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A discussion of Renaissance humanism must begin with Burckhardt, whose The civilization of the Renaissance in Italy has set the terms of debate and analysis from the time of its publication in 1860 up to the most recent scholarship. Burckhardt had posited a political explanation of the origins of Renaissance individualism, which in his view was the product of the egoistic and amoral political world of the Italian city-states. The great merit of Kristeller's interpretation of Renaissance humanism, indeed the key to its lasting appeal, is his philological study of primary sources. History, as one of the five disciplines of the studia humanitatis, was a principal concern of the humanists, who not only assiduously studied the ancient Roman histories but also wrote histories of their own. The grammar curriculum in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was divided into two relatively distinct phases: elementary education, and secondary education.
War was more than an opportunity for physical excitement or the chance to win reputation through deeds worthy of being recorded for the benefit of others. War was widely regarded as a way of securing peace and justice. Differences between religious and social systems lay behind wars fought mainly at the extremities of Europe. The most decisive development was the move towards centralisation of military organisation and command which was to be achieved in many parts of Europe. The requirement to avoid the collective consequences of defeat led to societies choosing both soldiers and, in particular, leaders from among those who had good practical experience of war. The war involving England, France and Burgundy, fought largely in the north and north-east of France, advanced considerably the use of heavy artillery in that part of Europe. War helped to stimulate the development of economies associated with it, in particular the provision of armaments and the materials which went into their making.
In the fifteenth century the king and nobility of Bohemia were in competition to fulfil what each saw as the interests of the kingdom. Along with Moravia, Silesia and Upper and Lower Lusatia, the kingdom of Bohemia was one of five provinces united under the crown of St Wenceslas. By the fourteenth century, lay religious groups such as the Waldensians were active in southern Bohemia, Hradec Královè, Prague and Žatec, and would supply recruits for the Hussite cause. Nicholas of Hus constituted an example of a man prepared to risk worldly achievements for the sake of Hussite ideals. The fifteenth-century was marked by the Hussite revolution which grew out of an attempt to reform the religious lives of the people. Hus was primarily concerned with the reform of religious life both in the individual and in the Church. The first diet of the Hussite revolution recognised urban power and was determined to give Czechs the dominant position within the realm.
Edward IV dated the start of his reign from 4 March 1461, the day he was acclaimed by the Londoners and took his seat on the throne in Westminster Hall. His claim to be king of England received its real confirmation three weeks later, on 29 March, when he led the Yorkists to victory at Towton. Alongside Edward's search for domestic security went the need to secure recognition for his dynasty in Europe. The Burgundian alliance was formalised in the marriage of Duke Charles to Edward's sister Margaret, the only one of the Yorkist royal family to make a 'dynastic' marriage. Edward IV, now reconciled with Clarence, defeated Warwick at the battle of Barnet and then went on to overcome a Lancastrian army at Tewkesbury. The handful of exceptions included the Lancastrian half blood, now represented by Jasper Tudor and his nephew Henry, and a few men who knew that they had no hope of regaining their land under York.
The European countryside in the fifteenth century was more sparsely populated than at any time since 1150. This chapter focuses on the view of a 'demographic crisis' that helps understanding of the fifteenth century, but that excessive dependence on it leads to a distorted and incomplete picture. The desertion and shrinkage of settlements followed from the demographic crisis. The developments in farming amounted almost to a new ecological balance, reflected in the scientific evidence of pollen samples by a diminishing proportion of cereals and the weeds of cultivation, and increases in grass and tree pollen. The examination of the varied history of different regions suggests that the 'demographic crisis' applies most appropriately to lowland arable farming regions. Fifteenth-century Europe had experienced centuries of commercialisation and urbanisation. Peasants accounted collectively for the bulk of agricultural production. Despite the widespread abandonment of direct production for the market, home farms still produced for lords' households, and some nobles ventured into profitable enterprises.
The epochs in the history of art occupy so central a position in western achievement yet so strongly resist the neat distinctions of period and categorisation as the fifteenth century. The arts of fifteenth-century Christendom, known variously as 'late medieval', 'early Renaissance', 'late Gothic', even 'florid' and 'flamboyant', present an extraordinarily heterogeneous picture. The most profound changes come from the most mimetic of media, manuscript and panel painting, and to leave architecture, and to a lesser extent sculpture, unaltered until the mid-sixteenth century. The contrasting sensibilities of van der Weyden and van Eyck established the two poles within which Netherlandish painting operated to the end of the century. The Quattrocento sanctioned all kinds of personal commemoration for political, military, literary and artistic achievement. The cultivation of purely aesthetic values and interests, allied to a proliferation of new kinds of secular art in northern Europe and Italy, cannot obscure the fact that fifteenth-century art remained predominantly religious.
The diversity of European experience at the end of the Middle Ages could also be seen in the changing role played by nobilities, now increasingly national, in a rapidly altering world. The economic history of Europe was affected by famine and even more by war, although it is claimed that war did not have as ruinous an effect on international trade as might be expected. The rise of the state, which historians of recent years have traced back to the thirteenth century, took on different forms and emerged at different tempi in different parts of Europe. Royal intervention in England against the subversive activities of the Lollard heretics in the century's early years, and the establishment, by royal request in 1478, of the Inquisition in Castile, originally to deal with converted Jews who renounced their Christianity. The development of taxation, already advanced in many territories by 1400, was now becoming a marked feature of life over the whole of Europe.
Italy in the fifteenth century was becoming a more coherent political area and it is hard to confine discussion to the northern part of the peninsula, without reference to the pope or to the king of Naples. Rising levels of taxation and borrowing, increasing expenditure on state enterprises, eroded the instinctive capitalistic interests of individual entrepreneurs and distorted the economies of the Italian states. In the early fifteenth century the hegemonic aspirations of first the Visconti and then Ladislas of Naples appeared to be the controlling factors in Italian politics. Of the three main states of northern Italy it is Florence which has attracted most interest from historians in the first half of the fifteenth century. Florentine republicanism was edging gradually towards oligarchy in the later years of the fourteenth century. The corollary to the emergence of class and cultural division within the individual societies of Renaissance Italy was a tendency for the elites to seek links with each other.
The salient features in the history of schools and universities of medieval Christendom were progress and, on the whole, continuity until the crisis of the Great Schism. This chapter focuses on the consideration of the old and the new, of tradition and innovation. The new universities created in fifteenth-century France, be frequently linked with provincial parlements, were in towns that were asserting their authority as regional capitals. Universities formed the top tier of educational establishments in Europe during this period. There were the traditional ecclesiastical schools, to be found in large numbers in the vicinity of cathedrals, main collegiate churches and urban monasteries. The responsibility for primary education devolved upon municipalities and families, whose financial capacities were limited. During the fifteenth century some university colleges initiated grammar courses in annexes, so that future students could be better prepared. Because of the absenteeism endemic among teaching staff, curricula were often only partially covered, and the practice of disputation fell into disuse.
Central and eastern Europe in the late Middle Ages was home to many ethnic, cultural, political and social systems. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries this region, experienced an increase in settlement density, especially in the kingdom of Poland and certain areas of the grand duchy of Lithuania. The Angevin period lasted sixteen years, maintaining the unity of the kingdom of Poland and its administration. The Angevin regime, in particular during the regency of the nobles from Little Poland, heightened the nobility's sense of its political value. The Lithuanian state, which developed as a monarchy in the thirteenth century, had been consolidated by Grand Duke Gediminas, and was to reach the peak of its political power as an independent state in the second half of the fourteenth century. The Polish-Lithuanian federation now became the great power of central and eastern Europe. Casimir IV's intention was to weave a network of alliances based on the several branches of the Jagiellonian dynasty.
In 1415 Henry V, king of England, invaded northern France. In the east, two new powers, Muscovy and, above all, the Ottoman Empire, were putting eastern Europe to the sword. The 'modern states' of western Christendom were characterised by the provision of substantial revenues derived from national taxation raised by consent. Dialogue, political intercourse between prince and subjects, was essential to the modern state. Both theory and practice needed adapting to the particular political society of each state on at least two levels. Epitomising power, witnessed by an attentive audience, they became complex rituals, given tangible expression as dramatic presentations overlaid with symbolism. Speeches, in particular sermons, could convey unequivocal declarations of political thought. Clerics and ecclesiastics who had completed their university studies in the faculty of arts had become acquainted with the political works of Antiquity. History, like politics, was being transformed by literature; the success of Jean Froissart's work in aristocratic and bourgeois circles is testimony of this.
The usurpation of 1399 provided a precedent and a model which exercised a profound influence over the politics and government of fifteenth-century England. The dubious title of the Lancastrians diluted the hereditary principle and thus widened the field of potential claimants to the crown. The Lancastrian era, from Henry IV's usurpation until Henry VI's deposition in 1461, was dominated by three interwoven themes: warfare, service and finance. Henry V's elder surviving brother. The crisis of the Lancastrian monarchy was inevitably precipitated by events in France. The cohesion amongst the leading magnates, long sustained by the common purpose of defending Lancastrian France, began to disintegrate. In May loyal Lancastrians were summoned to Leicester for military service, and the following month a great council was held at Coventry. The victories of Henry V, culminating in the Treaty of Troyes, linked the fortunes of the Lancastrian dynasty inextricably to continued military success in France.
Byzantines were more concerned than most medieval people with the insecure business of measuring time and defining authority. In secular terms the Ottoman state already ruled far more Orthodox Christians than did the Byzantine emperor. In the fifteenth century, 'Byzantines' still called themselves 'Romans', synonymous with 'Christians'; in Greek their Church was Catholic. This chapter concentrates on the Roman Orthodox in the last century of their world. It focuses on four homelands, based on Salonica, Mistra, Constantinople and Trebizond. The city of Salonica has many names: Greek Thessalonike, Roman Thessalonica, Slav Solun, Venetian Saloniccho, Turkish Selanik and Hebrew Slonki. The history of the Morea is a late Byzantine success story, which illustrates the dilemmas faced by Roman Orthodox leaders who were caught between the west and the Ottomans. Trebizond in the Pontos, the last Byzantine Empire to be conquered by Mehemmed II, is a final illustration of the bonds which held the Roman Orthodox world together in the fifteenth century.