Part 344

The preparation of Europe for an effective use of the art of printing may be said to have begun in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the great universities of Paris, Bologna, Naples, Padua, Modena, and others, came into existence, to be centers of intellectual irritation—disputation—challenge—groping inquiry. But it was not until the fourteenth century, when the labors and the influence of Petrarch and other scholars and men of genius roused interest in the forgotten literature of ancient Rome and Greece, that the craving and seeking for books grew considerable. Scholars and pretended scholars from the Greek Empire then began to find employment, in Italy more especially, as teachers of the Greek language, and a market was opened for manuscripts of the older Greek writings, which brought many precious ones to light, after long burial, and multiplied copies of them. From Italy, this revival of classic learning crept westward and northward somewhat slowly, but it went steadily on, and the book as a commodity in the commerce of the world rose year by year in importance, until the printer came forward, about the middle of the fifteenth century, to make it abundant and cheap.

Whether John Gutenberg, at Mentz, in 1454, or Laurent Coster, at Haarlem, twenty years earlier, executed the first printing with movable types, is a question of small importance, except as a question of justice between the two possible inventors, in awarding a great fame which belongs to one or both. The grand fact is, that thought and knowledge took wings from that sublime invention, and ideas were spread among men with a swift diffusion that the world had never dreamed of before. The slow wakening that had gone on for two centuries became suddenly so quick that scarcely more than fifty years, from the printing of the first Bible, sufficed to inoculate half of Europe with the independent thinking of a few boldly enlightened men.

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The Greek Revival.

If Gutenberg's printing of Pope Nicholas' letter of indulgence, in 1454, was really the first achievement of the new-born art, then it followed by a single year the event commonly fixed upon for the dating of our Modern Era, and it derived much of its earliest importance indirectly from that event. For the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, was preceded and followed by a flight of Greeks to Western Europe, bearing such treasures as they could save from the Turks. Happily those treasures included precious manuscripts; and among the fugitives was no small number of educated Greeks, who became teachers of their language in the West. Thus teaching and text were offered at the moment when the printing press stood ready to make a common gift of them to every hungering student. This opened the second of the three stages which the late John Addington Symonds defined in the history of scholarship during the Renaissance: "The first is the age of passionate desire; Petrarch poring over a Homer he could not understand, and Boccaccio in his maturity learning Greek, in order that he might drink from the well-head of poetic inspiration, are the heroes of this period. They inspired the Italians with a thirst for antique culture. Next comes the age of acquisition and of libraries. Nicholas V., who founded the Vatican Library in 1453, Cosmo de' Medici, who began the Medicean Collection a little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolani, who ransacked all the cities and convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of Greek, who in the first half of the fifteenth century escaped from Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are the heroes of this second period." "Then came the third age of scholarship—the age of the critics, philologers, and printers. … Florence, Venice, Basle, and Paris groaned with printing presses. The Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben, toiled by night and day, employing scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty brain, whose work it was to ascertain the right reading of sentences, to accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place beyond the reach of monkish hatred or of envious time, that everlasting solace of humanity which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in the field of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labours of these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for the accomplishment of their titanic task. Virgil was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1512. They then became the inalienable heritage of mankind. … This third age in the history of the Renaissance Scholarship may be said to have reached its climax in Erasmus [1465-1536]; for by this time Italy had handed on the torch of learning to the northern nations" (Symonds).

Art had already had its new birth in Italy; but it shared with everything spiritual and intellectual the wonderful quickening of the age, and produced the great masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, in Italy, the Brothers Van Eyck in Flanders, Holbein and Dürer, in Germany, and the host of their compeers in that astonishing age of artistic genius.

Portuguese Explorations.

A ruder and more practical direction in which the spirit of the age manifested itself conspicuously and with prodigious results was that of exploring navigation, to penetrate the unknown regions of the globe and find their secrets out. But, strangely, it was none of the older maritime and commercial peoples who led the way in this: neither the Venetians, nor the Genoese, nor the Catalans, nor the Flemings, nor the Hansa Leaguers, nor the English, were early in the search for new countries and new routes of trade. The grand exploit of "business enterprise" in the fifteenth century, which changed the face of commerce throughout the world, was left to be performed by the Portuguese, whose prior commercial experience was as slight as that of any people in Europe. And it was one great man among them, a younger son in their royal family, Prince Henry, known to later times as "the Navigator," who woke the spirit of exploration in them and pushed them to the achievement which placed Portugal, for a time, at the head of the maritime states. Beginning in 1434, Prince Henry sent expedition following expedition down the western coast of Africa, searching for the southern extremity of the continent, and a way round it to the eastward—to the Indies, the goal of commercial ambition then and long after. In our own day it seems an easy thing to sail down the African coast to the Cape; but it was not easy in the middle of the fifteenth century; and when Prince Henry died, in 1460, his ships had only reached the mouth of the Gambia, or a little way beyond it. His countrymen had grown interested, however, in the pursuit which he began, and expeditions were continued, not eagerly but at intervals, until Bartolomew Diaz, in 1486, rounded the southern point of the continent without knowing it, and Vasco da Gama, in 1497, passed beyond, and sailed to the coast of India.

Discovery of America.

Five years before this, Columbus, in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, had made the more venturesome voyage westward, and had found the New World of America. That the fruits of that surpassing discovery fell to Spain, is one of the happenings of history which one need not try to explain; since (if we except the Catalans among them) there were no people in Europe less inclined to ocean adventure than the Spaniards. But they had just finished the conquest of the Moors; their energies, long exercised in that struggle, demanded some new outlet, and the Genoese navigator, seeking money and ships, and baffled in all more promising lands, came to them at the right moment for a favorable hearing. So Castile won the amazing prize of adventure, which seems to have belonged by more natural right to Genoa, or Venice, or Bruges, or Lubeck, or Bristol.

The immediate material effects of the finding of the new way to the Asiatic side of the world were far more important than the effects of the discovery of America, and they were promptly felt. No sooner had the Portuguese secured their footing in the eastern seas, and on the route thither, which they proceeded vigorously to do, than the commerce of Europe with that rich region of spices and silks, and curious luxuries which Europe loved, abandoned its ancient channels and ran quickly into the new one. There were several strong reasons for this: (1) the carriage of goods by the longer ocean route was cheaper than by caravan routes to the Mediterranean; (2) the pestilent Moorish pirates of the Barbary Coast were escaped; (3) European merchants found heavy advantages in dealing directly with the East instead of trading at second hand through Arabs and Turks. So the commerce of the Indies fled suddenly away from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic; fled from Venice, from Genoa, from Marseilles, from Barcelona, from Constantinople, from Alexandria; fled, too, from many cities of the arrogant Hanse league in the North, which had learned the old ways of traffic and were slow to catch the idea of a possible change. At the outset of the rearrangement of trade, the Portuguese won and held, for a time, the first handling of East Indian commodities, while Dutch, English and German traders—especially the first named—met them at Lisbon and took their wares for distribution through central and northern Europe. But, in no long time, the Dutch and English went to India on their own account, and ousted the Portuguese from their profitable monopoly.

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Commercially, the discovery of America had little effect on Europe for a century or two. Politically, it had vast consequences in the sixteenth century, which came, in the main, from the power and prestige that accrued to Spain. But perhaps its most important effects were those moral and intellectual ones which may be attributed to the sudden, surprising enlargement of the geographical horizon of men. The lifting of the curtain of mystery which had hung so long between two halves of the world must have compelled every man, who thought at all, to suspect that other curtains of mystery might be hiding facts as simple and substantial, waiting for their Columbus to disclose them; and so the bondage of the mediæval mind to that cowardice of superstition which fears inquiry, must surely have been greatly loosened by the startling event. But the Spaniards, who rushed to the possession of the new-found world, showed small signs of any such effect upon their minds; and perhaps it was the greedy thought of their possession which excluded it.

Nationalization of Spain.

The Spaniards were one of half-a-dozen peoples in Western Europe who had just arrived, in this fifteenth century, at a fairly consolidated nationality, and were prepared, for the first time in their history, to act with something like organic unity in the affairs of the world. It was one of the singular birth-marks of the new era in history, that so many nations passed from the inchoate to the definite form at so nearly the same time. The marriage of Isabella of Castile to Ferdinand of Aragon, in 1469, effected a permanent union of the two crowns, and a substantial incorporation of the greater part of the Spanish peninsula into a single strong kingdom, made yet stronger in 1491 by the conquest of Grenada and subjugation of the last of the Spanish Moors.

Louis XI. and the Nationalizing of France.

The nationalizing of France had been a simultaneous but quite different process. From the miserably downfallen and divided state in which it was left by the Hundred Years War, it was raised by a singular king, who employed strange, ignoble methods, but employed them with remarkable success. This was Louis XI., who owes to Sir Walter Scott's romance of "Quentin Durward" an introduction to common fame which he could hardly have secured otherwise; since popular attention is not often drawn to the kind of cunning and hidden work in politics which he did.

Louis XI., on coming to the throne in 1461, found himself surrounded by a state of things which seemed much like a revival of the feudal state at its worst, when Philip Augustus and Louis IX. had to deal with great vassals who rivalled or overtopped them in power. The reckless granting of appanages to children of the royal family had raised up a new group of nobles, too powerful and too proud to be loyal and obedient subjects of the monarchy. At the head of them was the Duke of Burgundy, whose splendid dominion, extended by marriage over most of the Netherlands, raised him to a place among the greater princes of Europe, and who quite outshone the King of France in everything but the royal title. It was impossible, under the circumstances, for the crown to establish its supremacy over these powerful lords by means direct and open. The craft and dishonesty of Louis found methods more effectual. He cajoled, beguiled, betrayed and cheated his antagonists, one by one. He played the selfishness and ambitions of each against the others, and he skilfully evoked something like a public opinion in his kingdom against the whole. At the outset of his reign the nobles formed a combination against him which they called the League of the Public Weal, but which aimed at nothing but fresh gains to the privileged class and advantages to its chiefs. Of alliance with the people against the crown, as in England, there was no thought. Louis yielded to the League in appearance, and cunningly went beyond its demands in his concessions, making it odious to the kingdom at large, and securing to himself the strong support of the States-General of France, when he appealed to it.

The tortuous policy of Louis was aided by many favoring circumstances and happenings. It was favored not least, perhaps, by the hot-headed character of Charles the Bold, who succeeded his father, Philip, in the Duchy of Burgundy, in 1467. Charles was inspired with a great and not unreasonable ambition, to make his realm a kingdom, holding a middle place between France and Germany. He had abilities, but he was of a passionate and haughty temper, and no match for the cool, perfidious, plotting King of France. The latter, by skilful intrigue, involved him in a war with the Swiss, which he conducted imprudently, and in which he was defeated and killed (1477). His death cleared Louis' path to complete mastery in France, and he made the most of his opportunity. Charles left only a daughter, Mary of Burgundy, and her situation was helpless. Louis lost no time in seizing the Duchy of Burgundy, as a fief of France, and in the pretended exercise of his rights as godfather of the Duchess Mary. He also took possession of Franche Comté, which was a fief of the Empire, and he put forward claims in Flanders, Artois, and elsewhere. But the Netherlanders, while they took advantage of the young duchess' situation, and exacted large concessions of chartered privileges from her, yet maintained her rights; and before the first year of her orphanage closed, she obtained a champion by marriage with the Archduke Maximilian of Austria, son of the Emperor, Frederick III. Maximilian was successful in war with Louis; but the latter succeeded, after all, in holding Burgundy, which was thenceforth absorbed in the royal domain of France and gave no further trouble to the monarchy, while he won some important extensions of the northwestern frontiers of his kingdom.

Before the death of Louis XI. the French crown regained Anjou, Maine, and Provence, by inheritance from the last representative of the great second House of Anjou. Thus the kingdom which he left to his son, Charles VIII. (1483), was a consolidated nation, containing in its centralized government the germs of the absolute monarchy of a later day.

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Italian Expedition of Charles VIII.

Charles VIII. was a loutish and uneducated boy of eight years when his father died. His capable sister Anne carried on the government for some years, and continued her father's work by defeating a revolt of the nobles, and by marrying the young king to the heiress of Brittany—thereby uniting to the crown the last of the great semi-independent fiefs. When Charles came of age, he conceived the idea of recovering the kingdom of Naples, which the House of Anjou claimed, and which he looked upon as part of his inheritance from that House. He was incited to the enterprise, moreover, by Ludovico il Moro, or Louis the Moor, an intriguing uncle of the young Duke of Milan, who conspired to displace his nephew. In 1494 Charles crossed the Alps with a large and well-disciplined army, and met with no effectual opposition. The Medici of Florence and the Pope had agreed together to resist this French intrusion, which they feared; but the invading force proved too formidable, and the Florentines, then under the influence of Savonarola, looked to it for their liberation from the Medicean rule, already oppressive. Accordingly Charles marched triumphantly through the peninsula, making some stay at Rome. On his approach to Naples, the Aragonese King, Alfonso, abdicated in favor of his son, Ferdinand II., and died soon after. Ferdinand, shut out of Naples by an insurrection, fled to Sicily, and Charles entered the city, where the populace welcomed him with warmth. Most of the kingdom submitted within a few weeks, and the conquest seemed complete, as it had been easy.

But what they had won so easily the French held with a careless hand, and they lost it with equal ease. While they revelled and caroused in Naples, abusing the hospitality of their new subjects, and gathering plunder with reckless greed, a dangerous combination was formed against them, throughout the peninsula. Before they were aware, it had put them in peril, and Charles was forced to retreat with haste, in the spring of 1495, leaving an inadequate garrison to hold the Neapolitan capital. In Lombardy, he had to fight with the Venetians, and with his protege, Louis the Moor, now Duke of Milan. He defeated them, and regained France in November. Long before that time, the small force he left at Naples had been overcome, and Ferdinand had recovered his kingdom.

In one sense, the French had nothing to show for this their first expedition of conquest. In another sense they had much to show and their gain was great. They had made their first acquaintance with the superior culture of Italy. They had breathed the air beyond the Alps, which was then surcharged with the inspirations of the Renaissance. Both the ideas and the spoil they brought back were of more value to France than can be easily estimated. They had returned laden with booty, and much of it was in treasures of art, every sight of which was a lesson to the sense of beauty and the taste of the people among whom they were shown. The experience and the influence of the Italian expedition were undoubtedly very great, and the Renaissance in France, as an artistic and a literary birth, is reasonably dated from it.

Italian Wars of Louis XII.

Charles VIII. died suddenly in 1498 and was succeeded by his cousin, of the Orleans branch of the Valois family, Louis XII. The new king was weak in character, but not wicked. His first thought on mounting the throne was of the claims of his family to other thrones, in Italy. Besides the standing Angevin claim to the kingdom of Naples, he asserted rights of his own to the duchy of Milan, as a descendant of Valentina Visconti, heiress of the ducal house which the Sforzas supplanted. In 1499 he sent an army against Louis the Moor, and the latter fled from Milan without an attempt at resistance. Louis took possession of the duchy with the greatest good will of the people; but, before half a year had passed, French taxes, French government, and French manners had disgusted them, and they made an attempt to restore their former tyrant. The attempt failed, and Louis the Moor was imprisoned in France for the remainder of his life.

Milan secured, Louis XII. began preparations to repeat the undertaking of Charles VIII. against Naples. The Neapolitan crown had now passed to an able and popular king, Frederick, and Frederick had every reason to suppose that he would be supported and helped by his kinsman, Ferdinand of Aragon, the well-known consort of Isabella of Castile. Ferdinand had the power to hold the French king in check; but instead of using it for the defense of the Neapolitan branch of his house, he secretly and treacherously agreed with Louis to divide the kingdom of Naples with him. Under these circumstances, the conquest was easily accomplished (1501). The betrayed Frederick surrendered to Louis, and lived as a pensionary in France until his death. The Neapolitan branch of the House of Aragon came to an end.

Louis and Ferdinand speedily quarreled over the division of their joint conquest. The treacherous Spaniard cheated the French king in treaty negotiations, gaining time to send forces into Italy which expelled the French. It was in this war that the Spanish general, Gonsalvo di Cordova, won the reputation which gave him the name of "the Great Captain"; and it was likewise in this war that the chivalric French knight, Bayard, began the winning of his fame.

The League of Cambrai and the Holy League.