Additional Factors Toward Renaissance in the West

1. Additional Factors Toward Renaissance in the West CIV 101-02 Class 30 November 4, 2015

2. Carolingian Renaissance • Sponsored by Charlemagne • Led by Englishman Alcuin (730-804) • movement to copy, preserve, catalog, and distribute works of both classical and Christian derivation. • Innovates writing styles • the Roman script that used all capital letters and no spaces • Introduces lower case letters and spaces between words.

3. Urbanization • Cities exhibit superlinear growth: as they get bigger, people become more productive by a factor of approximately 1.5 (West and Bettencourt) • Cities produce more creativity, innovation, commercial activity • Also disease, crime, etc…

4. Urbanization in the Europe in general, Late Middle Ages From the eleventh century, Northern and Central Italy became unmistakably dominant. The demographic high point was reached in about 1300, when Venice, Milan and Florence counted at least 100,000 inhabitants each and both Genoa and Bologna had perhaps around 80,000. There were 20 other cities in their environs with more than 20,000 residents at this time. WimBlockmans Urbanisation in the European Middle Ages. Phases of openness and occlusion. in Living in the City. Urban Institutions in the Low Countries 1200-2010,a cura di L. Lucassen e W. Willems, New York, Routledge, 2011, pp. 16-27 http://rm.univr.it/biblioteca/scaffale/Download/Autori_B/RM-Blockmans-Urbanisation.pdf

5. Urbanization in the Europe in general, Late Middle Ages • Increase in agricultural production • increased the population while decreasing available rural lands • offered food for urban areas via trade. • ability of farm laborers who had been indentured to gain freedom and voting rights in cities. • (in some places, in a year and a day) • Sometimes, former “owners/bosses” sought recovery/payment • cities established law and order (with laws and orders) . . . in some ways, though chaotic, they were safer than the countryside that had no such provisions. In effect, cities became pacified. • cities developed health care systems; trade systems for providing food, etc. • there will still be problems: famine, disease, wars still bound. In fact, in many places, populations fluctuated toward smaller numbers at times.

6. Urban development in Mediterranean Europe • Social position dependent on participation in public life of the community: merchants, financiers, civic officials, and professionals form the backbone of increasingly populous cities. • Increased trade • Increase of multi-ethnic urbanization • Increased concentration of wealth then available for patronage.

7. Emergence of the guild system • Somewhat like modern trade unions/associations, but more wide-ranging. • Included apprenticeship-based training, setting prices & quality standards, methods for and volume of production, wages. • Focused an individual trades so led to professions/fields • Offered an alternative to education and training and some of the marketplace functions that had been previously overseen by the Church or feudal lords. • Supplements the urban functions that early cities don’t yet fully provide • Supplements social functions, giving people options to Church sponsored activities outside the home

8. Re-organizatonof the Islamic world • Turks invaded and reorganized the Islamic world around 1200 • In the late 13th century and in the 14th century the Mongolian invasion, from the east, overwhelms most of the northern Islamic world. • Western leaders, especially Church leaders, attempted to forge relationships with the new Mongolian states. Although these were often unsuccessful the efforts opened China to the West. • Southern parstof the Islamic world, stretching from modern-day Libya and Egypt to northern Syria, remained under Turkish control and became, for nearly 200 years, the Mamluk Sultanate. • The Turkish and Mongolian invasions had MUCH GREATER impacts on the Islamic/Arabic world than did the Western-led Crusades • The fragmentation left openings for the West, though never to the point of re-integration, yet, not singularly insular.

9. Printing press (1445)and the Literacy Equation • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_QB4zGQ79I • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ojyCDRc8uc

10. Printing press (1445)and the Literacy Equation • Guttenberg combined technologies of paper, viscous oil-based ink, winepress, and movable type. These were all available technologies at the time but his was a unique combination • the press led to more standardized formatting, making tax easier to read • printed text lowered the prices of books therefore enabled a wider range of purchasers • the ability to produce more books led to the development of publishing as an industry that included printing distribution and that supported authorship and reading. • literacy spread from an elite practice to an every day regularity for a wider range of people • printing change power relationships between those who knew and those who were learning. All teacher-student relationships shifted: Priest of the faithful, teacher to the student. • reading became the dominant communication medium • even architecture changed as quite spaces needed to be carved out for individualized reading, thinking, reasoning, argument.