AP European History
AP European History
The European Renaissance began in Italy in the early 1300s and continued, spreading northward, through the late 1500s. It was by no means a complete break from the Middle Ages that preceded it. The European population was still devoutly religious, not secular, in its ways of thought and behavior. Ideas of universal equality were still a long way in the future. All human achievements were still dedicated to the glory of God (at least on the surface).
However, two important factors did make the Renaissance different from the centuries that came before. One was the rediscovery of the Classical era, the great age of Rome and to a lesser extent Greece. It was this interest in ancient literature, philosophy, science, and art that gave the Renaissance its name; the era marked a “rebirth” of Classical values and ideas.
The second factor was the questioning of Church teachings. For a thousand years, the Church had held sway over every aspect of European life and society. During the Renaissance, this began to change due to a variety of factors. The Church’s inability to stamp out the Black Plague made people begin to question its claims of unlimited power. Great scholars began to study subjects other than theology. The development of movable type made printed books Widely available, and thus literacy rates rose. Cultural exchanges led to the study of ancient texts unaffected by Church tradition. This trend of questioning the Church’s accuracy and authority would eventually lead to the sixteenth-century Reformation and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
The word renaissance means “rebirth.” The 250-year period of European history beginning about 1350 is called the Renaissance because it marked the rebirth of a certain way of thinking-a return to the values of the Classical era. A variety of conditions gave rise to the Renaissance. First, the Black Death decimated Europe, striking down almost half of the population. Second, survivors of the plague began migrating to the cities, causing them to grow and prosper. This prosperity in turn meant that wealthy citizens had disposable income to spend on culture and the arts. Third, the perfection of the printing process brought about the possibility of near-universal literacy and education.
The earliest stirrings of the ideas that would make historians label this era “the Renaissance” occurred in the Italian city-states. Several factors were responsible for this. First, Italy was the location of the Roman Empire, whose great artistic and intellectual achievements became so important to the era. It was natural that the Italians would be the first to celebrate the cultural past, which could be seen, touched, and studied literally on their very doorsteps. Second, Italy was enjoying a period of great economic prosperity. This meant that there were enormously wealthy families who had money to spend on major artistic and architectural projects. Third, the Catholic Church, which was headquartered in Rome, had begun to depend financially on wealthy Italians like Cosimo de’ Medici. This financial dependency gave these wealthy businessmen and politicians a certain amount of power over Church policies. Fourth, Italy’s location in the center of the Mediterranean, between the Middle East and the West, had always made it a place of cultural and intellectual exchange.
The Black Death is the name given to a severe epidemic of bubonic and pneumonic plague that spread across Europe from about 1348 to about 1350. The plague originated in the Crimea and was brought westward on trading ships. It was highly infectious and was spread by flea and rat bites and by close contact with the infected. Symptoms included raging fever, delirium, aching joints, vomiting, and ugly, painful swellings in the armpits and groin. Very little could be done to make a sick person comfortable, let alone cure him or her. Most of the plague’s victims died within a week of catching the disease.
Historians estimate that the Black Death killed 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population. The loss was highest in cities, where people were crowded together in unsanitary conditions: the populations of Florence, Paris, and London were cut in half The death rate was comparatively lower in isolated rural areas, where there was less chance of infection.
Naturally, this was a time of terror throughout Europe. Medical science was at a primitive stage, and no one understood where the disease had come from or what caused it. Many people believed it was a sign that the world was coming to an end. People turned to the Church for help, as it was the universal authority of the time. However, the Church could do nothing to combat the epidemic. Priests who cared for the sick caught the plague and died like anyone else.
The Black Death helped to bring about the Renaissance in a number of ways. First, survivors began moving to cities looking for work as the disease receded. Cities grew larger as a result. Second, so many workers and artisans had died that those who were left found that their services were in greater demand. Third, people began to doubt that the Church was as omnipotent as it had always claimed to be. If it was so helpless in the face of real disaster, what power did the Church really have?
For a thousand years before the Renaissance, the Roman Catholic Church had held universal, undisputed sway over all aspects of life in Western Europe. This began to change during the Renaissance for a number of reasons.
First, the Church proved powerless in the face of the Black Death. This shook the faith of the ordinary people. Second, secular authorities such as the powerful merchant families of Italy arose; they proved powerful rivals to the Church’s authority. Third, the Church itself encouraged and eased the cultural exchange that led to such developments as the study of Greek and Middle Eastern texts and ideas. Fourth, the Church embraced the Classical revival that played a part in undermining its own authority. Fifth, the availability of printed books in Europe after 1450 meant that more people were reading and learning to think for themselves.
Beginning in 1414, the Church sponsored a series of councils-international gatherings of scholars and church officials. The goal of the councils was to repair a schism in the Church that had led to rival papacies throughout much of the fourteenth century, one in Avignon and one in Rome. Once the Church was reunited under one pope, the next goal was to reunite the Roman and Eastern Orthodox churches, which had been split since the year 1054. This was the purpose of the Council of Florence, convened in 1438. It was sponsored in part by money from the Medici family.
Scholars and officials from Greece, Ethiopia, Russia, Cairo, and Trebizond came to Florence for the council. It thus became an unprecedented exchange of ideas from the various cultures. Eastern and Western scholars were able to trade books and manuscripts and hold long debates and discussions on questions of science and philosophy. While the Eastern guests admired new Italian works of art and architecture, Western scholars pored over texts by Euclid, Plato, and Aristotle-works to which they had never before had access.
The council not only failed to reunite the Roman and Orthodox Churches, but, ironically, by making the spread and exchange of knowledge possible, it weakened the authority of the Church. As knowledge continued to spread and literacy continued to rise, people questioned the Church more and more. Only another eighty years would go by before Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation that would change everything .
In the days of the Black Death, Italy was not a unified nation. It was a collection of politically independent city-states whose people shared a common ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic heritage. These city-states were ruled by wealthy middle-class families who seized and clung to political power because this was the best way to further their business interests.
Florence was especially important in the Renaissance because its economy recovered quickly from the Black Death and the city enjoyed a period of great prosperity. The Medici family ruled the city of Florence for most of the 1400s. This stupendously wealthy family of bankers and importers used and invested its money in two areas. The first was patronage of the arts; the Medicis sponsored many of the most significant artistic achievements of the period. The second was financial loans to the Church. By being the Church’s banker, the Medici family gained a significant amount of influence over Church policies. Strong family ties to the papacy gave the Medicis virtual control of Rome as well as Florence. In the 1480s, a Medici married the son of Pope Innocent VIII. In 1513, Giovanni de’ Medici became Pope Leo X.
The political insights of Niccolò Machiavelli, born in Florence in 1469, remain highly influential even today. Machiavelli’s most famous work is a short discourse titled The Prince, published in 1513. In an obvious bid for employment, Machiavelli dedicated The Prince to Giuliano de’ Medici. It is a treatise explaining how to gain and hold absolute political power. What made the book so revolutionary was its frank assertion that a prince should not hesitate to act treacherously or dishonestly in order to keep his power. He should not be swayed by considerations of ethics or religion. Machiavelli’s realistic approach to politics is as relevant today as it was in his own time.
Born in Florence in 1475, Michelangelo Buonarroti is one of the towering figures of art. He achieved great fame in his own lifetime and forever after as a sculptor, architect, painter, and poet. During his career, Michelangelo received many important commissions from members of the Medici family.
The frescoes that Pope Leo X commissioned for the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel constitute Michelangelo’s greatest claim to fame. Michelangelo eschewed the usual practice of the time, in which the master artist would design the overall plan but have assistants help him on the actual painting. Instead, Michelangelo himself painted the entire ceiling (a surface of more than ten thousand square feet) over a four-year period from 1508 to 1512. He planned an ambitious, daring scheme of Old Testament scenes framed and surrounded by painted architectural elements and Classical figures.
From the historian’s point of view, the Sistine Chapel ceiling is most notable for its mix of biblical and Classical elements. Michelangelo set aside twelve large, prominent spaces for portraits of ancient prophets of the birth of Jesus. Seven male prophets from the Old Testament alternate with the figures of five female pagan sibyls-prophets from the Classical world. Michelangelo treated these figures equally in terms of placement, size, and scale, with no suggestion that either the artist or the patron saw any incongruity. Given that the Sistine Chapel was at the very heart of the headquarters of the Catholic Church, and that the Church itself sponsored the project, this alone makes it clear that Renaissance Europeans had no sense that these elements were contradictory.
The ceiling frescoes show a clear break with medieval artistic traditions in their style as well. The figures are heroic in size and scale, bursting out of frames that cannot contain them. They are shown in a great variety of poses, from every angle and point of view-a complete break from the medieval style. These figures also show that Michelangelo had a thorough knowledge of human anatomy; the depiction of the bones and muscles beneath the skin is perfectly accurate. The faces reveal recognizable emotions that make the frescoes a celebration of the human being. All these elements mark the Sistine ceiling as a product of the Renaissance. Sixteenth-century art historian Giorgio Vasari later wrote that the Sistine ceiling “restored light to a world that for centuries had been plunged into darkness.”
The word humanism refers to a Classical course of study at European universities, many ofwhich were founded between about A.D. 1000 and 1200. Humanism meant the study of the seven liberal arts, “liberal” because in ancient Rome this was regarded as the proper course of study for a free man (in Latin, liberus means "free”). The liberal arts consisted of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.
The humanist course of study focused on Classical texts, from both the Greek and Roman eras. Roman texts predOminated for two reasons. First, they were written in Latin, which was much easier for Europeans to understand than Greek. All the Romance languages of Western Europe, especially Italian, were closely based on Latin, and Latin had been kept alive by constant use in the Church. Second, Italy was the seat of the Roman Empire; the Roman manuscripts and scrolls were physically handy, relatively easy to obtain and copy for study purposes. Only time, travel, and cultural exchange would eventually bring the Greek manuscripts west for study.
Humanist scholars of the Renaissance focused their interest on the human being as a unique individual, with his or her own way of thinking about the great questions of philosophy and the meaning of life. All of this, however, was firmly in the context of the human being as God’s creation, with all human achievement being dedicated to God’s glory. In this era, the word humanism did not have the secular connotation it has in our own time.
Desiderus Erasmus, born in Rotterdam in 1466, is probably the best known of the Humanists. Erasmus’ work shows that he embraced both biblical and Classical studies. He published a Latin translation of the Greek New Testament in 1516, but also completed translations and scholarly commentaries on Classical texts, including the works of Plutarch and Seneca. He corresponded with most of the great European scholars of his day and was widely regarded as the hub of the intellectual world.