The Close of the Middle Ages, 1272-1494, 3rd Ed.

by Sir Richard Lodge

In the first place, the modern conception of the state as a nation was very imperfectly grasped in the Middle Ages. The modern nations, such as the French, English, Spaniards, and others, were in process of formation, but they only became fully conscious of their distinct corporate unity at the end of the period. Mediæval theorists—guided by the traditions of the Roman Empire, as modified by the influences of Christianity—regarded Christendom as a single state under two heads—the Pope and the Emperor—who held ecclesiastical and secular authority as delegates of the Deity. The best concrete illustration of this conception of unity is offered by the Crusades, which ended in failure, partly on account of the distance of the scene of action, but mainly because the unity of Christendom was theoretical rather than real. Internally western Christendom was organised under what is called the Feudal System, a semi-agricultural and semi-military organisation, in which the mutual rights and duties of classes to each other were regulated by the tenure of land, while industry, the most potent of modern forces, had no place in it. Allied with feudalism was the fantastic body of rules and customs known as Chivalry. Chivalry was as essentially non-national as Christianity itself. A French and a German knight had more in common with each other than either had with a French or German citizen or peasant.

In the second place, the social unit in the Middle Ages was not what it is now, the individual man, but a corporation; either the feudal unit which in England is called the manor, or the municipal commune, or within the commune the guild. There was no scope for the activity of the individual by himself. The only way in which an able and ambitious man could hope to rise from obscurity to eminence was by entering the greatest of all corporations—the Church.

Thirdly, the mediæval period was a period of ignorance. Learning and education were for the most part monopolised by the clergy, and in their hands were bound down by prescription and by ecclesiastical authority. Everybody knows with what ill-will the Church regarded freedom of inquiry and scientific research: the charge of heresy was always ready to be brought against a Roger Bacon or a Galileo. Moreover, quite apart from the influence of the Church, learning and literature were withheld from the mass of the people by their expense. Printing was unknown, and paper was only introduced at the very end of the period. Parchment was so expensive that many of the manuscripts of ancient writers were erased in order to make room for monkish chronicles or service-books. Moreover, such literature as existed was in Latin, and that in itself was sufficient to close it alike to nobles, burghers, and peasants, most of whom were unable to read or write even their native tongue. And ignorance was, as usual, accompanied by gross superstition. To realise this it is only necessary to peruse the lists of marvels with which the mediæval chroniclers fill their pages, or to study the working of the judicial system in which the guilt or innocence of an accused person was decided by the ordeal.

The period of the Renaissance, in its proper and most comprehensive meaning, may be regarded as the age in which the |The Renaissance.| social and political system of the Middle Ages came to an end, in which mediæval restrictions upon liberty of thought and inquiry were abolished. It may be said to begin in the thirteenth century, to be in full progress during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and to be continued in an altered form in the religious struggles of the sixteenth century. It is, in fact, the period covered by the present volume. To this great epoch of transition, ‘The Close of the Middle Ages,’ belong a number of changes of the first magnitude: the decline of the Empire and the Papacy, and of the ideas and traditions with which they were connected; the growth and the hardening into shape of the French, Spanish, and English nations; the rise of national literatures and of the conception of national churches; the breaking up of feudalism and chivalry by the growing importance of industry; the overthrow of aristocratic and ecclesiastical predominance by the rise of the people to political influence; the growth of strong territorial monarchies based upon popular support, though in every country except England the monarchy kicked away its support as soon as it was no longer needed. With these changes must be coupled the results of the great inventions and discoveries of the age: the employment of the compass and the astrolabe, and the consequent development of maritime adventure, which led to the finding of a new way to India and a new world across the Atlantic, and so to an enormous extension of knowledge and a complete alteration of the great trade-routes of the world; the discovery of gunpowder, and the revolution which it effected not only in the art of war, but also in the organisation of society, which in the Middle Ages was inextricably bound up with the military system; the invention of printing, followed by a vast extension and popularisation of literature and knowledge; and, finally, the great astronomical discovery of Copernicus, which overthrew the old belief in the stability and central position of the earth, and dealt a fatal blow to the vast structure of superstition which had been erected upon that belief.

All these vast changes belong to the Renaissance; they are all part of the development which has been aptly called a new birth; no one of them can be fully appreciated apart from the rest. Some of them have been alluded to in the preceding pages of this volume; all of them merit the most careful consideration; their mere enumeration is enough to show their immense importance. But a single chapter can only serve as a sort of sign-post, and the dictates of prudence compel a limitation of attention to two movements with which the name of the Renaissance has been pre-eminently and sometimes exclusively associated—the revival of letters and the revival of art. And it is to the Renaissance in this narrower sense that Italy rendered its most active and enduring services.

The revival of literature and art was peculiarly the work of Italy. It is not merely that the Italians began the work and that other nations carried it on to completion. The recovery of ancient literature and art and the application of the lessons to be learned from them to contemporary needs were both begun and completed in Italy. It was only after this completion |Prominence of Italy in the Renaissance.| that the other countries came in to learn the lessons which Italy was able and ready to teach them. It is true that the spirit inspired by this teaching was applied by the other nations with great results to the reform of religion, to the extension of geographical knowledge, and to new discoveries in the realms of science. But this must not blind us to the magnitude and completeness of the task accomplished by Italy single-handed; nor must it be forgotten that, in the departments of painting and sculpture at any rate, the actual achievements of the Italians have never been surpassed by their pupils.

Nor is there anything surprising in the prominence of the part played by Italy in the intellectual Renaissance. Although Italy, like the other provinces of Rome, fell a victim to the barbarian invaders, yet the tradition of supremacy which Roman victories had created was not wholly destroyed, and it was revived with the growing authority of the Papacy during the Middle Ages. Moreover, the geographical position of Italy was of immense importance in an age when the Mediterranean was still the centre of the world’s commerce. Trade and manufactures brought wealth to the great civic communities of Italy, to Florence, Venice, and Genoa, and wealth has rarely failed to create a sense of self-importance, a consciousness of power and a desire for freedom, while at the same time it supplies the leisure requisite for prolonged intellectual exertion. But it may be thought—after what has been said before—that the Church, having its central seat and authority in Italy, would be strong enough to suppress independence of thought and inquiry. But to this suggestion two answers may be made. It is an old saying that familiarity breeds contempt. The Italians had no objection to the presence of the Papacy in their midst. On the contrary, it flattered their pride to think that Rome was still the head of a great spiritual empire, as it had once been of a vast territorial power. Moreover, the tribute of other states was poured into Italy by way of the papal coffers; and Italians had, if not a monopoly, at any rate a preponderant share in the cardinalate and other lucrative offices in the Church. But at the same time the Italians by no means felt the same superstitious awe and reverence of the Church and Papacy as prevailed in more distant countries. The ecclesiastical thunders of excommunication and interdict were much less dreaded by people who could see the working of the machinery which could produce such awful sounds. The abuses of the papal court, which ultimately produced the indignant revolt of the greater part of northern Europe, were so familiar to the Italians that they were hardly scandalised by them. Thus though the Italians, as a whole, showed little zeal for religious reform, they were, at any rate the wealthier classes, usually free from superstition and unlikely to tolerate ecclesiastical despotism.

It is also to be noted that the popes in Italy did not always pursue a policy of enlightened devotion to their spiritual interests. These interests were, or were |The Papacy and the Renaissance.| thought to be at a later time, opposed to freedom of thought, and therefore to such an advance in literature and art as would favour such freedom. But the popes were secular princes as well as heads of the Church. The central provinces of Italy constituted a considerable temporal principality; and it frequently happened that the interests of this principality by no means coincided with the interests of Roman Catholicism throughout Europe. The same motives which made so many Italian princes the munificent patrons of literature and art appealed to the popes also in their secular capacity. They, too, desired to have a magnificent and learned court; they were ambitious to compete with the Medici of Florence and with the kings of Naples; they wished to have their palaces and their churches built and adorned by the most eminent artists of their time; they were eager that their praises should be handed down to posterity by men whose genius would secure immortality to their patrons as well as to themselves. Thus individual popes, such as Nicolas V. and Leo X., were the industrious furtherers of the Renaissance; and they unconsciously stimulated a movement which was destined to overthrow the magnificent structure of ecclesiastical autocracy which had been built up by their great predecessors from Gregory VII. to Innocent III. Such shortsightedness has many parallels in history. It is easy to recall how the French nobles in the eighteenth century flirted with a philosophy which preached the doctrine of popular rights and liberties; and how the French monarchy gave practical aid to a rebellion which secured such rights and liberties in North America, thus encouraging the advance of that Revolution which for a time swept the French monarchy and the French nobility from the face of the earth.

Turning now to a rapid survey of the actual achievements of Italy, we find that the revival of literature and art was not only a stimulus to intellectual progress and a |The Revival of letters.| deathblow to ignorance and superstition; it also marks a great step in the freedom of the individual from mediæval restrictions. In art, and still more in literature, the individual found a career by which he could exercise his highest talents, and in which he could attain a personal eminence hitherto impossible. Dante, who stands on the threshold of the Renaissance, was the first great man in the Middle Ages who stood out by himself, unconnected with any corporate body or institution. He used to boast exultingly that he was his own party. The Divine Comedy gave literary form to the first of the new living languages of Europe. For Italy the work was almost too great; it has left too weighty an impression upon his fellow-countrymen. To this day it is the highest ambition of an Italian writer to use the language of Dante, and he must have frequent recourse to a dictionary to make sure that his words were really current in the thirteenth century. It is never wholesome to have too marked a distinction between the language of literature and that of ordinary life, and this servile habit of looking back has checked the growth of a really great Italian literature in later times. But Dante, with all his greatness, was not really imbued with the modern spirit. He had not emancipated himself from the ideas of his time, though he had raised himself above them. In his De Monarchia he willingly surrendered himself to the scholastic philosophy, and made a vigorous effort to defend the already effete and worthless theory of a universal empire. Dante stands on the threshold of the Renaissance, but he is rather the last giant of the Middle Ages than the herald of a new epoch.

Dante was followed by Petrarch, whose sonnets have influenced literary form in all countries, while his passionate devotion to the literature and liberty of the ancients makes him the first of Italian humanists. A contemporary of Petrarch was a man of still greater original genius, Giovanni Boccaccio. Like Petrarch, Boccaccio was a great lover and student of ancient literature, and he did much to introduce the study of Greek into Italy. But it is as the author of the Decameron that he is entitled to the greatest fame. In this collection of stories he displayed a contempt for superstition and a delight in life which were alien to the spirit of the Middle Ages. Chaucer borrowed many plots of the Canterbury Tales from the Decameron; and through Chaucer and other writers Boccaccio has influenced the whole of later English literature.