The Renaissance - The Age of Exploration - The Scientific Revolution

The urge for trade profits encourages Europeans to improve navigation and shipbuilding techniques as a way of cutting out the Islamic middlemen (for example the rudder and lateen sail). Prince Henry of Portugal begins to explore the coast of Africa from 1415, though superstitious belief is still common - for example, it is accepted that if you sail too far south it becomes so hot that the sea boils.

In 1453 the Byzantine Empire falls to the Turks and its scholars escape westwards with their collections of classical knowledge. This encourages the revival of scholarship, study and scientific method that today we call the Renaissance, or "rebirth". Though this traditional view of the process may not be strictly accurate it is fair to say that scholarship and knowledge increase in Italy during the 15th century as a new spirit of inquiry is born.

By 1550 a Chinese invention - printing - coupled with the old Roman alphabet used by western Christians - and with Islamic number notation adopted - makes the expansion and dissemination of knowledge possible.

A key date in the Renaissance is 1397 when scholars in Florence, led by Manuel Chrysoloras of Constantinople, begin to realise that classical works deal with questions not answered by the Christian church. From their deliberations comes Humanism, the belief that people, not God, decide their own fate. This notion is intellectual dynamite to the established order and within 200 years will shatter forever the intellectual authority of organised religion. Sculpture and art too become more realistic. Once works of art can be eproduced by printing, accurate scientific books like Versalius Fabrica can be produced en masse. Exact standards and measurements will become the norm, setting the basis for modern science. Leonardo Da Vinci becomes the ideal 'Renaissance man' - an all round genius with ideas ahead of his time. His ideas include a helicopter, which will require only technological and engineering advances before it can be realised. But even Leonardo has to be wary of the power of the church. The astronomer Galileo, for example, is sentenced to life imprisonment for heresy in 1633, having said that the Earth moves round the Sun and not the other way round. It will not be until 1992 that the Catholic church will officially admit that Galileo was right! During this period, renaissance astronomers overturn people's idea about their place in the Universe. Humans are not at the centre of God's creation after all. Intellectual certainty has gone for ever.

With cheap printing established religious ideas are questioned in the Reformation that splits western Europe into catholic and protestant. As a breakaway sect the Protestants are much more open to new ideas and foster freer thought, including science. In the 17th century it is in protestant northern Europe that the scientific revolution really begins. The protestant belief that people should read the bible for themselves encourages the growth of literacy, printing and debate. The human form, not the divine, becomes the ideal in the arts and in science. Explorers seek out new lands to discover and exploit. New ideas and products - like the herb tobacco are introduced and developed. When Columbus reaches America in 1492 and Vasco da Gama sails around Africa to India in 1498, the world is for the first time linked. Magellan makes the first round the world voyage between 1519-1521, though only one ship and 17 men return home (without Magellan). American civilisations like the Aztecs and Incas are quickly overwhelmed by European diseases, metals technology, and religious zeal, and many of their scientific ideas will only be rediscovered by archaeologists at the end of the 20th century.

By 1660 the scientific revolution is well under way. In London, King Charles II founds the Royal Society to explain and investigate the natural world. Rene Descartes says, 'I think therefore I am', emphasising reason and analysis rather than church dogma. His ideas pave the way for Newton and subsequent scientists to seek out the 'natural laws' of physics by which all nature is governed, although it must be remembered that all these philosophies still require a 'God' to set the system up in the first place! Medical progress by scientists like Harvey and Versalius, and mathematical advances like Napier's logarithms, give scientists the tools to seek out 'natural order' and to explain the world in terms of practical and/or mathematical proof. This is the birth of science as it will be known at the end of the 20th century. Newton develops his theories of planetary motion by mathematically explaining gravity. Yet, as the Salem witch trials of 1692 prove, there is still a lot of superstition to overcome. By 1700 science and the rationality of the 'Enlightenment' have got the upper and over superstition and religion. Science is now the thinking person's first resort for explanation.

Exploration has become trade and exploitation by 1700 as Europeans rapidly assimilate Asian ideas and technologies and improve on them. It is their superior navigation, shipbuilding and weapons technologies (particularly the metallurgy of cast bronze cannon) that enable them to do this. Science is the key to prosperity and political and economic power. Technology - 'the appliance of science' is becoming indespensible to progress as the world's divided cultures link and interact. In the 20th century the Canadian academic Marshal McCluchan will claim - "Gutenberg made everyone a reader - Xerox everyone a publisher".