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Renaissance Europe and the Middle Ages

Paolo Veronese: Feast in the House of Levi, 1573

 

The period known as the European Renaissance was a time of rapid discovery and social change. The influx of ideas from outside of Europe inspired a new wave of thinkers and led to the development of new techniques and a better understanding of the scientific world. These ideas also influenced fashion, music, art, and royal courts. The rise of intellectual growth began in Italy, which was not the cohesive state that it is in modern day. Rather, Italy was a constellation of city-states – Venice, Milan, Florence, Rome – each with its own sphere of influence over the countryside and towns around it. Within these cities, the system of patronage flourished under the influence of Islamic and other external inspiration. Patronage was the system where nobility, courtiers, and members of the royal family hired artists, scholars, priests, or other creative minds to think and create within their households, hoping that economic support would both produce new works and discoveries while enhancing the social status of the employer.

A good example of the power and patronage involved during the Renaissance can be found in the Medici family of Florence. The Medici began as a banking family in 1250 and slowly rose to the ranks of Dukes of Florence, the most powerful and influential position in the area. Ultimately, this one family would produce four popes. Much of this advance was through a combination of financial success, political networking, and the status resulting from patronizing the arts and sciences. Patronage only further enhanced the series of discoveries and exploration that occurred during the Renaissance. For approximately 300 years, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, European kingdoms experienced intense cultural development and change that would forever mark a different interaction with the rest of the world. Let’s begin by understanding life in Europe before the Renaissance began.

 

Botticelli’s “Primavera” painted for the Medici Family in 1482

Europe before the Renaissance

 

In general, Europe between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance was a period of economic and intellectual stagnation. Society was heavily stratified: perhaps 2 to 5 percent of society was land-owning nobility with political, economic, and social benefits to rule over the remaining 90 percent of society, who were feudal peasants. The concept of feudalism – a way to organize land ownership and community labor that tied a person’s livelihoods to the local nobleman and required that they work to pay annual rents in order to remain in the local village – dictated the hierarchy of life. Rural peasants worked incredibly long days tending and harvesting their farms and animals. The nobility had a right to take a certain percent of their work every year in the form of feudal dues, which could be paid in cash, material goods, animals, or produce. In addition, the Church took its own percentage, leaving the peasants hard pressed for luxuries, education, or the products of prosperity. Hard-working peasants did not have the chance to learn and experiment with science, music, or art. Some cities produced middle-class families who could specialize in artisan trades and even send their children to school, but most educations were designed to train people for religious duties: priests, monks, or nuns.

Feudal networks often stretched out from a local manor, outside of which were living spaces, towns, villages, and farmland all to be worked under the control and payment of the local baron or lord. Meanwhile, the landscape was dotted by medieval cities. The structure of a medieval city was determined by a strong desire to protect against marauders and the potential threat from invading armies. The migrating groups of Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Franks, Vikings, and other groups from approximately the first century CE to the height of the Middle Ages ensured that a sound defense was a priority for any medieval city. City walls were a common form of defense; high stone walls with limited breaks or access allowed cities to close up at night or during threats of attack. Supplies to support the city population during times of siege were held in underground stores. Merchant guilds (proto-unions) ensured that order of a city matched the need for trade, safety, and neighborhood distinction, while political leadership usually dominated particular areas of a city. Some cities had vast neighborhoods of shanty towns that sprung up overnight on bridges, in roads, and alongside markets. Wealthier people built walls around their houses to provide a sense of privacy. As a result of this level of economic disparity, fires were a common risk, and pollution filled the streets.

 

  Feudal vassals work for their lords on the right; on the left, a king accepts fealty from a knight

 

Feudalism in both city and country fueled the threadbare economy as it existed in the Middle Ages. People were tied to their place in the social hierarchy. Furthermore, as nobles began fighting with each other and barons went to war against dukes in order to gain more land and influence, they were able to draft soldiers from their feudal lands. The right to farm a land that belonged to a nobleman came not only with the duty to give the noble a certain proportion of the goods produced, but also the duty to defend and fight on behalf of any mission the feudal lord engaged in. This rule formed the basis of the armies that met in conflict against each other repeatedly over what is known as the Hundred Years War.

 

A Tapestry depicts a battle during the Hundred Years War

 

The Hundred Years War was a conflict over land between French and English nobles from 1337 until 1453. The seeds of war began long before, when William the Conqueror of Normandy crossed the English Channel to invade and conquer England. The new Norman kings maintained land in France, but new barons and dukes in France encroached on those lands, creating a violent conflict that was fought by feudal serfs acting as soldiers for their lords. The outbreak of War in 1337 was followed by a continual series of battles that repeatedly gave the English the upper hand in controlling warfare. Longbowmen in particular gave victory to the English. However, in 1429 the siege of Orleans changed the English tide, when Joan of Arc led a powerful force against the English. She was burned as witch for acting as a male soldier, but the engagements of the next quarter-century maintained more French victories and English retreats. Finally, French armies beat back those of England until the only English bastion remaining was the small city of Calais.

 

Agriculture was the backbone of the majority of Medieval European lives. They worked the land year-round, taking care of non-agricultural goods like the sewing of clothing or the construction of furniture in the winter when farming was almost impossible. Almost all goods were made by hand in the home. Farming itself was rough, with crude implements that required back-breaking labor for the most basic of crops. Medieval towns existed but relied on neighboring farmers to feed those living in urban environments. Relief often came only in the form of religion: harvest and feast days provided the few days of recreation in any given year.

While peasants often worked with animals, they were unlikely to own them. They were usually owned by the local nobility, who farmed the animals to families for care. In return, they paid the local noble family a price for renting the use of an ox or horse. The great majority of European peasants were also vegetarian by necessity, using perhaps pieces of animal fat to season grains or vegetables. The use of chickens or beef steaks was preserved only for nobility or for the very best of occasions. In a twist to ensure nobility had special rights, some monarchs deemed the hunting of particular animals like deer to be illegal in order to preserve further the sense that meat belonged only to the nobility.

However, the difficulty of life did encourage neighborly assistance. Those who fell on hard times often found help through neighbors. Legal codes took into account how a community would survive if a criminal were found guilty and executed; sometimes forgiveness and the preservation of life was essential to a town surviving the winter. Plots of land were set aside for shared gardens and labor intensive periods, such as harvest months, involved great collections of villagers coming together to finish the work as a whole.

Trade was almost nonexistent in these local peasant communities. Larger cities had a higher collection of wealthier merchants or nobility who could afford the luxuries of trade, but local villages simply worked together to care for each other as best they could. Having access to trade was a mixed blessing, however, since with exotic goods came disease and infestation in port cities.

 

A dramatic imagining of what town life was like during the plague. Death was indiscriminate

 

One of these risks became a full-blown epidemic, one of the worst in recorded history: The Black Death. Also known as the Bubonic Plague, the Plague was a bacterial infection that seems to have originated in China. The traveling Mongol armies fell ill with the sickness during a siege of the trading city of Caffa. They attempted to capitalize on their own losses by catapulting their dead into the city in order to infect the inhabitants and hasten the end of the siege. The plan worked and the Crimean people within Caffa were infected. Genoese traders, terrified of the speed with which people died after infection, fled the city. But they carried the disease with them to Sicily, where it traveled north with more traders. The Plague spread in other ways, too: it traveled along trade routes including the Silk Road and then onto merchant ships bound for every port town in Europe. Couriers, diplomats, and missionaries transmitted the disease as they traveled. The form of transmission was simple and impossible to eradicate. Rats were a constant presence on ships and caravans, and rats had fleas that sucked the blood of infected people one day, only to infect another victim while feeding the next day. Human lice, scourge of the medieval existence, also transmitted the disease from human to human. Within 24 to 48 hours of infection, painful lumps began to appear in the groin or the armpits, where lymph nodes carry both nutrients and infections to key areas of the body. People who noticed the painful sores developed fevers within the day, along with exceedingly painful joints, extreme thirst, and the presence of blood in the lungs. Three days after the appearance of the first sore, the infected victim was dead. A particularly robust victim might make it to four days.

 

Plague suffers were covered in painful pustules. They suffered fevers, thirst, and aches. They died quickly.

The appearance of the Plague occurred strongest between 1348 and 1350, when infection and chaos were rampant. Infection was impossible to stop and death was incredibly fast. Survivors were in no position to care for the rapidly mounting dead bodies, whose rotting flesh continued the cycle of infection. Nearby villages cut off cities rumored to be harboring the disease, but often their precautions were futile since the rats escaped even as the infected cities died off. The basic tenets of society broke down while 30 to 50 percent of Europe’s population died of infection and starvation. Medical ignorance made the situation worse, as some people thought water supplies, cats and dogs, or food stores were the source of disease. In an attempt to fight off the Plague, hundreds of thousands of cats and dogs were slaughtered in London. Water was re-diverted away from towns and cities, and stores of food were destroyed. Scores of people attempted to gain favor through sacrifice to God. Flagellants – people who flogged themselves for the sins of mankind – attempted to increase their self-harming efforts so God would forgive them the sins of their communities and allow them to survive the Plague. Yet the Plague persisted, and millions more died.

A medieval book shows Death stalking the countryside, seeking victims

 

Beyond the immediate threat of death, other major problems faced society during the Plague, especially for the survivors. Farmers were unable to till the fields as laborers died by the thousands. Fruit trees and grain fields went unharvested and rotted as villages dealt with the medical emergency. Animals who required daily care died in large numbers. Whole villages unaffected by the Plague faced starvation instead. Labor shortages forced some manors to end the long tradition of agriculture and adopt other forms of produce instead: sheep farming or the production of material goods like clothing or furniture. This only made the shortage of basic food like bread worse. Rapid inflation followed. The price of food went up fourfold.

Eventually, the rate of death slowed and communities began to recover. The loss of half a population was devastating – in some cases, whole villages had disappeared entirely. However, through recovery, there was the opportunity for rebirth. Social changes occurred in the aftermath of such enormous loss. For one, feudal manors were desperate to recruit farmers. Traditionally, one could only leave the land to which one was tied if the feudal lord gave permission. However, if the feudal family were dead, tenants could leave en masse to find a better life. Surviving nobility began to compete for the labor of these survivors, matching wages with the inflated price of food and offering special conditions for employment, like pensions and housing. Opportunities for peasants led to the increase in those living in middle class positions. With a better-cared-for peasant population, the nobility swelled slightly, allowing for more specialized trades in art, philosophy, science, math, and religion. As a result, over the next 300 years, the culture of Europe was “reborn” through the Renaissance.

 

Renaissance Ideas

Developments and discovery during the Renaissance covered a wide expanse of categories: science, math, art, philosophy, music, history, literature, and religion. Some of these discoveries would shake the foundation of Medieval European worldviews. Others were more complimentary. Influences from abroad, especially through Islamic traders, enhanced the discoveries of Renaissance thinkers so that major breakthroughs in agricultural, scientific, and navigational techniques were possible. Such breakthroughs allowed farmers to yield more crops per square mile, understand the stars and medicine more clearly, or begin to navigate the oceans with skill rather than blind luck. Who were some of these influential scholars?

  Leonardo da Vinci designed the movement of a Renaissance man on the left; on the right, a Renaissance woman

Perhaps the epitome of the Renaissance Man was Leonardo da Vinci. The stunning work of this influential man and his enormous talent spread across four categories: visual art, mechanical engineering, human anatomy, and architecture. He served as an apprentice as a teenager, but soon abandoned the endeavor as it was more constricting for his varied interests. Instead in 1482 he entered the employ of the Duke of Milan, who was part of the larger Italian patronage system that encouraged scientists and artists through the employment of nobility. While working for the Duke, Leonardo continued painting, sculpting, and exploring artistic events during his official duties. Privately, he began exploring the mechanics of flying, building canals, designing new urban construction. He began to explore weaponry, drawing early versions of tanks, bombs, and even underwater boats. He worked extensively on a book of anatomy, departing from the medieval tradition of balancing medicine through the four humors and instead seeking to understand the mechanics behind the human knee or the design of the heart with all its chambers.

  The da Vinci Tank and a Renaissance study of anatomy

 

However, Leonardo’s interests proved to be too demanding and too broad. He frequently began projects with great enthusiasm, only to abandon them weeks later for a new grand idea. His brilliant flashes of concept and design were unmatched with any sense of perseverance. As a result, many of his projects, paintings, sculptures, and designs were completed by other people. In fact, in seventeen years, he only completed six works. His great love was scientific inquiry through observation and drawings. He spent much of his time in nature making observations about natural phenomena, human bodies, animals, and plants. However, this proved to be a mixed blessing, as much of his unfinished work served as a major inspiration to those who followed. Seeds planted by the ideas of da Vinci became full-blown projects and discoveries under other minds with a better eye toward completion.

 

 

Mathematic, scientific, and astronomical discoveries were continued under Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei. Copernicus (1473 to 1543) in particular was crucial to a better understanding of the nature of the universe. Long-standing tradition viewed the Earth as the center of the universe. Some scholars had proposed a heliocentric model of the stars in order to explain some variation in their movement, but most of these scientists had been dismissed. Copernicus, however, decided to prove that a heliocentric model was the only way to explain some of the unique patterns of the stars. He rejected Aristotle’s understanding of the uniform circular motion of planets and stars. Copernicus created a conceptual universe that relied on the rotation of planets around the sun at varying distances. The use of math was crucial to balancing this theory, but with each mathematical formula, the theory withstood the test of time.

Galileo Galilei (1564 to 1642) continued to improve upon the work of Copernicus. He was the oldest of seven children, born in 1564 in Pisa. Also an ideal Renaissance Man, Galileo studied medicine, theology, science, astronomy, and math. He investigated the movement of pendulums in relation to the ground, allowing him to develop pendulum clocks that accurately kept track of time. He invented a rudimentary thermometer and began to record temperature variations. His curiosity looked to the heavens, and he built an elaborate telescope that enabled him to view the moon and various planets with heretofore unseen accuracy. Measuring the smooth and bumpy surfaces of the moon, Galileo was able to understand that the moon revolved around the Earth in a pattern quite different from the planets and the sun. He observed moons outside of Jupiter and discerned the rings of Saturn. His collective information supported the heretical theory of Copernicus that indeed, the Earth rotated around the sun.

Galileo’s support for Copernicus was in direct contradiction to religious thought. While Copernicus benefitted in timing with the Protestant Reformation, Galileo’s discoveries coincided with the enhanced strict measures of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Accordingly, the Catholic Church challenged Galileo’s theories and sent him to the Inquisition. He was an old man threatened with torture. Rather than endure such pain, he publically withdrew his assertions about the universe. He was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life, where his daughter cared for him until his death in 1642.

 

  The left painting is in the Medieval style. Spacing is awkward and inaccurate; compare this to the balance and mathematical considerations of the Renaissance painting on the right, from architecture to dress and form

 

Artistic representation became much more realistic during the Renaissance, and much of that came from the inspiration of the ancient Greek and Roman artists, mathematicians, and architectures. Perhaps the most famous artist from this period was Michelangelo (1475 to 1564), a sculptor and painter, poet and architect, whose influential works drew admirers and eager students from throughout Western Civilization. His most famous works of art include the sculpture David, The Creation of Man, which depicts God’s creation of Adam through outstretched arm, and the elaborate painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican City. His use of realistic proportions departed from medieval styles. Other sculptors and painters from Titian and Raphael to da Vinci and Donatello utilized these once-forgotten mathematical designs. Consider the shell of a snail, which is actually highly mathematical in design. The structure of a snail shell uses the “Golden Mean” a method of divining harmonious shape. This mean can be applied to human faces, the bodies of animals, and the structures of great buildings. Old treatises on the subject of art and architecture were sought out, translated, and used to enhance the style of design during Renaissance paintings, sculpture, and building designs.

 

 

Two influential concepts that spread intellectual curiosity during the Renaissance were the conflicting ideas of Humanism and scholasticism. Humanism was the study of human values and the mantra of Humanists was “back to the sources.” A humanist education began by learning the ancient works and languages of Greco-Roman philosophers. Capitalizing on the Renaissance-like ideas of Greece and Rome, which we covered in Lecture Three, Humanists focused on reading them in their original versions to touch the original meanings of their authors. To contrast, Scholasticism was a method of critical thought that defended orthodoxy through logical and plural thought. Scholastics sought to improve the proofs for God and the contemporary understanding the universe through rhetorical exercises. A great example of this is the logical exercise that follows:

· God is everything good

· Existing is more good than not existing

· Therefore, God must exist, for existing is good and God is all that is good.

The application of “logic” is of course nonsense in a religion that holds faith in spite of contrary evidence to be the most supreme expression of devotion. Faithful Christians cannot experience failsafe evidence of God, for that is contrary to the core beliefs of Christianity. However, in a world that found the concept of Zero troubling – a concept that was increasing in popularity due to the rise of international mercantile trade – such exercises were very important to Renaissance minds like Thomas Aquinas or William of Ockham. Other struggles included the new evidence proposed by Copernicus that the Earth was not in fact the center of the universe. Scholastics sought to quell conflicting beliefs by showing how they actually enforced each other. Such projects formed the basis of the majority of European universities during the Renaissance.

The Renaissance came to England in a fury of religious dispute during the 1500s, which we will cover in the next Lecture. Renaissance thought in England covered a great deal of Humanist and Scholastic thought through writers and philosophers like Sir Thomas More and Erasmus. Under Elizabeth I (1558-1603), the English Renaissance came into its own from the work of playwrights Shakespeare and Marlowe to Francis Bacon and Philip Sydney. Court life encouraged this exploration through hired artists such as Hans Holbein and Court Musicians from Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, among many others.

 

Legacy of the Renaissance

 

Perhaps the longest-lasting legacy of the Renaissance and its ideas was the challenge to the status quo. These ideas and discoveries were controversial in their day but coincided with a period of great transformation, as large groups began challenging Church doctrine during the Reformation. Ultimately the ideas inspired future Enlightenment thinkers and brought economic stability to Europe in the form of mercantilism. Without economic stability, discovery and education would not have had much change to change the shape of Western Civilization. Without the challenge to scientific, medical, and other knowledge, perhaps the atmosphere of intellectual debate new to Europe would have never produced a Reformation.

The discoveries of the Renaissance led sailors into oceans farther than they thought they could go; those sailors discovered lands previously unknown and unsuspected. The ideas helped normal people become more comfortable with analyzing the power and authority of Church and State alike. Without the ground-breaking discoveries of Renaissance thinkers, Protestant sects of Christianity might never have challenged the Catholic Church and revolutionaries might never have rebelled against their monarchs to create democracies.