Renaissance
"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!"
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. As more people took an interest in those ancients, they started to uncover 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 Byzantium and the Middle East and banking. The merchant princes of Italy would invest that wealth to make more money, but also into grand architecture, the arts, literature, engineering and academics ranging from studies of the Classical Period to natural philosophy. Things which were seen as noble pursuits in their own right but they were also as signs of wealth and prestige and ways of currying favor with other influential figures ("The Cardinal would be glad to back your bid after your magnificent assistance on the new Cathedral"). Eventually, ideas from Italy would begin to spread out and took 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 a mind of keeping the squabbling vassals in line. Guns were making an increasing impact on the battlefield. In Spain, the Spanish 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 Columbus 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 began by the Spanish and Portuguese at first, followed by the French, Dutch and English later. 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 turbulent period of upheaval, to say the least, ultimately culminating 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 the lesson didn't stick).
The broad strokes of the Renaissance wars were that the Protestants and Catholics hated each other, each side bringing in more and more forces until the entire continent was ablaze. This is also the period where modern day political thought was put in 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 a shitstorm for most of this 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. 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. The Venetians were making shit tons of money dominating the Mediterranean, the Swiss were killing people for money, and the Italians were killing each other over who was the more Catholic. And with few exceptions, almost every one of them be at one point fighting against, and at another point allied with, every other one. It was that crazy.
Protestantism
The Christian denomination of 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 degree of 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 corruption, but he was the most noticeable and proactive. So after nailing a list with 95 criticisms to a 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 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 brazen acts while they controlled the papacy, including bribery, incest, and murder; the truth is, the papacy had been in severe trouble for many centuries, including a period where the Papacy was to tightly controlled by the French that they relocated the seat of the Pope from the apostolic Rome to the backwater town of Avignon and back again; when the hold of the French Kings started to loosen up 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 ripped through the Dutch, German, and Austrian parts of the Holy Roman Empire, 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 in Geneva and Zurich, establishing theocratic regimes where all forms of fun (dancing, excessive eating, drinking) were strictly verboten. It swept into France, where it intersected with power struggles among the nobility for the throne to nastily split the majority Catholic kingdom.
This 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 (his only living children were daughters and his wife was too old to produce more children) and 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 any 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 (and the much less violent Quakers) would cause problems for the British Crown later on. But either way, with England the continental Protestants 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.
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 Ferdinand II reacted by destroying a Protestant church and his officials started killing Protestant protestors. While nominally the war was over Protestantism vs. Catholicism, politicking played an important role in the ever-shifting alliances of the nations involved. For example, despite being devoutly Catholic themselves, 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) 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 for National Sovereignty. 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, which established the first modern professional army with the 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 the grand palace in Istanbul, surrounded by their massive harems of concubines and armies of viziers. However, by the tail end of this period, the Ottomans 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, ending with Marcus Aurelius, 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 has reached the apogee of its power, having sent massive fleets of ships to the west between 1405 and 1433 in a show of power that ultimately came to nothing. It would soon fall into decline as economic problems, troubles at the Mongolian border, the Japanese invasion of Korea, and natural disasters sap 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 get their opportunity when a massive peasant revolt captures Beijing, leading to the suicide of the last Ming Emperor in 1644. With the help of a turncoat Ming general, the Qing sweep into power and fully consolidate themselves as the imperial sovereign of what we now know as China. Not wanting to associate with those they still considered barbarian, the Joseon Dynasty of Korea 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 heavily-armed 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 later, 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 contains 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, and Ming reinforcements 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, 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 armies became more centralized and systematic than the old feudal systems as the beginnings of 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 point. The sorts of walls needed to stop cannons meant static defenses after this era would be purpose built fortresses guarding invasion choke points.
- This was a golden age for mercenaries. Raising and maintaining a standing army was time consuming and expensive and as such if a King wanted extra soldiers for a war it was usually cheaper for him to hire out one or more companies of battle hardened troops for a campaign for a standing rate, rations and a cut of the plunder for the conflict.
- Production guilds and workshops begin using early mass production techniques not seen since Rome, supporting larger militaries (with larger price tags). The Venetian Arsenal is said to have been able to build new merchant ships in a day using prefabricated parts.
- The Dutch begin their 500 year war to push back the sea using windmills. This inadvertently leads to the invention of modern banking, insurance, and fractional share investing.
- 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 to coincide 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 and control a good chunk of Europe, owning Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, and all territories owned by those states.
- 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. 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 Palaliologoi, the last imperial dynasty) bringing the knowledge preserved in Byzantine Empire to the west, which played a key role in 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.
The appeal of the Renaissance
The Renaissance is the closing of the middle ages. A lot of its mechanisms were still in place in various forms, but things were beginning to change. There were knights in Shining Armor and they were still formidable battering rams, but they were facing new competition from pike squares and arquebusiers in a rather distinctive combo. Chivalry was gradually on the wain even as armor plates were forged proofed against shot. All the while there was a lot of shrewd political scheming and intrigues. Why mobilize a thousand levies and a hundred knights to kill someone when a few drops of poison or a well-placed stiletto could accomplish the job cheaper and with far less fuss? The game of dynastic power is still being played, but with a rules update that favors a more subtle style.
At the same time, mechanics 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 DaVinci, 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 carve their place in history by finding new lands, settling them and conquering Bronze Age societies. For those who want to see what Da Vinci could’ve accomplished if he was 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 listed as an art history thing more than anything and it did provide plenty of classics. William Shakespeare operated at the tail end of this period as well, 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 Ivan the Terrible Russia and even has Streltsi unit (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 reminds of 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 it's 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.
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| 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 |