Delanceyplace.com 08/08/06-Knowledge Moves North

In today's excerpt, the movement of business wealth, and its necessary predecessor, knowledge, from southern Europe to northern Europe from the 16th century forward. Spain entered this period as the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world due to its gold from the New World. Italy, of course, had the powerful legacy of the Renaissance and the brilliance of geniuses from Brunelleschi to Galileo, but the pre-eminence of both nations rapidly dissipated:

"Not only money moved, but knowledge as well, and it was knowledge, specifically scientific knowledge, that dictated economic possibilities. In the centuries before the Reformation, southern Europe was a center of learning and intellectual inquiry: Spain and Portugal, because they were on the frontier of Christian and Islamic civilization, and had the benefit of Jewish intermediaries; and Italy, which had its own contacts. Spain and Portugal lost out early, because religious passion and military crusade drove away the outsiders (Jews and then the conversos, those forcibly converted) and discouraged the pursuit of the strange and potentially heretical; but Italy continued to produce some of Europe's leading mathematicians and scientists...

"The Protestant Reformation, however, changed the rules. It gave a big boost to literacy, spawned dissents and heresies, and promoted the skepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of scientific endeavor. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure...

"A rain of interdictions followed (from 1521 on), not only of publishing but of reading heresy, in any language. The Spanish authorities, both lay and clerical, viewed Lutherans (all Protestants were then seen as Lutherans), not as dissenters but as non- Christians, like Jews and Muslims enemies of the faith...in 1558 the death penalty was introduced for importing foreign books without permission and for unlicensed printing. Universities were reduced to centers of indoctrination...scientific works were banned because their authors were Protestant...

"Nor were Spaniards allowed to study abroad, lest they ingest subversive doctrine. In 1559, the crown forbade attendance at foreign universities except for such safe centers as Rome, Bologna and Naples. The effect was drastic. Spanish students had long gone to the University of Montpellier for medical training; they just about stopped going--248 students from 1510 to 1559; 12 from 1560 to 1599...

...this reactionary, anti-Protestant backlash, more than Protestantism itself, sealed the fate of Europe for the next 300 years."

Galileo, of course, was humiliated and banished to a stultifying house arrest in 1633, and so the scientifically curious then found it safer to move to the tolerant surroundings of Holland and elsewhere.

David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Norton, 1998, pp. 179-181