Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

The Medici, it has been said, ‘used taxes as other men use their swords’, and the charge of deliberate corruption that has been brought against them is undeniable. ‘It is better to injure the city than to ruin it,’ once declared Cosimo himself, adding cynically, ‘It takes more to direct a government than to sit and tell one’s beads.’

Neither he nor his descendants were the type of ruler represented by Charlemagne or Alfred the Great. Their ideals were frankly low, with self-interest in the foreground, however skilfully disguised. When this has been admitted, however, it should be also remembered that Cosimo employed no army of hired ruffians to terrorize fellow citizens as the Visconti had done. Florence was willing to be corrupted, and if she lost the freedom she had loved in theory, yet she rose under the benevolent despotism of the Medici to a greater height of material and political prosperity than ever before or since in her history. ‘The authority that they possessed in Florence and throughout Christendom’, says Machiavelli, ‘was not obtained without being merited.’

The New Learning

It was under the fostering care of the Medici that Florence, more than any of the other Italian states, became the home of the intellectual Renaissance, from which the ‘New Learning’ was to radiate out across the world. This intellectual movement was twofold. Still under mediaeval influence, it began at first by finding its inspiration in the past, and so introduced a great classical revival, in which manuscripts of Greek and Latin authors and statues of gods and nymphs were almost as much revered as relics of the saints in an earlier age. Rich men hastened on journeys to the East in order to purchase half-burned fragments of literature from astonished Greeks, while in the lecture-halls of Italy eager pupils clamoured for fresh light on ancient philosophy and history. So great was the enthusiasm that it is said one famous scholar’s hair turned white with grief when he learned of the shipwreck of a cargo of classical books.

Cosimo de Medici had been a ‘friend and patron of learned men’; but it was in the time of his grandson, Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’, that the Renaissance reached its height in Florence. It was Lorenzo who founded the ‘Platonic Academy’ in imitation of the old academies of Greek philosophers, an assembly that became the battle-ground of the sharpest and most brilliant intellects of the day. Here were fought word-tournaments, often venomous in the intensity of their partisanship, between defenders of the views of Plato and of Aristotle: here were welcomed like princes cultured Greeks, driven into exile by Mahometan invasion, certain of crowded and enthusiastic audiences if only they were prepared to lecture on the literary treasures of their race. The enthusiasm recalled the days when Abelard held Paris spellbound by his reasoning on theology, but showed how far away had slipped the age of dialectics.

The last great name amongst the schoolmen is that of Duns Scotus, a Franciscan of the thirteenth century, who raised the process of logical reasoning to such a fine art that it has been said of him, ‘he reasoned scholasticism out of human reach’. Ordinary theologians could not dispute with him, since it made their brains reel even to try and follow his arguments, so at last they snapped their fingers at him, crying, ‘Oh, Duns! Duns!’ Thus by his excessive skill in intellectual juggling he reduced himself and his subject to absurdity, and ‘Dunce’ has passed down to posterity as a fitting name for some one unreasonably stupid.

Scholasticism, the glory of mediaeval lecture-halls, held no thrill or charm for men of the Renaissance, and though Aristotle was still revered and a great deal of labour expended on trying to make his views and those of Plato match with current religious beliefs, yet the spirit that underlay this attempt was wholly different to the efforts of mediaeval minds.

‘Salvation’, ‘The City of God’—such words and phrases had been keys to the thought of the Middle Ages from St. Augustine to St. Dominic and St. Thomas Aquinas. To Renaissance minds there was but one master-word, ‘Humanity’.

What message had these classical philosophers, that tradition held had lived in a golden age, for struggling humanity more than a thousand years later? The men and women of the Renaissance, as they put this question, hoped that the answers they discovered would agree with the Faith that the Church had taught them; but there was no longer the same insistence that they must or be disregarded as heresy. The interest in an immortal soul had become mingled with interest in what was human and transitory, with the beauty and charm of this life as well as with the glory of the next.

Searching after beauty, no longer under the stern school-mistress ‘tradition’, but led by that will-o’-the-wisp ‘literary instinct’, the poets and authors under the influence of the Renaissance gradually turned from the use of Latin and Greek to that more natural medium of expression, their own language.