Ideas

by Peter Watson

  The painting is highly relevant to the theme of this chapter because while the Renaissance is probably the single most familiar period of history, few aspects of the past have undergone such a profound reassessment in the last generations as the idea that there was a ‘Renaissance’ of thought and culture between 1350 and 1600. Beginning in the nineteenth century, and thanks mainly to the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, in his book The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), a view evolved that the Renaissance was ‘of transcendent importance’ in the development of the modern world, that, after the stagnation of the Middle Ages, a ‘cultural springtime’ spread over Europe associated with a new appreciation of classical literature and a remarkable surge of brilliance in the visual arts. While some of this is undoubtedly true, what is no less true is that the Renaissance is now understood far more as an economic revolution as a cultural one.2

  On reflection, this ought not to be surprising in view of the fact that the Renaissance was itself the result of some important developments, many of which were economic in character. The last three chapters have shown that, probably from the tenth, and certainly from the eleventh century on, major changes were afoot in Europe–in religion, in psychology, in the growth of towns, in agriculture, and in the spread of learning. There were new forms of architecture, the pagan world of science, medicine and philosophy had been rediscovered and major innovations had occurred in time-keeping, mathematics, in reading, in music and in art, where perspective had been discovered. In no sense could the High Middle Ages be called a period of stagnation. Beginning with the Harvard historian Charles Haskins in the 1920s, scholars began to talk about the twelfth-century renaissance, a concept that is now widely accepted.3

  In some quarters, there is now a scepticism towards ‘mega’ periods in history. This is regarded as a nineteenth-century ‘triumphalist’ version of the past, in which the Renaissance is pitched against the Middle Ages. It is also the case that, as twentieth-century historians such as Erwin Panofsky have pointed out, there have been several other ‘renascences’: the Carolingian renaissance, the Ottonian, the Anglo-Saxon and the Celto-Germanic. So it was not only the Italians of the fourteenth and fifteenth century who rediscovered classical antiquity. However, it is still true to say that, despite these reservations, the Italians–more than anyone else–recognised what was happening. Even Panofsky conceded that the Italian Renaissance was a ‘mutation’, a decisive and irreversible step forward, rather than an ‘evolution’.4

  Various factors–mainly technological and economic–appear to have combined to help create what we might call the Renaissance proper. Technologically, these were: the arrival of the magnetic compass from China, which made possible a number of exceptional off-shore navigational feats that opened the globe to European exploration; gunpowder–which also arrived from China and, as was alluded to earlier, contributed to the overthrow of the old feudal order and helped the rise of nationalism; the mechanical clock, which transformed man’s relationship to time and in particular work, freeing the structure of human activity from the rhythms of nature; and the printing press, which accounted for a quantum jump in the spread of learning, and moreover eroding the monopoly on it once held by the church. In addition, silent reading promoted solitary reflection that helped in an insidious way to free individuals from the more traditional forms of thinking, and from the collective control of thinking, helping to fuel subversion, heresy, originality and individuality.

  A great deal of ink has been spilled over the impact of the great plague, the Black Death, on the Renaissance. For example, in the fourteenth century, as a result of the plague, many areas of the countryside were short of people. This had the effect of forcing many landlords to give in to peasant demands and the resulting improvement in living standards has been born out by archaeological discoveries which have demonstrated a shift at this time from earthenware to metal cooking pots.5 The plague seems to have had two main effects on the church, and on religious life. The very great number of deaths made people pessimistic and drove them inwards, towards a more private faith. Many more private chapels and charities were founded in the wake of the plague than hitherto, and there was a rise in mysticism. There was also a new focus on the body of Christ: whereas Lateran IV had stipulated that Catholics should take communion at least once a year, the faithful now sought to partake as often as they could.6 At the same time, of course, many people went in the opposite direction, psychologically speaking, and started to doubt the existence of a providential God. The second main effect of the plague was on the structure of the church itself: some 40 per cent of priests had been carried off and in many cases very young clergy were appointed to replace those who had died. These young priests were much less well-educated than their predecessors and this reinforced the fact that the church’s authority in the area of learning was much reduced. Catholic schooling collapsed in many areas. Any link between the Black Death and the Renaissance is thus tenuous and the specific evidence goes both ways. Yes, the less well-educated clergy may have contributed to a lessening of clerical authority, but the greater piety in the wake of the plague is the very opposite of what we see in the Renaissance. Perhaps the best that can be said is that, in helping to destroy the old feudal system, which was already waning, the Black Death delivered the coup de grâce, allowing a new system to flourish.

  More convincing are the explanations for why the Renaissance originated and went furthest in Italy. This had a great deal to do with the small size of the Italian city-states. They had retained their independence largely because of the long-running battles between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. In addition, Italy’s geography–one-fifth mountainous and three-fifths hilly, a long, thin peninsula with a very long coastline–discouraged agriculture and encouraged commerce, seafaring, trade and industry. Together, this political and geographical set-up promoted the growth of towns: by 1300 Italy had twenty-three cities with a population of 20,000 or more. A relatively urban population, with a large measure of independence, together with its trading position, between northern Europe and the Middle East, meant that Italy’s merchants were better educated than most and in a better position to profit from the changes taking place.

  We saw in an earlier chapter that the twelfth-century renaissance was associated with a change in schooling–from monastic schools to cathedral schools, and a change in teaching, from solitary charismatic masters with pupils on a one-to-one basis, to much larger classrooms and book-learning. Likewise, in Renaissance Italy there was a further change which, says Paul Grendler in his study of Schooling in Renaissance Italy, cannot be overestimated. ‘The extraordinary political, social, economic and even linguistic diversity [in Italy]–diversiveness would be a better term–threatened to pull the peninsula apart at any moment. But schooling united Italians and played a major role in creating the Renaissance. Humanistic pedagogues developed a new educational path very different from education in the rest of Europe in the early fifteenth century. Thereafter, Italy’s elite of rulers, professionals, and humanists shared the language of classical Latin. They shared a common rhetoric. And they drew from the same storehouse of moral attitudes and life examples learned in school. The humanistic curriculum unified the Renaissance, making it a coherent cultural and historical epoch of great achievement.’7

  Behind Renaissance education, says Grendler, lay the optimistic presupposition that the world was susceptible to understanding and control. By the mid-1300s, when the medieval church schooling system collapsed, there emerged in Italy three types of school. These were the Communal Latin School, run by the municipality, independent schools (or private schools, as we would say), and abbaco schools, for training merchant and business skills. According to figures Grendler quotes for Venice, some 89 per cent of students attended independent schools, compared with 4 per cent who went to communal schools. He says that 33 per cent of boys of school age had a rudimentary literacy, 12 per cent of girls, and that overall about 23 per cent of the inhabita
nts of Venice were literate by 1587.8 Venice, he says, was not atypical.

  In the fifteenth century the humanists changed the curriculum. Out went the verse grammars and glossaries, the morality poems and the ars dictaminis. Instead, they substituted grammar, rhetoric, poetry and history based on recently recovered classical authors and, above all, they introduced the letters of Cicero ‘as the Latin prose model’. Most of the schoolmasters were humanists and, by 1450, says Grendler, schools in a majority of northern and central Italian cities taught the studia humanitatis.9 Education focused on learning to read, on eloquent letter-writing, on poetry, and history, ‘a new subject not found in the medieval curriculum’. Grendler rejects the criticism that the study of Latin stifled originality and made students docile. The very fact of the Renaissance, he says, disproves this. Instead, he says that the majority of students ‘loved Latin and the civilisation it unlocked’. This, heargues, is what helps explain the Renaissance, and he likens the learning of Latin then to the learning of music and athletics today. Young people so love what they do, and what lies at the end of their exertions, that those exertions are not felt as such: people are fascinated by the skill and know how important its mastery is for what lies ahead. Above all, the education was secular and that, of course, had a big effect on the outlook of countless graduates of the system, whether they were artists, civil servants or businessmen.

  The abbaco schools took their name from the Liber abbaco written in the early thirteenth century by Leonardo Fibonacci, the son of a Pisan governmental official sent to direct the Pisan trading colony at Bougie, Algeria, where he encountered Hindu-Arabic numerals and other aspects of Arabic mathematics (see also Chapter 12). Fibonacci never had much effect on mathematical theory in the universities but he was a big influence on Italian Renaissance business. Boys studied abbaco for about two years at the mid-point of their other schooling. Niccolò Machiavelli, for example, enrolled in an abbaco school at the age of ten years and eight months and stayed for twenty-two months. Almost all boys who enrolled in these schools were between eleven and fourteen at the time. Sometimes the communes hired masters to teach abbaco, sometimes they were independent.10 The importance of these skills are shown by the fact that even Leon Battista Alberti, in Della famiglia, recommends that children study abbaco. ‘Students should then return to the “poets, orators and philosophers”.’11 Abbaco consisted of basic arithmetic, finger-reckoning, accounting, calculating interest, memorising multiplication tables, some geometry and, the heart of the system, study of up to two hundred mathematical problems of business–weights and measures, currency conversion, problems of division when there is a partnership, loans and interest, and double-entry book-keeping. The abbaco books–especially the section on merchant problems–acted as reference works after schooling was over: when a merchant couldn’t solve a problem, he looked through the abbaco until he found something roughly comparable. These books also taught good business practice–how to tie up in a bundle all the paperwork of a particular financial year, how to keep a record of disputes, how to anticipate inheritance problems and so on. There was no reference to the ‘just price’.12

  Once again, we shouldn’t make more of these schools than is there, but nor should we overlook the fact that this was the first time any civilisation had routinely and systematically trained its children, or adolescents, in good business practice. The explosion of imagination, for which the Renaissance is chiefly known, was not based only on commercial prosperity, but numeracy and business skills were regarded as an integral element in the education of Italian children in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and their contribution ought not to be overlooked or minimised.

  Among the Italian city-states, Florence stood out. At about 95,000 souls, its population was around half that of Milan, Venice or Paris, and much the same as Genoa and Naples.13 Some way from the sea, Florence had no harbour but by the late fifteenth century it mixed the craft-related services of Milan or Venice with banking. There were, says Peter Burke, 270 cloth-making workshops, eighty-four for wood-carving and inlay, eighty-three for silk, seventy-four for goldsmiths and fifty-four for stone-dressers. The city’s many new palaces had modern plumbing, as can be seen from contemporary accounts which are full of references for wells, cisterns, cesspools and latrines. The streets were already properly paved and kept clean by sewers that drained into the Arno.14 All of which reflected the fact that between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, the economy of Florence grew to dimensions which were paralleled nowhere else. This was based on three foundations: trade in textiles, the textile industry itself, and banking. Italy in general and Florence in particular was home to a commercial revolution in which trade, and international trade at that, was the basis of everything else.15 As an example, in the mid-fourteenth century, the Bardi family had agents in Seville, Majorca, Barcelona, Marseilles, Nice, Avignon, Paris, Lyons, Bruges, Cyprus, Constantinople and Jerusalem. The Datini family conducted transactions with two hundred cities from Edinburgh to Beirut.16 Robert Lopez says that no other economic upheaval has had such an impact upon the world, ‘with the possible exception of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century…It is no exaggeration to say that Italy played the same part in this first great capitalist transformation as England did in the second, four hundred years later.’17

  Although there were some technological advances, such as the invention of the caravel and the mobile foresail, the commercial revolution was mainly one of organisation. ‘A primitive striving after profit was replaced by expediency, calculation and rational, long-term planning.’18 Money of account developed around the same time as double-entry book-keeping and maritime insurance was born in the Tuscan cities where international commerce flourished. This caused freight tariffs to become more complex, which in turn increased paperwork. The archives of the Datini family at Prato include more than 500 account books and 120,000 letters, dating from 1382 to 1410. This represents an average of 4,285 letters a year, just under twelve a day. ‘Writing became the basis of all activity.’19

  Does all this mark the birth of capitalism? Yes, in the sense that there was the steady accumulation of capital, an increased use of credit, the separation of management from the ownership of capital and the labour force. Yes, too, in the sense that there were deliberate attempts to expand the market through larger-scale operations. Yes, too, in the self-conscious way the young were educated in the skills for trade. But it was of course on a much smaller scale than today.20

  But perhaps the most visible sign of capitalism was the success of the other main Florentine activity–banking. This was an economic revolution in itself. The late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw the rise of the great banking families–the Acciaiuoli, Amieri, Bardi, Penizzi and Scali–with networks of subsidiaries that were established by 1350 in all the principal trade centres: Bruges, Paris (twenty houses in 1292), and in London (fourteen). Most modern operations had already been introduced: currency exchange, deposit-taking, book transfers, credit for interest, overdrafts. Demand came from a relatively small group of European super-rich princes, whose passion for conspicuous consumption generated a huge demand for luxury goods–cloth, above all–and for banking services.21 Richard Goldthwaite says that this small group of aristocratic houses may be regarded as the creators of the Renaissance.22

  As commerce occupied more and more people, wealth became for the first time the main basis of class distinction, rather than birth. Merchants and even shopkeepers, if they were rich enough, were often knighted, whereupon, as often as not, they aped the old aristocracy by building palaces and buying country estates. It was this intermingling of the old aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie, says Peter Burke, that produced a melding of values and qualities, ‘the military courage of the noble and the economic calculation of the bourgeois’. Out of this came a new spirit of enterprise, ‘part war-like, part-mercantile, first manifesting itself in maritime trade’. Eventually, this settled to the quieter, less adventur
ous form of inland trade, but it was the buccaneering spirit that first sparked the great commercial revolution.23

  This marriage of aristocrat and bourgeois also sparked a new urban elite–highly literate, educated and rational, which embodied a new order, as typified by double-entry bookkeeping, the mechanical clock, and the widespread use of Hindu-Arabic numerals. But this was still an artisan society. Intellectual activity remained functional, related to specific vocational and professional purposes, and directed to meeting social needs in a secular world.24 Psychologically, this produced an emerging cult of virtù, the man who set himself above all religious traditions and relied upon himself–a not entirely accidental parallel with the Greek concept of the hero.25 For individuals, aware that they had to rely on their own strengths, conscious of the superiority of rationality over tradition, and that time- and money-management were the key, life took on a faster pace. Clocks in Italy now struck twenty-four hours a day.