Chapter 12 IDs Flashcards
Renaissance(1350 and 1550 CE)
French word for Rebirth
This was a period in which secularism, emphasis on man’s ability, and socioeconomic change flourished, although religious sentiment maintained a presence. Interest in the Classical (Graeco-Roman) world increased as Europe recovered from the Black Death and the other calamities which befell the fourteenth century.
The Renaissance originated in Italy, but soon spread to the rest of Europe.
Importance: The Renaissance was, in some ways, a continuation of the Middle Ages’ societal mechanisms, but it can be differentiated by the belief in humans’ abilities and potential as well as a series of artistic and intellectual accomplishments achieved during this period. Social philosophy also saw a revolution during this era.
Jacob Burkhardt
A Swiss historian and art critic who wrote The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which was published in 1860. He portrayed Italy during this time as a place where the culture of antiquity was restored, individual potential was encouraged, and secularism set the region apart from the rest of Europe. The latter two were somewhat exaggerated and the religious aspect was underplayed.
Importance: Burkhardt set a basis for what modern scholars interpret as the Renaissance in Italy and later on, the rest of Europe.
Leon Battista Alberti
A fifteenth-century Florentine humanist and architect. He held a high regard for human dignity, worth, and potential. He also wrote the treatise On the Family. He wrote about the social ideal of the universal person, capable of achieving in many different facets of life. The treatise also addressed families, which suffered from a lack of male heir, allowing the family name to die out, a common problem in Renaissance Italy.
Importance: He helped formulate and explain the idea of a universal person and his work provides some context for the issues that plagued Renaissance families.
Hanseatic League
A commercial/military alliance formed of Northern Europe’s coastal towns that existed as early as the thirteenth century. It exceeded 80 cities by 1500 and monopolized the Northern European trade in timber, fish, grains, metals, honey, and wines. The southern city of Flanders was a crucial meeting place for Hanseatic and Venetian merchants. In the fifteenth century, Bruges began to decline and took with it the Hanseatic League.
Importance: The Hanseatic League was an important step in Europe’s economic recovery from the decay left by the fourteenth century.
House of Medici
A family that brought Florence back to its primacy in banking. Originally involved in the cloth industry, the Medici family expanded into banking, business, and real estate. It was, in the fifteenth century, the greatest European bank, due to its many branches in Italy, Spain, France, England, and central Europe. It maintained its control in the cloth industry, and added alum mining to its interests. The House of Medici also served as the bankers for the papacy. This gave the Medici further influence and affluence. At the close of the fifteenth century, the Medici bank declined due to poor leadership and loans. The French eventually ousted the Medici from Florence and seized its property.
Importance: The Medici enhanced the prestige of Florence and served the papacy.
Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier
This book served as a manual for European aristocrats. In it, he detailed the basic attributes of the ideal courtier: fundamental endowments, participation in military exercise, and a life adorned with the arts. Courtiers should have excellent conduct and grace in showing their accomplishments, while maintaining a modest nature. Castiglione also explained the aim of a courtier: to serve his ruler honestly and effectively.
Importance: The book set a standard for court life and brought the ideal of a universal person into eminence as a key quality of the exemplary courtier.
condottieri
The leader of a mercenary band. Condottieri sold their services to the highest bidder, which were sometimes city-states of Italy. Some foreigners that went to Italy during ceasefires in the Hundred Years’ War became mercenaries and condottieri.
Importance: Condottieri helped city-states gain power.
Francesco Sforza
A leading condottieri in 1447. He seized the duchy of Milan after the final Visconti ruler died by turning on his Milanese employers and taking over the city.
Importance: He, like the Visconti, was extremely successful in his taxation and generated immense revenues for his regime. He also exemplifies the idea of a condottieri turned ruler.
Cosimo de’Medici
A member of the house of Medici who took control of the Florentine oligarchy, which itself was surreptitiously controlling the Florentine republic. Cosimo de’Medici did this in 1434. The family maintained a façade of republicanism, but controlled the government through extravagant sponsorship and cultivation of strong relationships with political allies.
Importance: Cosimo de’Medici essentially took over Florence, although he continued pretenses of a republic. He and his grandson controlled Florence while it was the center of the Renaissance in Italy
the Papal States
States in central Italy. Technically, these states were under the control of the papacy, but due to the split of the church (in Rome and Avignon), single cities and territories like Urbino, Bologna, and Ferrara became independent of the papacy.
Importance: Popes of the fifteenth century later tried to reestablish control of these dissenting states in another struggle.
Isabella d’Este
The daughter of the duke of Ferrara, married to the marquis of Mantua, Francesco Gonzaga. She was educated at the court of Ferrara and highly intelligent. She also possessed great political insight, as her many letters show. Isabella attracted many artists and intellectuals to the court of Mantua. During her husband’s life and after his passing, Isabella displayed keen negotiation skills and was an effective ruler of Mantua.
Importance: Isabella was a strong female ruler of the Renaissance and showed political autonomy in her actions, which was rare for the time, but a marginally more common occurrence among the smaller courts of the era.
Peace of Lodi and balance of power
The Peace of Lodi was a treaty that ended almost fifty years of war and began an era of peace which lasted forty years. The alliance of Milan, Florence, and Naples against the papacy and Venice was created and led to a workable balance of power, the principal that no state should become great at the expense of others.
Importance: The Peace of Lodi led both to a temporary era of peace and to a balance of power, which competing European states used later on.
1527 Sack of Rome
The event in which Charles I’s Spanish army ravaged Rome in 1527. This brought a temporary end to the Italian wars.
Importance: The Spanish dominated Italy after this while Italy remained blind to the potential benefits of an Italian alliance.
Machiavelli’s The Prince
The Prince is an extremely famous treatise on Western political power, written by Niccolo Machiavelli. The Prince primarily addresses the acquisition and expansion of political power as the means to restore and maintain order. Earlier theorists believed that exercises of or power were only justified when it added to the common good of a ruler’s subjects, but Machiavelli contradicted this by saying that power should be exercised for the sake of his state and turn a deaf ear to his conscience, which would only act as a restriction on the proper exercise of power.
Importance: Machiavelli endorsed Cesare Borgia and created a new model for justified political activity, one in which morality was not a concern.
civic humanism
Civic humanism is a branch of humanism formed at the beginning of the fifteenth century, as intellectuals turned to the Classical statesman and intellectual Cicero as an example. In civic humanism, scholars of the humanities should serve the state. Leonard Bruni, in his work The New Cicero, exalted Cicero’s role as a civic leader, which contributed to the currency of civic humanism.
Importance: The role of an intellectual as a statesman became a Renaissance ideal, and humanists came to the belief that humanist scholars should serve the state.
Petrarch
The father of Italian Renaissance humanism spent many years in the hospitality of various princes and city governments. He disparaged the Middle Ages, painting it as a dark era of history, ignorant of Classical intellect. He sought ancient Latin manuscripts and emphasized Classical Latin. He, in particular, exalted Cicero as a master of prose and Vergil as that of poetry.
Importance: Petrarch created a reawakening of interest in Classical literature. He also made Cicero and Vergil models for emulation by other humanists.
Leonardo Bruni’s The New Cicero
The New Cicero, by Leonard Bruni, praises Cicero’s successful undertaking of writing literature and being a politician simultaneously. It inspired the Renaissance ideal of civic humanism, in which an intellectual should serve his state, because it is the only place in which an individual can grow completely both “intellectually and morally.”
Importance: Because of Bruni’s biography, humanists arrived at the belief that they should serve their state, and many humanists served the state as advisors and chancellors.
Lorenzo Valla
Lorenzo Valla was a prime example of a civic humanist. He was learned in Latin and Greek, and eventually became the papal secretary. He wrote a treatise on Latin, titled The Elegances of the Latin Language, an effort to purify Latin. He accepted only Latin from the last century of the republic and first century of the empire, as opposed to earlier humanists.
Importance: The novel served to create a new standard for Latin and distinguish the different developmental phases of Latin. Valla also served as an example of a conscious civic humanist.
Marsilio Ficino and Neo-Platonism
Marsilio Ficino was a leader of the Florentine Platonic Academy, whose patron was Cosimo de’Medici. Cosimo hired Ficino to translate Plato’s dialogues. Ficino spent his entire life translating Plato and explaining the philosophy of Neo-Platonism. Ficino’s Neo-Platonism was based on the idea that humans occupied a middle position in the hierarchy of substances, between plants and God. Humans’ main purpose was to ascend and unite with God, achieving the true end of human existence.
Importance: Ficino fused Christianity and secular Platonism into his new system of Neo-Platonism, in which Platonism and Christianity no longer conflicted.
Renaissance hermeticism
Hermeticism was revived in the Renaissance when Marsilio Ficino translated Corpus Hermeticum from Greek to Latin. This manuscript contained writings which emphasized occult sciences, while others emphasized theology and philosophy. Some of these writings contained pantheism, that divine bodies were in nature and the heavens as well as Earth. Hermeticism viewed humans as divine create beings that had freely chosen to enter the material world of nature. Through a regeneration/purifying of the soul, humans could regain their creative power and acquire an intimate knowledge of nature and could even employ the forces of nature benevolently. These humans would be true sages, or magi.
Importance: this philosophy reconciled Christianity and paganism and yielded, to some, “nuggets of universal truth,” which were pieces of God’s revelation to humanity.
