Chapter 13: Crisis and Rebirth: Europe in the 14th and 15th Centuries

  • Mongols created a vast empire and secured trade routes, same trade routes also spread disease: bubonic plague
  • 14th century: famine, economic depression, war, social upheaval, rise in crime and violence, decline in power of Catholic Church
  • 15th century: humanism, Renaissance

The Black Death

  • Yersinia pestis: spread by fleas carried by rats
  • Spread along trade routes: (video)
  • Europe: 1347-1350
  • Many felt it was punishment from God
  • Flagellants
  • Anti-Semitism

Economy

  • Price of labor increased
  • Peasant revolts
  • English Peasants Revolt 1381
  • Jacquerie in France 1358
  • Gender division of labor continued w/ new guilds

Economic Recovery

  • Italy/ Venetians
  • Hanseatic League: northern Europe (Flanders)
  • Banking: House of Medici Family

Hundred Years War

  • Began over duchy of Gascony: held by English King in France
  • Philip VI of France vs. Edward III of England
  • Foot soldiers important
  • Battle of Crecy: English Won
  • 1415: English Henry V vs. French dauphin Charles
  • Joan of Arc
  • Battle of Orleans
  • Accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake: (1920 made a saint)
  • Use of canon and gunpowder important

The “New Monarchies”

  • Centralization of power of monarchical governments
  • France, England, Spain
  • France: Louis XI “Spider” taille system
  • England: Henry VII: Tudors: diplomacy to avoid wars
  • Spain: Isabella and Ferdinand: military strengthened, Catholicism as unifier in Spain (Inquisition)
  • Holy Roman Empire
  • Germany: many independent principalities
  • Hapsburg Family: rose to prominence in Austria
  • Eastern Europe
  • Poland/ Hungary Roman Catholic
  • Russia: Orthodox
  • Ivan III able to remove Mongols from power in Russia 1480

Ottoman Turks and the End of the Byzantine Empire

  • 1453: Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks and renamed Istanbul
  • Ottoman Turks: Muslim
  • Continued to expand into Eastern Europe
  • Europeans wanted alternate routes to Asia not controlled by Ottomans- leads to Exploration

The Italian States

  • Independent city-states
  • Venice
  • Milan
  • Florence
  • Medici Family
  • Isabella d’Este: “first lady of the world”

Machiavelli

  • The Prince
  • Acquisition, maintenance, and expansion of political power as a means to restore and maintain order in his time
  • The ends justify the means

The Decline of the Church

  • Pope Boniface VIII vs. King Philip IV of France
  • Fought over right to tax French clergy
  • Boniface excommunicated Philip
  • Philip kidnapped Boniface who died from shock
  • New pope: Clement V was chosen and resided in Avignon (French influence)

Papacy at Avignon

  • most felt pope should reside in Rome
  • Influence of French kings over popes

The Great Schism

  • Two popes chosen: Urban VI (Italian) and Clement VII (French)
  • Many became disenchanted w/ the Catholic Church b/c of its political struggles
  • Council of Constance called: Pope Martin V instated (Roman)

Heresy and Reform

  • Jan Hus
  • Leader of Czech reformers in Prague
  • Arrested and burned at the stake as a heretic
  • Popes eventually regained position in Catholic Church but never regained comparable power over the temporal governments again

Renaissance Papacy

  • End of the Great Schism (1417) to beginning of Reformation
  • Spiritual vs. temporal responsibilities
  • Julius II – involved in War and politics (golden armor)
  • Nepotism
  • Ignoring vows of chastity: illegitimate children
  • Patrons of Renaissance culture
  • Pope Leo X of Medici Family

Chapter 13 continued…

Characteristics of Italian Renaissance

  • Urban Society
  • Secular spirit
  • Interest in Greco-Roman culture
  • Humanism: individual potential
  • Elitist movement

Renaissance Society

  • Middle Ages: 1. Clergy 2. Nobility 3. Everyone else
  • Aritstocrats:
  • The Book of the Courtier Baldassare Castiglione
  • Well-rounded and polished individuals
  • Third Estate
  • Decline of serfdom
  • Merchants/Artisans in Towns/Cities
  • Marriage
  • Often Arranged
  • Large Dowry from woman’s family to groom
  • Italy: children had to be emancipated to become adults
  • Childbirth dangerous, but wanted many children due to high child mortality rate

Intellectual Renaissance

  • Humanism
  • Study of the classics, liberal arts
  • Petrarch: “father of humanism”
  • Cicero and Virgil as standards
  • Neoplatonism
  • Synthesize Christianity and Platonism
  • Hierarchy of substances: plants to God w/ humans in the middle
  • Platonic love (all are bond by sympathetic love)
  • Ex: Platonic friendship
  • Hermeticism
  • Believed humans were created as divine but chose to enter the material world
  • Could regain their divinity through purification of the soul
  • Became Sages or Magi
  • Education
  • “Liberal arts”
  • Educate an elite ruling class
  • Religion and morals for women
  • Vernacular
  • Language spoken in own regions
  • Dante: The Divine Comedy: souls progression to salvation: hell, purgatory, and heaven
  • Christine de Pizan: The Book of the City of Ladies
  • Impact of Printing
  • Movable metal type
  • Johannes Gutenberg

Artistic Renaissance

  • Perspective and outdoor space and light
  • Movement and anatomical structure
  • Leonardo da Vinci: Last Supper, Mona Lisa
  • Raphael: Madonnas, School of Athens
  • Michelangelo: Sistine Chapel

Northern Renaissance

  • Exact portrayal of their world
  • Jan van Eyck: oil paint Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride
  • Emotional intensity of religious feeling
  • Albrect Durer: Adoration of the Magi