Medieval Robots

Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art

E. R. Truitt

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780812291407
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa medievale

A thousand years before Isaac Asimov set down his Three Laws of Robotics, real and imagined automata appeared in European courts, liturgies, and literary texts. Medieval robots took such forms as talking statues, mechanical animals, and silent metal guardians; some served to entertain or instruct while others performed disciplinary or surveillance functions. Variously ascribed to artisanal genius, inexplicable cosmic forces, or demonic powers, these marvelous fabrications raised fundamental questions about knowledge, nature, and divine purpose in the Middle Ages. Medieval Robots recovers the forgotten history of fantastical, aspirational, and terrifying machines that captivated Europe in imagination and reality between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. E. R. Truitt traces the different forms of self-moving or self-sustaining manufactured objects from their earliest appearances in the Latin West through centuries of mechanical and literary invention. Chronicled in romances and song as well as histories and encyclopedias, medieval automata were powerful cultural objects that probed the limits of natural philosophy, illuminated and challenged definitions of life and death, and epitomized the transformative and threatening potential of foreign knowledge and culture. This original and wide-ranging study reveals the convergence of science, technology, and imagination in medieval culture and demonstrates the striking similarities between medieval and modern robotic and cybernetic visions.

CHAPTER 1

Rare Devices: Geography and Technology

In the mid-twelfth-century chanson de geste, Le Voyage de Charlemagne, Charlemagne and his barons travel to Constantinople, where they encounter King Hugo and the fantastic marvels at his court. These include a rotating palace and two musical automata, made of copper.¹ The interior of the palace is blue and is decorated with paintings of birds, beasts, serpents, and “every kind of creature.”² In the center of the palace a massive silver pillar forms the axis around which the entire structure revolves, “like a chariot wheel.”³ Philosophers and wise men fluent in the science of the stars had erected the palace; they used their knowledge and skill to make the palace mimic the circular motion of the celestial spheres. Two copper children grace the apex of the palace roof; each one holds an ivory horn to its mouth.⁴ These automata are so expressive “that you would have believed they were actually alive.”⁵ The west wind makes the palace turn like the shaft of a mill, and the statues “blew their horns and smiled at one another. You would have sworn they were alive. One blew loud, the other clear. [The music] is so lovely to hear that the listener would imagine himself in paradise, where the angels sing sweetly and gently.”⁶

The edifice is a monumental automaton that resembles the earth and the heavens, while the musical statues represent the microcosm. Hugo the Strong, the Byzantine emperor, and the learned men of his court have made these marvels using “cumpas and lofty secrets.”⁷ Cumpas is the branch of astral science that enables accurate predictions of the lunar cycle and eclipses, as well as the establishment of the liturgical calendar.⁸ The wind causes the palace to revolve and also brings a violent storm that rages outside the palace walls, “frightening and overpowering.”⁹ Charles and his barons are wholly unfamiliar with this kind of technology; they are taken by surprise and lose their footing once the palace begins to turn. “[Charles] sits down on the marble floor, unable to stand. The Franks are thrown to the ground.”¹⁰ Their total unfamiliarity with anything like the emperor’s palace reflects their ignorance of technological marvels and the cumpas responsible for their creation. The spinning palace reimagines space in a way that confuses and disorients Charlemagne and his barons. In this example, learned knowledge and specific geography combine to produce moving, mimetic objects that are disconcertingly foreign to the Latin Christians.

After a lavish banquet at Hugo’s expense, the Franks retire to their quarters where, drunk and boisterous, they exchange a series of outrageous boasts about their abilities.¹¹ One after another, the knights make a series of absurd, outlandish, and hyperbolic vows: to blow down Hugo’s palace, steal his wealth, violate his daughter over a hundred times in one night, and make a nearby river flood its banks.¹² A spy from Hugo’s court overhears these vows and reports them to Hugo, who confronts Charlemagne and swears that if Charlemagne and his knights cannot fulfill their vows then Hugo will have them beheaded. Charlemagne, desperate, prays to the relics he received earlier from the Patriarch of Jerusalem and has carried with him to Constantinople. Through the relics, God miraculously saves the Franks: he fulfills Bernard’s boast to cause a nearby river to flood. “It came into the city and flooded the cellars and soaked King Hugo’s people, and forced the king to run on foot to the tallest tower [of his castle, for refuge].”¹³ Hugo, trapped in his tower, agrees to become Charles’s vassal, and God reverses the flood.¹⁴ Both emperors use spatial and geographic dislocation to gain the upper hand. Hugo makes the ground move by using particular, abstruse knowledge, while Charlemagne, thanks to God, changes the landscape.

The author of Le Voyage de Charlemagne based his Byzantine marvels on earlier descriptions from travel accounts of extraordinary technology at the Byzantine court; however, this unfamiliar technology, though impressive, is overmatched in the chanson by Latin Christian piety. In a number of chansons de geste from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Latin Christians triumph—through faith and divine favor—over their enemies’ superiority in natural philosophy and advanced technology. Chansons de geste are vernacular, literary accounts of past deeds or heroes. In terms of setting and story, chansons de geste look backward in time and beyond the borders of Latin Christendom, and are similar in subject matter to the epics that predate them. But the past also looked like the present in chansons, as authors changed aspects of history to reflect or comment on contemporary (late eleventh- to thirteenth-century) mores and anxieties.

The strange and wonderful self-moving objects from Baghdad, Constantinople, and Karakorum described and appropriated by writers from the Latin West embody contemporary concerns about foreign knowledge and its uses. Arabic and Greek courts were known for their automata, which employed a combination of hydraulic, pneumatic, and mechanical technology. Writers in the Latin Christian West, trying to explain or understand these exotic and unfamiliar objects, often did so by invoking extremely complex theories of natural philosophy (the branch of inquiry directed toward all God’s physical creations, including the cosmos) or extremely simple examples of agricultural technology. Until the fifteenth century, automata in the Western imagination most often come from foreign lands or the strange geography of the past. Natural philosophy in this period explained how geographic location could confer special qualities on natural substances. Furthermore, different kinds of knowledge were available outside of Latin Christendom. What could be known and what could be observed were highly dependent on place.

In this chapter I explore the connection between geography, both real and imagined, and automata. Descriptions in Latin and vernacular texts of historical automata (automata that likely existed, but are not extant) from the eighth to the thirteenth century reveal the extent to which automata were known in the Latin West. Authors of autoptic accounts highlight the mechanical nature of automata in the Byzantine Empire and the Islamicate world, while also expressing wonder about how the automata function. This knowledge and these objects were located outside of Latin Christendom, in foreign places that were rich in knowledge and natural substances unavailable to Latins. Drawing on a textual tradition that encompassed ancient natural philosophy, early Christian philosophy and theology, itineraria, and encyclopedic knowledge, twelfth- and thirteenth-century natural philosophy held that greater natural variation occurred at the distant edges of the earth. This was in part because Nature expressed her many abilities more freely at the margins, and in part because the orientation of the planets toward faraway lands conferred potencies on natural objects, like gemstones, found in those places.¹⁵

The appearance of the Mongols in the Balkans in the mid-thirteenth century disrupted the established narrative of where automata came from and how they worked. Given the Mongols’ status as real and present conquerors and threats, missionary and mercenary reports of moving statues, musical fountains, and mechanical birds came to emphasize both the manufactured element of these creations and an aspect of deceit and cunning. The author of Mandeville’s Travels, in the mid-fourteenth century, based parts of his armchair itineraria on reports from Franciscan missionaries like Odoric of Pordenone and William of Rubruck.

Whatever their cause, wherever they were located, and in whatever kind of texts they appear, the examples to come have in common their status as marvels. Authors of chronicles and chansons, as well as soldiers, diplomats, pilgrims, and merchants use words like merveille, mirabilia, and mirifice to describe these objects. These words, and other related ones, connote objects that elicit wonder, an emotional response to objects or phenomena that ranges from awe to pleasure to terror.¹⁶ Wonder is highly contingent on perspective, and is often evoked by the uncommon and the unfamiliar. The most robust considerations of wonder from medieval writers occur outside literature, in natural philosophy and theology.¹⁷ Aristotle claimed wonder as the spark that lights the fire of philosophy. “It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.”¹⁸ Gervase of Tilbury, the early thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman writer, asserts in his didactic compendium of wonders, Otia imperialia (ca. 1211), that marvels are natural objects that defy explanation or categorization. “We embrace those things we perceive to be strange; first because of the variation in the course of nature, at which we marvel; then because of our ignorance of the cause [of that wonder], the reason for which is impenetrable to us.”¹⁹ Because marvels are natural objects that invite curiosity regarding their causes, natural philosophy is the proper discipline for their investigation. Marvels, including automata, appear routinely in narrative sources—chansons de geste, romance, chronicle, and travelogue—and the wonder they occasion often motivates inquiry into their causes.²⁰ Those causes were not always or completely understood as mechanical; as the examples to come demonstrate, automata were strongly correlated to foreign (or ancient) knowledge and powerful natural objects, such as gemstones, that drew their power from a specific geography. The marvelous status of automata in the Latin West in this period was due in part to their comparative rarity, as well as to the uncommon knowledge and substances used to create them.

Marvelous Geography

Medieval geographic tradition held that more extreme natural variation (in people, animals, plants, and environments) was found at the edges of the world. To the ancient Greeks, who came into contact with Asia and Africa through political conflict, India, Persia, and parts of Africa were places rich with the strange, the wonderful, the unknown, and the dangerous. Furthermore, Greeks believed that people, plants, and animals varied more widely in extreme climates than in the temperate zone (e.g., Greece).²¹ This belief was repeated in the medieval period, and was combined with a flourishing body of literature that recounted the many natural wonders of India, Ethiopia, and central Asia. Therefore, that the rulers of foreign lands had access to the kind of esoteric knowledge required to build automata was seen by Latin Christians in part as a function of geographic location, as those lands had long been seen as rich in material wealth and natural diversity.

The two main medieval cartographic traditions were the T-O map (also called the mappamundi) and the climate zone map (also called the Macrobian map). T-O maps, so-called because the O of the world is inscribed with the T of the known Eurasian bodies of water, are oriented with east at the top (rather than north) and Jerusalem at the center. They depict the physical world and sacred history “from alpha to omega.”²² The three known continents, Asia, Africa, and Europe, echo the perfect number of the Trinity, and some maps vividly illustrate the idea “that the entire ecumene is, in a spiritual sense, contained within the body of Christ,” by placing the head, feet, and hands of Jesus around the perimeter of the O.²³ The mappaemundi depict a world that is simultaneously centrifugal and centripetal. The three land masses are the inheritances of the three sons of Noah after the Flood, and the descendants of each populate the continents.²⁴ The postdiluvian diaspora radiates out from Jerusalem, the center. Yet, in a spiritual context, the inhabitants of this tripartite world will eventually to return to the center, Jerusalem, which is the site of the Crucifixion and will be the setting of the Last Judgment.

In contrast, the Macrobian tradition, based on the fifth-century scientific treatise The Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, prioritizes natural philosophy over theology. According to Macrobian maps, the world comprises five climatic zones: frigid and uninhabitable at the polar extremes, then two temperate zones in the northern and southern hemispheres, divided by a central torrid zone that is in turn bisected by the ocean. William of Conches, the Anglo-Norman natural philosopher of the first half of the twelfth century, gave a Macrobian account of terrestrial geography in his natural philosophical treatise, De philosophia mundi.²⁵ The text covers physics, astral science, geography, meteorology, and medicine. In an early copy from France in the second half of the twelf...