Death to the Middle Ages
and the Birth of
The Modern Age
 Gunpowder,
printing, and the compass were
important inventions that contributed to the
breakdown of feudalism in Western Europe
-Gunpowder, brought from China, meant
the end of the power of the feudal castle
and increased the ability of the monarch to
wage war against feudal barons
 Movable
type, invented around 1488, put
education within the reach of the masses and
made the circulation of the Bible possible
- Printing influenced the Renaissance and
the Reformation
 The
compass, brought from China through
Spain, plus geographical knowledge gained
from Arab cartographers made possible
European contact with the Americas during
the 1500s and the commercial revolution in
Europe
 In
Italy, a new concept
of humanity was
evolving
 A sense of the
tremendous capacities
and potential of every
human being replaced
the concept of the frail
creature in need of
God’s grace: humanity
became worthy of study
in its own right
 Dante
(1265-1321) wrote his Divine
Comedy in Italian
- He broke with tradition by writing in
the vernacular rather than Latin and
stressed happiness on earth
- The Comedy is considered the
highest literary expression of medieval
thought
 Petrarch (1304-1347) has been called
the father of humanism, because he
was among the first scholars to revive
interest in classical literature
- His sonnets stress earthly love and
physical beauty rather than the glory
of God
 Machiavelli
produced a handbook of
statecraft called The Prince (1513),
which was the first European secular
and pragmatic treatise on politics
 In many ways he diagnosed the era in
which kings were breaking with the
authority of the church and national
states were demanding the loyalty of
the people
-“It is better to be feared than loved,
if you cannot be both.”
-A monarch must maintain his power
by any means necessary
 Humanism
spread into north and
central Europe nearly a century
after it had begun in Italy
- The humanism of the north has
often been called Christian
humanism because it blended the
religious with secular humanitarian
concerns
- Erasmus of Rotterdam was the
greatest of all northern
humanists…He satirized the
scholastic philosophers, called for
the reform of the clergy, and urged
the translation of the Bible into
vernacular languages
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The Renaissance
The Birth of Nations
The Discovery and Exploration
of the Americas
The Revolt Against the Papacy
The Scientific Discoveries and
Experiments
 Height
of the Renaissance: 1450 to 1559
 Location: The Italian City-States – Florence,
Venice, and Milan became rich on trade and
art was financed on a scale not seen since
the classical age
 Key Ideas: Humanism and Secularism
 Key Artists: Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Raphael,
Donatello, Brunelleschi
 Don’t Forget: Shakespeare in England,
Cervantes in Spain, and Montaigne in France
 The Literal Meaning: “Rebirth”
 Although
generally more subdued and often
more religious than it was on the Italian
peninsula
 It
is important to remember that
medieval art was almost entirely
religious
 But Renaissance art was religious and
secular, combining both Christian and
humanist elements
 Medieval art existed mostly in
cathedrals; Renaissance art was
commissioned by both religious and
secular leaders, and adorned public
plazas and homes
 Medieval art was flat and stiff;
Renaissance art was realistic and more
human
 Medieval art didn’t try to be worldly;
Renaissance art tried very much to be
of this world
 Printing
was developed in China during
the Song Dynasty
 But moveable type wasn’t invented in
Europe until the mid-1400s, when
Johannes Gutenberg invented the
printing press
 Prior to Gutenberg’s inventions, the
creation of books was such a long and
laborious task that few were made
 Those that were made were usually
printed in Latin
 As a result, the typical person didn’t
read
 The
printing press changed that
 Books became easy to produce and thus were
far more affordable
 The growing middle class fueled demand for
books that were written in their own
vernacular language
 The
Medieval Church was a powerful
institution
 It was the one institution that the people of
western Europe had in common
 It was a unifying force
 With one foot on Earth and the other in
heaven, the pope acted as the intermediary
between man and god
 When
the church needed to finance
its immense building projects plus
pay for the huge number of
Renaissance artists in its employ, it
began to sell indulgences
 An indulgence was a piece of paper
that the faithful could purchase to
reduce time in purgatory
 In purgatory, a sinner would expiate
or make amends for his sins and then
be allowed to enter heaven
 Because purgatory was not a happy
place to go, people greatly valued
the concept of reducing their time
there
 Selling
indulgences was not only a means
of generating income but also a way for
the church to maintain power over the
masses
 During this time, land-owning nobles
grew increasingly resentful of the
church, which had amassed an enormous
amount of power and wealth and
exploited a huge number of resources at
the expense of the nobles
 This resentment and mistrust fueled
anti-church sentiments
 The selling of indulgences propelled the
frustration into the ranks of the peasant
class and helped set the stage for
confrontation
 The
selling of indulgences also confirmed to
many the corrupt nature of the church
A
professor at the University of Wittenberg
 Posted his Ninety-five Theses directed against the
selling of indulgences in 1517
 Luther claimed that the source of spiritual
authority was not the church but scripture and the
individual reader
 The church was not necessary to salvation, because
only faith could save man (“justification by faith
alone”)
 After the Diet of Worms in 1520, Luther refused to
recant, was excommunicated, and Lutheranism was
formed in defiance of the Roman Catholic Church
 Other
theologians began to assert their
own biblical interpretations
 John Calvin from France led a Protestant
group by preaching an ideology of
predestination
 Calvinist doctrine stated that God had
predetermined an ultimate destiny for
all people, most of whom God had
already damned
 Only a few would be saved and those
people were known as the elect
according to Calvin
 John
Knox founded the Presbyterian
church in Scotland but differed little
from Calvin in theology
 Henry VIII of England broke with the
Roman Catholic church in 1534
because the pope refused to allow
him to divorce his wife
 Although Henry broke without first
adopting any essential Protestant
principles, eventually the forces of
reform prevailed and the Anglican or
Episcopalian church developed
 Although
Protestants split into Anglicans,
Presbyterians, Congregationalists,
Huguenots, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans,
and so forth, each sect had certain beliefs in
common
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All Protestants rejected papal
authority and the supernatural
character of the priesthood
All replaced Latin with the vernacular
(the language of the country) and
accepted the authority of the Bible
All believed, with various
interpretations, in justification by
faith alone
All rejected purgatory,
transubstantiation, and obligatory
confession
All reduced the number of sacraments,
usually to two or three
 At
the Council of Trent, sitting
irregularly in the mid-1500s, the
Roman Catholic church was reformed
and rejuvenated
 In Spain, the Renaissance spirit had
not taken over, and it was here that
Catholicism was most militant
 Saint Ignatius Loyola founded the
Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), a
monastic order dedicated to active
participation in world affairs and
acting as a missionary force
throughout Asia and the Americas
 The
Inquisition was first established in Rome
to enforce conformity throughout the
Catholic world
 Change
from a self-sufficient town-centered
economy to a capitalistic nation-centered
economy
 New wealth and prosperity in Europe from
the profits of trade led to changes at home,
for the commercial aristocracy began to rival
the landed aristocracy in social and political
power
 Mercantilism was a direct result of attempts
by states to acquire more money through the
creation of a favorable balance of trade
 The
essence of science is the union of reason
with observation and experimentation: the
reasoned postulate or working hypothesis is
accepted only as long as it accords with the
observed data
 Nicholas
Copernicus (1473-1543):
Disputed the Ptolemaic theory, which
stated that the sun revolved around the
earth…Instead he advanced a
heliocentric or sun-centered universe
theory that was mathematically simpler
than the geocentric
 Johannes Kepler (1571-1642): Kepler
carried Copernicus’ theory further and
discovered the orbits of the planets
were ellipses
 Galileo
Galilei (1564-1642): Built one of
the first telescopes, confirmed the
Copernican theory, and suggested that
planetary bodies were made of the same
substance as the earth…Forced to recant
by the Roman Catholic Church
 Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Formalized
the inductive method of acquiring
knowledge and emphasized the
usefulness of knowledge
 Rene Descartes (1596-1650): The
developer of coordinate geometry,
believed that nature could be reduced to
a mathematical formula and advanced
“the principle of systematic doubt”
 Isaac
Newton (1642-1727): In 1687 Newton
published the Mathematical Principles of
Natural Philosophy showing that all motion
could be described by the same
mathematical formula
 Gravitation was the force that moved matter
 Until Einstein, his theories remained
unshaken, but now it has been proved that
they do not apply to subatomic structures
 Although
the effects of the new
science were important in
navigation, in the development of
calculus, in the science of mapmaking, and in warfare, the
psychological effects were the most
profound for mankind could no
longer claim to be the center of the
universe
 The universe was seen as natural,
understandable by natural laws
which could also be applied to
society
 Modern
nationalism was in part the
product of the nineteenth century
 The French revolution fostered it
 The mass army, the indoctrination
that every person was a citizen
with a duty to serve the state, and
the loyalty to the state rather than
the estate (class or group) were
ideas of the revolution
 Nationalism also sprang up as a
resistance movement to French
imperialism and Napoleonic
dictatorship
 In
the nineteenth century nationalism was a
force for the unification of states whose
peoples had been divided into a multitude of
states
 The ideal of European political unity gave
rise to a new allegiance to the national state
 European fragmentation fueled rivalry and
competition
 All
of these factors gave rise to a new era,
the modern era, an era of hopes, triumphs,
and tragedies; an era of great change.