The Renaissance Dawn of a New Age

About 1450, European scholars became more interested in studying the world around them. Their art became more true to life. They began to explore new lands. The new age in Europe was eventually called “the Renaissance.”

Italian cities such as Naples, Genoa, and Venice became centers of trade between Europe and the Middle East. Arab scholars preserved the writings of the ancient Greeks in their libraries.

Historians consider the Renaissance to be the beginning of modern history. The Renaissance began in northern Italy and then spread through Europe.

When the Italian cities traded with the Arabs, ideas were exchanged along with goods. These ideas, preserved from the ancient past, served as the basis of the Renaissance.

Leonardo DaVinci was viewed as true Renaissance Man He excelled in many areas of study, like painting, sculpture, anatomy and scientific inquiry- inventing. Theology also took a turn during this period, and the "humanity" of God was emphasized.

There was a more humanistic study of everything, the kind of humanism that viewed man’s full potential. This type expression was not a rejection of Christianity, but rather a means to promote it.

Everybody could now study from the ancient Latin and Greek texts, since they wanted to explore the full breath of human experience. There were great works in this time period devoted to Church Literature, and there was Church patronage of art and music.

When the Byzantine empire fell to Muslim Turks in 1453, many Christian scholars left Greece for Italy. However, the Renaissance was much more than simply studying the work of ancient scholars.

It influenced painting, sculpture, and architecture. Paintings became more realistic and focused less often on religious topics. Rich families became patrons and commissioned great art.

Artists advanced the Renaissance style of showing nature and depicting the feelings of people. In Britain, there was a flowering in literature and drama that included the plays of William Shakespeare.

It's hard to know why Europeans suddenly expanded over the globe with such rapidity and such ferocity. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the world was a fairly small and contained place for Europeans.

While they knew about far-flung areas such as China and southern Africa, their world view was still narrowly focused on Europe and the Mediterranean. Within two hundred years, Europeans would be all over the world with settlements on every continent except Australia and Antarctica.

By 1600, most of the coastline of the Americas would be under the domination of Europeans as well as all the major cities in eastern Africa. How did this happen? How did Europeans suddenly end up all over the world? And how did this change the European world view?

The simplest and most obvious answer is the growth of mercantilism in the high middle ages. Mercantilism is a simple economic activity.

All it involves is the purchase of certain goods in a region where those goods are common moving those goods to another region where they aren't common And then selling them at a profit.

Once Europeans learned mercantilism, they set about it with great enthusiasm. The European economy quickly changed from a predominantly barter economy to a predominantly money economy, and goods from all over the world began to circulate throughout Europe

These goods, however, were coming to Europe via middlemen, in particular, Islamic traders. The most lucrative market was the spice trade. Most of the exotic spices used in Europe came from the Middle East (such as cardamom), India (such as cinnamon), or China (cloves).