HIST 102 #3 - Renaissance Statecraft

Hello, welcome back to our lecture series for Western Civilization 102. Our speaker today is Dr. Robison, and he will lecture about the Renaissance, uh, entitled Renaissance Statecraft. And basically, what we're doing here, he will discuss Italy, of course, because Italy was very important for the Renaissance. You may have heard of the very famous family called the Medici, but he will also discuss different countries in Europe, so we'll move a little bit north in our lecture.

He will discuss England. Dr. Robinson is an authority on English History. He will discuss the House of Tudor. I know that you've probably know about the War of the Roses and how the House of Tudor will be the victors out of this civil war that occurred in England, um, and so we'll talk a little bit about that. Also, we will discuss with this third lecture Henry VII. Henry VII, very famous King of England and the 16th century, the early 16th century. You may have heard of him. He, he was the king that had six wives. Killed a few of them, of course, but his last wife managed to outlive him. Good for her.

We'll also discuss Spain and Charles V. Charles V was a very, an extremely pivotal figure in the 16th century. He was the King of Spain, but Charles V will become the Holy Roman Emperor. Now, the Holy Roman Empire will encompass basically Central Europe, so it encompasses more than one country, so very powerful position for Charles V. It will be Charles V that will have to deal with, um, a man named Martin Luther. Martin Luther is credited with beginning the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation, of course, is also another topic for this unit one lecture series.

Martin Luther was extremely important because, uh, you know, we've mentioned before about there were people that didn't agree with the Catholic Church in the 14th century. The Catholic Church had undergone some problems. There was a, a split in the leadership of the Catholic Church. We end up eventually with three popes. There was corruption among the, the leadership and the priest, and so there were people that wanted to reform the Church. And so in the 16th century, we have Martin Luther. He will post his 95 Theses, basically he attacks what's called indulgences. And because we have the printing press, this message will expand and spread across Europe, and there obviously are other people out there that feel the same way as Martin Luther.

Luther was a very interesting figure. He ended up marrying a nun, um, and they lived happily ever after. I think they had like six children, um, and he, the other women in the convent he married off, you know, he had them paired up as well. Uh, very interesting figure, Martin Luther. Martin Luther believed in justification by faith alone. In other words, Martin Luther didn't believe that you had to, um, do, I guess, a confession. He believed that your faith alone and you reading the Bible would be sufficient. Um, he also believed in, he believed in communion, but it was a different type of communion. It wasn't the, the Catholic Church, of course, with communion believes that the bread and the wine really are kind of like the, the body and the blood of Christ. Well, Martin Luther had a little different take on this, at which you'll find out eventually.

And he wasn't the only one. We're going to discover that with the Protestant Reformation, a lot of the, the major figures in this Protestant Reformation, not only just Martin Luther, but a man named Zwingli, John Calvin. You probably heard of John Calvin. He was extremely important as far as the United States or America is concerned because John Calvin will influence the Puritans of England, who eventually, of course, settle in the northern part of Massachusetts, United States. So a lot of these Protestant reformers will not agree either. It wasn't just Martin Luther, and he didn't, you know, have the handbook on the Reformation. They'll actually meet at one point, Martin Luther or, you know, Zwingli. They'll try to come to some kind of consensus on the Reformation, and they can't do it. And the major bone of contention will be their, their feelings on communion and what it means. Very, very simple, but it was a problem they could not agree. It was called the Marburg Colloquy, with this meeting that they couldn't end up agreeing at. Um, so you would think that these men would have, you know, uh, problems staying alive. We've learned that, you know, other reformers managed to die. Burned at the stake was a very popular method of execution, um, for people that went against church doctrine. You can call the, the church calls these people heretics or heresy when you go against church doctrine.

But Martin Luther managed to live out a long life and die a natural death, which is truly amazing. His ruler from his country, his ruler, and he was in the Holy Roman Empire, he lived within the Holy Roman Empire, of course, who was the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. His ruler actually had to kidnap him at one point and hide him away because he, he was marked for death. If he was caught, he would have been executed. At one point, and Charles V was not very happy with Martin Luther. Charles V, of course, had been the king of Spain, and Spain was very big into Catholicism. So Charles V was not happy with Martin Luther, and he's stirring up all this trouble, um, and the Holy Roman Empire. But Charles V had to deal with other issues at the time, as you'll find out. He had problems bigger than Martin Luther, I guess you'd say. One of those problems, one, there were many, but one had to do with a man named Suleiman the Magnificent, which Dr. Robinson will discuss in his upcoming lecture.

Now, Suleiman the Magnificent was the leader of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire is basically, for our Western Civilization 101 course, if you looked at toward the end of the lecture series for that, there was, um, the Byzantine Empire, the, the Eastern Empire. Well, basically, not ex, you know, exactly, but basically that's the Ottoman Empire. So they were making forays into Europe and causing problems. So Charles V has to deal with Suleiman. Machiavelli is another, uh, person that Dr. Robinson discusses. Sir Thomas More of England, you will find out about why he is important as well.

So let's find out about, uh, Renaissance statecraft. In making sense of Renaissance statecraft, it is critical to understand the centrality of Italy. If you look at the map of Europe, and if you keep in mind that the Mediterranean Sea is still the principal avenue of commerce in 1500, and the fact that the far north and the far northeast are still not very much involved in European affairs, then Italy sits right at the center of the map. It also, of course, is the center of the Renaissance and the center of the Roman Catholic Church, still the universal church all over Western Europe in 1500. But it's a good deal more than that. It's also the center of commerce, it's the center of banking, and it's the home of five of the most important states in Europe, although they are relatively small compared to others.

First of all, there's Rome itself, which carries the legacy of the ancient Roman Empire and the combined, uh, legacy of both the emperors and of the papacy, which has been there since the early days of the Roman Catholic Church. In addition to that, we have the city-state of Venice in the northeast. It often surprises people to learn that in 1500, Venice was the most powerful state in Europe, not because of its size, but because of its wealth, its navy, and its vast trading network allowed it to conduct war and diplomacy at a level that almost nobody else could. And in fact, Venice virtually invented modern diplomacy during the Renaissance.

The city-state of Florence was a home of both money, thanks to trade, and culture, one of the real cultural centers of the Renaissance, and also the home of the very powerful Medici family. The city-state of Milan in Northern Italy was the gateway to Italy from the north, or to the north from Italy, and a strategic point and an economic point of great value. And finally, in the south, the kingdom of Naples turned out to be in the 16th century sort of the dynastic cockpit of Europe, that is, a place that everyone claimed and where everyone came to fight.

Now, in addition to understanding the centrality of Italy, another factor I want to introduce today is that of contingency, or what we might call luck. Of course, one can point to contingency at almost any juncture in history, but I want to give you several examples here today that will explore in more detail in a little bit. One of these has to do with the Union of Aragon and Castile by marriage in 1469, although that doesn't come to fruition until a little bit later. A second one is the fall of the state of Burgundy in 1477, which we'll talk about in just a minute. A third is the, the fall of a very powerful prince in Hungary in 1490. Fourth is what happens in Florence in 1492, a year that's big for a lot of reasons, and finally, the default of a dynasty in Naples in 1494. All these are key to understanding a lot of what goes on in the statecraft and diplomacy of this period.

We'll turn first to Burgundy, which was governed late in the 15th century by Charles the Bold, the fourth in a series of very powerful Dukes of Burgundy. Charles was in many ways a perfect Renaissance Prince, one of those individuals who was literally good at everything. His lavish court carried out a day-to-day routine or ritual that set the example for the rest of Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. He was a patron of the arts, he had an enormous library, he kept a staff of court musicians, and he had the ambition to be king and the military and political skill to make that a reality.

Burgundy lay between the kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire, and what Charles the Bold, like his father, hoped to do was to create the old early medieval state of Lotharingia, which had stretched from Northern Italy, including Switzerland, much of the territory between the Empire and France, all the way up to the Netherlands. And he came very close to doing that, but in one of those examples of contingency that I mentioned, he was killed while still a fairly young man in 1477 in battle with the French, and he left behind no male heir. So the kingdom of Burgundy, which came so close to existing, was not to be. Rather, his heir was a daughter, Mary of Burgundy, and she inherited a substantial part of his territory of Burgundy, most importantly that area that we nowadays know as the Netherlands, an area that was already a rising center of trade surrounding the mouth of the Rhine River, and only to become more economically important as the 16th century progressed.

What's particularly important is that in 1477, the same year her father died, she married the Holy Roman Emperor, or the future Holy Roman Emperor, uh, Maximilian the First. Maximilian the First, who came to the throne in 1493, on the, in the Holy Roman Empire, ruled over that vast collection of territories in Central Europe that includes all of modern Germany, parts of Northern Italy, various other territories like Bohemia, and that now has added to it the economic engine of the Netherlands. This greatly strengthened the Empire and created the potential for any children of Maximilian and Mary to be even more powerful. In fact, they had a very promising son, Philip the Handsome, who is Archduke in his younger days, who inherits a potential claim not only to the Holy Roman Empire but also to Burgundy.

Now let's turn to Spain for a minute, and there's a reason for doing this here. In Spain, there, there was in fact no single kingdom during the Middle Ages, but in 1469, there occurred a very important marriage that on one side involved the ruler of the kingdom of Aragon, Ferdinand the Second. Ferdinand came from the House of Trastámara and was already king of the island of Sicily, off the southern coast of Naples, another part of Italy. In 1469, he married Isabella of Castile, to whom I'll introduce you in just a moment. In 1479, he became king of Aragon in his own right, and not long after that was drawn into the Italian Wars that we'll be talking about a little bit later on. In 1504, he, as a result of that involvement, also became the king of Naples. So he, in fact, ruled the eastern half of what we now know as Spain and the southern half of what we now know as Italy, and therefore sort of dominated the Western Mediterranean region.

The woman he married in 1469 came from a different branch of the House of Trastámara, and not only did they marry in 1469, in 1478, they persuaded the Pope to allow them to set up a separate operation of the Inquisition in Spain, the notorious Spanish Inquisition, which, as it turns out, is the only national institution linking Aragon and Castile, important not only for its prosecution of heresy but also for its reinforcement of Spanish nationalism.

In 1492, by which time Ferdinand and Isabella both ruled in their own right in Aragon and Castile respectively, several important things happened. Number one, in 1492, they conquered the kingdom of Granada, the last outpost of Islam in Spain. During the earlier Middle Ages, Islam had overrun most of Spain. By 1492, the only kingdom left was on the southern part of Spain in Granada, and in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella captured that. A second thing, not necessarily a high point in the, the history of humanitarianism, is that in 1492, they expelled all the Jews from Spain who refused to convert to Christianity. And of course, the third thing which happens is that in 1492, Isabella sponsored the exploratory voyage of a fellow named Christopher Columbus, which would open up to Spain a vast and wealthy empire in the New World. In 1494, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, they agreed with Portugal to essentially divide the unknown world between them. That doesn't hold up for very long, but they certainly tried to do it.

Now, where they fit into what we were discussing earlier about Burgundy and the Holy Roman Empire is that Ferdinand and Isabella had a number of children, and one of these was their daughter, Joanna of Castile, who in 1496 married Philip the Handsome. Remember, Philip the Handsome is potential heir to the Holy Roman Empire and Burgundy. Joanna of Castile, as the oldest child of Ferdinand and Isabella, is the potential heir of both of their kingdoms. In fact, when her mother died in 1504, when Isabella of Castile died, Joanna did briefly become queen of Castile, and her husband, Philip the Handsome, became the king there. Unfortunately for both of them, in 1506, Philip became ill and died, and Joanna shortly thereafter went completely insane with grief, and as a consequence, neither of them will really rule for very long.

However, they had a son, a young son by the name of Charles, who now, by virtue of his two sets of grandparents and his two parents, is potential heir to the Empire, to Burgundy, and to Spain and all of its New World empire, and it probably won't surprise you to hear that he's going to get that. Before we talk about him, though, I want to talk about a different Charles, not Charles of Spain, but Charles the Eighth of France, who also is a major factor in our story here.

Charles's father, Louis XI, sometimes known as Louis the Spider, had also acquired a piece of Burgundy in 1477, that part that lay within the boundaries of France. In 1491, Charles VII of France himself also acquired the Duchy of Brittany, making France a substantially larger kingdom, and in 1494, he found himself heir to the crown of Naples in southern Italy. Now, bear in mind that this is the late 15th century. We're talking about here. Kings do things not primarily in the interest of the state, but in the interest of the dynasty, and the opportunity to take land in Italy that was dynastically his. So Charles VII thought was one that he found to be irresistible, and in fact, it is Charles VII of France who ignites the Italian Wars, wars that would be continued by his successor, Louis XII, uh, down until his death in 1515.

Now, if we move across the channel from France to England, the king at this time is the first of the Tudor dynasty, Henry VII, the father of the much more famous Henry VIII. He had been the ultimate victor in a long struggle for control of the throne called the Wars of the Roses. He also, by virtue of ruling England, had control of Ireland as well, or at least as much control as any king of England at this time could muster, and he was at least nominally involved in the wars of Italy, though he never went there himself.

To the north of England at this time, there was still a separate kingdom of Scotland, which in 1500 was ruled by James IV, the latest in a long and continuing line of King James's who were part of the Stewart dynasty. And Scotland at this juncture was normally the ally of the French, who were normally hostile to the English. So England finds itself with an enemy to the north in Scotland, an enemy to the south in France.

Now let's move into the, the more fringe areas of Europe at this time, not, not to discount their importance, but they are not often central to the main action here. In Scandinavia, in that area that nowadays forms the three separate states of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, there was in fact in 1500 only one king, a king sometimes known as John, sometimes known as Hans. He was in fact king of Denmark, king of Norway, king of Sweden, because of something that had existed in the late Middle Ages called the Union of Kalmar, an attempt to link all three of these kingdoms permanently together. That's going to break down later, but for the moment, it is significant that all three are under the rule of a single king.

If we move further to the east, in Poland and what at the time was the vast state of Lithuania, a state that, you know, is nothing like that anymore, we have a king who comes to the throne in 1506, known as Sigismund the First, or Sigismund the Old. The significance of Sigismund is not that he is the first king to rule both Poland and Lithuania, but he is the first king to inherit both of them at the same time, and from this point on, those two are pretty much permanently linked, and eventually Poland sort of absorbs Lithuania and becomes the gigantic state that it is later on.

Finally, if we move as far to the northeast as we can go, we come into contact with Muscovy. Now, Muscovy makes up the nucleus of what we later on call Russia. There was not in fact a Russia at all in the Middle Ages. Russia was only coming into being in the late 15th century, and there we find a ruler by the name of Ivan III, who is the first individual to rule Muscovy or Moscow, who is also known as Prince of All the Russians. Under him, all of what becomes Russia is finally united into a single state, and although Russia still has a lot of rough sailing ahead in the 16th and early 17th centuries, this is of enormous significance. I should note that Russia at this juncture is still much more oriented to Asia than it is to Europe, but its involvement in European affairs will increase dramatically in the 16th and 17th centuries, making it an extremely important state.

Now, if we move south from Poland and Russia, that brings us to Hungary, and there we have another one of those examples of contingency that I mentioned early. Hungary does not in fact become a huge player in the affairs of the 16th and 17th centuries, but it was poised to do so at the end of the 15th century. Between 1456 and 1490, it was ruled by a relatively little known now king, but one of the most brilliant rulers of the time, a man by the name of Matthias Corvinus, who represents kind of a lost Renaissance and another one of those might have beens in history.

Matthias Corvinus was very intelligent, he was educated, he was a strong-willed king and a strong king generally. He was known for being just, he was a good soldier, he was a good statesman. He also was a true Renaissance Prince. He was a patron of the arts, a patron of learning. He established a vast library in Hungary known as the Bibliotheca Corviniana. He established in 1475 the University of Buda, which of course is still there, and in 1486 promulgated a law code based on that of the ancient Romans, again following that whole tendency of the Renaissance to look to the classical world for inspiration. And in fact, Matthias Corvinus was so successful militarily that by 1490, he appeared to be poised to take over a significant chunk of Central Europe. He had the Holy Roman Empire at bay, and he might very well, if he had lived longer, turned Hungary into the dominant state in Central Europe. But in 1490, he died prematurely, and that was the end of that. He was followed by a less capable ruler, Vladislaus II, who ruled both Hungary and Bohemia, but who never achieved the greatness of Matthias Corvinus, and what ultimately will happen there is that, uh, early in the 16th century, most of Hungary is conquered by the Ottoman Turks and passes out of Christian Europe for a couple of hundred years.

Now, if we turn back west, just to the northwest of Italy, we find the, the little state of Switzerland. Uh, Switzerland, of course, is a confederacy. It is not a single state. It's made up of both cities and rural states known as cantons. It had been independent for some time, but had to continue fighting for its independence as, as recently as 1499, when it defeated the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, who was trying to take it back. The significance of this is that Switzerland in the 16th century becomes one of the major suppliers of mercenaries to the rest of Europe. These days, Switzerland is a neutral country. We don't think of it as warlike. We think of it in terms of chocolate and watches and hidden bank accounts, but in the 16th century, it would provide some of the best soldiers anywhere in Europe. Swiss pikemen were feared by military men elsewhere, and it's free to do that because it is an independent state.

If we turn to Italy now, in the northwest of Italy, we find the city-state of Florence, one of the dominant states of Italy in the 15th century, thanks to the presence of the Medici family. And among the Medici, no one exercised more authority than Lorenzo de' Medici, or Lorenzo the Magnificent, as he was known at the time. However, in 1492, Lorenzo died, and although he left a male heir, his male heir was not capable. He did not have the abilities of his father and his grandfather, and within a couple of years, he would lose control of the city-state altogether. Another one of those examples of contingency, or from the point of view of the Medici, bad luck.

Down in the southern part of Italy, I've mentioned Naples several times already. The French wanting Naples, the Spanish eventually getting Naples, or Ferdinand II eventually getting Naples. The reason for that is the death in 1494 of the king of Naples, Ferrante the First. Now, there's a couple of problems with Ferrante. Number one is that he was an illegitimate son of a previous king of Naples, so his, uh, inheritance of Naples in the first place was some, somewhat suspect. A second problem with Ferrante was that he was a complete madman. One of the things that he liked to do was to have his enemies over for dinner, kill them afterwards, and have them stuffed by a taxidermist, and in fact, he kept them in a gallery within his castle. I submit to you that that's not normal behavior. But the biggest problem is that when he died in 1494, he left a weak successor, a successor whose inheritance was a little suspect because of his father's illegitimacy, and was a little shaky because of his father's madness, and as a result, others take advantage of that.

Charles VII of France will attempt to invade Naples. The Spanish also will get involved, and the Italian Wars are off and running. One of the reasons that happens, aside from the interest of the French, is that if we look up to the state of Milan in Northern Italy, another key strategic and economic point, remember, there is a man by the name of Ludovico Sforza, who's seeking his own ends. In 1494, invites the French into Italy. He becomes the ally of Charles VII of France, and that's one of the key factors in convincing Charles that he should in fact invade Italy and try to make good his claim to Naples. In the course of doing so, he will overrun Florence, he will at least temporarily capture Naples, and this will all backfire terribly on Ludovico Sforza because a few years later, Louis XII of France actually takes Milan away from him. One of those cases where what goes around comes around, perhaps.

Finally, there is the city-state of Venice, a major player in the Italian Wars again because it is the most powerful military state at the time. Early on in the Italian Wars, there is one point at which Venice finds itself virtually alone against the Pope, Milan, Florence, the Emperor, the King of Spain, the King of France, and a lot of people are betting on Venice to win. It doesn't, as it turns out, but that tells you how powerful Venice was, and mostly it's because of money that comes from trade and makes possible a huge navy and makes it possible for Venice to hire lots and lots of mercenaries. Venice's unique, uh, in, in this part of Italy in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, in that it is a republic. There are other republics in Italy, Genoa notably, but Venice is the most thriving of the republics. In fact, it does not have a prince. It is ruled by an elected official, sort of like a mayor, who is known as the Doge.

Well, in 1494, war breaks out in Italy because of the invasion of the French seeking the crown of Naples. Nobody knew this at the time, but this ignites a series of wars that will last from 1494 all the way down to 1559. One of the constants in those wars is that almost always the Valois dynasty of France will be on one side, and the Habsburgs will be on the other, the Habsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire, and drawing in also the Habsburgs of Spain.

Early on, another key factor in those Italian Wars is the fifth state in Italy, a state that you may not be used to thinking of as a state, but it is one nonetheless, and that is what we know as the Papal States, that is the central region of Italy that is governed as a secular state by the Pope. The Pope is both the head of the Roman Catholic Church, and he is the ruler of the Papal States. We have a tiny little remnant of that left today, it's the Vatican. The Vatican is not part of Rome, the Vatican is not part of Italy, it's a little bitty independent state inside. Well, in 1500, it was a much bigger state in Italy, and in 1492, there was elected to the papal throne, uh, one of the most notorious individuals of the Renaissance era, that is a guy by the name of Rodrigo Borgia, who upon his election became Pope Alexander VI. Showtimes recently had a series highlighting the escapades of the Borgia family, in which Alexander plays a central role. It may not be completely historical, but Alexander certainly was completely historical, and he's regarded by, by most people, in including Roman Catholic historians, is perhaps the most corrupt Pope ever, politically corrupt, personally corrupt. He openly consorted with mistresses, had a number of children, including his daughter Lucrezia, and more problematically, in terms of war, his son Cesare, during the early Italian Wars, Cesare was in constant motion, carrying out aggression against other states and attempting to expand the size of the Papal States and to create a larger Italian state there.

All this came to an end prematurely when Alexander VI died in 1503, apparently the victim of poisoning, and subsequently Cesare fled to Spain, where a few years later, in 1507, he was killed in a battle. Another one of those might have beens, perhaps. But the point is that in the Italian Wars, everyone is involved, not only the purely secular states but the papacy as well. In fact, after the death of Alexander and a brief interlude with another minor Pope, there came to the papal throne Pope Julius II, who is often known as the Warrior Pope, a member of the powerful Italian Della Rovere family, a great Renaissance patron, whom we associate with Michelangelo and things like the Sistine Chapel, but also a warrior, a man who actively continued the Italian Wars during his time. Upon his passing in 1513, lo and behold, a member of the Medici family was elected as Pope, Pope Leo X, about whom you will be hearing a great deal more later, not only because he too was a great Renaissance patron, but because he was the Pope at the time when the Protestant Reformation began. The Pope against whom Martin Luther launched his campaign in 1517 was in fact Pope Leo X.

Leo is important for another reason. He represents one of several members of a new younger generation of statesmen in the early 16th century. We typically don't think of Popes as being young men these days, they're usually very elderly, but as a matter of fact, Pope Leo was quite a young man when he became Pope. And what was active as a young man might be around the map of Europe as older monarchs died off, new young, well-educated, highly skilled, and extremely ambitious men were coming to power, and that is a recipe for more war, more conflict, and more aggressive Renaissance statecraft.

The first of these to come to the throne is perhaps the best known to modern, uh, audiences today, and that is King Henry VIII of England, who came to the throne there in 1509. There will be much more to be said about Henry VIII in subsequent lectures, but suffice it to say for the moment that he was a true Renaissance Prince, good at everything, highly educated, multilingual, learned in theology, knew his history, was a good soldier, was a good athlete, composed music, he could do it all, and his great goal in life was to reignite the Hundred Years' War and to win back territory that the English had lost in France. He also spent much of his career balancing the French Valois against the Habsburgs, and of course, later on, he has a fairly interesting marital career as well.

In 1515, there came to the throne Henry's chief rival, Francis I of France. Again, young, ambitious, multi-talented, a true Renaissance Prince, and although he is Henry's chief enemy, Henry is not always his chief enemy. Francis I was much more concerned, like his Valois predecessors, with the Habsburgs on the continent. Now, in 1515, Francis I seemed to be poised to dominate Europe. In 1515, he won a battle in the ongoing Italian Wars called the Battle of Marignano, which for the moment seemed to make him the most powerful man in Europe. But these kinds of things are frequently fleeting.

The very next year, something happened that would begin to change that. If you remember back to what we said about Maximilian and Mary and Philip the Handsome, about Ferdinand and Isabella and Joanna, I pointed out to you that Philip the Handsome and Joanna had a little boy named Charles. Well, that little boy grew up, and in 1516, he became the king of Spain, where he's known as Charles I. One year after Marignano, and all of a sudden, Henry VIII and Francis I have a new adversary to think about. Furthermore, three years later, Charles's grandfather, Maximilian, died, and Charles found himself elected Holy Roman Emperor. So, in fact, he inherited all those things that he had the potential to inherit. He inherits the Holy Roman Empire, he inherits Burgundy, the Netherlands, he inherits the kingdom of Spain and what by this time is a growing Spanish Empire in the New World that is bringing in gold and silver from Mexico and Peru and will eventually bring in other kinds of wealth as well.

Suddenly, Francis I is no longer the dominant man in Europe. That seems to be passing to Charles, who, confusingly enough, is Charles I in Spain, but Charles V in the Holy Roman Empire. By the way, in that election to the, the Holy Roman Imperial throne, and it is elective, the, the Emperor is chosen by seven German princes known as electors. There were other candidates. Two of those candidates were Francis I and Henry VIII. Whether either of them had a serious chance, we could debate all day, but it doesn't leave a legacy of good feeling between the three of them.

Now, in between Charles's elect, uh, inheritance of the Spanish throne and his election as of Holy Roman Emperor, there occurred what at the time seemed like a fairly minor event, an event that you will explore in much more depth in the next lecture or two. A hitherto obscure German monk by the name of Martin Luther nailed a protest through the door of the church in Wittenberg on Halloween, 1517. This was a list of 95 Theses, a list of theses criticizing the behavior of the church, of which Martin Luther himself was very much a part at the time. He was in fact a monk and a university professor of theology. Nobody really realized in 1517 how important this would be, and in fact, circumstances being different, Luther might have been squashed like the proverbial grape. But for the next couple of years, everyone was focused on the conflict over the Imperial election, over the conflict in the Italian Wars, and over the growing threat of the Turks in the East, and Martin Luther was left alone, with great consequences for the time being.

Charles V's dominance seemed to only grow. In 1525, he won a spectacular victory over his enemy Francis I at Pavia. He even captured Francis, who had to be ransomed by the French with all sorts of concessions, and again, he seems to be completely in control. But that's always a dangerous sign. Next door to the Holy Roman Empire in Hungary, remember Hungary, which had almost become the dominant state in Central Europe, there was a king at this time, in 1525 and 1526, by the name of Louis II, an effective but not spectacularly good king. In 1526, Louis II was killed in a battle called the Battle of Mohács, and in dying, he not only lost his life, he lost most of the kingdom of Hungary. Now, whom did he lose it to? He lost it to yet another of this rising generation of talented and ambitious young men, the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Now, you don't get the nickname "The Magnificent" by being a mediocre ruler, and Suleiman certainly was not a mediocre ruler. He was arguably the most powerful Ottoman ruler in history, perhaps the smartest, uh, perhaps the most educated Ottoman ruler in history. Although he was a Muslim, he was not a fundamentalist. He was very much enamored of the Renaissance, and his real goal seems to have been not so much to spread Islam through holy war, but, excuse me, try to recreate the old Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantine Empire that had once centered on Constantinople, and for him that meant conquering as much territory in Europe as possible. Hence his conquest of Hungary.

By conquering Hungary, Suleiman occupied the state next door to the Holy Roman Empire, and later on, Charles V found Suleiman the Magnificent and an enormous army of Turks literally at the gates of the city of Vienna, the capital city of the Holy Roman Empire. So pity poor Charles V. He's got the French to worry about on one side, he's got the Turks to worry about on the other side, he is fighting a war in Italy in the south, and as fate would have it, and as you'll see later on in this class, he has the Lutherans to worry about in the north. Now, at this juncture, it appeared that Suleiman the Magnificent was poised to defeat Charles V and move, who knows how far into Europe. Again, contingency. Right at this moment, his eastern frontier was attacked by the Persians, and he had to withdraw from Vienna and go away to fight them. But he will be back. He will continue to pose a threat to Europe all the way down until his death in 1566. So the Turks are a major, major factor.

Now, as this young generation of talented and ambitious men comes to various thrones around Europe, they are not without advice about how to do their jobs. Kings, presidents, governors, mayors, we all get plenty of advice about how to do our jobs. But one of the things that is significant about the Renaissance era is that thinkers took a great interest in the whole idea of statecraft. What was a prince, that is, a king or an emperor or some other sort of ruler, supposed to do? How should he behave? By what principles should he be guided? And there is a whole batch of literature that is produced in this period that gives advice to kings and emperors. Often this comes from some of the same people who are also offering opinions about how the church ought to be governed. And in fact, although Renaissance literature covers every imaginable subject, two of its big, big emphases are upon how the state should be run and upon how the church should be run.

So let me examine a few of these thinkers for you here very briefly. These are not necessarily in any particular order, but at any rate, we'll start with Baldassare Castiglione, who was an Italian who lived at the court of several different minor princes in Italy, and who in 1528 published something called The Book of the Courtier. This is a book that essentially describes how a courtier is supposed to behave. Now, what, what is a courtier? A courtier is someone who lives at the royal court and serves the king or the emperor or whatever sort of prince we may be talking about. These are the individuals who usually provide advice and service to the monarch. They are his daily associates, his friends, his companions, his, his hunting buddies, his war buddies, and so on. And Castiglione gives a great deal of instruction about how a courtier is to behave. A lot of this has to do with following very elaborate court ritual, very elaborate protocol. Every court has its way to behave, something that that reaches perhaps its logical extreme in the reign of Louis XIV at the end of the 17th century. But by reading Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, courtiers could learn how to do that. But it also contains an element of, of politicking, how to go about making yourself the most influential person possible at the court. So there is here an element of self-serving political advancement.

Now, if that is sometimes subsumed in other matters in Castiglione, it certainly is not in the work of the next individual I want to mention, uh, maybe the most notorious of the Renaissance theoreticians, Niccolò Machiavelli. Niccolò Machiavelli was from the city-state of Florence. He had grown up during the time of Lorenzo de' Medici. In fact, he'd been an enemy of Lorenzo the Magnificent, uh, and, uh, ultimately found himself in a position early in the 16th century, when the Medici finally came back to power, of wanting to figure out how to get into their good graces. He already had a reputation as an author. He had written some plays, some of which are not bad, and he had written a lengthy work called The Discourses on Livy, about the ancient Roman historian Livy. In The Discourses, Machiavelli appeared to be a republican with a little "r," that is, somebody who supports a republic. But in his most famous work, The Prince, Machiavelli set out to tell the Medici how to be an effective prince.

Now, the truth of the matter is, he's trying to ingratiate himself, but he also produces one of the most important bodies of political theory in the early 16th century, and the thing that is characteristic of this is that it is largely amoral, not immoral, but amoral. In other words, for Machiavelli, morality doesn't really figure into it. It's not really a part of politics. If you can be moral and political, fine, but if you have to be amoral or even immoral to be political, that's okay too. Ultimately, what matters for Machiavelli is strength, or what he calls virtue, and success. One of his great goals was to see somebody create a united Italy, something that would not in fact occur until the 1860s. But in arguing for an effective prince, he laid out a pattern of princecraft, if you will, that is both damned by others, Shakespeare, for example, and adopted by very many.

One of his peers in Florence at the time was a man named Francesco Guicciardini, and I bring him into this not so much because he was an advisor of princes, but because, like Castiglione, and even more like Machiavelli, he had a keen awareness of history. Both Machiavelli and Guicciardini wrote histories of the city-state of Florence, and that's one of the key things about the thinkers of this period: they recognize the importance of learning the lessons of history.

Another important figure in this period is a man by the name of Johannes Reuchlin, and Reuchlin is important primarily because he emphasizes the importance of studying ancient Hebrew. He's not the first to do this, but he is perhaps the most effective, and his emphasis on studying ancient Hebrew has, as a couple of offshoots. On the political side, of course, the more one studies the Old Testament, the more one finds examples of both good and bad kings. The other thing, though, is that the study of Hebrew advances biblical scholarship, which plays a huge role in the Reformation.

In Spain, the young Charles I, later Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, is guided in his youth by a man and Cardinal Cisneros, or Cardinal Ximénez. Cisneros was Charles's regent for a while. He had earlier served Ferdinand and Isabella and been head of the Inquisition, had been an Archbishop, had been an important teacher. He also was a Christian humanist, that is, one of those individuals who was both Christian and a student of the ancient world, and he too played a big role in biblical scholarship. Under his direction, a group of scholars in Spain produced a new edition of the Bible called the Complutensian Polyglot. Now, what on earth does that mean? Well, a polyglot is one which puts more than one version of scripture side by side. So basically, what this does is to take the original Greek or the original Hebrew and put it on one side of the page and put a Latin translation on the other side. Now, that wouldn't help most of us unless we read Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, but at the time, Latin was still the language of learning people, and so this was making it possible for biblical scholars to see scripture in the original language and as it had been translated into Latin, which was still used widely in the church. So Cisneros is a very important person.

An even bigger figure in biblical scholarship and in giving advice to princes was Desiderius Erasmus, a man who wrote prolifically about all sorts of things, but whose most important works, perhaps with regard to our discussion today, are these. First of all, in 1516, he wrote something called The Education of a Christian Prince, giving a prince advice on how to be a Christian prince, a very different sort of advice book from Machiavelli's work. Machiavelli, of course, was himself a Christian, and he was writing for other Christians, but he did not make Christianity central to his argument. Erasmus, who is a very devout man, did so.

The second thing is that Erasmus was a great biblical scholar himself, and one of the things that he did, using earlier things like Cisneros's Complutensian Polyglot, was to produce in 1516 a new Latin translation of the New Testament. Now, why would that be necessary? Remember from our earlier discussion that Bibles are produced until right around this time by being copied by hand. People made mistakes. Also, the scriptures had been translated from Greek and Hebrew into Latin. What Erasmus does is to go back and look at every single passage in the New Testament in the original language and to produce a more accurate Latin translation than ever, even better than Cisneros's. Now, what is so significant about this is that by the time he does this, the printing press is around. It's possible to print this up and to make it available widely, and in fact, when the Protestant Reformation begins, one of the first things that happens is that reformers begin translating scripture into vernacular languages, into German, into English, into French, and so on, so that it can be read by everybody or read to everybody in a language they understand. In fact, no matter what edition of the English Bible you have today, you can trace it directly back to Erasmus's Latin New Testament.

The third thing he does is that he gets into a conflict with Martin Luther, and you'll be hearing more about that later on. One of his contemporaries at the time over in England was a guy by the name of John Colet, a great advocate of education, and also a man, although he remained a devout Catholic priest all his life, had some ideas that begin to verge sort of in the direction of Protestantism. For example, he didn't believe in the idea of priestly celibacy. One of his contemporaries, and a man who also remained devoutly Catholic, was Thomas More, a man who at one point was the best friend of Henry VIII, later on he loses his head to Henry VIII, but that's another story. For the time being, he gave Henry a great deal of advice, and he wrote a book in 1515 that imagined the ideal society, or Utopia, which in fact is the name of the book.

Now, there are a number of other figures that we could mention here, but these are some of the main ones. Where I would like to close here is by telling you what happened in 1527. In the course of the Italian Wars, we, as we've already seen, the Popes had become heavily involved, and therefore they were combatants just like everyone else. Even after the Battle of Pavia, Charles V continued to fight in Italy to try to extend his control there, and in 1527, some of his troops, without him present, entered the city of Rome and sacked it, sacked the center of the church, if you will, put the Pope at the time, Clement VII, in fear of his life, uh, went on a rampage for a week in the city of, of looting, raping, pillaging, murdering, and burning, and so on. The significance of this is that it greatly weakens the authority of the papacy at a very, very crucial juncture. It also puts Charles V in a rather tricky position. But as we will see over the next few lectures, there are ripples from this that will continue for decades, and so the impact of Renaissance statecraft, both good and bad, will could be continued to be felt well into the 16th century.

Well, that was very interesting. I look forward to the next lecture. Until next time.