The greatest story in the world, period 2 (of 3)

by Horace G. Hutchinson

In this revival of a love for the ancient literature, and in the works in verse and prose which these great artists created, we cannot trace that they were influenced by the troubadours and trouvères of more than a century earlier. They went back further, to the best models of antiquity. Therefore we have to regard these wonderful Italians as the true originators of that new interest in learning and in all the arts which received the name of the Renaissance, or new birth. For its full growth and development it had to wait until the dawn of the sixteenth century. By that time the art of printing had been invented. Learning in all its branches had received a great impetus at all the universities in every country in Europe. The first English printing press was set up by Caxton, who brought it from Flanders in 1476.

Though the new birth of literature was thus delayed, some of the greatest of the Italian painters were hard at work during the fifteenth century. Cimabue, indeed, who may be said to have been the first of the real Italian painters, since all before him had followed the stiff Byzantine style, dates back to the latter half of the thirteenth. Ghirlandajo, his pupil, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, the great Venetian painter, and many more of great fame, were at work before the fifteenth century closed.

Even in a story sketched in its most bare outlines, as is this, and told with as few names and as few dates as possible, it seemed necessary to mention some of these glorious artists and to realise that the end was at hand of those Middle Ages which have also been called Dark Ages, because of the dark ignorance and barbarity in which humanity at that time was plunged. Some of the goldsmith's and silversmith's work of the day was very finely executed, and many of the finest painters and sculptors themselves did not scorn to work at the jeweller's craft. But the real glory which lightens the general darkness of the Middle Ages, is the splendour of the architecture—the cathedrals and churches, the public buildings and the palaces of the great nobles. The richness of the church architecture in our own country we have shortly noticed already, and all over the world beautiful and noble structures were raised in those troubled ages when most of the arts were little studied. Generally the building is in one or other of the successive varieties of the Gothic style. In Spain we see many traces of the Eastern taste of the Moslems for towers and domes and "minarets," as those slender towers with their balconies for prayer are called. Asiatic influence is found, though far less often, in some Italian buildings also.

The nations in 1500 A.D.

Now we may do well to take a look round the world, the scene of this greatest of all stories, and see to what condition we have traced its progress at this point of time—say A.D. 1500 or a year or two before or after that central date. We see, regarding it as a whole, that the nations have been engaged, after the break-up that followed the ruin of the Roman Empire, in framing their territories into something like the shape which we may find on the map now. And generally they have followed the same course, have gone through the same struggles and changes, in their way towards assuming that shape. For at first they split up into a number of small independent bodies, each under the rule of a lord. Nominally there was an overlord, but his sovereignty for a while was not very effective. It was but gradually that he made it real. Some of the nations differed from others in their local conditions. Thus Spain, rather cut off by the Pyrenees from the main story, had its own peculiar difficulties with the Moslems. The sovereignty of Italy, with its five principal States, was complicated by the claims of Pope and Emperor, of Guelph and Ghibelline and of the different city States asserting each its independence. But on the whole, what we are able to see is a tendency for the sovereign overlord gradually to make his power good over the lesser lords, and so to produce something like those national unities which we find now.

The position of Spain, to take that outlying part of the big story first, is that she has just succeeded in overthrowing the Moors in their last Spanish stronghold in Granada. She has almost completed national unity by the marriage of Isabella, the Queen of Castile, with Ferdinand, the King of Aragon. Then, with all her long sea-coast and the sea-going habits of its inhabitants, she will become for a while the greatest naval power in the world and play a leading part in the story. Portugal is independent of her and is opening up the trade with the East round the Cape of Good Hope.

Italy, as we have seen, is split into the five principal States, and has far to go yet before she can be one nation.

France has unified herself, and so has England, but we have to notice this difference between the conditions of the one and of the other, that in France the king has made himself despotic over his nobles and all his people.

England, no longer hampered by the possession of any territory on the Continent except the single city of Calais, which will be lost to her in the course of the century to follow, is more fortunate than France in that her nobles have won from the king a more liberal constitution, based upon Magna Carta. She will attain a freedom equal to that of France by less terrible means, though not without wars of Royalists and Puritans and the beheading of a king.