Dan Snow's History Hit - The Beauty and Violence of the Renaissance

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

The Renaissance was a time of radical change in Europe with an explosion in the production of art, new methods of waging war, Europeans discovering the new world, the printing press and religious strife with reformation. At the centre of all this tumult was Italy which was made up of competing princely states squabbling and fighting for cultural as well political supremacy. Ultimately it is this period that would come to shape what we know as the Western World. To help better understand this enthralling period Dan is joined by the author Catherine Fletcher to explore the politics, art, warfare and the amazing characters that make up what we think of as the RennaissanceThe History Hit Book Club is the new way to enjoy reading books that spark rich conversations about history. Every month we’ll carefully select a history book to read and discuss with like-minded members. If you would like to join the new History Hit Bookclub and to find out the full terms and conditions click here.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi there, everyone. Welcome to Dan Snow's History. I am Dan Snow. On this podcast, we're going to talk about the Renaissance.

I've got to say, you know me, I'm an 18th century kind of guy. I tend to think that most things that matter in human history happened in the 18th century. But recently, I've been having some doubts because people like Catherine Fletcher, who's my guest on this podcast, a brilliant historian of early modern Europe. She's just written a majestic book, The Beauty and the Terror, all about the Renaissance and the politics, the art, the warfare. And people like her have convinced me that, you know what, there's a lot going on. There's a lot going on in the 15th and 16th centuries. You've got the explosion of art in Italy, but also plays out in other countries that we associate with the Renaissance. But you've also got just radical transformations in the ability of the state to make war.

You've got a titanic clash between Islam and Christendom. You've got Europeans discovering that the Americas existed. You've got Europeans opening up direct trading routes with the East. You've got the printing press. You've got the Reformation. These things matter, and you'll hear me talking to Catherine Fletcher about all of them. Her book was so good that we wanted to launch our History Hit Book Club. Yes, the History Hit Book Club with her book. We recorded the episode. Lots of History Hit book club. Yes, the History Hit book club with her book. We've recorded the episode. Lots of History Hit subscribers joined us for that journey. We tested it all out. All the systems work. And by work, I mean, didn't quite work. But you know, we've tweaked it all.

And we now have a fully operational book club. If you like the sound of this book club, at the moment, because of demand, I want to make sure that we grow in a kind of sustainable way. We're only opening up to subscribers of historyhit.tv so if you've got a subscription to historyhit.tv check your email inbox possibly your junk mail as well and you'll have an email inviting you to become a member of the History Hit book club we will be opening this book club to non-subscribers later in the year as well. But for the moment, it's an option that you can take up if you're already a member of Team History Hit. So head over to historyhit.tv, subscribe and then join the book club. If you're already a subscriber, check your email and join us. The next book club after Catherine Fletcher will be Giles Milton, very well known, best-selling

historian, writer, talking about D-Day, given it's the anniversary of D-Day this month. Me and the book club members are currently reading Giles Milton's D-Day, but lots of very varied and interesting history books coming up, most of which you'll have heard all about as I interview the authors on this podcast, and some of them we invite back on the book club. But in the meantime, everyone, please enjoy this episode with Catherine Fletcher. I'm Evan. Please enjoy this episode with Catherine Fletcher. Catherine, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks, Dan.

Your book is just magisterial. I love it. But I found myself thinking, what is the Renaissance? It's like an incredibly turbulent and transformative time in European history. And the art is alongside military power, like an expression of greatness by all these extraordinary popes and leaders. But like, what happened? Why do we remember it as such a distinct period? Is it this traditional idea of Constantinople falling?

Let's do the big bit first. Oh, well, you know, the first thing to say is they were very good at self-promotion. So they were quite good at telling us how great they were and how they were reviving the classics. And of course, part of the reason we remember the Renaissance is because they had such great people to write themselves up. So they had Giorgio Vasari writing up the lives of the artists. Then you've got people like Machiavelli writing about the princes of the period. You've got his contemporary Francesco Guicciardini writing the Florentine histories. So part of the reason we remember it is because they were good at telling

us what they were doing. But yeah, you're absolutely right. There's an awful lot of things that are happening all around the same time. So we've got Italy, very, very wealthy part of Europe, divided into lots of small competing states. So you've got a lot of these Italian princes making money out of hiring themselves as mercenary commanders and then using that money to spend on commissioning fabulous art. Cities like Florence, very wealthy from the cloth trade. You have merchants. They've got fortunes to spend. So they spend it on their own houses and they also spend it on commissioning religious art because a lot of them have got into money lending, which is a little bit dubious in the eyes of the Christian church at this point. And they need to sort of make sure

that they're doing good works in this life so as to get credit for that in the next. And so that's part of the reason why you get all these wonderfully decorated churches. But yeah, it's just an incredible combination of circumstances. And as you say, with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, you do get Greek refugees eventually making their way into Renaissance Italy and contributing to the study of the classics there as well. So loads and loads of things going on. exploration the portuguese and spanish blue water expeditions down into west africa and obviously to the americas you're like oh yeah that was then the gunpowder revolution and then the reformation like my god you're absolutely right it's just like a mind-blowing period and these are then connected to they are an intimate part of the kind of renaissance story that we've forgotten to remember in that context yeah because if you think about what's happening in 1492 the kind of Renaissance story that we've forgotten to remember in that context. Yeah, because if you think about what's happening in 1492, I kind of start the book in 1492, and you

have the death of Lorenzo de' Medici, the great patron of Renaissance art. You have the election of Rodrigo Borgia as Pope, so you've got the Borgias in there as well. Medici, you've got the Borgias. That same year, you've got Columbus and his first encounters with the people of what then get to be known as the Americas after another Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci. So all these things are happening at once. We have the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in that same year. So it's just an incredible sort of concentrated historical period of all these different events. And of course, these people's paths cross in different ways. So Martin Luther comes to Rome at some point,

much later on writes up his reflections on what a terrible place Rome was. I mean, Protestants tend to do this. They all go to Rome and they're horribly shocked at just how bad it is. But it's fascinating the encounters that you get between these different figures. And you mentioned there that Amerigo Vespucci was Florentine,

Columbus was Genoese. The Italians were all over the early exploitation of the Western Hemisphere. Yeah, absolutely. Not so much in terms of whole Italian states sponsoring those voyages, but certainly plenty of individual Italians and plenty of Italian companies like the Medici had a branch in Seville. There are all sorts of people, including Mona Lisa's husband, who gets involved via Lisbon with colonisation in Madeira. They've got another family member in the Canary Islands. So you just pick almost any piece of Renaissance art and start tracking down the connections, whether that's into the growing Portuguese empire, whether it's into some bit of Italian warfare and politicking. It's just quite an astonishing picture when you start to tell it all together in one place. There was a powerful thought, perhaps it came from

Jared Diamond's famous Guns, Germs and Steel when I was growing up, that one of the reasons Europe experienced this explosion of scientific and artistic and cultural advance in the Renaissance was because of political fragmentation. And it seems to me reading your book, that's one great sort of shibboleth of my childhood that actually might be true. You guys have not overturned it and revised that opinion. The competitive nature of European politics was extraordinarily conducive to brilliant people like Leonardo jumping from one patron to the next, being paid fortifications, waterways,

shipbuilding technology. There were so many patrons to choose from. Yeah, and absolutely, you take Leonardo's case, they are fighting to get him to paint their portrait. Isabella d'Este is the Marchioness of Mantua, sending messages down to her agent saying, please, can you try and convince this guy to come and paint me? But equally, Leonardo is also able, when he feels perhaps a political situation in one part of Italy is getting a little bit hot, he wants to go somewhere else, he will pitch for work. He actually pitches to work as well to the Ottoman Empire, to the Sultan, sends plans for a bridge that could be built in Constantinople, which is quite something to think that those links are not simply within the

Christian world, but they're potentially going outside of it. But Leonardo's letter to the Duke of Milan is great. I mean, he sends this 10-point letter promoting himself. And what's fascinating about it is most of the points he makes in that letter are not about what he's going to do in terms of art or architectural sculpture. That comes right at the end. Most of it is about military technology, fortifications, tunnelling, guns, all those sort of things that actually are a prince's priority in the 15th and 16th centuries. Because this is still a period where fortunes are won and lost on the battlefield. Princes do gain personal honour by going out and fighting. Well, there is so much fighting in your book in the Renaissance that it actually boggles the mind. And we haven't even mentioned the printing press, by the way, in my list earlier. I mean,

the bloody printing press. But it's destroyed these Chinese inventions. These things come across from East Asia, gunpowder and the printing press. And it's Europeans that appear to take these inventions and just, well, almost literally, before you know it, you're on the moon, really, from their adoption. What's going on with that? It's fascinating. One of the things about gunpowder is actually gunpowder weapons are much better suited to the type of warfare that Europeans were fighting than they were to the type of thing that the Chinese were doing when they were at war. A lot of your Chinese warfare in this period, it's out in the desert,

it's on the steps, it's mounted archers primarily. And at this point, your gunpowder technology doesn't actually work very well in that environment because you can't just chase the cannon across the step. It's not very practical. So they don't really have the same incentive to develop it as do the Europeans. You've got lots of walled cities, they've got castles that they want to besiege, and they start to do a lot of infantry fighting because they've got terrain that works for infantry fighting. So handguns become much more of a useful technology that sits in a European environment very well. So you've got a combination of personal human ingenuity in polishing the technology, and then

also an environment that it fits into. So it's all these combinations of different things fitting together. You'd like to say, well, was it the guns? Or was it the people? Was it the competition? To some extent, you have to say it's all these different factors fitting together. And you're right, I guess, also right logistics is probably although the alps and stuff but it's much easier in europe there's always a handy river or port city quite close by that you can get a load of gunpowder in from yeah you can it's interesting they managed to get cannon over the alps only by getting these teams of of Swiss mountaineers to pull them across these tiny passes when they can't even get mules to pull a cannon up the passes. They have to get

teams of men to drag them. So that is the point that the technology is at. It's still not great in terms of being light and portable, but they can do it. I just spent your entire book thinking, if I was king of France, France was the most beautifully powerful and quite geographically coherent kingdom in Western Europe by that point. Why did they spend their whole time crossing the Alps to invade northern Italy? I mean, it's just exhausting. The Alps, man, just go with it. If ever God had wanted there to be a political frontier on this planet,

it's the Alps. Yeah, but it's a kind of matter of principle that their ancestors used to rule Naples. You see, you go back to kind of Norman Sicily and the Angevin claim to Naples, and those things are important, that kind of inheritance. And so when they get the chance, when they get kind of invited by the Duke of Milan to help out with a little family dispute, you see why French kings are like, ooh, you know that ancestral claim to Naples. They fancy distinguishing themselves in relation to their ancestors.

It's like Henry VIII wanted to be Henry V. These things matter in their own minds. Speaking of the Duke of Milan, I tell you what, he goes on the list of unbelievably stupid people that invited hugely powerful foreign neighbours in to deal with a little local inheritance trouble, like the Irish guy who invited Henry II over. Anyway, so the popes,

the popes. I mean, this is something that obviously we all enjoy in your book. And there is this kind of juxtaposition between the popes appearing to reach their kind of richest, most corrupt, in many ways, wonderful in terms of their art, ambitious, politically wealthy, and then Martin Luther coming along and calling time on the whole thing and a reformation blowing apart Christendom. But you argue it's not that simple. How much is that kind of material corruption and luxurious living of these high Renaissance popes, how much is that responsible for the reaction that Luther represents? I mean, I think the fact is there's a lot of people within the Catholic Church before you got to Luther who were quite conscious that the church had some problems and needed reform.

So even under Alexander VI, the Borgia Pope, supposedly the worst of the worst of the popes, I mean, the one with the most notorious reputation, there's a reform commission set up to discuss the problems with cardinals' lifestyles getting out of control and all the rest of it. Now, the problem is they can never quite agree to cut their own perks, because the people who have to make the decision about this, of course, the people who are benefiting from having really rather nice lifestyles. But before you even get to Luther, there's a lot of discussion already within the church. And the other fact that I think in defence of the popes is that they are having to fight a war, because from 1494, the French have invaded. So inevitably, a lot of their minds turn

away from sorting out the acknowledged problems of the church into fighting a major European war, albeit defending their own territory, because Papal States at that time is not the tiny Vatican enclave we know now. It's a much bigger swathe of land all across central Italy. So yeah, when Luther comes along, he kind of comes into this debate at a bit of a tangent with a set of ideas that are largely in his own head. Maybe they've been sparked a bit by his experience of seeing what the church in Rome was like, but we don't actually know a lot about the detail of his thought process. And he's not saying an awful lot initially that hasn't already floated around in some way as an idea within the church itself. So it isn't given that there's going to be a break, because they're looking primarily at their

own interests within Italy, actually take their eye off the ball a bit and don't really deal with trying to bring back Luther within to the church. Don't necessarily anticipate exactly how swiftly there might be breaks with Rome. You're listening to Down to the Nose History. I've got Catherine Fletcher talking about the Renaissance. More after this. Have you heard of the teenage werewolf prosecuted

in 1603? Did you know that the 17th century British government relied heavily on female spies? And do you want to know about chin-chucking and thigh sex? Of course you do. I'm Susanna Lipscomb and my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors, is a deep dive into what I like to think of as the long 16th century. We'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to witches, Belezcueth to Shakespeare, Mughal India to the Mayflower. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. get your podcasts. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in

the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. The printing press is, it feels to me, and now not just because we're living through an era in which Facebook is enabling the dismantling of our democracy, but the printing press feels so important. Like you look at other heresies in the centuries before Luther, whether it's Wycliffe in England or Huss in Bohemia. And they're all saying, it's pretty obvious what the problems with the Catholic church are. I'm obviously making this

incredibly simplistic, but they're all talking about the same kind of things. And it seems to me like these selling indulgences is a bit weird. Is Luther different or is the printing press, is this a text story as well? Well, I think it is absolutely a tech story because it's the printing press and Luther's decision to write in German rather than only in Latin and to get the message out there is extraordinarily important. And his words become bestsellers across Europe. So you have not only preachers, but you also have printers realising there's money to be made out of this sort of material and who want to distribute it. You have a way that standardised texts with a very simple message can get distributed out to hundreds of thousands of people very, very swiftly and more people than that, because you've got one piece of printed paper. A lot of people in this period still can't read, but you only need one person who can read to stand in the town square and read that out to an audience of 20 or 50.

And suddenly your one printed text has got a way bigger audience than just the individual who's reading it themselves. It's really interesting, your description of the response of the Catholic Church, because on one level, they were so used to dealing with heretics. They're like, here we go again, you know, let's just excommunicate. And this new technological environment just completely blew them away. It's fascinating. The technology is a problem for them. And there are also quite a lot of princes in Europe.

I mean, Henry VIII is one of them, but also some of the German princes who start thinking, actually, we could use this for a certain amount of leverage. Because why should we accept the authority of Rome? Why should we keep paying the amount of money that we have been paying to Rome from our church revenues? I mean, there's a financial interest in rebelling to some degree against the papacy. So this plays out a number of different ways. But I think it's again, one of these things where there are multiple factors that are individual ambitious princes who decide they don't like foreign interference, and they want to protect people like Luther. There's printing, there's popular uprisings.

And then there are some places where Protestant ideas float around for a little while, but don't ever really take off, or where they get almost incorporated back into the Catholic Church practices without ever really admitting that that's what's gone on. So when you look at what happens with a lot of Catholic reform in the later part of the 16th century, a lot of the things the Catholic Church does then, saying we're going to have better standards for the priesthood, we're going to have improved education, that we're going to think a little bit differently about how we view the nature of sin, albeit not going quite as far as the Protestants. They do accommodate to some of the new thinking, even without quite admitting that they're necessarily doing that. Oh yeah, come on, we all know that Catholics are basically Protestants who refuse to admit it.

Anyway, but I find it amazing, right, the Catholic Church, they survive the Avignon's papacy, like you'd think it was almost an existential threat to the papacy in the 14th century. And then they kind of just get hammered 150 years later. You read back, I don't know, kings like Henry II in England or French kings, more importantly, who were just as aggressive and just as proud of their own independence as these 16th century leaders. And yet, for some reason, that's when the wheels fall off and there is this kind of irreparable schism within. Kristen, I find it fascinating. Yeah, there's a cracking quote there from the Spanish ambassador, just to the point

of Henry VIII's break with Rome. And he's there in Rome and says, you know, it doesn't really matter if we lose one unfruitful island, which is England, Britain, because we've got the whole of the world. And from their point of view, what happens in the 16th century is it becomes global Catholicism because they have now got all these people. The Philippines. Yeah, right for conversion across the Americas. In Asia, you've got the Jesuit missionaries going out.

You have this change at the same time. On one hand, yeah, the Catholic Church is challenged by Protestantism, but hey, it's now got a whole world to look at. So your Spanish guy, whose name I forget, sort of sums it up to some extent. Yeah, we can live with this because we've got other places to think about now. The potential of that remark in many ways has only recently been realised when we finally had a Pope from outside Europe, but it now looks like that could become the norm. Can you please tell me, this is not an elegant segue at all, but please tell me about Catarina Sforza, because I think she's the most incredible person in your book. Oh, wow. The Tigress of Follies, as one biographer called her. She is one of the incredible women of the Italia Renaissance who really fights for her own territory and fights for her own

children in the face of multiple attacks on her property, her lands, her right to rule. And she's a kind of very famously controversial figure and quite a notorious figure because of a story that is told about her by Machiavelli, which is a story of when her castle is under siege and her children have been taken hostage. And she apparently stands up there on the battlements, kind of lifts her skirt and says, look, look at me. You can kill my children if you like, because I have the means to make more. Now, in fact, this is not a story that the eyewitnesses say happened. I mean, this is Machiavelli taking a famous classical tale and putting a contemporary spin on it.

But it says something about the kind of the way that her reputation has gone down as this fierce mother prepared to sacrifice her children in the face of coming under attack. And I suppose she's the extreme example of quite a number of prominent women who rule as regents during the Italian Wars and indeed beforehand when their husbands were away fighting different wars. So she, I guess, is one of the more outrageous examples. I mean, she famously marries a lower ranking man who she's not supposed to. And that kind of causes all sorts of fallings out with the family. supposed to and that kind of causes all sorts of fallings out with the family. But she, I think, is a kind of rather marvellous example of the Renaissance virago, really, the kind of woman who was going to go out there and fight. And she's briefly imprisoned. I mean,

she has all the triumphs and all the failures of many lives packed into one. When you look at the Renaissance, it's one of these periods of history with a sort of nice title to it. Is what strikes you before and after the kind of continuities or is there something very, very unusual about this period? I mean, I think there's a definite shift in 1492 when people around the whole of the world start to make contact. people around the whole of the world start to make contact. And I think that has quite a profound impact on the way people think. It shakes things up. If you've assumed that a configuration of the world was one way, that there were three continents, Europe, Africa, and Asia,

and suddenly there's this other place that you never heard of, I think that involved a sort of mental shift that also perhaps has other implications for the way you think about received knowledge. So I think that's part of the picture here. But away from that, I think there are some quite significant continuities. I think in terms of church reform, I think you can see that there's a lot going on in the Catholic Church beforehand and after Protestantism. It's not just a simple, there was Protestantism and then there was a kind of simple response to it. In terms of other things, yeah, trade is quite significantly disrupted by the contact with the Americas because that starts to shift trade patterns away from Italy being at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and as such,

it had a really, really important trading place for Europe towards the Atlantic coast of Europe. So there are all sorts of things that change at this point, whether if you're an ordinary person on the street in some small town in Tuscany, you would notice much of this beyond perhaps, you know, what the ballad singer was singing in a piazza. I'm not so sure. I suspect you go on with your olive farm and, you know, what the ballad singer was singing in a piazza. I'm not so sure. I suspect you go on with your olive farm and, you know, live much the same life as you would. And of course,

this is some of the Renaissance is a very elite kind of business. Although everybody is in church at some point, to be able to see those frescoes on the walls, and to be able to see the outdoor paintings within the colonnades. So I think there is a sense in which everyone has access if they want going into a church to Renaissance art. I wish I was an ordinary person on a street in Tuscany at the moment, I'll tell you that much. Horizontal rain hitting my windowpane here in England. Renaissance contributed to European exploration because the technology, and as we talked about, the kind of political geography and the economic stimulus for it. Did the kind of energy of the Renaissance shape European imperialism?

Did it imbue Henry VIII, Elizabeth, even the Protestant North Europeans like Francis Drake, these kind of imperialists, Walter Raleigh, and then obviously people all over Europe, these kind of imperialist Walter Raleigh, and then obviously people all over Europe, with a kind of excitement and confidence in European culture, ideas, arts, engineering, that would then prove very useful if they were about to embark on a project of global domination. The exploration springing from this period presumably is quite important. Well, I think there's certainly a sense that they are reviving an ancient culture. And I think reviving an ancient culture in which empire, like the Roman Empire, is very central and very important. I think that's significant because the word Renaissance

literally means rebirth. And if you perceive yourself as being involved in the rebirth of a great classical culture, which also had a big empire attached to it and moved all over the world, such as it was known at the time, and built roads and did all the things that the Romans did for us, then you can well imagine why you might think of the empire building as not just rebuilding the nice cultural world of Roman architecture, ancient Greek architecture, the literature and so forth, but also rebuilding empires on an ancient model. And with a kind of justification that this was a good thing to do in the past, and it can be a good thing to do now. So I think, yeah, that idea of a rebirth of classical culture brings with it a set of

wonderful stuff in art, but it also brings with it a set of ideas about empire, not all of which are positive, because some Renaissance people are actually quite fans of Brutus. They're not necessarily on the side of the empires, but that's a whole other story about Renaissance attitudes. But I think, yeah, absolutely, that is part of the rebirth of the ancient world, also involves the rebirth of empire in a way that perhaps we should think more about. Well, you've made me think more about that. Thank you for writing your astonishing book. It's just fired me with such a passion to go to Italy, basically, that's all I can say. It's a small place with a concentration of art and history like nowhere else. It's astonishing.

Yeah, it's wonderful. I've been going for 20 years and there are still so many places that I haven't seen. Yeah, I know all of your mentions of little, just even little Lucca. You could spend weeks just in Lucca or, it's wonderful. Thank you very much. Your book is called? The Beauty and the Terror, an alternative history of the Italian Renaissance. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask.

I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money, makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.