WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Ceaseless

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◈ The Medieval Heretic King is Too Good at Developing ◈

Chapter 52: The Information Revolution (5)

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Thump, thump, thump-

Gutenberg's workshop never stopped.

Whenever the enormous oak press creaked down, black truth was stamped endlessly onto white paper.

Before the dawn mist had even cleared, the workshop's back doors swung wide, and a line of wagons rolled out.

Their beds were loaded not with weapons or food, but with bundles of paper tightly bound with rope.

"Giddyup!"

At the driver's crack of the whip, the wagon wheels began to turn.

Their destination was not the dusty studies of nobles or the quiet libraries of monasteries.

They were headed where people gathered. Places thick with the smell of sweat and alcohol, markets and taverns marked by the harshness of daily life.

New blood called movable type had begun flowing through the veins of Bohemia.

Prague, Old Town Square.

The square was packed so tightly beneath the blazing May sun that there was barely room to stand. Merchants shouting for customers, chickens crowing, and cart wheels rattling blended into a chaotic roar.

An old wagon creaked its way through the crowd.

A Hussite priest in a black cassock climbed onto it and raised his voice.

"Come, come! Step closer! Look! Listen! Today, I haven't come to sell you bread, but food to nourish your souls!"

One by one, passing citizens stopped out of curiosity.

Women out shopping, day laborers unable to find work, and porters carrying loads began murmuring among themselves.

"What is it? Another sermon?"

"He's wearing priest's robes. Maybe he's here to collect donations."

Their eyes held not respect for the clergy, but distrust and exhaustion.

Even if he was a reform-minded Hussite priest rather than a Catholic one, Prague's people had suffered too long under the corrupt Church for their distrust to disappear easily.

The priest paid them no mind and pulled back the wagon's cover.

What he took out was a book.

It had none of the gilded decoration or leather binding favored by nobles. It was simply a rough volume bound in a thick paper cover.

The citizens were unimpressed.

"Ah, it's just a book."

"What good is that when I can't read?"

"It looks too expensive to use as firewood."

It was only natural.

In this era, a book was a treasure worth as much as a house.

Each was a one-of-a-kind work of art, made by stretching and drying calfskin while scribes spent months writing every letter by hand.

For commoners who lived hand to mouth, books were not even a distant luxury. They belonged to an entirely different world.

Yet the priest did not stop.

He took another book from a box.

Then another.

And another.

Within moments, dozens of identical books were stacked on the stall like a tower.

"Uh...?"

The crowd's expressions began to change.

Something was strange.

Books were precious things. One might expect to find only one or two in the deepest archives of a monastery, yet here they were piled up like crates of fish in a market.

An old scribe standing among the crowd stepped forward, unable to believe his eyes.

"H-Hey, Father. What are all those?"

"They are Bibles, sir. The Gospel of John, Romans, and an edict from His Majesty the King, bound together."

"Bibles? Don't lie! How could there be so many Bibles? It would take hundreds of scribes to copy all of those! Did you steal them? Or is this some trick?"

The old scribe picked up one of the books, his eyes full of suspicion.

He was certain that the opening pages had been made to look convincing in order to fool the illiterate, while the rest was blank. Or perhaps it was rubbish filled with scribbled, unreadable handwriting.

The scribe opened the cover with rough hands.

Then he stopped breathing.

"......!"

There was nothing.

No trace of human hands.

The ink was even from the first letter to the last. The spacing was perfectly measured, and there was not a single variation in the thickness of the strokes.

"W-What is this...?"

Flustered, the scribe picked up another book beside it.

He laid the two open side by side and began comparing them.

The first word of the first line.

The position of the period on the tenth line.

Even the faint ink marks stamped in the corners of the pages.

"Gasp...!"

They were identical.

Not merely similar. They were perfectly identical, down to the last letter, in a way that sent chills down his spine.

It was impossible to do by hand. Even the finest calligrapher would produce tiny differences when writing something twice.

Yet these books were the same, as if reflected in a mirror. No, as if one had split into many.

"Th-This wasn't written by a person..."

The scribe staggered back in terror. The book slipped from his hands and fell to the ground.

"The Devil... the Devil wrote it! How else could the letters be this identical?"

His horrified reaction only made the crowd more curious.

Whether devils or angels had written them, books not made by human hands were a spectacle in themselves.

Then a broad-shouldered man holding an iron hammer pushed through the crowd. He was a blacksmith in a leather apron.

"How much?"

He casually picked up the book from the ground and brushed off the dust with his rough palm.

"I've been needing a Bible for the guild members to take turns reading. I can't buy it if it costs as much as a house, though..."

The priest smiled and held up three fingers.

"Thirty silver groschen."

"...What?"

The blacksmith's eyes widened.

Thirty groschen.

It was by no means a small sum.

But it was not the price of a house. It was about the price of one fat pig.

An amount the blacksmith could manage if he struck iron and saved desperately for about a month.

"That's a lie! A Bible costs only as much as one pig?"

"It is not a lie. It is the mercy granted by His Majesty Ulrich. Just as bread fills the stomach, truth must fill the soul. That is His Majesty's will."

The crowd stirred.

Thirty groschen.

It was expensive, but not impossible.

For the first time, they had a chance to hold knowledge in their own hands, knowledge they had spent their entire lives glimpsing only over the walls of other people's homes.

The blacksmith looked back and forth between the book and the priest. His hands were rough, and he could not read.

Still, he hesitated.

There was a strange sense of conquest in knowing he could buy, with his own hands and his own money, a fragment of knowledge once possessed only by nobles.

"Give me one."

The blacksmith pulled a crumpled leather pouch from his clothes and counted out the silver coins.

Clink, clink.

The sound of silver passing into the priest's hands rang through the square.

The transaction was complete. The Bible, once part of an untouchable realm, had been exchanged for money like pork in a marketplace.

That opened the floodgates.

"M-Me too! Give me one!"

"Me too! I can't believe our family can own a Bible!"

People rushed forward, digging through their pouches.

Yet the priest did not simply sell books.

"Some of you can't read, can you? Don't worry!"

He opened the book wide and began reading aloud at the top of his voice.

"In the beginning was the Word!"

It was not Latin.

It was not the incomprehensible, spell-like language priests muttered from the Church's high pulpits.

"The Word was with God, and the Word was God!"

It was Czech.

The language they used to bargain in the market.

The language they used to scold their children.

Their familiar, rough mother tongue, used to whisper love to a lover.

Farmers passing by and porters carrying loads stopped in their tracks.

They stared blankly at the priest's lips.

'God... speaks our language?'

At church, they always heard Latin phrases such as Dominus vobiscum, "The Lord be with you."

They never knew what it meant. They simply bowed their heads with everyone else and said amen.

But now, God was speaking to them in their own language.

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it!"

Something surged up in the crowd's hearts.

The suffocating frustration of being unable to know God's will without a priest to interpret it.

The helplessness of having to hear from someone else's mouth whether they had sinned.

That thick wall was crumbling beneath a single thin sheet of paper.

"The Lord's truth shall prevail!"

As the priest shouted the final line, cheers burst from the crowd in the square.

"Amen!"

"That's right! Truth shall prevail!"

Even those who could not buy a book, and those who could not read, did not leave.

They gathered in small groups around those who had bought one.

"Hey, read some more. What does it say next?"

"It says Jesus drove the merchants out of the temple. Is that true?"

"It is! It says it right here. 'Do not make My Father's house a house of trade.'"

Those who could read read aloud, and those who could not, listened.

Then they asked and answered each other.

The passive flock that had only listened to priests preach for so long had begun discussing God's word for the first time.

Prague's square was no longer a marketplace.

It was becoming a church without a roof.

"Come on, read faster! You're making me dizzy!"

"Don't push! I can't see either!"

Hundreds of Bibles loaded onto the wagon sold out in an instant.

Yet most of the people holding books did not look happy.

They looked miserable instead.

"Damn it..."

Hans, the butcher, looked down at the book in his hands and sighed.

Thirty silver groschen. A fortune spent impulsively on the "Word of Truth."

But to him, the book was nothing more than black marks on white paper.

He was illiterate.

Having spent his whole life cutting meat, the only writing he knew was the numbers used to mark the weight of meat.

To him, the Bible was a tightly locked treasure chest.

"Thomas! Read this passage for me! What did Jesus say here?"

He grabbed Thomas's clothes and pleaded. Thomas was the scribe who lived next door.

But Thomas had his own problems.

"Move aside! I'm busy reading my own book!"

Similar scenes unfolded all over the square.

Dozens of people crowded around every person who could read, straining to catch each word.

"This is driving me mad!"

"Does it make sense that I can't read the book I bought with my own money?"

A fire was lit in their hearts.

It was a need they had never felt before.

When there were no books, ignorance was not a sin. But with a book in their hands, ignorance became a source of regret.

They wanted to know. They wanted to read.

They wanted to decipher those black symbols and see God's voice with their own eyes.

That was when it happened.

Boom, boom, boom-!

The king's heralds entered the square, beating drums.

They carried huge notices stamped with the red royal seal.

"An edict from the King! Make way!"

The heralds posted the notices on the bulletin board in the center of the square.

People rushed over.

"What is it? Don't tell me we're being taxed again?"

"The war is over. What kind of edict is this?"

"Can someone read it? What does it say?"

A literate young man was pushed to the very front.

He cleared his throat, then read the first line of the notice in a tense voice.

"Proclaimed in the name of Ulrich I, King of Bohemia and rightful heir of Luxembourg!"

The noise in the square died down.

The King's name carried weight.

"I intend to end this age in which ignorance blinds the people and false authority monopolizes truth. Just as bread nourishes the body, knowledge nourishes the soul. Therefore, to guarantee the right to learn for all subjects of Bohemia, I hereby decree the following!"

The young man swallowed and read the rest.

It read as follows.

________

1. Establishment of National Schools

: From this day forward, national schools shall be opened in every parish of Prague and throughout the Sternberg domain.

2. Eligible Students and Costs

: Social rank makes no difference in learning.

Children: The royal treasury shall fully cover enrollment and tuition fees for all children under twelve years of age. All tools needed for learning shall also be provided free of charge.

Adults: Adults aged twelve and above who wish to learn may attend evening classes for a modest fee of five groschen per month.

________

By the time he reached that point, exclamations had broken out among the people.

"It's free?"

"The King will pay for our children to study?"

For people who lived hand to mouth, education fees were an unimaginable luxury.

Yet the King had declared that he would bear that burden for them.

The true shock was in the final clause.

"Furthermore, capable people are sought from far and wide to teach the growing number of students. There is only one qualification: the ability to read and write!"

The young man's voice began to shake.

"Status, age, origin, and gender shall not matter. Noble or commoner, man or woman, only ability shall be considered!"

"......!!"

The square erupted.

"Gender does not matter? Women can become teachers?"

"They don't care about status either! Even a butcher can do it as long as they can read?"

Maria, a laundress standing among the crowd, doubted her own ears.

She was the daughter of a ruined merchant who could read, but after her household was financially ruined, she had survived by washing other people's clothes.

'Could I... become a teacher?'

Her talent, which had been rotting away at the washhouse, had finally been given a chance to shine.

She was not alone.

Clerks who could read but had been ignored for their low status, poor junior scholars, and daughters of fallen nobles.

Life returned to the eyes of intellectuals who had hidden in the shadows.

The scent of paper and ink drifted on Prague's spring breeze.

It was the scent of a new age.

Footnotes:

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