2.4: End of the Renaissance

During the 14th and 15th centuries, while the city-states of northern Italy were enjoying the height of their prosperity, northern and western Europe was divided between a large number of fairly small principalities, church lands, free cities, and weak kingdoms. Under the medieval system of monarchy, a king's power was based primarily on the lands they owned through the family dynasty, not on the taxes or deference they extracted from other nobles or commoners. In many cases, powerful nobles could field personal armies that were as large as those of the king, especially since armies were almost always a combination of loyal knights (by definition members of the nobility) on horseback, supplemented by peasant levies and mercenaries. Standing armies were almost nonexistent and wars tended to be fairly limited in scale.

During the late medieval and Renaissance periods, monarchs began to wield more power and influence. The largest monarchies expanded their territory and wealth, which provided the funds for better armies and more expansion. In the process, smaller states were often absorbed or at least forced to do the bidding of larger ones; this is true of the Italian city-states and formerly independent kingdoms like Burgundy in eastern France.

End of the Renaissance

A new regional power arose in the Middle East and spread to Europe starting in the 14th century: the Ottoman Turks. In 1453, the Turks had already seized control of the entire Balkan region (i.e. the region north of Greece including present-day Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Albania, and Macedonia). The rise in Turkish power spelled trouble for the east-to-west trade routes the Italian cities had benefited from so much since the era of the crusades. Despite deals worked out between Venice and the Ottomans, the profits to be had from the spice and luxury trade diminished (at least for the Italians) over time.

By the mid-fifteenth century, northern manufacturing began to compete with Italian production. Particularly in England and the Netherlands, northern European crafts were produced that rivaled Italian products and undermined the demand for the latter. Thus, the relative degree of prosperity in Italy vs. the rest of Europe declined in the sixteenth century.

The balance of power inaugurated by the Peace of Lodi slowly collapsed. The growing powers of France and of the Holy Roman Empire threatened Italian independence. The French king, Charles VIII, decided to seize control of Milan, citing a dubious claim based on the web of dynastic marriage, and a Milanese pretender who invited the French to help him seize control of the despotism in 1494. All of the northern Italian city-states were caught in the crossfire of alliances and counter alliances. Indeed, the Medici were exiled from Florence the same year for offering territory to the French in an attempt to get them to leave the city-state alone.

The Italian Wars ended the Renaissance. France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain jockeyed with one another and with the papacy (which behaved like a warlike state) to seize Italian territory. As Italy became a battleground, the independence of the Italian cities was either compromised or completely extinguished. Between 1503 – 1533, one by one, the cities became territories or puppets of one of the great powers. In the process, the Italian countryside was devastated and the financial resources of the cities were drained. Only the Papal States of central Italy remained truly politically independent, and the Italian peninsula would not emerge from under the shadow of the greater powers until the nineteenth century.

That being noted, the Renaissance did not really end. What "ended" with the Italian Wars was Italian financial and commercial power and the glory days of scholarship and artistic production that had gone with it. By the time the Italian Wars started, all of the patterns and innovations had already spread north and west. In other words, "The Renaissance" was already a European phenomenon by the late fifteenth century, so even the end of Italian independence did not jeopardize the intellectual, commercial, and artistic gains that had originally blossomed in Italy.

The greatest achievement of the Italian Renaissance was probably humanistic education, which combined the study of the Classics, a high level of literary sophistication, and a solid grounding in practical commercial knowledge (most obviously mathematics and accounting). Royal governments across Europe sought out men with humanistic educations to serve as bureaucrats and officials, even as merchants everywhere adopted Italian mercantile practices for their obvious benefits (e.g. the superiority of Arabic numerals over Roman ones, the crucial importance of accurate bookkeeping, etc.). Thus, while not as glamorous as beautiful paintings or soaring buildings, the practical effects of humanistic education led to its widespread adoption almost everywhere in Europe.

Even the Church, which continued to educate its priests in the older scholastic tradition, welcomed the addition of humanistic forms of education in some ways. Many of the most outstanding European scholars remained members of the Church. Erasmus and the German monk Martin Luther are two examples.

European artists tended to study under Italian masters, then return to their countries of origin to do their own work. By the middle of the fifteenth century, a "Northern Renaissance" of painters was flourishing in parts of northern Europe, particularly the Low Countries (i.e. the areas that would later become Belgium and the Netherlands). By the sixteenth century, "Renaissance art" was universal in Europe, with artists everywhere benefiting from the use of linear perspective, evocative and realistic portraiture, and the other artistic techniques first developed in Italy.

Italy in 1559

Source: Wikipedia