The ITalIan and norThern renaIssance to designate the interval between the downfall of the Classical Classical world of Greece and Rome and its rediscovery at the beginning of their own century a revival in which they felt they were participating Indeed the notion of a long period of cultural darkness had been expressed by Petrarch even earlier Events at the end of the Middle Ages particularly beginning in the 12th century set in motion a series of social political and intellectual transformations that culminated in the Renaissance Renaissance These included the increasing failure of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire to provide a stable and unifying framework for the organization of spiritual spiritual and material life the rise in importance of city-states and national monarchies the development of national languages and the breakup of the old feudal structures While the spirit of the Renaissance ultimately took many forms it was expressed earliest by the intellectual movement called humanism Humanism was initiated by secular men of letters rather than by the scholar-clerics who had dominated medieval intellectual life and had developed the Scholastic philosophy Humanism began and achieved fruition first in Italy Its predecessors were men like Dante and Petrarch and its chief protagonists included Gianozzo Manetti Leonardo Bruni Marsilio Ficino Giovanni Pico della Mirandola Lorenzo Valla and Coluccio Salutati The fall of Constantinople in 1453 provided humanism with a major boost for many eastern scholars fled to Italy bringing with them important books and manuscripts and a tradition of Greek scholarship 10
InTroducTIon Now few historians are comfortable with the triumphalist triumphalist and western Euro-centred image of the Renaissance as the irresistible march of modernity and progress The older view of the Renaissance centred too exclusively on Italy and within Italy on a few cities Florence Venice and Rome Nevertheless the term Renaissance remains a widely recognized label for the multifaceted period between the heyday of medieval universalism as embodied in the papacy and Holy Roman Empire and the convulsions and sweeping transformations of the 17th century In this period some important innovations of the Middle Ages came into their own including the revival of urban life commercial enterprise based on private capital banking the formation of states systematic investigation of the physical world Classical scholarship and vernacular literatures In religious life the Renaissance was a time of the broadening and institutionalizing of earlier initiatives in lay piety and lay-sponsored clerical reforms rather than of the abandonment of traditional beliefs In government city states and regional and national principalities supplanted the fading hegemony of the empire and the papacy and obliterated obliterated many of the local feudal jurisdictions that had covered covered Europe Within states though power continued to be monopolized by elites who drew their strength from both landed and mercantile wealth 11
Urban Growth and wars of Expansion Town revival was a general feature of 10th and 11th-century Europe associated with an upsurge in population that is not completely understood In Italy however the urban imprint of Roman times had never been erased By the 11th century the towers of new towns and more commonly of old towns newly revived began to dot the spiny Italian landscape The burgeoning population was literally brimming with new energy due to improved diets As in Roman times the medieval Italian town lived in close relation to its surrounding rural area or contado Italian city folk seldom relinquished their ties to the land from which they and their families had sprung Most successful tradesmen or bankers would invest some of their profits in the family farm while rural nobles often spent part of the year in houses inside city walls In Italian towns knights merchants rentiers and skilled craftsmen lived and worked 12 chapTer one
urban GrowTh and wars of expansIon side by side fought in the same militia and married into each other’s families Though there was a social hierarchy it was a tangled system with no simple division between noble and commoner between landed and commercial wealth CiviC institutions The fact that landed nobles took part in civic affairs helps explain the early militancy of the townsfolk in resisting the local bishop who was usually the principal claimant to lordship in the community Political action against a common common enemy tended to infuse townspeople with a sense of community and civic loyalty By the end of the 11th century civic patriotism began to express itself in literature City chronicles combined fact and legend to stress a city’s Roman origins and in some cases its inheritance of Rome’s special mission to rule Such motifs reflect the cities achievement of autonomy from their respective episcopal or secular feudal feudal overlords and probably the growth of rivalries between neighbouring communities Rivalry between towns was part of the expansion into the neighbouring countryside with the smaller and weaker towns submitting to the domination of the larger and stronger stronger As the activity of the towns became more complex permanent civic institutions began to emerge Typically the first of these was an executive magistracy named the consulate consulate to stress the continuity with republican Rome In the late 11th and early 12th centuries this process consisted of the establishment of juridical autonomy the emergence of a permanent officialdom and the spread of power beyond the walls of the city to the contado and neighbouring towns 13
