the influence of the Pope, who claimed the kingdom as a fief
of the papal see, secured the election to the throne of
Charles Robert, or Caribert, of the Naples branch of the House
of Anjou. He and his son Louis, called the Great, raised the
kingdom to notable importance and power. Louis added the crown
of Poland to that of Hungary, and on his death, leaving two
daughters, the Polish crown passed to the husband of one and
the Hungarian crown to the husband of the other. This latter
was Sigismund of Luxemburg, who afterwards became Emperor, and
also King of Bohemia. Under Sigismund, Hungary was threatened
on one side by the Turks, and ravaged on the other by the
Hussites of Bohemia. He was succeeded (1437) by his
son-in-law, Albert of Austria, who lived only two years, and
the latter was followed by Wladislaus, King of Poland; who
again united the two crowns, though at the cost of a
distracting civil war with partisans of the infant son of
Albert. It was in the reign of this prince that the Turks
began their obstinate attacks on Hungary, and thenceforth, for
two centuries and more, that afflicted country served
Christendom as a battered bulwark which the new warriors of
Islam could beat and disfigure but could not break down. The
hero of these first Hungarian wars with the Turks was John
Huniades, or Hunyady, a Wallachian, who fought them with
success until a peace was concluded in 1444. But King
Wladislaus was persuaded the same year by a papal agent to
break the treaty and to lead an expedition against the enemy's
lines. The result was a calamitous defeat, the death of the
king, and the almost total destruction of his army. Huniades
now became regent of the kingdom, during the minority of the
late King Albert's young son, Ladislaus.
He suffered one serious defeat at the hands of the Turks, but
avenged it again and again, with help from an army of
volunteers raised in all parts of Europe by the exertions of a
zealous monk named Capistrano. When Huniades died, in 1456,
his enemies already controlled the worthless young king,
Ladislaus, and the latter pursued him in his grave with
denunciations as a traitor and a villain. In 1458, Ladislaus
died, and Mathias, a son of Huniades, was elected king. After
he had settled himself securely upon the throne, Mathias
turned his arms, not against the Turks, but against the
Hussites of Bohemia, in an attempt to wrest the crown of that
kingdom from George Podiebrad.
The Fall of Constantinople.
Meantime, the Turkish Sultan, Mohammed II., had accomplished
the capture of Constantinople and brought the venerable Empire
of the East--Roman, Greek, or Byzantine, as we choose to name
it--to an end. He was challenged to the undertaking by the
folly of the last Emperor, Constantine Palæologus, who
threatened to support a pretender to Mohammed's throne. The
latter began serious preparations at once for a siege of the
long coveted city, and opened his attack in April, 1453. The
Greeks, even in that hour of common danger, were too hotly
engaged in a religious quarrel to act defensively together.
Their last preceding emperor had gone personally to the
Council of the Western Church, at Florence, in 1439, with some
of the bishops of the Greek Church, and had arranged for the
submission of the latter to Rome, as a means of procuring help
from Catholic Europe against the Turks. His successor,
Constantine, adhered to this engagement, professed the
Catholic faith and observed the Catholic ritual. His subjects
in general repudiated the imperial contract with scorn, and
avowedly preferred a Turkish master to a Roman shepherd. Hence
they took little part in the defense of the city. Constantine,
with the small force at his command, fought the host of
besiegers with noble courage and obstinacy for seven weeks,
receiving a little succor from the Genoese, but from no other
quarter. On the 29th of May the walls were carried by storm;
the Emperor fell, fighting bravely to the last; and the Turks
became masters of the city of Constantine. There was no
extensive massacre of the inhabitants; the city was given up
to pillage, but not to destruction, for the conqueror intended
to make it his capital. A number of fugitives had escaped,
before, or during the siege, and made their way into Italy and
other parts of Europe, carrying an influence which was
importantly felt, as we shall presently see; but 60,000
captives, men, women and children, were sold into slavery and
scattered throughout the Ottoman Empire.
Greece and most of the islands of the Ægean soon shared the
fate of Constantinople, and the subjugation of Servia and
Bosnia was made complete. Mohammed was even threatening Italy
when he died, in 1481.
{1049}
Renaissance.
We have now come, in our hasty survey of European history, to
the stretch of time within which historians have quite
generally agreed to place the ending of the state of things
characteristic of the Middle Ages, and the beginning of the
changed conditions and the different spirit that belong to the
modern life of the civilized world. The transition in European
society from mediæval to modern ways, feelings, and thoughts
has been called Renaissance, or new birth; but the figure
under which this places the conception before one's mind does
not seem to be really a happy one. There was no birth of
anything new in the nature of the generations of men who
passed through that change, nor in the societies which they
formed. What occurred to make changes in both was an
expansion, a liberation, an enlightenment--an opening of eyes,
and of ears, and of inner senses and sensibilities. There was no
time and no place that can be marked at which this began; and
there is no cause nor chain of causes to which it can be
traced. We have found signs of its coming, here and there, in
one token of movement and another, all the way through later
mediæval times--at least since the first Crusades. In the
thirteenth century there was a wonderful quickening of all the
many processes which made it up. In the fourteenth century
they were checked; but still they went on. In the fifteenth
they revived with greater energy than before; and in the
sixteenth they rose to their climax in intensity and effect.
That which took place in European society was not a
re-naissance so much as the re-wakening of men to a day-light
existence, after a thousand years of sunless
night,--moonlighted at the best. The truest descriptive figure
is that which represents these preludes to our modern age as a
morning dawn and daybreak.
Probably foremost among the causes of the change in Western
Europe from the mediæval to the modern state, we must place
those influences that extinguished the disorganizing forces in
feudalism. Habits and forms of the feudal arrangement remained
troublesome in society, as they do in some measure to the
present day; but feudalism as a system of social disorder and
disintegration was by this time cleared away. We have noted in
passing some of the undermining agencies by which it was
destroyed: the crusading movements; the growth and
enfranchisement of cities; the spread of commerce; the rise of
a middle class; the study of Roman law; the consequent increase
of royal authority in France,--all these were among the causes
of its decline. But possibly none among them wrought such
quick and deadly harm to feudalism as the introduction of
gunpowder and fire-arms in war, which occurred in the
fourteenth century. When his new weapons placed the
foot-soldier on a fairly even footing in battle with the
mailed and mounted knight, the feudal military organization of
society was ruined beyond remedy. The changed conditions of
warfare made trained armies, and therefore standing armies, a
necessity; standing armies implied centralized authority; with
centralized authority the feudal condition disappeared.
If these agencies in the generating of the new movement of
civilization which we call Modern are placed before the
subtler and more powerful influence of the printing press, it
is because they had to do a certain work in the world before
the printing press could be an efficient educator. Some
beginning of a public, in our modern sense, required to be
created, for letters to act upon. Until that came about, the
copyists of the monasteries and of the few palace libraries
existing were more than sufficient to satisfy all demands for
the multiplication of ancient writings or the publication of
new ones. The printer, if he had existed, would have starved
for want of employment. He would have lacked material,
moreover, to work upon; for it was the rediscovery of a great
ancient literature which made him busy when he came.
Invention of Printing.
The preparation of Europe for an effective use of the art of
printing may be said to have begun in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, when the great universities of Paris,
Bologna, Naples, Padua, Modena, and others, came into
existence, to be centers of intellectual
irritation--disputation--challenge--groping inquiry. But it
was not until the fourteenth century, when the labors and the
influence of Petrarch and other scholars and men of genius
roused interest in the forgotten literature of ancient Rome
and Greece, that the craving and seeking for books grew
considerable. Scholars and pretended scholars from the Greek
Empire then began to find employment, in Italy more
especially, as teachers of the Greek language, and a market
was opened for manuscripts of the older Greek writings, which
brought many precious ones to light, after long burial, and
multiplied copies of them. From Italy, this revival of classic
learning crept westward and northward somewhat slowly, but it
went steadily on, and the book as a commodity in the commerce
of the world rose year by year in importance, until the
printer came forward, about the middle of the fifteenth
century, to make it abundant and cheap.
Whether John Gutenberg, at Mentz, in 1454, or Laurent Coster,
at Haarlem, twenty years earlier, executed the first printing
with movable types, is a question of small importance, except
as a question of justice between the two possible inventors,
in awarding a great fame which belongs to one or both. The
grand fact is, that thought and knowledge took wings from that
sublime invention, and ideas were spread among men with a
swift diffusion that the world had never dreamed of before.
The slow wakening that had gone on for two centuries became
suddenly so quick that scarcely more than fifty years, from
the printing of the first Bible, sufficed to inoculate half of
Europe with the independent thinking of a few boldly
enlightened men.
{1050}
The Greek Revival.
If Gutenberg's printing of Pope Nicholas' letter of
indulgence, in 1454, was really the first achievement of the
new-born art, then it followed by a single year the event
commonly fixed upon for the dating of our Modern Era, and it
derived much of its earliest importance indirectly from that
event. For the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, was preceded
and followed by a flight of Greeks to Western Europe, bearing
such treasures as they could save from the Turks. Happily
those treasures included precious manuscripts; and among the
fugitives was no small number of educated Greeks, who became
teachers of their language in the West. Thus teaching and text
were offered at the moment when the printing press stood ready
to make a common gift of them to every hungering student. This
opened the second of the three stages which the late John
Addington Symonds defined in the history of scholarship during
the Renaissance: "The first is the age of passionate desire;
Petrarch poring over a Homer he could not understand, and
Boccaccio in his maturity learning Greek, in order that he
might drink from the well-head of poetic inspiration, are the
heroes of this period. They inspired the Italians with a
thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of acquisition
and of libraries. Nicholas V., who founded the Vatican Library
in 1453, Cosmo de' Medici, who began the Medicean Collection a
little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolani, who ransacked all the
cities and convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with
the teachers of Greek, who in the first half of the fifteenth
century escaped from Constantinople with precious freights of
classic literature, are the heroes of this second period."
"Then came the third age of scholarship--the age of the
critics, philologers, and printers. ... Florence, Venice,
Basle, and Paris groaned with printing presses. The Aldi, the
Stephani, and Froben, toiled by night and day, employing
scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty
brain, whose work it was to ascertain the right reading of
sentences, to accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the
press, and to place beyond the reach of monkish hatred or of
envious time, that everlasting solace of humanity which exists
in the classics. All subsequent achievements in the field of
scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labours of
these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of
Europe for the accomplishment of their titanic task. Virgil
was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato
in 1512. They then became the inalienable heritage of mankind.
... This third age in the history of the Renaissance
Scholarship may be said to have reached its climax in Erasmus
[1465-1536]; for by this time Italy had handed on the torch
of learning to the northern nations" (Symonds).
Art had already had its new birth in Italy; but it shared with
everything spiritual and intellectual the wonderful quickening
of the age, and produced the great masters of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries: Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci,
Raphael, Titian, in Italy, the Brothers Van Eyck in Flanders,
Holbein and Dürer, in Germany, and the host of their compeers
in that astonishing age of artistic genius.
Portuguese Explorations.
A ruder and more practical direction in which the spirit of
the age manifested itself conspicuously and with prodigious
results was that of exploring navigation, to penetrate the
unknown regions of the globe and find their secrets out. But,
strangely, it was none of the older maritime and commercial
peoples who led the way in this: neither the Venetians, nor
the Genoese, nor the Catalans, nor the Flemings, nor the Hansa
Leaguers, nor the English, were early in the search for new
countries and new routes of trade. The grand exploit of
"business enterprise" in the fifteenth century, which changed
the face of commerce throughout the world, was left to be
performed by the Portuguese, whose prior commercial experience
was as slight as that of any people in Europe. And it was one
great man among them, a younger son in their royal family,
Prince Henry, known to later times as "the Navigator," who
woke the spirit of exploration in them and pushed them to the
achievement which placed Portugal, for a time, at the head of
the maritime states. Beginning in 1434, Prince Henry sent
expedition following expedition down the western coast of
Africa, searching for the southern extremity of the continent,
and a way round it to the eastward--to the Indies, the goal of
commercial ambition then and long after. In our own day it
seems an easy thing to sail down the African coast to the
Cape; but it was not easy in the middle of the fifteenth
century; and when Prince Henry died, in 1460, his ships had
only reached the mouth of the Gambia, or a little way beyond
it. His countrymen had grown interested, however, in the
pursuit which he began, and expeditions were continued, not
eagerly but at intervals, until Bartolomew Diaz, in 1486,
rounded the southern point of the continent without knowing
it, and Vasco da Gama, in 1497, passed beyond, and sailed to
the coast of India.
Discovery of America.
Five years before this, Columbus, in the service of Ferdinand
and Isabella of Spain, had made the more venturesome voyage
westward, and had found the New World of America. That the
fruits of that surpassing discovery fell to Spain, is one of
the happenings of history which one need not try to explain;
since (if we except the Catalans among them) there were no
people in Europe less inclined to ocean adventure than the
Spaniards. But they had just finished the conquest of the
Moors; their energies, long exercised in that struggle,
demanded some new outlet, and the Genoese navigator, seeking
money and ships, and baffled in all more promising lands, came
to them at the right moment for a favorable hearing. So
Castile won the amazing prize of adventure, which seems to
have belonged by more natural right to Genoa, or Venice, or
Bruges, or Lubeck, or Bristol.
The immediate material effects of the finding of the new way
to the Asiatic side of the world were far more important than
the effects of the discovery of America, and they were
promptly felt. No sooner had the Portuguese secured their
footing in the eastern seas, and on the route thither, which
they proceeded vigorously to do, than the commerce of Europe
with that rich region of spices and silks, and curious
luxuries which Europe loved, abandoned its ancient channels
and ran quickly into the new one. There were several strong
reasons for this: (1) the carriage of goods by the longer
ocean route was cheaper than by caravan routes to the
Mediterranean; (2) the pestilent Moorish pirates of the
Barbary Coast were escaped; (3) European merchants found heavy
advantages in dealing directly with the East instead of
trading at second hand through Arabs and Turks. So the
commerce of the Indies fled suddenly away from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic; fled from Venice, from Genoa,
from Marseilles, from Barcelona, from Constantinople, from
Alexandria; fled, too, from many cities of the arrogant Hanse
league in the North, which had learned the old ways of traffic
and were slow to catch the idea of a possible change. At the
outset of the rearrangement of trade, the Portuguese won and
held, for a time, the first handling of East Indian
commodities, while Dutch, English and German
traders--especially the first named--met them at Lisbon and
took their wares for distribution through central and northern
Europe. But, in no long time, the Dutch and English went to
India on their own account, and ousted the Portuguese from
their profitable monopoly.
{1051}
Commercially, the discovery of America had little effect on
Europe for a century or two. Politically, it had vast
consequences in the sixteenth century, which came, in the
main, from the power and prestige that accrued to Spain. But
perhaps its most important effects were those moral and
intellectual ones which may be attributed to the sudden,
surprising enlargement of the geographical horizon of men. The
lifting of the curtain of mystery which had hung so long
between two halves of the world must have compelled every man,
who thought at all, to suspect that other curtains of mystery
might be hiding facts as simple and substantial, waiting for
their Columbus to disclose them; and so the bondage of the
mediæval mind to that cowardice of superstition which fears
inquiry, must surely have been greatly loosened by the
startling event. But the Spaniards, who rushed to the
possession of the new-found world, showed small signs of any
such effect upon their minds; and perhaps it was the greedy
thought of their possession which excluded it.
Nationalization of Spain.
The Spaniards were one of half-a-dozen peoples in Western
Europe who had just arrived, in this fifteenth century, at a
fairly consolidated nationality, and were prepared, for the
first time in their history, to act with something like
organic unity in the affairs of the world. It was one of the
singular birth-marks of the new era in history, that so many
nations passed from the inchoate to the definite form at so
nearly the same time. The marriage of Isabella of Castile to
Ferdinand of Aragon, in 1469, effected a permanent union of
the two crowns, and a substantial incorporation of the greater
part of the Spanish peninsula into a single strong kingdom,
made yet stronger in 1491 by the conquest of Grenada and
subjugation of the last of the Spanish Moors.
Louis XI. and the Nationalizing of France.
The nationalizing of France had been a simultaneous but quite
different process. From the miserably downfallen and divided
state in which it was left by the Hundred Years War, it was
raised by a singular king, who employed strange, ignoble
methods, but employed them with remarkable success. This was
Louis XI., who owes to Sir Walter Scott's romance of "Quentin
Durward" an introduction to common fame which he could hardly
have secured otherwise; since popular attention is not often
drawn to the kind of cunning and hidden work in politics which
he did.
Louis XI., on coming to the throne in 1461, found himself
surrounded by a state of things which seemed much like a
revival of the feudal state at its worst, when Philip Augustus
and Louis IX. had to deal with great vassals who rivalled or
overtopped them in power. The reckless granting of appanages
to children of the royal family had raised up a new group of
nobles, too powerful and too proud to be loyal and obedient
subjects of the monarchy. At the head of them was the Duke of
Burgundy, whose splendid dominion, extended by marriage over
most of the Netherlands, raised him to a place among the
greater princes of Europe, and who quite outshone the King of
France in everything but the royal title. It was impossible,
under the circumstances, for the crown to establish its
supremacy over these powerful lords by means direct and open.
The craft and dishonesty of Louis found methods more
effectual. He cajoled, beguiled, betrayed and cheated his
antagonists, one by one. He played the selfishness and
ambitions of each against the others, and he skilfully evoked
something like a public opinion in his kingdom against the
whole. At the outset of his reign the nobles formed a
combination against him which they called the League of the
Public Weal, but which aimed at nothing but fresh gains to the
privileged class and advantages to its chiefs. Of alliance with
the people against the crown, as in England, there was no
thought. Louis yielded to the League in appearance, and
cunningly went beyond its demands in his concessions, making
it odious to the kingdom at large, and securing to himself the
strong support of the States-General of France, when he
appealed to it.
The tortuous policy of Louis was aided by many favoring
circumstances and happenings. It was favored not least,
perhaps, by the hot-headed character of Charles the Bold, who
succeeded his father, Philip, in the Duchy of Burgundy, in
1467. Charles was inspired with a great and not unreasonable
ambition, to make his realm a kingdom, holding a middle place
between France and Germany. He had abilities, but he was of a
passionate and haughty temper, and no match for the cool,
perfidious, plotting King of France. The latter, by skilful
intrigue, involved him in a war with the Swiss, which he
conducted imprudently, and in which he was defeated and killed
(1477). His death cleared Louis' path to complete mastery in
France, and he made the most of his opportunity. Charles left
only a daughter, Mary of Burgundy, and her situation was
helpless. Louis lost no time in seizing the Duchy of Burgundy,
as a fief of France, and in the pretended exercise of his
rights as godfather of the Duchess Mary. He also took
possession of Franche Comté, which was a fief of the Empire,
and he put forward claims in Flanders, Artois, and elsewhere.
But the Netherlanders, while they took advantage of the young
duchess' situation, and exacted large concessions of chartered
privileges from her, yet maintained her rights; and before the
first year of her orphanage closed, she obtained a champion by
marriage with the Archduke Maximilian of Austria, son of the
Emperor, Frederick III. Maximilian was successful in war with
Louis; but the latter succeeded, after all, in holding
Burgundy, which was thenceforth absorbed in the royal domain
of France and gave no further trouble to the monarchy, while
he won some important extensions of the northwestern frontiers
of his kingdom.
Before the death of Louis XI. the French crown regained Anjou,
Maine, and Provence, by inheritance from the last
representative of the great second House of Anjou. Thus the
kingdom which he left to his son, Charles VIII. (1483), was a
consolidated nation, containing in its centralized government
the germs of the absolute monarchy of a later day.
{1052}
Italian Expedition of Charles VIII.