What Did Medieval People Think Space Was?
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- Опубликовано: 26 июл 2024
- From the beginnings of civilization, humans have always looked up to the heavens in wonder. Sightings of stars and planets, comets and eclipses are awe inspiring and help us to try and understand our place in the cosmos. Technological advances made just over the last few decades with larger and more powerful equipment mean that we can now probe much deeper into the unknown universe of countless galaxies, planets and stars, to understand its origin and growth. We know about pulsars, quasars, dark matter and black holes that all exist together within the vast infinity of space.
But for the Medievals, astronomy was also God’s creation and something that influenced their physical, spiritual and mental well-being. Welcome to Medieval Madness.
0:00 Introduction
1:04 The Science of God
2:18 Astrolabes and Quadrants
6:03 Beliefs
7:53 Astrometeorology
9:33 Illness
🎶🎶 Music by CO.AG: / @co.agmusic
Additional music from Storyblocks.
Narrated by James Wade
Written by Lisa E Rawcliffe
Edited by James Wade
Thank you for watching.
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Copyright © 2022 Top5s All rights reserved. In this video, we've compiled information from a variety of sources, including documentaries, books, and websites, all with the aim of providing an engaging viewing experience. While we strive to ensure accuracy, we acknowledge that there may be variations in the authenticity of the content. We encourage viewers to delve deeper and conduct their own research to corroborate the information presented.
If you're interested in learning more about space and our universe, you can check out our other channel AccessAstronomy to satisfy all of your intergalactic planetary needs! www.youtube.com/@AccessAstronomy
Well if they where fundamentalist christians they would know just like the ones today because what it was as the bible says! The world is 6000 years old, flat with a dome over it and light attached by god for navigation! 🤦♂🤣
Bible still says the clouds are heaven!
We know Earth is flat, shill. What will your ✡️ masters do with you once they realized they’ve failed again?
3:03
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatise
Also: when did we change the pronunciation of Geoffrey to 'Joffrey'?
Medieval diagrams are interesting, because while they often did reflect popular opinion, they were never designed to reflect people's perception of the physical world. Even in medieval times there were still a lot of people who knew that the world was round and that Jerusalem was not the physical center of the world. When we see maps of the world from that time period they are usually meant to represent abstract ideas and religious beliefs rather than accurately illustrate the physical world. Misrepresentations like these were oftentimes deliberate. Accuracy did not become important until the late 1400s when European powers began searching for a sea route to China and India to avoid having to pay tariffs for goods transported along the Silk Road. This is when maps and other diagrams became less abstract and more realistic.
This is such a good take I'm surprised it's not pinned
Brilliant take. I don't know how I've never realised nor thought of this before. Well done
Same with heliocentrism we knew about that in Ancient Greek times and we knew it in the medieval era. Learned men knew about it but Christian priests didn’t want yhe public to know.
But the bible still says the world is flat with a dome over it that god attached lights too an dit hides in the clouds! AKA HEAVEN! LOL SCARED O IRON CHARIOTS WHICH DEFEATED IT! LOL
There were some early accurate maps. The first portolan chart we've found was from the 13th century and is accurate enough to be usable to sail the Mediterranean today. People tended to rely less on accurate maps back in the day though and rather used more navigational charts since they're easier to use for accurate navigation since any map detailed enough qould need to be huge or you'd need many maps which could get expensive in the days before mechanized papermaking or the printing press, which is also why even into the early modern period maps could be much more vague than today's maps, more of a "this is kind of what the coastline is shaped like, and the mountains are in this vague location"
Wan-Hu, a wealthy Chinese official, tried to send himself to the moon by gathering every rocket he possibly could - bought almost every bit of gunpowder available in his region. He strapped these rockets to his chair, and had hundreds of his followers there to witness this undertaking, and when it all lit, there was so much there, it ignited as an explosion, and the resulting blast vaporized and dissipated him so completely, that his followers were convinced that he'd made it to the moon.
Thus: the man on the moon.
Is this true?
@@jplonsdale7242 100%
I bet everyone had their mouths open during the explosion.
@@EdwardSnortin edgelord
Tbis is just a legend.
Gotta give them props for what they did with very little tools or previously established knowledge. They weren't stupid as so many believed, just had a much harder go at learning.
they had a smaller archive of mistakes already made, so they had many more to make.
and... in the future's retrospect, so did we.
It be great if there was a video game like this that followed the logic of medieval era scholarship. Humors, star charts, demonic familiars, sounds like it would make a great setting.
Representations of animals with a strange appearance.
Medieval Dynasty, Kingdom come deliverance ( has a quest in a monastery) and perhaps Manor Lords.
Also worth checking out is Mount and Blade 1 and 2.
Excellent video as always. One of my best parts of the week is just taking 10-15 minutes and listening to one of your videos. Thanks for what you do and please keep doing it.
If I was a medieval person I'd probably think I was tripping balls looking at space.
Probably would be fromm the wild mushrooms you foraged
You would probably have no idea what tripping balls means, or what tripping was. You’d probably think it’s the same sky you’ve seen since you were a child and you’d be too busy working to give it a lot of thought. What I find interesting is here we are 25 years later and people still say “tripping balls” I wonder does it still have the same meaning?
@@MilitantPrepping you have a very self centered and modern worldview. As if people before internet never understood anything. Bless you heart.
@@redneckroy8947 … so you’re saying you think people in medieval times understood and regularly used terminology that came out of a counterculture associated with something that wasn’t discovered until the mid 20th century? Your snap value judgement needs work, I can objectively tell you my world view is less self centered than the majority of people you will ever meet. I’ve got plenty of faults, you’ll get no argument from me there, but egocentrism is not among them.
You should read the book, “Bread of Dreams.”
The author proposes most people in medieval times were in fact, tripping balls, because of all of the herbs they used in their bread that had psychedelic properties in them.
This is by far one of my favourite channels to watch on RUclips.
The effort that you put into each video is insane and it shows your love of the subject.
I
“The Discarded Image” by C.S. Lewis is a good ‘deep dive’ on this subject.
I remember watching a flat-earther explain away comets and meteorites by saying they are put up there by "The powers that be" with rail gun technology. Presumably, Medievals didn't have rail guns sooo....... Anyway, I bring this up because the title of this Medieval Madness was the very same question that came up in my mind when I watched that interaction. Awesome, informative video.
It is kind of silly how flat earthers don't even have the astronomical understanding of people that came 400 years before them
@@colxn I find it pretty disturbing.
Come on! *everyone* knows it was the ancient Egyptians' alien overlords that had the meteor-slinging rail guns.
It's simply insane when you realize that average people a thousand years ago had a better understanding of what the world was like than some people living today.
@@colxn I think most of them, or some *significant* number are just trolling. While a smaller number are fools.
Imagine how wild it must've felt going from, who knows how big earth is to, it's figured out
Pass me the joint
Space! The medieval frontier!
Excellent video!! Also particularly loved the music with this one, it made me feel like I was at the Mages' College in the Imperial City (Elder Scrolls Oblivion); absolutely excellent work! :D
Wondrous!! I pray thee aquire subscriptions many!
The ancient or medieval concept of the cosmos can seem ridiculous today. But who knows, in 500 years time our scientific concept of the universe or reality may seem equally naive or ridiculous to out distant descendants.
I think this is an oversimplification, because what happened in between was the development of the scientific method, which for the first time in human history allowed to gain _actual_ knowledge (and not just good guesses) by _testing_ theories for correctness. Newton's laws of gravity, Einstein's relativity, or quantum mechanics will never turn out to be _wrong_, but rather _incomplete_. In many of such cases we even already know about the incompleteness, as we know in which regimes the theories break down or start to contradict each other, even if we don't know (yet) how to fix it.
@@NeovanGoth The scientific method had already been in practice 3000 years ago by a number of ancient civilizations. But with any method, you have to start with assumptions and those assumptions could be not quite right.
The viewpoint of Einstein's relativity is stunningly different from the Newtonian viewpoint; it's not just adding a few extra terms to a Taylor series sort of thing or incompleteness. It wasn't a simple correction; it is was a revolutionary realization. Similarly with quantum mechanics. It wasn't a simply straightforward layering on top of older theories. It was revolutionary. I feel one day, relativity and quantum mechanics will be superseded as well not gradually but suddenly.
@@angryjalapenoI think you misunderstood me. Of course Relativity uses a completely different mathematical framework than Newtonian mechanics, but the outcome is practically identical for the limiting case of weak gravitational fields and low velocities. It's still perfectly fine to use Newtonian to calculate say the trajectory of an artillery shell. Same with quantum mechanics. Classical theories didn't suddenly stop to work with the advent of quantum theories, only their uses cases were limited.
Yay! I was waiting all week for a video from this channel!
Now this is a fascinating video concept even I had not thought about
How very interesting! and well articulated. I'm so glad to have found your channel, liked and subscribed.
Good work, keep it up!
Bless you man! Great timing
Your intro makes me feel like I’m right on a medieval battlefield with a cold wind blowing! Love your channel and all that you do! 💜
The question of what medieval people thought space actually was is *really* interesting - but the only answer here is one line about concentric transluscent spheres. I'd like to hear a deep dive into that. What did they think the actual structure and mechanics of the 'heavens' were? That would be fascinating.
Dante's Paradiso touches on it a bit more, iirc. It isn't anywhere close to a scientific text, even when it was written, but it does cover the belief system about the heavens. Be warned, though: it's a lot more difficult to get into than the Inferno.
The translucent spheres with planets attached to them is an idea from the Greek astrologer Ptolemy from the 2nd century AD. It was pretty widely accepted among European and Arabic scholars and it was part of Church dogma. The model imagined a series of nested solid spheres with Earth at the center. The moon, sun, and major planets were attached to these spheres. They turned in such a way as to appear to an earth observer that they orbited Earth (geocentrism). The model allowed astrologers to predict the future position of planets with reasonable accuracy considering that their measurment devices were quite crude.
Geocentrism held sway for about 1400 years even though scholars knew Ptolemy's model had serious flaws. Most of the research they conducted was into ways to patch up these deficiencies to make the model more accurate. For example, its prediction for Mars' position was often wildly incaccurate (due to the planet's apparent retrograde motion). This flaw was patched by assuming Mars was attached to a second smaller translucent sphere which in turn was attached to the primary sphere which moved Mars around Earth.
In the 16th c. Tycho Brahe built the largest equipment for measuing the positions of the stars and planets. His were the most accurate measurements ever obtained prior to the telescope. It allowed his professional frenemy, Johannes Kepler, to better quantify the gaps between Mars' observed position and the one predicted by Ptolemy's system. Like others before him, Kepler tried to reconcile these gaps by modifying Ptolemy's model but nothing worked. Instead, he took the remarkable step of discarding the system altogether and opted for a sun-centered model as proposed by Copernicus in the 15th c. (and by Aristarcus 1800 years earlier). When Kepler further assumed Mars had an elliptical orbit around the sun, Mars' observed positions matched the ones predicted by this model perfectly. Kepler's First Law of Planetary Motion forms the foundation of modern astronomy and even science itself.
@@SpottedSharks ah, thank you! I was at a lecture yesterday where they showed some diagrams from Copernicus and similarities to diagrams from centuries older Islamic texts that had added to Hellenistic ideas. I wrote (a bit) about Tycho Brahe in my undergrad - his having two separate teams of data collectors that weren't allowed to interact - one for a first floor observatory and one for an observatory dug into the ground to eliminate vibration - in part to be able to detect sources of error. Clever chap.
Do you know which of Ptolemy's texts he discusses the transluscent spheres in by any chance?
One of your best vids..thumbs up
I looked up this Merton university and they are STILL a functioning university 750 years later! 😮
You may have answered this question before, but why do so many medieval people shown in art have pockmarks on their faces? Does it have to do with the continual diseases during the era or could it have possibly been from a perceived imperfection when compared with God on these artworks?
Pox was a very common disease and with no means of combatting it...
They were doing meth.
Smallpox, probably.
I guess the perceived imperfections were far more readily apparent back then due to mostly ineffective treatments and not much in the way of hospitals or funeral homes to cart the dead or dying off to. And as the comment above mentions, probably smallpox was the cause of those blemishes, and also quite possibly syphilis.
SMALLPOX
the understanding of the cosmos goes back many thousand years if you look at sites like göbekli tepe which is astronomically alligned at the sunsets during the equinoxes and carvings of animals that reflect the constellations. that thing is like 12.000 years old.
many other ancient sites gaze precisely at their cellestial counterpart in the sky and incorporate some astronomical features in their architechture (angkor wat, pyramid in chechen iza, the pyramids in giza, the great sphinx, stonehenge) and many more. civilization goes back way further and was more advanced than mainstream academia teaches us in schools. some knowlegde was clearly lost and progress got reset during the last ice age. cheers
One of the best channels on RUclips
My absolute favorite channel.
I always liked the woodcut of the shepherd at the edge of the world taking a peek under the clouds to see the mechanism of the universe
That’s what smoking Salvia feels like.
4:23 Popeye, and his minime talk astrogeology to the room. 8:21 Beavis and Butt-Head smash a helmet with a hammer as a stunned horse looks on. 10:19 The 50 cent of 1050ad shows his banditry-banging scars off, and at 10:31 we can clearly see that the stars above have a sick crab tattoo on their chest, a wicked scorpion on their groin, and are not circumcized.
I love these videos.
It's easy to forget just how unknowable space is even in the modern day. Scientists still thought the universe only extended to the edge of the Milky Way as recently as the 1920s.
It's quite understandable people of that era would be ignorant of knowledge we now take for granted. But the painstaking process of obtaining that knowledge was built upon their shoulders. It's the natural human need for satisfying curiosity that makes for scientific development. What this video does not explain (nor I concede was intended to) is how today there are countless people who operate on the basis of rejecting information inconvenient to things they WANT to believe. In many respects, it's not so different today than in the days of Chaucer.
Well, I still don't how they actually views space now.
I liked the narrator's voice and tone.. a very good documentary, thank you.
subtle genius in your videos
Imagine all the superstitions we live our lives by
Yes, indeed. “Capitalism is natural”, bwahahahaha! People are so strange 😂
@@futuristica1710 what the fuck do you know about any kind of reality?
I really like this channel.
the more you learn about the Universe, it becomes more mysterious and divine
Divine ? really. The gawd gawn an done it fallacy because ignorance
Fool. Then you didn't learn.
@quad849 What is YOUR definition of learning? For me learning is observation and experiment to come to conclusions about something.
@quad849 There are layers upon layers of new information in this Universe. You find out what atoms are, now you have subatomic particles to work with, you figure those out now you have quantum mechanics to figure out, you find out what solar system is you have a whole galaxy to understand, and it just keeps going on and on. That is why I mean by the more we learn the more we realize this Universe is vast and there's so much to learn, and so little time.
Its 3:30 am and im watching what people thousands of years ago think what space was… ahh the youtube rabbit hole
I wonder if one day historians will be making slick 4 dimensional hologram videos asking what 21st century people thought space was.
The title should be: What Did Medieval Europeans Think Space Was?
I didn’t expect myself to be binge watching a bunch of videos about medieval times this week ha ha thanks
Technically Uranus is just naked eye but I don't think that anyone realized it was there prior to Herschel.As it's so dim it'd be hard to tell it apart from all the faint stars let alone see it's movement against said stars.Hard to know what they thought the stars are or the band of the Milky Way but the vastness is mind boggling to us let alone them.
I hope you do more medieval jokes and humor in the future! There were some real zingers. Maybe a video on the graffiti Romans left in Egypt, and just all over the place in general?
4:42
I like how the artist has painted them all with the same messed up eyes, like they've been reading by candlelight for too long.
ty
5:19 am but i simply must know what mediaeval people thought space was
What is the background music/choir called @ 1:20?
The telescope was invented in 1608. Imagine how terrifying it must have been to watch a sunset with it for the first time. To see the sun disc be obliterated as it crashed into the earth and disappeared.
and then they wake up and then there's a new ball again and the cycle continues
Now I'm no astropologist, but I don't think you can look at the sun directly with a simple lens telescope, at least not for long hahaha
@@thenathanimal2909 I said sunset...
Don’t think they would have been terrified. The people of 1608 knew the Earth was round, they just thought the Sun orbited the Earth.
But this can be seen with the naked eye... Were you drunk when you wrote this?
This was your best work to date. They had more knowledge back then than we do now. I was definitely born in the wrong time period. Current year is idiocracy on acid.
Just think. Light pollution was not a thing during this time. So the heavens looked much more brighter than they seem now
The omission of Arab astrologists takes so much from this Eurocentric reading of history, even if the video was titled "What did medieval Europeans think of space."
This channel is worthy of 10 fold the current views.
They also thought heaven was in the sky where the clouds were and that hell was beneath them far underground. Now we have planes and drills to see that’s not the case. They didn’t believe Earth was flat as I was told in Year 8 History Class, they knew it was a sphere but believed that it was the centre of our solar system before Copernicus and Galileo proved that false.
Their answers were often wrong, but they had ancient and complicated ways of finding them.
Wow! Those Medievals were less ignorant about the mysteries of the cosmos than I originally thought! 🙂
And thus speaks an American !
3:02 The words behind the teacher say "Silence!". The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Medieval people did indeed have some funny thoughts about the stars, but the thing is, before you can reach for the stars, you gotta build a telescope first. At least these medieval lads didn't have to listen to raid shadowlengends ads.
They had raid shadow legends but it was a board game,not a phone game
Medieval mind is very under estimated the curtain fell with enlightment
💙💙💙
I would say they had no more understanding then Kyrie Irving, and maybe make a hillarious joke. But I think Pythagoras or Rome or Egypt or thereabouts reasoned the Earth was round by the shadows that curtain objects cast.
This was a good one.
So you’re telling me that all these men were astrology girlies okayyyy 💁🏻♀️
I believe creation is direct evidence of God's existence, and the advancements of science haven't changed that for me and millions and millions of others.
Really ? just what is your concept of " creation" I bet its wrong
No 1 problem is IF creation is essential then what created god !
No 2 problem just why would a god create a universe
No 3 problem did said god just magic everything like it was supposed to have done with humans ?
No 4 problem if god created everything then what is said god doing now
The list of problems for creation is huge almost as huge as the errors in the bible Quran and all other iron age books of myths
@@gowdsake7103 why do jews have an overrepresentation of 30p% on the Media industry
A.D. 66
Jude 1:13:
"They are like wild waves of the sea, churning up the foam of their shameful deeds...
They are like wandering stars, doomed forever to blackest darkness."
Poetic, if sad. Reminds me of the movie 'Aniara', of a doomed starship who could not change its course.. only travel in one direction forever.
7:35 That'll upset the Flat Earthers 🦇
Who cares?
Was gunna say, probably something to do with God or something. Loving your channel ❤
What do modern people think space is?
Some insist no one went to the moon, so it suggests a wide range of possible interpretations and 'thoughts' !
I virtually empty 3 dimensional area outside of the Earths atmosphere
@@jamesb.9155 Well some insist that Astrology, Tarot and crystal healing are real, human stupidity is boundless
@@gowdsake7103 I don't see anybody mentioning such topics here.
People thought of the sky as Heaven - where God and the angels and saints lived. Anything unusual observed in the Heavens must be an omen.
After a while, I couldn't hear your words, only the repetitious numbing cadence of your delivery with the sleepytime music.
Start high and dip down with a hook, falling from a median high to the previous hook, continue pattern through listed facts, falling to a lower hook for the antefinale, and drop to new low and level for the final statement. Breathe.
Repeat.
9:50 “Ye Olde England Journal of Medicine”
They thought it would grant them eyes on the inside...
Where do you find all the medieval artwork?
have you tried the internet
@@ctylsh1214 lmao
Faith and science are still intertwined. How is it not?
Because FAITH requires zero evidence
@@gowdsake7103 true! and yet they are intertwined and exist together to form beliefs
To think that there were places like Persia and the Arabic Peninsula in that time actually trying the scientific method out, all in the name of God, of course.
I am a libra ♎️ yaaaaz
Apparently RUclips has a new glitch. I watched the intro to this which was a black screen thinking you were working your way up to a dramatic space reveal. I was like, ahh yes, a black screen for medieval space makes sense🧐 it’s going to be exposition narration and then the images will start. Nope, RUclips just decided not to show me the video even though everything else is loaded? 😭 wtf, I closed the video and opened it again and tried playing another video too and it’s still doing it even to the ads, guess I’ll be back if I can figure it out🤷♀️
I’ve had similar issues recently, no idea what’s causing it
Title should be: what did medieval Europe thought space was?
I hope that we can soon look back at our current naive selves like this.
soon?
@@prod.natejalo1122 The sooner the better.
How about one on the medievals attitudes towards children's.
Watching this video, you'd think the only "medieval people" on earth lived in Europe
4:25 💀
The King says it's going to reign.
What do we think space is today?
I wouldn’t call it madness progress was always being made and still is
I agree. Probably a thousand years from now, people will be calling “madness” a lot of what we think of as science.
They thought space was the heavens
We think we know.
And the theological madness continues still
Flat earthers exist as well
“Joffrey”?
yet they formed the basis for what we use today to do modern science.
only thing that changed is the spending on Science, our brain is still the same it was 10,000 years ago
10:44 in other words many people died because of this lol
in the middle ages they had to use horses to go to space
They did the best they could with the knowledge they had at the time, I’m trying not to sh1t on them but it’s hard 😭
Columbus: "Look, Indians!"
First Mate: "It's a small world isn't it?"
😵
Gods creation
🦏🐆🐎🐷🐐🦘🐥🦢🦤🐳🦕🦆🐥🦤🦖🦆🦉🦤🐊🦉🐢🐳🦜🦉🦈🦜🦜🦢🦉🦉🐳🦕🦜🦉🪶🐢🦖🦕🦜🦢🦤🐊🦕🐸🦢🪶🦎🐢
What created god !
@@gowdsake7103entropy
6:39 - when are we gonna bring the reverse-bowl cut hairdo back?
Nice video. . .big fan by the way. but also you should have mentioned Muslim astronomers and their contribution in medieval period. as the title of video is "what did MEDIEVAL PEOPLE think space was" not what European people thought of space at that period.
Antikythera mechanism