Renaissance

This article is a stub. You can help 1d4chan by expanding it

Men in breastplates with swords, spears and muskets. Hey that sounds kinda familiar...

"Welcome to the Renaissance!
With poets, painters, and bon vivants.
And merry minstrels.
Who stroll the streets of London.
A strummin' the lutes.
In puffy pants and pointy leather boots!
Welcome to the Renaissance!
Where we ooh and aah you with ambiance.
We're so progressive.
The latest and the greatest.
We bring it to you with much ado.
Welcome to the Renaissance!
Where everything is new!"

– Something Rotten!

Romanboos

The Renaissance is a period of time and history which had its origins in the 1300s in Italy and would gradually spread across Christendom and beyond. It started with scholars like Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Dante, who came across some old pre-church Latin writings and thought to themselves that it was really great stuff. They then started writing more things in homage to the ancients, sparking off an entire movement of hipsters who were really into ancient stuff. As more people took an interest in those ancients, they started to uncover lots more forgotten things and make art and other objects in emulation of them. It's also around the time that people began to think about history. This is where we get terms like "Dark Ages", "Middle Ages", and "Antiquity", applied to the nascent concept of periodizing history before what they would regard as the Renaissance.

The word roughly means "rebirth" in English. More specifically it refers to the revitalization of civilization after the medieval period. Various Italian city-states gradually grew in wealth and prominence through maritime trade as well as connections with the Middle East and banking. The merchant princes of Italy would invest that wealth to make more money, but also poured a lot of cash into grand architecture, the arts, literature, engineering and academics, ranging from studies of the Classical Period to natural philosophy. These things were seen as noble pursuits in their own right, but they were also signs of wealth and prestige and a good way of currying favor with other influential figures ("The Cardinal would be glad to back your bid after your generous assistance with his cathedral"). Eventually, the ideas from Italy would begin to spread out and take root elsewhere in Europe. Cities once again began to grow across Europe.

Political happenings

This was fine and dandy in of itself, but in coincided with other big changes. Kings began to consolidate power for themselves with the aim of keeping their squabbling vassals in line. Guns were making an increasing impact on the battlefield. The Spanish finally managed to drive the Muslims out of Iberia in the Reconquista and emerged as a new powerful European state. Not too long after that, thanks to improvements in ship design and navigation methods, Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa to India and later an Italian guy named Cristoforo Columbo set out sailing west across the Atlantic to prove to the ignorant masses that world was round that you could get to India by circumnavigation without starving to death first and ended up finding the Caribbean, thus beginning the colonization of the New World. The Spanish and Portuguese were the first to start setting up shop in the Americas, followed by the French, Dutch and Englis. Add to that some religious upheaval which shook the foundations of Christendom in the form of the likes of Hussites and eventually the start of the Protestant Reformation and you got a period of massive upheaval, to say the least. All this ultimately culminated in the Thirty Years War, which was the first time people not directly victimized started realizing that maybe this war thing isn't all that good (it took a thorough ass-fucking of the continent and even then the lesson didn't stick).

The broad strokes of the Renaissance-era wars were that the Protestants and Catholics hated the shit out of each other, with each side bringing in more and more forces until the entire continent was ablaze. This is also the period where modern day political thought started to take shape, with Machiavelli's magnum opus "The Prince", bringing concepts such as pragmatism and balance of power to the forefront. An ostensibly religious war would lead to hilarious abominations like Catholic France (de facto run by Cardinal Richelieu at the time, no less) allying with Protestant Swedes (that Exterminatused large portions of Germany) against Catholic Habsburgs as alliances shifted.

Physically and politically at the center of all this, the Holy Roman Empire was an absolute shitshow for most of the era and had mostly themselves to blame. They kept trying to rule the French, but the French had their one really competent king who refused to die. Meanwhile the Pope was having problems with the English, who also had their one really competent king who didn't like the Pope telling him he couldn't have a divorce, along with his daughter, who was even better at the job and really fucking hated Spain. The Spanish colonized everything, found a literal mountain made of silver and built the biggest overseas empire ever seen, only to lose it all to dynastic struggle, inflation, deindustrialization, and getting their prized armada destroyed by the English and a colossal storm. The Venetians were making shittons of money by dominating the Mediterranean trade, the Swiss were killing people for money and guarding the Pope, and the Italians were killing each other over who was more Catholic. And with few exceptions, almost every one of them would be at one point fighting against, and at another point allied with, every other one. It was that crazy.

Protestantism

Protestantism also emerged during this time. Depending who you ask, Martin Luther was either an enlightened reformer or whiny rules lawyer. (He definitely was a massive antisemite even by the standards of his time, though). He started out as a Catholic monk, but got fed up with the brazen corruption the Pope was endorsing and the clergy's deviation from the tenets of Christianity. Luther wasn't the first Catholic to call out the church's corruption, but he was the most noticeable and proactive. After nailing a list of 95 criticisms to his local cathedral door, Luther decided to start his own practice of Christianity... without blackjack or hookers. This went about as well as you'd expect (he was declared a heretic and hunted as a renegade), but what the Pope and the Hapsburgs (the dynasty that effectively controlled the title of Holy Roman Emperor) hadn't counted on was how incredibly unpopular they'd made themselves over the years.

You may have heard of the Borgia family and how they got away with some pretty crazy shit while they controlled the papacy, including bribery, incest, and murder. The truth is that the papacy had been in severe trouble for many centuries, including a period where the office of pope was so tightly controlled by the French that they relocated his seat from the apostolic Rome to the backwater town of Avignon just to prove a point. When the stranglehold of the French kings started to loosen a little, it devolved to the point where three people claimed to be pope at the same time. Lutheranism and its more radical strains like Calvinism hit the Dutch, German, and Austrian parts of the Holy Roman Empire like a tidal wave, making it essentially ungovernable as a single whole - not that the Holy Roman Empire was ever whole to begin with, even before Spain came into the picture. Protestantism also started making inroads into other countries. Radical Zwinglians and Calvinists set up shop in Geneva and Zurich, establishing theocratic regimes where all forms of fun (dancing, excessive eating, drinking) were strictly verboten. It even swept into France, where it intersected with power struggles among the nobility for the throne to nastily split the majority Catholic kingdom.

Even then, the Reformation might have been crushed had it not been for one nation. England was ruled by Henry VIII, who was a devout Catholic but wanted his marriage annulled because his only living children were daughters and his wife was too old to produce more children. However, there was a major roadblock to getting it: he'd gotten the Pope's personal dispensation to marry his sister-in-law after his brother had died and asking for a reversal meant sending a message to the Pope, who was at the time a prisoner of the Holy Roman Emperor, his wife's nephew. The Pope declined for obvious reasons (read: he didn't want to upset the guy who was holding him prisoner), so Henry got the Archbishop of Canterbury to step in and give him the annulment, which meant breaking with the Roman Catholic Church and forming his own branch of Christianity. This was further reinforced by his daughter Elizabeth I, who essentially made the monarch the head of the new religion and forced all English clergy to pledge loyalty to the Queen above all else. The average English noble and peasant alike were remarkably on-board with this, as the whole "England vs the Continent" mentality was already firmly entrenched from about four centuries of previous wars. However, many Protestants felt that the Church of England was still too much like Catholicism, with its head of state essentially taking the role of the Pope. These Puritans would cause problems for the British Crown later on. But either way, in England the continental Protestants had received a potent ally in opposition to Catholicism as the English sided with the Dutch against the Holy Romans, except when they sided with the Holy Romans against the French. Like we said, this was a weird time.

Things came to a head with the Thirty Years War, the first major conflict between the nations of Europe following the widespread adoption of gunpowder. It began with German princes holding more power than the Holy Roman Emperor and Bohemian (Bohemia now being called the Czech Republic) Protestants not wanting to be ruled by an anti-Protestant Emperor and throwing a group of imperial ambassadors out of a window (yes, really) in protest. Incumbent Emperor Ferdinand II reacted by destroying a Protestant church and his officials started killing Protestant protestors. While nominally the war was over Protestantism vs. Catholicism, politics played an important role in the ever-shifting alliances of the nations involved. For example, despite being devoutly Catholic themselves and having Cardinal Richelieu acting as the power behind the throne, France was more concerned with keeping the Hapsburgs at bay and supplied aid to the Protestants in the North (while harshly suppressing their own Protestants as a threat to the French Crown).

Eventually Louis XIV came to the throne in France (and ruled for 72 years, still the longest verifiable reign of any sovereign in recorded history) and quickly proved to be even more brutally cunning than Richelieu. With that the Habsburg ambitions died and everyone agreed to the Peace of Westphalia, which is regarded today as the foundation of national sovereignty as we know it. This also tends to mark the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the "Early Modern" period, or the "Age of Enlightenment."

Meanwhile in the East

In the Middle East, we've got the final death of Eastern Rome and the meteoric rise of the Ottoman Empire, undoubtedly the most iconic empire of the period. The Ottomans established the first modern professional army, including the famed Janissary corps, and thoroughly butt-fucked the Balkans for centuries to come. For a time they were the terror of Europe, a bushy-bearded, turban-wearing Muslim foe against whom Christendom would need to unite in order to survive, while on the high seas, their allies on the Barbary Coast terrorized coastal towns from Italy to Iceland. In that era, their only true rivals were the pesky Habsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire. A major feather in the Ottoman Empire's cap was invading, besieging and taking over the city of Constantinople from the Byzantine Empire, which was later renamed Istanbul. The sultans of Turkey ruled luxuriously from their grand palace in Istanbul, surrounded by their massive harems of concubines and armies of viziers. However, by the tail end of this period, the Ottoman era of rapid expansion would come to an end as the Ottoman state transitioned into a more sedentary imperial polity. Just like the Romans, the cracks started appearing when the brilliant golden age ruler (the Five Good Emperors for Rome and Suleiman for the Ottomans) was replaced by his incompetent drunken tyrant son (Commodus and Selim II).

In East Asia, the Ming Dynasty had reached the apogee of its power, having sent massive fleets of treasure ships to the west between 1405 and 1433 in a show of power that ultimately came to nothing as the Ming emperors decided that building a giant overseas empire wasn't for them. It would soon fall into decline as economic problems, troubles at the Mongolian border, the Japanese invasion of Korea, and natural disasters eroded the imperial court's ability to keep things together. The breakdown of order near the end of the sixteenth century led to a growing power vacuum that would be exploited by a confederation of Jurchens under the banner of the Aisin Gioro clan, soon to be known as the Manchu. After spending decades building up their strength, the newly-proclaimed Qing Dynasty got their opportunity when a massive peasant revolt captured Beijing, leading to the suicide of the last Ming Emperor in 1644. With the help of a turncoat Ming general, the Qing swept into power and fully consolidated themselves as the imperial sovereigns of what we now know as China. Not wanting to associate with those they still considered barbarian, the Joseon Dynasty of Korea promptly shut its doors for the next couple hundred of years.

One thing worth noting is that after the Ming (and later Qing) secured their power, they decided that the Middle Kingdom was too good for everyone else and isolated themselves from the rest of the world (apart from demanding tribute from nearby countries, a time-honored Chinese tradition). At the time, they could genuinely claim that they were the most advanced society on the planet, but this closing off to foreign ideas would have major consequences in the following centuries. It also caused a butterfly effect on European trade; the only way to acquire Chinese goods was to pay for it in gold and silver (though eventually trading in European firearms technology). In turn, this fueled European colonial ambitions in the New world, and eventually imploding the Spanish and Chinese economies once the silver supply dried up. Contrary to most popular perceptions of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the Chinese were in regular contact with the outside world throughout this period, up until the nineteenth century when the doors were blown wide open by the Opium Wars. The aforementioned fleets of ships testify to both their capacity and willingness to reach new shores. The court let in Jesuits, whose knowledge of astronomy, painting, and other European arts were well appreciated, at least until the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor. In 1689, the Qing concluded the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia, more or less establishing the border between both polities for over a century, and also highlighting the fact that the Middle Kingdom didn't simply lord themselves over other peoples.

At the same time however, the Ming also feared invasion by barbarians. Recall the experience of being ruled by the Mongols, which the mandarins detested because the Mongols were foreigners who employed other foreigners to govern their lands. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Ming were in trouble, because of all of the aforementioned problems which challenged the rule of the court; their response was to start circling the wagons, which included the cessation of all maritime trade, which was infested with piracy anyhow. Having taken advantage of those factors to overthrow the Ming, the Qing were very keen to make sure that the same didn't happen to them, particularly as the Manchu were seen as not entirely native to the Middle Kingdom, whatever that meant for the time. As the court became more and more aware of the Jesuits' intentions to convert the population of the empire to Catholicism (which would have required acknowledging the authority of the Pope as superior to the Emperor) and noticing how Europeans were setting up fortified outposts throughout Asia, they decided that it was not in their interests to allow a bunch of heavily armed foreign proselytizers to roam freely. Thus, by the eighteenth century, the Qing began to lay down rules that restricted European presence on the mainland.

Furthermore, unlike Europeans, the Chinese had no real reason to actually go on those voyages of discovery, in large part because they were at the heart of an existing trade network. They produced many of the things which had compelled Europeans to travel abroad in the first place, namely silk, porcelain, and tea. They also did not have a compulsion to seek out spices because they were practically made in their backyard. Because of the Qing's enormous population, they had an abundant labour force for both agricultural production as well as the manufacture of goods. There were also geographical factors to consider: China had plenty of frontier that could be opened up for siphoning off excess population. There was very little reason to bother braving the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean when pretty much all trade took place in Asia. They continued however, to trade with Europeans because of their need for silver to fuel their economy: having seen how the issuing of paper money by the Ming led to runaway inflation, the Qing insisted on a bimetallic standard using copper for everyday transactions and silver for trade and taxation. This would eventually lead to problems later on as the supply of currency simply could not match population growth and indeed, began to decline as supplies dried up, but we won't go too deeply into those problems here.

A little further east, the Renaissance encompasses the part of Japanese history most people care about: the Sengoku Jidai. This is the part where they cut each other to pieces with swords and shoot holes in each other with guns (as opposed to the other parts where they cut each other to pieces with swords, or the one part where they do both to others). Japan comes into contact with the wider world outside of Asia as the Portuguese landed on their shores, bringing Jesus and guns with them. The late Sengoku would be strongly influenced by the latter, as Japanese warlords seeking an advantage over their rivals adopted firearms into their armies, which contributed to the rise of massed armies of ashigaru conscripts under Oda Nobunaga. Nobunaga was well on the way to uniting Japan under one leader for the first time in forever until his loyal retainer Akechi Mitsuhide turned on him for unclear reasons. Nobunaga's lieutenant Toyotomi Hideyoshi finished the job and decided to invade Korea, which failed for a number of reasons: the rough geography of the peninsula, strong resistance on land and sea by the Koreans, the legendary Admiral Yi-Sun Shi completely trashing the Japanese navy twice (the second at the cost of his own life, losing no ships and barely anyone in both battles) and Ming reinforcements (the Chinese admiral is said to have gone over to Yi's ship after the last battle at Noryang Point to thank him for saving his life then beat his chest with grief upon realizing he had died) meant that the invasion stalled and was eventually abandoned.

When Toyotomi died in 1598, his son Hideyori's regents fought each other for control. The winner was Tokugawa Ieyasu, who was declared shogun in 1603. Ieyasu abdicated in 1605 and passed the role to his son Hidetada, but retained de facto political power. When his army killed Hideyori in the 1615 Siege of Osaka, there were no challengers to Tokugawa rule. To prevent future rebellions among the baronial daimyo, Tokugawa forced them to maintain a second residence in the shogunate capital of Edo, where they would have to spend about half of every year, both to keep an eye on them as well as to siphon away resources that could be used for a revolt; likewise, to tame potentially unruly veterans now that the fighting was over, he made most of the fighting men into samurai, who then gradually transformed into a caste of scholar bureaucrats and enforcers. Ieyasu's 1614 Christian Expulsion Edict forced out all foreign missionaries and traders except for a small Dutch trading post at Nagasaki, likely to ward off European colonial interests in Japan. After Ieyasu's grandson upheld the ban, the Bakumatsu period began.

Notes

• For the average peasant in the Renaissance the changes were as a rule not so great and usually weren't even noticeable. As far as they were concerned beautiful paintings, fine statuary and magnificent architecture were all well and good and they'd admire them if they had the opportunity to see them, but for all of that the grain still needed to be harvested and the cows still needed to be milked just like in their grandfather's day and as their grandchildren would do after they passed. They were more likely to be conscripted into a new army if war came, but this was hardly a world-shattering event for most people and not something they would be inclined to see as an improvement.
• Infantry returned to prominence during this period. New weapons such as arbalest crossbows, matchlock arquebuses, and pikes played a role in this, as did cheap munitions plate, but more importantly than that, the process of making war became more centralized and systematic than the old feudal systems and professional standing armies began to take shape. The nobility generally resisted this when they could, since it meant that the crown could boss them around more, but the general trend was well underway because these forces were just better at fighting wars. Cannons also played a role in the process, as did navies, though artillery would take some time to come into its own.
• Cannons destroyed castles (literally and figuratively). Cities stopped extending their walls and started growing around them because there was no longer any point to sinking colossal amounts of time and resources into a wall when some yahoo with a sufficiently big cannon could blow it to pieces and walk right in. The sorts of walls needed to stop cannons meant that static defenses after this era would be purpose-built fortresses guarding key chokepoints.
• This was a golden age for mercenaries. Raising and maintaining a standing army was time-consuming and expensive, so if a king wanted extra soldiers for a war it was usually cheaper for him to hire out some companies of battle hardened troops for a campaign for a standing rate, rations and a cut of the plunder for the conflict. It was not uncommon for a single company to switch sides in a conflict depending on who could pay them more, and some mercenaries such as Francesco Sforza became major power players in their own right.
• The decline of the lower nobility in Europe that had already set in in the later Middle Ages was in full swing by this period. Advances in administration made many petty lords more of a liability than a boon, most prominently evidenced in the Wars of the Roses, but also because many of them spent their fortunes and lives in pointless feuds between houses, greatly diminishing their importance to the social structure of the kingdoms they lived in. This resulted in most European countries becoming much more centralized as a result, with middle and upper-class commoners filling the economic gap left behind by the petty nobles. While they remained a part of the societal elite in most countries, their overall influence on the politics of their homeland was much more limited than before.
• Production guilds and workshops begin using early mass-production techniques not seen since Rome, supporting larger militaries (with larger price tags). The legendary Venetian Arsenale is said to have been able to build new merchant ships in a day using prefabricated parts.
• The beginnings of the financial industry began to take shape here. With the decline of the lower gentry in most of continental Europe, the downfall of the Knights Templar in 1311 and a multitude of trade barriers existing, demand arose for professionals who could accurately exchange the thousands of different currencies across the merchant empires of Venice, Genoa and the German Hansa. As demanding interest for borrowed money was deemed sinful by the church, this became the realm of Jewish merchants and goldsmiths based in countries where the church held less sway. Money became a much more important signifier of economical strength than owned land and the peasants working this land as a result.
• The Dutch began their 500 year war to push back the sea using windmills. This inadvertently led to the invention of modern banking, insurance, and fractional share investing. They may also have invented speculative bubbles with the so-called "tulip mania" of 1634-1637, when people started buying rare tulip bulbs for absolutely stupid prices until the bottom fell out of the market. "Tulip mania" has since become shorthand for any speculative bubble where the price of a given asset outstrips its intrinsic value.
• Feudalism began to decline as the idea of the nation-state started to take root. Nationalism would become more prominent in the early modern period, coinciding with the Enlightenment, but for now, modern countries were starting to take shape, as people began to think of their homelands as distinct cultural-geographic regions instead of the property of ever-changing noble families. At the same time though, this was when the infamous Habsburg family would come to power throughout much of Europe thanks to having Habsburg butts parked on the thrones of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and Austria.
• While many classical texts had been lost in the West, many had been preserved in the East, with some advances in the sciences provided by scholars under Muslim rule (particularly math; the world's prevailing numerical system is fundamentally indo-arabic). These texts returned to Europe due to increased trade with the East, which started with the Crusades. If you wanted to be educated, you had to be well versed in Greek, Latin, and even Arabic. With the fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, many Byzantine scholars escaped to Italy (including some members of the last imperial dynasty) bringing the knowledge preserved in the Byzantine Empire to the West, which played a key role in the Renaissance.
• The printing press made its debut, ensuring that all those rediscovered classics spread very quickly throughout Europe as the first modern universities took shape.
• Cartography came into its own. Maps before the Renaissance were like subway maps: designed to show rough locations and routes. But as maritime trade improved, the need for accurate charts became increasingly important, and a cottage industry of skilled mapmakers set about creating accurate maps of the known world.
• Our modern forms of Science started around here. Various wisemen like Leonardo Da Vinci, Nikolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei laid the foundations of many scientific theories, based on their observations of the natural world, imported texts from China and Arabia and thoroughly testing the tolerance of the church (although this is often exaggerated by pop history, many scientists of that time were in fact priests and monks). Astronomy and Chemistry were particular favorites, since they didn't infringe on any popular taboos and would, later down the line, invent many new methods of navigation and production.

The Appeal of the Renaissance

The Renaissance heralds the end of the Middle Ages. A lot of medieval mechanisms were still in place in various forms, but things were beginning to change. There were still knights in shining armor and they were still formidable battering rams, but they were facing competition from the new and lethal combination of pikemen and arquebusiers. Even as smiths and armorers learned to make bullet-resistant or bulletproof armor, knights found themselves on the way out. All the while there was a lot of shrewd political scheming and intrigues. Why mobilize a few thousand levies and a hundred knights to kill someone when a few drops of poison or a well-placed stiletto could accomplish the job much more cheaply and with far less fuss? The game of dynastic power was still being played, but with a rules update that favored a more subtle style.

At the same time, inventors and engineers were tinkering and contriving a wide variety of new machinery. If one was to ascribe a heroic ideal to the Renaissance it would be the Renaissance Man, an archetype reflected in the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, a brilliant engineer, scientist and artist all rolled into one. On the battlefield, the men of power were beginning to take notice of these new novelties and so active patronage of inventors was encouraged. At the same time, explorers and conquistadors carved their place in history by finding new lands, settling them and conquering the Bronze Age societies they encountered there. For those who want to see what da Vinci could’ve accomplished if the technology of his time had been equal to his imagination and he'd been a bit more of a mad scientist (i.e. if his tanks and other war machines were actually built), Clockpunk has you covered.

In general, if you like your medieval fantasy to have a dash of the modern in it, the Renaissance is where you look for ideas. Besides, the stuff associated with this period is frankly pretty. This period is often associated with its art more than anything else and it did provide plenty of classics. William Shakespeare operated at the tail end of the Renaissance, though since he was a big classics nerd many of his plays dealt with earlier time periods.

Renaissance-inspired Games, Factions, and Settings

• Some human nations in Warhammer Fantasy Battle tend to be heavily Renaissance-themed in technologies: the most obvious example is the Empire with its da Vinci-flavored Steam Tanks and extensive use of firearms. Same can be said about Kislev in some ways, as it's mostly inspired by Russia under Ivan the Terrible and even has Streltsi (that were historically introduced during Ivan's reign) in Mordheim and Total War: WARHAMMER; Nippon (see the reason below); partially Tilea and Estalia (Tilea has Roman influence too, and politically Estalia resembles medieval Spain); and, most likely, Marienburg. The exceptions are non-human (with probable exception of Dwarfs) and Chaos factions, painfully medieval Bretonnia, most likely medieval Cathay and Araby, and lastly inspirationally uncertain Border Princes and Kingdoms of Ind.
• Virtually any Japan analog as nobody, not even the Japanese, cares about pre-Sengoku Japan (except maybe the Mongol invasions) as a setting and nobody makes settings modern enough to have a post-sakoku Japan analog. Seriously, when the Meiji Revolution happened it was like one night you go to sleep and its Japan as its always been for forever, and the next morning you wake up and there are soldiers in the streets with bolt action rifles harassing people for not building gunpla and buying KFC for Christmas.
• Golarion edges closer to renaissance than straight middle ages.

Historical Time Periods
Deep Time:	Prehistory
Premodern:	Stone Age - Bronze Age - Classical Period - Dark Age - High Middle Ages - Renaissance
Modern:	Age of Enlightenment - Industrial Revolution - The World Wars - The Cold War - Post-Cold War