Cultural
and Intellectual developments in Europe
Any study of the transformation of Europe in the era between 1450-1750 would be incomplete without considering
the influence of vast cultural and intellectual changes that began in the
Italian city-states before 1450. Trade stimulated by the Crusades had made
several of the city-states wealthy, such as Venice,
Genoa, and Florence.
Wealthy families, such as the Medici in Florence,
became patrons of the arts, encouraging and supporting such geniuses as
Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Some of the
biggest supporters of Renaissance art and sculpture were the Catholic Popes,
who commissioned work for the Vatican
and St. Peter's cathedral in Rome.
The era also saw a revival of interest in reading, writing, architecture, and
philosophy. Without the patrons' wealth, the Italian Renaissance would have
been impossible, but it almost certainly was stimulated by contact with the
more sophisticated civilizations of the Middle East and
south and east Asia.
The Renaissance, or "rebirth" was
characterized by an attempt to revive the values of the classical civilizations
of the Mediterranean, Greece
and Rome. Although most of the
major Renaissance figures did not actively defy the church, they put emphasis
on other aspects of life than the religious. An important philosophical
influence restored from ancient civilizations was humanism, which focused on
the accomplishments, characteristics, and capabilities of humans, not of God.
Humanism is reflected in Renaissance art, with newly skilled artists showing
individual differences in faces and beautiful examples of human physiques. The
Renaissance spread from Italy
north, and by the 16th century had inspired new art styles in the Netherlands
and Germany, as
well as such literary geniuses as William Shakespeare in England.
The importance of the European Renaissance goes far beyond art and literature
because it encouraged people to think in different ways than they had before, a
quality that Europeans would need as they ventured in science, technology, and
eventually across the Atlantic to the Americas.
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
The revival of interest in Greek and Roman influences also stimulated
developments in math and science. The mathematical traditions that governed the
conception of the universe were based in Greek mathematics that had been
preserved and built upon by scientists in Muslim lands, such as Nasir al-Din in the 13th century. The Catholic Church
endorsed the views of Ptolemy, the Greek philosopher and astronomer who constructed
a geocentric theory where all planets, the moon, and the sun revolved around
the earth. Using calculations from al-Din, Polish monk and mathematician,
Nicholas Copernicus, concluded that the geocentric theory did not make sense.
Instead, his data indicated that the earth and all the other planets rotated
around the sun, a conclusion that he did not share widely, for fear of
retaliation from the church. In fact, his heliocentric theory was not published
until after his death in 1543.
The scientist that really got into trouble over the heliocentric theory was
Italian Galileo Galilei, who strengthened and
improved Copernicus' theory. Other scientists, such as Johannes Kepler, had demonstrated that planets also moved in
elliptical orbits, and Galileo confirmed those theories as well. Perhaps most
famously, he built a telescope that allowed him to observe the phenomena
directly, recording details of heavenly bodies that the ancients could never
have known about. Galileo's theories were published in The Starry Messenger in
1610, a highly controversial book criticized by other scientists, as well as
officials of the church. Galileo made the mistake of making fun of people that
disagreed with him, and he was arrested and put on trial, eventually recanting his
theory publicly in order to save his own life.
Perhaps the greatest scientist of the era was Isaac Newton (1642-1727), an
English mathematician whose genius shaped many modern fields of science. He
formulated the set of mathematical laws for the force of gravity, made
discoveries regarding the nature of light, and built on earlier Indian and Arab
ideas for algebra. Newton did not
challenge the authority of the Catholic Church, but he did prove that the
Greeks and Romans were mistaken in some of their theories, and that fact
encouraged others to question traditions that had not been challenged before.
THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION
The Catholic Church had been a very important societal force in
medieval Europe. Not only had people's lives revolved
around religion, but the church had actively defined many other aspects of
society, including politics, art, and science. During the era from 1450 to 1750
the church lost significant power in almost every way. Not only were scientists
and literary writers beginning to challenge the church, but the Pope's
political power was compromised as centralization of government gave more
authority to kings. Starting in the early 16th century, the church's religious
authority was seriously weakened by the Protestant Reformation, a movement led
by Martin Luther, a German priest who believed that the church was seriously
flawed.
The Catholic Church was very rich by the early 1500s. Popes were often from
Italian merchant families, and their wealth was bolstered by the many lands
that church officials claimed all over Europe. Their
land ownership in turn led to great political power that many kings deeply
resented. Martin Luther, a priest and teacher at the University
of Wittenberg, was troubled by all
of these trends, especially as he compared the situation to the modest
beginnings of Christianity and his interpretation of the teachings of Jesus.
His doubts were provoked by priest named Tetzel.
Luther placed a great deal of emphasis on the importance of faith, the glue
that he believed formed the bond between Christians and God. According to his
own writings, his most important revelation was that faith and actions cannot
be separated. A true believer will naturally do good works, so the two are
intertwined. He believed that the church practice of accepting indulgences
directly contradicted this basic building block of true Christianity.
Indulgences were payments to the church that insured eternal salvation,
or life after death in heaven. For example, in 1519, when Luther openly
challenged the religious authority of the church, the Pope was conducting an
indulgence campaign to raise money for a new basilica for St. Peter's Church in
Rome. Tetzel
was the priest collecting indulgences in Wittenberg,
who so enraged Luther with his blatant selling of indulgences for promises of
salvation that he wrote and openly displayed the 95 Theses, which listed 95
problems with church practices. With this action, Luther did what no priest had
dared to do before &endash; openly defy the
authority of the church.
The developments after Luther's posting of the 95 Theses indicate just how
dramatically times were changing in Europe. Luther was
excommunicated from the church, but he managed to hide from them throughout his
long life with the help of many German princes. His writings were widely
accepted in Germany,
where Protestantism, as the protest movement came to be called, took firm root.
Other Protestant groups sprang up in France,
and from their found new vitality in Geneva, Switzerland,
where John Calvin started yet another branch of Protestantism called Calvinism.
Calvinism was carried to Scotland
by one of Calvin's admirers, John Knox, and from there it made its way into England.
Another blow to the church came when King Henry VIII of England
separated religious institutions in his kingdom from the church when the Pope
refused to grant him an annulment from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
By the end of the 16th century, large parts of Europe,
particularly in Germany
and Britain,
were no longer under the authority of the Catholic Church. The church responded
with its own internal reformation, but the result was a Europe
deeply divided between Protestants and Catholics, a dynamic that fed the
already intense competition among European nations.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE PRINTING PRESS
Johannes Gutenberg, a printer from Mainz
Germany,
contributed greatly to the rapid spread of Protestantism. He died in 1468, many
years before the Reformation began, but without his construction of a workable
printing press around 1450, Luther's word almost
certainly never would have gotten out. In 1454 he printed his famous Gutenberg
Bible with moveable type, and the book inspired early Renaissance writers, such
as Erasmus, to use the technology to print their own works. By 1550 at least 10
million printed works were circulating around Europe
from presses in hundreds of towns. Guttenberg did not invent moveable type or
the printing press. Both the Chinese and Koreans had used them in earlier
years, and they too had spread literacy in Asia by
printing books and making them accessible to more people. In Europe
the device appeared as a critical invention at a critical time in European
history. Without it the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Protestant
Reformation, and ultimately the Maritime Revolution would not have been
possible.
THE EARLY EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT
During the 17th century, the Scientific Revolution began to be applied to
social and political areas of life, a movement known as the Enlightenment.
Enlightenment philosophers believed that human reason that discovered laws of
science could also discover the laws that governed social and political
behavior. The movement was also inspired by the Reformation, which had
challenged and revised accepted religious thought, and by contact with
political and social philosophies from other parts of the world.
In England
the English Civil War shaped political thought. The king was decapitated, and
political authority fell to Parliament, causing English political philosopher
John Locke to reconsider the nature of government. In his famous Second
Treatise of Civil Government, he argued that rulers get their right to rule not
from the heavens, but from the consent of the governed. His philosophy laid the
basis for rule of law, not by the whim of the monarch, an idea that was far
from new. However, he added that if monarchs overstepped the law, citizens not
only had the right, but the duty to rebel. His philosophy influenced thinkers
in the late 1700s, who in turn inspired democratic revolutions
in many places, including North America and France.