Around the time Orban’s huge bombard was breaking down the walls of Constantinople, Gutenberg printed the first Bible with movable type. As with all past inventions, we take it for granted without stopping to understand just how many things had to be just right to make movable type work. Ink. It has to be thick and quick-drying, which is a whole chemistry experiment. Paper. It has to be strong enough while still being cheap (Europe’s paper industry was mature by 1450, but just barely). And the type itself: too many issues to even list accurately. The machinery that holds it together and presses the paper: so many things can go wrong. Gutenberg got it all to work at the same time.
After his first run of Bibles, though, Gutenberg lost control of his invention, or as we’d say today, his IP. His financial backer accused him of misuse of funds; they went to court, and the printer lost. His assets—the press and half the Bibles—were handed over to his backer, who hired his assistant to take over.
Gutenberg still had his mind and ideas, and he found another funding source and started over. But in those days, the patent system was not operating, so control over IP was maintained only by physical control, like doors and locks. He’d lost that. I wonder if his ink formula was actually the greatest secret, since I’ve read some of the ink recipes of the time and they were primitive. In any case, with his assistant taking over, other assistants learned the trade and within 20 years there were competing German publishing companies in Strasbourg, Cologne, Augsburg, Basel, and Lubeck (where the powerful Hanseatic League operated).
One of these companies, Ravensburg, set up a press in Valencia, Spain in 1473 (around when printing came to London too). By the time of the Spanish Inquisition, most university/cathedral cities had German-made presses. The third Grand Inquisitor, the reforming Franciscan Cisneros, funded a Bible printed in six languages to try to jump-start more Biblical scholarship. This massive work, showing not only Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but also some Aramaic, Syriac and even Chaldean, was printed in 1522 with the Pope’s blessing. Significantly, the first book printed in Portugal was a Torah, the first five books of the Bible, printed by a Jew named Eliezer Toledano. So we know that in 1489, on the eve of the Jewish expulsion, at least some Jews–perhaps ones with connections in Germany–knew the formulae for ink and type.
As printing spread all over Europe, what about the Muslim world? It was an interesting exception to the general enthusiasm for movable type. When Muslims had seen Chinese block printing in earlier centuries, it was one technology they did not bring west. During Mongol “Muslim” periods, the rulers issued paper currency on the Chinese model, and it was certainly block-printed. But that seems to be all.
As we see with Bibles, printers prioritized religious texts first, because at first there was not much vision for general book marketing. Among Muslims, the lack of vision for printing ran deeper. They were against translating the Quran, since they saw the script itself (adopted around Mohammed’s time) as holy. Qurans had to be beautiful and hand-copied. The Christian world would soon have infamous battles over Bible translation, but there was never any sentimentality about hand-held pens vs. type. Muslim authorities also worried that a printer could introduce error or deliberate sectarian interpretations into the Quran, which would then be disseminated far faster than hand-copying could achieve. It’s likely there was also some economic reasoning, too, from a politically powerful scribal industry. In any case, Bayezid II prohibited printing books in Arabic in 1483, perhaps in response to some enterprising booksellers’ requests.
The first printing press set up in Constantinople, then, was the work of Sephardic Jews who had recently arrived in Ottoman ships, David ibn Nahmias, and his son Samuel. The Nahmias family probably came from the city of Hijar, Spain, where there was a Jewish/Hebrew printing press. They probably traveled through Naples, where they used a stopover to see what printers were doing there. Their first book came out in 1493: it was a book of Jewish law, the Four Laws of Rabbi Jacob ben Asher. (this information is from a thesis posted online) In 1505, they published a Torah with commentaries. About a hundred books in Hebrew were created in the first 30 years, probably with other printers setting up competing shops.
In the East, printing remained the trade of Jews for a long time. In 1567, an Armenian Christian who had learned printing in London began to print books in Constantinople, in his Armenian script. His first priorities were prayer books and liturgical calendars; he worked for about two years before the Ottoman officials stopped him. The first Greek press in Constantinople (the subject of the thesis I’m footnoting) didn’t get going until a Greek currant trader brought a press from London in 1627. In the late 1500s, a Maronite monastery in Lebanon set up a small press, but only in Syriac.
In Europe, they did create Arabic movable type. The Pope commissioned an Arabic prayer book in 1514 as outreach to the Arabic-speaking world. King Francis I of France commissioned a polyglot Book of Psalms that included Arabic, in Genoa in 1516. King Francis was very interested in developing the printing press; he also created the first royal library for establishing copy rights. But most of the publishing was by and for universities. We don’t really think about this now, but Arabic was a scholarly language taught in medieval universities (Latin by contrast was taught in every market town). Much of Aristotle’s work was still in “original” form in Arabic, since the Greek originals had been lost to fire and plunder. So professors of Arabic published grammar books and Quran commentaries, as well as poetry and history.
The first Ottoman press in Arabic didn’t open until 1729! Unlike other presses, its mandate was specifically to print anything but religious books. The Maronites in Lebanon finally got permission to print Christian books in Arabic, and western missionaries followed. Printing apparently didn’t really arrive in Egypt until Napoleon’s brief invasion. Muslim acceptance of printed Qurans came only in the 19th century.
It seems likely that the Ottoman Empire’s rejection of the printing press marked that region’s loss of academic prestige. People often ask, if the Arabic language used to be an important scholarly language, why did the Middle East sink into scientific irrelevance? There are many answers, but this is probably the big one.
(In case the linked thesis disappears, it is: “The First Greek Printing Press in Constantinople (1625‐1628),” NIL OZLEM PEKTAS. A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of London (Royal Holloway and Bedford New College) June 2014)