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SCENE 1: Introduction During the Renaissance period kings, dukes, earls and other nobles dominated the Political arena but as the old medieval feudal system began to collapse these titles began to hold less meaning. The long wars in Italy created a very unique political situation where you had two different empires, the French and the Spanish, fighting over a territory governed by over 5 main different kingdoms, and many other smaller ones. It was in this situation that the arts and the Renaissance in general thrived as the landowners and businessmen often had more power than the ruler. This created an ever-changing unstable environment which promoted development in all areas. The Renaissance period was dominated by wars not for the sake of gaining territory but for the sake of war, to quench the aristocratic thirst for war. SCENE 2: The Republican Idea The result of all these changes created the arena into which the first republic was established in Florence. In this region, social pressure built up between the high-class families and the lower class that was often resolved by a revolt of the people and the creation of a Republic. These occurrences sometimes happened, as is the case with Florence, when an external monarch who was trying to reinstate the medieval feudal system died. The Florentine State while technically run by the people and a republic they were often controlled by very wealthy businessmen such as the Medici family. It was these men who controlled the seven guilds which were organizations created to make standards and expectations in certain industries. They were the Renaissance equivalent of our unions, a group of artisans working together to further their aims. The aristocracies were nearly always firmly excluded from any type of governmental decision. It was this break from the age-old feudal system of Kings, Duke and Lords that made the state of Florence one of the major centers of the Renaissance revolution. It was in Florence that the Renaissance began and was sustained by its form of government. In other areas it came and went with the whims of kings, but it was the political situation in Florence that sustained it. SCENE 3: Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) Machiavelli is one of the most famous Political Renaissance writers of all times as a consequence of the book he wrote about the manifestations of power, labelled “The Prince” He was in fact a Diplomat and Lawyer who was in charge of Florence’s foreign affairs between 1498 and 1512 until the Medici family returned and took over government. He was then imprisoned for a short time and retired from public life where he began writing from his experiences of his diplomatic life. He wrote the book “The Prince” not as one out of interest, but dedicated and written for the leaders of the time in hope that Italy could be united under one rule and all other outside influences dispersed. It is about the savage nature of men and his insight into the methods that might be successful in the corrupt Italian society. An interesting fact is that everything that Machiavelli recommended he scorned and rejected from his own life. SCENE 4: The French Valois kings The French Empire began in the reign of Louis XI who inherited many territories surrounding the area around Paris. Louis reigned from 1461 to 1483 and during that period he managed to double the area held by the France state. This created a strong enough empire to challenge those of the Swiss and the Spanish. This being so it wasn’t Louis that started the Italian wars but his successor, Charles VIII. When Louis XI died Charles VIII was only 13 year old, which created a public opinion that the Empire Louis XI created would crumble but this did not happen as Charles VIII held together the new kingdom and managed to lead the first attack on Italy. The Valois dynasty, after the reign of Charles VIII, Louis XI, Francis I fell into civil war following the final treaty with Phillip II of Spain. The wars between the Protestants and Catholics were periodic but basically stopped most French hostile activity the rest of Europe for quite an extended period. SCENE 5: The Tudor Dynasty The Tudor dynasty in England, was established at the end of the War of the Roses which is described in its own section on this site (LINK TO THE SECTION ON THE WAR OF THE ROSES). This war, in short, was between two rival house in Britain, the house of Lancaster and the house of York. During that period many kings reigned for short periods but at the Battle of Bosworth fields (1485) the war was ended placing a new dynasty on the throne, the house of Tudor. The first king Henry VII and his son, the well known Henry VIII succeeded him in 1509. SCENE 6: The Papacy The Pope during the Renaissance period was a very important Political figure as he was meant to represent the spirituality of all people in Europe. He is often known as the successor of the first bishop St Peter, establishing him as man’s contact with God on earth. The Greeks forming the Orthodox Church in Constantinople did not follow this creed. Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Pope progressively established his Earthly rule in the Papal States. As centuries passed, the Pope began to be more and more concerned with dynastic fortune than with their worldly rule. This in turn lead to major corruption within the church, Europe’s most powerful institution. It was this that was the catalyst to the Protestant revolt in France and Germany, and the creation of an Anglican church in England. The pope held the power of ‘cutting someone off from god”, or excommunication and the power to allow or disallow a divorce. No ruler wanted the difficulty of dealing with a people whose contact with god had been severed. SCENE 7: The Rise of the Spanish Empire The Iberian Peninsula or the Spanish Peninsula was split up into two four sides at the start of the Renaissance. The Kingdom of Aragon to the East, Portugal to the West, The Moors in Granada to the South and The Kingdom of Castile in the centre. In 1469 the king of Aragon, John of Aragon, married his heir of his second wife, Ferdinand, to marry the sister of the king of Castile. Henry VI of Castile actually had an illegitimate daughter who he acknowledged as his heir before he died in 1474 yet on his death Ferdinand marched into Castile to support his claim to the throne. After successfully defeating a Portuguese army he achieved this under condition that Aragon was made subsidiary to Castile from which Ferdinand would never leave. In the south the kingdom of Grenada was the only remaining Muslim state in Spain and had been attacked frequently by Henry VI but never completely conquered. Ferdinand and Isabella took the war more seriously and after a 10 year campaign which began in 1482 completed the conquest of Granada in 1492 they . It was during this campaign that Ferdinand began to develop the might of the Spanish army and his power as a diplomat. This was the foundation of the Empire ruled by the three catholic kings, Ferdinand II, Charles V and Phillip II. SCENE 7a: The age of discovery After the fall of the Mongol empire and the rise of the new Muslim power, the Ottoman Empire, trade with the east from Europe was cut off by aggressive armies. The times of Marco Polo and other such men was over although Europe never forgot the East during the time before the Renaissance, and it was this drive to re-discover the east that lead to the discovery of new lands. In the small realm of Portugal in the Iberian Peninsular Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’ encouraged the search for India and the kingdom of Cathay(China). Her explorers managed first to map the African coast, then to round the cape and to enter the Indian Ocean. Explorers such as Vasca da Gama and Bartolomeu Dias are some of these men. Even though in the days of the explorers everyone knew that the world was round no one really expected that a continent would lay between Europe and Cathay around the world. This is why when Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean sea and its islands in 1493 he thought, and could never be convinced otherwise, that he had at last found a way to India. These discoveries and later settlement and bounty brought in the huge sums of money which would be used to finance the massive institutions of the Spanish armies. SCENE 8: The Holy Roman Emperors and the Spanish Monarchs The succession of Holy Roman Emperors was not theoretically hereditary but from the Renaissance period, it basically remained with the Hapsburg family. With the accession time of Charles V of Spain as Holy Roman Emperor, the Hapsburg family had the largest territorial holdings in history. Emperor Maximilian I married his son, Phillip I into the Spanish Royal family. Philip’s son, Charles V also acquired the throne of Spain and then, by election, acceded to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire thus combining the two empires into essentially one European State. The father and son combination of Phillip II and Charles V ruled territories spanning the globe including Spain, Portugal, Naples, Sicily, and an extensive colonial empire. These emperors played a major role in the affairs during the Renaissance because they were, until the failure of the Spanish Armada to destroy Britain at the end of the Renaissance, the most powerful State in Europe. SCENE 9: Reasons for the failure of the Spanish Empire There were many reasons for the decline of Spanish power. Most important was that its strength was partly a myth. The empire, that seemed so powerful and seemed to collect such huge sums of money each year from its vast territories was slowly accumulating debt. Each year the empire spent more money than it could collect and each year it went further into debt. This being so it was undeniable that any army in the western world would have been soundly beaten by the well organized Spanish forces. The lack of funds sometimes led to armies not being properly paid and often rebelling. The famous sacking of Rome in 1527 is an example. This great instability of forces was also made worse by the fact that the forces were made up of a multi-national group of people. This all came to a head when the failure of the Spanish Armada was made known to all destroying the myth surrounding the supposed invincibility of the Spanish armies. From this point on the empire fell into a slow decline which signaled the end of the Renaissance period.
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