In 1453, when the Turks took Constantinople, Pope Nicky 5 wanted a crusade and authorized the sale of letters of indulgence—religious documents that released the buyers from penalties for their sins. And guess who printed them?

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Commercial opportunities for a printing press went beyond books. One of those was the Fall of Constantinople. In 1453, the Ottoman Empire lead by 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II defeated the army of Constantine XI Palaiologos, the last Byzantine Emperor. To tell this story we also need to talk about The Great Schism, how and why Christianity split into east and west camps. Because there’s nothing Jesus loves more than a little bit of Christian on Christian violence.

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Hand carving a piece of metal type for a printing press would take a skilled craftsman an entire day. Just setting one page of the Bible would take 2600 pieces of type. So Gutenberg needed to come up with an efficient way to manufacture type – which is a lot harder than it sounds. He also needed to invent the printing press. On this episode we go through how he did those things – and then talk about how it was all ripped out from underneath him, just as he was about to have his big victory.

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One of Gutenberg’s partners died, and the guy’s brothers wanted in on the secret project. Gutenberg refused, so they took him to court. Then in 1444, Gutenberg left Strasbourg and went… where? We don’t know. He disappeared for three years. Some interesting conspiracy theories about where he might have gone. We also talk about the people who invented movable type before Gutenberg… the CHINESE! CHINA CHINA CHINA!

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In 1428, Gutenberg moved to Strasbourg where he would live for the next 20 years. It was there that he had his first big business venture—making holy healing ray containment devices. He brought on investors who later became suspicious that he was holding out on them. He had a secret project that he was working on. And they wanted in.

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Today we begin a series about the man without whom our podcasts would not exist because there would be no books.

And you know we get all of our knowledge from books. The man who invented movable type and the printing press (or did he?).

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Born 1401 as Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone, “Masaccio” (his nickname) was regarded as the first great Italian painter of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance. According to Vasari, he was the best painter of his generation. The first painter in the Renaissance who really understood linear perspective. He died age only 26, in 1428. “Masaccio,” said Leonardo da Vinci, “showed by perfect works that those who are led by any guide except Nature, the supreme mistress, are consumed in sterile toil.” His masterpiece was the Holy Trinity fresco in the Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

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Born Guido di Pietro but known to us as Fra Angelico which means the “Angelic friar”. Despite his early talent for painting, at age 12 he entered the Dominican order and spent the rest of his life in convents, painting their walls. Admired by Cosimo de Medici and extremely influential to the early Renaissance artists, he was one of the first to start to incorporate linear perspective.

We also talk about Pope Nicholas V, the first humanist Pope. Born into relative poverty, he spent most of his adult life in Florence as an assistant to an Archbishop and a Pope, while hanging around with the humanists, until his surprise election to the top job. He decided to Make Rome Great Again, by bringing as many of the top scribes, translators, architects, painters and sculptors to work for him as he could ge this hands on – including Fra Angelico and Leon Battista Alberti. He’s also the guy who created the vision for the modern Vatican Palace and the Vatican Library.

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The first written work of art theory, produced during the Renaissance was “De Pictura”, or “On Painting”, written in 1435 by Leon Battista Alberti but not published until 1450, in which he explained the science behind linear perspective.

He was a humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, mathematician and cryptographer. He also wrote the first autobiography since St Augustine.

A true polymath and the first Renaissance Man, who inspired every Renaissance artist who followed him.

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After returning to Rome to work for the Vatican, Poggio Bracciolini starting making some serious money of his own. Enough to get married and buy a big house. He served as chancellor of Florence for five years. After he died, Lucretius kept working its magic on the people of Europe. Forty years later, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola ruled Florence for several years as a strict “Christian republic” and tried to ban the book. And he wasn’t the last Christian to try to have it banned or at least scorned. But it kept influencing people. On the London stage in the mid-1590s, Mercutio teased Romeo with a fantastical description of Queen Mab:

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