Cultural Renaissance in WE

• In 476 CE Rome is captured and looted, and the final Roman emperor is murdered by the Visigoths. This drops Europe into the "Dark Ages'' from 500 CE to 1000 CE
• The Dark Ages was a period of total political isolation from the rest of the world, leading to endless endemic warfare across Europe
• During the Dark Ages, not a lot of cultural output occurred as everyday life revolved around the Roman Catholic Church, with masses lives generally rooted in church doctrine, religious teachings, and religious superstition
• People did not travel due to warfare against European nations, and the system of feudalism where land-owning nobles gave large landless populations land and offered protection in return for tribute, taxes, produce, and labor
• The population of Western Europe stayed self-isolated thanks to fear and religious superstition, and the only source of education/knowledge came from the church
• Western Europe begins to emerge from the Dark Ages into the High Middle Ages


  1000 CE
• Life was still centered around religion, but politically/culturally western Europe was becoming less isolated, and feudalism began to break down
• More modern states of Europe, such as Spain, Portugal, France, and England, began to form and consolidate themselves by bringing nobles and lords under their control and stripping them of their independence/power
• Tax collection became more efficient as it no longer relied on noble lords to collect taxes from peasants
• Growing nations allowed for better infrastructure, education, and overall more cultural output, but the Roman Catholic Church was still a major cultural output, such as Gothic architecture to glorify the church/god
• The Crusades period, where Nobles and lords ventured out to stop the expansion of Muslim states, reclaim the Holy Land in the Middle East for Christianity, and recapture territories that had formerly been Christian


  1000 CE to 1300 CE
• The Crusades were a failure in the long run, but in the short term, they set up crusader kingdoms with the influx of knights into the Middle East, which became outposts for Western European Christians in the center of the Islamic Homeland
• The Crusades also set up convergence/intersections of major trade networks of Eurasia (Silk Road, Indian Ocean, Sand Roads), and introduced Western Europe to Asian luxury goods/technologies, which started making Western Europe move out of its shell, as goods trickled back into Western Europe (gold, ivory, salt from Africa), increasing demand and forming trade relationships
• An effect of the reduced isolation of Western Europe was the revival of classical culture, such as Greco-Roman culture (Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Roman Empire)
• The revival of classical culture came from the Crusades, as the crusader states occupied areas in the Middle East and were introduced to scholarship from the Islamic world
• After the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE, the intellectual capital of Mediterranean regions came out of the Islamic world, and under the Abbasid caliphate, the capital of Baghdad built its greatest library "House of Wisdom"
• Muslim scholars, mathematicians, and astronomers had for centuries been taking Greco-Roman classical works (Aristotle, Pythagoras) and building on them, such as developing telescopes, observations of natural worlds, and algebra
• As trade began to increase between Western Europe and the Middle East in North Africa, classical culture was reintroduced back to Western Europe
• After the capture of Constantinople in 1450 by Ottoman Turks, hundreds of thousands of Byzantine Christians fled to Western Europe and brought their wealth of literature, knowledge, and scientific experimentation
• The influx of Greco-Roman knowledge along with the contributions of the Islamic world and knowledge of the Byzantine empire created a revival of classical culture and introduced new ways of thinking in the West
• Humanism


  The revival of classical culture in the 13th and 14th centuries leads to the development of this philosophy
• Humanism


  • The individual has the potential to control their destiny and fate without the intervention of a supernatural figure such as god/fate
  • Rational thought will allow human beings to acquire their understanding of the universe and that religious belief or prayer would not help them attain what they want out of life and advance their understanding of natural worlds without religion
• Humanism


  Creates a huge swing in literature, education, and art away from glorifying religion and more towards rational thought and logical thinking processes to better understand the universe
• Arrival of technology from Asia such as printing


  Furthered Renaissance humanism
• Printing


  • Allows for mass production of classical texts of science, and mathematics, leading to the diffusion of information
  • Allows people to self-educate, increase literacy, and further fulfill the idea of humanism as texts become more widely available and cheap
• Roman Catholic church teaches

  All humans are imperfect and stained with sin, and therefore must spend life seeking repentance, through prayer, good works, and attendance to church, to get to heaven in the afterlife
• Humanism


  Uplifts the role of RCC in Western Europe as Renaissance artists and architects through their individual greatness dedicate their whole lives to creating works of art glorifying god, or building massive churches, which further empowered the RCC
• Humanism


  Tends to challenge authority for RCC, however, it does not exclude religion, it helps promote cultural Renaissance by promoting money and funding for artists to push boundaries