The Super Summary of World History

by Alan Dale Daniel

  This was all very confusing for the common person. The mainstays of their world, the Catholic Church and the feudal system, were coming undone. The church bowed before the Black Death; there were popes aplenty; and the wars were destroying crops, towns, and livelihoods. The local feudal lords argued with the kings who wanted ever-increasing amounts of money and loyalty. The king and his army increased in power. Local towns were growing into cities with a lot of economic power, and they rejected feudal lords telling them what to do. They did not need the lords any longer. The townspeople were amassing power and wealth all their own, and it was enough to match any feudal lord. In Italy, the trading towns of Venice and Florence grew so powerful they were fielding large armies and navies.

  Continuous wars diminished the feudal lords’ powers while destroying the feudal system. If a government cannot provide protection it is worthless, and the feudal lords could no longer raise the money and manpower to protect the people. As a result, the powerful new cities began to protect themselves, and rural folks began to turn to the king for protection. The nation state was being born in Europe.

  Change was in the air by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (the years 1301 to 1500), and today we call this sweeping period of change the Renaissance. It started in Italy, but quickly spread to Europe and then the world.

  Let Us Learn

  Can the Dark Ages tell us anything of worth for our daily lives? Recall that hard times do come into the best of worlds, and people can survive them. Governments come and go, but the foundations of life come from the individual’s struggle to carry on and overcome all obstacles. Understand how religion can hold people together in bad times. Remember that progress, no matter how slow, is still progress. One small step forward (the iron plow) leads to others. So keep going forward, no matter how slowly, and the Renaissance will arrive. The Dark Ages also teach us the importance of unity. Disunity made the age so much worse. Stay unified in your home, workplace, church, school, or whatever. Say and do things that add to unity, not disunity.

  Books and Resources

  Great Rivals in History, When Politics Gets Personal, Cummins, J., 2008, Metro Books. P 50 starts William the Conquer and Harold Godwineson—the conquest by the Normans of England.

  The Middle Ages, Bishop, M., 2001, Mariner Books. Probably the most readable short history of the Middle Ages.

  The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, Revised Ed, McEvedy, C., 1992, Penguin Books. I love Penguin Atlases. Of course, The Penguin Atlas of World History Volume 1, From Prehistory to the Eve of the French Revolution, Kinder & Hilgemann, 1978, Penguin Books, contains chapters on the Middle Ages, and EVERYTHING in this book is wonderful. Kinder & Hilgemann’s Atlas starts the Medieval period on page 111, “Early Middle Ages, the Slavs,” and ends on page 211, “Late Middle Ages/China (1264-1368, India (999-1526). Super small print, great coverage.

  Lost to the West, The Forgotten Byzantine Empire that Rescued Western Civilization, Brownworth, Lars, 2009, Crown Publishers. Wonderful book on the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople. Easy to read and full of good stories.

  Chapter 4

  The Renaissance 1300 to 1500

  As the Dark Ages were stumbling along their plague-ridden way, the Renaissance (means rebirth) finally put an end to them. After all the problems of the Dark Ages, light began to pour into the Western world. A flowering of human knowledge and inventiveness began in Italy in 1300 or so, and it never stopped. Historians like to end things; so for the purposes of history, the Renaissance ended about 1500. In reality, it did not end because the ideas and attitudes of the Renaissance never die in the Western world. The mind-set of the Dark Ages (Medieval mind-set—whatever) focused on the afterlife and the worship of God as the center of life. After the Renaissance, the mind-set looked to this life and what a person could accomplish here on earth as the center of life. Man began to imagine he could improve the world, and he could start without God’s permission. The here and now became more important than the life beyond this world.

  New Thoughts and New Assumptions

  The mind-set of the Renaissance never changed in the West once it was established. In the Middle East, with Islam, the medieval mind-set remained; along with hard results for the modern world. This clash of worlds is a clash of thought processes. In Islam, their medieval mental outlook places the worship of their god (Allah) over everything of this world. This mind-set encourages young men to detonate their explosive-laden selves in crowded market places. Islam never experienced a Renaissance, and the resulting ancient view of life is at odds with the post-Renaissance Western world. The West might have directed the Renaissance to Islam, but Islam’s swift and permanent Renaissance rejection blocked the acceptance of Europe’s new mindset forever.

  In the Far East, China, Japan, and Korea also failed to enjoy a Renaissance, but the continuity of their civilizations and flexibility of their philosophies allowed them to grow and change anyway. Nonetheless, without the arrival of the West, the Far East may never have entertained the thought processes of the modern world. The Renaissance came to the Far East via the West where it enjoyed at least partial acceptance.

  Do theologians arguing about God matter? Yes, student of history, they do. As the here and now moved to center stage, the importance of man increased, and the things man could produce increased in importance. Science and the scientific method (much misunderstood) began to pry open the secrets of the universe. Advances in machines, art, writing, printing, building, and many more areas became common. The idea that life could get better, people could reduce pain, control crops, and do better than the ancients took hold. Once the idea of progress was established, the West never looked back. It is not that Western Europe rejected God; it was that Western Europe saw God in a new way. God was not against progress or science or thinking for oneself. The Bible was not intended to control every situation in life. Believe in God, but work for the here and now, was the new mind-set in Europe. Using these beliefs, the secular and spiritual worlds separated in Europe with tremendous implications for the world. Because Islam missed the shock of Renaissance, it failed to scrutinize its religious teachings, failing to acknowledge man might have more importance than believed.

  Europe discovered the giants of antiquity.[59] The discovery of Aristotle, Cicero, Plato and other great writers and thinkers of Rome and Greece, fueled an explosion of new ideas in Europe. Painters discovered oil paint, canvas, and perspective with stunning results that left the ancients behind them. Masterpieces of sculpture and painting turned out by Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci, and others are beyond compare. Most of these artistic giants were contemporaries which makes all this even more amazing. Not since the glory days of ancient Athens had the world witnessed such an outpouring of talent, inventiveness, and creativity.

  The advance to the modern world had just begun, but the speed of progress accelerated beyond all measure. From 1300 to 1500, the world of the peasant saw little change; but from these foundations, the world would witness amazing developments. A person alive in 1910, for example, could watch the world go from horses to motor cars to landing on the moon in about sixty years. Look around your world and remember it all started in Italy about seven hundred years ago.

  The key was a new outlook for the human mind. Once released, the avalanche of progress was unstoppable. The dazzling accomplishments of the Western world are unequaled anywhere so far, but these advances upset the remainder of the planet. A backlash is underway in the twenty-first century challenging the quantum leap forward brought about by the Renaissance and the scientific method (empirical method). The challenge comes from the Middle and Far East, and people not gaining (or perhaps adopting is a better word) the Renaissance mind and its empirical outlook. Those who challenge the Western mind-set have lost out on history. Without the challenge of fundamentally new ideas spawned by the Renaissance, old ideas and assumptions naturally stay in place. Areas of missing the Renaissance, or something like it, remain mired
in thought processes traceable to ancient ways of reasoning.[60] This rebuff of new ideas is traceable to deflecting challenges to religious or traditional dominance in society. It is the ultimate rejection of the Renaissance.

  How did Europe, of all places, manage to embrace such volatile new concepts? Why did Europe in 1300 begin to accept radical new perceptions of life, while other parts of the world rejected them? Islam preserved the books of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek and Roman classics, eventually transferring them to Europe where they were studied in the developing universities. Islam rejected the ideas contained in the classics from Greece and Rome. One rejection explanation is the Koran (the Muslim sacred book) is believed to be the perfect book (literally, no flaws), and anything remotely contradicting the holy book is abruptly discarded.[61]

  In Europe, theologians read the translations of the classic works (Thomas Aquinas, for example), but they accepted these classics as indispensable. Thomas Aquinas thought the books added to his understanding of the Bible. Western Christian theologians believed God created a discoverable world of order; thus, rather than reject ancient thinking, Aquinas sought to incorporate it into Christian theology. Instead of rejecting the thoughts of Greece and Rome, they embraced them with enthusiasm. Christianity was able to accept this challenge, although not without struggle, and grafted the new thinking onto the Christian worldview. For example, Thomas Aquinas reached the conclusion that science, religion, and philosophy all reached the same conclusion of proving God’s existence. Aquinas’ conclusions are often termed Scholasticism—the reconciliation of logic, reason, and faith.

  This acceptance was possible because Christianity told the theologians the world was an orderly place, and governed by a rational God. Thus, they could expect to find rational explanations for the world around them. Science gave them those explanations, and it did not conflict with the Bible or their view of God. This difference in thinking is the key to the all-important Renaissance in Europe. Those thoughts began a revolution of human ingenuity. Of all the differences made in painting and the arts, the real change came with science and the printing press. Science started looking at the world in an empirical way and fashioning man’s products after these observations.

  Science and Pseudoscience

  The word “science,” as used today, carries a tone implying “proven” or no dispute is possible. This thinking is erroneous. To make progress, scientific discoveries must be able to withstand a challenge, and when they fail, people start searching for better answers. All scientific theories are always open to challenge. New data is always coming in, so theories are always under suspicion. Even the raw data itself is open to challenge through additional experiments.

  In science, theories are ALWAYS temporary. Modernly, cosmology theorizes how the universe started, and the predictions from these theories have proven correct thus far. “Proven correct,” meaning the data collected from experiments and measurements agree with the theories. For illustration, the Big Bang would leave its “fingerprints” behind, that is, some evidence showing a stupendous explosion. We have found that data. This marks cosmology as a true science, even though one cannot go back and recreate the universe. This is so because the underlying math is repeatable, and experiments on cosmological theories show they conform with reality as we measure it. To understand the impact of science since the Renaissance, one must try to understand the method of “science.” The “scientific method” requires research, careful observation, recording, and publishing. Why the recording and publishing? Recording and publication gives others the chance to test the results for themselves. Theories in science come from data. The data comes from careful observation and measurement of results during an experiment. The experiment is an attempt to isolate a few (hopefully one) pieces of data that can be measured. Controlled experimentation is critical.

  Many fields claim to be scientific, but they do not predict; and their “experiments” are not repeatable. History is not a science because a repeatable experiment is impossible in this field. The hard sciences (chemistry, physics et al) do allow repeatable experiments; however, in pseudoscience, nothing is repeatable. In science, contradictory data is acceptable, even if unexplained. In pseudoscience, contradictory data sinks out of sight so the theories remain intact.

  Presented as science, evolution’s defenders claim the theory is proven; however, a theory is never proven, and the theories’ data cannot be subjected to repeatable experiments. Darwin admitted in his book (1859, The Origin of Species) the fossil proof of his theory was missing, but he said it would be found. Many critics say those fossils were never found, but supporters of the theory assert otherwise. Some argue the Theory of Evolution is merely a pathway to naturalism’s acceptance. Naturalism is the philosophy of explaining everything through nature; thus, eliminating a need for God. Those supporting Darwin object that it is science, not philosophy; nonetheless, few argue the impact of the theory on philosophy or the impact of naturalism on post-modernism.

  The problem is fossil discovery is not a repeatable experiment. We must simply take the expert’s word for the meaning of the fossil. There are finds or discoveries in anthropology, but nothing comparable to a repeatable experiment with controlled samples. The data is subject to an enormous number of explanations, but experts in the field only allow explanations fitting the theory. Challenging or validating a theory is impossible if the data remains open to widely varying interpretations. This was all worked out during the Renaissance. Men who began the scientific movement clearly understood the repeatability of the experiments was the key to progress. With this insight, the world began to move forward with empirical knowledge, and set the foundation for the inestimable progress to come.

  The Art of Oil Painting

  Figure 16 Jan van Eyck, The Ancolfini Portrait, Mid 1400s

  Art soared during the Renaissance. Discovering how to place perspective into paintings, making them especially lifelike, resulted in artwork never imagined before this era. The invention of oil paints and the perfection of painting on canvas, turned the art world onto new paths never before contemplated. Oil painting revolutionized color, enabling the artists to impart a stained-glass look to the painting. By applying color in thin glazes, the artists could achieve a glow from within the painting as the light passed through the various layers and bounced back through those same layers to the viewer’s eye. The names of the giants of Renaissance art: Jan van Eyck (1383 to 1440, Hans Holbein the Elder (1460 to 1524), Hans Holbein the Younger (1497 to 1543), Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519), Albrecht Durer (1471 to 1528), Michelangelo (1475 to 1564), and many others, launched Western art on an unparalleled journey to excellence. For the rest of the time, all paintings will be measured against the masters of the Renaissance.

  Music also began to become more complex and beautiful during the Renaissance. From about 1410 through 1600, music began to press forward. At least part of this advance was using the printing press to print sheet music. From 1470 on, the printing press was turning out sheet music. During this period, famous makers of musical instruments began to arise, for example: Stradivarius (violins) and Meuschel (trumpets). Baroque music began about 1600, and this eventually led to the Classical age. Composers such as Vivaldi, Handel, and Bach were popular during the Baroque era. It was during the Baroque period that composers began to use more complex and elaborate musical themes, and changes were made in musical notation that were important in conveying the ideas of the composers to the performers of the piece. Baroque expanded the complexity of playing styles and forced the performers to become more proficient in their playing skills.

  The Renaissance musical styles would lead to Baroque (1600 to 1760), the Classical musical era (1730 to 1820), and the Romantic era (1815 to 1910).

  Let Us Learn

  From the Renaissance era, we learn hope. A few fundamental changes, mostly in thought processes, changed the world. If the world changes for the better on such small things as thoughts, so can we. By adopting a mind
set of progress, viewing the process of our lives positively, and seeing that a little knowledge goes a long way we can change ourselves. One good event or experience can trigger a mass of others. The history of the Renaissance shows us this is a fact.

  We must learn to observe what is actually happening, rather than assuming we know or taking another’s word for what is going on. The scientific method changed the European world, and by using the same idea of close observation, we can change our own world. See for yourself, if possible, what is actually occurring. In addition, learn to question what you are told. Is it a fact that the continents move over time? Ask what evidence that proves movement. Find out if something else might explain the evidence cited. Great authorities may say it is right, but great authorities (Aristotle, etc.) have been wrong before. The only way to know is to investigate and ask fundamental questions of those espousing the idea. The Renaissance taught us to rely on facts, not long held opinions.

  Figure 17 Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665-1675

  Books and Resources:

  The Renaissance, A Short History, Johnson, P., 2002, Modern Library.