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Renaissance (14th - 16th Centuries)

• 16th century painter Gerogio Vasari described the period he was living in as a rebirth.

• Intellectuals of the Renaissance directly linked their achievements to the ancient Greeks and Romans, while claiming to go against the backwardness of Medieval times.

• The idea of individualism was born during this time, as people sought personal credit for their achievements rather than God.

• The Renaissance first took place in the Italian city-states and was aided by the invention of the printing press in the mid 1400s.

• These developments soon moved northward, creating the Northern Renaissance, which dealt with more religious matters and laid the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation.

• The city-states of Italy, such as Milan, Florence, and Venice, in the 14th and 15th centuries were an economic and cultural hub.

• These north-Italian city-states were controlled by the H.R.E., but residents had lots of autonomy.

• The old nobility in these places often competed with the rise of newly-rich merchant families.

• The popolo, or underclass, in these places were discontent with the political and economic order. This led to revolts such as the Ciompi Revolt in Florence in 1378, which established a government ran by the poor for a brief time.

• In Milan tensions caused the city to become run by a signor, or Tyrant, and later the family of Sforza.

• Another powerful family was the Medici, which used their wealth to take control over Florentine.

• Warfare had reduced Italy to being controlled by just the northern city-states, the Papal States in central Italy, and the Kingdom of Naples in the south.

• Renaissance began in Italy because of tensions between city-states; merchants; patrons, who paid for the development of the arts; Italy’s central location in the Mediterranean, and its history with ancient Greek and Roman cultural.

• Humanism has been described as a program of study that focuses on rhetoric, literature, and the classical world of the Greeks and Romans.

• Francesco Petrarch, who lived in the 14th century, took to studying the classics in their original forms.

• He coined the term Dark Ages to describe the decline that took place after the collapse of Rome.

• He also studied the letters of Cicero -- a philosopher who recorded the collapse of the Roman Republic -- and aimed to copy his writing style.

• Florentines known as civic humanist used their classical education to serve as diplomats and work in the chancellery office.

• Greek revivalists focused particularly on Plato’s teachings of training the human mind to go beyond our senses using reason.

• This platonic view of man can be found in Pico dell Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man.

• The Florentine Platonic Academy, sponsored by a Medici, merged this platonic philosophy with Christianity to create Neoplatonism.

• Castiglione’s The Courtier describes the ideal Renaissance man, who knows several languages, is educated in the classics, and is skilled in the arts.

• Lorenzo Valla studied languages and showed that the Latin Bible had some miss-translations.

• During the Renaissance wealthy women were able to receive the new Humanist education, but poor women still did not.

• Humanist scholar Leonardo Bruni created an educational program for women but left out the study of rhetoric.

• Italian woman Christine de Pisan received a humanist education and wrote the The City of Ladies, which counters the notion that women are inferior to men and that women should carve out their own spaces.

• Renaissance artists that became important individuals, unlike the Middle Ages, and patrons sponsored them to create works that glorified the patrons achievements rather than tout a religious message like in Medieval times.

• Renaissance architecture used classical motifs, such as symmetry and classical columns. One example of this architecture is the Cathedral of Florence by Filippo Brunelleschi.

• In the Middle Ages paintings using fresco on wet plaster/wood were commonplace, but in the 15th century oil painting was invented and became dominant in Italy.

• Artists also began to use chiaroscuro, the contrast of light and dark, to make images look 3D.

• Images were also made more realistic by the invention of single-point perspective in the 1420s.

• The end of the 15th century marked the start of the High Renaissance, where the center of the Renaissance became Rome.

• This period was marked by the style of art known as mannerism, which uses distorted figures and confusing themes to convey the growing crisis in religion and politics.

• Leonardo da Vinci represents the ideal Renaissance man, as he was an inventor, architect, sculptor, scientists, and artist famous for the Mona Lisa.

• Raphael painted and images of Jesus and Mary and The School of Athens, which is notable for its use of single-point perspective.

• Michelangelo was commissioned to construct the sculpture of David to represent Florence’s struggle against Milan, and he was employed by pope Julius II to work on the Sistine Chapel.

• Christian humanists, which came about in the Northern Renaissance, aimed to apply the classical teachings of humanism with Christianity

• One such Christian humanist was Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus collected ancient proverbs in Adages, criticized the problems of the church such as scholasticism In Praise of Folly, emphasized inner worship as opposed to outer worship such as sacraments in Handbook of the Christian Knight.

• Erasmus also translated the New Testament and corresponded with Martin Luther, but disagreed with him because Erasmus only wanted to reform the Church and believed in free will.

• Englishman Sir Thomas More, a friend of Erasmus, described his ideal society in Utopia and criticized the Church, but he was executed by King Henry VIII for refusing an oath recognizing Henry as head of the Church of England.

• Northern Renaissance art is characterized more by religious themes and ordinary peasant life rather than the classics portrayed in the Italian Renaissance.

• Albrecht Durer was one such Northern Renaissance artist, who painted woodcuts that lent support to Martin Luther’s doctrine.

• The greatest achievements of northern arts occurred England in the 16th and 17th centuries during a period known as the Elizabethan Renaissance.

• Great talents during this time include Geoffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio and his The Decameron, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare.

  Reformation (15th - 16th Centuries)

• German Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable type (the printing press) to Europe in the mid 1400s.

• The invention of the printing press resulted in a significant increase in literacy in the 16th century and helped spread the Protestant Reformation.

• Up till 1500, in western Europe there had only been the Catholic Church controlled by the pope in Rome.

• A few decades later began the creation of new Christian churches during the Protestant Reformation.

• This reformation prompted the a response from the Catholics known as the Catholic Reformation.

• The Protestant Reformation was brought about by the humanism, which led individuals to question certain practices and such as the efficacy of religious relics and the value of one’s salvation of living the life of a monk; the printing press, which made it possible for the masses to read the Bible themselves; and the rise of powerful monarchies, which questioned the authority of Rome.

• The church faced several crises during the 14th century, including those stemming from the Black Death.

• One of these was anti-clericalism -- a disrespect towards the clergy, which stemmed from their ineffectiveness during the plague and their self indulgence. This attitude towards the clergy is depicted in Canterbury Tales and The Decameron.

• Another problem was simony -- the selling of church offices, which made several clergy members ineffective.

• Furthermore, there was a rise in pietism, or the notion of a direct relationship with God, thereby reducing the importance of the church.

• The 14th century also saw the Great Schism, which saw three competing popes excommunicate each other.

• In the 14th century Englishman John Wycliffe questioned the wealth of the church, transubstantiation, penance, and the selling of indulgences.

• Wycliffe asked his followers, the Lollards, to read the Bible and interpret it for themselves, and he translated the Bible into English.

• In Bohemia Jan Hus believed the Bible to hold the authority, not the church. He also criticized the clergy and their handling of the sacraments

• Hus was brought before the Council of Constance in 1415 by Pope Martin V and promised safe passage, but Hus was then burned at the stake as a heretic, sparking a rebellion by his followers.

• The practice of selling indulgences began during the Crusades when the papacy sold indulgences to the knights, which were claimed to release the buyers from purgatory.

• In 1517 Albert of Hohenzollern had to raise money to become Archbishop of Mainz, so he borrowed from the powerful banking family called the Fuggers. To pay off his debt, Hohenzollern was to preach indulgences (some of the money was to go directly to Rome), which Dominican friar Johann Tetzel was sent throughout Germany to do.

• This became one of Martin Luther’s main criticisms of the Catholic Church, which resulted in him nailing the 95 Theses to the Castle Church at Wittenberg.

• Pope Leo X was initially unconcerned with this, but Luther soon amassed a large amount of followers, partly due to the spread of his theses by the printing press.

• John Eck was a theologian who frequently critiqued Luther in public debates.

• In 1520 Luther urged that secular government had the right to reform the Church, attacked teachings such as the sacraments, and stated that salvation is achieved through faith alone.

• Pope Leo X issued a papal bull that ordered Luther to recant, but Luther burned the bull, leading to his excommunication.

• In 1521 Luther was made to appear before the Diet of Worms, where the German nobility met. At this diet emperor of the HRE, Charles V, demanded that Luther recant.

• When Luther refused to recant, he was banned by the empire, but one of his supporters -- Frederick the Elector of Saxony -- agreed to hide him, allowing Luther to continue writing and translate the Bible into German.

• Luther reduced the sacraments to just communion and Baptism. He changed communion (the Holy Eucharist) by challenging the idea of transubstantiation, the transformation of bread and wine into Christ by a priest, when he stated that Christ was already present in the sacrament.

• Luther also wanted to do away with monasticism and celibacy.

• The following decades saw Protestantism spread across Europe.

• Luther’s ideas were able to grow partly due to his refusal to challenge the current social order, as can be seen by his condemnation of the German Peasants’ Revolt of 1525.

• Another reason for the spread of Luther’s ideas was Luther’s support by German princes.

• When Charles V came to power after Emperor Maximilian’s death, he was locked in a power struggle with French King Francis I for the throne.

• Even when Charles won control, he still was unable to effective control his possessions, which spanned vastly across the continent.

• In the 1540s Charles fought the Protestant princes in Germany during the Schmalkaldic War and was forced to sign the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which granted territories under a Lutheran ruler to continue to follow Lutheranism while Catholic territories remained Catholic.

• Historians refer to the development of religious sects that went beyond Luther’s reformation in the 16th century as the Radical Reformation.

• One one of these sect was the Anabaptists, who denied the idea of infant baptism and instead believed baptism should only be carried out on adults. Rebaptism became a capital offense under the HRE, which both the pope and Luther agreed on.

• There were also the Antitrinitarians, who denied the validity of the Holy Trinity.

• Ulrich Zwingli was another challenger of the Catholic Church; however, unlike Luther, Zwingli rejected all sacraments and called for social reform in his homeland of Switzerland. He eventually died leading the troops of Zurich against Swiss Catholics.

• John Calvin argued that individuals were predestined for salvation or hell and that there was no free will that could change this. Calvin also was a strict enforcer of his religion through the use of the Genevan government.

• Calvinism quickly spread in the mid 1500s and became the established Church in Scotland.

• In France the growing minority of Calvinists were known as Huguenots.

• English Calvinists, known as the Puritans, fled to Holland before traveling to Massachusetts to establish a colony where they could practice their religion.

• Henry VIII was initially supportive of the Catholic Church, even critiquing Luther in The Defence of the Seven Sacraments.

• However, Henry wanted to end his marriage to the Spanish Catherine of Aragon when she couldn’t produce children.

• After falling in love with Anne Boleyn, he formed the Reformation Parliament, which would give him the ability to gain power over the Church and allow him to remarry.

• In 1533 the parliament passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals, which gave him authority of all spiritual cases in England.

• A year later the Act of Supremacy was passed, which made the King of England the Supreme Head of the newly formed Church of England.

• While with Boleyn, Henry had a child named Elizabeth Tudor (Elizabeth I).

• Then Henry remarried to Jane Seymour and had son named Edward (Edward IV)

• Henry gained more power over the English church by closing all monasteries and confiscating their lands.

• The reign of Edward IV (r. 1547-1553) saw an attempt to make the Church of England more Protestant.

• Then the reign of Edward’s half-sister Mary Tudor (r. 1553-1558), who was married to the Catholic Phillip II, saw an attempt to make England Catholic again.

• To suppress Protestants, Mary burnt several hundred Englishmen at the stake, earning her the nickname of Bloody Mary.

• Elizabeth I’s reign saw England take a middle-ground between Protestantism and Catholicism.

• The Counter-Reformation began several decades after the Luther’s initial theses were crafted. It sought to counteract the successes of the Protestants.

• One of the methods of doing so was by instituting the Index of Prohibited Books, which included works by writers such as Erasmus and Galileo.

• The Catholic Church also re-instituted the papal Inquisition, which put those deemed to be heretics to death.

• The Council of Trent in the mid 1500s sought to address some of the problems raised by reformers.

• The council limited simony and mandated education for the clergy. The council however did not change its mind on theological doctrine.

• The council also helped facilitate the creation of intensely religious art, which helped develop the baroque style of art.

• During the Counter-Reformation the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was formed by Ignatius Loyola, who was deeply loyal to the Church. The Jesuits distinguished themselves as a teaching order and worked as Catholic missionaries.

Exploration

• Portugal had always turned to the sea to look for distant lands for sources of wealth, as its own land was not well suited for farming.

• In 1415 Prince Henry the Navigator, son of the Portuguese king, helped capture African port of Ceuta. This inspired him to establish a navigational school in Lisbon and further expeditions to Africa and the East to establish trade.

• In 1487 Bartholomew Dias sailed around the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa.

• In 1498 Vasco de Gama sailed around Africa to reach India, allowing Portugal to take control of the lucrative spice trade there.

• In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for the Spanish to find a new trade to the East and eventually landed in the Bahamas, thus “discovering” the New World.

• In 1519 the Spanish Ferdinand Magellan sailed around South America to land in the Philippines, where he subsequently died.

• That same year conquistador Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico with a small force and began to take over the Aztec Empire by exploiting local rulers discontent with the empire.

• The Aztec’s ability to fight back was further weakened by diseases such as smallpox brought by the Europeans.

• By 1521 Cortes had claimed Mexico as New Spain.

• The Inca Empire of Peru followed a similar story in 1531 when Francisco Pizarro once again exploited local conflicts, superior weaponry, and diseases to take over the empire for Spain.

• The Spanish set out to create plantations in their new colonies using a system of forced labor called encomienda, leading to mass death from disease and overwork.

• In order to replace the dying native workers, the Spanish began to abduct Africans from their homeland in what is known as the Atlantic Slave Trade.

• Exploration brought about the Columbian Exchange, which was the transfer of animals, technology, diseases, plants, people, and ideas between the New and Old World.

• Europeans brought things over to the New World such as horses, cattle, smallpox, Catholicism, and sugarcane. They also arrived back to the Old World with crops such as squash, beans, and potatoes and carried over syphilis.

  The Development of Monarchical States

• Prior to the 16th century, the king was not an absolute ruler; instead he had to rule with the consent of his vassals. However, that began to change with the idea that the monarchical power was God-given and therefore absolute.

• This rise of monarchical power was marked by growing bureaucratization, the existence of a permanent army, and growing need to tax.

• Italy during this period remained divided and became a target for other powers.

• The Treaty of Lodi in 1454 provided for a balance of power among the Italian city-states, sealing an alliance between Milan and Naples with the support of Florence. This helped keep major powers out of Italy.

• This was ended in 1490 when Ludovico il Moro of Milan reintiated hostilities with Naples and invited the French under Charles VIII to help take it over.

• During that time Florence had been taken over by Savonarola, who overthrew the existing Medici rulers and established a puritanical state.

• In 1498 Moro had joined and anti-French alliance, which had expelled the French from Italy and restored the Medici in Florence.

• The Medici promptly followed by burning Savonarola at the stake.

• These events had damaged the independence of Italian city-states, which became a battlefield for Spain and France throughout the 16th century.

• During the collapse of Italian independence Niccolo Machiavelli had witnessed the Florentine Republic, which he served, be overthrown by the Medici. He was then forced into exile, which influenced him to write The Prince.

• The Prince espoused his belief that a strong, sometimes ruthless leader was necessary to maintain control and prevent foreign domination.

• During the War of the Roses in the 15th century Henry Tudor (Henry VII) was able to win the central authority in England.

• His son Henry VIII took over in 1509 and continued his fathers policies to strengthen the crown.

• Henry VIII and was able to restore so much power to crown because his aristocratic opponents had been decimated in the aforementioned war and the economy was growing. Henry also was able to create a small but efficient bureaucracy and take over the Church.

• Queen Elizabeth, Henry’s daughter who ruled for the latter half the 16th century, received a humanist education and was a strong ruler. She is often called the “Virgin Queen” because she never married.

• Elizabeth’s lack of marriage meant that the Catholic Mary Stuart, ruler of Scotland, was her legal heir.

• Together, Mary and Phillip II of Spain conspired to overthrow Elizabeth, which culminated in the Spanish Armada in 1588.

• The armada was defeated, which began a period of stability that allowed the English Renaissance to take place.

• The 1469 marriage of Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and Isabelle, Queen of Castile, laid the groundwork for the unification of Spain.

• After the Reconquista finished in 1492, the Spanish monarchs formerly expelled the Jews.

• Jews and Moors who converted to Christianity were subsequently hounded by the Spanish Inquisition, which would later go after Protestants.

• Charles V became the successor to Ferdinand and Isabella and eventually passed his Eastern Hapsburg lands to his brother Ferdinand and Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands to his son Philip.

• Philip was able to gain vast wealth from the New World’s silver mines, but he spent most of his reign in debt trying maintain the empire.

• In 1571 Spain was able to win a battle for the Med. against the Ottoman Empire.

• Philip ended up spending vast amounts of money trying to put down a Protestant revolt in the Netherlands that began in 1568.

• After the Duke of Alva’s Council of Troubles and Don Juan failed to control the situation, Philip launched the Spanish Armada to end Elizabeth’s support of the rebellion.

• By 1609 Spain conceded the autonomy of the northern provinces of the Netherlands (while still maintaining control of the southern ones) and formally acknowledged their independence in 1648.

• The 16th and early 17th centuries began a cultural golden age in Spain.

• This age included famous writers such as Cervantes and painters like El Greco.

• Ultimately, this age collapsed in the late 17th century as a result of constant wars, the Price Revolution that caused mass inflation, and the collapse of the Castilian economy.

• The HRE dated back to 962 and was eventually weakened as a result of conflicts with the papacy.

• By 1356 the practice of electing the emperor was formally defined by the Golden Bull of Charles IV. German princes usually elected a weak emperor that could not stand in their way.

• By 1500 the empire consisted of 100s of semi-autonomous entities.

• Charles V, elected in 1519, attempted to establish more control over these territories.

• The Peace of Augsburg had ended the religious wars during Charles V’s reign, but had failed to grant recognition to Calvinists, causing problems later on.

• The Catholic Counter-Reformation in south Germany had been successful, which further stoked religious tensions in Germany.

• The Thirty Years’ War subsequently began in Bohemia in 1618 when Bohemian protestants protested the king Ferdinand’s religious intolerance, even defenestrating two of his advisors.

• After Ferdinand was elected HRE emperor, Frederick, the Calvinist Elector of the Palatinate, took over as king of Bohemia. Ferdinand responded by forming a military alliance with Bavaria and was able to dispose of Fredrick by 1622.

• The threat to the Protestants in Germany brought in foreign powers to the war such as the King of Denmark.

• Ferdinand then turned to Albrecht von Wallenstein to create a bigger army for the 2nd phase of the war.

• In 1629 the Edict of Restitution was passed, which outlawed Calvinism in the HRE and required the Lutherans to turn over all property seized.

• This led the King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, to enter the war, triggering the 3rd phase of the war.

• France supported the Swedes because French chief minister Cardinal Richelieu was concerned with the increase of Habsburg strength in Germany.

• The final phase of the war saw the French and Swedes beat back the Habsburgs, causing the decimation of towns, agricultural collapse, and the death of millions.

• The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 made sure the emperor remained weak, each German prince decided the religion of his own territory, and Calvinism was fully recognized.

• France had long had a struggle between the aristocracy and monarchy, which the French Wars of Religion in the latter half of the 16th century continued.

• After the death of Henry II in 1559, France would go through 3 different kings over the next few decades, all of which were dominated by their mother Catherine de’ Medici.

• Three prominent aristocratic families hoped they could restore their power while a weak monarch was on the throne.

• The Guises tuned toward militant Catholicism, while Admiral Coligny of the Montomorencies and Prince of Conde of the Bourbon tuned toward Calvinism.

• After 10 years of conflict, the Huguenots had the upper-hand.

• Calvinist Henry of Navarre, a Bourbon, married King Charles IX’s sister.

• When the Huguenot aristocracy gathered in Paris in 1572, Catherine Medici encouraged the king to set in motion the St. Bartholomew ‘s Day Massacre, which killed thousands of Huguenots. Henry of Navarre was only spared because he promised to return to Catholicism.

• In 1574 Henry III turned to defeat the Catholic League that formed under the Guise family.

• Henry III name Henry of Navarre his heir, which meant that Henry of Navarre became King Henry IV, thus beginning the Bourbon dynasty.

• In 1593 Henry Iv converted back to Catholicism permanently to win support.

• However, in 1598 he issued the Edict of Nantes, which granted Huguenots the freedom to worship and assemble in their towns.