Posted on 08/22/2008 9:38:37 PM PDT by WesternCulture
The Middle Ages saw the establishment of free cities with free citizens. That is one of its great accomplishments. It also saw the establishment of Republics. It was the wealthy merchants of these Medieval Republics that supported many of the artists and scholars of the Renaissance.
The original article of this thread mentions the Cathedral of Florence. Most of that church was build in the Middle Ages. That is very evident in the style of the bell tower at the front of the church. As for Brunelleschi's dome, that was paid for by the Wool Guild of Florence. How do you get the dome without those institutions that were created in the Middle Ages? Even his dome used a Gothic ribbed construction in the outer shell as well as a pointed arch.
As for the peasants working the land, did the Renaissance set them free? I think the French Revolution some centuries later answers that question.
Of course all the accomplishments of the Middle Ages must be debunked by the modern who expects every age to be a mirror of some perfection that has never exited and never will exist.
- War has seldom been fun.
But the idiocy of the wars taking place on the Italian Peninsula during the Renaissance were, in part, highly laughable and ridiculous.
Most experts of this department of European history admit it is extremely difficult to figure out what the conflicts between these national leaders actually were all about. Probably, it was even more difficult for these rulers to understand themselves.
According to most sources, the troops of Cesare Borgia were very cruel. Not to speak of their commander himself.
However, a Renaissance Florentine like Luca Landucci author of “Diario Fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516”) actually viewed wars fought on Italian soil mainly being far too sissy in nature and also complained no real physical contact between the combatants took place.
Landucci, furthermore, called for the necessity of Italians
learning the art of true warfare from the nations north of Italy.
Apart from being an amateur historian, Landucci was a rather well off pharmacist.
Thanks to him, we today know young Florentine boys occasionally enjoyed playing some sort of football with the heads of newly decapitated criminals.
Science is a discipline of knowledge that takes generation's to build up. Newtonian physics is based upon Galilean relativity that says space and time are constant but the speed of light is relative. But we know that to be false. In Einsteinian relativity space and time are relative but the speed of light is constant. Since Galileo got it wrong, should be dismiss him as a superstitious crank? Or should be instead honor him as one of the great historical figures of science even though he was quite mistaken about some things?
My point was that, with rare exceptions generally ended quickly and bloodily, the Middle Ages did not have anything resembling modern labor unions.
I agree that the Middle Ages often get no respect. Technologically Western Europe was probably ahead of the ancient classical world by 1250 or so, with the advancement accelerating all the time. Rome, OTOH, was stagnant or even retrograde in technology for centuries.
The common man in the Middle Ages, while often severely oppressed by modern standards, was also well ahead of his equivalent in the classical world. The serf was at least recognized as a man with enforceable legal and property rights. The slave was chattel.
It’s hard to compare Galileo to the Scholastics. I will grant that it would be a mistake to brand the Scholastics as bogeyman, an evil to be overcome, but I don’t think you can equate Galileo to the Scholastics by citing his errors. Galileo was revolutionary because of his experimental method, and because of his application of mathematics to the results of his experiments. However faulty many of his ideas might have been, he is recognizably modern in his approach, and we can easily identify with him. Just the opposite is true of the Scholastics. Whatever sort of merit or virtuosity we might identify in their thinking, their entire perspective and approach is alien to our modern minds.
Terminat hora diem. Terminat auctor opus :-)
Italian Renaissance wars were largely fought by mercenary condottieri, which is Italian for "contractors."
Not surprisingly, the condottieri on opposing sides were not anxious to destroy their capital investment, their army, by engaging in mutually bloody battle. Their wars therefore tended to be sieges or minimally bloody manuever-fests.
This did not, however, keep the wars themselves from being bloody, as soldiers on all sides had no problems with pillaging and killing civilians.
Machievelli saw the problems with mercenary armies and tried to organize a Florentine national army. Didn't work out.
Not surprisingly, numerous condottieri took over as tyrants of many Italian states.
The whole system collapsed pretty thoroughly in 1494 with the French invasion. The condottieri fell apart when faced with a real army that fought for keeps.
Thereafter Italy was generally dominated and fought over by outsiders for the next 350 years or so.
But most important of all, they did not have mircrowave ovens. Now that I call barbarian living.
“In Einsteinian relativity space and time are relative but the speed of light is constant.”
- The speed of light is constant only in complete vacuum according to Einstein.
Anyhow, Einstein was very much of brilliant mathematician and theorist and didn't bother much about the concrete aspects of the physical world as long as they didn't interfere with his theories - like they do in the case of the behavior of subatomic particles.
Irritatingly enough, they continue to elude our attempts at trapping them into a given mathematical definition of the freedom behind their choices of actions.
Naomi Klein, of all people, talks about the flip side of this in her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She notes that the destruction of established institutions can lead to the spread of revolutionary ideas.
She complains, however, about how Milton Friedmanit acolytes viewed the Katrina-caused destruction of New Orleans, for example, as an opportunity to fix the broken culture of the city rather than just restore the natives to their prior squalor (both economic and cultural). She sees it as a bad thing that the powers-that-be grasped the opportunity to replace the unworkable public schools system with a network of innovative charter schools. She somehow thinks that the response to destruction should be a restoration of the status quo rather than making things better.
“But most important of all, they did not have mircrowave ovens. Now that I call barbarian living.”
- If Italian peasants of that time would’ve been provided the opportunity of tasting microwave food, they would probably have considered anyone insane to pay for and even EAT it a true barbarian.
Correction:
“insane enough”
Much of the nineteenth century is alien to the modern mind.
Scholasticism is not a monolith. There were competing schools. But they were always reinterpreting Aristotle in some way. We can laugh about the experiments of Albertus Magnus, but that is the beginning of experimental science in the West. And it began in the Middle Ages before Galileo.
Galileo got his education as a boy in a monastery school and later at a university. These are institutions established in the Middle Ages. And without the mathematical training that Galileo received in these institutions, we would not be talking about him now.
So yes, let us honor the originality of Galileo, but let us never forget the great debt that he and we owe to the Middle Ages.
On the contrary, Einstein was quite aware that experimental results of subatomic particles contradicted his theory of relativity. This distressed him greatly. That is why he spent the last 30 years of he life trying to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics. They can't both be true. And perhaps they are both false. At any rate he failed to find the unified field theory he was looking for.
This contradiction between relativity and quantum mechanics still lies at the heart of physics. Whether string theory or some of the other related theories have resolved the contradiction is not yet clear. I guess we will have to wait and see if physicists have discovered the Theory of Everything.
Oh, yes, now I remember. Benjamin Franklin invented electricity at the end of a kite.
“This did not, however, keep the wars themselves from being bloody, as soldiers on all sides had no problems with pillaging and killing civilians.”
“The whole system collapsed pretty thoroughly in 1494 with the French invasion. The condottieri fell apart when faced with a real army that fought for keeps.”
- What keeps:D?
Furthermore; when the French, a people already insane by nature, enter another nation which also is out of their minds, but in a different way (like Italians are) the French automatically adopt the insanity of that particular nation - on top of their original insanity.
This explains the development of that particular epoque of Italian history in a quite satisfying manner.
Anyhow, good ol’ Luca reports that the French troops behaved very well while staying visiting Florence. According to Landucci, no citizen told of anything like a French soldier being overly drunk in the street or having harassed a Florentine girl.
- I apologize if I wasn't all that clear in my earlier remark. I meant he initially set sail for a “clinical” theory, disregarding the eventuality of certain particles not wishing to collaborate while he was there, on the job.
Perhaps I ought to take Einstein more seriously.
(Or maybe you haven't had a real drink yet this weekend, fellow freeper:D? - Just joking).
Actually, this, rather well known dilemma of Monsieur Einstein is exactly what I was aiming at in my comment.
My impression too is he was, at least somewhat, distressed by the problems he faced.
However, to genuine theorists like Einstein this problem could easily be done away with.
Like the surveyor's credo states;
“If the terrain doesn't fit the map, the terrain has to go.”
Part of the reason for the renaisance was the rediscover of ancient thought.
There are more scientists alive now than ever.
In the last 100 years technology has exploded (sometimes literally)
We have whole new art media.
We are no longer confined to be born, live and die in a 50 mile area.
we are hadly finished.
Looks like one of the obstacles in the latest installment of ‘Ninja Warrior’.
Is there a big pool of nasty muddy water somewhere beneath it?
Not altogether surprising, as Florence was an ally of the French, and had been for centuries.
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