The Renaissance (PASS: 10.1-10.2)

I. Economic Foundations

1. Increased trade and the growth of the merchant class

   The aftermath of Justinian's reconquest of Italy in 533 left the cities in Italy largely depopulated. From 500 to 1000 AD, Italy was largely a rural region with few populated urban centers.

   In the twelfth century, Italy saw a resurgence of urban living which grew into a flood in the thirteenth century. The Italian cities, especially Venezia (Venice), had long served as intermediaries in the trade between central Europe and the Muslim and Byzantine states to the east. As they grew wealthy, many of these cities became centers of banking long before the rest of Europe had discovered this lucrative area of commerce.

   This concentration of wealth and power in the cities led to new social classes which would have wide-ranging effects across the face of Europe. Most of the new wealth had been created by individuals not in the noble class. The bankers, in particular, came from the productive classes. Not only did these commercial activities produce wealth, they also seriously redistributed wealth.

   In general, Renaissance Italian society consisted of five classes which varied in nature and number depending on which area of Italy you were in.

   • At the top of the class hierarchy were the old nobility and the merchant class that had traditionally ruled the cities.
      
   • Below them were the emergent capitalist and banker class that identified with the lower classes and wished to become as powerful as the top class.
      
   • Below them were the less wealthy merchants and tradespeople.
      
   • Blow them, the poor and destitute. This group probably made up one fourth to one third of the urban population in Italy during the Renaissance.
      
   • Finally, there were the domestic slaves. Though few in number, they represent the first attempts by post-classical European society to institute slavery as an economic practice.

     The market in human slave labor in southern Europe began as early as the 12th century. Initially the Spaniards were the key trafficers in human life, but as the Italian city-states grew, their demand for slaves also grew and they became one of the largest consumers of human slaves. The slavery that they practiced was not yet racial slavery. Most slaves sold in Italy were Muslims from Spain, North Africa, Crete, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire. There was a trickle of black slaves into Spain, Portugal, and Italy, but they were only a very small minority.

2. The growth of Italian city-states

   The phenomenal growth of wealth in the Italian cities eventually led to the growth of a series of city-states - individual regions ruled centrally from a single city. In contrast to cities in central and northern Europe which were ruled by monarchs, the Italian cities were allowed a high degree of autonomy and expanded their political influence over the areas surrounding them.

   This growth in power of the city-states was fueled by the money pouring into the cities from trade and from banking. Italy had been fought over by the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. Each of these was so intent on the other that both permitted the growth of powerful autonomous regions to further their own aims.

   By the beginning of the Renaissance, there were five major players in city-state politics:

   • the Papal States (or Romagna) ruled by the Pope
   • the republics of Firenze (Florence) and Venezia (Venice)
   • the kingdom of Napoli (Naples)
   • the duchy of Milano (Milan)

   
3. The Medici Family of Florence

   Although Firenze was nominally a republic, the chaos that followed the Ciompi Rebellion (1378), continued for almost five decades until Cosimo de' Medici (1389-1464), the wealthiest of the Florentines, secretly gained control of the city. He exercised his power behind the scenes and spent money wildly on poets, scholars, painters, and sculptors. It was Cosimo who founded the Platonic Academy and provided both the resources and the centralization that revived Neo-Platonism in the western tradition.

   His son, Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-1492), Lorenzo the Magnificent (Lorenzo il Magnifico), ruled Firenze openly as a totalitarian ruler. He, as did his father, sought to legitimate that rule by dumping vast amounts of resources into the arts, literature, and scholarship.

   However, his son, Piero de Medici, did not have the strength or the shrewdness of his father and Medici was overturned at the establishment of a Florentine Republic under the puritanical monk, Savonarola.

 
II. The Rebirth of Learning

1. External influences: lost classics return to Europe

   The fall of Rome to Germanic invaders, in the fifth century, lead to the intellectual heritage of the ancient world had been lost - many of its most important books had been destroyed and dispersed - and a thousand years later, Europeans were still living in the ghetto. The only way in which Europeans could expect to pull themselves out of this intellectual catastrophe was to attempt to recover, edit, and make available these lost texts.

2. Humanism
   
   1. Within the Church:
      • Erasmus
      • Thomas More
       
   2. Neo-classical thinkers:
      • Dante
      • Pico della Mirandola
      • Boccaccio
      • Chaucer
      • Shakespeare
      • Cervantes
   
    
3. Masters of Renaissance art and literature, such as:
   1. Michelangelo
   2. Da Vinci
   3. Raphael
   4. Donatello
   5. Botticelli
   6. Bernini
   7. Rembrandt
   8. Durer
    
4. Impact of the Renaissance
   1. Increased literacy
   2. New technology: Gutenberg's printing press
   3. Europe looks outward
   4. Advances in science and engineering:
   5. Changes in the relationship of Church, state and subjects

      The crisis of Renaissance humanism came with the trial of Galileo which was centered on the choice between basing the authority of one's beliefs on one's observations, or upon religious teaching.

      The trial of Galileo made the contradictions between humanism and traditional religion visibly apparent to all. Although Pope Urban VIII was sympathetic to Galileo, even asking Galileo to ensure that both sides of the argument were presented for academic discussion, Galileo proceeded to publish a one-sided advocacy, thereby causing great distress and conflict within both sides of the argument.

 

I. Causes of the Reformation

1. Corruption in the Church

   The popes of the Renaissance had a dual position. On the one hand, they were entrusted with the spiritual welfare of Christendom; on the other, they were the heads of an Italian city-state.

   Their failure to reconcile these two positions or rather, their devotion to the second at the expense of the first secularized the papacy and brought the loss of much of its moral and spiritual authority.

   The world of the early Renaissance was a world where simple power and military ability was not enough. The states were small and numerous and out of this tension grew a sophisticated and devious kind of diplomacy. The only way to successfully maintain territorial integrity was to ally oneself with allies that one couldn't fully trust. The first of those alliances was struck between Firenze and the states of Milano and Napoli, both bitter enemies of each other, in the Treaty of Lodi (1454-1455).

2. The power and wealth of Popes

   No single group of people is treated more unkindly than the popes of the Italian Renaissance. With the three "worldly" popes in the vanguard, Alexander VI, Julius II, and Leo X, the papacy from the mid-fourteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century is often narrated as one long series of greedy, political, devious, and sometimes sex-crazy popes interested in everything except religion.

   From the mid-fourteenth century to the Reformation years, the popes and the Papal States government pursued three central objectives:

   • Reassert the supreme authority of the pope over Christians.
   • Bring about a uniformity of Christian belief by stamping out heresy.
   • Recover political power of the Papal States so that the papacy could remain politically neutral and unaffected by European and Italian power politics.
   • Protect Christianity from Islam primarily by driving the Ottoman Turks out of Europe and freeing Constantinople from Turkish domination.

     This latter fear was very real. To Europeans of the time it appeared as if the Ottomans would eventually conquer all of Europe. To church officials, including the pope, this meant nothing less than the complete destruction of Christianity.

   These were the goals of popes and each one pursued them differently. The most important of these goals, as far as the popes were concerned, was the maintenance of papal neutrality by shoring up the pope's control of the Papal States.

   Indulgences

   In 1516-17, Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar and papal commissioner for indulgences, was sent to Germany by the Roman Catholic Church to sell indulgences to raise money to rebuild St Peter's Basilica in Rome. Roman Catholic theology stated that faith alone cannot justify man; and that only such faith as is active in charity and good works can justify man. These good works could be obtained by donating money to the church.

II. New interpretations of faith

1. Critics of the Church
   1. John Wycliffe, Peter Waldo and Jan Hus
   2. Martin Luther
   3. John Calvin
   4. Henry VIII
    
2. The Catholic Reformation
   1. The Council of Trent
   2. New orders:
      • Jesuits
      • Ursulines
   3. Resurgence of missionary work
    
3. Consequences of the Reformation
   1. Increased conflict between Catholic and Protestant states
   2. New emphasis on faith and holy works; evolution of new ethics and values
   3. Consolidation of royal power
   4. Europe emerges as a pluralist culture