Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

This weight of tradition leads naturally to the third great change heralded by the Renaissance—the breaking-up of a sky curtained in mental darkness into separate groups of clouds, still heavily charged with superstition and ignorance, but their density relieved by the light of a genuine inquiry after truth for its own sake. During the Middle Ages we have seen that men and women looked back for inspiration to the Roman Empire, and this made them distrust progress, just as a timid rider will dread a spirited horse because he fears to lose control and to be carried into unknown ways.

The earliest guardian of mediaeval knowledge had been the Church, and in the light that she understood her task she faithfully taught the world about her. Her motto was ‘Reverence for the Past’; but, bent in worship before the altar of tradition, she lost sight of that other great world-motto, ‘Trust the Future’, which has been one of the guiding stars of modern times. Her interpretation of the Faith, of the legitimate bounds of knowledge, of the limits of Art, had been almost a necessary school of discipline for the early Middle Ages with their tendency to barbaric licence; but as she civilized men’s minds and their aptitude for reasoning and understanding deepened, the restrictions of the school became the bars of a prison. The mediaeval Church, once a pioneer, lost her grip on realities, her spiritual outlook became obscured by material ambitions, her faith weakened; until at last so little sure was she in her heart of the complete truth of her teaching that she opposed and denounced criticism or discovery, much like a merchant who is secretly afraid that his methods of business may be obsolete refuses to entertain ‘newfangled notions’ that would open his eyes.

When Columbus laid his scheme for crossing the Atlantic before a council of bishops and leading members of the Spanish universities, mediaeval knowledge derided his presumption by quoting texts from the Old Testament and various statements of St. Augustine and other Fathers of the Church. There could be no Antipodes, they argued, because it was distinctly said that the world was peopled by the descendants of Noah, and how could such men have crossed these miles of ocean? Many similar objections were raised and the mariner’s project condemned, just as Roger Bacon had been judged a heretic for his scientific inquiries two hundred years before.[51] It is significant of the change of mental outlook that while Roger Bacon wasted his last years in prison and Abelard was driven from the lecture-hall to a monastery, Columbus found public support, vindicated his calculations, and so opened up a new world.

The great secret of the Renaissance is indeed this release of the restless spirit of inquiry after truth, that is as old as humanity itself, and that, swooping like a bird through the door of a cage out into the air and sunshine, reckless of danger, carried along by the sheer joy of unfettered life, sometimes foolish and extravagant in its zest for experience, was at first too absorbed in the glory and interest of freedom to feel any regret for the prison that had been at least a shelter from the many stormy problems that were to rend the modern world.

Charlemagne had believed that ‘without knowledge good works were impossible’. The men of the early Renaissance were not so intent upon the importance of good works or the hope of salvation as their forefathers, but they would have assented eagerly to the statement that ‘without knowledge any true understanding of human life was impossible’.

Had the conditions under which knowledge could be obtained remained as restricted as in mediaeval times, the Renaissance on its intellectual side would in all probability have become a cult, a movement shared by a few learned men and women to which the mass of the people in every nation had no clue; and in this way it would have died out like a plant unable to spread its roots. Human invention intervened with the discovery of printing, which brought the great thoughts of the world out of the monastic libraries, where they had been laboriously collected and copied by hand, to distribute them, slowly at first but ever faster and faster, throughout the busy centres of Europe, where brains as well as stomachs are always eager for food.

It was a German, John Gutenburg, who invented printing by means of movable types, but because he had not enough money to carry out his design he was forced to borrow from a rich citizen of Mainz called John Fust. This Fust treated John Gutenburg very badly, for he demanded back the money he had lent so soon as he understood the value of the other’s secret, and by this means forced Gutenburg, when he could not pay, to hand over his plant in compensation. Fust then began to print on his own account, and when the people of Mainz saw the copies of the Bible that he produced, each number an exact replica of the first, they declared that he had sold himself to the devil and was practising magic. Thus, it is said, started the legend of Doctor Faustus that has inspired poets, musicians, and dramatists.

The first English printer was William Caxton, a Kentishman, to view whose press came King and court in great amazement, interested, but utterly unaware of what a mental revolution this small piece of machinery was to bring about.

The greatest of Italian printers were the Venetians, whose famous Aldine press produced volumes that are still the admiration of the world as well as treasure trove for book-collectors. In modern times the desire for knowledge, or rather for information, has become a scramble, and printing has degenerated into a trade. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was regarded as an art, and Aldus Manutius, the Roman who established his press at Venice, intending to reproduce an edition of all the Greek authors then known, was a great scholar, who modelled his letters on the handwriting of the Italian poet Petrarch, and gathered around him the most intellectual and enterprising minds of his day to advise and help him. It was at the Aldine press that one of the leaders of the Dutch Renaissance, Erasmus, had several of his books printed, and Venice at this time became a centre for scholars, and for all whose minds were alive with a thirst for new impressions.

Fifteenth-century Italy was not, on the surface, so very different from Italy in the fourteenth. The complete domination of the five Powers, foreshadowed in the earlier century, had become fixed, and three of them—Milan, Florence, and Naples—had succeeded in forming an alliance to preserve the balance of power in the peninsula, and to keep at bay the ambitions of Venice, whose empire was still spreading over the mainland. In Naples ruled Ferrante I, an illegitimate son of Alfonso V of Aragon, a typical despot like the Angevins his father had replaced. In Milan the Visconti had merged themselves in the House of Sforza, through a clever ruse of one of the most famous of mediaeval condottieri, Francesco Sforza, who, besieging his master, Filippo Maria Visconti, in Milan in 1441, had forced him to give him his only daughter and heiress Bianca in marriage, and then to acknowledge him as his successor.