From Cave Paintings to the Internet An Annotated Interactive Timeline on the History of Information and Media 1200 to 1300 Timeline

A version of the abacus appears in China. It is called suanpan in Chinese. On each rod this abacus has 2 beads on the upper deck and 5 on the lower deck. Such an abacus is also referred to as a 2/5 abacus. The 2/5 style will survive unchanged until about 1850 at which time the 1/5 (one bead on the top deck and five beads on the bottom deck) abacus will appear.

"In the famous long scroll Along the River During Qing Ming Festival painted by Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145) during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), a 15 column suanpan is clearly seen lying beside an account book and doctor's prescriptions on the counter of an apothecary).

"The similarity of the Roman abacus to the Chinese one suggests that one could have inspired the other, as there is some evidence of a trade relationship between the Roman Empire and China. However, no direct connection can be demonstrated, and the similarity of the abaci may be coincidental, both ultimately arising from counting with five fingers per hand. Where the Roman model and Chinese model (like most modern Japanese) has 4 plus 1 bead per decimal place, the old version of the Chinese suanpan has 5 plus 2, allowing less challenging arithmetic algorithms, and also allowing use with a hexadecimal numeral system. Instead of running on wires as in the Chinese and Japanese models, the beads of Roman model run in grooves, presumably making arithmetic calculations much slower.

"Another possible source of the suanpan is Chinese counting rods, which operated with a decimal system but lacked the concept of a zero as a place holder. The zero was probably introduced to the Chinese in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) when travel in the Indian Ocean and the Middle East would have provided direct contact with India and Islam allowing them to acquire the concept of zero and the decimal point from Indian and Islamic merchants and mathematicians."

Beginning around the year 1200, European monasteries no longer remain the exclusive purchasers of books, and manuscript book production starts moving from the exclusive domain of monastic scriptoria to the secular community. Intellectual life begins to be increasingly centered outside the monasteries at the universities. There scholars, teachers and students, in cooperation with artisans and craftsmen, organize an active manuscript book trade.

"So numerous were the private libraries [in the Muslim world] that one writer has estimated that, as of 1200, there were more books in private hands in the Moslem world than in all libraries, public and private, of western Europe." (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [1999] 81.)

"Not the least mportant in the destruction of Islamic libraries were the depredations of the Christian crusaders from the 11th to the 13th centuries. In Syria, Palestine, and parts of North Africa, the Christians destroyed libraries as enthusiastically as had the barbarians in Italy a few hundred years earlier. When Spain was reconquered from the Arabs, the great Islamic libraries at Seville, Cordoba, and Granada were destroyed or carried away by their retreating owners." (Harris 84).

Leonardo of Pisa, later known by his nickname Fibonacci, writes Liber Abaci or The Book of the Abacus or The Book of Calculation. In this book Fibonacci introduces Arabic numerals to Europe. These Fibonacci had learned while in Africa with his father who wanted him to become a merchant.

"Liber Abaci was not the first Western book to describe Arabic numerals, but by addressing tradesmen rather than academics, it was the book that convinced the public of the superiority of the new system. The first section introduces the Arabic numeral system. The second section presents examples from commerce, such as conversions of currency and measurements, and calculations of profit and interest. The third section discusses a number of mathematical problems. One example, describing the growth of a population of rabbits, was the origin of the Fibonacci sequence for which the author is most famous today. The fourth section derives approximations, both numerical and geometrical, of irrationational numbers such as square roots. The book also includes Euclidean geometric proofs and a study of simultaneous linear equations."

In the Fourth Crusade Norman crusaders sack Constantinople, almost completely destroying the city, and burning the Imperial Library which preserves much of the knowledge of the ancient world.

This has been described as one of the most profitable and disgraceful sacks of a city in history. What the Crusaders do not plunder they burn. It is thought that more destruction is done to the city and its libraries at this time than will occurs in the seige of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. It is also thought that crusaders may have sold some Byzantine manuscripts to Italian buyers.

Ibn Ismail Ibn al-Razzaz Al-Jazari creates the first recorded designs of a progammable automaton and a set of humanoid automata.

Though early foundation documents no longer exist, the University of Cambridge probably grows out of an association of scholars who gather at the ancient Roman trading post of Cambridge. These scholars flee from the University of Oxford to Cambridge after a fight with local townsmen in Oxford.

A group of barons demand a charter of liberties and protection against arbitrary behavior by England's King John. In May the barons take up arms and capture London. "By 10 June both parties met and held negotiations at Runnymede, a meadow by the River Thames. The concessions made by King John were outlined in a document known as the 'Articles of the Barons', to which the King's great seal was attached, and on 19 June the barons renewed their oaths of allegiance to the King. Meanwhile the royal chancery produced a formal royal grant, based on the agreements reached at Runnymede, which became known as Magna Carta (Latin for 'the Great Charter')."

"Four copies of the original Magna Carta grant survive. Two . . . are held at the British Library while the others can be seen in the cathedral archives at Lincoln and Salisbury. . . . According to contemporary chronicles, copies were distributed to bishops, sheriffs and others throughout the land, but the exact number of copies sent out from the royal chancery in 1215 is not known."

"The greatest destruction [of Muslim libraries] resulted from the raids of the Mongols in the 13th century. From the mountains and steppes of central Asia came the hordes of Genghis Kahn, conquering and destroying everything before them. In the first great sweep to the Caspian Sea and northern Persia, the cities of Bokhara, Samarkand, and Merv [and their libraries] were destroyed along with many smaller towns. . .(Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [199] 84-85).

Emperor Frederick II of Germany bans the use of paper for official documents, believing it to be less permanent than parchment or vellum (Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin 5).

The Byzantine capital having moved to Nicaea, Emperor John III reestablishes the Byzantine Imperial Library about this time. From Nicaea the Byzantines begin a compaign to recapture the territory from the Normans.

The first recorded issue of paper money in the Mongol Empire. "From 1260, when Kublai Khan completed the conquest of China and took the title of emperor, the issue of paper money became a settled and permanent feature of the Mongol government's financial policy. . . . Records have been preserved showing year by year the amount of notes issued through Kublai's reign and that of his successors for ninety-seventy years (1260-1356)." (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 107.)

"Paper money was the first form of Chinese printing met with by European travlers, was independently discussed by at least eight pre-Renaissance European writers, and, so far as is known, is the only form of Chinese printing described in European writings of pre-Gutenberg days. Marco Polo's description is the most detailed." (Carter, 109).

Date of earliest evidence of the pecia system of providing "certified texts" of manuscripts in university bookstores. "The system existed in at least eleven medieval universities, but evidence of it in practice in extant MSS has been found only for Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Naples where its high point was roughly from 1250-1350.

"Generally speaking, the purpose of the system was to provide reliable copies of the works of contemporary scholastic authors in law, theology, philosophy and pastoral aids, and it worked somewhat as follows. A university bookseller (stationarius) would obtain an autograph copy of an author's work, or, if that were hard to read (or if the author were long dead), a fair copy or other reliable exemplar of the work. From this exemplar the stationer made a copy or exemplar of his own on equal quires or pieces (peciae), each one of which was numbered in sequence, so that the stationer, when requested for copies of the text in question, could hire out these pieces in turn for copying to professional writers. . . ." (L. E. Boyle, Peciae, Apopeciae, and a Toronto MS. of the Sententia Libri Ethicorum of Aquinas, in Ganz (ed.) The Role of the Book in Medieval Culture [1986] 71)

"A geographer, Yakut al-Hamawi, who visited Merv [in the Middle East] found no fewer than twelve libraries there available to the public. Ten were endowed libraries and two were in mosques. One had over 12,000 volumes in codex form and another had been inexistence since 494 A.D. Yakut noted that the lending policies of the libraries in Merv were so liberal that he was able to have 200 volumes to work with in his rooms at one time." (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [1999] 79).

King James I of Spain promulgates a "sumptutary law" forbidding certain groups of the population from wearing "estampados" or printed fabrics. This is the earliest documentation that printed textiles exist in Europe. (Carter, Invention of Printing in China, 198).

French King Louis IX (St. Louis), "lieutenant of God on Earth," conducts two crusades. In order to finance his first crusade he orders the expulsion of all Jews engaged in usury and the confiscation of their property, for use in his crusade. However, he does not cancel the debts owed by Christians. One-third of the debts is forgiven, but the other two-thirds is to be remitted to the royal treasury. Louis also orders, at the urging of Pope Gregory IX, the burning in Paris of 24 cartloads or roughly 12,000 manuscript copies of the Talmud and other Jewish books. "Such legislation against the Talmud, not uncommon in the history of Christendom, was due to medieval courts' concerns that its production and circulation might weaken the faith of Christian individuals and threaten the Christian basis of society, the protection of which was the duty of any Christian monarch." (quoted from the Wikipedia article Louis IX).

Pope Innocent IV sends John of Plano Carpini to an embassy to the court of the Grand Khan. "He went by Prague and Kev to Mongolia, where he presented his letter and received his reply. This reply--the original--was discovered by accident in the year 1920 in the archives of the Vatican. It is written in Uigur and Persian and contains in lieu of his signature the seal of the Grand Khan Kouyouk (grandson of Jenghis). This is the first recorded appearance in Europe of an impression from a seal based on those in use in China and impressed with ink upon paper. " (Carter, The Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 159-60).

The Tabula Peutingeriana is an itinerarium or Roman road map, showing the road network of the Roman Empire. It is a unique copy, made by a monk in Colmar, Alsace, in the thirteenth century of a map that was last revised in the fourth or early fifth century.  That, in turn, was a descendent of the map prepared under the direction of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a friend of Augustus. After Agrippa's death the map was engraved on marble and placed in the Porticus Vipsaniae, not far from the Ara Pacis in Rome.

The Tabula Peutingeriana "is a parchment scroll, 0.34 m high and 6.75 m long, assembled from eleven sections, a medieval reproduction of the original scroll. It is a very schematic map: the land masses are distorted, especially in the east-west direction. The map shows many Roman settlements, the roads connecting them, rivers, mountains, forests and seas. The distances between the settlements are also given. Three most important cities of the Roman Empire, Rome, Constantinople and Antioch, are represented with special iconic decoration. Besides the totality of the Empire, the map shows the Near East, India and the Ganges, Sri Lanka (Insula Taprobane), even an indication of China. In the west, the absence of the Iberian Peninsula indicates that a twelfth original section has been lost in the surviving copy.

"The table appears to be based on "itineraries", or lists of destinations along Roman roads, as the distances between points along the routes are indicated. Travellers would not have possessed anything so sophisticated as a map, but they needed to know what lay ahead of them on the road, and how far. The Peutinger table represents these roads as a series of roughly parallel lines along which destinations have been marked in order of travel. The shape of the parchment pages accounts for the conventional rectangular layout. However, a rough similarity to the coordinates of Ptolemy's earth-mapping gives some writers a hope that some terrestrial representation was intended by the unknown compilers.

"The stages and cities are represented by hundreds of functional place symbols, used with discrimination from the simplest icon of a building with two towers to the elaborate individualized "portraits" of the three great cities. Annalina and Mario Levi, the Tabulas editors, conclude that the semi-schematic semi-pictorial symbols reproduce Roman cartographic conventions of the itineraria picta described by Vegetius, of which this is the sole testimony."

The map is named after Konrad Peutinger, a German humanist and antiquarian, who inherited it from Konrad Birkel or Celtes, who claimed to have "found" it somewhere in a library in 1494.  

"The map was copied for Ortelius and published shortly after his death in 1598. A partial first edition was printed at Antwerp in 1591 (Fragmenta tabulæ antiquæ) by Johannes Moretus. Moretus would print the full Tabula in December 1598, also at Antwerp."

"The Peutinger family kept the map until 1714, when it was sold. It bounced between royal and elite families until it was purchased by Prince Eugene of Savoy for 100 ducats; upon his death in 1737 it was purchased for the Habsburg Imperial Court Library (Hofbibliothek) in Vienna." 

It is preserved at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna.

Henry de Bracton (or Bretton or Bratton) writes De legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (On the Laws and Customs of England).  "The outstanding common-law treatise of the Middle Ages, it is remarkable for its use of actual court decisons for illustrative purposes. It appears to have been written by a number of authors in the 1250's, with the last work being done on it by Henry de Bracton when he was a judge of the King's Bench."

Bracton's original manuscript did not survive. "There are approximately 49 surviving manuscripts of Bracton, many fragmentary or abridged. All date from the c14 or very late c13, and none is closer than third generation from the original." (quotations from Harvard Law School Library Bracton Online).

Bracton's De Legibus will be first published as a printed book by Richard Tottel, London, 1569.

A paper mill is established at Genoa, Italy. Paper is cheaper to manufacture than vellum.

Robert de Sorbon, a chaplain and confessor to King Louis IX, founds the Collège de Sorbonne, or University of Paris.Starting with 20 theology students, the college quickly builds a prodigious reputation as a center for learning. By the end of the thirteenth century there are as many as twenty thousand foreign students resident in Paris, making Paris the capital of knowledge of the Western world.

Mongols under the command of Halagu Khan sack Baghdad. "In one week, libraries and their treasures that had been accumulated over hundreds of years were burned or otherwise destroyed. So many books were thrown into the Tigris River, according to one writer, that they formed a bridge that they would support a man on horseback." (Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World 4th ed [1999] 85).

Byzantines re-establish their capital in Constantinople and Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos reestablishes the Imperial Library in a wing of the palace.

The father and uncle of Marco Polo, are among the first Westerners to travel the Silk Road to China. In 1266 the Polos reach the seat of the Grand Khan in the Mongol capital Khanbaliq, now known as Beijing. Marco Polo, who will write the famous account of their travels, does not accompany them on this expedition.

"In his book, Il Milione, Marco explains how Kubilai officially received the Polos and sent them back — with a Mongol named Koeketei as an ambassador to the Pope.. They brought with them a letter from the Khan requesting educated people to come and teach Christianity and Western customs to his people, and the paiza, a golden tablet a foot long and three inches wide, authorizing the holder to require and obtain lodging, horses and food throughout the Great Khan's dominion. Koeketei left in the middle of the journey, leaving the Polos to travel alone to Ayas in the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia. From that port city, they sailed to Saint Jean d'Acre, capital of the Kingdom of Jerusalem."

"The long sede vacante — between the death of Pope Clement IV, in 1268, , and the election of Pope Gregory X, in 1271— prevented the Polos from fulfilling Kublai’s request. As suggested by Theobald Visconti, papal legate for the realm of Egypt, in Acres for the Ninth Crusade, the two brothers returned to Venice in 1269 or 1270, waiting for the nomination of the new Pope."

Pierre de Maricourt (Petrus Peregrinus) an engineer in a French army besieging Lucera in southern Italy, is in charge of fortifying the camp, laying mines and constructing machines to hurl stones and fireballs into the besieged city.  In his spare time he attempts to solve the problem of perpetual motion.  He devises a diagram to show how a wheel might be driven round forever by the power of magnetic attraction.  Excited by his discovery, he writes a treatise in the form of a letter on the properties of the lodestone which he had discovered during his experiments.  This letter, which circulates in manuscript, will be given the title Epistola de Magnete. In it Peregrinus is the first to assign a position to the poles of a lodestone.  He proves that unlike poles attract, while like poles repel; establishes by experiments that every fragment of a lodestone, however small, is a complete magnet, and determined the position of an object by its magnetic bearing . . ."- He describes how a compass is constructed. The Epistola is considered the earliest known European work of experimental science, and the foundation of the study of electricity and magnetism. It will be first printed in 1558.

"Prior to the introduction of the compass, wayfinding at sea was primarily done via celestial navigation, supplemented in some places by the use of soundings. Difficulties arose where the sea was too deep for soundings and conditions were continually overcast or foggy. Thus the compass was not of the same utility everywhere. For example, the Arabs could generally rely on clear skies in navigating the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean (as well as the predictable nature of the monsoons). This may explain in part their relatively late adoption of the compass. Mariners in the relatively shallow Baltic made extensive use of soundings.

In the Mediterranean, however, the practice from ancient times had been to curtail sea travel between October and April, due in part to the lack of dependable clear skies during the Mediterranean winter (and much of the sea is too deep for soundings). With improvements indead reckoning methods, and the development of better charts, this changed during the second half of the 13th century. By around 1290 the sailing season could start in late January or February, and end in December. The additional few months were of considerable economic importance; it enabled Venetian convoys, for instance, to make two round trips a year to the eastern Mediterranean, instead of one."

Maffeo and Niccolò Polo set out on a second journey carrying the Pope's response to Kublai Khan, in 1271. This time Niccolò takes his son Marco. When Marco Polo arrives at Kublai Khan's court he becomes a favourite of the khan and is employed in China for 17 years.

Gerard d' Abbeville, a Parisian master and neighbor of Robert de Sorbon, bequeathes nearly 300 volumes of manuscripts to the Library of the Sorbonne. This gift becomes the core of the Sorbonne Library. Of the roughly 300 volumes, 118 remain preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale. The bequest incorporates the library of Richard de Fournival, author of Biblionomia. (Ullman, The Library of the Sorbonne in the Fourteenth Century [1953] 37).

The oldest surviving literary document in Yiddish, the language originated by the Askenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, dates from this year. It is a blessing in a Hebrew prayer book.

The English law, "De Scandalis Magnatum" prohibits the distribution of "any false News or Tales, whereby discord, or occasion of discord or slander may grow between the King and his People, or the Great Men of the Realm." [3 Edw. 1, ch. 34 (1275)]. Although this might at first sound like a reasonable way of protecting officials from slander, in fact, the application of "De Scandalis" established the principle that even those who made negative comments about the King or government could be called before a select group of officials without need for any warrant or other legal proceeding even if the comments were truthful. Known as the Star Chamber because of the decor of the room in which they held their proceedings, this tribunal had the power to confer any punishment they pleased for the crime of 'endangering the public peace' by criticizing a monarch or other official."

Wang Zhen, author of the Nong Shu, develops moveable type carved from wood in China. It is more durable than clay type, but worn piece can only be replaced by carving new ones.

Date of the earliest surviving statute concerning the regulation of the book trade in Paris by the University. "Lbraires represented a serious potential danger to the university, because they controlled the supply fo books without which the university would be crippled. Therefore, the university's regulations of libraires concentrated first and foremost on the selling of 'used' university texts, attempting by a variety of means to ensure that the libraire did not swindle either the seller or the buyer, and that he took only a modest commission. The libraires had to guarantee their compliance by posting a bond. . .

"In addition to regulating the sale of existing books, the university also regulated the rental of examplars from which students and masters could copy, or hire someone to copy, new manuscripts of their own. In this the university initially must simply have put its stamp of approval on a process already informally in operation. To judge from the wording of surviving regulations through the years, the university evinced concern primarily with rental price and correct texts. In 1323 the stationers were forbidden to withdraw an examplar from circulation with first informing the university. . . " (Richard A. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers.Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris 1200-1500 [2000] 76-77.)

Accepted as the author’s autograph, these three volumes, which are somewhat incomplete, comprise the thirty-third, forty-second, and forty-third volumes of the Comprehensive Book on the Art of Medicine by Ibn al-Nafis who died in Cairo in 1288. It is thought that Ibn-Nafis may completed this work in as many as 300 manuscript volumes that he may have published only 80 volumes in manuscript, which would have circulated in scribal copies. Of the very extensive writings that Ibn-Nafis is understood to have written, these volumes at Stanford's Lane Medical Library are the only autograph manuscripts by Ibn-al-Nafis which have been preserved, and one of a very small number of autograph manuscripts by any famous medieval physician or scientist that survived.

The first volume of these manuscripts contains a study of plants, minerals, and animals from the medical point of view. These are arranged alphabetically Vol. 2 continues the study and covers the letters tā, thā, and jīm. It consists of two sections: Vol. 3 is a study of the use of the hand and surgical instruments for medical purposes.

Al-Nafis, an Egyptian physician of the 13^th century, was credited with various innovations, most notably the discovery of the lesser circulation, three centuries before Servetus (1553) and Columbo (1559).

Provenance: Aliyah, a Jewish physician of Damascus, Darwish Abbas (seal bearing date corresponding to CE 1743/4) Ernest Seidel (1852-1922), acquired in Lane Library’s purchase of the Seidel library in 1921.

The Library of the Sorbonne, the largest library in Europe, includes 1017 books at this time. This information comes from a catalogue of the library written in 1338 which incorporates a catalogue of the library written in 1290.

John of Monte Corvino, the first missionary sent by the Pope to China, arrives in Cambaluc soon after Marco Polo leaves for Europe. John remains at Cambaluc, as head of the mission until his death in 1328. This mission becomes the base for other Catholic missionary work in China. "These missionaries, spending their lives in China, learning the language and mingling with the people, must have come in contact with printed literature at every turn. John of Monte Corvino in the first dozen years of his work, even before reinforcements had arrived, had already translated the New Testament and Psalter, and prepared pictures and text for the ignorant at just the time when in China it was the natural thing to have every important literary work printed. There is no question that the Chinese who were associated in the work of translation would have suggested that the translation and the pictures should be brought before the public in what to them was the usual and natural way. Whether the missionaries agreed and thus became the first European patrons of the art of printing, we have no means of knowing. That religious image prints, prepared, like the pictures of John of Monte Corvino, 'for the ignorant,' began to appear in Europe some time within the half century after these early missionaries laid down their work, may not be altogether a coincidence." (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 161-62.)

"Tabriz is the only place in the Islamic world where there is a clear record of early block printing. In the year 1294 at this Mongol capital of Persia there was an issue of paper money with text in Chinese and Arabic.. . .The notes. . .were direct copies of Kublai's, even the Chinese character being imitated as part of the device upon them. . .There was an Arabic inscription each note to the effect that the notes were issued in the year 693 of the Moslem era (A.D. 1294), that all who issued false notes should be summarily punished, and that 'when these auspicious notes were put in circulation, poverty would vanish, provisions become cheap, and rich and poor be equal.' The prophecy was not fulfilled. After the constrained use of the new ch-ao for two or three days, Tabriz was in an uproar; the markets were closed; Izzudin, the minister who had proposed the issue, became the object of intense hatred and according to some accounts was murdered; and the whole project had to be abandoned.

"This dramatic issue of a printing project a century and a half before Gutenberg in a great comsopolitan community near the confines of Europe could have not gone unobserved in the commercial republics of Italy." (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 170-71).

Marco Polo and his family return from China and settle in Venice "where they became a sensation and attracted crowds of listeners who had difficulties in believing their reports of distant China. According to a late tradition, since they did not believe him, Marco Polo invited them all to dinner one night during which the Polos dressed in the simple clothes of a peasant in China. Shortly before the crowds ate, the Polos opened their pockets to reveal hundreds of rubies and other jewels which they had received in Asia. Though they were much impressed, the people of Venice still doubted the Polos."

Marco Polo supposedly dictates a book to a romance writer, Rustichello da Pisa, while in prison in Genoa during this time. His book is of significance on this timeline particularly because it contains the earliest detailed account of Chinese printed paper money that is widely available in Europe. (Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed [1955] 109-11 with complete text).

"His book, Il Milione (the title comes from either 'The Million', then considered a gigantic number, or from Polo's family nickname Emilione), was written in the Old French and entitled Le divisament dou monde ("The description of the world"). The book was soon translated into many European languages and is known in English as The Travels of Marco Polo. The original is lost, and we have several often-conflicting versions of the translations. The book became an instant success — quite an achievement in a time when printing was not known in Europe."

In spite of its wide fame, recent scholars question whether Marco Polo actually went to China.

The European table abacus or reckoning table has become standardized to some extent by this time. The pebbles previously used as counters have been replaced by specially minted coin-like objects that are cast, thrown, or pushed on the abacus table. They are called jetons from jeter (to throw) in France, and werpgeld for “thrown money” in Holland.