Chapter 12 - Recovery and Rebirth: The Age of the Renaissance

Chapter 12.1 - Meaning and Characteristics of the Italian Renaissance

Renaissance means ‘‘rebirth. ’’ Many people who lived in Italy between 1350 and 1550 believed that they had witnessed a rebirth of antiquity or Greco-Roman civilization, marking a new age.
To them, the thousand or so years between the end of the Roman Empire and their own era constituted a middle period , characterized by darkness because of its lack of Classical culture.
Historians of the nineteenth century later used similar terminology to describe this period in Italy.
The Swiss historian and art critic Jacob Burckhardt created the modern concept of the Renaissance in his celebrated book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1860.
He portrayed Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as the birthplace of the modern world and saw the revival of antiquity, the ‘‘perfecting of the individual,’’ and secularism as its distinguishing features.
Renaissance Italy was largely an urban society.
As a result of its commercial preeminence and political evolution, northern Italy by the mid-fourteenth century was mostly a land of independent cities that dominated the country districts around them.
Above all, the Renaissance was an age of recovery from the calamitous fourteenth century, a time for the slow process of recuperating from the effects of the Black Death, political disorder, and economic recession.
A revived emphasis on individual ability became a characteristic of the Italian Renaissance.
These general features of the Italian Renaissance were not characteristic of all Italians but were primarily the preserve of the wealthy upper classes, who constituted a small percentage of the total population.
The achievements of the Italian Renaissance were the product of an elite, rather than a mass, movement.
Nevertheless, indirectly it did have some impact on ordinary people, especially in the cities, where so many of the intellectual and artistic accomplishments of the period were most visible.

Chapter 12.2 - The Making of Renaissance Society

By the fourteenth century, Italian merchants were carrying on a flourishing commerce throughout the Mediterranean and had also expanded their lines of trade north along the Atlantic seaboard.
The great 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 increasingly powerful Hanseatic League of merchants.

## The Family in Renaissance

The family played an important role in Renaissance Italy . Family meant, first of all, the extended household of parents, children, and servants and could also include grandparents, widowed mothers, and even unmarried sisters.
Families that were related and bore the same surname often lived near each other and might dominate an entire urban district.
The family bond was a source of great security in a dangerous and violent world, and its importance helps explain the vendetta in the Italian Renaissance.
A crime committed by one family member fell on the entire family, ensuring that retaliation by the offended family would be a bloody affair involving large numbers of people.
To maintain the family, parents gave careful attention to arranging marriages, often to strengthen business or family ties.
Details were worked out well in advance, sometimes when children were only two or three years old, and reinforced by a legally binding marriage contract .
The important aspect of the contract was the amount of the dowry, money presented by the wife’s family to the husband upon marriage.
The dowry could involve large sums and was expected of all families.
The size of the dowry was an indication of whether the bride was moving upward or downward in society.
He gave it his name, was responsible for it in all legal matters, managed all finances , and made the crucial decisions that determined his children’s lives.
A father’s authority over his children was absolute until he died or formally freed his children.
His third wife, after bearing eleven children in fifteen years, ‘‘died in child-birth after lengthy suffering, which she bore with remarkable strength and patience.
Surviving mothers often faced the death of their children. In Florence in the fifteenth century, for example, almost 50 percent of the children born to merchant families died before the age of twenty.
Given these mortality rates, many upper-class families sought to have as many children as possible to ensure that there would be a surviving male heir to the family fortune.
This concern is evident in the Florentine humanist Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise On the Family, where one of the characters remarks, ‘‘How many families do we see today in decadence and ruin!

Chapter 12.3 - The Italian States in the Renaissance

The modern diplomatic system was a product of the Italian Renaissance.
There were ambassadors in the Middle Ages, but they were used only on a temporary basis.
Moreover, an ambassador, regardless of whose subject he was, regarded himself as the servant of all Christendom, not just of his par-ticular employer.
As a treatise on diplomacy stated, ‘‘An ambassador is sacred because he acts for the general welfare.
’’ Since he was the servant of all Christendom, ‘‘the business of an ambassador is peace. ’’ This concept of an ambassador changed during the Italian Renaissance because of the political situation in Italy.
To survive, the Italian states began to send resident diplomatic agents to each other to ferret out useful information.
During the Italian wars, the prac-tice of resident diplomats spread to the rest of Europe, and in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans developed the diplomatic machinery still in use today, such as the rights of ambassadors in host countries and the proper procedures for conducting diplomatic business.
With the use of permanent resident agents or ambassadors, the conception of the purpose of an ambassador also changed.
A Venetian diplomat attempted to define an ambassador’s function in a treatise written at the end of the fifteenth century.
He wrote, ‘‘The first duty of an ambassador is exactly the same as that of any other servant of a government, that is, to do, say, advise, and think whatever may best serve the preservation and aggrandizement of his own state. ’’
An ambassador was now an agent only of the territorial state that sent him, not the larger body of Christendom.

Chapter 12.4 - The Intellectual Renaissance in Italy

Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement based on the study of the Classical literary works of Greece and Rome.
All of these occupations were largely secular, and most humanists were laymen rather than members of the clergy.
Humanism had a strong impact on the writing of history. Influenced by Roman and Greek historians, the humanists approached the writing of history differently from the chroniclers of the Middle Ages.
The humanists’ belief that Classical civilization had been followed by an age of barbarism , which had in turn been succeeded by their own age, with its rebirth of the study of the classics, enabled them to think in terms of the passage of time, of the past as past.
Their division of the past into the ancient world, dark ages, and their own age provided a new sense of chronology or periodization in history.
The humanists were also responsible for secularizing the writing of history. Humanist historians reduced or eliminated the role of miracles in historical interpretation, not because they were anti-Christian but because they took a new approach to sources.
The new emphasis on secularization was also evident in the humanists’ conception of causation in history.
Medieval historical literature often portrayed historical events as being caused by God’s active involvement in human affairs. Humanists de-emphasized divine intervention in favor of human motives, stressing political forces or the role of individuals in history.
The art of printing made an immediate impact on European intellectual life and thought.
Printing from hand-carved wooden blocks had been done in the West since the twelfth century and in China even before that.
What was new to Europe in the fifteenth century was multiple printing with movable metal type.
The new printing spread rapidly throughout Europe in the second half of the fifteenth century. Printing presses were established throughout the Holy Roman Empire in the 1460s and within ten years had spread to both western and eastern Europe.
By 1500, there were more than a thousand printers in Europe who had published almost 40,000 titles .
Printing became one of the largest industries in Europe, and its effects were soon felt in many areas of European life.
The printing of books encouraged the development of scholarly research and the desire to attain knowledge.
Indeed, without the print-ing press, the new religious ideas of the Reformation would never have spread as rapidly as they did in the sixteenth century.

Chapter 12.5 - The Artistic Renaissance

In trying to provide an exact portrayal of their world, the artists of the north and Italy took different approaches.
In Italy, the human form became the primary vehicle of expression as Italian artists sought to master the technical skills that allowed them to portray humans in realistic set-tings.
The space available in these works was limited, and great care was required to depict each object, leading northern painters to become masters at rendering details.
The most influential northern school of art in the fifteenth century was centered in Flanders.
Among them was Guillaume Dufay , perhaps the most important composer of his era.
Born in northern France, Dufay lived for a few years in Italy and was thus well suited to combine the late medieval style of France with the early Renaissance style of Italy.
One of Dufay’s greatest contributions was a change in the composition of the Mass.
He was the first to use secular tunes to replace Gregorian chants as the fixed melody that served as the basis for the Mass.
Dufay also composed a number of secular songs, an important reminder that during the Renaissance, music ceased to be used chiefly in the service of God and moved into the secular world of courts and cities. In Italy and France, the chief form of secular music was the madrigal.
The Renaissance madrigal was a poem set to music, and it originated in the fourteenth-century Italian courts.
By the mid-sixteenth century, most madrigals were written for five or six voices and employed a technique called text painting, in which the music tried to portray the literal meaning of the text.
By the mid-sixteenth century, the madrigal had also spread to England, where the most popular form was characterized by the fa-la-la refrain like that found in the English carol ‘‘Deck the Halls.

Chapter 12.6 - The European State in the Renaissance

After 1438, the position of Holy Roman Emperor remained in the hands of the Habsburg dynasty.
Having gradually acquired a number of possessions along the Danube, known collectively as Austria, the house of Habsburg 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.
Much of the Habsburg success in the fifteenth century was due not to military success but to a well-executed policy of dynastic marriages. ’’ By marrying his son Maximilian to Mary, the daughter of Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy, Emperor Frederick III gained Franche-Comte ́ in east-central France, Luxembourg, and a large part of the Low Countries.
The addition of these territories made the Habsburg dynasty an international power and brought it the undying opposition of the French monarchy because the rulers of France feared they would be surrounded by the Habsburgs.
Much was expected of the flamboyant Maximilian I when he became emperor.
Through the Reichstag, the imperial diet or parliament, Maximilian attempted to central-ize the administration by creating new institutions common to the entire empire.
Opposition from the German princes doomed these efforts, however.
Maximilian’s only real success lay in his marriage alliances.
Philip of Burgundy, the son of Maximilian’s marriage to Mary, was married to Joanna, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella.
Philip and Joanna produced a son, Charles, who, through a series of unexpected deaths, became heir to all three lines, the Habsburg, Burgundian, and Spanish, making him the leading monarch of his age .
In eastern Europe, rulers struggled to achieve the centralization of their territorial states but faced serious obstacles.
After his death, how-ever, Hungary returned to weak rule, and the work of Corvinus was largely undone.
Since the thirteenth century, Russia had been under the domination of the Mongols. Eastern Europe was increasingly threatened by the steadily advancing Ottoman Turks .
The Byzantine Empire had, of course, served as a buffer between the Muslim Middle East and the Latin West for centuries, but it had been severely weakened by the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and its occupation by the West.
Although the Palaeologus dynasty had tried to reestablish Byzantine power in the Balkans after the overthrow of the Latin empire, the threat from the Turks finally doomed the long-lasting empire. Beginning in northeastern Asia Minor in the thirteenth century, the Ottoman Turks spread rapidly, seizing the lands of the Seljuk Turks and the Byzantine Empire.
In 1345, they bypassed Constantinople and moved into the Balkans. Under Sultan Murad , Ottoman forces moved through Bulgaria and into the lands of the Serbs, who provided a strong center of opposition under King Lazar .
In the meantime, in 1453, the Ottomans completed the demise of the Byzantine Empire. With 80,000 troops ranged against only 7,000 defenders, Sultan Mehmet II siege to Constantinople.
In their attack on the city, the Turks made use of massive cannons with 26-foot barrels that could launch stone balls weighing up to 1,200 pounds each.
After their conquest of Constantinople, the Ottoman Turks tried to complete their conquest of the Balkans, where they had been established since the fourteenth century.
Although they were successful in taking the Romanian territory of Wallachia in 1476, the resistance of the Hungarians ini-tially kept the Turks from advancing up the Danube valley.
Until the end of the fifteenth century, internal problems and the need to consolidate their eastern frontiers kept the Turks from any further attacks on Europe.

Chapter 12.7 - The Church in the Renaissance

The Renaissance papacy encompasses the line of popes from the end of the Great Schism to the beginnings of the Reformation in the early sixteenth century.
The manner in which Renaissance popes pursued their interests in the Papal States and Italian politics, especially their use of intrigue and even bloodshed, seemed shocking. Of all the Renaissance popes, Julius II was most involved in war and politics.
As one intellectual wrote, ‘‘How, O bishop standing in the room of the Apostles, dare you teach the people the things that pertain to war?’’
To further their territorial aims in the Papal States, the popes needed loyal servants.
Because they were not hereditary monarchs, popes could not build dynasties over several generations and came to rely on the practice of nepotism to promote their families’ interests.
The Renaissance popes were great patrons of Renaissance culture, and their efforts made Rome a cultural leader at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
For the warrior-pope Julius II, the patronage of Renaissance culture was mostly a matter of policy as he endeavored to add to the splendor of his pontificate by tearing down the Basilica of Saint Peter, which had been built by the emperor Constantine, and begin-ning construction of the greatest building in Christendom, the present Saint Peter’s Basilica.
Julius’s successor, Leo X , was also a patron of Renaissance culture, not as a matter of policy but as a deeply involved participant.
Made an archbishop at the age of eight and a cardinal at thirteen, he acquired a refined taste in art, manners, and social life among the Florentine Renaissance elite. ’’ Raphael was commissioned to do paintings, and the construction of Saint Peter’s was accelerated as Rome became the literary and artistic center of the Renaissance.