Fourteenth-century European society, however, was challenged by an overwhelming number of crises that led to the disintegration of medieval civilization. At mid-century, one of the most destructive natural disasters in history erupted—the Black Death, a devastating plague that wiped out at least one-third of the European population, with even higher mortality rates in urban areas. Reactions varied. Some people escaped into alcohol, sex, and crime. Others, such as the flagellants, believing the Black Death to be a punishment from God, attempted to atone for people’s sins through self-inflicted pain. In many areas, the Jews became scapegoats. Economic crises and social upheavals, including a decline in trade and industry, bank failures, and peasant revolts pitting the lower classes against the upper classes, followed in the wake of the Black Death.
Political stability also declined, especially during the Hundred Years’ War, a long, drawn-out conflict between the English and the French. Armored knights on horseback formed the backbone of medieval armies, but English peasants using the longbow began to change the face of war. After numerous defeats, the French cause was saved by Joan of Arc, a young peasant woman whose leadership inspired the French, who also began to rely on cannon and were victorious by 1453.
The Catholic Church, too, experienced a crisis. The confrontation between Pope Boniface VIII and Philip IV of France led to a loss of papal power and the removal of the papacy to Avignon on France’s border in 1305. The absence of the popes from Rome created a new crisis, but the return of the papacy to Rome in 1377 only led to new problems with the Great Schism, which witnessed the spectacle of two competing popes condemning each other as the anti-Christ. A new conciliar movement based on the belief that church councils, not popes, should rule the church finally ended the Great Schism in 1417.
All of these crises seemed to overpower Europeans in this calamitous fourteenth century. Not surprisingly, much of the art of the period depicted the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse described in the New Testament Book of Revelation: Death, Famine, Pestilence, and War. No doubt, to some people, the last days of the world appeared to be at hand. European society, however, proved remarkably resilient. Already in the fourteenth century new ideas and practices were beginning to emerge, as often happens in periods of crisis. As we shall see in the next chapter, the pace of change began to quicken as Europe experienced a rebirth of Classical culture that some historians have called the Renaissance.
CHAPTER TIMELINE
CHAPTER REVIEW
Upon Reflection
What were the chief factors that led to the urban and rural revolts of the fourteenth century?
What were the causes of the Hundred Years’ War, and what were the results of the war in the fourteenth century for France and England?
What impact did the adversities of the fourteenth century have on Christian practices?
Key Terms
Black Death
pogroms
scutage
Third Estate
condottieri
Great Schism
conciliarism
mysticism
Modern Devotion
Suggestions for Further Reading
GENERAL WORKS For a general introduction to the fourteenth century, see D. P. Waley and P. Denley, Later Medieval Europe, 3rd ed. (London, 2001); G. Holmes, Europe: Hierarchy and Revolt, 1320–1450, 2nd ed. (New York, 2000); and J. Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages (London, 2001).
THE BLACK DEATH On famine in the early fourteenth century, see W. C. Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1996). On the Black Death, see P. Ziegler, The Black Death (New York, 1969); D. Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, ed. S. K. Cohn Jr. (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); and J. Kelly, The Great Mortality (New York, 2005).
HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR Good accounts of the Hundred Years’ War include A. Curry, The Hundred Years’ War, 2nd ed. (New York, 2004), and R. H. Neillands, The Hundred Years’ War, 2nd ed. (New York, 2001). On Joan of Arc, see M. Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (New York, 1981).
POLITICAL HISTORY On the political history of the period, see B. Guenée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe, trans. J. Vale (Oxford, 1985). On medieval mercenaries, see W. Urban, Medieval Mercenaries (London, 2006).
CATHOLIC CHURCH A good general study of the church in the fourteenth century can be found in F. P. Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980). On the role of food in the spiritual practices of medieval women, see C. W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Calif., 1987). On female mystics in the Later Middle Ages, see D. Elliott, Proving Woman: A Female Spirituality and Inquisitorial Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 2004). On late medieval religious practices, see R. N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–1515 (Cambridge, 1995).
CULTURE A classic work on the life and thought of the Later Middle Ages is J. Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. R. J. Payton and U. Mammitzsch (Chicago, 1996). On Dante, see B. Reynolds, Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man (London, 2006). On Chaucer, see J. Dillon, Geoffrey Chaucer (New York, 1993). The best work on Christine de Pizan is by C. C. Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (New York, 1984).
SOCIAL HISTORY A wealth of material on everyday life is provided in the second volume of A History of Private Life, edited by G. Duby, Revelations of the Medieval World (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). On women in the Later Middle Ages, see S. Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, trans.C. Galai, rev. ed. (London, 2003). On childhood, see N. Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, Conn., 2001). The subject of medieval prostitution is examined in L. L. Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society (Chicago, 1987). Poor people are discussed in M. Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages (New Haven, Conn., 1986). For a general introduction to the changes in medicine, see N. G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago, 1990). The importance of inventions is discussed in J. Gimpel, The Medieval Machine (New York, 1976).
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Visit the CourseMate website at www.cengagebrain.com for additional study tools and review materials for this chapter.
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CHAPTER 12
Recovery and Rebirth: The Age of the Renaissance
Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling
Sistine Chapel, Vatican Palace//© Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY
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CHAPTER OUTLINE AND FOCUS QUESTIONS
Meaning and Characteristics of the Italian Renaissance
What characteristics distinguish the Renaissance from the Middle Ages?
The Making of Renaissance Society
What major social changes occurred during the Renaissance?
The Italian States in the Renaissance
How did Machiavelli’s works reflect the political realities of Renaissance Italy?
The Intellectual Renaissance in Italy
What was humanism, and what effect did it have on philosophy, education, attitudes toward politics, and the writing of history?
The Artistic Renaissance
What were the chief characteristics of Renaissance art, and how did it differ in Italy and northern Europe?
The European State in the Renaissance
Why do historians sometimes refer to the monarchies of the late fifteenth century as “new monarchies” or “Renaissance states”?
The Church in the Renaissance
What were the policies of the Renaissance popes, and what impact did those policies have on the Catholic Church?
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CRITICAL THINKING
How did Renaissance art and the humanist movement reflect the political, economic, and social developments of the period?
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WERE THE FOURTEENTH and fifteenth centuries a continuation
of the Middle Ages or the beginning of a new era? Both positions can be defended. Although the disintegrative patterns of the fourteenth century continued into the fifteenth, at the same time there were elements of recovery that made the fifteenth century a period of significant political, economic, artistic, and intellectual change. The humanists or intellectuals of the age called their period (from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century) an age of rebirth, believing that they had restored arts and letters to new glory after they had been “neglected” or “dead” for centuries. The humanists also saw their age as one of accomplished individuals who dominated the landscape of their time. Michelangelo, the great Italian artist of the early sixteenth century, and Pope Julius II, the “warrior pope,” were two such titans. The artist’s temperament and the pope’s temper led to many lengthy and often loud quarrels between the two. The pope had hired Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, a difficult task for a man long accustomed to being a sculptor. Michelangelo undertook the project but refused for a long time to allow anyone, including the pope, to see his work. Julius grew anxious, pestering Michelangelo on a regular basis about when the ceiling would be finished. Exasperated by the pope’s requests, Michelangelo once replied, according to Giorgio Vasari, his contemporary biographer, that the ceiling would be completed “when it satisfies me as an artist.” The pope responded, “And we want you to satisfy us and finish it soon,” and then threatened that if Michelangelo did not “finish the ceiling quickly,” the pope would “have him thrown down from the scaffolding.” Fearing the pope’s anger, Michelangelo “lost no time in doing all that was wanted” and quickly completed the ceiling, one of the great masterpieces in the history of Western art.
The humanists’ view of their age as a rebirth of the Classical civilization of the Greeks and Romans ultimately led historians to use the French word Renaissance to identify this age. Although recent historians have emphasized the many elements of continuity between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the latter age was also distinguished by its own unique characteristics.
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Meaning and Characteristics of the Italian Renaissance
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FOCUS QUESTION: What characteristics distinguish the Renaissance from the Middle Ages?
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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 (the “Middle Ages”), 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 (YAK-ub BOORK-hart) 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 (the Italians were “the firstborn among the sons of modern Europe”) and saw the revival of antiquity, the “perfecting of the individual,” and secularism (“worldliness of the Italians”) as its distinguishing features. Burckhardt exaggerated the individuality and secularism of the Renaissance and failed to recognize the depths of its religious sentiment; nevertheless, he established the framework for all modern interpretations of the period. Although contemporary scholars do not believe that the Renaissance represents a sudden or dramatic cultural break with the Middle Ages, as Burckhardt argued—there was, after all, much continuity in economic, political, and social life—the Renaissance can still be viewed as a distinct period of European history that manifested itself first in Italy and then spread to the rest of Europe.
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. These city-states became the centers of Italian political, economic, and social life. Within this new urban society, a secular spirit emerged as increasing wealth created new possibilities for the enjoyment of worldly things.
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. This recovery was accompanied by a rediscovery of the culture of Classical antiquity. Increasingly aware of their own historical past, Italian intellectuals became intensely interested in the Greco-Roman culture of the ancient Mediterranean world. This revival of Classical antiquity (the Middle Ages had in fact preserved much of ancient Latin culture) affected activities as diverse as politics and art and led to new attempts to reconcile the pagan philosophy of the Greco-Roman world with Christian thought, as well as new ways of viewing human beings.
A revived emphasis on individual ability became a characteristic of the Italian Renaissance. As the fifteenth-century Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti (al-BAYR-tee) expressed it, “Men can do all things if they will.”1 A high regard for human dignity and worth and a realization of individual potentiality created a new social ideal of the well-rounded personality or universal person—l’uomo universale (LWOH-moh OO-nee-ver-SAH-lay)—who was capable of achievements in many areas of life.
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.
The Making of Renaissance Society
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FOCUS QUESTION: What major social changes occurred during the Renaissance?
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After the severe economic reversals and social upheavals of the fourteenth century, the European economy gradually recovered as the volume of manufacturing and trade increased.
Economic Recovery
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. Hard hit by the plague, the Italians lost their commercial preeminence while the Hanseatic League continued to prosper.
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A Renaissance Banquet
As in Greek and Roman society, a banquet during the Renaissance was an occasion for good food, interesting conversation, music, and dancing. In Renaissance society, it was also a symbol of status and an opportunity to impress people with the power and wealth of one’s family. Banquets were held to celebrate public and religious festivals, official visits, anniversaries, and weddings. The following menu lists the foods served at a grand banquet given by Pope Pius V in the sixteenth century.
A Sixteenth-Century Banquet
First Course
Cold Delicacies from the Sideboard
Pieces of marzipan and marzipan balls
Neapolitan spice cakes
Malaga wine and Pisan biscuits
Fresh grapes
Prosciutto cooked in wine, served with capers
and grape pulp
Salted pork tongues cooked in wine, sliced
Spit-roasted songbirds, cold, with
their tongues sliced over them
Sweet mustard
Second Course
Cold Hot Foods from the Kitchen, Roasts
Fried veal sweetbreads and liver
Spit-roasted skylarks with lemon sauce
&n
bsp; Spit-roasted quails with sliced eggplants
Stuffed spit-roasted pigeons with capers
sprinkled over them
Spit-roasted rabbits, with sauce and crushed pine nuts
Partridges larded and spit-roasted, served with lemon
Heavily seasoned poultry with lemon slices
Slices of veal, spit-roasted, with a sauce made
from the juices
Leg of goat, spit-roasted, with a sauce made
from the juices
Soup of almond paste, with the flesh of three
pigeons to each serving
Third Course
Hot Foods from the Kitchen, Boiled Meats and Stews
Stuffed fat geese, boiled Lombard style and covered
with sliced almonds
Stuffed breast of veal, boiled, garnished with flowers
Very young calf, boiled, garnished with parsley
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