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6th to 15th Centuries
Late Middle Ages - Renaissance - Americas to 1500
Time Line of Art History: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
In his famous book, "Organism," Abraham Maslow originated the idea of self-actualization within a hierarchial structure of physilogical and psychological needs. Within this structure are what Maslow calls "esteem needs." From the very beginning of time historians have made manifest evidence of man's expression of "esteem needs." Over 30,000 years ago in Chauvet France the discovery of dynamic, vibrant paintings of animals drawn on limestone cave walls stand as a testament to man's need to express his world through art.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
That is all ye know on earth and
All ye need to know.
-------- John Keats (1819) "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Take the time to see the truth, to see the beauty that man has created across time and space. "Click away!"
Mesoamerica and Central America, 1000–1400 C.E.
The End of Europe's Middle Ages:
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Europe enjoyed an economic and agricultural boom. A slight warming of the climate and improved agricultural techniques allowed lands that had previously been marginal or even infertile to become fully productive. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, however, the climate once again began to cool and agricultural innovations could not maintain the productivity of frontier lands that again became marginal or were abandoned entirely.
In the Middle Ages, networks of personal agreements formed the basis of the political, economic and social systems. How these agreements developed and how they were utilised during the early Middle Ages are currently topics of scholarly debate. Nevertheless, by the late Middle Ages, the terminology and concepts that are implied in the designation of a feudal society had been defined by the legal profession.
As the Middle Ages progressed in Europe, feudalism created layers of conflicting laws, customs and traditions. Numerous feudal courts were established under dukes and earls whose interests were often contrary to those of the monarch, threatening royal authority. In an effort to rectify this situation, the monarchs of England, France, Spain, and Portugal took steps to re-establish their authority over the aristocracy and the clergy. They did this by centralising governmental offices and placing officials throughout the kingdom to represent royal interests. As they moved to secure autonomy within their own kingdoms, they also sought to solidify national boundaries. Those monarchies that experienced a move towards greater control by the king through a centralised government are known as the 'New Monarchies'.
The Holy Roman Empire (HRE) was faced with many difficulties during the later Middle Ages. The vast distances between territorial holdings, extreme regional disparities, ethnic complexities, and the lack of a strong hereditary kingship prevented the consolidation and centralisation of authority that characterised the New Monarchies of England, France, and Spain. Internal dissension and longstanding disputes with the papacy and France forced German kings to choose between maintaining control within their empire and enhancing the international prestige of the imperial crown.
The disorganization of the Holy Roman Empire, its ongoing dispute with the papacy over the extent of Church authority in secular government and absentee foreign overlords left Italians largely self-governing within their communes. At the start of the fourteenth century, Italy was a patchwork of independent towns and small principalities whose borders were drawn and redrawn by battles, diplomatic negotiations and marriage alliances. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many of these petty principalities consolidated into five major political units that precariously balanced power on the Italian peninsula: the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, the Papal States and the three major city-states of Florence, Venice and Milan.
Located on the periphery of Europe, Eastern Europe is comprised of Poland, Hungary and the many petty kingdoms of south-eastern Europe. Somewhat isolated from the rest of the continent, developments during the late Middle Ages occurred more slowly in Eastern Europe when compared Western European countries. Prior to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Eastern European monarchs had lost much of their prestige and power and they functioned more as figureheads than as heads of state. During the later Middle Ages, however, these monarchs worked to re-establish their former authority. While Poland and Hungary became two of the largest kingdoms in Eastern Europe, the ability to dominate other kingdoms depended upon the strength of the reigning monarch and most of the Eastern European kingdoms remained without a strong centralised government throughout the Middle Ages.
Although the Ottoman Empire is not considered a European kingdom per se, Ottoman expansion had a profound impact on a continent already stunned by the calamities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the Ottoman Turks must, therefore, be considered in any study of Europe in the late Middle Ages. The ease with which the Ottoman Empire achieved military victories led Western Europeans to fear that ongoing Ottoman success would collapse the political and social infrastructure of the West and bring about the downfall of Christendom. Such a momentous threat could not be ignored and the Europeans mounted crusades against the Ottomans in 1366, 1396, and 1444, but to no avail. The Ottomans continued to conquer new territories.
Although religion and faith continued to dominate virtually every aspect of life, the influence of the Church suffered greatly during the late Middle Ages and, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, its power would shift from the temporal commonwealth of Christendom to individual secular rulers. The Investiture Contests of the eleventh and twelfth centuries had weakened the ascendancy of the Church over the growing monarchies. More importantly, the increasing hostility of the laity to ecclesiastical wealth and decadence undermined papal prestige. Dissension within the Church neither increased confidence in its authority nor allowed it to address external challenges.
Until the sixteenth century, Latin was the official language of law, government, business, education and religion in Western Europe. The Latin of written communication was generally considered learned, or high, Latin and composition of documents followed standard guidelines regardless of where the document was written. On the other hand, the common, or Vulgar, Latin was a living language, mingling with and borrowing from regional dialects to suit the needs of local populations. As Vulgar.
Europe entered the late Middle Ages firm in the conviction that all nations were part of the greater state of Christendom and all mankind were brothers within the fold of the Holy Roman Church. The Church defined and explained the universe and stood at the centre of intellectual and theological thought and Ideas were endorsed or condemned according to their ability to merge with established doctrines. The quest for a degree in theology remained the ultimate aspiration for students at Europe's cathedral universities and only the brightest dared hope to achieve the revered designation. Given these conditions, it is hardly surprising to find that the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the time emerged from the ranks of theologians and educators that developed within the shelter of the Church.
The rise of secular powers and the disunity of the Church in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries impacted the visual arts with respect to both patronage and themes. The papacy and the Church remained majors patrons of artists and craftsmen but commissions from secular sources, both public and private, began to increase significantly. Strong national influences can be seen in architecture and art as each locale imposed its own interpretation upon the prevailing international styles. One of the most interesting aspects of the visual arts in the Late Middle Ages are the shifts that occurred in both style and dominance between the major forms of architecture, sculpture, and painting.
Musical developments in the later Middle Ages reflect changes in the political arena during that period. Secular lords were emerging from under the overarching influence of the Church and establishing their authority based on secular Roman and Common law. This movement away from the mystical religious world of the Church and towards the material and concrete world of earth penetrated the whole of medieval society, including its music.
Video Presentations:
Medieval Europe
The Western Tradition Annenburg Series
Two hundred years of war and plague debilitated Europe.
A new urban middle class emerged, while dynastic
marriages established centralized monarchies
The Crusades
Islam: Empire of Faith - Part 2
This part relates the golden age of Islam. A time of great learning when Europe was steeped in the Dark Ages. The building of great works of architecture, reading, writing, mathematics, medicine, and astronomy. Even before the printing press Muslims would have hundreds of scribes writing all at once so they would learn and reproduce the writings. Note: Start at 22 Minutes for the Islamic side of the Crusades ending with the Mongol invasion.
Ex-Monty Python member, Terry Jones, takes us through 200 years (1096 to 1270) of medieval history, explaining the Crusades and the religious conflicts of the era, using re-enactments and reconstructions. Each program is introduced by Roger Mudd. Series premiered June 5, 6, 7, 8, 1995 on the Arts and Entertainment Network. Former Monty Python member Terry Jones hosts this journey along the ancient route of the Crusades from Europe to the near East. Computer animation, "living" paintings, battle recreations and lush illustration bring this bloody, enriching and sometimes comical clash of Christianity and Islam back to life.
The Plague and Black Death
History's Turning Points - 1347 AD The Black Death
When a plague-ridden ship landed
in Venice in 1347, it was immediately put into quarantine...but no one could
stop the rats from corning ashore. Within three years, a third of Western
Europe's population was dead. It was the greatest calamity in history.
1453 The Fall of Constantinople
History's Turning Points - 1453 AD The Siege of Constantinople
The Byzantine Kings hid safely behind the massive walls of Constantinople. Then in 1453, with the Turkish Ottoman Empire encircling the city, Sultan Mehmet brought the newest technology of the 15th century, the cannon, and finally brought down the walls of the world's most impregnable fortress
Washington State University World Civilizations to 1500
The Renaissance
Historical categories are always fictions in some sense or another. Many historical categories, such as "Ming China" are purely descriptive and essentially say little, taking their name from an accident in history, such as the rise and duration of the Ming dynasty in China. Others, such as "the classical world," are not descriptive terms but interpretations and value judgements designed to make the historical period somehow meaningful as a whole. These categories are always placed on the period in hindsight: they are given not so much to explain the past as they are to explain the relationship of the present with the past. Historical categories, then, are ideas that express a culture's own sense of itself and its position in history; they often have little to do with the real historical experience of the period they pretend to explain.
The Backgrounds to the Italian Renaissance
For all practical purposes, the Renaissance
/ Early Modern Period is distinguished from other periods in European history
almost entirely in intellectual or cultural terms. As far as larger historical
patterns are concerned, the period is more or less considered as playing out
what had been set up in the later middle ages. European historians overwhelmingly
tend to place Europe's major break with its medieval and classical past with
the discovery of America and the Reformation.
Of all the practices of Renaissance Europe, nothing is used to distinguish the Renaissance from the Middle Ages more than humanism as both a program and a philosophy. Textbooks will tell you that the humanists of the Renaissance rediscovered the Latin and Greek classics (hence the "rebirth" or "renaissance" of the classical world), that humanist philosophy stressed the dignity of humanity, and that humanists shifted intellectual emphasis off of theology and logic to specifically human studies. In pursuing this program, the argument goes, the humanists literally created the European Renaissance and paved the way for the modern, secular world.
There are several misconceptions about the Platonic tradition and its "revival" in the Italian Renaissance. For instance, there really is no solidly coherent body of philosophy that is "Platonic," but rather a series of philosophies openly or implicitly derived from work of the fourth century Athenian philosopher, Plato. In addition, Platonism never really faded out of the Western tradition nor was the Italian Renaissance a rediscovery of Plato; rather, the Italian Renaissance forged new philosophies from Plato and the Platonic tradition in antiquity and the Middle Ages. This new Platonic philosophy not only represented one of the central currents of Renaissance thought, it also had far reaching consequences in the future development of European thought and science.
If there is such a thing as a "manifesto" of the Italian Renaissance, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's "Oration on the Dignity of Man" is it; no other work more forcefully, eloquently, or thoroughly remaps the human landscape to center all attention on human capacity and the human perspective. Pico himself had a massive intellect and literally studied everything there was to be studied in the university curriculum of the Renaissance; the "Oration" in part is meant to be a preface to a massive compendium of all the intellectual achievements of humanity, a compendium that never appeared because of Pico's early death.
Among the most original thinkers of the Renaissance is a brilliant and slightly tragic figure, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527). Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, his name would be synonymous with deviousness, cruelty, and willfully destructive rationality; no thinker was every so demonized or misunderstood than Machiavelli. The source of this misunderstanding is his most influential and widely read treatise on government, The Prince, a remarkably short book that attempts to lay out methods to secure and maintain political power.
Leonardo da Vinci needs no introduction; if there is anyone who seems to embody the Renaissance completely and totally, it is this grouchy and self-centered painter, scholar, inventor, scientist, writer, anatomist, etc. He seems to span the whole of human knowledge as it was known at the time, and combine all this knowledge into this one vast, syncretic whole. So encompassing was his artistic and intellectual accomplishment, that the life and work of Leonardo traditionally marks the beginning of what historians call the High Renaissance.
Throughout the Gothic period in the middle ages, when architecture in France and England was dominated by architecture executed on the grandest scale in Western history, with immense and airy cathedrals representing one of the highest points of European architectural genius, Italian architecture was an uninspired and relatively small affair. Although there was Gothic architecture in Italy, the sweep, genius and grandeur seemed to have passed those city-states by. The Renaissance, however, saw the development of a new architecture from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries that was the first "modern" architecture. When we look at Renaissance buildings, they look familiar, almost as if they were built one hundred years ago. The architectural language invented by the Italian Renaissance architects became the dominant architectural language of the modern world, displaced only by the advent of modernist architecture in the twentieth century.
Washington State University World Civilizations to 1500
Civilizations in America
Unlike the cultures of the Valley of Mexico, the only period in which the urban centers were important to the Mayas was during the Classic period from 300 to 900 AD. The culture of the Mayas, however, has little changed from the classic period to the modern period, for Maya culture was largely tribal and rural all throughout the Classic period. What distinguishes Classic from post-Classic Maya culture was the importance of urban centers and their structures in the religious life of the Mayas and the extent of literate culture.
Teotihuacán was conquered
by northern tribes in 700 AD and began to rapidly decline in its influence
over the Mexican peoples. For two hundred years following the decline of Teotihuacán,
the region had no centralized culture or political control. Beginning around
950, a culture based in northern Mexico at Tula began to dominate Central
America. These people were known as the Toltecs. They were a war-like people
and expanded rapidly throughout Mexico, Guatemala, and the Yucatán
peninsula. At the top of their society was a warrior aristocracy which attained
mythical proportions in the eyes of Central Americans long after the demise
of their power. Around 1200, their dominance over the region faded.
The term, Aztec,
is a startlingly imprecise term to describe the culture that dominated the
Valley of Mexico in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Properly speaking,
all the Nahua-speaking peoples in the Valley of Mexico were Aztecs, while
the culture that dominated the area was a tribe of the Mexica (pronounced
"me-shee-ka") called the Tenochca ("te-noch-ka"). At the
time of the European conquest, they called themselves either "Tenochca"
or "Toltec," which was the name assumed by the bearers of the Classic
Mesoamerican culture. The earliest we know about the Mexica is that they migrated
from the north into the Valley of Mexico as early as the twelfth century AD,
well after the close of the Classic Period in Mesoamerica. They were a subject
and abject people, forced to live on the worst lands in the valley. They adopted
the cultural patterns (called Mixteca-Pueblo) that originated in the culture
of Teotihuacán, so the urban culture they built in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries is essentially a continuation of Teotihuacán culture.
The earliest urban
culture on the South American continent was the Chavín culture, so-called
because its major site was found in the area of Chavín de Huantar.
The Chavín culture arose in the highlands of northern Peru around 1000
BC—about the same time as the Olmecs in Central America ;and thrived
until 500 BC. We know almost nothing about the Chavín; like the Olmecs,
they worshipped a jaguar-man god which suggests there might have been some
kind of cultural contact between the two. For five hundred years, the Chavín
culture dominated Peruvian culture during a period we call Early Horizon (1000-200
BC).
After the decline of the Chavín civilization in northern Peru, the Andean regions were dominated by local urban cultures. In the Middle Horizon period (600-1000 CE), a new culture, the Huari-Tiahuanaco dominated the region and enforced cultural conformity. The culture centered around Tiahuanaco near Lake Titicaca. The Huari-Tiahuanaco culture built massive architectural works with giant stones cut with extreme precision. Scholars believe that the architecture and the social and political structure of the Incas ultimately derive from Huari-Tiahuanaco.
Incas
The Incas were a distinct people with a distinct language living
in a highland center, Cuzco. They were an ancient people, but had been subject
to the regional powers during the entire history of South American urban cultures.
They began to expand their influence in the twelfth century and in the early
sixteenth century, they exercised control over more territory than any other
people had done in South American history. The empire consisted of over one
million individuals, spanning a territory stretching from Ecuador to northern
Chile.
Explore the MesoAmerican World
Audio Presentations:
MesoAmerica
Lost Treasures Of The Ancient World - Empires In The Americas
National Geographic-Pyramids of Death Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5
Even the ferocious Aztec were awed by their first glimpse of Teotihuacan.
By the 13th century when the Aztec swept into central Mexico, the once teeming
city—which reached its zenith around 400 C.E. —had been long since
abandoned by its mysterious builders. Its grand ceremonial center, where tens
of thousands of people had gathered amid sacred monuments of stone, lay under
thick green overgrowth. The Aztec gave the site its name and identified its
most imposing features according to their own beliefs—the Pyramid of
the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon. Assuming that some of the buildings were
tombs, they called the main thoroughfare Street of the Dead.
Lost Civilizations: History of the Incas Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6
Archaeologists look at ritual behavior and sacred spaces and objects in archaeological and ethnographic settings to attribute religious meanings. Examples from present-day, traditional societies show the complexity of spiritual life and the limits and possibilities of archaeological reconstruction
The decline and fall of civilizations captures our interest. Could we be next, going the way of the Sumerians, the Romans, the Maya? The collapse of Copan, brought on by overpopulation and overexploitation of resources, is explored along with other ancient cultures that have faced the problems we confront today.
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