Europe's+Renaissance

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The Renaissance in Europe looks, at first glance, like a period of instability and chaos. For that reason, it is often difficult to understand why so much of cultural importance was created during the period between 1300 and 1600. In fact, I would argue that the very chaotic nature of the Renaissance – its position as a transitional period in the intellectual, cultural, and political life of Europe – was the cause of that creativity. In fact, the Renaissance was a period characterized by competition on every level of society, and that competition led to a synthesis of past ideas with the needs of the time. That synthesis was the basis for creative problem solving that resulted in the literature, art, and socio-political changes that we associate with the Renaissance.

The competition that I am referring to was at every level of society, and in nearly every activity that occurred within and around Italian city-states in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. These city-states had broken free of control by feudal landlords during the high renaissance, and had maintained trade contacts with the Muslim world, as well as their domestic production of such goods as woolen textiles and grain. Since, as cities, their production of foodstuffs was initially limited, they had to base their entire wealth and social system on trade, most early found that the feudal land tenure system did not work well for them. They thus began to base their economic systems on a kind of proto-capitalism in which limited free trade (monopolies certainly existed, and were defended by the state) and the circulation of money became more important than production of goods and barter trade.

This development was accented when, starting in 1348, the continent was racked by the Black (Bubonic) Plague, and other diseases including most probably anthrax. With little or no medical knowledge, the people living in 14th century Europe were devastated by the plague. It killed between ½ and 2/3 of the population, depending on the region, and various factors such as population distribution, public sanitation practices (which were universally rather poor), and proximity to centers of trade and contact with travelers, etc. The continued popularity in our own time of the children’s rhyme, "//ring around the rosy, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down//" shows how pervasive exposure to this disease was. The rhyme refers to its symptoms, the need to carry flower petals in a handkerchief and cover one’s nose with it when passing through a village, and the sense that perhaps all would succumb to the disease. Images of skeletons were rampant in religious and secular art. People turned increasingly to the church with a sense of an urgent need to find salvation before a potentially immediate death.

The plague itself usually killed very rapidly, with most dying of it within 2 to 3 days of the onset of the first symptoms. There was no cure. The possibility that one might die within the next two days was a constant reality to people. This prompted both and increased interest in religion, and sort of millenarian //joie de vivre//. The actions of people were reminiscent of Siduri’s words to Gilgamesh in the ancient epic (though Europeans were unaware of this particular articulation of the idea: people would live for the moment, and often throw caution and morality to the wind in order to enjoy life to its maximum in what little time they may have left.

The age between 1348 and 1395, then, was composed of an interesting counterpoint between religious piety, and the determination to enjoy life before it was taken away. The fear of the Plague also led people to do whatever they could to avoid it, or cure it. They devised a Dance of Death, meant to work like the Tarantella, by exhausting dancers, and creating within them a kind of euphoria born of that exhaustion, the dance was performed in groups, and thought to be able to cause the demons that caused the disease to leave in the belief that the body they inhabited was already dead. This dance was often lead by a figure dressed as a skeleton, or as Thanatos, the mythical anthropomorphic figure of death. Others, determined that the Plague was a punishment sent by God for the sins of Christians, went about the countryside in great groups, chanting religious themes and whipping themselves or each other, often drawing blood, sometimes to the point of exhaustion or death in an attempt to secure forgiveness for themselves and release from death by plague.

In any case, the Plague was everywhere, and it killed tremendous numbers of people. By its end, around 1395, Europe had gone from being overpopulated and unable to feed itself to a condition of chronic underpopulation and labor shortage. The level of potential wealth had not changed, but the number of people around to share it had been reduced. This made most Europeans, in theory, at least, potentially wealthier than before. With a reduced population, landlords needed to ask for extra work from their tenants and serfs, and in the west, this meant that landlords were forced to pay better wages. It also meant the weakening of feudal bonds as tenants and workers became the most in-demand commodity. People were able to leave their land and feudal relationships, and the workforce became more mobile, and thus able to negotiate better working conditions. Of course, fewer people also meant lower rents as landlords tried desperately to fill their estates with workers. It was a period (with some regional exceptions) of rising income and dropping cost of living. This meant more disposable income, and more mobility and opportunity for all to get a bigger piece of the pie.

The city-states of Italy were the first to recover from the plague, partly because of its direction of movement northward, but also because cities like Naples, Florence, and Venice were able to create strict standards of health to be proven before visitors were allowed to enter the city. These cities inspected goods and people and issued health certificates to those who passed. This helped to control the spread of the disease, and the death rate soon dropped and life stabilized.

With the plague largely behind them, people in Italian city states began to look at life in a new way. Rather than a concern with living for today, and preparing for possible death at any moment, survival became more of a given. With the expectation of survival, the question of providing for the future financially gained greater importance, and people of all classes became increasingly concerned with economic and lifestyle issues rather than spiritual and moral ones. Additionally, the increased demand for labor meant that individual mobility increased one’s economic potential, and thus lifestyle improvements were better made by individual action rather than through loyalty to the group.

Thus, the two greatest legacies of the Renaissance were a move from group to individual values, and a move from culture dominated by religion to culture dominated by secular concerns and interests. These two legacies were complimentary and made both the Christian Reformation and the Scientific Revolution possible.

The competition that was engendered by the end of the Black Plague and the increase in autonomy and trade among Italian city-states existed at many levels. It was, in addition, not a competition for scarce resources, but a competition for an increasingly large amount of resources as the plague did its work. This led to social and cultural innovation in the name of getting a piece of the pie.

Within city states like Florence, competition among different social classes was intense. There were four major social groups in Florence, which is relatively representative of other city-states in Italy at the time. Those social classes included the //grandi// – the old money and aristocrats who had moved into the city to take part in its growing wealth and prestige. These families were old, and used to ruling. They saw it as their birthright to be the rulers of the city, and believed that only their training and pedigree would be effective in managing the new wealth, and the labor that produced it.

The //popolo grasso// – Florence’s nouveax riches – bankers, merchants, traders, saw themselves as the legitimate rulers because it was their money and activities that had contributed to the growing wealth of the city, and they were the employers of most Florentines. Therefore, they thought they should run the place.

The shopkeepers, artisans, and small traders, because they were the largest group of business people, who controlled trade of goods within the city, had contact on a daily basis with the most Florentines, and as a group processed huge sums of money, saw themselves as the true local leaders. Their interests were local, their business was local, their customers were local, and their money was local. This made them, in their own eyes, the ultimate Florentines, and thus they felt they should lead.

Of course, the largest group of Florentines was the working class. These people made up the 30,000 textile workers of Florence, as well as supplying labor in other industries, including the spice, silk, and porcelaine trades run by the //grandi// and the //popolo grasso//. These people felt that, as the biggest single segment of the population, and as the engines of the economy (without labor, everything would shut down) they should be the leaders of Florence. This competition was constant, and the leadership of Florence changed hands among these groups several times. Each time a group came to power, and even while attempting to take power, they needed ideas that would convey legitimacy upon them. This, of course, led them to look for justifications, and even glorifications, of their social positions and cultural values. Such searches eventually resulted in the Italian rediscovery of Roman and Greek ideas that had been unpopular in the Catholic church because they were deemed incompatible with Medieval Christianity, and so had been ignored or in extreme cases destroyed. The rediscovery of these ideas and manuscripts, and their use in justifying the activities of individuals during the renaissance constituted the major intellectual activity of the time.

Examples of thinkers who operated in this way include Machiavelli, whose //The Prince// was written as political advice for Lorenzo DiMedici, and Petrarch, Dante, and Bocaccio. These individuals wrote for others, but they wrote for themselves, as well. Each and every document they produced had to be at once a document that achieved its purpose of argument, and at the same time advertised the erudition and knowledge of the writer, so that readers might consider giving him a commission. This illustrates the trend toward individualism within the Renaissance intellectual tradition.

Art was used by those who wanted power, or wanted to advertise the power they had, during the Renaissance as well. However, these requirements could not be met by the reigning painting and sculpture styles of the High Middle Ages, whose subjects were almost universally Christian and allegorical, and commissioned by the Church. These paintings told the stories of characters from the Bible, and admonished viewers to be moral and devout. Commoners rarely played a role in such art, and when they did, they were only a small (literally) part of a painting. Such a role in a painting was not what subjects like Lorenzo Di Medici wanted when they paid a painter to immortalize them. Instead, they wanted to be the center of attention – a place they saw as fit for successful, intelligent leaders of a community. Thus the style of art had to change to suit their needs. Painters took at least some of their inspiration from Roman and Greek artistic ideals, and added observation of the real world to their arsenal of talents. Painting the real world, these artists soon became obsessed with the idea of perspective and attempted to make everything in their paintings look as real as possible – to capture the life in the moment. This led, ironically, to an almost scientific view of perspective and geometry in paintings that were intended to eliminate the science, and emphasize the human in their message and subject.

In all, the renaissance was a time of renewed interest in life, and looked back to those who had been, from the 14th century point of view, most successful in understanding the conditions of human life: the Greeks and Romans, for its inspiration. Rediscovery of Greek and Roman ideas of the value of the study of humanity combined with a new need to provide for tomorrow that resulted in a reduced concern for spiritual issues and a growth of interest in the secular. The rediscovery of humanism, combined with the interest in the secular made study of humans and their environment the great interest of the age – for practical reasons that understanding humanity helped to improve ability to conduct business, and understanding self helped to support ethical behavior – which was also good for business. Thus, a new outlook on culture, politics, and society was ultimately driven, at least in part, by economic concerns.