The Renaissance
It’s questioned if the 14th and 15th centuries were a continuation of the middle ages, or if they marked the beginning of a new era. While some patters of the 14th century continued into the 15th, there was some recovery that took place in the 15th century, including political, economic, artistic, and intellectual. The humanists of the age called their period an age of rebirth; they believed that they had restored arts and letters after they had been neglected for centuries.
Michelangelo and Pope Julius II (the “warrior pope”) didn’t get along. After he had been hired to paint the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo refused to let anyone, including the pope, see his work. An angry Julius replied that if he didn’t finish the ceiling quickly, he would be thrown down from the scaffolding. Michelangelo quickly finished the ceiling.
Meaning and Characteristics of the Italian Renaissance
The Middle Ages is characterized by darkness because of its lack of culture.
Jacob Burckhardt-Swiss historian and art critic. He created the modern image of the Renaissance in his book, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. [published: 1860] He believed that Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries was the birthplace of the modern world, and saw a rebirth of antiquity, “perfecting of the individual,” and secularism (a doctrine that rejects religion and religious considerations) at its distinguishing features. Burckhardt exaggerated the individuality and secularism of the Renaissance and failed to recognize its religious aspects. Still, he established the framework for all modern ideas of the Renaissance.
While contemporary scholars don’t believe that the Renaissance represents a sudden of dramatic cultural break with the Middle Ages, the Renaissance is still considered to be a distinct period of European history.
Renaissance Italy was an urban society. By the mid-fourteenth century, northern Italy was mostly composed of independent cities that dominated the country districts around them. These city-states became centers of Italian political, economic, and social life. Within this new urban society, increasing wealth created a more materialistic lifestyle.
The Renaissance was an age of recovery. Italy and Europe were in the process of recovering from the effects of the Black Death, political disorder, and economic recession.
During a period where their knowledge of their own historical past was increasing, Italian intellects became intensely interested in the Greco-Roman culture of the ancient Mediterranean world. This affected activities such as politics and art and led to new attempts to reconcile the pagan philosophy of the Greco-Roman world with Christian thought, as well as new ways of viewing people. An emphasis on individual ability became a characteristic of the Italian Renaissance.
“Men can do all things if they will.”-Leon Batlista Alberti
l’uomo universtale-The social ideal of the well-rounded personality or universal person.
The Making of Renaissance Society
The features of the Italian Renaissance where not typical of all Italians; they made up the wealthy upper-class; a small percentage of the total population. The achievements of the Italian Renaissance were not the product of an elite, not a mass. However, it did have some effect on ordinary people.
The Italian Renaissance actually began in an era of severe economic problems. The commercial revolution of the 12th, 13th, and early 14th centuries had produced great wealth and developed a capitalist system. After three centuries of economic expansion, in the second half of the 14th century, Europeans experienced severe economic reversals and social upheavals. By the middle of the 15th century, gradual economic recovery had begun with an increase in the volume of manufacturing and trade. Despite the recovery, Europe didn’t experience the economic boom of the High Middle Ages.
Economic Recovery
The galleys of the Venetian Flanders Fleet maintained a direct sea route from Venice to England and the Netherlands, where Italian merchants came into contact with the Hanseatic League of merchants. After the plague, the Italians lost their high commercial status while the Hanseatic League continued to prosper.
The Hanseatic League (or Hansa) is believed to have been formed as early as the 13th century, when a few north German coastal towns (Such as Lubeck, Hamburg, and Bremen) began to cooperate in order to gain favorable trading rights in Flemish cities. To protect themselves from Pirates and the competition from Scandinavian merchants, these and other northern towns formed a commercial and military league. By 1500, more than 80 cities belonged to the Hanseatic League. The league had established settlements and commercial bases in cities in England and northern Europe. (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.)
For almost 200 years, the Hansa had a monopoly on northern Europe trade of timber, fish, grain, metals, honey, and wines. The Hansa’s southern outlet in Flanders (city of Bruges) became the economic crossroads of Europe in the 14th century because it served as the meeting place between Hansa merchants and the Flanders Fleet of Vince. In the 15th century, the Hansa League died out as it became harder and harder to compete with the developing larger territorial states.
The Italians continued to maintain an awesome commercial empire, despite new restrictive pressures on their Eastern Mediterranean trade from the Ottoman Turks.
The economic depression of the 14th century also affected patters of manufacturing. The woolen industry of Flanders and the Northern Italian cites had been devastated.
The Italian cities began to develop and expand luxury industries and hand worked items in metal and precious stones. Sadly, the industries employed fewer people than the woolen industry, and therefore contributed less to society overall.
Other new industries (printing, mining, and metallurgy, especially,) began to rival the textile industry in importance during the 15th century. Rulers began to transfer their rights to underground minerals as collateral for loans.
Expanding iron production and new skills in metalworking allowed for more development of firearms.
Florence regained its status in banking in the 15th century with the help of the Medici family. The Medici had expanded from cloth production into commerce, real estate, and banking. During the 15th century, the House of Medici was the greatest banking house in Europe. The family also had controlling interests in industrial enterprises for wool, silk, and the mining of alum (used to dye textiles). Despite its great success, the Medici bank suffered a sudden decline at the end of the century due to poor leadership and a series of bad loans. In 1494, the Medici collapsed when the French expelled them from Florence and confiscated their property.
Social Changes in the Renaissance
In the Middle Ages, society was divided into three estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the peasants. The social order underwent certain adaptations in the Renaissance.
The Social Classes: Nobility
Landholding nobles were faced with difficulties during the greater part of the 14th and 15th centuries as income declined and the expense of maintaining their status was rising. Nevertheless, members of old nobility survived. While they made up between 2 and 3 percent of the population, they managed to dominate society as they had done in the Middle Ages. They served as military officers and held important political posts such as advising the king.
The Development of a Courtly Society in Italy
In the Early Renaissance, old noble families had moved into the cities, merging with the merchant middle class to form the upper-class in urban societies. As a result, Italy seemed to lose the notion of nobility or aristocracy. In the 15th century, this began to change, as the tenor of Italian upper-class urban society became more aristocratic.
The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529); first published in 1528, it outlined three basic attributes of the perfect courtier. First, there was what they’re born with: impeccable character, grace, talents, and noble birth. The perfect courtier must also cultivate certain achievements. They must stay modest, while not hiding their accomplishments. Unlike the medieval knight, courtiers were expected to have not only military skill, but a classical education and a life adorned with the arts; they had to play music, draw, paint. Nobles would follow Castiglione’s guide for hundreds of years.
The Social Classes: Peasants and Townspeople
Peasants made up about 85 to 90 percent of the European population. Due to the economic crisis of the 14th century, there was a decline in the manorial system and the elimination of serfdom continued. Lords found it easier to deal with the peasants by granting them freedom and accepting rent. Eastern Europe had a reversed trend. The weak rulers allowed nobles to tie their peasants to the land and use servile labor in the large-scale production of grain.
At the top of the urban society were the patricians. Below them were the petty burghers, the shopkeepers, artisans, guild masters, and guild members. Below them were the propertyless workers and the unemployed. At the very bottom were slaves.
Slavery in the Renaissance
While agricultural slavery was still around during the Middle Ages, it declined to do economic causes. By the 9th century, it had been replaced by serfdom. By the 11th century, only some domestic slavery remained. Slavery began its reappearance in Spain, where Christian and Muslim prisoners were made into slaves during the reconquista. Italy also began using slaves again after the Black Death in the second half of the 14th century. In 1363, the government of Florence authorized the unlimited importation of foreign slaves.
In the city, slaves were used as skilled workers, making handcrafted goods, or as household workers. Girls served as nursemaids and boys were used as playmates. Slaves were taken from the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea region, including Tartars, Russians, Albanians, and Dalmatians. There were also slaves from Africa, either Moors or Ethiopians, and Spanish Muslims. Most slaves were females, many of them young girls. Often, men of the house would take them as concubines. By the end of the 15th century, slavery had declined in the cities. Many slaves had been released for humanitarian reasons. Also, slaves were begin considered “domestic enemies,” more dangerous than they were worth.
The Family in Renaissance Italy
In Renaissance Italy, family meant the extended household of parents, children, and servants and could also include grandparents, widowed mothers, and unmarried sisters. Families that were related and had the same last name lived near each other. They might even dominate an urban district.
A crime committed by one family member fell on the whole family, therefore, relation could become a bloody affair.
Weddings were all about maintaining the family-they were arranged by the parents when the children were two or three. These arrangements were reinforced by a legally binding contract, and were often used to strengthen business or family ties. The size of the dowry was the most important aspect of the contract, as it showed whether the bride was moving up or down in society. With a large dowry, a daughter could marry a man of higher social status, making her family move up in status. However, with a small dowry, a daughter would marry a man of lower social status, and she would raise her husband’s family’s social status. Wealthy families sometimes established societies to provide dowries for poor girls. Due to the lack of emotional attachment from these marriages, many men sought out extramarital relationships, however, women were supposed to follow different guidelines. In some cases, the wife would be executed. The age difference (which averaged about 13 years) also heightened the need for sexual outlets outside of a marriage. Women got married between the ages of 16 and 18, while men were typically around their 30s or early 40s. In 1415, the city of Florence decided that prostitution was a necessary, enviable vice, so the city fathers established communal brothels.
The father-husband was, as expected, the head of the Italian family. He was responsible for it in all legal matters, he controlled all the finances, and made all the important decisions in the children’s lives. His authority over the children was absolute until he died or formally emancipated them. The general age for emancipation was from the early teens to late twenties.
As for the wife, her main function was to bear children. Upper-class wives were frequently pregnant; they could conceive faster because they could afford wet-nurses. Giving birth was dangerous; around 10% of mothers died in childbirth. Surviving mothers faced high odds of the death of the children. Around 50% of children born into merchant families died before the age of 20. These mortality rates were part of the reason many upper-class families had as many children as possible; to ensure that there would be an heir to the fortune.
The Italian States in the Renaissance
By the 15th century, five major powers controlled the Italian peninsula. These were the duchy of Milan, Venice, Florence, the Papal States, and the kingdom of Naples.
After the death of the last Visconti ruler of Milan in 1447, Franceso Sforza turned on his Milanses employers, thus conquering the city and becoming its new duke. The Visconti and the Sforza rulers worked to create a highly centralized territorial state. They devised a system of taxation that generated a ton of revenue for the government. Its commercial empire also brought in enormous revenues and gave it a status of international power. At the end of the 14th century, Venice began the conquest of a territorial state in northern Italy to protect its food supply and its overland trade routes. While this made sense to the Venetians, it scared the Milan and Florence, which worked to curb what they believed to be the expansion of the Venetians.
The republic of Florence controlled the region of Tuscany. Florence was governed by a small merchant oligarchy that manipulated the government. Cosimo de’ Medici took control of this oligarchy in 1434. Cosimo (1434-1464) and later his grandson Lorenzo (1469-1492) the Magnificent were successful in dominating the city.
Papal residence in Avignon and the Great Schism had made for individual cites and territories to become free of papal control. The Renaissance popes of the 15th century directed most of the energy towards reestablishing their control over the Papal States.
The kingdom of Naples was fought over by the French and the Aragonese until the Aragonese established that they were dominant in the mid-fifteenth century. All though the Renaissance, the kingdom of Naples stayed a mostly feudal monarchy mostly made up of poor peasants dominated by unruly barons. They saw little of he cultural glories of the Renaissance.
Italy wasn’t just made up of the five major states; there were a lot of independent city-states under the control of powerful families.
Federigo da Montefeltro ruled Urbino from 1444 to 1482. He received a classical education from the famous humanist school in Mantua run by Vittorino da Feltre. He was not only a good ruler and a brilliant general, but he was reliable and honest and loved by his people. It was said that he could walk though the streets of Urbino without a bodyguard, something very few Renaissance rulers dared to do. As well, he was one of the greatest patrons of Renaissance culture.
Battista Sforza was the niece of the ruler Milan, and was married to Federigo da Montefeltro. She was an intelligent woman; she knew both Greek and Latin and did much to foster art and letters in Urbino. As her husband was frequently absent, she was respected for her good judgment in governing the state.
Isabella d’Este (1474-1539) was the daughter of the duke of Ferrara, who married Francesco Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua. Their court, where Isabella was educated, was an important center of art and learning in the Renaissance. She was known for her intelligence and political wisdom, called the “first lady of the world.” She was responsible for creating one of the finest libraries in all of Italy. She also successfully ruled Mantua before and after her husband’s death, and won a reputation as a clever negotiator.
The Italian territorial states created the political practice known as the balance of power, which was later used on a larger scale by competing European states. An alliance system was created which led to a workable balance of power within Italy. However, it didn’t establish lasting cooperation among the major powers of a common foreign policy.
The quickly growing monarchical states led to problems for the Italians. Italy became a battleground for the power struggle between the Spanish and French monarchies. The breakdown of the Italian balance of power was what had encouraged the invasions and began the wars. Ludovico Sforza, the duke of Milan, invited the French king Charles VIII (1483-149 cool to intervene in Italian politics. So in 1491, with an army of 30,000 men, he advanced though Italy and occupied the kingdom of Naples. Ferdinand of Aragon then indicated his willingness to intervene. For the next 15 years, the French and the Spanish competed to dominate Italy. In the decade of the 1510s, the war was carried out by a new generation of rulers. Frances I of France and Charles I of Spain. Italy was only a convenient area for fighting battles. Rome was sacked by 1527 by the armies of the Spanish King Charles I, which brought a temporary end to the Italian wars. Hereafter, the Spaniards dominated Italy.
One of the reasons Italy got invaded so often was due to the fact that Italians never worked as a country, and instead remained loyal to their own petty states. Italy would not become unified until 1870.
The Birth of Modern Diplomacy
The modern diplomatic system as we know it was actually a product of the Italian Renaissance. Ambassadors of the Middle Ages regarded themselves as the servants of all Christendom, not just to whomever they were employed. The political situation in Italy changed this concept during the Italian Renaissance. The Italian states began sending resident diplomatic agents to each other in hopes of finding useful information. This practice spread through the rest of Europe during the Italian wars. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Europeans developed the diplomatic system which is still in use to this day.
Not only was the concept of an ambassador changed, but the purpose of the ambassador changed during the Italian Renaissance as well. An ambassador was no longer an agent of Christendom, but instead just the territorial state from which he came. He could use any methods he thought would be beneficial to the political interests of his own state.
Machiavelli and the New Statecraft
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) embodied the Renaissance preoccupation with political power. Machiavelli is often considered to be the founder of modern, secular power politics, but he himself was more concerned with Italy’s political condition. He was the secretary to the Florence Council of Ten, and made numerous diplomatic missions. He traveled to France and Germany, where he was the workings of statecraft firsthand. In 1512, the Spanish’s victory of the French led to the reinstatement of the Medici in Florence. Republicans, (including Machiavelli) were sent into exile. Now that he had been forced to give up politics, Machiavelli now wrote books, including The Prince [1513]. The major concerns of The Prince were the acquisition and expansion of political power as the means to restore and maintain order in his time. His ideas on politics came from two major sources; Italy’s political problems and his knowledge of ancient Rome. Late medieval political theorists believed that a ruler was justified in using his political power only if it contributed to the common good of the people he served. The ethical side of the prince’s actions was the focus of many late medieval treatises on politics. Machiavelli contradicted this approach. He believed that people shouldn’t ignore the reality of how people act in order to live up to an ideal, and that political activity couldn’t be restricted by moral considerations. He believed this to be far more realistic than the ideas of medieval times. According to Machiavelli, a prince’s attitude toward power must be based on an understanding of human nature. “For of men one can, in general, say this: They are ungrateful, fickle, deceptive and deceiving, avoiders of danger, eager to gain.”
Cesare Borgia was a good example for Machiavelli’s ideals. “So anyone who decides that the policy to follow when one has newly acquired power is to destroy one’s enemies, to secure some allies, to win wars, whether by force or by fraud, to make oneself both loved and feared by one’s subjects…can not hope to find, in the recent past, a better model to imitate than Cesare Borgia.” –Machiavelli
Shortly after The Prince, Machiavelli wrote a political treatise called The Discourses. In this work, he wrote about how a man of his day could learn lessons from examining the institutions of the Roman Republic.
The Intellectual Renaissance in Italy
Individualism and secularism emerged and grew during the Italian Renaissance, most noticeably in the artistic and intellectual realms. Italy was the cultural leader of Europe. The new culture was mainly the product of a wealthy, urban society. The most important literary movement associated with the Renaissance is humanism.
Italian Renaissance Humanism
Renaissance humanism was a form of education and culture based on the study of the classics. It was an educational program that revolved around the liberal arts-grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy or ethics, and history, all of which were based on examination of classical authors.
Some humanists were teachers of the humanities at secondary schools and universities. Others were secretaries in the chancelleries of Italian city-states or at the courts of princes or popes. Most humanists were laymen rather than members of the clergy.
The Emergence of Humanism
Petrarch (1304-1374) is considered to be the father of Italian Renaissance humanism, as he did more than any other individual in the 14th century to foster the development of Renaissance humanism. He was the one who first characterized the Middle Ages as a period of darkness, although this promoted the mistaken idea that medieval culture was ignorant of classical antiquity. He considered the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages for its “barbarous” Latin and use of logic, in the place of rhetoric, to combine faith and reason.
Petrach’s interest in the classics sent him on a quest for forgotten Latin manuscripts and began the ransacking of libraries in Europe.
He rejected his father’s dream of him becoming a lawyer and took up a literacy career instead. He was an arrogant man who once said, “Some of the greatest kings of our time have loved me and cultivated my friendship….When I was their guest it was more as if they were mine.”
It was fashionable for humanists to use Cicero as a model for prose and Virgil for poetry. Petrach one said, “Christ is my God; Cicero is the prince of the language.”
Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Italy
The humanist movement took a new direction when it became closely tied to Florentine civic sprit and pride. 14th century humanists like Petrach described the intellectual life as one of solitude, therefore they rejected family and a life of action in the community. However, in the busy civic world Florence, intellectuals began to take a new view of their role. Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) was a humanist, Florentine patriot, and chancellor of the city. He wrote a biography of Cicero called New Cicero, in which he waxed enthusiastically about the fusion of political action and literary creation in Cicero’s life.
Cicero served as the inspiration for the Renaissance belief that it was the duty of an intellectual to live an active life for one’s state. A person only “grows to maturity—both intellectually and morally—though participation” in the life of the state. Humanists then came to believe that their study of the humanities should be put to the service of the state.
Also in the 15th century was a growing interest in Greek. Leonardo Bruni was one of the first Italian humanists to gain knowledge of Greek. He became a pupil of the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras, who taught in Florence from 1396-1400. Humanists perused the works of Plato and Greek poets, dramatics, historians, and orators, such as Thucydides, Euripides, and Sophocles, all of which had been ignored by the scholars of the High Middle Ages. By the 15th century, people began to become conscious of their role as humanists.
Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) became a papal secretary. He then turned his attention to the literary criticism of ancient texts. His most famous work was his demonstration that the Donation of Constantine, a document used by the popes, to claim temporal sovereignty all over the west, was forgery that was actually written in the 8th century. He also wrote The Elegances of the Latin Language, which was an effort to purify Medieval Latin and restore the language to its proper position over the vernacular. Unlike the early humanists who sought to take model of any author who had written before the 7th century AD, Valla identified different stages in the growth of the Latin language and only accepted the Latin of the last century of the Roman Republic and the first century of the empire.
Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) was another significant humanist of this period. He reflected the cult of humanism at its best. He served as a papal secretary for 50 years, which enabled him to collect classical manuscripts. He was responsible for finding all of the writings of 15 different authors. His best known work was the Facetiae, a collection of jokes that included cynical criticism of the clergy. Poggio and other Italian humanists were critical of the Catholic Church, but fundamentally they accepted it and wished to restore more simple, pure, and ethical Christianity. For the humanists, the study of the classics was perfectly compatible with Christianity.
Humanism and Philosophy
During the second half of the 15th century, more and more people became interested in the works of Plato, especially in the members of the Florentine Platonic Academy. (Which was an informal discussion group, not an actual school.) Its patron was Cosimo de’ Medici, the de facto ruler of Florence, and he commissioned a translation of Plato’s dialogues by Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), one of the academy’s leaders who dedicated his life to the translation of Plato and the exposition of the Platonic philosophy known as Neoplatonism.
Ficino tried to fuse Christianity and Platonism into a single system. His Neoplatonism was based on two ideas: the Neoplatonic hierarchy of substances and the theory of spiritual love. He restated the idea of a hierarchy of substances from the lowest form of physical matter (plants) to the purest spirit (God). Humans occupied a position in between them, and were the link between the material world and the spiritual world. This theory maintained that like humans are bound together by their common humanity by love, so too are all parts of the universe.
Another product of the Florentine intellectual environment in the late 15th century was Renaissance Hermeticism. Ficino translated a Greek work entitled the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin. The Hermetic manuscripts stressed the occult sciences with emphasis on astrology, alchemy, and magic, and focused on theological and philosophical beliefs and speculations. Some parts of the Hermetic writings talked about seeing divinity embodied in all aspects of nature. Giordano Bruno, one of the most prominent of the 16th century Hermeticists one said: “God, as a whole is in all things.” For Renaissance intellectuals, the rebirth of Hermetic ideas offered a new view of humankind. They believed that humans were had been created as divine beings with divine power, but had chosen to enter the natural world. Humans could recover this divinity though a regenerative experience or purification of the soul. After they did this, they became true sages or magi, who had knowledge of God and of truth.
Ficino and his pupil Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) were the most prominent magi in the late 15th century in Italy. Pico created one of the most famous writings of the Renaissance, the Oration of the Dignity of Man, a preface to his 900 Conclusions, which were meant to sum up all learning and were offered for public debate. Pico diligently sorted though the writings of many philosophers of different backgrounds for the common “nuggets of universal truth.” In the Oration, Pico stated that man’s potential was unlimited: “To him it is granted to have whatever he chooses, whatever he wills.” Pico took an interest in Hermetic philosophy, considering it to be the “science of the Divine, which embraces the deepest contemplation of the most secret things, and at last the knowledge of all nature.”
Education in the Renaissance
The humanist movement had a huge impact on education, because Renaissance humanists believed that a person could be dramatically changed by education. They wrote books and developed schools for their ideals. Vittorino de Feltre (1378-1446) made the most famous one in 1423. Vittorino based much of his educational system on the ideals of classical authors, mainly Cicero and Quintilian.
A treatise on education called Concerning Character by Pietro Paolo Vergerio (1370-1444) influenced the Renaissance view of the importance of the liberal arts. This treatise stated that the liberal arts were the key to true freedom, enabling individuals to reach their full potential. Liberal arts included history, moral philosophy, eloquence, letters (grammar and logic), poetry, math, astronomy, and music. Also, one had to master Greek and Latin since it enabled students to read the great classical authors who were the foundation of the liberal arts. In short, the purpose of a liberal education was to produce individuals who followed a path of virtue and wisdom and possessed the rhetorical skills to persuade others to take it.
Humanist schools weren’t trying to create great scholars, but rather to create citizens who could participate in the civic life of their communities.
Students at Vittorino’s school at Mantua also had to undergo physical education. Students were taught javelin throwing, archery, and dancing and were encouraged to run, wrestle, hunt, and swim. Christianity was not excluded from the school, either. Students were taught the Scriptures and the works of the church fathers, especially Augustine. Vittorino himself was a devout Christian, and his students were required to attend daily mass.
Humanist schools were mainly for rich men. Vittorino’s only female pupils were the two daughters of the Gonzaga ruler of Mantua, and they were discouraged from learning math and rhetoric. Religion and morals were thought to “hold the first place in the education of a Christian Lady.”
Isotta Nogarola and Cassandra Fedele of Venice were two women of Italy who were educated in the humanist fashion and went own to establish their own literary careers.
Humanism and History
Humanism had a strong impact on the writing of history. The humanists approached the task of writing history differently than from those who wrote the history of the Middle Ages. The humanist beliefs enabled them to think in terms of the passage of time. They divided the past into the ancient world, the dark ages, and their own age, which provided a new sense of chronology in history. The humanists were also responsible for secularizing the writing of history. They took out the role of miracles in historical interpretation, looking instead to documents. Humanists also changed the conception of causation in history. In most medieval historical literature, historical events were supposed to be caused by God’s role in human affairs. Humanists deemphasized divine intervention in favor of human motives, stressing political forces or the role individuals in history.
Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540) has been called the greatest historian between Tacitus in the first century AD AND Voltaire and Gibbon in the 18th century. His History of Italy and History of Florence represent the beginning of “modern analytical historical bibliography.” Guicciardini believed that the purpose of writing history was to teach lessons. He emphasized political and military history, and his works relied heavily on personal examples and documentary sources.
Leonardo Bruni wrote a History of the Florentine People and Jacob Wimpheling wrote On the Excellence and Magnificence of the Germans.
The Impact of Printing
The period of the Renaissance witnessed the invention of printing, which made an immediate impact on European intellectual life and thought. While printing from hand-carved wooden blocks had been around in the west since the 12th century, the 15th century saw multiple printing with movable metal type. Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz played a big role in bringing the processes to completion. Gutenburg’s Bible was the first real book produced from movable type. It was completed in 1455.
By 1500, more than 40,000 titles had been published, about half of which were religious books. After bibles and whatnot came the Greek and Latin classics, medieval grammars, legal handbooks, works on philosophy, and a bunch of popular romances. While it led to standardized and definitive texts, some humanists believed printing vulgarized learning. Without the printing press, the new religious ideas of the Reformation wouldn’t have spread as quickly as they did in the 16th century.
The Artistic Renaissance
Artists of the Renaissance considered imitating nature to be their main goal. Leonardo da Vinci and other Italians believed that it was Giotto in the 14th century that began this, but what Giotto started wasn’t continued again until Masaccio (1401-142 cool Masaccio’s cycle of frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel has long been considered as the first masterpiece of Early Renaissance art. He painted massive, 3D human figures which would provide a model for later generations of Florentine artists. He painted Tribute Money.
In the 15th century, an experimental trend grew in two directions. One placed importance on the mathematical side of painting, things such as working out the laws of perspective and organizing the outdoor space and light by geometry. Paolo Uccello’s (1397-1475) work showed a mastery of the laws of perspective.
The other direction was involved the investigation of movement and anatomical structure. Antonio Pollaiuolo’s (c. 1432-149 cool The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian attempts to show the human body under stress. Indeed, the realistic portrayal of the human nude became one of the foremost preoccupations of Italian Renaissance art.
Sandro Botticelli’s (1445-1510) interest in Greek and Roman mythology was shown in one of his most famous pieces, Primavera or Spring, which is set in the garden of Venus, the garden of eternal spring. Although his figures are well defined, the also show an otherworldly quality that is not typically normal of the realistic paintings of the Early Renaissance.
The revolutionary artistic achievements of the Renaissance weren’t limited to paintings. Donato di Donatello (1386-1466) carved a statue of David, that, like his other sculptures, radiated simplicity and strength that reflected the dignity of humanity.
The architectural monuments of Roman antiquity inspired Filippo Brunelleschi, (1377-1446) who then applied their style to new architecture. The inside of the Church of San Lorenzo (which he designed) was much different than the medieval cathedrals. It had columns, rounded arches, and coffered ceilings that created an environment that didn’t overwhelm the worshiper. Like painters and sculptors, Renaissance architects tried to reflect a human centered world. Thus came an emphasis on portraiture.
The final stage of Renaissance art, known as the High Renaissance, was between 1480 and 1520. The shift to the High Renaissance was marked by the increasing importance of Rome as the cultural center of the Italian Renaissance.
The Italian Renaissance was dominated by three artists, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Raphael (1483-1520) and Michelangelo (1475-1564). Leonardo carried on the 15th century experimental tradition by studying everything, even dissecting human bodies to better see how nature worked. But he stressed the need to advance beyond realism and he initiated the High Renaissance’s preoccupation with the idealization of nature, or the attempt to generalize from realistic portrayal to an ideal form.
Raphael grew as a painter at a young age; by age 25, he was already considered one of Italy’s best painters. He painted numerous madonnas, in which he tried to achieve an ideal of beauty beyond human standards.
Michelangelo was an accomplished painter, sculptor, and architect. He was influenced by Neoplatonism, which can be seen in his figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. The figures are muscular and reveal an ideal type of human being with perfect proportions. Their beauty is meant to reflect their divine beauty.
Michelangelo carved a statue of David, which he maintained was already inside the uncarved piece of stone: “I only take away the surplus, the statue is already there.” It is 14 feet high, the largest sculpture in Italy since the time of Rome.
Donato Bramante (1444-1514) was an architect in the High Renaissance. He came from Urbino but took up residence in Rome, where he designed a temple on the supposed site of Saint Peter’s martyrdom. It was called the Tempietto or ‘little temple,’ and it had Doric columns surrounding a sanctuary enclosed by a dome. He had recaptured the grandeur of ancient Rome. This led Pope Julius II to commission him to design a new basilica for Rome, which eventually became the great St. Peter’s.
The Artist and Social Status
In the Early Renaissance, artists began their careers as apprentices to masters in craft guilds. Apprentices with unusual talent might eventually become masters and run their own workshops. Much like the Middle Ages, artists were still viewed as artisans. Guilds depended on commissions for their projects, therefore the upper classes determined both the content and purpose of paintings and sculptures. But by the end of the 15th century, talented individuals were no longer seen as artisans, but as artistic geniuses. They were heroes, praised for their creativity rather than their competence as craftspeople. For example, Michelangelo was often called “II Divino,” or the Divine One. Society excused their eccentricities and valued their genius. As respect for artists grew, so did their profit. They managed to rise on the social scale, mingling with the political and intellectual elite. Because of this, they became aware of new intellectual theories, which they embodied in their art.
The Northern Artistic Renaissance
Artists of the north and artists of Italy took different approaches in trying to show their world exactly as it was. In Italy, the human body became a way to show expression, but in the north, the prevalence of Gothic cathedrals resulted in more emphasis on illuminated manuscripts and wooden panel painting for altarpieces. Great care was required for each of these pieces, as space was limited.
Jan van Eyck (1390?-1441) was among the first to use oil paint. He painted Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride, in which the attention to details is incredible. Van Eyck’s comprehension of perspective was still uncertain. As usual for northern artists, his effort to imitate nature was not done by mastery of the laws of perspective and proportion, but in the accurate portrayal of details. Also, northern painters put great emphasis on the emotional intensity of religious feeling. By the end of the 15th century, however, northern artists began to study Italy and were influenced by the artists there.
Albrecht Durer (1471-152 cool was greatly affected by the Italians. He made two trips to Italy and mastered the laws of perspective and Renaissance theories of proportion. He even wrote treatises on both subjects. He made the Adoration of the Magi.
Music in the Renaissance
The dukes of Burgundy in northern Europe attracted some of the best artists and musicians of the time. One of them was Guillaume Dufay (c. 1400-1374), who was one of the most important composers of his time. He combined the late medieval style of France with the early Renaissance style of Italy. His main work was in changing the music of the mass. He used secular tunes instead of Gregorian chants.
The European State in the Renaissance
Professional bureaucracies, royal courts, and parliamentary assemblies were all products of the 12th and 13th centuries. Song monarchy had developed and organized these states, but in the 14th century, financial and dynastic problems as well as changes from their nobilities had threatened the internal stability of European governments. Territorial units such as the Holy Roman Empire and Italy failed to develop such monarchies, but even in these places strong princes and city councils managed to maintain their authority. Italian Renaissance states were the first true examples of the modern secular state.
The “New Monarchies”
In the second half of the 15th century, attempts were made to reestablish the centralized power of monarchical governments. Renaissance monarchs were different than traditional monarchs in their concentration of royal authority, their attempts to suppress the nobility, their efforts to control the church, and their insistence upon having the loyalty of people living within definite territorial bounds. The Renaissance period marks the further extension of centralized royal authority.
The Growth of the French Monarchy
After the Hundred Years’ War, France had few people, desolate farmlands, ruined commerce, and the unruly nobles made it hard for the kings to assert their authority. But the war had a positive outcome for the French: a newly created national feeling towards a common enemy, which the kings could use to reestablish monarchical power.
Charles VII (1422-1461) established a royal army made up of cavalry and archers. He received from the Estates-General the right to levy the taille, which is an annual direct tax. Losing control of the purse meant less power for this parliamentary body. Charles VII also secured the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (143 cool , which was an agreement with the papacy that strengthened the liberties of the French church administratively at the expense of the papacy and enabled the king to assume control over the church of France.
King Louis XI (1461-1483) advanced the process of developing a French territorial state. He was known as the Spider because of his wily and devious ways. Some consider him to be the founder of the French national state. He declared the tallie a permanent tax, which secured a sound, regular source of income. Charles had tried to create a middle kingdom between France and Germany, which Louis opposed to. Louis tried to help the French economy though the growth of industry; he introduced new industries such as the silk industry to Lyons. He was unsuccessful, however, in repressing the French nobility. Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy (1467-1477) was particularly problematic. In 1477, Charles was killed by the Swiss, after which Louis took over part of his land.
England: Civil War and a New Monarchy
The Hundred Years’ War also took its toll on England. The lack of manpower and the cost of the war strained its economy. As well, the end of the war brought domestic turmoil to England when the War of the Roses broke out in the 1450s. This civil war was between the ducal house of Lancaster, whose symbol was a red rose, and the ducal house of York, whose symbol was a white rose. Many aristocratic families were brought into it. In 1485, Henry Tudor, the duke of Richmond, defeated the last Yorkish king, Richard III (1483-1485) at Bosworth Field and established the new Tudor dynasty.
Henry VII (1485-1509) was the first Tudor king, and he worked to reduce internal disagreement and establish a strong monarchial government. This was hard because the English aristocracy had been weakened by the War of the Roses as so many nobles had been killed. Unlike France and Spain, England didn’t have a standing army. Instead, the king relied on special commissions to trusted nobles to raise troops for a specific campaign. Henry established the Court of Star Chamber, which didn’t use juries and allowed torture to be used to achieve confessions.
Henry VII was highly successful in providing income from the traditional finical resources of the English monarch; the crown lands, judicial fees and fines, and customs. He also used diplomacy to avoid wars in order to save money, which also made it so he could avoid calling Parliament on a regular basis to grant him funds. Henry won the favor of the gentry and middle class, who supported his monarchy.
The Unification of Spain
Several independent Christian kingdoms had been created in the course of the long reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims during the Middle Ages. Few people in the beginning of the 15th century would have predicted the unification of these kingdoms. A huge step in that direction was made when Isabella of Castile (1474-1504) married Ferdinand of Aragon (1479-1516) in 1469. Both kingdoms kept their same parliaments, courts, laws, coinage, speech, customs, and political organs. Nevertheless, the two rulers worked to strengthen royal control of government. The royal council was stripped of aristocrats and filled with middle-class lawyers who were trained in the principles of Roman law.
Hermandades (“brotherhoods”) were medieval town organizations that had been organized to maintain law and order. They were brought back into existence, though they were disbanded by 1498 when the royal administration became strong enough to deal with lawlessness. Ferdinand and Isabella had made them into a kind of national militia. Ferdinand and Isabella also reorganized the military forces of Spain, and by the 16th century it was the best in Europe.
Ferdinand and Isabella recognized the importance of controlling the Catholic Church. They took the right of the pope to select the most important church officials in Spain. The monarchs were sincere Catholics, and used their power of the church to bring reform. Cardinal Ximenes, Isabella’s chief minister, restored discipline and eliminated immorality among the monks and secular clergy.
Spain had two big religious minorities, the Jews and the Muslims. During the 14th century, persecution of Spanish Jews caused for many conversions to Christianity. Complaints of these people secretly reverting to Judaism caused Ferdinand and Isabella to ask the pope to introduce the Inquisition into Spain in 1478. The Inquisition worked with cruel efficiency, eliminating conversos. However, it had no power over practicing Jews. But in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled all professed Jews from Spain, and in 1502, Isabella issued a decree expelling all professed Muslims from her kingdom.
While Ferdinand and Isabella were in power, Spain became an important power in European affairs. Granada and Navarre had been conquered. But still, Spain remained divided.
The Holy Roman Empire: The Success of the Habsburgs
The Holy Roman Empire failed to develop a strong monarchical authority, and after 1438, the Habsburg dynasty was still going on. The house of Habsburgh had become one of the wealthiest landholders in the empire, and by the mid-fifteenth century began to play an important role in European affairs. Their success was not though military victories, but though a policy of dynastic marriages.
Fredrick III (1440-1493) lost Bohemia and Hungary for Habsburg, but he gained Frenche-Comte in east central France, Luxembourg, and a large part of the Low Countries by marrying his son Maximilian to Mary, the daughter of Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy. France feared the Habsburgs would surround them.
Much was expected of Maximilian I (1493-1519) when he became emperor. He attempted to centralize the administration by creating new institutions common the entire empire, however, the German princes offered opposition, which doomed these efforts. In the end, his only success came from his marriage alliances. Philip of Burgundy, the son of Maximilian, was married to Joanna, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. Philip and Joanna had a son, Charles. After a long series of deaths, Charles became heir to three lines, the Habsburg, Burgundian, and Spanish, making him the leading monarch of his day.
While the Holy Roman Empire didn’t develop along the lines of a centralized monarchical state, the power of independent princes and electors within the empire rose. Princes built up bureaucracies, developed standing armies, created fiscal systems, and introduced Roman law. They posed a threat to the church, the emperor, and smaller independent bodies in the Holy Roman Empire.
The Struggle for Strong Monarchy in Easter Europe
Rulers of Eastern Europe struggled to achieve the centralization of their territorial states. Religious differences also troubled the area, as Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox Christians, and pagans didn’t get along.
Most of Poland’s history revolved around the struggle between the crown and the landed nobility.
In 1511, the magnates reduced the peasantry to serfdom and established the right to elect their kings. The Polish kings proved unable to establish a strong royal authority.
Bohemia was part of the Holy Roman Empire, but their distrust of the Germans and close ethnic ties to the Poles and Slovaks led the Czechs to associate with the Slavic. The Hussite wars led to further dissension and civil war. Because of weak monarchy, the Bohemian nobles increased their authority and wealth at the expense of both the crown and church.
Wealthy bishops and great territorial lords became powerful, independent political figures. King Matthias Corvinus (1458-1490) broke the power of the lords and created a well-organized bureaucracy. He also patronized the new humanist culture, brought Italian scholars and artists to his capital at Buda, and made his court one of the most brilliant outside Italy. After he died, Hungary returned to weak rule, and his work was undone.
Ever since the 13th century, Russia had been under the control of the Mongols. Gradually, the princes of Moscow rose to power by using their relationship to the Mongol Khans to increase their wealth and expand their land. During Ivan III’s (1462-1505) rule, a new Russia was born. Ivan III annexed other Russian principalities and took advantage of dissension among the Mongols to throw off their yoke by 1480. He invaded the lands of Lithuanian-Polish dynasty and added the territories around Kiev, Smolensky, and Chernigov to his new Muscovite state.
The Ottoman Turks and the End of Byzantium
The Ottoman Turks were threatening Easter Europe. The Byzantine Empire had served as a buffer between the Muslim Middle East and the Latin West for centuries. The sack of Constantinople in 1204 and its occupation in weakened it by the west. The Palaeologus dynasty (1260-1453) had tried to reestablish Byzantine power in the Balkans after the Latin Empire was overthrown, but the threat from the Turks doomed the long-lasting empire.
The Ottoman Turks spread rapidly, taking over the lands of the Seljuk Turks and the Byzantine Empire. Finally, in 1453, the great city of Constantinople fell to the Turks after a siege of several months. The Turks then prepared to exert renewed pressure on the west, in both the Mediterranean and up the Danube valley toward Vienna. By the end of the 15th century, they were threatening Hungary, Austria, Bohemia, and Poland. The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, became their enemy in the 16th century.
The future belonged to territorial states organized by national monarchies. They had superior resources and were developing institutions that represented the interests of most of the population. The interests of a state were the interests of its ruling dynasty. Loyalty was owed to the ruler, not the state. Some chance of a representative government remained in the form of Parliament, Estates-General, Cortes, or Reichstag. Monarchs were the strongest in the west, and (except for Russia) weakest in the east.
The Church in the Renaissance
The Great Schism finally ended in 1417 because of the efforts of the Council of Constance. The council had three main objectives: to end the schism, to eradicate heresy, and to reform the church.
The Problems of Heresy and Reform
Heresy wasn’t a new problem; the church had developed inquisitorial machinery to deal with it. But Lollardy and Hussitism, two new movements in the 14th and early 15th centuries posed new threats to the church.
John Wyclif (c. 1328-1384), an Oxford theologian, was the creator of Lollardy. His disgust with the corruption of the clergy led him to a far-ranging attack on papal authority and medieval Christian beliefs and practices. He alleged that there was no basis in Scripture for papal claims of temporal authority and said that popes should be stripped of both their power and property. At one point, he even called the pope the Antichrist. He believed that the Bible should be a Christian’s sole authority, therefore condemning pilgrimages, the worshipping of saints, and a whole series of rituals and rites that had developed in the medieval church. He attracted a group of followers who became known as Lollards. The Lollards were forced to go underground after 1400. However, a marriage between the royal families in England and Bohemia enabled Lollard ideas to spread to Bohemia, where the reinforced the ideas of a group of Czech reformers led by John Hus (1374-1415).
Hus called for the elimination of the worldliness and corruption of the clergy and attacked the power of the papacy within the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church in Bohemia was already widely criticized.
The Council of Constance tried to deal with the problem of heresy by bringing John Hus to the council. Although Emperor Sigismund granted him a safe conduct, Hus was arrested, condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake at 1415. This turned Bohemia into a revolutionary upheaval, thus starting the Hussite wars which combined religious, social and national issues. It wracked the Holy Roman Empire until a truce was arranged in 1436.
The council passed two reform decrees. One was Sacrosancta, which stated that a general council of the church received its authority from God, therefore every Christian, including the pope, was subject to its authority. The other decree Frequens, which provided for the regular holding of councils to ensure that church reform would continue. These decrees proved to be ineffective. Popes had to execute decrees, and they wouldn’t cooperate with councils that diminished their authority. As early as Martin V in 1417, popes worked steadfastly for the next 30 years to defeat the conciliar movement. In 1460, Pope Pius II issued the papal bull Execrabilis, condemning the appeals to a council over the head of a pope as heretical.
By the mid-fifteenth century, the popes had reasserted their supremacy over the Catholic Church. However, they didn’t have any possibility of asserting supremacy over temporal governments as the medieval papacy had. It had lost much moral prestige.
The Renaissance Papacy
The phrase “Renaissance papacy” refers to the line of popes from the end of the Great Schism (1417) to the beginnings of the Reformation in the early 16th century. Renaissance papacy and the Catholic Church had become secularized. Popes had been temporal as well as spiritual rulers for centuries.
Of all the Renaissance popes, Julius II (1503-1513) was most involved in war and politics. He personally led armies against his enemies, which disgusted the Christians who viewed the pope as a spiritual leader.
To further their territorial aims in the Papal Sates, the popes needed financial resources and loyal servants. Since they were not hereditary monarchs, popes couldn’t build up dynasties, and instead came to rely on the practice of nepotism to promote their families’ interests. For example, Pope Sixtus IV (1471-1484) made five of his nephews cardinals and gave them a bunch of church offices to build up their finances.
Alexander VI (1492-1503) was a member of the Borgia family. He raised one son, one nephew, and the brother of one mistress to the cardinalate. He scandalized the church by encouraging his son Cesare to carve a territorial state in central Italy out of the territories of the Papal States.
Leo X (1513-1521) was the son of Lorenzo de’ Medici. He was made an archbishop at age 13, and acquired a taste refined taste in art, manners, and social life among the Florentine Renaissance elite. He became pope at the age of 37.
Conclusion
The Renaissance was a time of transition that saw a continuation of the economic, political and social trends that had begun in the high Middle Ages. It was a movement in which intellectuals and artists achieved a new view of mankind and raised fundamental questions about the value and importance of the individual. Accomplishments were made by an elite; the ideas of the Renaissance didn’t have a large base among the masses.
The humanists raised fundamental issues about the Catholic Church, which was still an important institution.
After the Reformation, Europe would never be the unified Christian commonwealth it once was again.
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