Chapter 13

Awakening to the Renaissance

In This Chapter

Reevaluating humankind’s place in God’s universe

Celebrating the physical world through the arts

Spurring a scientific revolution

Pursuing personal perfection for God’s glory

To many people, the word Renaissance means “art,” especially Italian art. If you’re one of those people, good. Keep thinking art. Keep thinking Italy.

You can look at Renaissance art — the result of a creative explosion that began in Italy in the early fifteenth century — and understand not just why the artists saw and depicted the world differently than their predecessors did but also why their vision reflected the world at large.

Renaissance art embodied ideas about the place of humankind in God’s universe, reflecting a significant shift in the perception of what being human means. Because of this shift, striving to make the very best of mortal minds and bodies became important. The new thinking said that you could strive to be your best, and should do so, while enhancing rather than imperiling your immortal soul.

Even the Protestant Reformation (see Chapter 14), when all those European Christians broke away from the Roman Catholic Church, becomes easier to grasp if you look at the paintings and sculptures of Masaccio and Michelangelo first. Never heard of Masaccio? Don’t worry. I discuss him — and other Renaissance supermen — in this chapter.

Realizing the Reach of the Renaissance

By focusing on Renaissance artists, you may wonder whether you risk missing the scope of the Renaissance. Wasn’t it about so much more?

Yes, it was. The Renaissance was about philosophy and religion. It was also about literature, architecture, technology, science, music, political theory, and just about everything imaginable. The Renaissance was about more than I can possibly do justice to in this chapter. So why mention art? If you’re interested in history, it’s convenient that the intellectual, spiritual, and even commercial trends of the Renaissance all are reflected in its creative works. A defining worldview shows up in the art, so the paintings and sculpture can help you understand what made this era tick.

The Renaissance spread beyond Italy, all over Europe. One reason it’s hard to put dates on the Renaissance is that it was gradual. Different aspects of it hit different parts of Europe at different times — from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries and maybe beyond.

The Renaissance spread far beyond Europe as explorers, responding to the same economic and cultural influences that stimulated artists back in Italy, landed in the New World and found sea routes from Europe to Asia in the late fifteenth century.

One root of all this change was more individual wealth. More Europeans could afford to buy foreign trade goods. And (here I go oversimplifying again) that came about in part because there were fewer Europeans, at least temporarily. The bubonic plague (see Chapter 7) killed so many people that those who survived had more resources, more land, and even more money. The value of their work increased because of the scarcity of workers.

Redefining the Human Role

Chapter 12, which discusses Christian philosophies through medieval times, ends with a focus on humanism — a philosophy that concentrates on God’s relationship with humanity. This philosophy was a big deal during the Renaissance (and has been important for most of the time since it appeared); Christian writers started to depict human beings not just as God’s creations but as symbolic of God — little embodiments of divinity. Among the earliest writers to reflect this view were the Italian poets Francesco Petrarcha (1304–1374), known as Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375).

Florence in flower

The humanist shift in thinking got a boost when the Florentine chancellor, Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), started promoting his city-state’s status as the intellectual capital of Europe. In 1396, he invited Manuel Chrysoloras, a scholar from Constantinople, to teach Greek in Florence. Many more Eastern scholars came west, bringing with them Greek learning and philosophical traditions, after Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

The status associated with scholarship wasn’t lost on another Florentine leader, the financier, statesman, and philanthropist Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464). He was a patron of Florence’s Platonic Academy (founded by Salutati), where scholars such as Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and the philosopher Giovanni, Conte Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) worked to reconcile Christianity with newly rediscovered ideas from Greek and Roman philosophy.

In this effort, Pico della Mirandola mixed into his Christian humanism Greek and Roman stoicism (a philosophy that saw the world as a benevolent, organic whole, as you can read about in Chapter 11); material from the Jewish Kabbalah, a philosophical and literary tradition rooted in a mystic striving to know the unknowable secrets of existence; and Islamic sources. He thought all people’s intellectual and creative endeavors were part of the same thing: God.

Spreading the word

The Platonic Academy in Florence and other schools like it drew students from far away, and their influence spread humanism all over Europe.

For example, John Colet (1467–1519) came to Florence from Oxford, England. When he returned to England and became a priest, he shared Florentine teachings with prominent Englishmen and the famous Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), who lived in England. Erasmus wrote criticisms of the Church that anticipated the Protestant Reformation, which I discuss in Chapter 14.

Promoting human potential

Why did humanism pack such a wallop? Well, Pico della Mirandola, who best expressed what the early Renaissance was about, wrote that the human being is a perfect expression of the ultimate truth. As a human, he argued, you’re a tiny reflection of God’s enormous universe. This concept of the human as a microcosm may seem less-than-adventurous reasoning today, but it was an enormous change from the way medieval Christians thought about themselves.

 Under the influence of St. Augustine, medieval Christian thinking held that humankind was false, flawed, corrupted, forever marked by Adam’s sin, and unable to play any active role in winning redemption (see Chapter 12 for details). Humanism changed that, making it okay within a Christian context to celebrate human beauty and creativity in ways that no one in Europe had dared to do since Roman times.

Reclaiming the ancients

Because the dawn of the Renaissance meant that intellect and creativity reflected God’s greatness, all the Classical poets and playwrights whose works had been ignored, lost, or both through medieval times could be reclaimed and inducted into the Godliness Hall of Fame (figuratively speaking). Roman playwrights such as Seneca, who wrote comedies, became fit subjects for study and emulation.

Renaissance writers took ideas from Rome and Greece and put new life into them. The word renaissance means “rebirth” or “reawakening.” Renaissance scholars woke up to old books that had been kept in monastery libraries — books that monks copied by hand from still older books.

Chrysoloras, the Greek who came from Constantinople to teach in Florence, encouraged his students to start collecting ancient Greek manuscripts. (There were no Pokemon cards, so they thought this would be fun.) Well-heeled Florentines even started traveling to Greece to look for books. They came back with literary treasures and began amassing the first private (rather than Church-kept) libraries since the Roman Empire.

Presenting the printing press

In Mainz, Germany, along came the right technology at a crucial time. Johann Gutenberg, who started his career as a goldsmith, devised a way to print books and pamphlets using movable type. He made a little metal cast of each letter (his metalwork skills came in handy), and then he arranged the letters, clamped them firmly into place, coated them with ink, and printed as many identical pages of type as he liked before rearranging the letters and printing copies of the second page, then the third, and on and on.

Fifteenth-century printing wasn’t as easy as clicking a Print icon, but it was much easier and faster than what medieval monks were doing, which was painstakingly lettering every word on every page by hand. Until Gutenberg’s advance, every book was a precious, one-of-a-kind artifact. Thanks to Gutenberg, books could be mass-produced.

Printing the Gutenberg Bible

 Gutenberg and his financial backer, Johann Fust, built their press around 1450. The Gutenberg Bible, the first mass-produced book, came off that press (or a successor to it) around 1455. (Actually, Fust and his son-in-law, Peter Schöffer, completed the Gutenberg Bible after Gutenberg went bankrupt. Unable to repay a loan from Fust, the printer had to hand over his innovative press.)

Books were suddenly more numerous and cheaper, so more people could afford them. And because books were more widely available, more people learned to read.

Reading other early publications

At first, other Europeans called printing the German art. But technology never respects borders. A wealthy merchant named William Caxton learned the new process in Cologne and took it to England around 1473. Caxton’s first publications included a history of the Trojan War and a collection of sayings of the philosophers.

In Venice, the scholar Aldo Manuzio (also known by his Latin name, Aldus Manutius) picked up Gutenberg’s craft and printed easy-to-read, easy-to-carry editions of Greek and Latin classics at affordable prices. Imagine the change from going to a musty abbey and heaving open a hand-lettered volume so valuable that it was chained to the library shelf, to carrying a book in your pocket!

Having an impact on Church authority

Because the pre-Christian authors were now considered reflections of God’s glory, there was a reason to read, admire, and even copy them, and doing so didn’t put your faith in jeopardy. But in a subtle and gradual way, the pre-Christian books still undermined the Church’s authority. Through medieval times, the Church held the monopoly on wisdom. In the Renaissance, other, older, diverse voices were influencing people throughout Europe as literacy flourished. This was one of the ways that the Renaissance led to the Reformation.

Uniting Flesh and Soul

Are you still thinking about the Renaissance as a flowering of Italian art? Good, because it’s time to turn toward Michelangelo’s David, shown in Figure 13-1; the Renaissance artist sculpted this masterpiece in Florence at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The white marble statue depicts a perfect, exquisitely rendered male form — lean, muscular, graceful, and nude. David is a sculpture of the hunkiest young man that probably anybody in Italy could imagine — sexy in the extreme but also a representation of a sacred subject: David, the great biblical war hero, Hebrew king, and earthly ancestor of Jesus.

Michelangelo’s masterpiece is flesh and spirit rolled into one. Sex and scripture. Earthly and godly. Flesh, according to the philosophy of humanism, is spirit. Not all Christians were comfortable with this convergence, which is another factor that contributed to the Protestant Reformation.

© Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images

Inspiring Michelangelo

Michelangelo (1475–1564), whose style may be considered the height of Renaissance sculpture, didn’t think up his approach all by himself, of course.

Pioneers such as the painter Masaccio inspired Michelangelo. Born in Florence in 1401, the painter was born Tommaso di Giovanni di Simone Guidi but earned the nickname Masaccio, which means “clumsy Tom,” for his absent-minded, careless approach to life. Focused on his art, he painted biblical scenes of unprecedented drama and sensual richness, exploring the human form in ways that would have seemed sinful a century before. His fleshy, dramatic approach changed sacred art, despite his early death at age 27.

The sculptor Donatello (in full, Donato di Betto Bardi) was another pioneer and inspiration for Michelangelo. Born around 1386 in Florence, he was the first artist since Classical times to make statues that were independent works of art rather than parts of a building. He fashioned an anatomically impressive David, too — one made of bronze.

Painting a picture of Genesis

Michelangelo is the guy you may picture lying on his back on top of a scaffold, painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The 1965 film The Agony and the Ecstasy features Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as the pope, who stares up at the artist while he paints the chapel ceiling. There’s some good dialogue between the two, assuming you can buy Heston as the artist.

Donatello was one of the earliest Renaissance artists to rediscover mathe-matical perspective, along with Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), who moved on from sculpture to architecture. In art, perspective is any method used to achieve the illusion of three-dimensional depth. The ancient Greeks, who were interested in geometry and optics, noticed how objects appear smaller the farther away they are from the viewer. What’s mathematical about that? An artist with a feel for geometry can give the impression of distance in a drawing or painting by working as if on a grid of lines (merely imagined or marked and then painted over in the finished work) shaped like an upside-down fan. Such lines seem to project from a point of convergence on the horizon called thevanishing point. (Imagine staring at a straight two-lane highway that you can see all the way to the horizon on a level plain.) Brunelleschi came up with this one-point system around 1420.

Living in the material world

Because Renaissance thinking held that the human form was a reflection of God and that the material world was an aspect of the divine, concentrating on all the angles, curves, contours, and colors of the physical world became positively holy. Artists wanted paintings and sculpture to be lifelike and reflect reality — albeit an idealized reality.

To that end, artists branched out. Artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was also a human anatomist, botanist, engineer, architect, writer, musician, and inventor. His knowledge of the physical world informed his art (see Figure 13-2). He and other painters and sculptors ushered in new ways of thinking about the physical world and how its pieces interact. Leonardo da Vinci even drew diagrams of flying machines, although there’s no evidence he ever built one.

© Garry Gay/Getty Images

Leonardo’s work in engineering and perspective stimulated and intersected with the work of a new breed of architects and mathematical theoreticians, some of them much more practical-minded than he was. While the artist was sketching flying machines, some other Italian engineers built on ancient mathematical disciplines to improve weapons and fortifications.

Returning to Science

The Renaissance planted the seeds of a scientific revolution that took off after 1600 with discoveries made by people such as the astronomer Galileo and the physicist Isaac Newton. (Chapter 15 has more on both men.)

Shifting the center of the universe

 Copernicus, a Polish-born, Italian-educated churchman, took a big step toward the scientific revolution in 1543 when he published his theories about how the Earth and planets move in relation to the sun. Copernicus said that the sun, not the Earth, was the center around which the universe revolved.

Copernicus delayed releasing his findings, but at the urging of supporters, he published his book The Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres around 1543, the year of his death. His sun-centered universe, along with the notion that the earth spins on its axis, upset some other astronomers and other churchmen. To claim that God would place His creation on a spinning ball that revolved around another heavenly body struck many people as preposterous, not to mention heretical. The controversy only caught fire, however, after 1610, when physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei of Pisa published a book about his own astronomical observations, which supported those of Copernicus. The Catholic Church banned Copernicus’s book, The Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, in 1616 and didn’t lift the ban until 1835. (For more about Galileo, see Chapter 15.)

Studying human anatomy

Whereas Leonardo da Vinci’s interest in engineering stimulated and was part of a revival of mathematical theory and Classical architecture, his anatomical studies came just as the field of medicine began to catch the Renaissance spirit.

Medieval physic (as doctoring was called) was based on a theory that the body contained four fluids: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Called the humors, their balance was considered essential to good health. People today still sometimes refer to good humor, which is rooted in this theory (although Good Humor brand ice cream treats wouldn’t be nearly as appetizing if they made you think of bile).

 At the turn of the fourteenth century, Pope Boniface VIII prohibited the dissection of human cadavers. The idea that human flesh reflected God meant that to cut into and study it was a kind of sacrilege. The pope’s decree, however, inconveniently interrupted the work of doctors who thought that there was more to learn about the body than this humors business.

Some maverick researchers conducted dissections in secret. By 1543, this science was out in public again with the publication of Seven Books on the Structure of the Human Body, a breakthrough work by Andreas Vesalius, a professor of surgery and anatomy at the University of Padua (Italy). His successor there, Matteo Realdo Columbo, figured out heart-lung circulation, a phenomenon that Michael Servetus of Spain discovered independently. Their work led to the Englishman William Harvey’s discovery in the following century of the circulation of the blood throughout the body.

This new focus on the body resulted in medical breakthroughs, including the following:

Girolamo Fracastoro, who practiced medicine in Naples after 1495, came up with a theory about microscopic contagion based on his work with syphilis, typhus, and tuberculosis patients.

In Bologna, Gaspare Tagliacozzi (1545–1599) pioneered plastic surgery in the late sixteenth century when he transplanted skin from his patients’ arms to repair noses eaten away by syphilis.

Until these guys came along, surgery was the work of barbers. The anatomist and French Army surgeon Ambroise Paré (1510–1590) helped change that. Among his advances, he was the first to tie off arteries after an amputation. Until Paré, cauterizing a blood vessel with a hot iron was the accepted way to close off the vessel.

Being All That You Could Be

You could think about what happened in the Renaissance as a kind of philosophical-intellectual feedback loop.

A feedback loop, as anybody who was ever in a rock band knows, happens when the microphone or electric guitar picks up part of the output signal from a nearby amplifier or speaker. The mike or guitar then sends that sound back to the amp, where it’s made louder, so that it creates louder interference, which is amplified again and then goes through the loop over and over — all at the speed of electric current. Within a second or two you have a shrill, incredibly loud shriek that causes everybody but really hardcore heavy metal fans to hold their hands over their ears and scream for mercy.

The noises that the Renaissance made were more pleasant and varied than that. So were the ideas and the works of art. But the Renaissance movement fed itself, and fed on itself, because humanism made it not just okay but actually virtuous to both contemplate and pursue human achievement.

Achievements — intellectual, artistic, and physical — amplified and gave glory to the reflection of God. The pursuit of human perfection fed an appreciation for human perfection that in turn spurred even more pursuit of human perfection.

Striving for perfection

In the Renaissance mindset, everybody had a responsibility to become as perfect as possible by developing all the powers given by God. “Be all that you can be,” a recruiting slogan used by the United States Army in the twentieth century, could have been applied to the Renaissance man.

In pursuit of human potential, artists studied math, architecture, engineering, and even literature. Long before the world thought in terms of interdiscip-linary work, all these subjects overlapped, each discipline informing and strengthening the others.

What a man!

One of the most wide-ranging Renaissance men was the Genoan architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472). He was an artist, poet, physicist, mathematician, and philosopher, as well as one of the finest musicians of his day (he played the organ) and an astonishing athlete. Alberti claimed that he could leap, with his feet together, between the heads of two men standing shoulder-to-shoulder, without touching them. Who said white men can’t jump?

Alberti’s arm would have made him a fortune today as a pro baseball pitcher or football quarterback. He surprised people by throwing an apple over the highest roof in Genoa, and he could chuck the javelin farther than anyone who challenged him. He was also a crack archer.

Hate him already? Me too, especially after I read that he was always in a good mood — cheerful, unflappable, and uncomplaining, even in terrible weather.

 Renaissance man sounds sexist today, and it was. There’s no pretending otherwise. Although human beings — male and female — could be exalted, males were thought to have the godly gifts most worth developing.

Many people think Leonardo was the ultimate Renaissance man: engineer, artist, inventor, and so on. But there were many others, including the sculptor-architect Brunelleschi, who was also a goldsmith. The Spanish medical researcher Servetus was a theologian, and Michelangelo, a great painter and greater sculptor, was a poet, too. See the “What a man!” sidebar for another example.

Stocking up on self-help books

Because making the best of what God gave you was so important, self-improvement became a hot topic during the Renaissance.

The best-selling book of 1528, The Courtier by Count Baldassare Castiglione, spelled out rules for what a gentleman ought to be. Among the most desirable qualities: You should be good at everything, but you shouldn’t look like you’re trying too hard. Even your manners should be easy and natural — courteous, but not polished. The Courtier was sixteenth-century cool.

Castiglione thought that being a courtier, one of those nobles who hangs around the castle and waits on the prince or king, was one of the most important things anyone could do. Today, you may look back on courtiers as hangers-on and yes men, and many of them probably were. But Castiglione saw the courtier’s job as both advising the prince and setting a good example for him. Even if the prince was a slobbering clod, the good manners and wisdom of exemplary courtiers were supposed to rub off on him.

Nicolo Machiavelli wrote the most notorious how-to book of the Renaissance, a little volume called The Prince. This 1513 publication was and remains controversial, because it seems to advocate an amoral pragmatism, a way of operating that came to be known as Machiavellian.

Machiavelli may be remembered as an advocate or as simply the best, most honest reporter of another aspect of all this focus on human achievement. On the more ear-punishing fringes of rock music, feedback becomes an instrument in itself. Within the Renaissance focus on humanity, sometimes the chase for human perfection turned to a selfish pursuit of human glory, personal wealth, and especially political power.

 In Machiavelli’s view, a ruler’s end justifies his means. If a prince is successful, he is right. “Cruelties inflicted immediately to secure one’s position are well inflicted (if one may speak well of ill),” he wrote. To be feared is more important than to be loved, the author claimed. As for honesty, a prince should keep his word as long as it’s useful to do so.

Machiavelli’s critics call him evil. His defenders say that he was telling it like it was and simply sharing what he learned as a Florentine official and diplomat. Machiavelli placed his work well within the framework of Christian humanism, as he understood it.

 “God is not willing to do everything,” he wrote, “and thus take away our free will and that share of glory, which belongs to us.”

Writing for the Masses

With the development of the Gutenberg press and the spread of printing (refer to the earlier section “Presenting the printing press”), language changed. Regional tongues such as French, English, and Italian took on a new vitality and authority. More and more writers began using these instead of Latin to write poetry and plays (see the “Who killed Latin?” sidebar). The old prejudice that educated people shouldn’t write in the vernacular (common) language faded.

Even before the Renaissance, the poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) wrote his Divine Comedy and other works in Italian. London’s Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400), who traveled in Italy and read works by Boccaccio, wrote in English.

Creating new classics

Writing in the vernacular really caught on as printers realized there was a commercial market for it. William Caxton, who brought printing to England, achieved a bestseller when he published Chaucer’s comic Canterbury Tales.

Many of the new books written in everyday language, given time, proved just as classic as the old Latin and Greek books. Here are some examples:

Castigliano wrote The Courtier in Italian. (Refer to “Stocking up on self-help books” earlier in this chapter for the story behind The Courtier.)

François Rabelais, a physician and humanist, wrote controversial sixteenth-century satires in French.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, William Shakespeare cranked out plays for the popular theater (and the popular press) in English.

Shakespeare’s contemporary, Miguel de Cervantes, wrote The Adventures of Don Quixote in Spanish.

Staging dramas with Classical roots

Shakespeare brought Renaissance drama to its peak, but he built on a tradition that began in the late thirteenth century when the Italian Albertino Mussato began writing comedies in the style of Seneca, a Roman. In addition to The Prince and other work in political science, Machiavelli wrote stage comedies after the Classical style. The most famous to survive is called The Mandrake, which he wrote in 1518.

Shakespeare’s plays show how thoroughly the new scholarship permeated European society. Full of references to Greek and Roman gods, his plots were sometimes drawn from Roman plays and even, as with Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, from Roman history. Even some of Shakespeare’s plays set in his own time take place in Italian cities that gave rise to the Renaissance.

Packing something to read onboard a ship

Europe’s growing literacy, which was rooted in a return to ancient classics and powered by the invention of printing, influenced matters much more down-to-earth than poems and plays. The ancients also wrote serious books about geography and navigation, and they drew maps that preserved what Greek and Phoenician navigators had learned about seas and landmasses. After all, Greek and Phoenician navigators were the greatest travelers of their times. (Turn to Chapter 5 for more about Phoenicians, their North African city Carthage, and their seafaring empire.) Europeans of the Renaissance read those books, too.

Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century advances in navigation and cartography (mapmaking), like other intellectual advances of the time, had their roots in the relevant Greek and Roman texts. Explorers such as Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama (more about them in Chapter 21) started with an atlas designed by the Egyptian-Greek astronomer Ptolemy (90–170 AD) and then radically redrew it. Their discoveries about the shape and size of the world went hand in hand with the theories of Copernicus (covered earlier in this chapter) and his heirs, astronomers Johannes Kepler and Galileo, both of whom I discuss in Chapter 15.

Fighting for Power in Europe

All the cross-pollination of the Renaissance — with scholars and their ideas traveling from city to city and country to country — suggests a climate of political harmony throughout Europe. It wasn’t that way, however. The Renaissance was a time of many borders and lots of political powers vying for dominance.

Battling for control of Italian city-states

Italy, the heart of the Renaissance, was nothing like the modern nation it is now. Italy was a hodgepodge of city-states, kind of like ancient Greece had been (see Chapter 4).

Some of these city-states, such as intellectually rich Florence, were wealthy trade centers. Their rulers, people such as the Medicis, a family that got rich in banking, hired the sculptors, painters, architects, and writers that made their renaissance the Renaissance.

Italian rulers also competed with each other for influence and territory. Just as the bankers and traders who marked this age kept financial agents in other cities to look after their interests, so the rulers (some of them also bankers and traders) placed political agents to watch out for them in competing capitals. This is how both modern diplomacy and modern espionage were born.

Who killed Latin?

Latin is a dead language, but did you know that it lived long after the fall of the Roman Empire? Only when Renaissance scholars tried to save Latin did the language begin to ossify into the sterile tongue it has been ever since.

Latin — the language of Rome, from everyday people to government, business, and scholarship — helped hold the Roman Empire together as long as it existed. And after the Rome-based western empire declined, Latin hung on in Western Europe. (The eastern, Byzantine Empire spoke Greek.) Educated people all over Western Europe continued to communicate in Latin. All the courses and debates at medieval universities were conducted in the language; the universality of Latin was really cool if you were a professor, because whether you were from Ireland or Italy, you could be just as much at home in a German classroom as a colleague from Cologne. That applied to students, too, who didn’t have to understand French to study in Paris.

As living languages do, Latin kept growing and changing. Grammatical uses shifted. Sentence structure became a little simpler here and a bit rougher there. Then in the Renaissance, scholars began reading Latin from texts that were 1,500 years old and realized how different their Latin was from the language of the great Roman rhetorician, Cicero.

With their newfound appreciation of pre-Christian classics, these scholars saw Cicero’s Latin as the original, uncorrupted language: the right stuff. So they worked hard on turning the clock back on their own scholarly language, making strict rules of grammar and usage and enforcing them as an important part of a classical education. Schoolboys all over Christendom conjugated Latin verbs, which may have been a good tool for building disciplined young minds, but it was the beginning of the end for Latin. By losing its flexibility, Latin no longer lived the way ever-changing English, for example, lives today.

It took centuries, but Latin eventually fell out of use, even in most areas of scholarship.

The Italian states also hired mercenary soldiers, or condottieri. Moving as a unit, a military leader and his men provided armed support to anybody who paid. Some were foreigners. An Englishman, John Hawkwood, and his men, the White Company, were among the fiercest. Some mercenaries were also lords of Italian cities; for example, the Montefeltro family, rulers of Urbino, financed their municipal budget by hiring out as condottieri.

In his book The Prince, Machiavelli argues that a successful ruler needs to use cleverness and trickery. In heady times, Italian princes valued brainpower over brute strength, but sometimes they outsmarted themselves. In 1494, Duke Ludovico Sforza of Milan invited the French to help him defeat Naples. Because the French king, Charles VIII, had a claim on the throne of Naples (these families intermarried and seldom agreed whose turn it was to rule), the French accepted.

The French army easily routed Naples’s smaller force. But then Sforza and his Italian co-conspirators, including some from the island of Sicily, turned on their northern allies and forced the French to high-tail it over the Alps. Boy, were those French angry. Sforza’s trick humiliated them, and the French wanted revenge. Besides, they had just enjoyed a taste of Italian wealth, and they wanted more. After Charles VIII died, Louis XII succeeded him. Charles had been called “the Affable.” Nobody called Louis affable. Also believing that he had a claim on Milan’s throne, the new French king mounted another invasion force. This time, the target was Ludovico Sforza. Milan wasn’t ready, so the French overwhelmed the city, captured Sforza, and threw him in prison, where he died. He wasn’t so clever after all.

Things got worse for Italy — a lot worse. Remember those Sicilians who helped Sforza drive the French away in 1494? Their king was Ferdinand, who also ruled Aragon, one of the largest kingdoms in Spain, which was coming together as a united land. (His wife and joint ruler, Isabella, was queen of Castille. See Chapter 19 for more on them.) Ferdinand had a claim to Naples as well. And like the French, he had noticed how rich, and how politically divided, Italy was.

The Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian, wanted in on the action in Italy, too. The Holy Roman Empire, as I note in other chapters, wasn’t really Roman. It started out French, under Charlemagne, but for a long time it was mostly German and Austrian. Yet Maximilian had hereditary “Roman” claims on northern Italy. Since he and Ferdinand were in-laws (two of Max’s kids were married to two of Ferdie’s), the Emperor sided with Spain. This meant war — actually a series of wars. Spaniards and Imperialists fought to get the French out of Italy. Various Italian city-states fought on one side, then the other.

Spilling outside of Italy’s borders

The Italian Wars melded into more wars that spilled out into other parts of Europe (see Chapter 13). Charles I, becoming co-ruler of Spain in 1517 (along with his mother), won election as Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire two years later. This political victory made the French nervous, because it meant they were in the middle of a Hapsburg Empire sandwich.

 The election of Charles wasn’t democratic, by the way. Just as the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t Roman, it wasn’t really an empire, either. The Holy Roman Empire was a conglomeration of states, some of which were practically kingdoms. The electors were powerful princes of seven of those states, who enjoyed the hereditary right to choose each new emperor. They elected Charles.

Being picked Holy Roman Emperor by the electors wasn’t always a vote of confidence. Sometimes they chose rulers they thought they could manipulate. Charles, however, had considerable success taking charge. He wrested Milan away from his French rival, Francis I (successor to Louis VII). Charles’s Spanish troops even took Francis prisoner. Charles also got Naples, and the other Italian states knew not to mess with him.

Yet that didn’t settle things. The Italian Wars melded into a long fight of Hapsburg versus France that lasted until the middle of the eighteenth century.

 Before he retired to a Spanish monastery in 1556, the embattled Charles found it necessary to split his empire back into two parts — Spanish and Austrian — to make it less unwieldy and easier to defend. If this reminds you of something that the Roman emperors did more than 1,000 years before Charles’s time, good for you. If not, you can read about that in Chapter 5.

By the time Charles called it quits, other things in Europe had changed profoundly, partly as a result of the financial strains of prolonged wars. To start, taxes rose. Princes were forced to borrow money, enriching new generations of bankers — and sometimes bankrupting the bankers when the princes defaulted on loans. Then came this big thing called the Protestant Reformation. (I devote Chapter 14 to the Reformation.)

An irony of the Renaissance is that the place where it began, Italy, ended this era in such disarray and decline. While Spain, Portugal, England, Holland, and other powers were starting worldwide empires and becoming richer and more powerful, the once-mighty Italian city-states remained divided and dominated. Foreigners ruled several of them.

Renaissance buildings and sculptures, once symbols of a thriving movement ahead of its time, became tourist attractions, which they remain today. The symbols of a vital present and a promising future turned into artifacts of yet another glorious past.

Tracking the Centuries

1360s: Geoffrey Chaucer, an English diplomat and poet, travels to Italy and meets the writer Boccaccio.

1396: Coluccio Salutati, chancellor of Florence, invites Manuel Chrysoloras, a scholar from Constantinople, to teach Greek to Italian students eager to probe ancient writings.

About 1420: The artist Filippo Brunelleschi invents the one-point system for giving perspective to paintings and drawings.

1453: Constantinople falls to the Ottoman Turks. Many scholars of the Byzantine Empire flee west to Italy.

About 1455: Johann Fust and his son-in-law Peter Schöffer publish the Gutenberg Bible, the first mass-produced book. Gutenberg surrendered his revolutionary press to Fust after being unable to repay a loan to the backer.

About 1473: William Caxton returns to London from Cologne, where he learned printing, and goes into the publishing business with a book about the Trojan War and a volume of sayings of the ancient philosophers.

1519: Charles I of Spain wins election as Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. The French, who are geographically between Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, don’t find this a reassuring development.

1528: In his book The Courtier, Count Baldassare Castiglione spells out rules for gentlemanly behavior. He says you should be good at everything, but you shouldn’t look like you’re trying too hard.

1543: Andreas Vesalius, anatomy professor at the University of Padua, publishes Seven Books on the Structure of the Human Body.

1556: The Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire retires to a monastery in Spain.

1835: The Roman Catholic Church lifts its 219-year ban on Copernicus’s book, The Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres.