1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

1491

I am the author of "1491," the book which Layman blogged

about on Wednesday. As the post says, I made a brief

reference to the Church and zero in my book -- too brief,

because I think I was inadvertently misleading. This is the

good thing about blogs -- they point out where people like

me goofed. Anyway, here is a longer explanation of

what I should have said.



First, as I hope you realized, my book is not a brief

against the Roman Catholic Church. For example, I devote

time to its campaign against the exploitation of Indians,

which began very early with a papal declaration of their

rights as human beings that is something Catholics can be

proud of to this day.



But the church goofed about zero, though, in my opinion.

Let me explain. The Vatican did not have a single

monumental campaign against the zero (which is what I think

my book suggests -- sorry!), but there were numerous

ecclesiastical attempts to ban and stifle it, most but not

all on a local level. The best single source for this that

I know of is Tobias Dantzig's classic book Number from the

1930s, but histories of zero by Robert Kaplan and George

Ghevergese Joseph are also useful. The most useful popular

source is Dick Teresi's Lost Discoveries, which came out

in, I think, 2002.



According to all the historians that I know of, zero did

not come into Europe until Fibonacci, in the 12th century.

Prior to that, hardly anyone there had heard of it, and

calculations were difficult. And zero didn't become a full

fledged part of the European curriculum until the 17th

century -- Descartes apparently didn't use it, for example,

in his mathematics.



The reason is that zero is weird, if you think about it.

When you calculate with zero, you are treating a nothing as

if it were an entity, a something. Middle Ages western

intellectuals, many of whom were priests, couldn't wrap

their heads around it. Even Fibonacci referred to the "nine

[Indian numerals] and the sign 0" -- he didn't want to call

it a number, but saw it was a convenient device for

calculation.



This suspicion led to a series of actions against zero.

Back in 967, for example, the monk who became Pope

Sylvester II figured out that his counting would be easier

with a zero sign (it wasn't a zero, as in a circle, but

worked like one). He was accused of trafficking with evil

spirits and forced to abjure it. This kind of thing went on

until at least 1348, when the ecclesiastical authorities of

Padua prohibited the use of zero in price lists, arguing

that prices had to be written in "plain" letters.



Through much of this period European merchants went ahead

and used zero for their accounts, because it was so much

easier. But they hid this from the legal and churchly

authorities. Florentine bankers, prohibited in the 12th

century from using "infidel" symbols, created duplicate

sets of books, one to show the church, one to do your

calculations in. Thirteenth-century archives are replete

with evidence of such bootleg zeroes.



So I should have said "in europe, governments and church

authorities resisted zero" rather than "European

governments and the Vatican." My apologies, and thank you

for drawing my attention to my mistake.



Best wishes,

Charles C. Mann

1491

In a recent post, I noted that the book, by Charles C. Mann, stated that zero "didn't appear in Europe until the twelfth century. Even then European governments and the Vatican resisted zero--a something that stood for nothing -- as foreign and un-Christian." Mann,, page 19. Although I did not doubt the timing of zero's appearance in Mayan and European culture, I did ask whether the Vatican had opposed zero (because I honestly did not know). Fortunately, Mr. Mann has emailed me and clarified his comment and provided specific examples and references on the issue. He has given me permission to post his email on the blog:I truly appreciated hearing from Mr. Mann and told him in my response that although I had not finished reading, I do not believe it is anti-Catholic or anti-Christian. In my less learned opinion, it is a welcome reassessment of the issues related to American Indians. I truly hope I did not give the impression that I thought Mr. Mann had written an assault on the Catholic or any other Church.Mr. Mann's website is www.charlesmann.org and it has instructions on how to contact him should you wish to comment on this or another issue. He, like the rest of us, has had to cope with the ever rising tide of spam.