The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 08 · Chapter 2An Outline Narrative
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The Renaissance marks the separation of the mediaeval from the modern world. The wide difference between the two epochs of Teutonic history arises, we are apt somewhat glibly to say, from the fact that our ancestors worshipped and were ruled by brute force, whereas we follow the broad light of intellect. Perhaps both statements require modification; yet in a general way they do suggest the change which by a thousand different agencies has, in the course of the last four centuries, been forced upon the world. Mediaeval Europe was a land not of equals, but of lords and slaves. The powerful nobles regarded themselves as of wholly different clay from the hapless peasants whom they trampled under foot, serfs so ignorant, so brutalized by want, that they were often little better than the beasts with which they herded. Gradually the tradesmen, the middle classes, forced their way to practical equality with the nobles. Then came the turn of the masses to do the same. The beginnings of the merchants' movement we have already traced in the preceding volumes; the end of the peasants' effort is perhaps even to-day scarce yet accomplished.
In dealing with modern history, therefore, every writer is apt to begin with a different date. Some go back as far as Petrarch, who reintroduced the study of ancient art and learning; that is, they regard our world as a direct continuation of the Roman, with the thousand years of the Middle Ages gaping between like an earthquake gulf of barbarism, that was bridged at last. Some take the invention of printing as a starting-point, feeling that the chief element of our progress has been the gathering of information by the poorer classes. Some, looking to political changes, turn to the reign of Louis XI of France, noting him as the first modern king, or to the downfall of Charles the Bold, the last great feudal noble. Others name later starting-points such as the establishment of modern art by Michelangelo and Raphael at Rome, the discovery of America, with its opening of vast new lands for the pent-up population of narrow Europe, or the Reformation, which has been called man's revolt against superstition, the establishment of the independence of thought.
All of these epochs fall within the limits of the Renaissance, and all, except that of Petrarch, within the later Renaissance which we are now considering. The period is therefore worth careful study.
Gutenberg's invention had no immediate effect upon his world.[1] Indeed, so little enthusiasm did it arouse that while the inventor's plans were probably evolved as early as 1438, it was not until 1454 or thereabouts that the first completed book was issued from his press. His business partner, Faust, sold his wares in wealthy Paris without explaining that these were different from earlier hand-written books; and when their cheapness, as well as their exact similarity, was discovered, the merchant was suspected of having sold himself to the devil. Hence probably originated the Faust legend. Superstition, it is evident, had still an extended course to run.
It is worth noting that to sell his books Faust left Germany for Paris, and that while printing-presses multiplied but slowly in the land of their origin, the new art was instantly seized upon in Italy, was there made widest use of and pushed to its perfection. In fact, through all the Middle Ages the Romance or semi-Teutonic peoples of Italy, France, and Spain were intellectually in advance of the more wholly Teutonic races of the North. Many of their descendants believe half contemptuously that the difference has not even yet been overcome.
Italy at this time held clearly the intellectual supremacy of the western world, and Florence under the Medici, Cosmo and then Lorenzo, held the supremacy of Italy.[2] Not only in thought, but in art, was there an outburst brilliant beyond all earlier times. A friend and pupil of Cosmo de' Medici was made pope at Rome, and under the name of Nicholas V originated vast schemes for the rebuilding and beautifying of his city of ruins.[3] Modern Rome with all its beautiful churches and wonders of art rose from the hands of Nicholas and his immediate successors. It was their idea that the city should no longer be remembered by its heathen greatness, but by its Christian splendor; that the sight of it should impress upon pilgrims not the decay of the world, but the glory and majesty of the Church. Nicholas also continued the work of Petrarch, gathering vast stores of ancient manuscripts, refounding and practically beginning the enormous Vatican Library. He established that alliance of the Church with the new culture of the age which for a century continued to be an honor and distinguishment to both.
In his pontificate occurred the fall of Constantinople, bringing with it the definite establishment of the Turks in Europe and the final extinction of that Roman Empire of the East which had originated with Constantine. For this reason the date of its fall (1453) is also employed as marking the beginning of modern Europe. It was at least the closing of the older volume, the final not undramatic exit of the last remnant of the ancient world, with its long decaying arts and arrogance, its wealth, its literature, and its law.[4]
Greek scholars fleeing from the sack of their city brought many marvellous old manuscripts to Western Europe and were eagerly welcomed by Pope Nicholas and all of Italy. Nicholas even preached a crusade against the terrible Turks, and tried once more to rouse Europe to ancient enthusiasms. But he failed, and died, they say, heartbroken at his helplessness.
The Turks had recovered from their defeat by the Tartars of Timur, and became once more an active menace. With Constantinople in their power, they attacked the Venetians and compelled those wealthy traders to pay them tribute. Venice by sea and Hungary on land remained for a century the bulwarks of Christendom, and were forced, almost unaided, to withstand all the assaults of the East. They wellnigh perished in the effort. In Hungary this was the period of the great hero, Hunyady, a man of unknown birth and no official rank, who roused his countrymen to repeated effort and led them to repeated victories and defeats against the vastly more numerous invaders.[5]
Hunyady died, worn out with ceaseless warfare, and his son, Matthias, was elected by acclamation to be monarch of the land the father had preserved. This was the proudest era in the history of the Hunnish race. Under Matthias they even resumed their German warfare of five centuries before, and won from a Hapsburg emperor his city of Vienna, ancient capital of Austria, the eastmark or borderland which had been erected by Otto the Great to hold the Huns in check. For a few years Matthias placed his kingdom amid the foremost states of Europe; but with his death came renewed disunion and disorder to his lawless people, and the fierce, fanatic Turks returned again to their assaults.
Further north the yellow races were less successful. Along the shifting borderlands of Asia which mark the line of demarcation between the two mightier families of man, the tide turned ever more steadily in the Aryans' favor. The Russians, under their chief, Ivan III, threw off the galling Tartar yoke which they had borne for over two hundred years. Ivan concentrated in his own hands the power of all the little Russian duchies, overthrew the celebrated Russian republic of Novgorod the Great, and defied the Tartars. Equally noteworthy to modern eyes was his wedding with Sophia, heiress of the last of the emperors of the East. When that outworn empire perished with the fall of Constantinople, Ivan succeeded nominally at least to its heirship. Hence it is that his successors have assumed the title of caesar or kaiser or czar and have grown to look upon themselves as inheritors of the ancient supremacy of Rome.[6]
The fifteenth century was thus a time of many changes in Eastern Europe. Not only did the Eastern Empire disappear at last, not only did Hungary rise to the brief zenith of her glory, there was a sort of general movement, sometimes spoken of as the "Slavonic reaction," against the hitherto successful Teutons. The Slavic Bohemians in their "Hussite" wars repelled all the religious fighting strength of Europe. The Poles began to win back territory from the German empire, and especially from their hereditary foes the "Teutonic Knights" of Prussia. And Russia, greatest of all the Slav countries, grew into a strong kingdom. She and Turkey, rising as twin menaces to the West, assumed at almost the same period that threatening aspect which Turkey has only lately lost, and Russia, to some statesmen's eyes, still holds.
Turn now to the affairs of Western Europe. The feebleness of the German empire continued. For over half a century it was nominally ruled by Frederick III (1440-1493), the lazy and feeble emperor who let Matthias of Hungary expel him from Vienna, and never made any vigorous effort to recover his capital. He was succeeded by his son Maximilian, a man of far other temper, full of courage, energy, and hardihood. Maximilian has been called "the last of the knights," and indeed his whole career may well exemplify the changing times. The one achievement of his life was the recovery of Vienna from the Hungarians, and in that he was successful only because the heirs of Matthias were being overwhelmed by the Turks.
The remainder of his career was spent in learning bitterly how little real power he had as emperor. He attempted to bring the Swiss once more under the imperial dominion, but the little armies he could scrape together against them were repeatedly defeated.[7] He was always declaring war against this kingdom or that, and summoning his great lords to aid him in upholding the glory of the empire. They persistently declined; and he was helpless. At one time having pledged his alliance to the English king, Henry VII, against France, he preserved his knightly word by going alone and serving as a volunteer in Henry's army, whither his people would not follow him. Instead they stayed at home and demanded from him constitutions and courts of law and other internal reforms, uninteresting matters about which the gallant soul of Maximilian cared not a straw and which he gave his subjects under protest.
To the westward of him a far subtler monarch, by far subtler means, was strengthening the power of France and making smooth her way toward that supremacy over European affairs which she was later to assert. Louis XI (1461-1483) is called the first modern king, though it is little flattery to modern statecraft to compare its methods with his, and perhaps our recent governments have truly outgrown them. Louis was no warrior, although under compulsion he showed possibilities of becoming an able general. He preferred to send others who should do his fighting for him, to embroil his opponents one with another, and then reap the fruit of their mutual exhaustion. He was passed master of all falsity and craft; and by his shrewdness he brought to his country peace and prosperity. Typically does he represent his age in which intellectual ability, though sometimes wholly divorced from nobleness of soul, began to dominate brute force.
Charles the Bold stands as the representative of this brute force. He was the mightiest of the French nobles. His ancestors, a younger branch of the royal family, had been made dukes of Burgundy, and by skilful alliances and rapid changes of side through the long Hundred Years' War, they had steadily added to their possessions and their powers. The father of Charles found himself stronger than his king, possessor not only of Burgundy, but of many other fiefs from Germany as well as France, and lord of the Netherlands as well.[8]
Charles was thus the last of those great, overgrown vassals so characteristic of feudal times. Like Hugh Capet in France, like William the Conqueror in England, he hoped to establish himself as an independent king. He opened negotiations for this purpose with the Emperor Frederick, Maximilian's father. He made himself practically independent of France. He wielded a military power greater than that of any other prince of the moment, and he knew it and charged like a mad bull at whoever seemed to interpose in his designs.
Over such a man Louis XI's cunning had full play. He involved Charles in fights with every neighbor. Finally he lured him into conflict with the Swiss, and those hardy mountaineers won the repute of being the best soldiers of Europe by defeating Charles again and again till they left him slain on the field of Nancy (1477).[9] Louis promptly seized most of his dead vassal's domains. Maximilian, having wedded Charles' daughter, inherited the remainder; and the old Burgundian kingdom, so nearly revived to stretch as a permanent dividing land between France and Germany, disappeared forever.
What Louis had done with Burgundy he attempted with his other semi-independent duchies. The Hundred Years' War had almost destroyed central government in France. Louis, by means as secret and varied as his cunning could suggest, gradually reestablished an undisputed leadership above his lords. Fortunately for France, perhaps, England was prevented by a long series of civil wars from interfering in her neighbor's affairs. These wars, though they originated before Louis' time, were constantly fomented and kept alive by him, and England thus paid dearly for having become a source of danger to France.
The Wars of the Roses,[10] as they are called, caused deep-seated changes in England's life and society. They mark for her the transition from the mediaeval to the modern era which was everywhere taking place. Beginning as a contest between two rival branches of the Plantagenets for the kingship, these wars remained aristocratic throughout. That is to say, the common people took little interest in them, while the nobles, espousing sides, fought savagely and murderously, giving one another no quarter, sparing the lesser folk, but executing as traitors their prisoners of rank. When one side seemed hopelessly overcome, Louis would lend them arms and money wherewith to seek revenge once more. Thus almost all the old nobility of England perished; and both lines of kings became extinct, Richard III, their last representative, being accused of murdering all his relatives or possible rivals.[11] At last, Richard too was slain, and a new family of rulers, only remotely connected with the old, was inaugurated by Henry Tudor, grandson of a private gentleman of Wales. This new king, Henry VII (1485-1509), found no powerful lords to oppose his will. One or two impostors were raised against him,[12] France making anxious efforts to prolong the troubles of her dangerous neighbor; but the attempts failed through the utter completeness of the aristocracy's exhaustion.
Thus in England as in France, though by widely differing chances, the kingly power had triumphed over feudalism. Monarchs began to come into direct contact, not always pleasant, with the entire mass of their subjects, the "third estate," the common people.
Spain also was to pass through a similar experience. Indeed, one of the most striking facts of this age of the Renaissance is the swift and spectacular rise of Spain from a land of feebleness and internal strife into the most powerful kingdom of Europe. We have seen the Spanish peninsula in previous ages the seat of endless strife between Saracens and Christians. Gradually the Moors had been driven back, and the little independent Christian states had been united by the fortunes of war and marriage into three—Portugal on the Atlantic coast, Castile occupying the larger part of the mainland, and Aragon, a maritime kingdom, less extensive in Spain, but extending its sovereignty over many of the Mediterranean isles, over Sicily and southern Italy. In 1469 Isabella, heiress of Castile, and Ferdinand, heir of Aragon, were wedded; and soon afterward their countries were united under their joint rule. The combined strength of both was then devoted to a long religious war against the Moors. Granada, the last and most famous of the Moorish capitals and strongholds, was finally captured in 1492.[13] The followers of Mahomet were driven out of Western Europe during the same period that, under Turkish leadership, they had at last won Constantinople in the East.
The whole Spanish peninsula with the exception of Portugal was thus united under Ferdinand and Isabella, greatest of the sovereigns of Spain. The ages of battle with the Moors had bred a nation of cavaliers, intensely loyal, passionately religious. They were splendid fighters, but stern, hard-hearted, merciless men. Isabella, "the Saint," most holy and pure-souled of women, herself introduced into her country the terrible Inquisition.[14] Jews and Moors were given little peace in life unless they turned Christian. Heretics and relapsed converts from the other faiths were burned to death. The Queen declared she would approve all possible torture to men's bodies, when necessary in order to save their souls.
If such were the women of Spain, what was to be expected of the men? How could even Ferdinand, "the Wise," keep them employed now that there were no longer Moors to fight against? Uprisings, rebellions, began to threaten Spain with such desolation as England had endured. But a higher Providence solved for Ferdinand his impossible problem: the age of maritime discovery began.[15]
The Portuguese from their Atlantic seaboard had already begun to explore southward along the African coast. In 1402 they had settled the Canary Isles. In 1443 they reached southward beyond the sands of the Sahara and saw Cape Verd, discovered that Africa was not all burning desert, that heat would not forever increase as they went southward. In 1487 Bartholomew Diaz, after almost a year of sailing, reached the Cape of Good Hope, the southern point of the vast African continent; and in 1497 Vasco da Gama rounded the cape and sailed on to India[16]. He had found a way of bringing Indian spices, silks, and jewels to Europe, bringing them in quantities and without paying tribute to the Turks, without crossing the deadly deserts of Arabia. He had made his little country wealthy.
Meanwhile, stimulated by Portuguese success, the mariners of other nations began to brave the giant storms of the Atlantic. The Turks had made trade with the far East wellnigh impossible. Portugal was not the only land to seek a sea-route to India. Venice and Genoa saw before them the threat of ruin to their most profitable commerce. So we may even say that it was the Turks who set the Genoese captain Columbus to planning his great voyage; it was the conquest of the Moors that set Isabella free to listen to him, and offer her crown jewels for the expedition which should convert other heathen, establish other inquisitions; and it was the downfall of the Moors which left the Spanish warriors so eager to throng to adventure and warfare in the West, once Columbus had shown the way.
For a time the theatre of great events shifts to the new continent. The Portuguese explorers had doubled the size of the known world. The Spaniards doubled it again. But the credit must not be given wholly to Spain. Though it was the liberality of her monarchs which had made discovery possible, and though it was the daring of her warriors that laughed at danger and made conquest sure, yet the Spaniards were not sailors. It was to Italy, the home of commerce, that they turned for their captains and their pilots. Columbus, the Genoese, had discovered the islands along the coast. England, wishing to have a share in this world of wonders, sent a Venetian mariner, John Cabot; and he and his son sailed along our northern mainland in English ships.[17] Columbus touched the coast of South America in 1498.[18] A Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, was the first to cruise far along this southern coast, probably in 1499, and it was his name which Europe gave to the new lands.[19]
Following the discovery came settlement, warfare with the unhappy Indians, a fierce and frantic search for gold. It was while engaged in this work that Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama, saw the vast waters of the Pacific, and riding out into them upon his warhorse took possession, in the name of Spain, of the largest ocean of the globe.[20] Men recognized at last that these were not the Asiatic shores, but a wholly new continent which they had found.
Let us pause to recapitulate the wonders which this age of the Renaissance had seen—a new world of Africa discovered in the South, a new world of America in the West, the rise of Spain, the conquest of the last of the western Saracens at Granada and the rise of the Turks in the East, the rise of Russia, the downfall of the last vestige of the ancient empire of Rome, the last expiring effort of feudalism in Charles the Bold, and of errant knighthood in Maximilian; the beginning of modern statecraft in Louis XI of France, Henry VII of England, and Ferdinand the Wise of Spain; the spread of printing and with it the spread of thought and knowledge among the masses; and, sometimes accounted greatest of all, came the wonderful awakening of art in Italy. We have traced the early part of this under the Medici and Pope Nicholas. Lorenzo de'Medici was the centre of its later development.[21] From his court went forth that galaxy of artists which the world of art unites in calling the unequalled masters of all ages—Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and a host of others.[22]
Unfortunately in Italy at least the great movement in art and literature took an antireligious, sometimes an antipatriotic, tone. Lorenzo was openly defiant and scornful of the teachings of the Church, and after his death a French king, Charles VIII, was able to enter Italy and march from end to end of it without opposition. Religion seemed dying there, and love of country dead.
Florence underwent an extravagant though brief religious revival. The monk Savonarola preached against wickedness in high places, and thundered at the Florentines for their presumption and vanity. The impressionable people wept, they appointed a "day of vanities" and laid all their rich robes and jewels at Savonarola's feet. They made him ruler of the city. But, alas! they soon tired of his severities, sighed for their vanities back again, and at last burned the reformer at the stake.[23]
In Rome itself there arose popes, Lorenzo's followers, who preferred art to Christianity, or others like the terrible Alexander Borgia, who adopted the maxims of the new statecraft. Alexander, a worthy disciple of Louis XI, admired falsehood before truth, and sought to win his aims by poisoning his enemies. The career of his nephew Caesar Borgia has supplied history with its most awful picture of successful crime, and the book written in his praise by Macchiavelli has given us a new word for Satanic subtlety and treachery. We call it Macchiavellian. The rest of Europe shrank from Italy in fear, and named it "poisoning Italy."[24]
Against the spiritual dominance of such a land the world was surely ready for revolt. The mind of man, so long and slowly awakening, and at last so intensely roused, seeing great discoveries on every hand, was no longer to be controlled by authority. The time was ripe for the Reformation.
[Footnote 1: See Origin and Progress of Printing, page 5.]
[Footnote 2: See Beginning and Progress of the Renaissance, vol. ix, p. 110.]
[Footnote 3: See Rebuilding of Rome by Nicholas V, page 46.]
[Footnote 4: See Mahomet II Takes Constantinople, page 55.]
[Footnote 5: See John Hunyady Repulses the Turks, page 30.]
[Footnote 6: See Ivan the Great Unites Russia, page 109.]
[Footnote 7: See Establishment of Swiss Independence, page 336.]
[Footnote 8: See Culmination of the Power of Burgundy, page 125.]
[Footnote 9: See Death of Charles the Bold, page 155.]
[Footnote 10: See Wars of the Roses, page 72.]
[Footnote 11: See Murder of the Princes in the Tower, page 192,]
[Footnote 12: See Conspiracy, Rebellion, and Execution of Perkin Warbeck, page 250.]
[Footnote 13: See Conquest of Granada, page 202.]
[Footnote 14: See Inquisition Established in Spain, page 166.]
[Footnote 15: See Columbus Discovers America, page 224.]
[Footnote 16: See The Sea Route to India, page 299.]
[Footnote 17: See Discovery of the Mainland of North America by the Cabots, page 282.]
[Footnote 18: See Columbus Discovers South America, page 323.]
[Footnote 19: See Amerigo Vespucci in America, page 346.]
[Footnote 20: See Balboa Discovers the Pacific, page 381.]
[Footnote 21: See Lorenzo de'Medici Rules in Florence, page 134.]
[Footnote 22: See Painting of the Sistine Chapel, page 369.]
[Footnote 23: See Savonarola's Reforms and Death, page 265.]
[Footnote 24: See Rise and Fall of the Borgias, page 360.]