Renaissance, Reformation and Geographical Discoveries

Three movements between the fourteenth and the seventeenth century closed the medieval age in Europe and opened the modern one: the Renaissance, which revived learning and art; the Reformation, which broke the religious unity of western Europe; and the geographical discoveries, which carried European ships to India and the Americas. Competitive papers rarely ask why these movements happened. They ask who did what, and in which year, so this note fixes the pairs and the dates first and explains the movement around them.

Why the Renaissance began in Italy

Renaissance means rebirth, and what was reborn was the learning of ancient Greece and Rome. It began in the city states of Italy, above all Florence, Venice, Genoa and Milan, and spread north across Europe in the sixteenth century. Three conditions made Italy the starting point. First, the Italian cities grew rich on the eastern trade and their merchant families, the Medici of Florence most famously, paid for artists and scholars. Second, Italy stood on the ruins of Rome, so classical manuscripts, statues and buildings lay close at hand. Third, when the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Mehmed the Second captured Constantinople in 1453, Greek scholars fled westwards with their manuscripts and settled in Italian towns. The capture of Constantinople also closed the old land route to the east and pushed Europe to look for a sea route to India, which links this movement directly to the voyages.

Humanism, literature and the printing press

The new outlook was humanism: an interest in human life in this world, in reason and in the individual, rather than only in salvation. Petrarch is called the father of humanism. Dante Alighieri wrote the Divine Comedy, Boccaccio the Decameron, and Niccolo Machiavelli the Prince, a cold manual of statecraft that separated politics from morality. In northern Europe Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote In Praise of Folly and Thomas More wrote Utopia. None of this would have spread far without Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, who introduced printing with movable metal type in Europe about 1450 and printed the Gutenberg Bible. Printing made books cheap, carried new ideas across borders in months and later made the Reformation unstoppable.

Art and science of the Renaissance

Renaissance artists studied anatomy and used linear perspective, oil paint and light and shade to make flat surfaces look real.

The Reformation

The Reformation was a revolt against the authority and the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church. The immediate grievance was the sale of indulgences, pardons for sin sold for money. On 31 October 1517 Martin Luther, a German monk and professor at Wittenberg, published his Ninety Five Theses against indulgences. He was excommunicated, refused to withdraw at the Diet of Worms in 1521, translated the Bible into German and taught that faith alone and the Bible alone, not the priest, save a Christian. His followers were called Lutherans, and from the protest of the German princes in 1529 came the word Protestant. John Calvin carried the movement further at Geneva, wrote the Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 and preached predestination; Ulrich Zwingli led the reform at Zurich. In England the break was political as much as religious: Henry the Eighth, refused a divorce by the Pope, got the Act of Supremacy passed in 1534, which made the king the supreme head of the Church of England. The German wars of religion were closed by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which let each prince fix the religion of his own state.

The Counter-Reformation

The Catholic Church answered with reform of its own. Ignatius Loyola, a Spanish soldier turned priest, founded the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, who became teachers and missionaries and reached Goa and the Mughal court. The Council of Trent, which met between 1545 and 1563, ended the worst abuses, tightened discipline over the clergy and restated Catholic doctrine. The Church also drew up the Index of Prohibited Books and used the Inquisition against heresy. A century of religious war followed in central Europe and ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

The geographical discoveries

The motives were gold, spices, glory and the spread of Christianity, and the push came from the Ottoman hold on the land routes. The means were new: the mariner compass, the astrolabe, better maps and the light, manoeuvrable caravel. Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal organised the first systematic voyages down the African coast.

Spain and Portugal divided the unknown world between themselves by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. The new continent took its name from Amerigo Vespucci, who argued that it was a separate landmass and not Asia. Hernan Cortes destroyed the Aztec empire of Mexico and Francisco Pizarro the Inca empire of Peru, and American silver flowed into Europe.

What the discoveries changed

• Trade moved from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, so Lisbon, Seville, Amsterdam and London rose while Venice and Genoa declined.
• The exchange of crops was permanent: potato, tomato, maize, chilli, tobacco and cocoa came to the Old World, while wheat, sugarcane and horses went to the New World.
• American silver caused a long rise in prices in Europe, called the price revolution, and funded the age of mercantilism.
• Colonies, the plantation economy and the Atlantic slave trade followed, and for India the arrival of the Portuguese in 1498 began four and a half centuries of European presence.