Printing History
Okay, pay attention today all. This puzzler is long, and it has a lot of detail to it. This is a bit of history.
Here goes.
It was a dark and stormy night in the summer of 1347 and a small Genoese trading post in the Crimea. The Hungarians and the Mongols had laid siege to this little trading post in the city-state of Genoa. So, some of the Mongolian soldiers began to get sick, during the siege. In fact, they got really sick and they began to die.
One of the Hungarian generals said, "Hey, I got an idea. We'll build a catapult and fling these bodies over the wall. So the soldiers inside will get sick and die too. And then we can win the siege of the outpost."
So, that's what they did. They catapulted the bodies over the wall into the outpost.
However, some of the people inside the trading post managed to escape the siege. They escaped the city by boat. They sail for a while until they wind up in the Sicilian city of Messina. So they arrive there safely, or so they think... They arrive in the town with all their gold, and unknowingly, carrying this disease.
Within a couple of months, half the city of Messina is dead. Within six months, half of Sicily is dead. Within two years time, it spread to Italy, and Southern Europe, and by 1350, it spread all over the continent of Europe, up the Baltics, and into England, and killed roughly half the population of Europe.
And of course, we all know this as the bubonic plague or the Black Death.
Okay, now we jump ahead about 75-100 years or so, and a fellow by the name of Gutenberg invents the printing press. So, there were other printing presses at the time, but they used wood and parchment. This one had a movable type and used lead and stuff. Very advanced for the time. And it printed on actual paper. And as luck would have it, there happened to be a lot of this special type of paper that Gutenberg would use to print on. There was a huge surplus of this paper available that made Gutenberg's invention a success.
Now the question is, how are these two things related?
How could the bubonic plague have benefited Gutenberg and his invention of the printing press?
Good luck, all.
