Main Points

History is Now

The Medieval Era saw religion sweep the globe. As the tide of barbarian invasions broke across Eurasia and slowly subsided, China and Europe were able to rebuild and expand. With peace, a rising standard of living and increasing population led to economic prosperity. And in ways both direct and indirect, this was the cause of the next great transformation in society.

Birth of Nationalism

Economic growth created disposable income. This allowed rulers to spend money on... surprise... themselves. While rulers had always spent money on themselves and their aggrandizement, their spending now began to take an entirely different form, usually consciously. Rulers started to spend money to glorify, not themselves, but "the state". In real terms, this made little difference to the lifestyle of the ruling elite. While rulers would occasionally donate money, goods, and lands to the church or to the poor, generally there was little motivation to do anything that did not benefit them directly. Whether a palace, a festival, or a statue was erected to their own glory or the abstracted glory of a political "state", these rulers were still enjoying the fruits of their wealth. And yet the distinction proved critical, even revolutionary.

In the Medieval Era, religion had shown people that they could share a common bond even with people hundreds or thousands of miles away. While this did not always have an impact on people's actions (as seen most dramatically in the European Fourth Crusade of 1204 AD), it was an important psychological development. Religion meant that one person could talk about "Christians" or "Muslims" on another continent and the listener could hear "people like me". No such idea was possible before religion emerged. With this foundation, rulers simply promoted the same message, only this time the connection was not wrapped in a common God, but a common region. The Renaissance Era was born with this idea, called nationalism; it was the critical idea that created the world's first nations.

While today we talk of Italy and Greece, Arabia and Persia, India and China, it is only accurate to talk of these entities as geographic areas before the Renaissance. Previously, people had been united either by religion (which augmented but never created political power) or by a ruler who depended on his charisma or willingness to exercise brute force; thus political power was frequently (even usually) upset by the death of rulers – the Roman Republic and Greek Democracy are the only states which can challenge the truth of this statement. It is during the Renaissance that "states" evolve as political entities the way we think of them now.

The Benefits of Nationalism

Nationalism was encouraged and spread by intelligent rulers using their abundance of wealth to pass laws and commission propaganda in the form of literature, drama, paintings, and statues. That is why the proud economic powerhouses of Italy and China became the first true states in history. The consequences were sometimes subtle, but important. Subjects could tolerate a ruler they hated for the good of China, and rejoice in the success of the "state" even when they detested the ruler who most directly benefited. Citizens could even fight and die for a ruler they despised because in their hearts they were fighting for Italy. While these were all things they could do in the name of religion, nationalism gave people a non-religious alternative; something that had not existed before the Renaissance.

Further, nationalism benefited politics more directly. Where religion had done little to prevent political fragmentation, after nationalism, the death of rulers was rarely a cause for war. Combatants might use the succession as an excuse to wage war, but it was no longer usually the real cause. Further, the tradition of dividing an empire among a ruler's children finally died among those Medieval civilizations which still practiced the custom. The idea of carving up the state became as ridiculous as carving up a member of the family.

Nationalism is also the reason that internationalism and isolationism flourished side by side; they were simply opposite reactions to the question of how interesting the outside world should be. For powerful and isolated nations like China, this became the seemingly rational reasoning for closing their borders. For small beleaguered countries like Portugal and Spain, it was the driving force behind their national obsession with naval power which led to their mastery of the sea and the first global empires.

Rebirth of Learning

In China, nationalism was interesting but not revolutionary. The borders of China stabilized during the Song Dynasty and foreign policy turned mildly isolationist. Rulers enjoyed stronger support from their subjects; it is no accident that the Song emperors rebounded from the loss of Northern China to become the first dynasty in Chinese history to emerge stronger and more powerful following a mid-dynasty collapse. However, because Buddhism had coexisted so comfortably with learning and scholarship, the high culture and art which the Song dynasty enjoyed was a natural continuation of Medieval China's interests. The same arts and many of the same themes continued to be popular, though innovations and social changes meant that these disciplines continued to grow and progress.

Yet while China demonstrated continuity with the past, learning and culture flowered more than ever, and the rise of the middle class created a huge market for education and art. Printing emerged in China more than 500 years before Europe and full color illustrations were a normal part of the wood-block printed books that blossomed during the Song Dynasty. Poetry continued to be a vital art practiced by many important artists who followed in the footsteps of the Tang masters. Drama was another emerging trend; the middle class became avid theater patrons. And Song painting represents a high point of Chinese, even world art, especially the landscape painting of the literati – called shan-shuǐ tú (mountain-water painting).

In Europe, on the contrary, nationalism was like a bomb that rocked the continent. The new national unity challenged the established religious unity. While religion was not immediately affected, its position had been undisputed for a thousand years. With many states more interested in the power which learning could bring them, the easy coexistence of secular nationalism and secular learning became the first serious threat to religion. And the resurgence of learning was the most visible and most vulnerable area where the church could counter attack; after all, asking questions had been frowned upon during the Medieval Era when the only appropriate answer was devout silence and respectful faith. The result was religious backlash and religious wars initially raged across the Europe until a new spirit cooled their fires.

Birth of Science

While China did not exhibit an entirely similar response, any discussion of the Renaissance that ignored the birth of European science would be woefully incomplete. Both China and Europe underwent a surge in naval exploration though Europe's interest in internationalism explains why it continued long after the Chinese lost interest in the outside world. This seemingly minor difference is the primary reason Europe would emerge as the dominant global power. However, beyond opening new lands, Europe also explored a unique new landscape of ideas in ways unknown to any other culture in history.

Islamic thinking, the introduction of the "Arabic numerals" – actually from India – and a broad tradition of Arabic learning had brought important concepts about experimentation to European thought. There were a number of thinkers who continued the classical traditions throughout the Renaissance and beyond. However, others rejected the idea that truth derived from the mind as championed by Aristotle. Outside the church, virtually all men of learning were rejecting the Medieval concept that truth derives from faith. These were both replaced by the idea that truth comes from the five senses, the philosophical school of empiricism. This principle was soon formalized more specifically giving philosophical statement to the expanding acceptance of the Islamic practice of finding truth in the results of practical, first-hand experimentation.

A second but no less important part of empiricism is the belief that numbers could be used to describe the world. This idea could trace its roots back to the mystical numerologists and alchemists of the Medieval and Ancient Eras. However, when merged with a belief in experimentation, science was born. Numbers gave the new scientists a much more reliable way to record and trade information. The level of detail and accuracy which could be conveyed from one experiment to the next and from one scientist to the next was a revolution. Numbers in essence became the new means of communication, the new language that allowed discussion across Europe across languages about all manner of physical phenomena.

Almost equally important, numbers gave concrete and unarguable form to the new scientific truths. In the battle for popular belief, scientists could measure the acceleration of gravity as a number; today the figure is accepted as 9.81 m/s2. Priests could only say that God's love bound the universe together; while the religious explanation was more profound and the two views were in no way incompatible, religion had always defined truth throughout human history, since before the agricultural revolution. Now science could define truth... and it could do so with numbers and decimal points. In the battle for hearts and minds in the Industrial Era, numbers may be the key factor in how scientific truth began to trump religious truth. While only religion spoke to questions of the heart, the ability to ascribe exact numbers to "truth" gave it concreteness and a certainty that religion could not match in the popular imagination.

Thus Renaissance scientists like Copernicus and Galileo waged the first battles against the church for scientific acceptance, though at this point science was not seen that differently than any other area of secular learning which questioned church authority. All the work of the early scientists became the pieces which came together to create the most important document of the Renaissance; in 1687 AD, Isaac Newton published the Philsophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philsophy), known as the Principia. Newton developed the Islamic algebra into the most advanced mathematics yet produced – calculus – and used it to compute numerical data from his experiments and the work of others. From all this data he distilled three simple laws of motion which could be used to generate the results of the experiments he studied.

The momentousness of the Principia can't be overstated as it demonstrates three fundamental foundations of science. It made extensive use of mathematics, it relied on numerical data from experiments to determine natural laws, and it reduced a complex set of experimentation to easily comprehensible laws. Specifically, Newton demonstrated mathematically three fundamental laws which underlie the movement of everything, from a ball rolling across the floor to the Moon moving through the heavens; it was the birth certificate of science as we know it today. Isaac Newton was also one of the founders of the Royal Society, an English "club" of gentlemen devoted to these principles and methodologies. The organization of scientists into formal groups which despite their personal infighting were dedicated to the institutional advancement of science became an important model for the future.

Banking and Paper Currency

The economic growth of the Medieval Era not only continued but dramatically accelerated throughout the Renaissance – indeed it has continued to accelerate to the present day. Thus the Renaissance saw the creation of the largest economies in history. While this was an amazing achievement, economies of this size brought different challenges which people had never faced before. The transitions and attempts to cope with them were often rocky. However, the solutions which emerged were surprisingly similar.

Far more than China, the Europeans faced challenges with international trade. For one thing, Europe was far more engaged in intercontinental trade; China's tendency toward isolationism meant that economic demand did not encourage international trade to the same degree that it did in Europe. Even more importantly, China was territorially unified, whereas Europeans might pass through three countries in a journey of a hundred miles. Political fragmentation made business and trade much more difficult than in China, both legally and practically. The result was a robust and sophisticated banking industry that specialized in handling all kinds of international difficulties and putting the economy of Renaissance Europe on a relatively equal footing with Song dynasty China.

The primary secret which allowed European banks to close this gap was the development of innovative paper financial instruments. Paper documents became a means of issuing private credit, providing receipts and officially acknowledging purchases and sales; they gave banks and merchants the ability to access their money at different cities across the continent in ways that worked much like currency. If each nation had different currency, you could at least look for a branch of your bank which spread across the continent. Thus the increasing sophistication of European banks permitted the development of a de facto paper currency which enormously simplified the difficulties of international trade throughout Europe.

Nor did Chinese banking stand still; if anything the Chinese economy posed even more fundamental problems. China was so large, so populous, and so culturally and economically advanced that the Chinese economy was growing faster than any economy in history. And so they were the first economy in history to outpace their monetary growth.

In practical terms, the size of any economy is directly measured by the amount of the medium of exchange in circulation. To this point in history that had meant one thing – the more precious metals and coinage a society had in circuation, the larger its economy. So long as miners extracted precious metals from the mines at about the same rate that workers were adding value to the economy, this worked beautifully. It was a frequent problem, however, that conquest or new lucrative mines had caused rampant inflation when a sudden influx of currency erupted without a corresponding growth of real value in the economy. However, during the Renaissance, the Chinese economy grew so rapidly that it overtook the amount of coinage in circulation. For the first time in history, an economy was fundamentally producing more wealth than its coinage could express. The result was depressed prices which brought a halt to Chinese economic growth.

The Chinese solution? Paper currency. Despite having a different economic challenge, here too paper currency provided a way out. If Chinese miners could not dig fast enough, then the Chinese government would simply print the extra money that they needed. And so bureaucrats and bankers half a world away and 500 years apart developed paper currency during the Renaissance to address the new problems they faced.

The growth of the Medieval economy had been a major factor in the dawning of the Renaissance, and accelerating economic growth would ultimately prove to be the deciding factor in its end as well. The middle class began emerging as an important force during the Medieval Era, and this trend continued throughout the Renaissance. Finally, its influence overwhelmed the aristocracy and the middle class claimed the dominant position in the economy, in culture, and finally in politics. And this ushered in the Industrial Era.