Download INTRODUCTION TO THE RENAISSANCE (1350

INTRODUCTION TO THE RENAISSANCE (1350-1600)
The term "Renaissance" is derived from a French word meaning "rebirth." It
was a term invented by Renaissance scholars who considered the preceding
medieval age to be a time of ignorance and superstition (they called the
medieval age "The Dark Ages"). By contrast, they thought that their own
time marked the beginning of a glorious new age, and they sought to
reconnect it with the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome. Modern
historians view the Renaissance as a transitional period between the
medieval age and the modern age.
A convenient place for historians to mark the beginning of the Renaissance
is the era of the Black Death in Europe (c. 1350). It began in Italy, which at
the time was not a unified nation but a region divided into distinct
geographic areas. Northern Italy was more urban, with vibrant commercial
centers like Florence, Milan, Venice, and Genoa. They were company towns
controlled by rich middle class merchant families, or they were controlled by
powerful, local warlords. Each was independent of the others and often in
competition with its neighbors, and from time to time, foreign armies
invaded northern Italy in order to seize its valuable territory and commercial
assets. Central Italy was controlled by the Catholic Church and was divided
into a number of small principalities called the Papal States. Finally,
southern Italy was largely agricultural and part of the so-called Kingdom of
Naples and Sicily. Italy, in fact, would not unify into a modern nation until
1870.
The middle class merchants who controlled Florence, Genoa, Venice, and
Milan by the late 1300's succeeded in making both themselves and their
cities very rich, and they used their wealth to expand their businesses, their
political authority, and their military power. They also funded artists, the
building of churches, the work of scholars, and the writers of literature. The
result was the first great flourishing of the creative arts in modern times.
This was the era of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello, Lorenzo
Ghiberti, Titian, Alessandro Botticelli, and Giovanni Bellini, just to name a
few great artists of the period. A major innovation of the early Renaissance
was the development of perspective art—mathematically precise renderings
which fooled the eye and appeared to exhibit depth, even though the images
were purely two-dimensional. This was also the era of talented writers
(Niccolo Machiavelli, Giovanni Boccaccio, Dante Aligheri, for example),
architects such as Filippo Brunelleschi and Donato Bramante, and scholars
such as Marsilius of Padua, Marsilio Ficino, and Lorenzo Valla. The period
from about 1450 to 1500 was relatively untroubled in northern Italy, with the
result that Italian commercial fortunes and the fine arts both enjoyed
spectacular success.
Around 1500, however, the situation changed. Northern Italy was invaded
by foreigners, and Italy's city-states went to war with each other after a truce
which had lasted almost 50 years. This turmoil disrupted both commerce and
the arts, so that after 1500 the progressive Renaissance movement drifted
northward into central Europe. The new centers of Renaissance culture and
art after 1500 would be located in England, France, Spain, Portugal, the
Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. Again, the arts and scholarship
flourished, although this North European phase of the Renaissance was
decidedly more Christian in tone, with less of the classical focus common to
Italian Renaissance art and scholarship. North European scholars were, in
general, more interested in analyzing Biblical manuscripts than works by
Cicero, Aristotle, or Herodotus, and the works of North European artists
were more likely to reflect Biblical events than those from Greek mythology
or early Roman history. While Italian artists pioneered perspective art, North
European artists developed the first oil paints, which had the virtue of drying
slowly, allowing the artist to work less quickly and frantically. Oil paints
also dried to a brilliant luster and expanded the number of colors at the
artist's command. The result is often stunning in its realism and precision.
Good examples of these new artistic capabilities can be seen in paintings
like Jan van Eyck's "Arnolfini Portrait" (1434) and "The Madonna of
Chancellor Rolin" (1435). Jan van Eyck and his brother Hubert were Belgian
pioneers in the use of oil paints. In the realm of scholarship, Erasmus of
Rotterdam was a Catholic cleric from the Netherlands who combined great
intelligence and wit in his criticisms of the Catholic Church, which he hoped
to reform. His book, The Praise of Folly (1512) is a classic of the period. He
is only one of many prominent scholars of the North European Renaissance.
The upturn in European economic activity which had begun in the High
Middle Ages (1000-1350 AD) was temporarily derailed during the Black
Death pandemic of the mid-1300's, but following the Black Death, economic
activity once again began to increase in volume and expand geographically.
Historians, in fact, refer to the Renaissance as an age of Commercial
Revolution. Disturbances by the Muslims, however, were on the increase in
eastern Europe. The threat of Muslim invasion or attack hung over many
cities and communities in eastern Europe, and a Muslim army attacked and
seized the Byzantine capital at Constantinople in 1453, bringing Roman
culture to an end at last. These disturbances shut down the flow of
commercial goods from the Far East to Europe via the Silk Road or made
them prohibitively expensive. Europeans, therefore, began looking for a
cheaper and more direct way of acquiring Far Eastern products. In 1498, the
Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, succeeded in sailing from Europe to
India, opening the first modern all-sea route to the Far East. This event was
to revolutionize maritime trade and deepend cultural and commercial
connections between East and West. Moreover, in an attempt to find yet
another route to the Far East, Christopher Columbus sailed westward from
Europe, in the belief that the globe was much smaller than it actually is. Had
he understood the earth's true dimensions, he would never have ventured
westward in an attempt to reach the Far East. He was also unaware that an
unbroken landmass, the Americas, blocked his way to the Far East, and as a
result, he accidentally discovered the New World. Thus, commercial
expansion during the Renaissance also increased geographical knowledge of
the world and contributed to unprecedented, new interactions between
previously isolated human communities and cultures.
An unexpected and particularly poignant tragedy occurred as a result of
these new human interactions. Explorers and colonists brought their native
plants and animals to far-flung regions of the world, unwittingly changing
the local ecology, introducing new predators and invasive species, and
spreading disease across the globe. Worse, human beings themselves often
carried deadly diseases with them across the world during their travels.
Infectious diseases in general tend to originate in human populations which
live in close proximity to animals. Measles, for example, is a human version
of a disease common to grazing animals like cows and buffalo, called
Rinderpest. Similarly, smallpox is a deadly disease related to a number of
similar animal diseases such as cowpox and monkeypox. Not all animal
diseases give rise to deadly disease in people, but when they do, the result is
often devastating, at least to the first generations of human beings exposed to
the new disease. There are always some people who are immune to it or who
survive having it, and their offspring generally have some degree of
immunity as well. They may then act as carriers of disease without knowing
it. When Europeans came into contact with native Americans, they
unwittingly sparked epidemics that devastated whole villages and tribes.
Native Americans had long hunted animals but had never lived in close
proximity with them, so they had no protective immunity. As a result,
European explorers and colonists proved deadly to America's native peoples.
No one will ever know the full extent of the disaster, but it is clear that the
vast majority of native Americans did not survive their encounter with the
foreigners. The ease with which Europeans established themselves in
America was often the result, at least in part, of the debilitating impact of
infectious disease.
The ancient Roman Empire had been a unified state controlled by an
emperor who resided either in Rome or Constantinople. Europe had never
before been so unified and has never achieved that degree of political unity
again. Medieval Europe, by contrast, was fragmented into hundreds of small
principalities ruled by local nobles. It had no centrally located capital city or
preeminent ruler. A powerful European noble who presumed to call himself
"king" typically did so only with the grudging consent of the majority of his
fellow nobles, most of whom lived securely in their own regional kingdoms
and ignored the pretensions of anyone calling himself "king." One of the
important achievements of the Renaissance was the gradual consolidation of
these numerous medieval principalities into centralized monarchies and the
emergence of the modern nations which make up the political map of
Europe today, a process called by historians "nation-building." For this
process to take place, however, an ambitious noble eager to be king in more
than name only had to find ways of either winning the active support of his
fellow nobles or of eliminating them altogether.
Nation-building began in western Europe with the emergence of the modern
nation of Spain in the late 1400's. The marriage in 1469 of Ferdinand of
Aragon and Isabella of Castile, heirs of Spain's two largest kingdoms,
united Spain for the first time. Both fervently Catholic, they carried on a
protracted campaign to rid Spain of Jews and Muslims, and thereby gave
Spain's nobles a common purpose which joined them to their king and
queen. England made its most significant strides toward political
centralization at about the same time. A long civil war called The Wars of
the Roses (1455-1485) was a dynastic struggle among two noble families,
the Lancasters and the Yorks, for control of the English throne. England's
nobles joined one side or the other in this bloody civil war, and as a result,
whole aristocratic families were wiped out to the last man, while many
others were significantly weakened. The victor of this struggle, Henry
Tudor, the Earl of Richmond, who became King Henry VII, was England's
first powerful monarch. The Hundred Years' War did much to begin the
process of uniting France, but in many ways France remained politically
fractured until the reign of King Louis XIV in the late 1600's.
In central and eastern Europe, however, the process of nation-building
stalled entirely, either because of regional differences or because of the
strength and stubborn resistance of the local nobility. Italy remained
politically fractured until the late 1800's, as noted above. In the Holy Roman
Empire, the German realm which emerged from Charlemagne's Frankish
kingdom, nobles were in complete control, although they periodically
elected an emperor as their figurehead ruler. Seven of the most powerful
German nobles elected a new emperor whenever necessary. They
purposefully kept him weak by denying him a standing army and by
severely limiting his ability to collect taxes from them. An assembly of
German nobles, called a "diet," convened from time to time to deal with
important matters, but at these meetings regional interests and local leaders
often took precedence over national concerns or the concerns of the emperor
himself. The Holy Roman Empire, nonetheless, survived until it was
dissolved by Napoleon in the early 1800's. The modern, centralized nation of
Germany emerged from its ruins, but not until 1871. Nonetheless, the
centralizing, nation-building process which was to create the map of modern
Europe had its beginning in the Renaissance era.
Some historians regard the Renaissance as the first major historical period of
modern times. It is certainly easy to see it as a transitional period, since
Renaissance culture was clearly an outgrowth of late medieval culture.
However, many of its prominent characteristics were new and modern. Old
patterns were being broken, new ideas and technologies were emerging, the
geographic outlines of the modern European map were being drawn, the
world was being opened up for exploration and exploitation, and a new
chapter in the history of human interactions was about to be written.