Cultural and Intellectual Developments: 1450-1750

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. It is reflected in the writings of Petrarch, Boccoccio and Machiavelli whose writings portray the human side of politics and even religion. 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.

What set the Scientific Revolution apart from other periods of scientific accomplishment was its method. During the Middle Ages most people simply accepted without question information they had inherited from an accepted source, such as the Bible or Aristotle. These sources were presumed to be authoritative and served as the basis for discovering information about the world. Francis Bacon was the first major thinker to break from this method. Bacon rejected the presumptive authority of Aristotle and the Greeks and urged scientists to begin with direct observations of the world. The information gleamed from these observations would then serve to reach new facts and understanding about the world. With Bacon began the pattern of replacing accepted authorities and theories about the world with direct human experience.

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.