Recap Middle Ages
Final collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the time of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian 483-565.
Rise of the Franks - Merovingian Monarchy 350 to 600 AD
Carolingian Renaissance 650 - 850 attempt to recover the glory of the western Roman Empire.
High Middle Ages 900 - 1300
Invasions by Vikings, Magyars and Saracens 800 - 1100
Feudalism, Manoralism, Monasticism, The Paupers
Crusades - 9 campaigns from 1096 to 1271. In the 4th crusade (1204) Constantinople was sacked.
Church Reform under Pope Innocent III 1196-1216
Rise of the medieval universities 1200's
Norman Invasion of England 1066 see Bayeux Tapestry
The Gothic Age - 1100 - 1500 gothic architecture (largely cathedrals and churches) and works of art first created in France in the 12th cent. that spread throughout Western Europe
Great Famine 1311-1317 and 1321 over 10% of the population died of starvation
Hundred Years War 1337-1453
Plague 1347 - 1352 25 to 35 M killed by the plague
Great Schism of the West 1378 -1414 (multiple Popes)
Peasant Uprising 1381 - hundreds of thousands slaughteredEstimated population of Europe from 1000 to 1352.
- 1000 38 M
- 1100 48 M
- 1200 59 M
- 1300 70 M
- 1347 75 M
- 1352 50 M
The National Monarchies, 1400-1500
Map Europe 1470 AD after the 100 yrs war, the fall of Byzantium, the union of Poland and Hungary, and the expansion of Aragon in the Western Mediterranean
Civil wars were one of the legacies of the Hundred Years' War and the economic dislocation of the times. (see Jacquerie; Cabochiens; Armagnacs and Burgundians) and local wars (see Breton Succession, War of the) increased the destruction and the social disintegration. The close of the Hundred Years' War threw large numbers of professional soldiers out of work, and the concentration of wealth that was characteristic of the period placed money in the hands of the great magnates. They were thus able to hire bands of followers in a process known as livery and maintenance, which means simply that the magnate furnished his employees with uniforms (livery) and a living wage (maintenance). Some individual magnates were able to assemble enough strength to challenge the kings, but, more often, family alliances pooled their money and power. All across Europe, the great families of the magnate class struggled with the monarchs for control of the state.
The Hundred Years War inflicted untold misery on France. Farmlands were laid waste, the population was decimated by war, famine, and the Black Death (see plague), and marauders terrorized the countryside. Yet the successor of Charles VII, Louis XI, benefited from these evils. The virtual destruction of the feudal nobility enabled him to unite France more solidly under the royal authority and to promote and ally with the middle class. From the ruins of the war an entirely new France emerged. For England, the results of the war were equally decisive; it ceased to be a continental power and increasingly sought expansion as a naval power.
The close of the 15th century saw the resolution of these civil wars
England experienced a long struggle known as The Wars of the Roses between the Lancaster and York families. The War got its name from the fact that a white rose was the symbol of the York family, and a red rose that of the Lancasters. The wars ended with the accession of Henry Tudor as Henry VII and the end of the Plantagenet dynasty in 1485.
France
France fell into disorder because of the contention of several great nobles, but the Duke of Burgundy, a region that had been relatively untouched by the Hundred Years' War eventually emerged as the wealthiest and most powerful of them all, including the king. In 1481, however, Louis XI, the "Spider king" assumed the throne. A thoroughly nasty man, he was nevertheless an extremely astute politician and managed to fend off the Duke, Charles the Rash. Charles had ambitions to control Italy and its wealth, however, and to do that he had to control Switzerland. He attacked the Swiss peasants with the old-style army that had proven ineffective against English archers at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt. It proved ineffective against the Swiss in 1476. The Swiss used closely packed bodies of infantry with long spears (pikes), and the Burgundian cavalry was powerless against them. The Burgundians lost, the Duke was killed, and infantry replaced cavalry as the most important arm of battle.
This battle eliminated the Burgundian threat, but Louis allowed the Holy Roman Emperor to take advantage of the situation rather than seizing the chance to strengthen France. What he did do, however, was to strengthen the monarchy in a way never before seen in western Europe. He no longer depended for support on the French representative assembly, the Estates General, and established heavy taxes. He used these taxes to expand a salaried bureaucracy and a standing army.
Holy Roman Empire
The German, Maximilian Hapsburg, gained control of Burgundian lands -- Burgundy, Lorraine, Alsace, and the modern Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. These were perhaps the richest lands in Europe, and when Maximilian became Holy Roman Emperor, he was able to make the position once again the dominant power in Germany.
Russia
By 1480, Ivan III, Duke of Moscow, threw off Mongol domination and declared himself Tsar (emperor) of Russia.
Spain
In Spain, the period of civil strife known as the Trastamaran Wars was ended with the marriage of Ferran and Isabel (the proper names for the individuals usually called Ferdinand and Isabella. Aragon and Castile were united in 1469 by this marriage and completed the Reconquista with the conquest of Granada in 1492. Ferran and Isabel forged an alliance with the Church -- an easy matter since Aragon controlled much of Italy. They "purified" their realms by expelling both Muslims and Jews, and used the Inquisition as a personal police force that gave them power that the laws and customs of the land did not permit them. By 1500, the riches of the Americas began arriving in Spain, making the Spanish monarchs supreme in Spain and a major power in western Europe for the next two centuries.
General Observations
One can make some general observations. The new monarchs began to assume almost absolute powers, depending upon their circumstances. What were the bases of their power?
Wherever possible, they gained permanent taxation powers from the representative assemblies, and were thus less dependent upon popular support. They used this income to surround themselves with salaried employees: administrators drawn from the middle classes and standing armies of professional soldiers. Their professional administrators allowed them to keep much better records and financial accounts, and they used their control of information to increase their power still further.
They used the weakness of the papacy to gain control of their national churches, which gave them many advantages. They had control of most intellectuals, teachers, writers, and administrators; access to the wealth of the church when needed, control of church courts and recourse to canon law, by means of which they could circumvent traditional limitations on their powers. They often used the Inquisition as a secret police and were able to depend upon the secular clergy to help in shaping public opinion in their favor.
They used their powers to put down popular uprisings, gaining the support of the middle class and the reputation of being the sole defense against rebellion and anarchy. They were economically aware, and used their powers to tax, regulate, charter, and subsidize to promote the economy of their states. Under royal guidance, the economy of Europe began to emerge from the recession of the 15th century.
Generally speaking, the new monarchs were political creatures with little concern for ethical action or the general welfare other than that of their own state. Their accession marked the end of any real aspiration for morality in international affairs. They gained power largely because the monarchy was the only institution of European society that had not been thoroughly discredited.
Although medieval society was much changed by the end of the 15th century, the basic conditions to which it had to adapt -- limited resources, too great a population, periodic waves of contagious disease, insufficient capital, shrinking markets -- were still much the same. The rise of the national monarchs was important, but not decisive in ending the Middle Ages.
What was important was that these national monarchs were laying the foundations of the modern state. Although the kings up to this time might have seemed powerful, their powers were actually quite limited. They generally ruled only after swearing to obey the customs of the land, and there was always a nobility and clergy ready to oppose their policies if they appeared to be taking more power than was traditional. Most of the wealth of their countries was in the hands of nobles and the Church, and their power to tax these properties was limited. Transportation and communication was difficult, and the kings could not expect to be able to control their subjects if those subjects did not want to be controlled. If the kings tried to instituted new or heavier taxes, they found that they could not find officials able to gather the revenues that they demanded. In short, they depended a great deal upon the good will of their subjects.
This was not true of the new states. Independent jurisdictions were swept away, and no one was exempt from the power of the central government. Competent administrators, backed with a professional royal army, were able to impose the royal will even against the wishes of the mass of the population. Perhaps most important, though, was the fact that people were beginning to think of themselves in terms of their nation. Up to this point, people had gained their identities from their religion, their profession, and their social status, and felt greater kinship with "foreigners" of the same class, than fellow countrymen of a different class. This was ending, and the common ideals of western Europeans were becoming less important than the well-being of their own particular country.
Italy
Italian Renaissance ~1250 - 1520 Northern Renaissance 1400 - 1550 RRchapter15 part 1 answers
Cimabue. Maestà (Madonna Enthroned). c.1270.
How to cover the Renaissance? Rather than try a potted history of the Renaissance, let me draw your attention to European painting around the year 1450.
For centuries, painters had been portraying the Virgin, the Christ child, and angels. Then painters suddenly began drawing portraits of real people, so realistic that you could identify the sitters with no trouble if they walked into the room. Jan van Eyck (~1390 -1441) was among the first to do this, but Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516) wasn't far behind.
Man in a Turban 1433
Van Eyck may also have been the creator of the first realistic self-portrait, if "Man in a Turban" is indeed him.
Durer certainly did self-portraits by about 1500, although they appear idealized, almost as Christ figures.
Giovanni Bellini did the portrait of Sultan Mehmet II who had conquered Constantinople.
Portraits of women lagged, though one of the earliest is far more famous than any of these male representations. It was painted about 1505 by Leonardo da Vinci and shows the wife of a banker from Florence. (We know it as the Mona Lisa, of course.)
Realistic representation came to sculpture, too:
a good example might be the National Gallery's bust of Lorenzo de Medici, by Andrea del Verrochio.
What's going on here is more than new technical skills, such as painting in oil; it's a shift in outlook. Gone is the medieval preoccupation with piety, salvation, and shame toward one's body. Now we're back to the ancient view of the Greek philosopher Protagoras, who had famously called man the measure of all things.
One can see this discovery of the individual emerging in the Gothic style, with its love of light and its belief that the material world possessed a beauty that could lead the mind to deep truths.
Painting, which had been a two-dimensional affair, becomes with Giotto (c. 1266-1337) conscious of three-dimensional space. What to fill it with?
Giorgione (1478-1510) dared to paint nude and sensual women.
David Michelangelo (1475-1564) paints a defiant David, about as unashamed of his nakedness as one could possibly be.
Or consider Holbein's "The Ambassadors," painted about 1500. It shows two men confidently surrounded by the equipment of exploration, including a globe of the newly understood world. They are lavishly dressed, proof that knowledge produces wealth. The chief hint of the medieval past is the strangely distorted skull at the men's feet, a symbolic check on arrogance.
What is going on here? How had the world view changed from a focus on purely spiritual matters, unrealistic representation, to vivid, defiant realistic art?
The Italian Renaissance HumanistsHumanism studia humanitatis: grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music. artes liberales: the skills and knowledge necessary for a human being to be truly free.
The most important idea distinguishing the Renaissance from the Middle Ages is humanism. Textbooks will tell you that the humanists of the Renaissance rediscovered the Latin and Greek classics (hence the "rebirth" or "renaissance" of the classical world), that humanist philosophy stressed the dignity of humanity, and that humanists shifted intellectual emphasis off of theology and logic to specifically human studies. In pursuing this program, the argument goes, the humanists literally created the European Renaissance and paved the way for the modern, secular world. Like all origin myths this account is partially true and partially false. First, there really was no such thing as a "humanist movement". The term "humanism" was coined in 1808 by a German educator, F. J. Niethammer, to describe a program of study distinct from science and engineering. In the early modern period, humanism was not a philosophy but a new educational curriculum. It was based on the revival of a course of study from classical Rome. Defined this way, "humanism" begins in the twelfth century in the institution of studia humanitatis, or "the studies of human things" in the newly formed European universities. In the fifteenth century, the term "umanista," or "humanist," was current and described a professional group of teachers who taught the studia humanitatis. These "human studies" included grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music. In antiquity, these disciplines were called the artes liberales, or "liberal arts," for they were the skills and knowledge necessary for a human being to be truly free. The Renaissance studia
humanitatis generally correspond to what we would
call grammar, rhetoric, history, literary studies and moral
philosophy, though in the middle ages and Renaissance both
history and literary studies were a part of grammar. Classical humanism begins in the middle of the fourteenth century, when the great Florentine poet, Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, begins to do systematic scholarship on the ancient writers, especially Cicero. As a result of this scholarly interest in the classics, the early humanists recovered the study of Greek and Hebrew, and also began to rethink their world views and their social organization by drawing on principles extracted from the writers of antiquity. This was more than scholarship; the classical humanists were engaged in syncretism - a project of mixing their present society and world view with that of the works and thoughts of the ancient Roman and Greek world.
In some ways the most important work of the Italian Renaissance, was not a sculpture or painting or architecture, but rather an essay. The essay was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's "Oration on the Dignity of Man". It forcefully shows the shift in attention to human capacity and the human perspective. Pico had a massive intellect and literally studied everything there was to be studied in the university curriculum of the Renaissance. He was a syncretist - that is, he synthesized all that he read and tried to come up with a single world view drawn from the whole. His essay, On the Dignity of Man, was meant to be a preface to a massive compilation of all the intellectual achievements of humanity, a book that never appeared because of Pico's early death at 31. Pico was one of the most read of the Renaissance philosophers because his work synthesized all the strains of Renaissance and late medieval thinking. These were: humanism, Neoplatonism, Aristotelianism, Averroism (a form of Aristotelianism), and mysticism. "Humanism" is not anti-Christian as modern fundamentalists make it out to be. In fact, late medieval and early modern humanism is just the opposite. Renaissance humanism was a response to the standard educational program that focused on logic and linguistics and the other great late medieval Christian philosophy, Scholasticism. The Humanists, rather than focusing on what they considered futile questions of logic, semantics and proposition analysis, focused on the relation of the human to the divine. For them human beings were the summit and purpose of God's creation. They tried to define the human place in God's plan and the relation of the human to the divine; therefore, they centered all their thought on the "human" relation to the divine, and hence called themselves "humanists." At no point do they ignore their religion; humanism is first and foremost a religious and educational movement, not a secular one What we call "secular humanism" today is a world view that arises in part from "humanism" but was initially conceived in opposition to "humanism". The humanists held that religious truth was revealed to all, both Christian and non-Christian, so part of their project was to reconcile non-Christian thinking, especially the thought of Plato and his followers, to Christian thinking, and to point out, through analysis of texts, the similarities between non-Christian philosophies and religions and Christian philosophies and religion. The importance of Plato for Renaissance humanism cannot be over stressed. Among other things, it gives rise to a particular species of Renaissance magic which will, in turn, form the basis of what we call "science" as it is invented in the early Enlightenment (late seventeenth century). Pico brought to this project an immense mind, insatiable curiosity, infallible memory, and a confidence in his intellectual capabilities that few if any have ever matched before or since. His larger project was the synthesis of all human knowledge into a single whole; while humanists sought to reconcile classical philosophy with Christianity, Pico sought the reconciliation of every human philosophy and every human religion with Christianity. To understand Pico, his project, and his theory of humanity, it helps to review the central philosophical problem in the Western tradition and Christianity: the problem of the relation of The One and the Many. This is an old problem from the very source of Western philosophy in Greece in the seventh century BC. Simply put, the problem of the one and the many is this:
The standard
Christian position was that the many things of the
universe were created by God out of nothing ; this is called
"creation ex The Neoplatonists, on the other hand, believed that the many things of the universe were "emanations" from God. As a result, rather than the universe being an arbitrary act of God, the creation of the universe is necessarily part of the nature of God. There is an underlying logic to the created universe that is always infallibly true. Finally, in Averroism, which was the version of Aristotelianism that the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance inherited from the Muslim scientist and philosopher Averro, the question of creation is simply laid aside as irrelevant to inquiry into the material world. Averroism tries to explain physical events by looking at their immediate and determinate causes. Pico tried to reconcile these three completely opposed ways of understanding the universe in relation to God. Pico's basic approach to the problem of the one and the many was to argue that the many things of the universe, rather than being created by God or emanating from God or being unrelated to God, were all symbols of God. Everything in creation, every object, every human, every thought, every speech, every religion, every philosophy, is an image of God and an expression of God as the One. What unites all of creation is this symbolic relation to God. This is contrary to the medieval understanding of creation—the medieval world view, following Augustine's assertion that the world was a "region of unlikeness," believed that all of creation was a negative symbol of God. For the medievals, humans could never understand God because nothing on earth resembled God in any way; the best that humans could do is understand God in a negative sense—God is not like the things in the world. Pico reverses this
situation; not only is the world similar to God, but
everything that human beings can think, imagine, and create
are expressions of divinity. This concept was centrally
important for the development of art and literature in the
High Renaissance; the later artists of the Renaissance,
including Michelangelo, were convinced that through the
operation of their own intellect and creativity that they were
giving expression to the divine or at least expressing its
likeness. In traditional, neoPlatonic Christianity, humanity occupied a middle position in the hierarchy of the universe: as both physical and spiritual, humanity sat dead center between the spiritual and physical worlds. Pico unhinged humanity from that position, exalted as it might be, and claimed that human beings could occupy any position whatsoever in the chain of being. A human being could become as low as an animal or, though intellect and imagination, become equivalent to God, at least in understanding.
The picture above,
from Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, is a famous study of human
proportion. It expresses much of what Pico is arguing about
the capability of humanity to encompass the whole of creation.
In Renaissance mathematics and in Neoplatonism, the square in
geometry represents the terrestrial world and the circle
represents the celestial world, while the triangle represents
the divine world. The circle and square in da Vinci's drawing
represents more than the mathematics of drawing a human
figure, they represent how the human being encompasses in its
reach the whole of the terrestrial and celestial worlds. This point of view will become the starting point of all modern philosophies, including that of Kant, Marx, and the existentialists. Because of this freedom to change, Pico did not accept the Christian view of eternal punishment or reward; if the singular characteristic of humanity is that it can change itself, it's impossible that it would lose that ability in the afterlife. Eternal damnation, then, is illogical, for it argues that the human soul doesn't have the power to reform itself even after death. This idea of "willed change" had a shattering influence on the arts. Not only can the arts express the divine, they can also express this capacity of human beings to create and transform themselves. In the later logic of the High Renaissance, art and literature becomes an expression of the individual's free creative power and, by extension, the free creative power of all humanity. It's at this point that writers, painters, sculptors and others cease to be artisans, which is what they were considered up until and through the Renaissance, and start to become artists in the modern sense of the term. In this sense, artist are artisans (painters, sculptors, etc) whose art is a function primarily of their creativity and freedom rather than a function of their abilities. |
Now hopefully this all makes
sense. But if you go back and read the thought and ideas that were
being advanced in the late middle ages and through the Renaissance, you are likely to get stuck.
Understanding the historical and geographic ideas of periods prior to
the 18th century and of cultures very different from our own is
complicated because changing intellectual frameworks —advances in sciences and
changes in forms-of-life—can make prior places and other people’s
worldviews and practices almost unintelligible. The way
we organize our understanding of the world - our intellectual
categories - change so radically over time and between cultures
that we have difficulty understanding the questions others ask and
their expected answers.
The predominant European Medieval position on how we know what exists, the correspondences world view, held that elements in different domains of being corresponded to each other because they embodied the same principle—the universe was known to be a meaningful order. Being could be explained in terms of the ideas it embodied. Knowing was the same as perceiving the balance in nature. This idea persisted in the Renaissance.
This is what Pico and the Renaissance thinkers meant by the world being symbols of God. It is also what earlier neoPlatonist thinkers meant by the world being emanations from God.
They saw the world as existing to express an order of Ideas, the will of God, or the Book of Nature. You may remember the famous story of Galileo. He was a mathematician teaching at the University of Padua. He made one of the first telescopes and in 1610 he discovered the four largest satellites of Jupiter, the first satellites of a planet other than Earth to be detected. His investigations confirmed his acceptance of the Copernican theory of the solar system where the sun, not the earth, was the center and that the earth and other planets moved around the sun.
In 1616 the system of Copernicus was denounced as dangerous to faith, and Galileo, summoned to Rome, was warned not to uphold it or teach it.
He published a work in 1632 which supported the Copernican system. He was tried (1633) by the Inquisition and brought to the point of making an abjuration of all beliefs and writings that held the sun to be the central body and the earth a moving body revolving with the other planets about it. Accounts of the trial have concluded with the statement that Galileo, as he arose from his knees, exclaimed sotto voce, “E pur si muove” [nevertheless it does move].
