declared openly against papal rule. To oppose this new tribune, Albornoz
conceived the project of using the influence of Rienzi, whose rule was
now regretted by the populace that had previously deserted him. The Pope
was persuaded to release Rienzi from prison and to send him to Rome,
where the effect of his presence was almost magical. The Romans flocked
to welcome their former liberator, and he was reinstalled in power with
the title of senator, conferred upon him by the Pope. But his character
was not improved by adversity, and his rule was more arbitrary and
selfish than it had been before.
The execution of the _condottiere_, Fra Moreale, was an act of
ingratitude as well as of treachery. Popular favor was soon alienated
from a ruler who could no longer command either affection or respect,
and, in a mob rising, Rienzi was put to death, October 8, 1354. But his
return had served the purpose of Albornoz. Rome was preserved to the
papacy, and the cardinal could proceed in safety with his task of
subduing the independent tyrants of Romagna.
Central Italy had not yet witnessed the general introduction of
mercenaries, and the native populations still fought their own battles.
The policy of exciting revolts among the subject citizens was completely
successful, and by 1360 almost the whole of Romagna had submitted to the
papal legate. His triumph was crowned in this year, when, by skilful use
of quarrels among the Visconti princes, he succeeded in recovering
Bologna.
BEGINNING AND PROGRESS OF THE RENAISSANCE
FOURTEENTH TO SIXTEENTH CENTURY
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
The new birth or resurrection known as the "Renaissance" is
usually considered to have begun in Italy in the fourteenth
century, though some writers would date its origin from the
reign of Frederick II, 1215-1250; and by this Prince--the
most enlightened man of his age--it was at least
anticipated. Well versed in languages and science, he was a
patron of scholars, whom he gathered about him, from all
parts of the world, at his court in Palermo.
At all events the Renaissance was heralded through the
recovery by Italian scholars of Greek and Roman classical
literature. When the movement began, the civilization of
Greece and Rome had long been exerting a partial influence,
not only upon Italy, but on other parts of mediæval Europe
as well. But in Italy especially, when the wave of barbarism
had passed, the people began to feel a returning
consciousness of their ancient culture, and a desire to
reproduce it. To Italians the Latin language was easy, and
their country abounded in documents and monumental records
which symbolized past greatness.
The modern Italian spirit was produced through the
combination of various elements, among which were the
political institutions brought by the Lombards from Germany,
the influence of chivalry and other northern forms of
civilization, and the more immediate power of the Church.
That which was foreshadowed in the thirteenth century became
in the fourteenth a distinct national development, which, as
Symonds, its most discerning interpreter, shows us, was
constructing a model for the whole western world.
The word "renaissance" has of late years received a more extended
significance than that which is implied in our English equivalent--the
"revival of learning." We use it to denote the whole transition from the
Middle Ages to the modern world; and though it is possible to assign
certain limits to the period during which this transition took place, we
cannot fix on any dates so positively as to say between this year and
that the movement was accomplished. To do so would be like trying to
name the days on which spring in any particular season began and ended.
Yet we speak of spring as different from winter and from summer.
The truth is that in many senses we are still in mid-Renaissance. The
evolution has not been completed. The new life is our own and is
progressive. As in the transformation scene of some pantomime, so here
the waning and the waxing shapes are mingled; the new forms, at first
shadowy and filmy, gain upon the old; and now both blend; and now the
old scene fades into the background; still, who shall say whether the
new scene be finally set up?
In like manner we cannot refer the whole phenomena of the Renaissance to
any one cause or circumstance, or limit them within the field of any one
department of human knowledge. If we ask the students of art what they
mean by the Renaissance, they will reply that it was the revolution
effected in architecture, painting, and sculpture by the recovery of
antique monuments. Students of literature, philosophy, and theology see
in the Renaissance that discovery of manuscripts, that passion for
antiquity, that progress in philology and criticism, which led to a
correct knowledge of the classics, to a fresh taste in poetry, to new
systems of thought, to more accurate analysis, and finally to the
Lutheran schism and the emancipation of the conscience. Men of science
will discourse about the discovery of the solar system by Copernicus and
Galileo, the anatomy of Vesalius, and Harvey's theory of the circulation
of the blood. The origination of a truly scientific method is the point
which interests them most in the Renaissance. The political historian,
again, has his own answer to the question. The extinction of feudalism,
the development of the great nationalities of Europe, the growth of
monarchy, the limitation of the ecclesiastical authority, and the
erection of the papacy into an Italian kingdom, and in the last place
the gradual emergence of that sense of popular freedom which exploded in
the Revolution: these are the aspects of the movement which engross his
attention.
Jurists will describe the dissolution of legal fictions based upon the
False Decretals, the acquisition of a true text of the Roman code, and
the attempt to introduce a rational method into the theory of modern
iurisprudence, as well as to commence the study of international law.
Men whose attention has been turned to the history of discoveries and
inventions will relate the exploration of America and the East, or will
point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing
and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and by
gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all the
instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the
dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and
perpetuate the new and useful and life-giving.
Yet neither any one of these answers, taken separately, nor indeed all
of them together, will offer a solution of the problem. By the term
"renaissance," or new birth, is indicated a natural movement, not to be
explained by this or that characteristic, but to be accepted as an
effort of humanity for which at length the time had come, and in the
onward progress of which we still participate. The history of the
Renaissance is not the history of arts or of sciences or of literature
or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of
self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European
races. It is no mere political mutation, no new fashion of art, no
restoration of classical standards of taste. The arts and the
inventions, the knowledge and the books which suddenly became vital at
the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on the shores of
the dead sea which we call the Middle Ages. It was not their discovery
which caused the Renaissance. But it was the intellectual energy, the
spontaneous outburst of intelligence, which enabled mankind at that
moment to make use of them. The force then generated still continues,
vital and expansive, in the spirit of the modern world.
How was it, then, that at a certain period, about fourteen centuries
after Christ, to speak roughly, humanity awoke as it were from slumber
and began to live? That is a question which we can but imperfectly
answer. The mystery of organic life defeats analysis. Whether the
subject of our inquiry be a germ-cell, or a phenomenon so complex as the
commencement of a new religion, or the origination of a new disease, or
a new phase in civilization, it is alike impossible to do more than to
state the conditions under which the fresh growth begins, and to point
out what are its manifestations. In doing so, moreover, we must be
careful not to be carried away by words of our own making. Renaissance,
Reformation, and Revolution are not separate things, capable of being
isolated; they are moments in the history of the human race which we
find it convenient to name; while history itself is one and continuous,
so that our utmost endeavors to regard some portion of it, independently
of the rest, will be defeated.
A glance at the history of the preceding centuries shows that, after the
dissolution of the fabric of the Roman Empire, there was no possibility
of any intellectual revival. The barbarous races which had deluged
Europe had to absorb their barbarism; the fragments of Roman
civilization had either to be destroyed or assimilated; the Germanic
nations had to receive culture and religion from the effete people they
had superseded. It was further necessary that the modern nationalities
should be defined, that the modern languages should be formed, that
peace should be secured to some extent, and wealth accumulated, before
the indispensable _milieu_ for a resurrection of the free spirit of
humanity could exist. The first nation which fulfilled these conditions
was the first to inaugurate the new era. The reason why Italy took the
lead in the Renaissance was that Italy possessed a language, a favorable
climate, political freedom, and commercial prosperity, at a time when
other nations were still semibarbarous. Where the human spirit had been
buried in the decay of the Roman Empire, there it arose upon the ruins
of that Empire; and the papacy--called by Hobbes the ghost of the dead
Roman Empire, seated, throned, and crowned, upon the ashes thereof--to
some extent bridged over the gulf between the two periods.
Keeping steadily in sight the truth that the real quality of the
Renaissance was intellectual--that it was the emancipation of the reason
for the modern world--we may inquire how feudalism was related to it.
The mental condition of the Middle Ages was one of ignorant prostration
before the idols of the Church--dogma and authority and scholasticism.
Again, the nations of Europe during these centuries were bound down by
the brute weight of material necessities. Without the power over the
outer world which the physical sciences and useful arts communicate,
without the ease of life which wealth and plenty secure, without the
traditions of a civilized past, emerging slowly from a state of utter
rawness, each nation could barely do more than gain and keep a difficult
hold upon existence. To depreciate the work achieved for humanity during
the Middle Ages would be ridiculous. Yet we may point out that it was
done unconsciously--that it was a gradual and instinctive process of
becoming. The reason, in a word, was not awake; the mind of man was
ignorant of its own treasures and its own capacities. It is pathetic to
think of the mediæval students poring over a single ill-translated
sentence of Porphyry, endeavoring to extract from its clauses whole
systems of logical science, and torturing their brains about puzzles
more idle than the dilemma of Buridan's donkey, while all the time, at
Constantinople and at Seville, in Greek and Arabic, Plato and Aristotle
were alive, but sleeping, awaiting only the call of the Renaissance to
bid them speak with voice intelligible to the modern mind. It is no less
pathetic to watch tide after tide of the ocean of humanity sweeping from
all parts of Europe, to break in passionate but unavailing foam upon the
shores of Palestine, whole nations laying life down for the chance of
seeing the walls of Jerusalem, worshipping the sepulchre whence Christ
had risen, loading their fleet with relics and with cargoes of the
sacred earth, while all the time, within their breasts and brains, the
spirit of the Lord was with them, living but unrecognized, the spirit of
freedom which ere long was destined to restore its birthright to the
world.
Meanwhile the Middle Age accomplished its own work. Slowly and
obscurely, amid stupidity and ignorance, were being forged the nations
and the languages of Europe. Italy, France, Spain, England, Germany took
shape. The actors of the future drama acquired their several characters,
and formed the tongues whereby their personalities should be expressed.
The qualities which render modern society different from that of the
ancient world were being impressed upon these nations by Christianity,
by the Church, by chivalry, by feudal customs. Then came a further
phase. After the nations had been moulded, their monarchies and
dynasties were established. Feudalism passed by slow degrees into
various forms of more or less defined autocracy. In Italy and Germany
numerous principalities sprang into preëminence; and though the nation
was not united under one head, the monarchical principle was
acknowledged. France and Spain submitted to a despotism, by right of
which the king could say, "_L'état c'est moi_." England developed her
complicated constitution of popular right and royal prerogative. At the
same time the Latin Church underwent a similar process of
transformation. The papacy became more autocratic. Like the king the
pope began to say, "_L'Église c'est moi_." This merging of the mediæval
state and mediæval church in the personal supremacy of king and pope may
be termed the special feature of the last age of feudalism which
preceded the Renaissance. It was thus that the necessary milieu was
prepared. The organization of the five great nations, and the levelling
of political and spiritual interests under political and spiritual
despots, formed the prelude to that drama of liberty of which the
Renaissance was the first act, the Reformation the second, the
Revolution the third, and which we nations of the present are still
evolving in the establishment of the democratic idea.
Meanwhile it must not be imagined that the Renaissance burst suddenly
upon the world in the fifteenth century without premonitory symptoms.
Far from that, within the Middle Age itself, over and over again, the
reason strove to break loose from its fetters. Abelard, in the twelfth
century, tried to prove that the interminable dispute about entities and
words was founded on a misapprehension. Roger Bacon, at the beginning of
the thirteenth century, anticipated modern science, and proclaimed that
man, by use of nature, can do all things. Joachim of Flora, intermediate
between the two, drank one drop of the cup of prophecy offered to his
lips, and cried that "the gospel of the Father was past, the gospel of
the Son was passing, the gospel of the Spirit was to be." These three
men, each in his own way, the Frenchman as a logician, the Englishman as
an analyst, the Italian as a mystic, divined the future but inevitable
emancipation of the reason of mankind. Nor were there wanting signs,
especially in Provence, that Aphrodite and Phoebus and the Graces were
ready to resume their sway. We have, moreover, to remember the Cathari,
the Paterini, the Fraticelli, the Albigenses, the Hussites--heretics in
whom the new light dimly shone, but who were instantly exterminated by
the Church.
We have to commemorate the vast conception of the emperor Frederick II,
who strove to found a new society of humane culture in the South of
Europe, and to anticipate the advent of the spirit of modern tolerance.
He, too, and all his race were exterminated by the papal jealousy. Truly
we may say with Michelet that the sibyl of the Renaissance kept offering
her books in vain to feudal Europe. In vain, because the time was not
yet. The ideas projected thus early on the modern world were immature
and abortive, like those headless trunks and zoöphytic members of
half-moulded humanity which, in the vision of Empedocles, preceded the
birth of full-formed man. The nations were not ready. Franciscans
imprisoning Roger Bacon for venturing to examine what God had meant to
keep secret; Dominicans preaching crusades against the cultivated nobles
of Provence; popes stamping out the seed of enlightened Frederick;
Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical literature to make
way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the
parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by
sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with
demoniac zeal--these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe.
Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance were fragmentary
and sterile.
Then came a second period. Dante's poem, a work of conscious art,
conceived in a modern spirit and written in a modern tongue, was the
first true sign that Italy, the leader of the nations of the West, had
shaken off her sleep. Petrarch followed. His ideal of antique culture as
the everlasting solace and the universal education of the human race,
his lifelong effort to recover the classical harmony of thought and
speech, gave a direct impulse to one of the chief movements of the
Renaissance--its passionate outgoing toward the ancient world. After
Petrarch, Boccaccio opened yet another channel for the stream of
freedom. His conception of human existence as a joy to be accepted with
thanksgiving, not as a gloomy error to be rectified by suffering,
familiarized the fourteenth century with that form of semipagan gladness
that marked the real Renaissance.
In Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio Italy recovered the consciousness of
intellectual liberty. What we call the Renaissance had not yet arrived;
but their achievement rendered its appearance in due season certain.
With Dante the genius of the modern world dared to stand alone and to
create confidently after its own fashion. With Petrarch the same genius
reached forth across the gulf of darkness, resuming the tradition of a
splendid past. With Boccaccio the same genius proclaimed the beauty of
the world, the goodliness of youth, and strength and love and life,
unterrified by hell, unappalled by the shadow of impending death.
It was now, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Italy had
lost, indeed, the heroic spirit which we admire in her communes of the
thirteenth, but had gained instead ease, wealth, magnificence, and that
repose which springs from long prosperity, that the new age at last
began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried
the civilization of the Old World. Behind stretched the centuries of
mediævalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were
as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who
were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted,
their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired. No ages of
enervating luxury, of intellectual endeavor, of life artificially
preserved or ingeniously prolonged, had sapped the fibre of the men who
were about to inaugurate the modern world. Severely nurtured, unused to
delicate living, these giants of the Renaissance were like boys in their
capacity for endurance, their inordinate appetite for enjoyment. No
generations, hungry, sickly, effete, critical, disillusioned, trod them
down. Ennui and the fatigue that springs from scepticism, the despair of
thwarted effort, were unknown. Their fresh and unperverted senses
rendered them keenly alive to what was beautiful and natural. They
yearned for magnificence and instinctively comprehended splendor. At the
same time the period of satiety was still far off.
Everything seemed possible to their young energy; nor had a single
pleasure palled upon their appetite. Born, as it were, at the moment
when desires and faculties are evenly balanced, when the perceptions are
not blunted, nor the senses cloyed, opening their eyes for the first
time on a world of wonder, these men of the Renaissance enjoyed what we
may term the first transcendent springtide of the modern world. Nothing
is more remarkable than the fulness of the life that throbbed in them.
Natures rich in all capacities and endowed with every kind of
sensibility were frequent. Nor was there any limit to the play of
personality in action. We may apply to them what Browning has written of
Sordello's temperament:
"A footfall there
Suffices to upturn to the warm air
Half-germinating spices, mere decay
Produces richer life, and day by day
New pollen on the lily-petal grows,
And still more labyrinthine buds the rose."
During the Middle Ages man had lived enveloped in a cowl. He had not
seen the beauty of the world, or had seen it only to cross himself, and
turn aside and tell his beads and pray. Like St. Bernard travelling
along the shores of Lake Leman, and noticing neither the azure of the
waters nor the luxuriance of the vines, nor the radiance of the
mountains with their robe of sun and snow, but bending a
thought-burdened forehead over the neck of his mule--even like this
monk, humanity had passed, a careful pilgrim, intent on the terrors of
sin, death, and judgment, along the highways of the world, and had not
known that they were sightworthy, or that life is a blessing. Beauty is
a snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man fallen and lost,
death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell everlasting, heaven
hard to win, ignorance is acceptable to God as a proof of faith and
submission, abstinence and mortification are the only safe rules of
life--these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic mediæval Church. The
Renaissance shattered and destroyed them, rending the thick veil which
they had drawn between the mind of man and the outer world, and flashing
the light of reality upon the darkened places of his own nature. For the
mystic teaching of the Church was substituted culture in the classical
humanities; a new ideal was established, whereby man strove to make
himself the monarch of the globe on which it is his privilege as well as
destiny to live. The Renaissance was the liberation of humanity from a
dungeon, the double discovery of the outer and the inner world.
An external event determined the direction which this outburst of the
spirit of freedom should take. This was the contact of the modern with
the ancient mind, which followed upon what is called the Revival of
Learning. The fall of the Greek empire in 1453, while it signalized the
extinction of the old order, gave an impulse to the now accumulated
forces of the new. A belief in the identity of the human spirit under
all manifestations was generated. Men found that in classical as well as
biblical antiquity existed an ideal of human life, both moral and
intellectual, by which they might profit in the present. The modern
genius felt confidence in its own energies when it learned what the
ancients had achieved. The guesses of the ancients stimulated the
exertions of the moderns. The whole world's history seemed once more to
be one.
The great achievements of the Renaissance were the discovery of the
world and the discovery of man. Under these two formulas may be
classified all the phenomena which properly belong to this period. The
discovery of the world divides itself into two branches--the exploration
of the globe, and that systematic exploration of the universe which is
in fact what we call science. Columbus made known America in 1492; the
Portuguese rounded the Cape in 1497; Copernicus explained the solar
system in 1507. It is not necessary to add anything to this plain
statement, for, in contact with facts of such momentous import, to avoid
what seems like commonplace reflection would be difficult. Yet it is
only when we contrast the ten centuries which preceded these dates with
the four centuries which have ensued that we can estimate the magnitude
of that Renaissance movement by means of which a new hemisphere has been
added to civilization.