Chapter 13: The Renaissance

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• Merchants who took advantage of the changing work opportunities made more money, which allowed them to pay for luxuries and hire artists through patronage to produce specific art.  The wealthier the people became, the more art that was created.  Italy became rich from overseas trade, and flourished during the Renaissance.  Merchants loaned and invested money and created banks to store their money.   

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• Northern Italian cities were communes, or sworn associations of free men who wanted economic and political freedom from the nobles. Italian nobles began marrying into commercial families. This merger resulted in an oligarchy, a small group of people who ruled the city and the countryside around it.  The rest of the common people, or popolo, were very upset at the high taxes that had fallen on them. They used violence to take over the governments and create a republic, where representatives of the people make the decisions. Eventually many cities became signori, where a man passes his power to his son.   

1. 5 Powers

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   • The five powers that dominated the Italian peninsula were Venice, Milan, Florence, the Papal States, and Naples. These large city states ruled over the weaker and smaller ones. They worked to create a balance of powers, in which all city states were equally as powerful. The main diplomatic contribution to society was the creation of embassies with ambassadors.   

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• Humanism is a program of study that used the critical study of Latin and Greek literature in order to understand human nature. Humanism emphasized the potential of humans to learn and experience many different things.   
• Humanists thought that education should not be for private or religious reasons, but for the greater good of the public.  The Courtier was written to instruct young men on how to be an intelligent gentleman.  It was the one book of the Renaissance that had the most influence on education.   

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• The Prince emphasizes the idea that the man job of a ruler is to preserve order and security.  Weakness of that ruler can lead to war and disorder, and possibly invasion.  Everything the ruler does must be for the good of the state, not for his own personal good.   

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• Secularism is the belief that the church should not be involved in the state’s affairs.  The Renaissance thinkers did not believe that secularism conflicted with their religious beliefs.  They thought that Christianity is not a set of laws but Christ, his life and the mark he has made on humanity.   

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• Christian Humanists used ancient Italian texts and humanism to deepen the spiritual life of  the people.  They were hoping to use these ideas to help people deepen their relationship with God and eventually to help reform the church.  The people who began these ideas were Ficino and Pico, and later, people like Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus added their ideas as well.  

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• Moveable type allowed multiple copies of books and other publications to be printed at a time.  This meant that the common people could now afford their own books.  Schools could better instruct their students, and urban literacy increased.    

1. Patronage

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   • In the beginning of the Renaissance, corporate groups sponsored art; but by the late fifteenth century, rulers and individuals paid artists to glorify themselves and their families.  The individual portrait became a distinct form of art and also showed human ideals, which is relative to the ideas of humanism.   
2. Styles

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   • In the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, art mainly portrayed religious scenes. As people could afford to pay artists to create art, the styles changed to individual portraits.  These portraits emphasized human ideals by using a realistic style. These changes relate to the ideas of humanism and secularism.  The artists Francesca and Mantegna were the first to really use perspective and the linear representation of distance in their art.  Classical styles of architecture were brought back by Filippo Brunelleschi. He designed a hospital carefully and thought it out proportionally. 
3. Status of Artist

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   • Some artists were paid very well, while others became famous and well-known.  Before the Renaissance, people saw art as something done through God, and recognized no originality in the piece. During the Renaissance, however, people recognized the art as a work created from a unique and creative personality.

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• Ethnic groups were categorized using the words “race,” “people,” and “nation” to describe different nationalities or religious groups.  Africans began to be imported by Christian and Muslim groups and sold into slavery.  Slaves were in high demand, and they were used to do work and sometimes to entertain.  So many blacks were imported by the Portuguese that by the mid-sixteenth century, ten percent of Lisbon were of African ethnicity.

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• The word “class,” used in “middle class” and “lower class” were not used in the medieval period.  In the Renaissance era, a social hierarchy based on wealth was developing with the medieval idea of orders.  Most people were in the “Third Order,” or “those who work.”  However, the weakest nobles were still classified as above the wealthiest commoners, to separate the nobles from the common people.  Commoners could only move upward in the social ladder if they married the noble’s daughters.

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• The querelle de femmes, or “debate about women,” was a debate about the women’s nature and character.  Misogynists argued that women were devious, domineering and demanding.  Others made lists of famous and intelligent women in history.  The debate began to question female rulers also.  They asked if a girl is raised to rule, should she be allowed to rule and overcome the limitations of her gender? Also, women weren’t receiving the credit they deserved for raising a family or doing the same work as men. The conclusion to these debates was that women were not equal to men, and would only tend to the home and other private affairs.

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• Charles VII reconciled neighboring groups, the Burgundians and the Armagnacs, who had been in a civil war for thirty years.  He expelled the English from French land except for Calais by 1453.  Charles reorganized the royal council, and increased the influences of lawyers and bankers. He strengthened royal finances through taxes like the gabelle and taille on salt and land. He also created the first permanent royal army.

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• The English population was still declining from the plague and other issues. Henry didn’t trust the nobles and lords to run the royal council, so instead he elected smaller landlords and urban residents trained in law.

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• Ferdinand and Isabella excluded nobles from the royal council, and instead appointed lesser landowners. They trained men in Roman law.  With the money from ecclesiastical states, the Spain was able to regain the southern land they had lost to the Arabs.  The Jews fled to Spain after being banished from France and England.  The Christians used influence, money, and intelligence from the Jews to help royal power.  In the fourteenth century, however, anti-Semitism became more popular, fueled by anti-Jewish preaching and economic dislocation.  The northern Europeans saw the Jews as scapegoats for the Black Death.  New Christians were the fraction of the forty percent of Jews who were either killed or converted.  The poor hated the converso, or New Christian, tax collectors and the church questioned the sincerity of their conversions.  Queen Isabella and Ferdinand received permission from the pope to create their own Inquisition to search and punish the New Christians.  People began to believe that Jews could never be Christians because Judaism was in their blood.