Rapid Change Is Nothing New

We tend to think of the rapid change of our times as somehow both the norm and unique at the same time. We want our time to be special, so we too often fail to understand the extent or the kinds of changes our ancestors saw, while, at the same time, magnifying every little fad of ours into momentous change. The truth is that there were changes going on in Europe five, six, and seven hundred years ago that were cognitively as wrenching as anything we have experienced.

I've mentioned humanism in the preceding posts. It introduced a new educational agenda, along with new ways of looking at language, history, politics, and authority. Meanwhile, in England and Bohemia, serious religious upheavals were underway, leading to religious wars that lasted fifteen years in Bohemia, and occasionally spilling out into neighboring lands. But of course all of Europe was wracked by wars, and when not by wars, often by marauding bands of ex-soldiers. The Plague had thinned the population and altered social and economic relationships all over the continent.

If the humanists were mainly interested in the word, the artists of the time were evincing a new interest in the eye. The development of linear perspective was critical in the rise of the sciences and engineering in Europe. It taught a new way to observe the present, just as humanist textual analysis taught new ways to see the past.

There were so many new technologies contributing too. If, when Leonardo Bruni wrote his De Militia in 1422, printing was not yet a reality, he was a beneficiary of cheap paper and eyeglasses. His childhood would have included revolts and labor unrest that included riots by workers being forced to work according to the new concepts about time resulting from the spread of clocks. Metallurgy was also on the move among Europeans in the wake of the blast furnace and the trip hammer, though these had been in existence for some time. We can see this in the development of armor between 1300 and 1500, moving from chainmail with smaller pieces of steel plate armor, to full suits of plate, culminating in the magnificently worked suits that we admire in museums today, and in which we anachronistically dress the Knights of the Round Table.

One of the reasons, particularly after 1400, for improvements in armor was the introduction of guns to Europe by the 1320s. These, as well as the powder they used, underwent continual improvements in these years, ultimately wrecking medieval walls with unprecedented speed by the mid-1400s, requiring new types of fortification, and affecting the lives of city dwellers everywhere by fostering new types of city planning (to ensure the most effective fortifications). They also altered the balance of power on more than one occasion, contributing to the endemic warfare and political turmoil of the times.

It is against this backdrop that we must see the people and events of the Renaissance. Life failed to stop moving, nor did the human mind cease to find new directions for development. Likewise the battlefield was in constant flux, with major changes coming with each new war or even each new campaign.