Italian Renaissance: Encyclopedia II - Italian Renaissance - Origins

Italian Renaissance - Origins

Italian Renaissance - Northern Italy in the High Middle Ages

By the late Middle Ages, central and southern Italy, once the heartland of the Roman Empire, was far poorer than the north. Rome was a city largely in ruins, and the Papal States were a loosely administered region with little law and order. Partially because of this, the Papacy had relocated to Avignon, France. Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia had for some time been under foreign domination.

The north was far more prosperous, with the states of northern Italy among the wealthiest in Europe. The Crusades had built lasting trade links to the Levant, and the Fourth Crusade had done much to destroy the Byzantine Empire as a commercial rival to the Italians. The main trade routes running from the east passed through the Byzantine Empire or the Arab lands and onwards to the ports of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice. Luxury goods bought in the Levant, such as spices, dyes, and silks were imported to Italy and then resold throughout Europe. Moreover, the inland city-states profited from the rich agricultural land of the Po River valley. From France, Germany, and the Low Countries, land and river trade routes brought goods such as wool, wheat, and precious metals into the region. The extensive trade that stretched from Egypt to the Baltic generated substantial surpluses that allowed significant investment in mining and agriculture. Thus, while northern Italy was not richer in resources than many other parts of Europe, the level of development, stimulated by trade, allowed it to prosper. Florence became one of the wealthiest cities of Northern Italy, due mainly to its textile production. Wool was imported from Northern Europe and Spain, ^[1] and dyes from the east were used to make high quality clothing.

The Italian trade routes that covered the Mediterranean and beyond were also major conduits of culture and knowledge. From Constantinople, recently Christianized Spain, and the Arab lands came much of the preserved ancient learning of the classical era. The Crusades led to some European contact with classical learning, preserved by Arabs, but more important in this regard was the Spanish Reconquista of the fifteenth century and the resulting translations of Arabic-language works by the Arabists of the School of Salamanca. From Egypt and the Levant, the scientific, philosophical, and mathematical thinking of the Arabs entered Northern Italy. The region also was sitting just to the north of the remnants of the heart of the Roman civilization, and if one looked carefully, ancient manuscripts could be found, architectural principles observed, and artistic styles examined.

Italian Renaissance - European economy

In the thirteenth century, Europe in general was experiencing an economic boom. The trade routes of the Italian states linked with those of the Hanseatic League to create a unified European economy. The city-states of Italy expanded greatly during this period and grew in power to become de facto fully independent of the Holy Roman Empire. During this period, the modern commercial infrastructure developed with joint stock companies, an international banking system, a systematized foreign exchange market, insurance, and government debt. ^[2] Florence became the centre of this financial industry and the Florin became the main currency of international trade.

This produced a new class of aristocrats who won their positions through financial skill, overturning the feudal model that had dominated Europe in the Middle Ages. Northern Italy, with the exception of the region around Milan, had long been less feudal than the rest of Europe. In much of the region the landed nobility was consistently weaker than the urban patriarchs. The increase in trade during the early Renaissance enhanced this characteristic. The decline of feudalism and the rise of cities influenced each other; for example, the demand for luxury goods led to an increase in trade, which led to greater numbers of tradesmen becoming wealthy, who, in turn, demanded more luxury goods. This change also gave the merchants almost complete control of the governments of the Italian city-states, again enhancing trade. One of the most important effects of this political control was security. Those that grew extremely wealthy in a feudal state ran constant risk of running afoul of the monarchy and having their lands confiscated, as famously occurred to Jacques Coeur in France. The northern states also kept many medieval laws that severely hampered commerce, such as those against usury, and prohibitions on trading with non-Christians. In the city-states of Italy, these laws were repealed or rewritten.^[3]

Italian Renaissance - Fourteenth-century collapse

The fourteenth century saw a series of catastrophes that caused the European economy to go into recession. The Medieval Warm Period was ending as the transition to the Little Ice Age began. ^[4] This change in climate saw agricultural output decline significantly, leading to repeated famines, exacerbated by the rapid population growth of the earlier era. The Hundred Years War began between England and France, disrupting trade throughout northwest Europe, most notably when, in 1345, King Edward III of England repudiated his debts, leading to the collapse of the two largest Florentine banks, those of the Bardi and Peruzzi. In the east, war was also disrupting trade routes as the Ottoman Empire began to expand throughout the region. Most devastating, though, was the Black Death that decimated the populations of the densely populated cities of Northern Italy. The population of Florence, for instance, fell from 90,000 to 50,000 people.^[5] Widespread disorder followed, including a revolt of Florentine textile workers, the ciompi, in 1378.

It was during this period of instability that the first Renaissance figures, such as Dante and Petrarch lived, and the first stirrings of the Renaissance took place in the opening half of the 14th century. Paradoxically, some of these disasters would help establish the Renaissance. The expansion of the Ottoman Empire at the expense of Byzantium caused an influx of wealthy and educated Greek refugees from the east, who brought with them knowledge of classical Greek learning, leading to the rediscovery of many long-forgotten classical works. The Black Death wiped out a third of Europe's population, and the new smaller population was much wealthier, better fed, and, significantly, had more surplus money to spend on luxury goods like art and architecture. As incidences of the plague began to decline in the early 15th century, Europe's devastated population once again began to grow. This new demand for products and services, and the reduced number of people able to provide them (due to the deaths caused by the plague), put the lower classes in a more favourable position. Furthermore, this demand also helped create an increasing class of bankers, merchants, and skilled artisans. The horrors of the Black Death and the seeming inability of the Church to provide relief would contribute to a decline of church influence, another significant contributing factor to the Renaissance. Additionally, the collapse of the Bardi and Peruzzi banks would open the way for the Medici to rise to prominence in Florence. Robert Sabatino Lopez argues that the economic collapse was a crucial cause of the Renaissance.^[6] According to this view, in a more prosperous era, businessmen would have quickly reinvested their earnings in order to make more money in a climate favourable to investment. However, in the leaner years of the fourteenth century, the wealthy found few promising investment opportunities for their earnings and instead chose to spend more on culture and art.

Another popular explanation for the Italian Renaissance is the "Baron Thesis," first advanced by historian Hans Baron.^[7] It states that the primary impetus of the early Renaissance was the long running series of wars between Florence and Milan. By the late fourteenth century, Milan had become a centralized monarchy under the control of the Visconti family. Giangaleazzo Visconti, who ruled the city from 1378 to 1402, was renowned both for his cruelty and for his abilities, and set about building an empire in Northern Italy. He launched a long series of wars with Milan, steadily conquering neighbouring states and defeating the various coalitions led by Florence that sought in vain to halt the advance. This culminated in the 1402 siege of Florence, when it looked as though the city was doomed to fall, before Giangaleazzo suddenly died and his empire collapsed.

Baron's thesis was that during these long wars, the leading figures of Florence rallied the people by presenting the war as one between the free republic and the despotic monarchy, between the ideals of the Greek and Roman Republics and those of the Roman Empire and Medieval kingdoms. For Baron, the most important figure in crafting this ideology was Leonardo Bruni. Baron argues that this time of crisis in Florence was the period when most of the major early Renaissance figures were coming of age, such as Ghiberti, Donatello, Masolino, and Brunelleschi, and that they were inculcated with this republican ideology. These and other figures, according to Baron, later went on to advocate such republican ideas, ideas which were to have an enormous impact on the Renaissance.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Origins", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki