Chapter 12: European Society in the Age of the Renaissance

Wealth and Power in Renaissance Italy

The magnificent art and new ways of thinking in the Renaissance rested on economic and political developments in the city-states of northern Italy.
Economic growth laid the material basis for the Italian Renaissance, and ambitious merchants gained political power to match their economic power.
They then used their money and power to buy luxuries and hire talent in a system of patronage, through which cities, groups, and individuals commissioned writers and artists to produce specific works.

Trade and Prosperity

Northern Italian cities led the way in the great commercial revival of the eleventh century.
By the middle of the twelfth century Venice, supported by a huge merchant marine, had grown enormously rich through overseas trade, as had Genoa and Milan, which had their own sizable fleets.
Another commercial leader, and the city where the Renaissance began, was Florence, situated on fertile soil along the Arno River.
Florentine merchants also loaned and invested money, and they acquired control of papal banking toward the end of the thirteenth century.
By the first quarter of the fourteenth century, the economic foundations of Florence were so strong that even severe crises could not destroy the city.
In 1344 King Edward III of England repudiated his huge debts to Florentine bankers, forcing some of them into bankruptcy.
Soon after, Florence suffered frightfully from the Black Death, losing at least half its population, and serious labor unrest shook the political establishment.
In Florence and other thriving Italian cities, wealth allowed many people greater material pleasures, a more comfortable life, and leisure time to appreciate and patronize the arts.
The rich, social-climbing residents of Venice, Florence, Genoa, and Rome came to see life more as an opportunity to be enjoyed than as a painful pilgrimage to the City of God

Communes and Republics of Northern Italy

The northern Italian cities were communes, sworn associations of free men who, like other town residents, began in the twelfth century to seek political and economic independence from local nobles.
Merchant elites made citizenship in the communes dependent on a property qualification, years of residence within the city, and social connections.
Only a tiny percentage of the male population possessed these qualifications and thus could hold political office.
The common people, called the popolo, were disenfranchised and heavily taxed, and they bitterly resented their exclusion from power.
Many cities in Italy became signori, in which one man— whether condottiero, merchant, or noble— ruled and handed down the right to rule to his son.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the signori in many cities and the most powerful merchant oligarchs in others transformed their households into courts.
Courtly culture afforded signori and oligarchs the opportunity to display and assert their wealth and power.
Rulers of nation-states later copied and adapted all these aspects of Italian courts.

City-States and the Balance of Power

Renaissance Italians had a passionate attachment to their individual city-states: political loyalty and feeling centered on the city.
In the fifteenth century five powers dominated the Italian peninsula: Venice, Milan, Florence, the Papal States, and the kingdom of Naples.
In one significant respect, however, the Italian citystates anticipated future relations among competing European states after 1500.
Whenever one Italian state appeared to gain a predominant position within the peninsula, other states combined against it to establish a balance of power.
In the formation of these alliances, Renaissance Italians invented the machinery of modern diplomacy: permanent embassies with resident ambassadors in capitals where political relations and commercial ties needed continual monitoring.
At the end of the fifteenth century Venice, Florence, Milan, and the papacy possessed great wealth and represented high cultural achievement.
When Florence and Naples entered into an agreement to acquire Milanese territories, Milan called on France for support, and the French king Charles VIII (r. 1483–1498) invaded Italy in 1494.
Prior to this invasion, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) had preached in Florence a number of fiery sermons attended by large crowds predicting that God would punish Italy for its moral vice and corrupt leadership.
Savonarola became the political and religious leader of a new Florentine republic and promised Florentines even greater glory in the future if they would reform their ways.
For a time Savonarola was wildly popular, but eventually people tired of his moral denunciations, and he was excommunicated by the pope, tortured, and burned at the very spot where he had overseen the bonfires.
The Medici returned as the rulers of Florence.
The French invasion inaugurated a new period in Italian and European power politics.
The failure of the citystates to consolidate led to centuries of subjection by outside invaders.
Italy was not to achieve unification until 1870.

Intellectual Change

Humanism

Giorgio Vasari was the first to use the word Renaissance in print, but he was not the first to feel that something was being reborn.
Two centuries earlier the Florentine poet and scholar Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) spent long hours searching for classical Latin manuscripts in dusty monastery libraries and wandering around the many ruins of the Roman Empire remaining in Italy.
He became obsessed with the classical past and felt that the writers and artists of ancient Rome had reached a level of perfection in their work that had not since been duplicated.
Petrarch clearly thought he was witnessing the dawning of a new era in which writers and artists would recapture the glory of the Roman Republic.
Around 1350 he proposed a new kind of education to help them do this, in which young men would study the works of ancient Roman authors, using them as models of how to write clearly, argue effectively, and speak persuasively
People who advocated it were known as humanists and their program as humanism.
Humanism was the main intellectual component of the Renaissance.
The glory of Rome had been brightest, in the opinion of the humanists, in the works of the Roman author and statesman Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.).
Cicero had lived during the turbulent era when Julius Caesar and other powerful generals transformed the Roman Republic into an empire.
In the fifteenth century Florentine humanists became increasingly interested in Greek philosophy as well as Roman literature, especially in the ideas of Plato.
Under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici (1389– 1464), the scholar Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) began to lecture to an informal group of Florence’s cultural elite.
For Ficino and his most gifted student, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), both Christian and classical texts taught that the universe was a hierarchy of beings from God down through spiritual beings to material beings, with humanity, right in the middle, as the crucial link that possessed both material and spiritual natures.
Man’s divinely bestowed nature meant there were no limits to what he could accomplish.
They were especially interested in individuals who had risen above their background to become brilliant, powerful, or unique.
Such individuals had the admirable quality of virtù, which is not virtue in the sense of moral goodness, but their ability to shape the world around them according to their will.
Humanists disagreed about education for women.
Many saw the value of exposing women to classical models of moral behavior and reasoning, but they also wondered whether a program of study that emphasized eloquence and action was proper for women, whose sphere was generally understood to be private and domestic.

Education

Humanists thought that their recommended course of study in the classics would provide essential skills for future politicians, diplomats, lawyers, military leaders, and businessmen, as well as writers and artists.
Humanists put their ideas into practice.
Beginning in the early fifteenth century, they opened schools and academies in Italian cities and courts in which pupils began with Latin grammar and rhetoric, went on to study Roman history and political philosophy, and then learned Greek in order to study Greek literature and of the new learning.
No book on education had broader influence than Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528).
This treatise sought to train, discipline, and fashion the young man into the courtly ideal, the gentleman.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries The Courtier was translated into most European languages and widely read.
It influenced the social mores and patterns of conduct of elite groups in Renaissance and early modern Europe and became a how-to manual for people seeking to improve themselves and rise in the social hierarchy as well.

Political Thought

Ideal courtiers should preferably serve an ideal ruler, and biographies written by humanists often described rulers who were just, wise, pious, dignified, learned, brave, kind, and distinguished.
The most famous (or infamous) civic humanist, and ultimately the best-known political theorist of this era, was Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527).
The first work Machiavelli finished— though not the first to be published— is his most famous: The Prince (1513), which uses the examples of classical and contemporary rulers to argue that the function of a ruler (or any government) is to preserve order and security.
Like the good humanist he was, Machiavelli knew that effective rulers exhibited the quality of virtù.
He presented examples from the classical past of just the type of ruler he was describing, but also wrote about contemporary leaders.
The Prince is often seen as the first modern guide to politics, though Machiavelli was denounced for writing it, and people later came to use the word Machiavellian to mean cunning and ruthless.
Even today, when Machiavelli’s more secular view of the purposes of government is widely shared, scholars debate whether Machiavelli actually meant what he wrote.
He dedicated The Prince to the new Medici ruler of Florence, however, so any criticism was deeply buried within what was, in that era of patronage, essentially a job application.

Christian Humanism

In the last quarter of the fifteenth century, students from the Low Countries, France, Germany, and England flocked to Italy, absorbed the “new learning,” and carried it back to their own countries.
These Christian humanists, as they were later called, thought that the best elements of classical and Christian cultures should be combined.
The English humanist Thomas More (1478–1535) began life as a lawyer, studied the classics, and entered government service.
Despite his official duties, he had time to write, and he became most famous for his controversial dialogue Utopia (1516), a word More invented from the Greek words for “nowhere”.
More’s purposes in writing Utopia have been debated just as much as have Machiavelli’s in penning The Prince.
Better known by contemporaries than Thomas More was the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus(1466?–1536) of Rotterdam.
His fame rested on both scholarly editions and translations and popular works.
Two fundamental themes run through all of Erasmus’s work.
First, education in the Bible and the classics is the means to reform, the key to moral and intellectual improvement.
Second, renewal should be based on what he termed “the philosophy of Christ,” an emphasis on inner spirituality and personal morality rather than Scholastic theology or outward observances such as pilgrimages or venerating relics.

The Printed World

The fourteenth-century humanist Petrarch and the sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus had similar ideas on many topics, but the immediate impact of their ideas was very different because of one thing: the invention of the printing press with movable metal type.
Printing with movable metal type developed in Germany in the 1440s as a combination of existing technologies.
The printing revolution was also made possible by the ready availability of paper, which was also produced using techniques that had originated in China, though, unlike the printing press, this technology had been brought into Europe through Muslim Spain rather than developing independently.
By the fifteenth century the increase in urban literacy, the development of primary schools, and the opening of more universities had created an expanding market for reading materials.
Gutenberg was not the only one to recognize the huge market for books, and his invention was quickly copied.
Other craftsmen made their own type, built their own presses, and bought their own paper, setting themselves up in business.
The effects of the invention of movable-type printing were not felt overnight.
Nevertheless, movable type radically transformed both the private and the public lives of Europeans by the dawn of the sixteenth century.
Printing gave hundreds or even thousands of people identical books, allowing them to more easily discuss the ideas that the books contained with one another in person or through letters.
Government and church leaders both used and worried about printing.
They printed laws, declarations of war, battle accounts, and propaganda, and they also attempted to censor books and authors whose ideas they thought challenged their authority or were incorrect.
Printing also stimulated the literacy of laypeople and eventually came to have a deep effect on their private lives.

Art and the Artist

Patronage and Power

In early Renaissance Italy, powerful urban groups often flaunted their wealth by commissioning works of art.
Increasingly in the late fifteenth century, wealthy individuals and rulers, rather than corporate groups, sponsored works of art.
Patrons varied in their level of involvement as a work progressed; some simply ordered a specific subject or scene, while others oversaw the work of the artist or architect very closely, suggesting themes and styles and demanding changes while the work was in progress.
For example, Pope Julius II (pontificate 1503–1513), who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel in 1508, demanded that the artist work as fast as he could and frequently visited him at his work with suggestions and criticisms.
Michelangelo, a Florentine who had spent his young adulthood at the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, complained in person and by letter about the pope’s meddling, but his reputation did not match the power of the pope, and he kept working until the chapel was finished in 1512.
In addition to power, art reveals changing patterns of consumption among the wealthy elite in European society
After the palace itself, the private chapel within the palace symbolized the largest expenditure for the wealthy of the sixteenth century.
Decorated with religious scenes and equipped with ecclesiastical furniture, the chapel served as the center of the household’s religious life and its cult of remembrance of the dead.

Changing Artistic Styles

The content and style of Renaissance art both often differed from those of the Middle Ages.
Religious topics, such as the Annunciation of the Virgin and the Nativity, remained popular among both patrons and artists, but frequently the patron had himself and his family portrayed in the scene.
The individual portrait emerged as a distinct artistic genre in this movement.
Rather than reflecting a spiritual ideal, as medieval painting and sculpture tended to do, Renaissance portraits showed human ideals, often portrayed in the more realistic style increasingly favored by both artists and patrons.
Art produced in northern Europe tended to be more religious in orientation than that produced in Italy.
In the early sixteenth century the center of the new art shifted from Florence to Rome, where wealthy cardinals and popes wanted visual expression of the church’s and their own families’ power and piety.
Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520), another Florentine, got the commission for frescoes in the papal apartments, and in his relatively short life he painted hundreds of portraits and devotional images, becoming the most sought-after artist in Europe.
Venice became another artistic center in the sixteenth century.

The Renaissance Artist

Some patrons rewarded certain artists very well, and some artists gained great public acclaim as, in Vasari’s words, “rare men of genius.”
In the Middle Ages people believed that only God created, albeit through individuals; the medieval conception recognized no particular value in artistic originality.
It is important not to overemphasize the Renaissance notion of genius.
Younger artists gathered together in the evenings for further drawing practice; by the later sixteenth century some of these informal groups had turned into more formal artistic “academies,” the first of which was begun in 1563 in Florence by Vasari under the patronage of the Medici.
As Vasari’s phrase indicates, the notion of artistic genius that developed in the Renaissance was gendered.
There are no female architects whose names are known and only one female sculptor, though several women did become well known as painters in their day.
Women were not alone in being excluded from the institutions of Renaissance culture.
Though a few rare men of genius such as Leonardo and Michelangelo emerged from artisanal backgrounds, most scholars and artists came from families with at least some money.

Social Hierarchies

Race and Slavery

Renaissance people did not use the word race the way we do, but often used race, people, and nation interchangeably for ethnic, national, religious, or other groups— the French race, the Jewish nation, the Irish people, “the race of learned gentlemen,” and so on.
Ever since the time of the Roman Republic, a small number of black Africans had lived in western Europe.
They had come, along with white slaves, as the spoils of war.
Beginning in the fifteenth century sizable numbers of black slaves entered Europe.
Although blacks were concentrated in the Iberian Peninsula, some Africans must have lived in northern Europe as well.
Africans were not simply amusements at court. In Portugal, Spain, and Italy slaves supplemented the labor force in virtually all occupations— as servants, agricultural laborers, craftsmen, and seamen on ships going to Lisbon and Africa.
Until the voyages down the African coast in the late fifteenth century, Europeans had little concrete knowledge of Africans and their cultures.

Wealth and the Nobility

The word class— as in working class, middle class, and upper class— was not used in the Renaissance to describe social divisions, but by the thirteenth century, and even more so by the fifteenth, the idea of a hierarchy based on wealth was emerging.
The development of a hierarchy of wealth did not mean an end to the prominence of nobles, however, and even poorer nobility still had higher status than wealthy commoners.
Along with being tied to hierarchies of wealth and family standing, social status was linked to considerations of honor.

Gender Roles

Renaissance people would not have understood the word gender to refer to categories of people, but they would have easily grasped the concept.
Toward the end of the fourteenth century, learned men (and a few women) began what was termed the debate about women (querelle des femmes), a debate about women’s character and nature that would last for centuries.
Misogynist critiques of women from both clerical and secular authors denounced females as devious, domineering, and demanding.
With the development of the printing press, popular interest in the debate about women grew, and works were translated, reprinted, and shared around Europe.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, the debate about women also became a debate about female rulers, sparked primarily by dynastic accidents in many countries, including Spain, England, Scotland, and France, which led to women ruling in their own right or serving as advisers to child kings.
Ideas about women’s and men’s proper roles determined the actions of ordinary men and women even more forcefully.
Women were also understood as either “married or to be married,” even if the actual marriage patterns in Europe left many women (and men) unmarried until quite late in life.

Politics and the State in Western Europe

France

The Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War left France drastically depopulated, commercially ruined, and agriculturally weak.
Charles reconciled the Burgundians and Armagnacs (ahr-muhn-YAKZ), who had been waging civil war for thirty years.
By establishing regular companies of cavalry and archers— recruited, paid, and inspected by the state— Charles created the first permanent royal army anywhere in Europe.
His son Louis XI (r. 1461–1483), called the “Spider King” because of his treacherous character, improved upon Charles’s army and used it to control the nobles’ separate militias and to curb urban independence.
Two further developments strengthened the French monarchy.
The marriage of Louis XII (r. 1498–1515) and Anne of Brittany added the large western duchy of Brittany to the state.

England

English society also suffered severely from the disorders of the fifteenth century.
The aristocracy dominated the government of Henry IV (r. 1399–1413) and indulged in disruptive violence at the local level, fighting each other, seizing wealthy travelers for ransom, and plundering merchant caravans.
The Yorkist Edward IV (r. 1461–1483) began establishing domestic tranquillity.
He succeeded in defeating the Lancastrian forces and after 1471 began to reconstruct the monarchy.
Edward IV and subsequently the Tudors, except Henry VIII, conducted foreign policy on the basis of diplomacy, avoiding expensive wars.
Henry VII did summon several meetings of Parliament in the early years of his reign, primarily to confirm laws, but the center of royal authority was the royal council, which governed at the national level.
When Henry VII died in 1509, he left a country at peace both domestically and internationally, a substantially augmented treasury, an expanding wool trade, and a crown with its dignity and role much enhanced.

Spain

While England and France laid the foundations of unified nation-states during the Middle Ages, Spain remained a conglomerate of independent kingdoms.
By the middle of the fifteenth century, the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon dominated the weaker Navarre, Portugal, and Granada; and the Iberian Peninsula, with the exception of Granada, had been won for Christianity.
Although Ferdinand and Isabella (r. 1474–1516) pursued a common foreign policy, until about 1700 Spain existed as a loose confederation of separate kingdoms, each maintaining its own cortes (parliament), laws, courts, and systems of coinage and taxation.
Ferdinand and Isabella were able to exert their authority in ways similar to the rulers of France and England, however.
There still remained a sizable and, in the view of the majority of the Spanish people, potentially dangerous minority, the Jews.
In the fourteenth century anti-Semitism in Spain was aggravated by fiery anti-Jewish preaching, by economic dislocation, and by the search for a scapegoat during the Black Death.
Anti-Semitic pogroms swept the towns of Spain, and perhaps 40 percent of the Jewish population was killed or forced to convert.
Those converted were called conversos or New Christians.
Recent scholarship has carefully analyzed documents of the Inquisition.
Most conversos identified themselves as sincere Christians; many came from families that had received baptism generations before.
In 1492, shortly after the conquest of Granada, Isabella and Ferdinand issued an edict expelling all practicing Jews from Spain.
The Spanish national state rested on marital politics as well as military victories and religious courts.
In 1496 Ferdinand and Isabella married their second daughter, Joanna, heiress to Castile, to the archduke Philip, heir to the Burgundian Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire.