The growth of centralized monarchy claiming absolute sovereignty over its subjects may be observed in other places, from the England of Henry VIII on the extreme west of Europe to the Muscovite tsardom of Ivan III (the Great) on its eastern edge, for the New Monarchy was one aspect of a more general phenomenon—a great recovery that surged through Europe in the 15th century. No single cause can be adduced to explain it. Some historians believe it was simply the upturn in the natural cycle of growth: the great medieval population boom had overextended Europe’s productive capacities; the depression of the 14th and early 15th centuries had corrected this condition through famines and epidemics, leading to depopulation; now the cycle of growth was beginning again.
Holbein, Hans, the Younger: portrait of Henry VIIIHenry VIII, painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, c. 1540.© duncan1890/iStock.com
Once more, growing numbers of people, burgeoning cities, and ambitious governments were demanding food, goods, and services—a demand that was met by both old and new methods of production. In agriculture, the shift toward commercial crops such as wool and grains, the investment of capital, and the emancipation of servile labour completed the transformation of the manorial system already in decline. (In eastern Europe, however, the formerly free peasantry was now forced into serfdom by an alliance between the monarchy and the landed gentry, as huge agrarian estates were formed to raise grain for an expanding Western market.) Manufacturing boomed, especially of those goods used in the outfitting of armies and fleets—cloth, armour, weapons, and ships. New mining and metalworking technology made possible the profitable exploitation of the rich iron, copper, gold, and silver deposits of central Germany, Hungary, and Austria, affording the opportunity for large-scale investment of capital.
Guildhalls in the Grote Markt, Antwerp, Belg.Steve Allen/Getty Images
Portuguese caravels departing Lisbon for Brazil, the West Indies, and America; from an engraving after Theodor de Bry's Americae Tertia Pars, 1562.Giraudon/Art Resource, New YorkOne index of Europe’s recovery is the spectacular growth of certain cities. Antwerp, for example, more than doubled its population in the second half of the 15th century and doubled it again by 1560. Under Habsburg patronage, Antwerp became the chief European entrepôt for English cloth, the hub of an international banking network, and the principal Western market for German copper and silver, Portuguese spices, and Italian alum. By 1500 the Antwerp Bourse was the central money market for much of Europe. Other cities profited from their special circumstances, too: Lisbon as the home port for the Portuguese maritime empire; Sevilla (Seville), the Spaniards’ gateway to the New World; London, the capital of the Tudors and gathering point for England’s cloth-making and banking activity; Lyon, favoured by the French kings as a market centre and capital of the silk industry; and Augsburg, the principal north-south trade route in Germany and the home city of the Fugger merchant-bankers. (For further discussion, see below The emergence of modern Europe: Economy and society.)
Northern humanism
Cities were also markets for culture. The resumption of urban growth in the second half of the 15th century coincided with the diffusion of Renaissance ideas and educational values. Humanism offered linguistic and rhetorical skills that were becoming indispensable for nobles and commoners seeking careers in diplomacy and government administration, while the Renaissance ideal of the perfect gentleman was a cultural style that had great appeal in this age of growing courtly refinement. At first many who wanted a humanist education went to Italy, and many foreign names appear on the rosters of the Italian universities. By the end of the century, however, such northern cities as London, Paris, Antwerp, and Augsburg were becoming centres of humanist activity rivaling Italy’s. The development of printing, by making books cheaper and more plentiful, also quickened the diffusion of humanism.
A textbook convention, heavily armoured against truth by constant reiteration, states that northern humanism—i.e., humanism outside Italy—was essentially Christian in spirit and purpose, in contrast to the essentially secular nature of Italian humanism. In fact, however, the program of Christian humanism had been laid out by Italian humanists of the stamp of Lorenzo Valla, one of the founders of classical philology, who showed how the critical methods used to study the classics ought to be applied to problems of biblical exegesis and translation as well as church history. That this program only began to be carried out in the 16th century, particularly in the countries of northern Europe (and Spain), is a matter of chronology rather than of geography. In the 15th century, the necessary skills, particularly the knowledge of Greek, were possessed by a few scholars; a century later, Greek was a regular part of the humanist curriculum, and Hebrew was becoming much better known, particularly after Johannes Reuchlin published his Hebrew grammar in 1506. Here, too, printing was a crucial factor, for it made available a host of lexicographical and grammatical handbooks and allowed the establishment of normative biblical texts and the comparison of different versions of the Bible.
Reuchlin, Johannes Statue of Johannes Reuchlin, Pforzheim, Ger.Michael Hild
Christian humanism was more than a program of scholarship, however; it was fundamentally a conception of the Christian life that was grounded in the rhetorical, historical, and ethical orientation of humanism itself. That it came to the fore in the early 16th century was the result of a variety of factors, including the spiritual stresses of rapid social change and the inability of the ecclesiastical establishment to cope with the religious needs of an increasingly literate and self-confident laity. By restoring the gospel to the centre of Christian piety, the humanists believed they were better serving the needs of ordinary people. They attacked scholastic theology as an arid intellectualization of simple faith, and they deplored the tendency of religion to become a ritual practiced vicariously through a priest. They also despised the whole late-medieval apparatus of relic mongering, hagiology, indulgences, and image worship, and they ridiculed it in their writings, sometimes with devastating effect. According to the Christian humanists, the fundamental law of Christianity was the law of love as revealed by Jesus Christ in the Gospel. Love, peace, and simplicity should be the aims of the good Christian, and the life of Christ his perfect model. The chief spokesman for this point of view was Desiderius Erasmus, the most influential humanist of his day. Erasmus and his colleagues were uninterested in dogmatic differences and were early champions of religious toleration. In this they were not in tune with the changing times, for the outbreak of the Reformation polarized European society along confessional lines, with the paradoxical result that the Christian humanists, who had done so much to lay the groundwork for religious reform, ended by being suspect on both sides—by the Roman Catholics as subversives who (as it was said of Erasmus) had “laid the egg that Luther hatched” and by the Protestants as hypocrites who had abandoned the cause of reformation out of cowardice or ambition. Toleration belonged to the future, after the killing in the name of Christ sickened and passions had cooled.
Erasmus, DesideriusDesiderius Erasmus.Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Christian mystics
The quickening of the religious impulse that gave rise to Christian humanism was also manifested in a variety of forms of religious devotion among the laity, including mysticism. In the 14th century a wave of mystical ardour seemed to course down the valley of the Rhine, enveloping men and women in the rapture of intense, direct experience of the divine Spirit. It centred in the houses of the Dominican order, where friars and nuns practiced the mystical way of their great teacher, Meister Eckhart. This wave of Rhenish mysticism radiated beyond convent walls to the marketplaces and hearths of the laity. Eckhart had the gift of making his abstruse doctrines understandable to a wider public than was usual for mystics; moreover, he was fortunate in having some disciples of a genius almost equal to his own—the great preacher of practical piety, Johann Tauler, and Heinrich Suso, whose devotional books, such as The Little Book of Truth and The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, reached eager lay readers hungry for spiritual consolation and religious excitement. Some found it by joining the Dominicans; others, remaining in the everyday world, joined with like-spirited brothers and sisters in groups known collectively as the Friends of God, where they practiced methodical contemplation, or, as it was widely known, mental prayer. Probably few reached, or even hoped to reach, the ecstasy of mystical union, which was limited to those with the appropriate psychological or spiritual gifts. Out of these circles came the anonymous German Theology, from which, Luther was to say, he had learned more about man and God than from any book except the Bible and the writings of St. Augustine.