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Introduction
to the Modern Period
The
West Reborn
The boundary between the medieval and modern worlds is hazy, more a
matter of gradual change than of dramatic ends and beginnings. Yet, most historians do set the beginning of modern history
at the Renaissance, somewhere between 1300 and 1500.
While a noticeably more dynamic and expanding European world is evident,
much about Europe remains quite medieval for quite a long time.
Historians like to use the phrase the early modern period to
describe this "mixed up" period from the 1400s to the 1600s.
Shifting
Values and Outlooks
We have already noted that the most significant change from one era to
another on the "Western Civilization timeline" involves significant
changes in how people look at the world and the place of people in it.
The Greeks and Romans shared a set of values that historians label
classical humanism, which you know emphasized reason, the full development
of individual potential, and participation in worldly affairs.
In the Middle Ages, the western outlook was dominated by the values of
Christianity, which stressed faith over reason, obedience to religious authority
over individual will, and focused on development of one's spiritual life to gain
eternal life rather than on worldly affairs.
So, what are the values of the modern era that set it so distinctly apart
from the medieval world that preceded it?
The
Modern Outlook
Modern thinkers came to reject many features of medieval life.
Quite a few of the "new attitudes" they embraced really had
their roots in classical humanism. What
do modern people value?
1.
Significance of science.
In the Middle Ages, the final authority was God's word as written in the
Bible and interpreted by the Church. Modern
thinkers broke with this outlook. They
began to analyze both nature and human society using reason rather than
traditional authority. Scientists,
beginning with the Renaissance, will challenge traditional ideas about the
workings of nature and the structure of the universe.
We will examine the scientific revolution that begins in the 1500s
and will come to see how the modern era is characterized by wide-ranging
scientific discoveries and how reliance on
science and technology becomes a key characteristic of modern people.
2.
Secularism.
In the Middle Ages, no one doubted that the purpose of life was to gain
salvation. Early modern westerners
do not reject this idea, but they do make room for multiple purposes for their
lives. Even the most superficial
look at Renaissance art shows that,
for early modern people, religion remained important.
(Think of all those portraits by Renaissance artists of the Madonna and
Child that will be arriving soon in your mailbox for Christmas.
These Renaissance people were still deeply religious.)
Yet, modern westerners pursued a more active life in society, politics,
and economic activity. By the end of the early modern period, the most influential
thinkers were no longer the clergy, and the most influential ideas no longer
came from Christian teaching. The
Church as an institution lost much of its political power and influence.
3.
Individualism.
The modern area revived the classical humanist interest in individuals
and their worldly accomplishments. Westerners
came, once again, to view the purpose of life as did the Greeks and Romans: the
development of each individual's abilities and personality.
This recognition had wide-ranging impacts on modern life.
In the arts, painters, sculptors, and writers, beginning in the
Renaissance, sought to capture the unique qualities of individual personality.
In politics, theorists insisted that individuals had rights and that the
purpose of government was to protect those rights.
The slow development of representative government is a
characteristic of the modern era. In
economics, ambitious businessmen built personal fortunes and,
invented efficient business techniques, established a global network of
trade, and laid the foundation of modern capitalism. In exploration,
daring individuals, seeking fortunes and glory, sailed on voyages of discovery
to worlds hitherto unknown to Europeans, and, in consequence,
European nations ruthlessly carved out great empires around the globe.
4.
Freedom.
A value that underpins all these others is the value that modern thinkers
placed on individual freedom. They
insisted that people must be free to think for themselves, to seek after the
truth unhindered by censorship. If
a person is to achieve self-fulfillment, they argued, that individual must be
free to make decisions, to criticize and praise, to choose freely among courses
of action.
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Directions. Read and hi-light. At the conclusion of each article, list the main ideas.
A curious example of this mistreatment of the past …is a widespread historical error, an error that the Historical Society of Britain some years back listed as number one in its short compendium of the ten most common historical illusions. It is the notion that people used to believe that the earth was flat--especially medieval Christians. It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat.
A round earth appears at least as early as the sixth century BC with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and others in observing that the earth was a sphere. Although there were a few dissenters--Leukippos and Demokritos for example--by the time of Eratosthenes (3rd century BC), the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all educated Greeks and Romans.
Nor did this situation change with the advent of Christianity. A few early Christian fathers denied the sphericity of earth by mistakenly taking passages such as Ps. 104:2-3 as geographical rather than metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise…
No one before the 1830s believed that medieval people thought that the earth was flat. The idea was established, almost contemporaneously, by a Frenchman and an American.... The American was no other than our beloved storyteller Washington Irving (1783-1859), who loved to write historical fiction under the guise of history. His misrepresentations of the history of early New York City and of the life of Washington were topped by his history of Christopher Columbus (1828). It was he who invented the indelible picture of the young Columbus, a "simple mariner," appearing before a dark crowd of benighted inquisitors and hooded theologians at a council of Salamanca, all of whom believed, according to Irving, that the earth was flat like a plate…
But that is not the truth.Jeffrey Burton Russell, (Professor of History at the University of California at Santa Barbara)
The
Columbian Exchange: Plants, Animals, and Disease between the Old and New Worlds
The exchange of organisms between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres… began when the first humans entered the New World a few millennia ago… The humans in question were hunter-gatherers who in all probability came to America from Siberia, where the climate kept the number of humans low and the variety of organisms associated with them to a minimum.
There were other humans in the Americas, certainly the Vikings about AD 1000 possibly Japanese fishermen, etc., but the tidal wave of biological exchange did not begin until 1492. In that year, Europeans initiated contacts across the Atlantic (and, soon after, across the Pacific) which have never ceased. Their motives were economic, nationalistic, and religious, not biological. Their intentions were to make money, expand empires, and convert heathens, not to spread Old World DNA; but if we take the long view we will see that the most important aspect of their imperialistic advances has been biological.
The contrast between the two sets of organisms, Old World and New World, those closely associated with humanity—crop plants, domesticated animals, germs, and weeds—was very sharp. The difference between the two lists of crops was, with the possible exception of cotton, absolute. (I am omitting dozens of not quite so important crops in these lists.)
New World Crops: maize
(corn), white potatoes, sweet potatoes, manioc, peanuts, tomatoes, squash
(including pumpkin), pineapples, papaya, avocados
Old World Crops: rice, wheat, barley, oats, rye, turnips, onions, cabbage, lettuce,
peaches, pears, sugar
New World Domesticated Animals: dogs,
llamas, guinea pigs, fowl (a few species)
Old World Domesticated Animals: dogs,
horses, donkeys, pigs, cattle, goats, sheep, barnyard fowl
Scholars Debate
The Columbian exchange of infections is a matter of immense controversy. Few doubt that there were pandemics among the Amerindians post-1492, but historians do argue about whether these propelled the native populations over the cliff into declines of ninety to one hundred percent or something far less. Henry F. Dobyns argues for the biggest plunge, David Henige for the least, each in a barrage of publications.
Recent research on the impact of the Columbian Exchange on Native Americans created a heated debate that made new headlines in 1992—the 500th anniversary of the voyages of Columbus. Before the 1892 celebration, the debate, if you want to consider it as such, was about the degree of European triumph and about which particular set of Europeans had triumphed most. In 1992 there was an argument, ugly at times, which still continues, pivoting on whose version of Amerindian demographic history we accept, and on whether we think acquisition of the smallpox virus was a fair price for the Amerindians to have paid for the acquisition of Christianity and the alphabet.
Alfred W. Crosby, author of Germs, Seeds, and Animals: Studies in Ecological History (1994).
“The Great Disease Migration”
Only weeks before the great conquistador Hernan Cortes seized control of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) in 1521, his forces were on the verge of defeat. The Aztecs had repeatedly repelled the invaders and were preparing a final offensive. But the attack never came, and the beleaguered Spaniards got an unlikely chance to regroup. On Aug. 21 they stormed the city, only to find that some greater force had already pillaged it. "I solemnly swear that all the houses and stockades in the lake were full of heads and corpses," Cortes's chronicler Bernal Diaz wrote of the scene. "It was the same in the streets and courts We could not walk without treading on the bodies and heads of dead
Indians. .. .Indeed, the stench was so bad that no one could endure it ... and even Cortes was ill from the odors which assailed his nostrils."
The same scent followed the Spaniards throughout the Americas. Many experts now believe that the New World was home to 40 million to 50 million people before Columbus arrived and that most of them died within decades. In Mexico alone, the
native population fell from roughly 30 million in 1519 to 3 million in 1568. The eminent Yale historian David Brion Davis says this was "the greatest genocide in the history of man." Yet it's increasingly clear that most of the carnage had nothing to do with European barbarism. The worst of the suffering was caused not by swords or guns but by germs.
By the time Columbus set sail, the people of the Old World held the distinction of being thoroughly diseased. By domesticating pigs, horses, sheep and cattle, they had infected themselves with a wide array of pathogens. And through centuries of war, exploration and city-building, they had kept those agents in constant circulation. Virtually any European who crossed the Atlantic during the 16th century had battled such illnesses as smallpox and measles during childhood and emerged fully immune.By contrast, the people of the Americas had spent thousands of years in biological isolation. Archeological evidence suggests they suffered from syphilis, tuberculosis, a few intestinal parasites and some types of influenza (probably those carried by waterfowl). Yet they remained untouched by diseases that had raged for centuries in the Old World. When the newcomers arrived carrying mumps, measles, whooping cough, smallpox, cholera, gonorrhea and yellow fever, the Indians were immunologically defenseless.
The disaster began almost as soon as Columbus arrived, fueled mainly by smallpox and measles. Smallpox was a particularly efficient killer. Alfred Crosby, author of "The Columbian Exchange," likens its effect on American history to "that of the Black Death on the history of the Old World." Smallpox made its American debut in 1519, when it struck the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo, killing up to half of the population. The Spaniards were on the move, and their diseases often outpaced them. "Such is the communicability of smallpox and the other eruptive fevers," Crosby notes, "that any Indian who received news of the Spaniards could also have easily received the infection. " Smallpox was just one of many aft1ictions parading through defenseless communities, leaving people too weak and demoralized to harvest food or tend their young. Some native populations died out altogether; others continued to wither for 100 to 150 years after surviving particularly harsh epidemics. The experience wrought irrevocable changes in the way people lived.
Persuaded that their ancestral gods had abandoned them, some Indians became more susceptible to the Christianity of their conquerors. Marriage patterns changed, too. In North America most pre-Columbian Indians lived in communities of several hundred relatives. Tradition required that they marry outside their own clans and observe other restrictions. As populations died off and appropriate marriage partners became scarce, such customs became unsustainable. People had two choices: they could break the rules or become extinct. Occasionally, whole new tribes arose as the survivors of dying groups banded together. The epidemics even fueled the African slave trade. "The fact that Africans shared immunities with Europeans meant that they made better slaves," says anthropologist Charles Merbs of Arizona State University. "That, in part, determined their fate."
Like smallpox or syphilis or AIDS, most seem to result from old bugs exploiting new opportunities. "What's happening today is just what we've been doing for thousands of years, " Crosby says. "Bit by bit by bit, we're getting more homogenized. In the Middle Ages the population got big enough to send out a boat and bring back the Black Death. Columbus brought together two worlds that were a huge distance apart. People were living side- by-side, then elbow to elbow. Soon we'll be living check to jowl. Everybody's diseases will be everybody else's diseases."
Geoffiey
Cowley
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