Ideas, Institutions, and Empires: The Foundations of the Modern State

PREFACE

The intricate tapestry of European history, woven with threads of power, conflict, and innovation, undergoes a dramatic transformation as we transition from the decentralized order of feudalism to the centralized authority of the emerging nation-state. The crucible of internal strife and the relentless pressures of external wars served as catalysts for this monumental shift.

As the old feudal structures crumbled under the weight of these challenges, a new vision of political order began to take shape. The monarchies, once mere first among equals, asserted their dominance, gradually consolidating power and establishing centralized bureaucracies. This consolidation was accompanied by a shift in the nature of violence. The arbitrary brutality of feudal warfare gave way to the more organized and controlled violence of state-sponsored armies.

But beneath the veneer of order and progress lay a world of shocking contradictions. A society that extolled chivalry and honor was also one rife with brutality and inequality. The rise of the nation-state, heralded as a beacon of unity, often came at the expense of religious and cultural minorities. As we delve into this complex era, we will uncover stories of both heroism and villainy, of progress and regress, that will challenge our preconceptions and ignite our curiosity.

UCLA Professor Eugene Weber invites you to embark on a captivating exploration. Through his insightful lectures, we will unravel the mysteries of this pivotal period, examining the ideas, institutions, and empires that laid the foundation for the modern world.

CHAPTER 1

THE COLLAPSE OF THE MEDIEVAL ORDER

The once imposing edifice of feudalism was crumbling under the weight of its internal contradictions and external pressures. The Holy Roman Empire, once a potent symbol of imperial authority, had devolved into a loose confederation of German states, its emperor reduced to a figurehead.

The papacy, the spiritual and temporal leader of Christendom, was mired in a crisis of its own making. The Avignon Papacy, a period of papal exile in France, had irrevocably damaged the Church's independence and authority. The subsequent Great Schism, with multiple claimants to the papal throne, plunged the Church into a state of profound disarray.

As the Church faltered, the feudal aristocracy found its power waning. The rise of urban centers and the growth of a merchant class undermined the economic foundations of the feudal system. The traditional relationship between lord and vassal, based on reciprocal obligations, was being transformed. The substitution of monetary rent for feudal services marked a significant shift in power dynamics. Serfdom, the cornerstone of the medieval agrarian economy, was gradually eroded as economic opportunities in towns and cities lured peasants away from the land.

This breakdown of the old order created a sense of instability and uncertainty. The familiar rhythms of medieval life were disrupted, and new social and economic structures were emerging. The once self-sufficient manor was becoming increasingly integrated into a wider commercial network. The rise of nation-states, with their centralized bureaucracies and standing armies, signaled the decline of feudal particularism.

It was a time of both destruction and creation. The old world was dying, but the new world was still taking shape. The specter of anarchy loomed large, but within this chaos lay the seeds of a new era, an era of unprecedented change and opportunity.

In the twilight of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, the towering figure of Catholic theology, posited a universal human experience bathed in the light of divine reason. For Aquinas, this intellectual commonality transcended religious divisions, binding Christians and pagans alike within a shared cosmic order.

Yet, Dante Alighieri, a Florentine disciple of Aquinas, would take this concept a radical step further. Deeply rooted in Catholic faith, Dante's vision of ideal unity extended beyond the ecclesiastical realm to encompass all of humanity. For him, the ultimate expression of God's order was not the hierarchical Church, but a harmonious and interconnected human family.

Dante, this visionary of the early fourteenth century, was a multifaceted genius. His poetic mastery, evident in the monumental Divine Comedy, is undeniable. This epic journey through the realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise is a testament to his profound imagination and his ability to craft a work of unparalleled literary and theological significance. Yet, beneath the poet lay a deeply engaged citizen and political thinker.

A product of both Christian tradition and the enduring legacy of classical Rome, Dante was a man of his time and beyond it. His Florentine roots immersed him in the cutthroat world of city-state politics, where he experienced firsthand the bitter taste of exile. This personal ordeal fueled his scathing critique of the political landscape and intensified his longing for a just and ordered society.

Dante's ideal state was a theocracy, but one of a particular kind. He saw the Roman Empire not merely as a historical power but as a divine instrument, predestined to establish order and peace among humanity. This imperial vision, however, was tempered by his fervent Catholic faith, which he believed held sway over the spiritual realm. In Dante's mind, the Church and the Empire were two pillars supporting the edifice of human civilization, each with its distinct but complementary role.

The Church, too, was under siege. For centuries, the Church had been the unquestioned moral and spiritual authority, its influence extending far beyond the confines of the ecclesiastical realm. It was the custodian of knowledge, the arbiter of truth, and the linchpin of the social order. Yet, as the foundations of medieval society trembled, so too did the bedrock upon which the Church's power rested.

The Twilight of Medieval Christendom

The Church, once the unyielding bedrock of European society, found itself increasingly adrift in a sea of change. Its temporal power, once absolute, was being steadily eroded by the ascendance of secular monarchies. The concept of papal supremacy, a doctrine that had undergirded the medieval world order, was being challenged with a fervor not seen since the Investiture Controversy. The Hundred Years’ War, a conflict ostensibly between crowns, was in reality a battle for sovereignty that marginalized the Church's role as a peacemaker.

Simultaneously, the intellectual landscape was undergoing a profound transformation. The Renaissance, a movement that extolled human potential and celebrated the glories of classical civilization, posed a direct challenge to the Church's theological and philosophical dominance. The rediscovery of Greek and Roman texts ignited a thirst for knowledge that extended beyond the confines of ecclesiastical scholarship. Humanists, with their emphasis on rhetoric, history, and ethics, offered a secular worldview that competed with the Church's spiritual narrative.

The Great Schism, a calamitous period of papal division, further weakened the Church's moral authority. The spectacle of rival pontiffs vying for supremacy not only undermined the papacy's claim to infallibility but also exposed the institution's vulnerability to political pressures. The Church's wealth, once a source of power and influence, became a target of envy and resentment. The very foundations of clerical privilege were called into question as society demanded greater accountability and transparency.

As the fifteenth century dawned, the Church stood at a precipice. Its survival, as an institution and as a spiritual force, was far from assured. The challenges it faced were immense, and the path forward was fraught with uncertainty. Yet, within this crisis lay the potential for renewal. The Church, if it could adapt to the changing times, might emerge from this crucible as a transformed and revitalized force.

That was what people were most afraid of. No clear social or moral order. Just a struggle for power with no holds barred. A situation in which, as Shakespeare describes it in Troilus and Cressida, there would be no justice and no right or wrong. Force would be right.

Then everything includes wolf, so doubly seconded with will and power, must make perforce a universal prey, and last eat up himself.

very essence of order, the national monarchy. Kings had already reduced the Holy Roman Emperor, who was their nominal lord, to a shadow, now they turned against the power of their nominal subordinate, the feudal lord.

The struggle between the central authority of the crown and the disruptive, decentralized forces of feudalism, was going to end at last in the Crown's triumph, and the internal unity imposed by the king was then going to prepare the way for external expansion.

d'Arc, Joan of Arc, was the inspirer and the patron saint of this outburst of French patriotism produced by the misery and the humiliation of the Hundred Years' War. from angels and God who told her to rally her fellow French and drive out the English.

Her martyrdom in 1431 at the hands of an ecclesiastical tribunal in English-controlled Rouen, made her an even more powerful symbol of French resistance.

By the second half of the 15th century, the war with England was over, feudal divisions were being mastered, and the foundations were laid for a national army and a national system of finance. then up to Louis XI, in the second half of the 15th century, to consolidate the monarchy as the core of a centralized state.

XI and after his successor Louis XII, the remnants of feudal independence were crushed and France began to expand at the cost of weaker neighbors. Province after province was incorporated into the French monarchy, and before the end of the 15th century, the strength of the new- Isabelle of Castille, drove the Moors out of Andalusia, and founded the modern kingdom of Spain.

Before long, Spain would also be pushing outside her borders over the Atlantic into America and over the Mediterranean to challenge the French in Italy. In England after 1495 Henry VII was going to bring peace and order to the country while on the other side of Europe a series of marriages was creating another power.

Maximilian of Austria married the heiress of Burgundy in the 15th century and united the Netherlands with Austria.

His son, the Archduke Philip, married the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabel of Spain, and their two sons were Charles V emperor of the Spanish Empire and Ferdinand I who married the daughter of the king of Hungary and Bohemia founded the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.

A lot of family details that probably bore you, but that set the basis, the structure of European politics for the next few hundred years. undetermined, and there remained minor principalities and powers, especially in Germany and Italy, which offered an easy prey to their ambitious neighbors. In Germany, the king was also emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, which extended over hundreds of independent principalities and duchies.

So, he could only attain his office by agreeing not to enforce his authority, and the empire, in effect, was the tomb of German national unity. The unity of Italy, meanwhile, was prohibited not only by the rival ambitions of its cities and princes, but also by the position of the popes.

This is Leo X, who became pope in 1513. Leo and his successors could not tolerate a secular rival in the peninsula, and although the papacy was never strong enough or durable enough to unite Italy itself, it was always influential enough to keep anyone else from doing it, even if that meant calling in outsiders to help. And so Italy, like Germany, was ruled out of the national race and had to wait 300 years for the national consolidation which its rivals achieved by the 16th century.

Now, this period was also a time of more contact between states as political and territorial definition grew. And this increased contact, in turn, led to the development of new political forms to handle. Squatters isolated on a large plane have little need for organized communication but when they stake out their claims right up to their neighbor's property they see each other more often, they watch each other more closely, they tend to fight. And that's what happened with the national states.

Before the era of national expansion, diplomatic relations had been rare and spasmodic, and ambassadors were only dispatched on special occasions. But during the 15th and the 16th centuries ambassadors became regular and resident.

These two French ambassadors were painted in 1533 and while the modern diplomatic system was growing out of the necessity of countries busy watching each other, modern international law was growing out of the need to adjust the increasing number of international disputes. And out of the calculations based on each state's jealousy of the other's growth, the idea of the balance of power grew as well.

There were other changes. Louis XII going off to assert his authority, actually not in France, but in Italy. Every extension of the king's sway intensified his dignity and lifted him higher above his subjects.

Local liberties and feudal rights which checked a duke of Brittany, or a king of Aragon were much less effective against a king of France, like Francis I, or a king of Spain, who had more soldiers, higher revenues, and better credit.

Feudal and local powers fought a long holding action against the crown for hundreds of years, but the tendency was against them once the king became the symbol of national unity and the center of national aspirations. And this monarch gained as much from the growth of the new ideas as he did from the decay of the old.

The Renaissance, which we shall discuss in detail next time, the revived study of Roman civil law, and eventually the Reformation, all of these would contribute to the growth of royal power.

Even scholars who worked with their pens and who had to live on pensions contributed to it. Pensions, after all, can be more easily got from princes than from parliaments, because parliaments don't regard purely intellectual achievements as a service to the state. king and the king got his reward in the praise he received from the world of letters.

superior to medieval Latin dismissed as dog Latin, so Roman imperial law seemed superior to the barbarousness of European common law and feudal costume.

As scholars rediscovered Roman law, its study and application spread outward from the Italian universities, first into the lands of the Holy Roman Empire, whose emperors regarded themselves as the successors of imperial Rome, and then into the rest of Europe. So, by the 15th century, the maxims of Roman law were everywhere, and our civil laws are all marked by it.

Nothing could have suited the new kings better because the old common law and feudal custom were based on local interests and constituted checks on any central power. The maxim of Roman law, however, was that the will of the king was law, and this was a maxim that couldn't be quoted against lords or popes or parliaments. There was also the Roman tradition of deifying emperors and by the 16th century some European courtiers were almost inclined to pay similar honors to their kings.

But in truth, love of freedom has never been the predominant note of popular politics. At most times, popular demand has been for a strong government. The government of the kings was never good, but it seemed better, at least for a while, than the anarchy that preceded it. Authoritarian stability was better than authoritarian anarchy.

The violence of an organized state was preferred to the blinder violence of a disorganized feudalism. And in the 14th century, any state that could afford it had means of violence more efficient and more expensive than ever before. Strong government and capital intensive warfare traditionally go together. That's because the power that controls the weapons can enforce its will.

And the first thing it enforces is taxation to pay for more weapons. bureaucracy and makes it more efficient. the better the weapons and the military that use them, the greater the central authorities capacity to tax and control, and the expense of its subjects and of other lesser powers. saw the appearance of weapons that would affect history down to our own day. Guns and gunpowder.

Centuries before, the Byzantines had used Greek fire, fireballs that helped them beat off the Slavs and the Arabs.

These fireballs were shot from catapults, but increasingly from tubes as well. So when the idea of guns with metal tubes reached Europe from India and China in the 13th century, there were European weapon makers who could copy them. Cannon and cannonballs made of iron or stone were useful against walls, ships, and troops in close formation.

Turkish cannon battered down the walls of Constantinople in 1453, French cannon helped drive out the English at the end of the Hundred Years' War, and there were also handguns. An English general was killed by a handgun in the last battle of the Hundred Years' War.

in 1452. By the 1500s, the arquebus, the musket, the rifle came into their own and became the core weapon of modern infantry, also the key to European power beyond Europe. It would be handguns that won much of America for Spain and the East Indies for Spaniards, Portuguese, English, and Dutch. In Mexico, the guns of the Spanish were thought to produce lightning.

It would be difficult for any man to stand up against controlled lightning.

And so the future lay with Europe's more modern armies, equipped with artillery, like the French armies that conquered Italy after the 1490s, and equipped with handguns that won America for the Spaniards and gave the Spanish infantry a superiority that dominated Europe into the 17th century.

After all, not everybody could build a gun. You needed arsenals and expensive equipment. By the 16th century, Spain and other states were spending two-thirds of their revenue on weapons. Naturally, countries with plenty of iron ore and a superior metallurgy had a great advantage, and that meant Central Europe, France, and in due course, the Swedes.

The new weapons also meant that cities and feudal lords were no longer safe behind their walls. Modern warfare based on guns and gunpowder dispensed once and for all with castles, with knights in armor, and also with a culture of chivalry and the culture of independent cities. It opened the age of the modern state interested in order, in taxes, and in strong, ever stronger institutions. So war and government and the world in general have all been transformed by gunpowder.

Those of you who don't like the idea of a strong interventionist state will deplore this development and I really see the point. But you have to remember the robber barons and the general disorder that went before.

The days of Romeo and Juliet may seem romantic but they were also days of gang warfare and terror and bludgeon. A lot of English and glad to see noble knights replaced by the king's peace, fragile as it was and as it still is.

 CHAPTER 2

RENAISSANCE

Next time, the Renaissance. Until then. a new modern world, a world of imagination, action, enterprise? Or was it the culmination of the Middle Ages which had lasted for nearly a thousand years?

Or was it a bit of both? the renaissance and the age of discovery this time on the western tradition And now, UCLA Professor Eugene Weber's continuing journey through the history of Western civilization.

I told you a few programs back that the Middle Ages were invented by the Renaissance. But the Renaissance was invented by itself. I don't mean that people in the 14th or 15th century conjured up the word, but they acted as if they might do so at any time, because they felt so excited by what was going on around. Now, part of what was going on was the same old mess as before and after, wars, injustice, violence, misery.

What we call the Renaissance, after all, ran from about the 14th century through the 16th. So it overlapped the late Middle Ages for more than a hundred years. there was an important difference.

There were serious economic problems but there was more enterprise, more wealth, more leisure in the Renaissance and also more competition in the conspicuous consumption that went with wealth and leisure. And one form of consumption that especially soared was culture.

Culture which adored and pursued antiquity with an extraordinary urgency and passion. Their literature and architecture and visual arts soared and their achievements made contemporaries feel that they lived in a time when men were at last on the way to recapture the greatness of the ancients, whom the West had measured itself for 1,000 years.

If you want to be objective, the West had been reviving since the 12th century at least. The great cathedrals hadn't waited for the 14th century.

And previous generations had translated the Greeks, had studied philosophy and the laws of nature, had made technological improvements. In the 13th century better chimney construction made heating more flexible and thus made privacy possible for the better off. The chimney probably affected the art of love more than the troubadours did, and it fostered more individualism than Renaissance philosophers did.

Another invention of the 12th century was the spinning wheel, which not only made yarn cheaper, but also suggested the use of a belt to transmit power.

And the wheelbarrow, which cut in half the number of people needed to haul small loads by substituting a wheel for the front man. And even the button, which revolutionized the history of clothing.

So the Middle Ages was often innovative and increasingly productive. But what changed most in the 14th century was the mood, perhaps because what was being done was less to the glory of God and more to the glory of man. You can see this in literature rebirth of ancient Latin and ancient Greek revived the Greek belief in man as the measure of all things and introduced subversive notions of a life unencumbered by revealed religion. women who called themselves humanists because they were interested in human nature and human values.

To put it differently, they were trying to discover the secret of the good life, the virtuous life. And they thought they could find it not in the centuries like them, then you could hope to become as good, as great, as they had been.

So the humanists revived the classics, and they studied and they taught them in the humanities, which were supposed to teach you to be good, that is virtuous and honorable in private and especially in public. The humanities stressed personal judgment, the worth and possibilities of individuals, man's free will, his superiority over unformed, unpolished nature, his duty to society.

And they are at the origins of the classical curriculum which was going to last into the 20th century.

The typical Renaissance humanist was a professional scholar.

Today, he would be a professor. Like many professors, a lot of humanists were chiefly interested in splitting hairs or coming out with learned quotes. But also, like some professors, humanists wanted to prepare their students and readers to operate wisely in the world. Ideally, most of these students would be princes or courtiers or men and women who exercise some power around them.

Certainly, they would have to be educated because they had to know Latin one of the most famous humanists of the renaissance was a Dutch monk Desiderius Erasmus and culture, good manners, common sense, civility, and the Christian virtues, all of which were as signally lacking in his day as they are today. his Italian contemporaries, Niccolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli was a less erudite man, but more inclined to think for himself and what this produced.

You can see if you read his little book, The Prince. much condemned, cynical, and immoral because his book describes power politics as they are and not as they should be. But Machiavelli had a lot of experience with politics in one of the most politicized cities of the time, Florence.

This is the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who ruled the city when Machiavelli was growing up there. In the mess that followed Lorenzo's death, Machiavelli learned to consider politics as a jungle, where the strong take what they can, the weak go to the wall, and ordinary people fare better under strong rulers than under weak ones. In a way, Machiavelli simply described what he saw around him. should add Thomas More, most humanists have little to say to us today. Their writings are not very readable, they're overstuffed with classical references and quotes.

It's much more exciting and much more accessible to trace the new spirit of the Renaissance in the visual arts, which really illustrate the vigor and the excitement of the time and its focus on human possibilities.

You can begin to see the change by contrasting the great mosaics of the 11th and 12th centuries with a work of Giotto, who lived during the late 13th and early 14th centuries in Florence in the early days of the Renaissance.

Many of Giotto's contemporaries still created great, hypnotic figures of authority and power, or else they painted puppet shows in the impersonal Byzantine manner, full of lifeless mannequins in splendid attire.

But Giotto's work was affected by the new revival of classical ideals, and especially by the new humanity that St. Francis had brought to religion. Giotto's approach was emotional and urgent, unlike the stiff manner of the Middle Ages. It expressed a new humanity. So Giotto was innovative, but he was also profoundly Christian and medieval.

Characteristically, his best-known paintings can be seen in a chapel in Padua called the Scrovegni Chapel because it was built by the son of a usurer of that name.

Old Mr. Scrovegni was so notorious that Dante placed him in one of the circles of hell in the inferno. So here you have a typical medieval act of redemption.

The usurer's son holds out his chapel in a propitiatory gesture to make up for the ill-gotten family wealth. Now, compare this with a picture painted in 1434, 100 years after Giotto's death, Jan van Eyck's portrait of Giovanni Agnolfini and his wife.

We are in Bruges, but the subject is an Italian merchant and his young bride. the house of a businessman and a moneylender like Scrovegni, if they were nobles and they make no apologies for their money. And look at the realism and the precision of presentation which are in keeping with the rationality of a new, more secular society. 50 years go by, and Botticelli is painting his Birth of Venus in Florence around 1485. By this time, spiritual concerns have been drained out. Not from all life, of course, far from it, but from this painting.

All Botticelli seems to care about is sensuousness and recreating the ancients. He takes an ancient subject, he tries to paint it as the ancients would have done, and he revels not in spiritual but in sensuous beauty. Then another fifty years go by and Michelangelo paints the last judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel finishing in 1541. It's an overwhelming composition, and the best thing really is just to look at it and gasp. I mention it here because it's so different from any kind of medieval Christian in the same room, there are also frescoes that Michelangelo painted a quarter century earlier. These are about the creation.

And they look to me like a powerful, explosive affirmation of man. So in these two works, the Renaissance has really supplanted the Middle Ages.

When he painted The Last Judgment, Michelangelo was an old man in his 60s. Rome had been sacked and pillaged a few years before, and the old sense of unlimited possibilities had started to crack. But the thing that strikes me is that whether in a vision of torment, doubt, defeat, or in a vision of affirmation, you can find here in a Vatican chapel at the center of Western Christendom, you can find here one of the ongoing themes of the modern Western world. Man is great.

He's always in trouble, but he's the most is a theme you wouldn't have found 400 years before. greatness of man was going to be proved and accelerated in another way by the invention of printing from movable type, which occurred in Germany around 1445 and which we attribute to a goldsmith called Gutenberg. By 1480, over 110 European towns had printing shops. And by 1500, about 20 million books had been printed. And the 16th century was going to see at least ten times more than that.

The humanists quickly realized the advantage of cheaper and more numerous books. So did the church. At first, most of the books were for clerks and clerics anyway, and most of them were in Latin, which meant that access to reading was limited. But by the 16th century, this changed.

Magistrates, burghers, tradesmen owned books, often in their own language. industry grew up to cater to more simple people with pious books and entertaining books and almanacs and chivalric romances of adventure and glory were turned out in vast numbers by Italian and Spanish printers who fed the dreams of future conquistadores.

And in fact, during the 15th century and the first half of the 16th, the Renaissance, a period of intense and passionate cultural achievement, was going to exist with the age of discovery, a period of fervent expansion. creativity in the arts, exploration and discovery. Bartholomew Diaz rounds the Cape of Good Hope in 1487, Botticelli is helping to paint the Sistine Chapel in Rome. In 1506, Columbus dies impoverished,

the Isthmus of Panama to reveal the existence of the Pacific and Machiavelli publishes the prints.

Raphael dies in 1520 when Magellan is sailing around the world and a rebellion is gathering in Germany around a monk named Martin Luther, a rebellion which would soon burst into the Reformation. And in the 1530s, while Pizarro is conquering Peru,

Erasmus and Rabelais are in full bloom, while Michelangelo is painting his last judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel.

The Renaissance and the Age of Discovery were two peaks of achievement, one of imagination, the other of action. But did they have anything in common? Is it possible to say that Erasmus wrote, and Raphael painted, and Bartholomew Diaz ventured past the Cape of Storms in obedience to a similar impulse?

And was this impulse derived from some common experience, a way of thinking, an approach to living that historians have agreed to call the European renaissance did the urge to discover new lands grow from the intellectual ferment of the renaissance and what effect did the broadening of geographical horizons have on the mental horizons of the people at home.

The first thing we can say is that human nature did not change, but the scope of human aspirations was increased by greater material possibilities.

By the 1480s and 90s, Europe had developed an agricultural base, an industrial capacity, a superiority in arms and a skill in sailing the oceans that enabled it to explore the rest of the globe, to conquer and loot and colonize it for the next four centuries in a way that the greediest ancient Roman would have envied.

Many of the material things that made this The magnetic compass was by 1187. Sea charts and pilot books were available after 1280. And the ships and the guns that explorers used were not developed by Renaissance intellectuals, but by craftsmen, and just as the means of exploration developed out of the Middle Ages, so did the motives behind it.

This is the reception of Columbus by Ferdinand and Isabella.

They and other rulers were interested in gold and silver to supplement dwindling sources at home and in slaves and in spices from the east which were necessary in the first place to preserve food which spoiled fast in the ages before refrigeration and then quite simply to make lousy food eatable, tough and stringy meat from skinny cattle, tasteless vegetables, unappetizing and often spoiled food in general.

But this spice trade was threatened by the advance of a new Muslim power, the Turks, who took Constantinople in 1453, and the Balkans as well, thus upsetting the commercial balance of the Mediterranean.

Before that, Italy had enjoyed a near monopoly spice trade for several centuries, which was the source of much of its prosperity. countries of Western Europe sought to outflank the Turks and the Italians as well. France, Spain, Portugal,

England, and the Netherlands all saw the possibilities of sailing south or sailing west to reach the East Indies and they had the means to do it.

Another motive universally expressed and quite widely believed was the desire to extend Christianity and here too the age of discovery did not see something new but the redirection of an earlier medieval motive which had linked conquest and gain with missionary enthusiasm in the Crusades which Europe had sent out since the 11th century.

This crusading ideal had declined precipitously but it was revived by the advance of the Turks in the southern and eastern Mediterranean and by the fall of Constantinople. And it was maintained by the war against the Moors in Spain, which only ended significantly in 1492 at which point the Spanish crown finally gave Columbus permission to say the most Renaissance aspect of discovery lay in the cooperation between the crown geographical experts and highly educated merchants out for profit, but also very curious and increasingly well-informed.

And we can find aspects of a new mentality among seamen and travelers as well. We find it in a Venetian called Cadamosto, who said that he joined the Portuguese sailing down the African coast in 1455 and 1456 in order to see interesting sites.

And we find it in another Italian, Antonio Pigafetta, who joined Magellan's expedition 60 years later to experiment, he said, and go and see with my own eyes a part of those things we have heard so much about.

And finally, we find it in the great explorers themselves, who were not just leaders and seamen, but who had to visualize their undertaking within the context of an emerging knowledge of the world as a whole, testing the hypotheses of medieval geography and developing them into a new science altogether, as we shall see in our next program.

The discovery of new societies confronted Europeans with a dazzling range of beliefs and institutions different from their own. It persuaded some that the world was their oyster and it led others to begin a revolution in critical thinking the

 CHAPTER 3: THE AGE OF DISCOVERY

Renaissance and the new world this time on the Western tradition And now, UCLA professor Eugene Weber's continuing journey through the history of Western civilization.

Last time, we ended with the confluence of two great movements, the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries.

And yet we also saw how many of the material things that made exploration possible came out of the Middle Ages, as did many of the motivations of European governments, primarily the quest for spices and slaves and converts to Christianity. But what about the explorers themselves? Do they reflect a new renaissance mentality that we define as modern?

Or was their vision primarily a medieval one? What kind of men were they? What motivated them? As evidence, we have Richard Chancellor's statement

that he was describing his search for a northeast passage in 1553, so that, as he says, he may encourage others to the like travel now this is a very modern kind of self-awareness and an equally modern sense of being part of an evolution not a one-shot adventure like Marco Polo's trip to China in the 13th century, but an ongoing process.

And both are very close to the intellectual temper of the Renaissance. And there is another Renaissance trait which the explorers possessed, and that is their appetite for fame. The passion for glory provides a major theme of Renaissance art, especially with a presentation of distinguished contemporaries as memorable characters from antiquity. This is Gianfrancesco Gonza, an Italian captain general depicted as Mars, the god of war, while his wife Isabella is Venus.

Some explorers like Columbus were also fired by missionary zeal, but fame, the desire to be known for having accomplished great deeds, this was a strong component in the explorer's motivation. And that became especially true as more and more travel writing came on the market, as printing spread and began to compete with romances of chivalry. So here you have the search for fame, the search for fortune, but within a context of exactness and foolproof.

And in a world where it seemed that very few things were still left undone. And if they were undone, that was a good reason for getting them done. And this is very much a Renaissance attitude.

But we are on even firmer ground when we turn, oddly enough, to theory. Theory was the fuel of action in the Renaissance as it had not been in the Middle Ages. The revival of antiquity, the rediscovery of theories which appeared to have influenced action in the past, produced new concepts and models for action that would change the world.

The humanists, or at least their pupils, really did try to be the all-round men that Cicero praised. The architects and artists were actually affected by theoretical treatises based on assumptions about what had produced great art in ancient times. And the soldiers who now had longer pauses between crises adopted all sorts of military ideas from the ancients about how to organize their troops, or fortify, or besiege a city.

And it might have had the same effect on geography if it hadn't been for the actual voyages which forced Renaissance scholars to reconsider their theories about the size and shape of the world in the light of actual experience. Not all of the classical theories agreed either. Ptolemy, a second century Greek, was one established authority who believed that you couldn't sail around the world because Africa merged with a large continent that filled the Southern Hemisphere and joined Africa to India.

On the other hand, there was the geographer Strabo, a contemporary of Augustus, ocean sea to the west washed the southern shores of Asia.

You had to be careful when you sailed the ocean because you might fall over the edge. Still Strabo believed, to quote him, that the uninhabited world forms a complete circle itself meeting itself, so that if the immensity of the Atlantic did not prevent it, we could sail from Iberia to India along one and the same parallel. By the early 1400s, Strabo's theories were gaining ground as sea charts and ship logs got better. There was also constant contact between the sailors, the theorists, and the map makers.

The best example of this could be found at Sagres, at the southwest tip of Portugal, where in the middle 1430s, the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator, a remarkable figure, founded a small court to which he attracted seamen, cartographers, astronomers, shipbuilders, and instrument makers, and from which, with improved ships and maps and instruments he sent out expeditions that went further and further down the African coast practically to the Ivory Coast Henry's ultimate purpose and he wasn't alone in this, was to outflank the power of Islam and to establish direct commercial contact with a source of gold and slaves, ivory and spices in Africa and in Asia.

 So Henry's brother went to Florence to buy maps, and Columbus elicited an important letter from another Florentine geographer, Toscanelli, that assured him that he could get to China by sailing west. And when the sailors made their discoveries, they were quickly recorded in the maps the cartographers drew up and revised for other sailors to use.

Columbus. first demonstration of the scientific method, proceeding from hypothesis to experiment and then on to a new hypothesis. see in the largest and the most dramatic way.

That there was open water between Europe and Asia to the west, as Columbus first believed, was disproved not by abstract calculation, but concretely by revealing an enormous new territory full of exotic peoples and providing a new way of life for thousands of soldiers and settlers. And it was a continuous process with the findings and ideas of one man entered on maps until further experimental voyages disproved them or revise them.

What you have to remember is that the scientific method which we take as the hallmark of modern thinking could not be applied rigorously in a pure scientific field in astronomy or physics or chemistry until the 17th century when the pendulum clock and the telescope and the microscope were developed.

Before that, however hard the would-be scientist thought, it was difficult to verify his ideas because the means for scientific proof were rudimentary. One field where you could actually verify theory was the field of discovery through the cooperation between the theorizers at home and the observers in their ships. You might even say that the first scientific laboratory was the world itself. So the Age of Discovery and the Renaissance were in partnership. But it was a fumbling and confused relationship because the first explorers carried with them a mass of medieval

presuppositions which prevented them from making a properly objective report on what they saw. What the public wanted and got a lot of were monsters and marvels and giants and dwarfs and headless men with faces in their chests and dog-headed men and men with one huge foot which they could use as a sunshade and all kinds of other grotesques.

Another feature in the new lands that people wanted to find or to hear about was the existence of an earthly paradise, some golden age existence where men could be found happy, naked, free, without government or property, without disease or melancholy.

One major reason why Europeans wanted to believe in the existence of paradise was that they fared so badly at home, where they were torn by war, eaten by plague, brutalized by poverty and famine and all kinds of other troubles.

So explorers were tempted to color their facts to fit their hopes, and publicists popularized and vulgarized their reports to turn the Indian into a noble savage and life in the new world into a kind of moral symbol of the Golden Age.

But these fantasies were going to collide with something else, something very urgent and very concrete, which was the religious issue.

Significantly, the first question European intellectuals asked about the natives of the New World was not what are they like, but can they be saved?

And that was because the societies being discovered in the New World did not fit into the framework of the book of Genesis. So it wasn't clear whether Jesus died for these creatures and whether they were really human at all.

The question was important because the sort of treatment Indian might expect depended on the answer. that the Indian was an animal, hence a natural slave, this view was pressed with some force. 16th century Englishmen, for instance, assumed that the Indians were on the whole wild, ignorant, and animal-like.

For their part, the Indians quite sensibly refused to work the hours where the clothes follow the diet of Europeans. So the way was open for the pessimists to point out that Indians were incapable of living virtuously and freely and that they must therefore be, by nature, slaves.

This notion fitted very well with a growing clamor for cheap labor to work in silver mines like this one in Peru or on sugar estates in a climate which sapped the energy of white men and which would soon take the lives of the natives.

Even worse would be the devastating European diseases for which Indians had no immunities. With European brutality confirmed by economic need, with forcible conversion to Christianity accepted as common necessity, the slave trade took on a new and long enduring of life, or rather death.

While in this painting a European artist depicts Indians worshipping a column erected by the French explorer, Laudonniere. So here we find several further ingredients of the modern world. A new treasury of myth and of incentives on one hand, and on the other, the role of the European as exploiter and colonist, rationalizing his activities by drawing on those very myths to justify his doings and yet the counter agents were at work within the experience itself above all the novel tendency to compare and contrast which arose out of the variety of new information and experience pouring in on Europeans during the Renaissance.

Where medieval people reasoned by association, learning about one thing by connecting it with something similar, modern reasoning involves contrast as well as association. This is different from that. What do I learn from the comparison? And this kind of thinking entered our intellectual habits not only when the humanists of the Renaissance revived the civilization of pre-ian antiquity and compared it with their own but also when newly discovered societies all over the world confronted Europeans with a wide range of governments and religions social habits that were different from their own

But before the sophisticated races of the East or the more primitive races of the West could present thought-provoking contrasts, they had to be seen not merely as picturesque, but as the product of a specific environment.

You had to go beyond the striking detail, the nakedness, the war paint. You had to go on to a more anthropological approach. And you begin to find this when one of Vasco da Gama's officers spends the night with the natives of the Cape of Good hope to see how they live and what they eat.

Or when missionaries begin to learn the languages and the religious beliefs of the peoples they were trying to convert because they could only hope to convince the natives when they had entered into their world and values. And by the 16th century, the greatest mind of the 16th century, I mean Michel de Montaigne, is fascinated by cannibals, by so-called savages who seem far less savage and far closer to happiness and virtue than his own fellow citizens.

Not just far less savage, more sensible too.

Cannibals kill, but they kill for a purpose. They want to eat. We, says Montaigne, we kill to no good purpose. And so here, 400 years ago, we can hear the forest murmurs of relativism.

But it was very far away, and it was going to be a very slow process that culminated in the  8th century, when the comparative study of strange societies and religions and brave new worlds would lead to a critical re-evaluation of European religion, philosophy, and political structures.

But that had its roots, I think, in the Renaissance, in the growing willingness based on a growing willingness based on a growing necessity to see, estimate, evaluate, test, to learn more and actually use it, invest it, so to speak, in order to learn more still, to seek only the self subjectively, which was one of the great joys of renaissance humanists, but the world objectively, because objectivity was the great liberator, the widener of mental horizons, the progenitor of modern science.

It was fed by forcing the imagination not inward, but outward, exposing it to challenging information about different ways of life. It was the humanists like Erasmus who laid the ground for this critical and comparative approach to information and experience and when Erasmus and the other humanists said that one authority was superior to another that a roman author was a better source of wisdom than a doctor of the medieval church.

They implied the right to decide between different authorities and therefore the possibility to judge for yourself. And the best of them, like Leonardo da Vinci, decided to place experience and experiment above any book, above any second-hand authority, and this was something new. Leonardo was not only a great painter of subtlety and understated harmony. He was also a great architect and engineer. His great love was scientific observation, especially anatomy. He was fascinated by the forces that move nature. This sketch is from his study of hydrology, the properties of water.

And he approached these forces in a thoroughly empirical way.

When he works out his geological theories, he doesn't look for a text in Aristotle, he looks around him. He notes that things that are born in salt water are found on high mountains far from present seas. And he concludes the phenomena we witness explain the past. He dissects bodies. he suggests the possibilities of comparative anatomy, he predicts the helicopter, and when he dies in France in 1519, his title is first painter, architect, and mechanic of the king.

Soon after Leonardo's death, a French physician, Ambroise Paré, provided the formula of the new scientific approach when he wrote that we have to use the ancients as stilts or towers from which we can see further than they did.

But, said Paré, whenever experiment contradicted the ancients, we must follow what we see.

Tradition is no use if it just encourages you to go on making other people's mistakes because you're too lazy or too timid to strike out for yourself. I would prefer to do everything by myself than to fall into error with the sages and even with all mankind. Knowledge, says Paré, is a great thing, but only if it is based on experience.

This new attitude was going to lead men to examine things for themselves, natural phenomena, political institutions, even the Bible. Until the Renaissance, all these had

been accepted simply because they were there.

Now they could be considered in terms of appropriateness, effectiveness, and opportunity. Obviously, this didn't all happen at once. Most people conformed as they had always done without much question. But the fact remains that by the 1600s knowledge and science had ceased to rest on an inert tradition transmitted from the past.

They became the knowledge, science, investigation of what is, which you acquire by searching and looking and drawing conclusions from what you see.

And this is a revolution, or at least it's the edge of despair.

An explosion of social unrest and bitter political conflict. Christendom to its very core.

CHAPTER 4: MARTIN LUTHER

The Reformation, this time on the Western tradition. And now, UCLA Professor Eugene Weber's continuing journey through the history of Western civilization.

A lot of history is about kings and queens and battles because for a long time, so much of history turned around kings and queens and battles. The whims and personalities of princes and of the great men who served them influenced policies, made wars, made treaties, affected the lives of everybody else. Now this rule had been suspended during part of the Middle Ages when power had been restricted to a local scale, but as the 15th century turned into 16th, modern monarchs and modern monarchies appeared.

They wanted to be all-powerful, and they persuaded their subjects that indeed they were, or at least they should be, all-powerful. Even their guardian angels were considered more important than the angels that guarded people of lesser rank.

There was Louis XI of France who lived in the 15th century, Ferdinand of Spain who straddled the 15th and 16th centuries, and Henry VIII of England who was born the year before Columbus sailed and who died in 1547.

These were the fathers of the modern state. It would take centuries to be perfected, but from the very beginning, the modern state pursued four major tasks. First,

to secure obedience, to neutralize all possible challenges, to gain the monopoly of force, to maintain law and order, to make the violence it exerted the only legitimate violence. And what this meant, you can see in the gibbets that figure prominently in a lot of paintings.

The second thing the state had to achieve was to exert control over economic life, to facilitate the circulation and exchange of goods, to grasp as much as possible of national Third, it had to refocus patriotic identity from the local to the national scale.

Here we see not only Henry III of France, but also the lily, or fleur-de-lis, which had become the symbol of French royalty. And finally, the state had to dominate or control the religious life of religion. Now, we've already seen that the rise of the modern state was dependent on both the growth of a modern economy of capital and account books like this one, and on the arms that new technology made possible and the new economy made affordable.

it also owed a great deal to the revival of Roman law which had survived in Italy and which after the 13th century spread through Europe, carried by lawyers trying to strengthen the king against the clergy and against his feudal vassals. Roman law carried the idea of an absolute ruler, the princeps, whose will was law.

This combined with another classical ideal, that of the hero, who is practically a god, strong, benevolent, and wise.

This heroic royal figure was going to incarnate what we today describe as nationalism, a sentiment of patriotic pride in origins and in past glories which would be used to justify present dominion and future greatness. By the 16th century, Italians, Spaniards, and Frenchmen learned to sing the glory of their particular country to glorify a national character or a national tongue.

German humanists compared the German past to that of ancient Rome and Maximilian. praised England, disparaged its neighbors, exalted patriotic sentiment. The reference to the past which inspired the present could also focus on the ideal figure of the prince who personified his people and the nation. In theory, the prince answered the need for a strong central authority to impose unity and order.

In practice, the material interests of most princes were served by more law and order, more law and order improved revenues, regular revenues paid for the regular armies that could impose more law and order and squeeze more revenues, thus further increasing the central power. centralization of the state, between the central authority and the individual subject and taxpayer began to take shape. So did the representative institutions, the councils, parliaments, estates that mark the modern West, and that are all related to taxes.

When states and rulers no longer turned for aid to vassals, but to all their subjects, they had to win their consent.

But popular assemblies composed of all the citizens, as in the ancient Greek cities were not feasible where the number of people and the distances between them were too great and so as a substitute for personal attendance there developed the concept of representation the idea that certain men elected or, could speak for other men, or cities, or estates.

Some of these representative assemblies became instruments of opposition to royal authority.

But for the most part, their very existence gave disparate territories a sense of unity they had not had before.

Voting taxes and paying them didn't just affect the purses of people, it affected their minds as well. same time, the princes needed administrators. France, whose kings were best served in these matters, there were some 12,000 civil servants in 1505, one to about 1,250 people. Four hundred years later,

there would be one for every 70 French men and women, and today there are almost as many state employees as there are citizens to be administered. The princes also needed soldiers to back up their officials and above all for war which was the greatest industry of their time as it often is of our time.

The princes also needed representatives for negotiations, for diplomacy, which is the continuance of war by other means, and which the 15th and 16th centuries were beginning to develop, along with international law, a code that governed relations between sovereigns and between sovereign states. Meanwhile, medieval concepts were disappearing. The Holy See was not even a shadow of what it had once been. The Pope was an Italian prince trading in what merchandise he had.

Ecclesiastical appointments, dispensations from the application of church law to permit divorce, absolve from adultery or even murder, indulgences which provided remission of sins in return for worthy acts, or better still, in return for payment. As for the emperor, like Sigismund of Hungary here, who was crowned in 1411, he had no power to tax or to impose his will outside his own territories.

He was simply the highest bidder in the auction for the imperial crown of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1519, for example, Charles the fifth king banking houses, especially the of Augsburg, who advanced most of the money to buy the electors and the Pope, and who just as importantly refused to credit the bank drafts of Charles's competitors. It's from this point on that the power of money or finance capital dominates the world.

Financial power created the armies with which the new emperor conquered his enemies and kept his huge empire together. Charles was the first emperor who managed to do this, and if changed economic conditions played their part, a new business outlook and a business alliance played equally important parts.

Charles's son, Philip II, who lived from 1527 to 1598, was not only the king of Spain, but also king of Portugal, which he inherited through his mother. He ruled an empire far greater than that of ancient Rome, an empire that stretched from the Americas to Asia. You have to imagine the scale of this empire in terms of what distance meant in the 16th century.

A round trip from Lisbon to Goa in India took 18 months. A trip from Seville in Spain to Lima in Peru took two years and from Seville to Manila in the Philippines which were named for Philip of course it took up to five years you can understand the remark of a Spanish Viceroy that if death came from Madrid we should all live to a very old age no doubt if death had come, it would have come by written order. Spanish government was governed by paper and by the bureaucracy that shuffled the paper.

The bureaucrats were trained in universities whose numbers in Spain tripled during the 16th century from 11 to 33 and which were also set up across the Atlantic. Americas, a hundred years before Harvard College.

followed in Mexico and Peru. And it was the flow of capital in the form of gold and silver from America that paid for the university and the bureaucracy that lubricated the wheels of commerce and fueled the military and political supremacy of Spain through the 16th and the 17th centuries.

So Spain's American empire made her European empire possible.

The new alliance between capital and the state would be disturbing for a lot of people, as would be the newly important part which money came to play in the life of a society whose members had managed without it, or with very little of it, for a long time.

There were waves of speculation, waves of bankruptcies, and these didn't just affect the bankers and the merchants but also a whole series of dependent industries and enterprises and of course workers. This was the crucial period when Europe switched from the more or less stable economic plane of the Middle Ages to an economic life that isn't really very different from our own.

A life where the value of money fluctuated, it Luther, who taught theology at the University of Wittenberg in Saxony, nailed on the door of the castle church 95 theses, that is, propositions or arguments, against the papal misuse of indulgences and absolution.

Now, Luther's gesture was contentious, but it was not revolutionary. Proposing a debate on theological theses was accepted practice. Luther's language was perfectly appropriate for academic debate, and yet the echo of his gesture was going to shake the Western world.

Religious war and religious rebellions invariably cut into political conflicts. They provide old enemies with new battle cries; they contribute new and profound causes of friction.

Religious conflict ravaged Germany until the 1550s. France and the Netherlands through the second half of the century, and it threw England into political confusion. Within one generation, the seamless robe of Western Christendom was rent. From then on, men stood divided by Christian faith as much as by political allegiance or economic interest. This was the Protestant Reformation.

Now, obviously, a religious contest on this scale doesn't break out in an irreligious society. Luther himself is evidence of this. He was driven to the verge of madness

by uncertainty and doubt and guilt and the terrible fear that he could never achieve salvation until he realized that it's not what you do or don't do, it's what's inside you that counts.

Your faith in God and in his salvation, his free, forgiving mercy that are more important than your weakness, your failings, your feeble attempts to atone. The problem that upset Luther, that terrorized him before he found his justification in faith, this passionate anxiety anxiety also upset and frightened a lot of other people and made them listen to Luther when he found a solution to his own problems and offered it as a solution to their problems. A way to achieve salvation which as Albrecht Durer the painter put it opened up new worlds to me.

Another evidence of contemporary religious concern is late Gothic art of a flamboyant style that showed off for all to see just how much money and how much art men would invest in the palaces of God. But the age of flamboyant Gothic is also an age of flamboyant piety.

This was the time when we begin to get images of the suffering Christ and images of the heart surrounded with thorns which would be followed by the future cult of the Sacred Heart and fraternities of the passion that still survived today in Central and South America and in Spain there was also the devotion of the rosary, which is a way of praying and honoring the Virgin by reciting 150 Hail Mary’s and a whole host of other practices glorifying the Lady who appeared more and more like the channel of the grace her divine Son provided for me and from the Virgin one moved back to her mother St. Anne whose great vogue came at the turn of the 15th century and beyond with a growth of the theory of immaculate conception first of the Virgin then also of her mother even Erasmus wrote that he had been devoured with piety for her since his tenderest youth.

This incidentally was also a time when many male babies as well as female were baptized and such as the French Duke and Marshal and Montmorency.

It was also a great time for pilgrimages, with Venice fostering a whole new industry of pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Law courts sometimes sentenced the guilty party to a pilgrimage to one or another sanctuary where today they would inflict a fine.

Along with this, there was an entire cult of relics, various objects from the lives of the saints, even parts of their bodies.

At the same time, the church was printing up indulgences and bringing out hundreds of writings first for the priests then for the public translated from Latin or written directly in French, German, English for the middling bourgeoisie which ignored Latin and for those pious women who could read. If we look at contemporary art we can hardly find a Flemish painting without a pious image pinned to the wall. In the 15th and 16th

centuries, more and more, God and the Saints operate very close to the human plane, and the new naturalism of the artists reflects a growing familiarity, or desire for familiarity, between the worshiper and the worshiped.

This was a period in which the plastic arts provided the imagination with a vision of a very human Christ, and above all a very humane one, infinitely pitiful and suffering and good, very close to men and women who could recognize their own image on the panels and the paintings which once upon a time bore images of idealized and superior figures. A very human Christ, a very human Virgin Mary, a vast family of saints. Altogether then there was no sense in the 15th and 16th centuries that the springs of faith were drying up. There was no loss of interest in religion, no hostility to the old practices.

On the contrary, the impression one gets is of a lot of piety and a great appetite for the divine with a great variety of expression. And yet as far as one can tell there was also a sense of unease, a discomfort, a certain vague aspiration towards something else and it came from that new class that had been moving up, not only in riches, but also in influence and status. And these were the people who manufactured and traded and practiced law in the growing urban centers, the city burghers whom we now describe as the bourgeoisie. In our next program, we shall see how their concerns and their interests were going to shake the Western world. Until then.

CHAPTER 5: RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS

Reformation, reaction, new dogmatisms, new pragmatisms, Europe stirred, especially its cities.

Printing spread new ideas, and artists turned to secular subjects and everyday life. The rise of the middle classes,

this time on the Western tradition.

And now, UCLA Professor Eugen Weber's continuing journey through the history of Western civilization. We began to explore the great religious and political changes of the 16th century, hand in hand with the urban activities and the rise of urban social groups that nowadays we describe as bourgeois.

Now, these burghers were not, for the most part, unscrupulous adventurers, fortune hunters, nouveau riche who had popped up out of nothing through their rackets, through their speculations. There were some of those, of course, but on the whole, the bourgeois were not solely concerned with gain. Many of them got on by hard and patient labor. And many had a kind of seriousness, a need and respect for morality and for knowledge that made them accumulate books about the lives of the saints in their libraries that made them devote half their wills to invocations to God and to the saints and bequests to pious causes.

And even sometimes it led them to retire at an early age and devote their time to study and prayer. The bourgeois were also realists in a hard world, but their realism did not exclude a strong sense of duty and a strong need of religious certainty and comfort. The question then became what kind of certainty because as the medieval order collapsed the old certainties did not suffice anymore. They read the ancients and drew from them the idea of a religion that was clear and reasonable and reasonably human. Now, what kind of religion did the official church have to offer? Simple folk had their saints and hellfire.

More educated people were offered church services that were either perfunctory, purely formalistic, and when they looked beyond, they found theologians who wrote books for found theologians who wrote books for other theologians. This was part of the trouble. In some ways, the Protestant Reformation was less a revolt against corruption than against cliquishness and condescension. The basic argument of the theologians was that dogma was beyond the grasp of reason and therefore the faithful should accept this fact and accept the dogma without trying to understand it.

There was a dryness here, a drought of the spirit that the reformers rose against as much as they rose against the superstitions fed to the masses. When Luther said juristen böse christen, lawmen are bad Christians, he was talking about a kind of religious sterility in the church, formalized and legalized. This was not the sort of theology that was suited to the new men of the cities who grew in number and importance, who developed a new group consciousness, and who developed a taste for clarity and lucidity by reading the ancients and by reading humanists like Erasmus.

So, there was bound to be a clash between the aspirations of the bourgeoisie which wanted to reconcile its action and its faith and the status quo of an anachronistic church. Now, I don't want to make my explanation too narrow. No single interpretation can ever be valid, and there is no exclusive relation between the Reformation and the rise of the bourgeoisie. For one thing, the 16th century bourgeoisie and nobles were also spiritually ill at ease and discontented. with bringing people closer to salvation and to God.

It had always managed to handle these heretics by absorbing them or by burning them. At this time the church had lost its touch and if that, it was at least partly connected with this Berger-related spirit that I've described. The gap between the church and the bourgeoisie grew wider every day.

The more so because most of the clergy, especially the theologians, didn't know and didn't much care about the concerns of their time. They lived among themselves. They closed their eyes to everything but internal church affairs. And even those clergy who realized that the church did need to change, thought that they could save religion simply by reforming the clergy and the church machinery, a kind of party purge. Improve the education of the clergy, reform its discipline, and everything would be okay.

Perhaps the clergy were right, but I think they missed the point at issue, the point on which the Reformation struggle really seems to have started, which is the issue of authority. The old men and the establishment in general envisioned reform as merely making adjustments to the repository of authority,

the clergy, and they thought that this would be sufficient. The new men, however, wanted them to demonstrate the right and the nature of authority itself. This was the basic difference out of which the Reformation came. And two, the idea of justification by faith.

The idea that faith alone justifies and saves the believer, not the myriad rituals and practices that lay at the core of the church.

These ideas were not plucked out of the air by Martin Luther in 1517 or by John Calvin, the French theologian and reformer who was banished from Paris in 1528 for his Protestant teachings. The ideas had been there before, in a mood, in a widespread yearning.

These, in turn, led to new translations of the Bible in the vernacular, which were then placed in the hands of the faithful without cuts or reservations or previous censorship by some body of official interpreters and this gave the people of the time two novelties first a living human God and second a radical transformation of the whole notion of priesthood people wanted to get nearer to God nearer to Christ.

But they felt that they were being held off kept away for lack of an opportunity to engage in a direct dialogue between the believer and his

Redeemer this direct dialogue would be facilitated, however, if the Bible was written in your own language so you could read it yourself in your own home.

But that would make it a dialogue from which the priest was henceforth absent, or at least subordinated, unwanted, sometimes even resented.

The fact is that more and more, these burghers who raised themselves to the top by personal effort, by their own merits and gifts, who fought for advancement and achieved successes that they knew they owned only to themselves. These men did not want priestly mediation or intercession. They were still deferential to their social or spiritual betters, but they had a new pride and a new sense of responsibility which encouraged them to question most authorities except the very highest. Another development arising from the bourgeois spirit of the time was the new glorification of manual labor, and this too affected the new men's attitude towards the church.

For hundreds and thousands of years, the ideal of man had been a sort of unproductive idleness to be abandoned only for destructive or formal or ritual purposes. Most people earned their living by the sweat of their brow, but that's because they had to. To labor was vulgar. Even Christianity, which put prayer and meditation above work and the other pursuits of the world, even Christianity embraced this view.

But in the 16th century, Catholics like Rabelais and Protestants like Calvin began to sing another tune and the lyrics said, he who doesn't work doesn't deserve to eat. They saw very little piety in the useless lives of monks who prayed but didn't contribute anything concrete to the welfare of their fellow men. And so now monks and priests were envisaged as parasites, avoiding the responsibilities of the world and doing nobody any good, least of all themselves.

Moreover, you don't need monks and priests if you have your Bible and you can read it. believer, on the other, who can receive God's message without any intermediary who can capture this message directly through the scriptures which are quite literally the Word of God there is a profound and subversive logic in Martin Luther who translated the Bible into this German edition, and who asserted every Christian is a priest, every believer is his own priest. The other very important gift the Reformation furnished to the bourgeoisie was the idea that faith alone justifies and saves the believer. And the thing to realize here is that the formula of justification by faith for which so many people accepted persecution and death was not so much a theological formula as a psychological formula. It offered two things.

First of all, it attacked the prevalent Catholic mystique of justification by works, not just good works like founding chantries, not just payment, but also personal mortification, the punishment of the body, the rejection of active life and so on.

Now this entire value system which we have seen triumph with the rise of Christianity and monasticism after Mediterranean civilization collapsed 10 or 12 centuries before. This was now rejected by the Reformation in a radical re-evaluation of life, the world, the body, and by a re-evaluation of activity in all these spheres. Activity to the greater glory of God, of course, but also to the glory and the use of the things that God created which should not be scorned or set aside too lightly. And even when some Protestants became Puritan, tending to renounce or to reject the pleasures of life and of the flesh, a stance which came rather close to a certain Catholic traditional sainthood, the Puritans still represented a different personality type. Catholics and Protestants might still agree that the world was a terrible place and all that counted was salvation. But Catholics in general prefer to be reassured by a paternalistic church that offered access or at least intercession for salvation whereas Protestants insisted that you have to forge your own salvation you have to make it on your own and you can see how this fitted perfectly with the new urban spirit of enterprise and pragmatism.

Justification by faith also abolished the terrible fear that you might die unshriven, unabsolved by a priest of all the sins that imperiled your salvation, and it abolished the cult of the dead, all the prayers and practices that had lain at the heart of Christian sensibility as of so many other religions.

So in the new Protestant societies, the endowed masses and chantries and all the activities and monuments that had funneled money away from secular consumption and secular investment, all these came to an end.

The house of the Lord shed its splendors for sobriety, the soberness that fits the sober, serious temper of burghers and bankers and scholars who admired Luther for daring to stand up before the emperor himself and to insist on his right to obey his own judgment and his own conscience. After all, the bourgeois also wanted to assert their freedom of conscience, their independence,

and reformers like Luther encouraged this. They told the Christian to do his business with God directly without the mediation of priests, to forget saints and relics and any kind of interference in the crucial business of salvation, to open his Bible and read for himself without a priestly interpreter.

Christians because it also made the visual propaganda of paintings and sculptures in church seem unnecessary, superfluous. Protestants could afford to be iconoclasts because they were people of the book and Protestantism was a religion of the book so the visual arts of Protestants were going to focus not on religious subjects on landscapes, on portraits.

This is a portrait, a self-portrait of Hieronymus Bosch, a mystical and moralistic painter who died just before Luther nailed his thesis to the Wittenberg Chapel door the paintings of bosch are eerie they are like grotesque hallucinations nightmares of temptation the fall and punishment in and beyond a profoundly corrupt world there is no room in Bosch's works for normal untroubled people or at least his extraordinary ordinary people exist only in terms of spiritual categories likegel, who lived from 1525 to 1569 and who was a younger contemporary of John Calvin, things had changed quite radically. Bruegel was influenced by Bosch, as most northern painters were at that time, but Bruegel was a humanist. He was didactic, moralizing, and often grotesque, but where Bosch was catastrophic, Bruegel was satirical. He was as Christian as Bosch, and he was passionate in his own way, but his religious ideas were common sense ideas, rational and ethical. He denounced avarice and greed, he ridiculed pretentiousness, and he parodied ceremonies, including religious ceremonies.

Bruegel was interested in nature and in real people. ordinary people, peasants and the poor, who hardly ever attracted anybody's attention before. not sweeten or glorify or poeticize these people but painted them warts and all which really made him the first modern painter and an example of the forces at work in these times. On the other hand it's interesting to note that Bruegel's major patron was a cardinal and that the Catholic Habsburg princess who governed Belgium for Philip II so admired Bruegel's work that the best place to see his paintings today is the court museum in Vienna. Even so, we know that on his deathbed, Bruegel told his wife to burn all his remaining paintings, lest she should get into trouble. So even an artist with high protectors had reason to worry. And we have to bear this in mind when we think of the Catholic counteroffensive the counter-reformation

which set out to clean and reform the church as well as fight and defeat the Protestant enemy beginning in 1545 church council, the Council of Trent, reaffirmed the authority of the church, of tradition, and of the church hierarchy. The Inquisition, the special tribunal for identifying and punishing heresy, was also refurbished, and the first thing it did was to attack on the printing front. The first index of prohibited books appeared in 1559, books better burnt than read, and there would be a catechism, a book of questions and answers outlining principles of right belief for all Catholic Christians, and there would be an approved Bible, the Vulgate, written in Latin.

There was also the new Society of Jesus founded by a Spanish knight, Ignatius Loyola, who lived from 1491 to 1556. Loyola was fascinated by chivalric ideals and treated the service of God as a kind of holy knighthood. The Jesuit was an up-to-date version of the Christian athlete, highly trained on the intellectual plane as well as on the spiritual, flexible, adaptable, disciplined, and self-disciplined.

Literate, cultivated, subject to a strong central authority, the Jesuits were ready to compete with Protestant enterprise on the educational front, in missionary enterprise, and religious fervor. And their achievements in all these realms were going to be quite remarkable. So the Counter-Reformation was a very powerful force, and the battle lines were drawn.

But from this point on, there was going to be a choice within Western culture. There was going to be a competition. battles of books as well as of soldiers. the great elements of modern Western civilization, gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion had come together.