U1: The Renaissance and Exploration

Unit 1: The Renaissance And Exploraion

(1450-1648)

Age of the Renaissance

1350 - 1550

Renaissance → derived from the French word for “rebirth” during the time of Michaelangelo (post centuries of darkness, i.e., the Calamitous period, the Hundred years war)

The fourteenth century witnessed changes in Italian intellectuals (people began to shift to a more humanistic view and started to focus more on the individual rather than religion, i.e., the Catholic Church), artistic, and cultural life (shifting away from the idea that the church held the most power over state and mind).

Key Points

The worldview shifted from one based on classic texts and scripture to one based on thought and observation of the natural world.

I. A renewed interest in classical texts led to new ideas about education, society, and religion

II. The invention of the printing press promoted the circulation of new thoughts and concepts.

III. The arts reflected those new ideas from the Renaissance and used them to share ideas about personal, political, and religious goals.

IV. New ideas in science were now based on observation, experimentation, and mathematics

Europeans explored different lands including overseas territories, communicating with indigenous populations they had discovered upon their journeys.

I. European countries' goals for establishing overseas empires were mainly God, glory, and gold (wealth → trade)

II. Advanced technology in navigation, map making, and military technology (i.e., weapons, guns, steal) allowed Europeans to successfully colonize.

III. Europeans established empires and trade networks overseas. This caused rivalries between nations to emerge.

IV. Europe’s colonial expansion led to a worldwide exchange, which included exchanges of  different products, organisms, diseases, culture traditions and practices, etc. This led to the destruction and fall of some indigenous civilizations, and it moved towards European dominance, and therefore resulting in the expansion of the slave trade network.

Civic Humanism

● Machiavelli concerned with becoming an active member of society

● Acquire power entry, order, and stability

Christian Humanism

● Erasmus was concerned with morals and reforming the Church and society

Renaissance Italy

● There occurred a decentralization and balance of power: the Peace of Lodi

● Italy sat at a crossroads between the Middle East and Europe, land routes costly and risky, maritime technology improving, the Hundred Years’ War having destabilized northern Europe, availability of capital from an agricultural surplus, the management of Church wealth, and the emergence of a merchant capitalist elite

● Great economic and political development (Materials)

● Merchants gained power to match their wealth (money=power)

● To see life more as an opportunity to be enjoyed rather than as a painful pilgrimage to the city of God

● The powerful dominated the weak

● Savonarola became the leader of Florentine after expelling the Medici dynasty. He went against everything about humanism and anything that celebrated human beauty/vanity and burned it. He then went on to be excommunicated, tortured, and then burned

● Development of Communes and Republics of Northern Italy

○ Communes: they were made up of free men who sought political and economic independence from local nobles

○ They collected taxes and maintained the condition of the cities as well as maintaining civil order

○ Nobles would marry off their children to receive money from dowries

○ Formation of an oligarchy (a small group of [rich] nobles and commercial elites controlled the city and surrounding areas)

○ Common People: Popolo; they were heavily taxed and excluded from power. Countless cities tried to use armed forces to overthrow the government

○ Many cities became Signori (a government with one-man rule in Italian cities, usually passed on to sons)

Renaissance Art

● Centered on faith

● The printing press allowed for the democratization of information

● Inspirations

○ Classical antiquity

○ Legend (lives of saints)

○ Mythology

○ Naturalism vs. religious depictions

○ Architecture (Brunelleschi and Alberti, Ancient Rome)

● New Materials and Techniques

○ Tempera Paints (Italy); Oil paint (Northern Europe)

○ Naturalism; use of classical figures

○ Balance, proportion, and size

● In the Creation of Adam, Michelangelo painted a humanistic interpretation, with a massive figure of God giving life through an extended hand to a reclining figure of Adam

○ Michelangelo Buonarroti, Creation of Adam, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City, Rome, Italy, 1511-1512

● This sculpture created by Michelangelo is a good representation of the newly adapted naturalism focused on proportion and size. David is a biblical figure hero

○ Michelangelo Buonarroti , David. Marble, 13’ 5” high. Galleria dell’ Accademia, Florence.

Raphael, Philosophy (School of Athens), Stanza Della Segnatura, Vatican Palace, Rome, Italy, 1509-1511. Fresco. Highlighting philosophers that had a great influence with their writings on different ideals.

Social Hierarchies

● The only division amongst uneducated and educated people with one of many social hierarchies

● Hierarchies are or rather can be forms of idealizations describing how people imagine their society to be without expectation in (social climbing plebeians or group that did not  fit in with the standard categories)

Race and Slavery

● Distinctions of race: not based on skin color & used interchangeably with race/nation of people (ethnic, national, religious, etc)

● Slaves were first created from spoils of war (both black and white)

● Unstable political conditions led to many parts of Africa to be raided and people being seized to be sold into slavery

Wealth & Nobility

● 15th-century hierarchies were often tied to wealth and family standing, and social status was linked to honor depending on your job. The social construction of gender left women in the second status

● The ideal wife, “a virtuous wife”, was often compared to a snail or tortoise

○ Women were either “married” or “to be married”

● Men were dominant and women were subordinate

● Gender was the most “natural” division and the most highly-regarded

Politics and the State in Western Europe

France

● The black death and the Hundred Years War left France's population feeble

● Agriculture and Commercial trade was weak

● Charles VII begins France’s recovery

● Louis XI (1462-1483) “Spider King”

● The French government was still influenced by religion

England

● Also suffered due to the result of the Black Death and Hundred Years War

● The aristocrats dominated the government of Henry IV (1399-1413) - violence

● The population continued to decline

Spain

● Many independent kingdoms

● The marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon united Spain kingdoms

● Established a National Church

● An organized Massacre against anti-semitic people

● Spanish national state was built on the foundation of absolute religious Orthodoxy and the purity of blood

The New Monarchs

The High Middle Ages (12th and 13th century): The basic institutions of the centralized state had already begun to emerge.

● They wanted to control the church and use it as an extension of their Institution

● They used Renaissance ideas to reform/influence their societies

● Old monarchs were feudal Kings; they saw themselves as a part of a Divine hierarchy

● Constitutions during the high Middle Ages were emerging in the 12th and 13th century, but they were halted by the calamitous 14th-century

● Missing a strong centralized monarchy (needed to keep in check people who opposed the king or his laws, have control over state finances, bring new wealthy towns and the church to heel, deal with civil unrest, and carry forward successful foreign expansion)

● Opportunities and obstacles presented by the Hundred Years War include socio-economic and demographic destructions of the plague, etc.

● Machiavelli and the aggressive politics and diplomacy of Renaissance Italy (Civic humanist)

● Excluded rival Nobles either turning to the newly emerging middle class (the “hierarchy of wealth”) and/or creating new Nobles from the ranks of their supporters

● Sought new sources of revenue (taxes, the beginnings of mercantilism, etc)

● Centralized administration of government by creating an exclusive bureaucracy dominated by their nobles and the middle class – groups dependent on the success of the government

● Sought to assert control over the Catholic Church by creating National churches through the power lay investiture [Emerging concern: religious pluralism ≠ political unity]

● Emphasize the fact/appearance of Royal Majesty (divine right)

● Sought to create a sense of national identity and loyalty to the ruler (ruler = state)

England and the Tudors

● They were financially and economically devastated by the Hundred Years War

● The monarchy severely weakened

● The War of the Roses and the growing dominance of The Tudors

○ Henry VI, Edward IV, Richard III, Henry VIII, Henry VIII

● The rulers were dependent on Parliament for funding.

● War of the Roses: a series of English Civil Wars for control of the Throne of England

○ Royal House of Plantagenet - the House of Lancaster (red) and the House of York (white)

France and the Valois Dynasty

● Devastated by the Hundred Years War

● Charles VII, Louis XI, Louis XIII, Francis I, Henry IV (Bourbon)

● Competing for medieval fiefdoms to the French throne (Burgundy Armagnac, Anjou, Bar, Maine, Province → emergence of modern France through territorial consolidation)

● Strengthen Royal Finances (taxes; i.e., salt)

● Commercial treaties, internal trade, controlled guilds

● Ended ‘livery and maintenance’ and created a standing Royal Army

● Established the ‘Gallican’ (controlling Church wealth and property)

○ Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438)

○ Concordat of Bologna (1516, Pope Leo X)

Spain After the Reconquista

● Medieval kingdoms: Castille, Leon, Aragon, Valencia, Mallorca, Sicily, Cardeña, Naples

● Ferdinand and Isabella (1469) - daughter Joanna married to Philip, heir to the Holy Roman Empire; their son Charles V, and his son Philip II → successful diplomacy with Habsburgs; fear of France

○ Royal Council

○ Exclusion of great Nobles (elevation of the middle class: conversos)

○ Hermandades (Holy Brotherhood)

○ Full executive, legislative, judicial power (Roman law) 

● The church becomes the focal point of government

The Age of Exploration

God, Glory, and Gold

● Europeans wanted access to gold and spices to expand their economic power

● Mercantilism birthed new commercial development in colonies

● Spreading Christianity was used as a justification for invading the indigenous peoples and converting them

● Better navigational technologies

● Culmination of greater knowledge of the world and the world’s oceans.

● Advances in steel production, advanced weapons (guns and swords), and diseases brought by Europeans allowed Europeans to overcome indigenous peoples

● The Portuguese establish trade along the African coast, in parts of Asia, and in South America.

● The Spanish had colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean, which made Spain a dominant state in Europe.

● England, the Netherlands, and France followed that example, leading to rivalries down the road

● Europe’s colonial expansion led to a global exchange of food, plants, animals, practices, and diseases, which in turn resulted in the destruction of some indigenous civilizations

● Trade shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic states (Transatlantic trade)

● The exchange of new plants, animals, and diseases during the Columbian Exchange created economic opportunities for Europeans and solidified European domination over the Americas and parts of Africa

Terms And ID’s

the Medici

Castiglione, Book of the Courtier

Isabella d'Este

The Peace of Lodi and the balance of power

Machiavelli, The Prince

Humanism and virtủ

Christian humanism

patronage

Johannes Gutenberg

Brunelleschi

Leonardo da Vinci

Raphael

Michelangelo

Petrarch

Mirandola

Pope Leo X

popolo

communes

oligarchy

condottieri

signori

Northern Renaissance

Jan van Eyck

Albrecht Durer

‘new monarchies’

Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges

Henry VII

Marco Polo

the Ming Dynasty and Admiral Zheng He

Calicut

Cairo

the Kingdom of Mali

Prester John

the Persian and Ottoman Empires

conquistador

caravel

Ptolemy's Geography

Prince Henry the Navigator

Vasco da Gama

Bartholomew Diaz

Timbuktu and the gold trade

Christopher Columbus

Treaty of Tordesillas

Ferdinand Magellan

John Cabot

Jacques Cartier

the Mexica Empire

Tenochtitlán

Hernando Cortés

Inca Empire

Powhatan Confederacy

Samuel de Champlain

Henry Hudson

Plymouth

viceroyalties

War of the Roses

Court of the Star Chamber

Ferdinand and Isabella

Spanish Inquisition and the Index

Hermandades

‘New Christians’

the Habsburgs

encomienda system

Bartolomé de Las Casas

peninsulares, mestizo/métis, mulattoes

Columbian Exchange

sugar

the 'new slavery' (or 'race slavery')

the slave trade

Potosí

silver and inflation

Montaigne and the essay (skepticism)

Shakespeare