The Renaissance and Italian cities

This chapter follows Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the period after the feudal order of the three orders began to break down. Three big changes run through it: the Renaissance (a new interest in ancient Greek and Roman culture and in human beings), the Reformation (challenges to the Catholic Church), and the scientific revolution.

Sources for this period are plentiful: documents, printed books, paintings, sculptures, buildings and textiles.

The word Renaissance, meaning 'rebirth', was used by nineteenth-century historians. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt made the idea famous in his book The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). His teacher, the German historian Leopold von Ranke, believed history meant mainly the politics of states, written from government papers. Burckhardt disagreed: culture mattered as much as politics.

• Burckhardt argued that a new 'humanist' culture grew in Italian towns from the fourteenth century.
• At its heart was the individual: a person able to make their own decisions and develop their own skills, not simply a member of one of the three orders.
• He contrasted this 'modern' outlook with the 'medieval' one.

Why Italy? After the western Roman Empire fell, Italy was politically weak and divided into small states, while the Pope in Rome was powerful in religious matters but not over all of Italy. But:

• Italy had been the heart of the Roman Empire, and its ruins and statues were all around.
• Its ports revived with trade: with the Byzantine empire and the Islamic lands, and, after the Mongols opened routes to China, with Asia too. Italian towns grew rich.
• Many towns became independent city-states. Florence and Venice were republics.
• In these towns, merchants and bankers took an active part in government. The clergy were not politically dominant and feudal lords were weak, so the idea of citizenship took root.

Venice is a good example. The writer Cardinal Gasparo Contarini described it as a commonwealth in which authority lay with a council of all gentlemen above the age of 25. Membership depended on lineage, belonging to old families, rather than simply on wealth.