Practically nothing is known about mining in the Dark Ages, not even whether the coins issued by Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian monarchs were made from old metal or from the products of new mining. By the time of Charlemagne, the great Spanish mines had passed into the hands of the Moors; output at first declined, but it was the Moors who discovered means of utilizing sulphide ores of copper, from which they obtained copper sulphate by oxidization. When the sulphate was dissolved in water and run over iron, pure copper was deposited. But the severance of Spain from Mediterranean Christendom is perhaps more important as part of the process by which, when the scene becomes clear again, the centre of European mining is found to have been transferred to the Saxon miners of central Europe. They were at work in the Harz mountains before A.D. 1000, at Freiberg about 1170, and in the following century as far as Hungary.

By a fortunate chance the mining methods in vogue in the later Middle Ages have been thoroughly recorded by an outside skilled observer--such as is almost wholly lacking in the earlier history of technology. The observer was the physician Georg Bauer (commonly Latinized as Agricola), a Saxon who had studied medicine in Italy but practised in the Bohemian mining district of Joachimsthal. In his day this was famous chiefly for silver, which had been found there in 1516 in such profusion that the valley gave its name to a silver coin known as the thaler, the eponym of the modern dollar. But as the district had long been famous for the mining of base metals (it is today famous for uranium), the twelve books of the De re metallica, published in 1556, are a fair guide to late medieval methods in a strongly traditional industry.

In metal-working, as distinct from the mining of metallic ores, a decline began before the fall of the Roman empire in the west and continued in the Dark Ages. Surviving material has not yet been at all fully examined, but it would appear that the working of other metals was interrupted more seriously than that of iron; no darkness could obscure the need for tools and weapons. Skills that had been practiced in Roman Gaul survived in Merovingian France, and there were some Syrian experts working in western Europe, while by the eighth century there were books in circulation describing Byzantine skills. Great skill was expended on the forging of swords and the decoration of their handles and scabbards. The most remarkable surviving product of the age is a type of pattern-welded sword, which contained strips of iron rod, about 1/100 in. thick and 1/8 in. wide, twisted in either direction and running the full length of the blade, giving worm-like markings on the surface. Such welding required great skill, and the works of Burgundian and Frankish smiths were even imported by the Arabs.

Two of the most interesting medieval uses of metals may be traced from the revival of western Christendom in the age of Charlemagne. One is the building of church organs with pipes of copper or bronze. The organ had been well known in the ancient world: the problem of providing an even wind-pressure by mechanical means had engaged the attention of both the great Alexandrian mechanics, Ctesibius and Heron. Its use in Christian services appears to have begun at Constantinople in the fourth century, and St Jerome tells of an organ at Jerusalem, with two elephant-skins for a wind chest, which was audible a mile away. The Franks received their first as a gift from the Byzantine emperor in 757, and by the tenth century organs were fairly common in England as well as in France and Germany: St Dunstan, for instance, installed two, and there was one in Winchester cathedral said to be furnished with 400 bronze pipes and 26 bellows. The pipes were at first operated by pulling rods, but a keyboard was employed at Magdeburg cathedral before 1100; the pedals were added before the end of the Middle Ages. By the time of Samuel Pepys, who longed to buy one, small organs were a not unusual amenity in private houses.

The casting of church bells in bronze likewise dates from the eighth century, their predecessors having been made of sheet-iron, like the small Roman table-bell. Probably the cir perdue process was used at first; later, the bell was cast between a core and an outside cope, the former being covered and the latter lined with a carefully dried loam mixed with horse-hair and manure. In the eleventh century a bell weighing 2,600 lb, at Orleans, was still thought large, but the size of the mould increased-hence the 'bell-fields' adjoining some great churches, where bells have been cast on the spot--so that the experience of the bell-founder eventually prepared the way for the casting of cannon.

Meanwhile, Charlemagne's contemporaries were learning to appreciate the importance of armor in war, especially for the horseman. Not many of the Germanic peoples who overran the Roman empire in the west had originally adopted the armor and armor-making of the Romans, which survived chiefly in the Byzantine empire: interlaced chain mail was at first brought from the east. But the medieval smith came to be above all an armorer, who equipped the feudal knight with anything up to 100 lb of mail or plate. Rings of iron wire were welded or riveted together to form the mail, which was shaped to cover the feet and arms and even the head; by the twelfth century the latter might be completely cased (apart from holes for eyes and nose) in a helm of steel. By the fourteenth century plate armor, which was originally a reinforcement of chain mail, was taking its place. The skill of the smith was then shown both in finish and in inlay, but most practically in contriving protection where the plates were jointed.

A key event of the Middle Ages was the gradual colonization of large regions in east central Europe, in which German and other settlers developed not only mining but the working of metals. Ores containing silver attracted the most eager attention, as we might expect. But in addition to the steel-yielding iron ores of Styria and Carinthia, there were important developments in the production of copper in both Saxony and Sweden; of lead, produced about equally in central Europe and England; of Cornish tin; and eventually of zinc. Smelting and cupellation, however, were largely conducted by the old methods, and new developments are to be found chiefly in the metallurgy of iron. . .

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