Nature's Evil

From Sweden to Peru, the miners’ lives were shaped by their ores, just as the neighbouring peasants’ lives were shaped by their cereals and cattle. The peasants lived on the surface; they ploughed their land and the land of their masters. The mines went deep underground, the furnaces reached up into the sky, and the wealth that they produced also had peaks and troughs. The peasants lived by tradition and calculation; they knew what they would do in winter and what in summer, which field would be ploughed the following year and which would lie fallow. The miners and blacksmiths lived by secret knowledge combined with sheer fluke. In every mining town, local legends told about how metal was found there by chance: in Tyrolean Schwaz a peasant woman wandering across a field with her cow stumbled across a nugget of silver. In Saxon Halle a shiny gleam of ore revealed itself on a roadside verge while someone was transporting salt. These were unheard of treasures; but then strangers who didn’t speak the local language tasted and smelt the ore, dissolved it in urine, crushed it to a powder and heated it in crucibles. Alchemists believed that metals grew in the earth in the same way as plants; they sought the magic words that would allow them to smelt lead into gold. But their mystical language really helped them to distinguish metals, purify ore, plan mines, reinforce them and pump the water out. These people often belonged to the medical profession; the bowels of the earth seemed to them to be a living organism which could experience growth, convulsions and bloating with gases. The juices of the earth, such as mercury, entered into a sexual union with metals such as silver. Monotheism was left at the entry to the mine and the smelting furnace; within them ‘prejudices’ ruled. Witches and trolls were the true rulers of the mines; physiological analogies and poetic metaphors were the tools of the craft. But they did help to control the highly complex processes of smelting, casting, forging and tempering.

Alchemy was the profession of refugees, counterfeiters and spies. Scary and comical, their contribution to the establishment of early modernity competed with those of the giants of the Italian Renaissance. This was an alternative Renaissance, a mineral reawakening. Its leaders weren’t artists and humanists, but entrepreneurs and alchemists. It makes perfect sense that the Reformation was engendered in such an atmosphere. The Renaissance was moving to the east and the north of Europe; its last site – the Prague of Emperor Rudolph II – saw an unprecedented blossoming of arts and sciences, with the alchemists stealing the show. Their furnaces produced neither gold nor immortality, but they forged modernity. Many of the alchemists’ undertakings were carried out in imitation of the East; they were not so much seeking new materials as trying to reproduce known and expensive ones. 15 In 1708 the elector of Saxony, August II, arrested the Prussian refugee Johann Friedrich Böttger; in prison, the alchemist found a method of mixing kaolin and alabaster, achieving vitrification – the formation of a glass-like material that was similar to Chinese porcelain. This was the origin of the factory in Meissen which would go on to bring great profits to Saxony.

In a similar way, the alchemists had success with gunpowder. The key element was saltpetre (rock salt), a strangely named substance which bacteria create while breaking down organic matter. In China, saltpetre was simply collected from the surface of the soil – in some places it emerged as a layer of white powder. Europe developed its own methods of preparing it. Elongated pits were filled with manure, straw and ashes, covered over and then left for a year; to be on the safe side they were drenched with urine, and occasionally the contents were mixed. Then water was poured into the pits, the solution was mixed with ashes and evaporated. In this way, gunpowder was produced from manure and rubbish. Its discovery was the result of the folk knowledge of the East, followed by meticulous imitation by the West. Gunpowder was adopted for military ends and also for the mining industry. While the mass manufacture of cannons and muskets increased the demand for metals, new mines used explosives along with chisels and axes. 16