The Renaissance in Italy- Main Objectives:

1. Why were the Italian city-states a favorable setting for a cultural rebirth?2. What was the Renaissance?3. What themes and techniques did Renaissance artists and writers explore?

Roll- In Questions:• Why does Education “pay?”

• What jobs are necessary and what makes them lucrative?

• What skills do you need for that job?

Complete the Map of Renaissance Italy:

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Crash Course Video- The Renaissance

1. What is Humanism?

2. Why did the Renaissance start in Italy?

3. Why is trade “Awesome” for society?

4. How did the Muslim world help create the Renaissance?

5. Why did a majority of Europeans not experience the Renaissance during theRenaissance?

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How the Crusades Caused the Renaissance:

Cities of Renaissance Italy:

Why did the Renaissance Begin in Italy? ____________________________________

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The Renaissance

The Papal States: ________________________________________________________________________

Geography- Why Italy?

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Commercial Giants-

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Life in the City-States:

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________________________________________________________Section Reading and Questions:

Plague and Progress in the 1300sBetween the years 1000 and 1300 the availability of food in Christendom allowed its population to grow 2.5 times. Paris, Milan, Florence and Venice had become cities with more than 80,000 inhabitants. London, Cologne and Barcelona had more than 40,000. Rome, Naples, Vienna, Prague and Lisbon had more than 20,000, and Dublin had more than 10,000. But a decline in Europe's economy was on its way, and it would be followed by the worst of plagues.Farm expansion in Western Europe had come to an end by the year 1300. Marginally productive lands had been abandoned. Pastures, heaths and meadows had been converted to farming, and cattle raising had declined, reducing the amount of protein in diets and reducing manure for fertilizer, contributing to a decline in crop yields. This coincided with a climate change caused by the advance of polar and alpine glaciers, bringing longer winters, wetter weather and what is called a "Little Ice Age" – which was to last for the next 400 years. The growing season shortened, and a major food source from the sea – fishing- began to disappear.

Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Grain production failed in Iceland and diminished in Scandinavia. Rains In the year 1315 were incessant, and people talked of the return of the flood described in Genesis (The bible). Crops were ruined. With food shortages came a rise in food prices. Between the years 1315 to 1317, famines developed in the poorer areas of Christendom. Hunger produced cannibalism. It is said that inPoland and Silesia the bodies of hanged criminals were taken down from the gallows as food for the poor.

Technological ProgressEurope was enduring its longest economic depression. But linen production as an alternative to wool had arisen. Metal and glass industries were growing. The use of free labor – in contrast to slave gangs of ancient times – would in the 1300s contribute to inventions such as cogwheels, gears and suction pumps in mining. Rare and expensive in ancient times, iron would soon become inexpensive and its use more widespread.

Europe was benefiting from geographical advantages. It had a variety of slow-moving rivers on which goods could be transported, which was easier and cheaper than transporting goods across land by pack animals as was done in some other parts of the world.In Europe governments were uninterested in taking over or holding a monopoly on any industry, leaving industry freer than in China. Instead of businessmen being dependent on government for favor, monarchs in Europe were dependent on businessmen. If a monarch called in his debts he was in effect killing the geese that laid the golden eggs.

Black Death and SinThe increase in world trade and movement of people within the last two centuries exposed more people to the bubonic plague. Rats gave the disease to fleas, the rats were transported by humans and fleas passed the disease – a bacterium, Yersinia pestis – to humans by biting them. Then diseased humans made the disease airborne, spreading it to the lungs of others.

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In December 1347 the disease was in the Crimea and Constantinople. That same month it spread to Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and Marseille. By June, 1348, it was in Spain, Italy and as far north as Paris. By June 1349 it had advanced through London and central Europe. From there in the year and a half that followed it swung as if on a hinge in central Europe, through Ireland and through Scandinavia. It reached people weakened by decades of hard times and malnutrition.Spread of the disease was made worse by crowding in the cities. Some cities lost from half to two-thirds of their population. Some small cities became ghost towns. Common folks were dying as well as the most pious. Perhaps a third of the Catholic clergy died, with priests who attended the afflicted being hit the hardest. The poor were hit harder than aristocrats because they were generally in poorer health and less able to resist the disease and because they lived closer together. Wolves fared better and appeared in some cities.The mindset of these times was on the spiritual as causation rather than the purely physical. The benefit of wearing the kind of medical mask that people might wear in the 21st century was unknown. The belief in witchcraft was revitalized. There was panic. Believing that the end of the world was at hand, some groups engaged in orgies. People called the Flagellants believed with others that the plague was the judgment of God on sinful mankind. The Flagellants traveled the country, men and women flogging each other. They preached that anyone doing this for thirty-three days would be cleansed of all his sins – one day for every year that Christ lived. The Church was still on guard against these groups they saw as heretical, and in 1349 Pope Clement VI condemned the movement.The wandering mobs focused their wrath upon clergy who opposed them, and they targeted Jews, whom they blamed for inciting God's wrath. In Germany rumors arose that Jews had caused the plague by poisoning the water. Jews were arrested. Their fortunes were seized by the lords under whose jurisdictions they lived, and Jews were put to death by burning. The attacks on Jews were condemned by Clement VI, and he threatened excommunication for those Christians who harmed Jews.The success of this greatest of plagues was limited and destined to diminish as it had centuries before in Europe. The body that the bacterium entered was its environment and source of life. It used up its environment and again faded away, but not completely.

Depopulation, Rebellion and Social ProgressIt has been roughly estimated that a third of England died from the Black Death of 1348-49, and perhaps this is not far from the percentage of losses suffered in other areas of Europe. Much farm land went into disuse, reducing the output of food. Farm animals died, further diminishing the food supply. With all the deaths and drop in demand for food, the price of food dropped. In Western Europe, with fewer people to do work the demand for labor increased, as did wages.The shortage of labor increased the demand for slaves, cutting into the demand for free labor. Wealthy merchants vied for servants to staff their households. Craftsmen and shopkeepers felt that they had to keep slaves. Cobblers, carpenters, weavers and woolworkers bought men and women from the slave dealers to help in their industries. And more slaves were put on the market as hungry parents sold their children, preferring their children's enslavement to watching them starve to death.With labor in short supply, common people were aware of their added value as producers and eager to improve their situation. In response to rising wages, authorities started to fix wages at a low level. Hostility toward employers and authorities increased. Peasants and other workers tried to dodge these obligations to the nobles. In cities, workers rose against the wealthy merchants who had been running city hall. Peasants and workers revolted in Spain, the Netherlands, southern Germany, Italy, and England.In England, some asked why there was bondage when all were from one father and mother – Adam and Eve. Rebellion

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was mixed with religious fervor and a call for holding everything in common and for the abolition of differences between lord and serf. But in most of England were castles with soldiers enough to control local peasants, and the peasants failed to transform their questions and hostilities into successful social revolution.But other changes were taking place. Land had become cheaper to buy. With fewer people to labor in agriculture, serfdom was diminishing in Western Europe. Landlords in need of people to work their lands had begun renting out their land to peasants for sharecropping, and great estates were being replaced by small farms.

Part 1- Plague and Progress in the 1300s

1. Identify Two factors that contributed to why the “Black Death” had a big impactupon European society in 1347.

a._______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________B. People in European countries were weakened by decades of hard times, poor crops, bad

weather, and malnutrition

2. Who were the “Flagellants?” and why did their behavior reflect the mood of the times?

3. Why did the Black Death increase the demand for labor and how did this workas an advantage for the “Common People?”

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Cannons, Politics and Machiavelli

The End of ByzantiumThe emperors at Constantinople had been losing territory in Asia Minor to the Seljuk Turks, and with this they lost revenues from taxing agricultural production. In the 1100s they lost eastern markets to Venetian and Genoese maritime traders and revenues from customs duties. Constantinople had come to see the upkeep of their merchant fleet as a drain on their meager money supply, and the city's neglected fleet rotted away while foreign ships came and went from its port.The royal government continued spending money for extravagant displays necessary to keep up the appearance of grandeur. Constantinople became impoverished. Some of the poor of Constantinople emigrated. The once proud Christian people, enthusiastic for their racing team at the sports arena, were no more. By the 1400s Constantinople had a diminished population and Constantinople was diminished militarily.When the Turks overran Constantinople in May 1453, Constantinople's thousand year reign as the center of the Roman Empire had come to an end. The flow of refugees from Constantinople to Italy included intellectuals with their manuscripts. This stimulated a new interest in the ancient past, an interest that was humanistic rather than concerned with sin and salvation. Byzantium's loss was Italy's gain. Wealthy businessmen in Italy began to support education and the arts – the beginning of what would be called the Renaissance.

Patriotism, Central Authority and the New StateAlso on the rise in Western Europe was national identity, stimulated by the Hundred Years' War. The English and the French were looking more toward their king as a father figure, away from the Holy Father in Rome. France's king had gained politically with the numerous deaths of nobles during the war. There were now fewer local lords between the king and his subjects and fewer layers of authority: barons, earls, counts and knights. The expansion of the money economy had contributed to the breakdown of the old agricultural feudalism. Fiefdoms had been disappearing. Warring nobles were of the past. A new kind of state was developing. The king of France won the right to tax, judge and legislate for all inhabitants in his realm. Political power was becoming more centralized.

In England between 1455 and 1471 there was civil war between royal families, the Lancasters and the Yorks – the "War of the Roses." This was more of the usual wars concerning succession. Henry VI, king since, 33 in 1455, was enfeebled by insanity, and the two families were fighting for influence. In 1485 a member of the Lancaster family defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. (His bones, with marks from a violent death, were to be discovered during a parking lot excavation in August 2012.)Henry Tudor, the only surviving male representing the House of Lancaster, became King Henry VII. He married Elizabeth of York, the leading Yorkist claimant to the throne. Henry VII further strengthened his position by weakening the nobles through taxation. The English people wanted order and an end to the disruptions and costs of

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warfare, and they supported strong central authority. Feudalism in England had come to an end.

In France, meanwhile, Charles VII (r 1403-61) had managed to reform the military, to pursue sound fiscal policies and encourage trade. He was succeeded by his son, Louis XI, who had been in revolt against his father since 1446. His successor, Charles VIII married Ann of Brittany, adding Brittany to territory belonging to the French king. As historian Max Boot writes, "Charles VIII presided over the most powerful nation in Europe at a time when the very concept of a 'state' was just taking shape." note31

In Italy much wealth had been accumulated from commerce and trade, and city-states were controlled by wealthy merchants and bankers, while patriotism had remained local. Five powers dominated Italy: Venice, Milan, Florence, the Papal states (in central Italy, including Rome) and Naples (which ruled the southern half of the peninsula). Competition for territory was intense, there was worry that one state might become so powerful as to rule the others. So alliances were formed. Warring in Italy was continuous, including a war in 1450 between Venice and Milan, with an alliance between Florence, Naples and Milan on one side and Venice and the papacy on the other.

Cannons and Charles VIII to ItalyIn 1489, Pope Innocent VIII, then at odds with Ferdinand I of Naples, offered Naples to Charles VIII of France, who had a vague claim to the Kingdom of Naples through his paternal grandmother, Marie of Anjou.Charles entered Italy with 25,000 men (including 8,000 Swiss mercenaries) in 1494 and marched across the peninsula, reaching Naples on 22 February 1495. France had around thirty-six of the latest in cannons.The French army subdued Florence in passing and took Naples without a pitched battle or siege. Charles was crowned King of Naples. His cannon had frightened and made a big impression on the Italians. In the city-state of Florence, the Dominican friar Savonarola, known for his book burning and destruction of what he considered immoral art, believed that Charles VIII and his cannon were sent by God to purify the Florentines. He looked forward to Charles ousting sinners and making the city a center of morality appropriate for a restructured Catholic Church.Instead, an anti-French coalition of powers, the League of Venice, arranged by Innocent's successor, Pope Alexander VI, drove Charles back to France. Charles wanted to rebuild his army and return to Italy, but he was now heavily in debt and couldn't afford it.In Italy, Charles left behind concern about the nature of warfare in the mind of many including a Florentine named Machiavelli – his view more secular in its interpretation of events than Savonarola's.Savonarola, by the way, was later excommunicated by Pope Alexander, charged withheresy and executed.

MachiavelliWord had spread that walls and castles were no longer much of a defense. The world had noticed this when the Muslims finally broke down Constantinople's walls(with European cannon and cannoneers) in 1453.Castles were on their way to becomingrelics. Rulers saw that security would have to be provided by something more than stonewalls, namely large standing armies and perhaps good alliances and a balance of power,which required diplomacy. Addressing the art of diplomacy at the end of the1400s was Niccolò Machiavelli. William H McNeil describes him as "well educated in the humanisttradition." Machiavelli anticipated the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th century – which encouraged people to view current events as of human or scientific origin rather than influenced by God. Machiavelli believed that a ruler

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should be concerned not with how things ought to be (Should be) but with how things are and that politics should be about documented realities rather than religious faith. He was of the city of Florence and advised the ruler of Florence that there were bad people in the world and that his realm might have to contend with them other than with prayer and Christian love. As late as the twentieth century and perhaps the twenty-first, these views would earn him a reputation among a few people as an immoral schemer and a cynic.Machiavelli claimed that a good ruler maintained permanent embassies in other lands and based his diplomacy on good information. His better known work, The Prince, was written in 1505 and published in 1515. Machiavelli was trying to win back his standing as a diplomat. It is believed that he wanted a new appointment from the Medici family, which ruled Florence. He urged a development similar to what had been taking place in France. An advanced princely state, claimed Machiavelli, needed a professional military rather than mobilizations by knights. He saw rulers as needing the support of their subjects gaining in strength by political and other improvements. He wrote that a prince should act in the interest not just of himself but in the interest of his subjects, that a prince should create institutions that serve and evoke loyalty. Societies, he held, should be governed by laws rather than whim (faith).Machiavelli described the king of France as still "placed in the midst of an ancient body of lords ... and the king cannot take them away without danger to himself." Machiavelli observed that Turkish rule in Constantinople was benefitting from a more centralized administration. Later in the 1500s France's monarchs would seek similar centralization at the expense of the nobles.

Part2 – “Canon, Politics and Machiavelli”

Directions- Just Read the section titled “Machiavelli”

1. Where was Niccolo Machiavelli from? And what was his job?

2. What are some principles, Machiavelli outlines in his book “The Prince”, thatrulers should follow?

Europe's Renaissance BeginsFrom the mid-1300s and into the 1400s a few scholars in one of the most urbanized areas of Europe, in Italy, were searching through libraries and recovering works in Latin by ancient writers such as Cicero, Livy and Seneca. People there saw daily the remains of ancient Roman structures around them and they were looking to understand what the

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ancients thought. They lived in republics where merchants and trade dominated, free of monarchical oppressions (unfair rule of kings and nobles), and it was here that a cultural movement called the Renaissance began that included sculptors, Florentine painters and in the late 1400s the political philosophy of Machiavelli (1469-1527).With the conquest of Constantinople by Islamic Turks in 1453, a wave of Christian scholars fled to Italy, and they brought with them manuscripts concerning ancient Greece, many of which had fallen into obscurity in the West. A new attention to the Greek and Arabic works followed, on the natural sciences, philosophy and mathematics. This gave rise to those called humanists, people who pursued literary knowledge and linguistics acquired from the ancient Greeks. They are said to have criticized the "barbarous Latin" being used in Europe's universities, and some would see the importation of the Greek classics from the Mid-East as saving Europe from barbarity. The humanists focused on humanity's doings, without denying the supreme being that was traditional in the culture of Christians, including Platoism.(Platoism- Belief in a spiritual force in the universe which does not directly influence humans and the world)

Associated with a new attitude toward humanity was a work published in 1468 called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance." It was titled Oration on the Dignity of Man and written by a 23-year-old Italian, Pico dellaMirandola, from the town of Mirandola in north-central Italy. He was to be described as having studied everything there was at that time. He wrote that exercising one's brain added to one's dignity and that if one fails to exercise his intelligence he vegetates.Individual accomplishments were on the rise in Italy. In Florence was Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). He was an inventor, engineer, anatomist, botanist, geologist, musician, painter and sculptor. He appreciated the freedom to formulate ideas and freedom in general: he would buy caged birds and release them.There were others like da Vinci who were curious, interested in science and expressing themselves artistically.

Outside of Italy at the University of Paris, a Roman Catholic institution, was Erasmus (1466-1536). He was from Rotterdam, a major commercial center and became a celebrated Biblical scholar. In 1509 he wrote In Praise of Human Folly and become known as the "Prince of Humanists." He believed that a common person might be able to understand Christianity as well as a priest, and he advocated tolerating diversity in ideas. He saw what he called absurd superstitions among Christians. And regarding heretics he wrote, "It is better to cure a sick man than to kill him." note24

England's Thomas More, born in 1478, ten years before Erasmus, was another who has been classified as a social philosopher, a humanist and part of Europe's Renaissance. In 1504 he was elected to Parliament. In 1516 his Utopia was published, a book that advocated the community together should own the land (Early form of Socialism), education for both males and females, and almost complete religious toleration.Going into the new century, an interest in mechanics similar to da Vinci's produced the pocket watch, a wheel-locked musket and the first flush toilets. And there was the Biblical hero David, sculpted by a 28-year-old Florentine, Michelangelo. A part of his humanism was idealizing the human body as well as the human spirit, done better with David unclothed.

Part 3- Europe’s Renaissance Begins

1. How did the conquest of Constantinople by Islamic Turks in 1453 contribute to

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Italy becoming the center of a new cultural and educational movementcalled the Renaissance?

2. What is Humanism?

3. Identify and list the views of the following Humanist thinkers described in thepassage:

Pico della Mirandola

Leonardo da Vinci

Erasmus

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Thomas More

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