Renaissance

A

Renaissance as Rebirth

Both the idea of historical rebirth and the use of the term renaissance to describe this process were characteristic products of the Renaissance itself. The term rinascità (an Italian word for 'renaissance') was probably first attached to the modern period in a book of biography entitled Le vita de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, ed scultori italiani (1550; The Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors, 1568), more commonly known as Lives of the Artists, published by Italian painter Giorgio Vasari. Vasari applied the concept specifically to a rebirth of art that drew its inspiration from antiquity rather than from the work of more recent medieval artists.

In the 14th and 15th centuries many Italian scholars began to display a remarkable awareness of history. They believed that they lived in a new age, free from the darkness and ignorance that they felt characterized the preceding era. These scholars compared their own achievements to the glories of ancient Rome and Greece. One group of Italian writers in the 14th century, following the example of the contemporary poet Petrarch, emphasized that their age resembled the great civilizations of the past because it focused on artistic achievement. In their view, this renewed emphasis on the arts had begun in the late 13th and early 14th centuries with the work of Italian painter Giotto and Italian poet Dante Alighieri.

Another group, led by Florentine scholar and diplomat Leonardo Bruni, added an equally important political dimension to this concept. Bruni and his followers admired a republican or representative form of government and looked to ancient Rome, as it was before the emperors came to power, as the best model. They applied humanistic learning to social and political life and encouraged patriotism among the residents of Florence and other Italian city-states.

The Renaissance originally grew out of cultural and political developments in Italy. Over the next three centuries, writers north of the Italian Alps adopted some of these ideas and soon spread them widely throughout Europe. Northern European Renaissance scholars, such as Dutch writer Desiderius Erasmus, added their own dimension to the Renaissance. They emphasized the need to reform Christian society and believed that this reform could be accomplished through education that was based on the great writings of ancient Greece and Rome.

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Intellectuals continued to build on the ideas of the Renaissance during the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, a time when scientific advancements led to a new emphasis on the power of human reason. One of the early Enlightenment thinkers was French philosopher and writer Voltaire. He claimed that the Renaissance was a crucial stage in liberating the mind from the superstition and error that he believed characterized Christian society during the Middle Ages. Voltaire applauded the declining power of the Roman Catholic Church during the Renaissance.

Later historians and writers who became part of the 19th-century romantic movement evaluated the Renaissance in an entirely different manner. Followers of romanticism emphasized passion over reason. They showed a keen interest in the vital, heroic, and unconventional personalities of the Renaissance such as Italian poet Petrarch, Italian artist Michelangelo, and French philosopher René Descartes. The romantics believed that an important characteristic of the Renaissance was individualism, which emphasized the capabilities and rights of the individual.

By the middle decades of the 19th century, two historians—Jules Michelet of France and Jakob Burckhardt of Switzerland—had combined these various perspectives in their interpretation of the Renaissance. Michelet saw the Renaissance as the momentous debut of a new phase in human history. He believed that it made possible all the great achievements of modern man, including the discovery of the Americas, the new science, and modern literature and art.

Michelet’s view of the Renaissance as the beginning of the modern era was refined in Jakob Burckhardt's Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1878), first published in 1860. He attached particular importance to the Renaissance state and saw in it the origins of modern political attitudes and behavior. In Burckhardt's view, Renaissance leaders conceived of the state as a work of art, one that they created deliberately by identifying and then applying the best means to reach their desired goals. Another characteristic of the Renaissance that Burckhardt considered modern was an interest in human personality and behavior.

Burckhardt saw all these traits as indications of a deeper quality: a fundamental individualism that was a central feature of the Italian Renaissance. He believed that the absence of centralized control in Italy during the 13th century had created an atmosphere of insecurity that encouraged the emergence of ruthless individuals, free spirits, and geniuses. Burckhardt believed that the study of antiquity had inspired Italians, but that its impact was less significant than other scholars had believed.

Historians who followed Burckhardt rarely disputed his interpretation of the Renaissance. However, they supplemented it with detailed investigations of other aspects of Renaissance life, including economics, science, and philosophy. These studies have reinforced the interpretation of the Renaissance as a period of striking innovation that pointed toward the modern world. Other scholars have also applied Burckhardt's vision of the Italian Renaissance to Europe as a whole.

B

Renaissance as Gradual Change

Those who have challenged Burckhardt’s theories have generally argued that the Renaissance was not as unique or different as previous scholars claimed. In particular, scholars who studied the Middle Ages became convinced that the centuries before the Renaissance, far from being a period of unrelieved barbarism, had developed a high order of civilization. They insist that most elements of the Renaissance had their roots in the past, and that it is misleading to speak of the 'rebirth' of culture in the Renaissance or to emphasize its significance in the formation of the modern world. These alternate interpretations have suggested that the Renaissance was a waning of the Middle Ages rather than the dawning of a new era, and that medieval scholars also knew and valued classical writings.

Scholars have largely abandoned the notion of an abrupt break between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and have modified older ideas about the nature of the era. It is now clear, for example, that people of the Renaissance did not abandon Christianity and that vigorous religious impulses were a major feature of the Renaissance. Scholars recognize that many aspects of the Renaissance were not modern; they also acknowledge that what may be true of one movement, region, or decade, may not be true of another.

Despite these differing interpretations, there are many indications that Europe had changed dramatically by the 16th century. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that Renaissance intellectuals believed their age marked a momentous turning point in history and that they were somehow fundamentally different from their medieval ancestors.

IV

Economic and Social Basis of the Renaissance

A

A Changing Economy

The civilization of the Renaissance was the creation of prosperous cities and of rulers who drew substantial income from their urban subjects in the Italian city-states and the countries of England and France. The commerce that kept cities alive also provided the capital and the flow of ideas that helped build Renaissance culture. During the early Middle Ages foreign trade had virtually come to a halt. By the 11th century, however, population growth and contact with other cultures through military efforts such as the Crusades helped revive commercial activity. Trade slowly increased with the exchange of luxury goods in the Mediterranean region and various commodities such as fish, furs, and metals across the North and Baltic seas. Commerce soon moved inland, bringing new prosperity to the citizens of towns along major trade routes. As traffic along these routes increased, existing settlements grew and new ones were established.

The cities of Italy were strategically located between western Europe and the area along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea known as the Levant. Italy’s leadership in the Renaissance was due in part to its central location for trade. The cities became important and wealthy commercial centers, and the riches accumulated by the merchants of Venice, Genoa, Milan, and a host of smaller cities supported Italy's political and cultural achievements.

Important towns developed beyond Italy as well. Especially with the expansion of trade, towns grew along the Danube, Rhine, and Rhône rivers of Europe; around the North Sea and the Baltic Sea; and in the Low Countries of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands where northern and southern trade routes met. Wherever these towns were located, they became a unique element in a medieval world that up to this time was dominated by seignorialism, an agricultural system in which the primary economic and political relationship was between landowners and their tenants.

Capital that accumulated through trade was eventually available for other enterprises, notably banking and, to a lesser degree, industry. The wealth of Florence, the leading cultural center of the Renaissance, came particularly from these alternate enterprises because the city’s inland location limited participation in large-scale commerce. At its height the Florentine textile industry employed 30,000 people, but it was banking that helped build the greatest family fortunes in Florence.

In the early 14th century, Florence became the banking center of Italy. The city’s importance as an international financial center was reinforced in the 15th century by the Medici bank. Under the management of Cosimo de' Medici, also known as Cosimo the Elder, this firm maintained branches in the major cities of Europe. The bank loaned money to popes, rulers, and merchants; operated mines and woolen mills; and carried on various other commercial enterprises. It accumulated huge profits that were used to finance political activity and to support cultural activities.

Well before the end of the 15th century, other powers challenged the economic leadership of Italy. In the kingdoms beyond the Alps, powerful rulers consolidated their control. This consolidation was accompanied by the growing prosperity of local businesses and by efforts to dispense with the Italian middlemen in trade. Rulers in France, England, and the Spanish kingdoms pursued policies favorable to their own middle-class tradesmen. In central Europe, powerful banking houses, such as that of the Fugger family in Augsburg, Germany, emerged at the encouragement of one of Europe’s most prominent royal dynasties, the Habsburgs.

Portugal’s development of a direct sea route to Asia at the end of the 15th century also undercut Italy’s role as the primary intermediary between the Far East and the Western world. Europe’s expansion to other parts of the world was one of the most momentous developments of the Renaissance era. The voyages of Italian-Spanish navigator Christopher Columbus to the Caribbean Sea in 1492 and of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama to India in 1498 set in motion a series of explorations that sparked European imagination during the late Renaissance period.

These journeys intensified national rivalries. The Atlantic powers, including Spain, Portugal, and France, competed for colonial territory and vastly increased their wealth. For Italy the geographical discoveries had a less positive effect, however. They signaled the eventual transfer of the world’s major commercial routes and, thus its wealth, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic seaboard. These economic developments also exposed other countries to Renaissance ideas and gave them the resources to rival Italy in cultural expansion.

B

Urban Society

The relationship between economic prosperity and the achievements of the Renaissance is not direct. The 14th century, which is generally regarded as the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, was a time of economic stagnation and even contraction, at least compared to the centuries that preceded it. Political disorder interfered with commerce; agricultural productivity appears to have declined; and the outbreak of the bubonic plague, or Black Death, drastically reduced the population of many parts of Europe. The 15th century probably saw some recovery, but it is not certain that this prosperity matched the success of the 13th century, particularly in Italy. Although economic conditions had an effect on the development of the Renaissance, economic prosperity and the accumulation of wealth were not necessarily the most important factors in the achievements of the era.

Other factors related to economic growth were at least as important in stimulating the political and cultural changes that became part of the Renaissance. Certainly one of these was the new environment provided by the town, an environment that was a by-product of increased commercial activity. The pursuit of wealth and the opportunity for traders and bankers to interact with the world beyond their town walls created an atmosphere more open to new ideas and to innovation, experimentation, and enterprise in all aspects of life.

The towns also developed a distinctive class structure. As urban areas grew in size and wealth, their social and political organization became more complex. When towns were small, urban populations tended to be homogeneous and democratic. With increased size and prosperity, the populations became more diverse, with different social classes that varied in background and power.

Peasants migrated to the towns from the countryside, often to escape their status as serfs, and began to form a growing working class that had no political rights. Members of the nobility who lived in the towns made up another distinct class. Merchants who were engaged in large-scale commerce or other particularly profitable enterprises gradually became differentiated from other tradesmen by their greater wealth. As a ruling class developed that manipulated government for its own interests, the gulf between social groups widened. By the 14th century the tensions generated by great inequalities of wealth and power had reached the breaking point. Disorder followed and, as a result, ambitious despots became the rulers of many Italian towns, then known as communes.

C

Rural Society

Rural society also changed as a result of the development of trade and towns. The towns and noble families of Italy, and later of northern Europe, provided the resources and the initiative behind the Renaissance, but the majority of Europeans still lived in rural areas and worked the land. The new urban markets for agricultural products steadily transformed a largely self-sufficient rural economy into a system that produced goods for sale. Whereas landowners had previously required payments in goods or services from their tenants or serfs, they now wanted to receive money in order to buy products sold by the merchants. The agricultural labor system known as serfdom was slowly transformed. In the new system, tenants held land based on money rents. The practice of making collective decisions based on long-established customs, a tradition that was common in closely knit medieval peasant communities, dissolved into a more independent kind of rural life.

Otherwise, the rural populations participated little in the new movements of the Renaissance. People who lived in rural areas often suffered profoundly from the political decisions of the period, as they bore the burdens of the warfare and economic reorganization that national rivalries and internal struggles brought. In contrast, the cultural energy of the Renaissance hardly affected them at all. The driving forces behind both the political and cultural changes of the period were the townspeople, especially the urban elite, and the rulers with whom they were allied.

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