.  In the process, Galileo Galilei also appeared to be re-writing the Holy Bible, for it was on biblical interpretations that Church consensus rested.

 

I realize, I just went along way to undermine your confidence in the public education system, but I thought you’d want to know.  Indeed, you must know, if you are ever to understand how Europe was led, inextricably to two World Wars by pseudo-science.

 

Galileo Galilei was not practicing pseudo-science, but his contribution to the sciences was proving unoriginal thoughts on geometry.

 

Galileo proved that planets looked like spheres.  In renaissance Italy, that was a risk to life and limb.  Galileo Galilei was, ultimately, sentenced to house arrest for a non-crime.  Why and how a just society could imprison a man in his own home just for telling the truth still perplexes me.

 

I believe it is best to address an occupational hazard to all scholars: Accredited Academia.  Accredited Academia, whether it is in Galileo’s day or ours, exhibits a tendency to turn on anyone who challenges the accepted paradigm.

 

I am, correctly concerned about accredited academia’s reception of my own contribution to the sciences.  The remainder of the following essays will document this occupational hazard.  It manifests itself in particularly acute forms every time there is a revolution in information technology.  In the light of new information, old paradigms fall.  And there is more than one ego attached to every paradigm which has ever existed.

 

I pray my fellow believers keep me in their prayers because the ride is about to get rough.

 

Follow me now to see what a Dutchman named Van Leeuwenhoek did with Ibn Sahl’s telescope!  Next