AP Euro Ch. 12 Quiz

Christian Humanism - Christian Humanism Invention - Utopia - Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam

Students from the Low Countries, France, Germany, and England flocked to Italy, absorbed the "new learning," and carried it back to their own countries. Northern humanists shared the ideas of Ficino and Pico about the wisdom of ancient texts, but synthesized Christian and classical traditions to see humanist learning as a way to bring about reform of the church and deepen people's spiritual lives. These Christian humanists thought that the best elements of classical and Christian cultures should be combined. For example, the classical ideals of calmness, stoical patience, and broad-mindedness should be joined in human conduct with the Christian virtues of love, faith, and hope. Thomas More began life as a lawyer, studied the classics, and entered government service. Despite his official duties, he became most famous for his controversial dialogue Utopia, a word More invented from the Greek words for "nowhere." Utopia describes a community on an island somewhere beyond Europe where all children receive a good education and adults divide their days between manual labor or business pursuits and intellectual activities. The problems that plagued More's fellow citizens, such as poverty and hunger, have been solved by a beneficent government. Some view it as a revolutionary critique of More's own hierarchical and violent society, some as a call for an even firmer hierarchy, and others as part of the humanist tradition of satire. Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam's fame rested on both scholarly editions and translations and popular works. Erasmus's long list of publications includes The Education of a Christian Prince, a book combining idealistic and practical suggestions for the formation of a ruler's character; The Praise of Folly, a witty satire poking fun at political, social, and especially religious institutions, and a new Latin translation of the New Testament alongside the first printed edition of the Greek text. Themes in his work include education in the Bible and the classics is the key to moral and intellectual improvement and renewal should be based on what he termed "the philosophy of Christ," relics. His ideas were important roots of the Protestant Reformation.

England - Henry IV - Edward IV - Foreign policy - What Henry VII did - After his death

The aristocracy dominated the government of Henry IV and indulged in disruptive violence at the local level, fighting each other, seizing wealthy travelers for ransom, and plundering merchant caravans. Population continued to decline. The chronic disorder hurt trade, agriculture, and domestic industry. Under the pious but mentally disturbed Henry VI, the authority of the monarchy sank lower than it had been in centuries. Edward IV began establishing domestic tranquillity. He succeeded in defeating the Lancastrian forces and began to reconstruct the monarchy. Edward, his brother Richard III, and Henry VII of the Welsh house of Tudor worked to restore royal prestige, to crush the power of the nobility, and to establish order and law at the local level. All three rulers were ruthless Edward IV and subsequently the Tudors, except Henry VIII, conducted foreign policy on the basis of diplomacy, avoiding expensive wars. Thus the English monarchy did not have to depend on Parliament for money, and the Crown undercut that source of aristocratic influence. Henry VII had a distrust of the nobility: though not completely excluded, very few great lords were among the king's closest advisers. He chose men from among the smaller landowners and urban residents trained in law. The council conducted negotiations with foreign governments and secured international recognition of the Tudor dynasty through the marriage in 1501 of Henry VII's eldest son, Arthur, to Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. The court applied methods that were sometimes terrifying: accused persons were not entitled to see evidence against them; sessions were secret; juries were not called; and torture could be applied to extract confessions. When Henry VII died in 1509, he left a country at peace both domestically and internationally, a substantially augmented treasury, an expanding wool trade, and a crown with its dignity and role much enhanced.

Education - Schools - Education for Women - The Courtier

Beginning in the early fifteenth century, humanists opened schools and academies in Italian cities where pupils studied areas in Latin, Roman and Greek. Gradually, humanist education became the basis for intermediate and advanced education for well-to-do urban boys and men. Humanist schools were established in Florence, Venice, and other Italian cities, and by the early sixteenth century across the Alps in Germany, France, and England. Humanists disagreed about education for women. Many saw the value of exposing women to classical models of moral behavior and reasoning, but they also wondered whether a program of study that emphasized eloquence and action was proper for women, whose sphere was generally understood to be private and domestic. In his book on the family, Renaissance Man Leon Battista Alberti stressed that a wife's role should be restricted to the orderliness of the household. No book on education had broader influence than Baldassare Castiglione's The Courtier. According to Castiglione, himself a courtier serving several different rulers, the educated man should have a broad background in many academic subjects, and should train his spiritual and physical faculties as well as intellect. Castiglione also included discussion of the perfect court lady, who, like the courtier, was to be well educated and able to play a musical instrument, to paint, and to dance. Physical beauty, delicacy, affability, and modesty were also important qualities for court ladies.

Spain - The Kingdoms - What Ferdinand + Isabella Did

By the middle of the fifteenth century, the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon dominated the weaker Navarre, Portugal, and Granada. But even the wedding in 1469 of the dynamic and aggressive Isabella of Castile and the crafty and persistent Ferdinand of Aragon did not bring about administrative unity. Rather, their marriage constituted a dynastic union of two royal houses, not the political union of two peoples. Although Ferdinand and Isabella pursued a common foreign policy, there was a loose confederation of separate kingdoms, each maintaining its own laws and courts. Ferdinand and Isabella exerted their authority in ways similar to the rulers of France and England. They curbed aristocratic power by excluding high nobles from the royal council. The council and various government boards recruited men trained in Roman law, which exalted the power of the Crown. They also secured from the Spanish Borgia pope Alexander VI the right to appoint bishops in Spain and in the Hispanic territories in America. They were able to expand their territories to include the remaining land held by Arabs in southern Spain. The victorious entry of Ferdinand and Isabella into Granada signaled the conclusion of the reconquista. Granada was incorporated into the Spanish kingdom, and in 1512 Ferdinand conquered Navarre in the north.

Trade and Prosperity - Venice - Florence - Merchants - Economic Foundations - What Wealth Did

By the middle of the twelfth century Venice had grown enormously rich through overseas trade, as had Genoa and Milan. Florence (situated on Arno River with fertile soil) was where the Renaissance began. Because of its location on the main road northword from Rome, the city became wealthy buying and selling goods throughout Europe and Mediterranean. The Florentine merchants also loaned and invested money, and they acquired control of papal banking. Because of this, Florentine families dominated the European banking. The economic foundations of Florence were so strong that severe crisis like the Black Death couldn't shake the establishment of the economy there, and the city regrew. The wealth people acquired allowed them greater material pleasures, a more comfortable life, and leisure time.

France - Charles VII - Charles' accomplishments - Parliament / Louis XI - Further Developments

Charles VII, revived the monarchy and France. He seemed an unlikely person to do so. Frail, indecisive, and burdened with questions about his paternity (his father had been deranged; his mother, notoriously promiscuous), Charles VII nevertheless began France's long recovery. Charles reconciled the Burgundians and Armagnacs who had been waging civil war for thirty years. Charles reorganized the royal council, giving increased influence to lawyers and bankers, and strengthened royal finances through taxes on certain products and on land. Charles created the first permanent royal army anywhere in Europe. His son Louis XI, called the "Spider King" because of his treacherous character, improved upon Charles's army and used it to control the nobles' separate militias and to curb urban independence. The army was also employed in 1477 when Louis conquered Burgundy upon the death of its ruler Charles the Bold. Three years later, the extinction of the house of Anjou with the death of its last legitimate male heir brought Louis the counties of Anjou, Bar, Maine, and Provence. Two further developments strengthened the French monarchy. The marriage of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany added the large western duchy of Brittany to the state. Then King Francis I and Pope Leo X reached a mutually satisfactory agreement about church and state powers in 1516. French kings thereafter effectively controlled the appointment and thus the policies of church officials in the kingdom.

Humanism - Petrarch - Humanism Studies - Virtu

Florentine poet and scholar Francesco Petrarch became obsessed with the classical past and felt that the writers and artists of ancient Rome had reached a level of perfection in their work that had not since been duplicated. Writers of his own day should follow these ancient models. Petrarch believed that the recovery of classical texts would bring about a new golden age of intellectual achievement, an idea that many others came to share. He proposed a new kind of education in which young men would study the works of ancient Roman authors. This study became known liberal studies or the liberal arts. People who advocated it were known as humanists and their program as humanism. Humanism was the main intellectual component of the Renaissance, and it contained the philosophy that human nature and achievements were worthy of contemplation. Renaissance thinkers viewed people as springboards to far greater individual achievement. They were interested in individuals who had risen above their background to become brilliant, powerful, or unique. Such individuals had the admirable quality of virtu, which is not virtue in the sense of moral goodness, but their ability to shape the world around them according to their will. Bruni and other historians included biographies of individuals with virtù in their histories of cities and nations, describing ways in which these people had affected the course of history.

Political Thought - Humanists to politicians - Niccolo Machiavelli - What The Prince Argues - Examples of virtu

Ideal courtiers should serve an ideal ruler, and biographies written by humanists often described rulers who were just, wise, pious, dignified, learned, brave, kind, and distinguished. In return for such flattering portraits of living rulers, authors sometimes received positions at court, or at least substantial payments, particularly in Italian cities, however, which often were divided by political factions, taken over by homegrown or regional despots, and attacked by foreign armies. Humanists thus looked to the classical past for their models. Some argued that republicanism was the best form of government. Others used the model of Plato's philosopher-king in the Republic to argue that rule by an enlightened individual might be best. Both sides agreed that educated men should be active in the political affairs of their city, or have "civic humanism." After the ouster of the Medici with the French invasion, Niccolò Machiavelli was secretary to one of the governing bodies in the city of Florence; he was responsible for diplomatic missions and organizing a citizen army. Almost two decades later, power struggles in Florence between rival factions brought the Medici family back to power, and Machiavelli was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned on suspicion of plotting against them. He was released but had no government position, and he spent the rest of his life writing and making fruitless attempts to regain employment. The Prince argues that the function of a ruler is to preserve order and security. Weakness only leads to disorder, which might end in civil war or conquest by an outsider, situations clearly detrimental to any people's well-being. To preserve the state, a ruler should use whatever means he needs, but should not do anything that would make the populace turn against him. Machiavelli was denounced for writing it Machiavelli knew that effective rulers exhibited the quality of virtù. He presented examples from the classical past of just the type of ruler he was describing, but also wrote about contemporary leaders. Cesare Borgia was the son of Rodrigo Borgia, a Spanish nobleman who later became Pope Alexander VI. Cesare Borgia combined his father's power and his own ruthlessness to build up a state of his own in central Italy. Despite Borgia's efforts, his state fell apart after his father's death, which Machiavelli ascribed not to weakness, but to the operations of fate, whose power even the best-prepared and most merciless ruler could not fully escape, though he should try.

Partonage and Power - Money - Sponsoring Art - Art reveals changing patterns

In early Renaissance Italy, powerful urban groups often flaunted their wealth by commissioning works of art. The Florentine cloth merchants delegated Filippo Brunelleschi to build the dome on the cathedral of Florence and selected Lorenzo Ghiberti to design the bronze doors of the adjacent Baptistery. Increasingly in the late fifteenth century, wealthy individuals and rulers, rather than corporate groups, sponsored works of art. Patrician merchants and bankers, popes, and princes spent vast sums on art. Writing in 1470, Florentine ruler Lorenzo de' Medici declared that his family had spent hundreds of thousands of gold florins for artistic and architectural commissions. In addition to power, art reveals changing patterns of consumption among the wealthy elite in European society. In the rural world of the Middle Ages, society had been organized for war, and men of wealth spent their money on military gear. As Italian nobles settled in towns, they adjusted to an urban culture. Accordingly, expenditures on military hardware by nobles declined. Wealthy individuals and families ordered gold dishes, embroidered tablecloths, wall tapestries, paintings on canvas, and sculptural decorations to adorn these homes. By the late sixteenth century the Strozzi banking family of Florence spent more on household goods than they did on clothing, jewelry, or food.

Communes and Republics of Northern Italy - What were communes - How nobles got in - The popolo - Signori - Courts

Northern Italian cities were known as communes. They were comprised of free men who sought political and economic independence from local nobles. Despite merchant guilds building walls, the local nobles frequently moved into the cities, marrying the daughters of rich commercial families and starting their own businesses, often with money they had gained through the dowries provided by their wives. This created a powerful oligarchy, a small group that ruled the city and surrounding countryside. Yet because of rivalries among competing powerful families within this oligarchy, Italian communes were often politically unstable. The common people, called the popolo, were disenfranchised and heavily taxed, and they bitterly resented their exclusion from power. The popolo used armed force to take over the city governments. At times republican government was established in numerous Italian cities. These victories of the popolo proved temporary, however, because they could not establish civil order within their cities. Merchant oligarchies reasserted their power and sometimes brought in powerful military leaders called condottieri to establish order. Many Italian cities became signori, where one man ruled and handed down the right to rule to his son. Some kept the institutions of communal government in place, but these had no actual power. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the signori in many cities and the most powerful merchant oligarchs in others transformed their households into courts. Courtly culture afforded signori and oligarchs the opportunity to display and assert their wealth and power. Rulers of nation-states later copied and adapted all these aspects of Italian courts.

The Printed Word - Johann Gutenberg - How it was made possible - How many? - What printing did - Government + church

Printing with movable metal type developed in Germany in the 1440s as a combination of existing technologies. Several metal-smiths, most prominently Johann Gutenberg, recognized that the metal stamps used to mark signs on jewelry could be covered with ink and used to mark symbols onto a surface. The printing revolution was also made possible by the ready availability of paper, which was also produced using techniques that had originated in China. This technology had been brought into Europe through Muslim Spain rather than developing independently. Historians estimate that, within a half century of the publication of Gutenberg's Bible in 1456, somewhere between 8 million and 20 million books were printed in Europe. Printing gave hundreds or even thousands of people identical books, allowing them to more easily discuss the ideas that the books contained with one another in person or through letters. Government and church leaders both used and worried about printing. They printed laws, declarations of war, battle accounts, and propaganda, and also attempted to censor books and authors whose ideas they thought challenged their authority or were incorrect. Officials developed lists of prohibited books and authors, arresting printers and booksellers, or destroying the presses of printers who disobeyed. None of this was very effective.

Changing Artistic Styles - Religious to... - Individual portrait - Florence to Rome - Venice

Religious topics, such as the Annunciation of the Virgin and the Nativity, remained popular among both patrons and artists. As the fifteenth century advanced and humanist ideas spread more widely, classical themes and motifs, such as the lives and loves of pagan gods and goddesses, figured increasingly in painting and sculpture, with the facial features of the gods sometimes modeled on living people. The individual portrait emerged as a distinct artistic genre in this movement. Rather than reflecting a spiritual ideal, as medieval painting and sculpture tended to do, Renaissance portraits showed human ideals, often portrayed in the more realistic style increasingly favored by both artists and patrons. In the early sixteenth century the center of the new art shifted from Florence to Rome, where wealthy cardinals and popes wanted visual expression of the church's and their own families' power and piety. Renaissance popes expended enormous enthusiasm and huge sums of money to beautify the city. Pope Julius II tore down the old Saint Peter's Basilica and began work on the present structure in 1506. Michelangelo went to Rome from Florence in about 1500 and began the series of statues, paintings, and architectural projects from which he gained an international reputation. Venice became another artistic center in the sixteenth century. Titian produced portraits, religious subjects, and mythological scenes, developing techniques of painting in oil without doing elaborate drawings first, which speeded up the process and pleased patrons eager to display their acquisitions. Titian developed an artistic style known in English as "mannerism" in which artists sometimes distorted figures, exaggerated musculature, and heightened color to express emotion and drama more intently.

City-states and the balance of power - City-states - The Five Powers - Invasion - Girolamo Savonarola - French invasion and politics

Renaissance Italians had a passionate attachment to their individual city-states. This intensity of local feeling perpetuated the dozens of small states and hindered the development of one unified state In the fifteenth century five powers dominated the Italian peninsula: Venice, Milan, Florence, the Papal States, and the kingdom of Naples. The major Italian powers controlled the smaller city-states, and competed furiously among themselves for territory. The world of Italian politics resembled a jungle where the powerful dominated the weak. Venice, with its enormous trade empire, ranked as an international power. Though Venice was a republic in name, an oligarchy of merchant-aristocrats actually ran the city. Milan was also called a republic, but the condottieri-turned-signori of the Sforza family ruled harshly and dominated Milan and several smaller cities in the north. Likewise, in Florence the form of government was republican, with authority vested in several councils of state, but the city was effectively ruled by the great Medici banking family for three centuries. At the end of the fifteenth century Venice, Florence, Milan, and the papacy possessed wealth and represented high cultural achievement, but were also an inviting target for invasion. When Florence and Naples entered into an agreement to acquire Milanese territories, Milan called on France for support, and the French king Charles VIII invaded Italy in 1494. Girolamo Savonarola had preached in Florence a number of fiery sermons predicting that God would punish Italy for its moral vice and corrupt leadership. Florentines interpreted the French invasion as the fulfillment of this prophecy and expelled the Medici dynasty. Savonarola became the political and religious leader of a new Florentine republic and promised Florentines even greater glory in the future if they would reform their ways. He reorganized the government, and organized groups of young men to patrol the streets looking for immoral dress and behavior. People tired of his moral denunciations, and he was excommunicated by the pope, tortured, and burned at the very spot where he had overseen the bonfires, and the people returned to Florence. The French invasion inaugurated a new period in Italian and European power politics. Italy became the focus of international ambitions and the battleground of foreign armies, particularly those of the Holy Roman Empire and France in a series of conflicts called the Habsburg-Valois wars (named for the German and French dynasties). The Italian cities suffered severely from continual warfare, especially in the frightful sack of Rome in 1527 by imperial forces under the emperor Charles

Race and Slavery - Interchangeability - Africans in Europe - Amusements in court - Slaves - No knowledge

Renaissance people did not use the word race the way we do, but often used race, people, and nation interchangeably for ethnic, national, religious, or other groups Ever since the time of the Roman Republic, a small number of black Africans had lived in western Europe. They had come as the spoils of war. Even after the collapse of the Roman Empire, Muslim and Christian merchants continued to import them. In the 1580s in Northern Europe, Queen Elizabeth I of England complained that there were too many "blackamoores" competing with needy English people for places as domestic servants. Black servants were much sought after. Italian aristocrats had their portraits painted with their black page boys to indicate their wealth. Blacks were so greatly in demand at the Renaissance courts of northern Italy, in fact, that the Venetians defied papal threats of excommunication to secure them. Africans were not simply amusements at court. In Portugal, Spain, and Italy slaves supplemented the labor force in virtually all occupations (servants, agricultural laborers, etc) Until the voyages down the African coast in the late fifteenth century, Europeans had little concrete knowledge of Africans and their cultures. They perceived Africa as a remote place. Africans' contact, even as slaves, with Christian Europeans could only "improve" the blacks, they thought.

The Renaissance Artist - Genius - Freedom in art - Gender

Some patrons rewarded certain artists very well, and some artists gained great public acclaim as, in Vasari's words, "rare men of genius." This has led many historians to view the Renaissance as the beginning of the concept of the artist as having a special talent. A genius had a peculiar gift, which ordinary laws should not inhibit. Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci perhaps best embody the new concept of the Renaissance artist as genius. As certain artists became popular and well known, they could assert their own artistic styles and pay less attention to the wishes of patrons, but even major artists like Raphael generally worked according to the patron's specific guidelines. Though they might be men of genius, artists were still expected to be well trained in proper artistic techniques and stylistic conventions. The notion of artistic genius that developed in the Renaissance was gendered. All the most famous and most prolific Renaissance artists were male. The types of art in which more women were active, such as textiles, needlework, and painting on porcelain, were not regarded as "major arts," but only as "minor" or "decorative" arts. Embroidery changed in the Renaissance to become more naturalistic, more visually complex, and more classical in its subject matter. There are no female architects whose names are known and only one female sculptor, though several women did become well known as painters in their day. Stylistically, their works are different from one another, but their careers show many similarities. Women were not alone in being excluded from the institutions of Renaissance culture. Though a few rare men of genius such as Leonardo and Michelangelo emerged from artisanal backgrounds, most scholars and artists came from families with at least some money. The ideas of the highly educated humanists did not influence the lives of most people in cities and did not affect life in the villages at all.

Wealth and the Nobility - Idea of hierarchy - Nobles - Social status

The idea of a hierarchy based on wealth was emerging. This was particularly true in cities, where wealthy merchants who oversaw vast trading empires lived in splendor that rivaled the richest nobles. In many cities these merchants had gained political power to match their economic might, becoming merchant oligarchs who ruled through city councils. The development of a hierarchy of wealth did not mean an end to the prominence of nobles. Thus wealthy Italian merchants enthusiastically bought noble titles and country villas in the fifteenth century, and wealthy English or Spanish merchants eagerly married their daughters and sons into often-impoverished noble families. Along with being tied to hierarchies of wealth and family standing, social status was linked to considerations of honor. Among the nobility, for example, certain weapons and battle tactics were favored because they were viewed as more honorable.

Gender Roles - Debate Against Women - Printing Press - Debate about female rulers - Men and women's proper roles - Understanding of women - Symbolism of women

Toward the end of the fourteenth century, learned men began what was termed the debate about women, a debate about women's character and nature that would last for centuries. Misogynist critiques of women from both clerical and secular authors denounced females. With the development of the printing press, popular interest in the debate about women grew, and works were shared around Europe. Prints juxtaposed female virtues and vices, with the virtuous women depicted as those of the classical or biblical past and the vice-ridden dressed in contemporary clothes. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the debate about women also became a debate about female rulers, sparked primarily by dynastic accidents in many countries, including Spain, England, Scotland, and France. This led to women ruling in their own right or serving as advisers to child kings. Questions directly concerned the social construction of gender. Ideas about women's and men's proper roles determined the actions of ordinary men and women even more forcefully. The dominant notion of the "true" man was that of the married head of household, so men whose social status and age would have normally conferred political power but who remained unmarried did not participate in politics to the same level as their married brothers. Women were understood as either "married or to be married," even if the actual marriage patterns in Europe left many women (and men) unmarried until quite late in life. This meant women's work was not viewed as financially supporting a family and was valued less than men's. If they worked for wages women earned about half to two-thirds of what men did. The maintenance of appropriate power relationships between men and women, with men dominant and women subordinate, served as a symbol of the proper functioning of society as a whole.