# Introduction ith the renaissance in stupidity, idiotic irrelevance was no longer confined to scholastic arguments and monastic debates. A universe beckoned, and stupidity rushed out to fill the void. While for the previous millennium, stupidity had been primarily recorded within the domain of the Church, now it was noted by everyone in any number of worldly pursuits. There was stupidity in exploration, stupidity in invention, stupidity in statecraft, medicine, art and war. Whereas the range of mental activity had been constrained to Church ends by theologians during the Middle Ages, the born again Western mind now embraced all dimensions of life 4 with a conspicuous lack of foresight, planning or purpose. If there was a new schema for this new age, it was so broad as to provide no guidance at all to people openly plunging into the secular world with shameless abandon. Among the plungers were the popes, artists in the south, humanists-in the north, and explorers, who returned from new worlds with greater knowledge and awareness of peoples and cultures. Growth of knowledge and awareness became a major contributing factor to the outburst of secular enthusiasm for life and a rebirth of interest in all dimensions of Western culture which characterized the age. The leading group of plungers were, unexpectedly, the popes (1470-1530), who might be misjudged as unfortunate examples of Christian amorality. However, that would miss the point that they had eagerly embraced the secular norms of the age as standards for judging their behavior. Their successes according to their new standards designated them as failures to people who clung devoutly to the old, but their new schema of dedication to worldly achievement W made them blind and deaf to the institutional dissonance and dissatisfaction their behavior engendered. As they plunged into the world, they became immune to the criticisms of those committed to the religion they were, by their indifference to it, dragging into disrepute. 5 Whatever else it was, this was the period when a new religion of humanism and interest in worldly affairs challenged and to a degree supplanted the dogma of the Church and concern with the life hereafter. The Church, however, never sensed or responded to the era as a challenge and cause for reform. 6 Another reason the Church was so ill disposed to reform was that it had a long and venerable tradition of inciting and ignoring critics. More than a millennium of criticism had made it thick skinned 7 and prone to dismiss calls for reform as part of the routine bother an established power had to expect from frustrated idealists. In the thirteenth century, the overall power of and faith in the schema of the medieval Church began to decline. This was a result of the self-defeating methods employed by the medieval popes to enhance their immediate, short-term secular powers at the expense of their basic spiritual authority. With the Church increasingly absorbed in the exercise of power rather than the cultivation of morality, it might even have led the way to the intellectual Renaissance had it not been stuck with Christian theology as the ultimate source of authoritative explanations and rationalizations for everything. Au contraire, a renaissance of immorality reigned as people indulged their 19 th century ids 8 while humanists focused on noting what the people were actually doing as well as what the ancients had written. Medieval scholars had cherry picked the ancients when their writings conformed to the Bible and selectively ignored the rest, but the humanists were deliberately inclusive so as to promote, hopefully, secular virtue. 9 In fact and despite itself, the Church at first actively encouraged the new humanism which began intellectually in 1345 with Petrarch's discovery of Cicero's personal letters sparking the Renassiance 10 with a commitment to learning which promoted the development of the modern mind at the expense of piety and orthodoxy. This trend was furthered by Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455), who, as the first humanist pope, was a bit too broad minded for the good of the Church. He bestowed papal offices on scholars whose learning he respected regardless of their conclusions, but while this was a boon to humanists, it shocked the self confirming expectant devout. Such shocks notwithstanding, the Church suffered more from the belligerent policies and immorality of popes who cultivated wars and indulged in power politics and perversions than from those who cultivated talent and indulged in arts and letters. 11 It would have been bad enough had the secular spirit of the age glazed the papacy in a superficial way, but instead, the venality, amorality and avarice of worldly power politics was carried to excess by the Renaissance Popes. 12 Sixtus IV (1471-1484) typified the new standard bearers in that he could not have been less interested in the internal health of the Church. 13 His great successes were all secular: He improved the city of Rome physically, invigorated the arts and made the papacy a powerful monarchy. However, his great failures were all moral: He conspired with assassins, blessed cannons and indulged in simony, nepotism and war 14 all without shame. The renaissance in papal stupidity was compounded by the self serving nature of papal advisors, who were caught up in both the spirit of the age and the political character of their environment. As Alexander VI (1492-1503) observed, "The most grievous danger for any pope [leader] lies in the fact that encompassed as he is by flatterers, he never hears the truth a about his own person and ends by not wishing to hear it." 15 This danger is inherent in every political organization: If advisors are going to advise first and foremost to secure political favor, then everyone is going to lose one way or another, more or less, sooner or later. b In fact, it is a basic, fundamental cause of stupidity in every human organization in every age. However, in this era, the defining cause of stupidity was the intransigence with which ingrown ideas and values stifled the developing modern mind, which was eagerly embracing secular values over those espoused if not practiced by the Church. So the irony was that the humanist popes displayed and openly supported the new schema while others just displayed it a An exception to this rule, the royal fool (court jester) was an ironic tribute to stupidity. Bridging the medieval and modern eras, the traditional fool was, if not a clever spy (Worth. p. 182) abnormally innocent and there for amusingly truthful. Often at the side of kings, he alone in the guise of absurdity could say things no one wanted to hear and no one else would dare utter. (Swain) A classic example occurred in June, 1340 after the French loss in naval battle of Sluys. No one dared tell the French king Philip VI so the court jester dissed the cowardly English who did not jump overboard like the brave Frenchmen. (David. p. 292) This ploy of burying the truth in humor was carrie don in the minstrel shows in America of the 1840's in which attacks on respectability were attributed to ignorance if not stupidity. (Toll and Sutherland) It was also used in Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire in 1912, in which a dumb puppet raised awkward questions wrapped in riddles. (Watson. 2001. p. 58.) b To flip this the other way, Napoleon observed he heard the truth only from traitors. (Quoted on p.262 of Zweig.1930) or, as "Poor Richard" noted, "Love your enemies, for they will tell you your faults". (Franklin, B. Mid-18th century) in their shameless pursuit of worldly power. Basically, it was found in popes and people who took responsibility for their own fate by acting upon the notion that the individual rather than God was the architect of the human condition. 16 The human being became the center of life, and although the gap between the way things were and the way they should have been remained, the standard for judging the way they should be changed to accommodate human limitations and emphasize human c aspirations. 17 Had the popes honored Catholic values, they would have prayed, studied and preached, and it was by the traditional standards of poverty, humility and chastity that their behavior was condemnable. However, judged by worldly standards, the Renaissance Popes achieved a degree of success by disregarding their vows and embracing stupidity. As Erasmus noted in his Colloquies, it would have been inconvenient for "Wisdom to descend upon them...It would lose them all that wealth and...all those possessions." He further noted that many pimps, bankers and others would have been thrown out of work. 18 These vested interests were strongly committed to the new morality, complemented the popes' stupidity and proved to be the Protestants' greatest allies. Not only had the standards of the popes used for judging their own behavior shifted, but their rapacious pecuniary policies converted supporters into opponents. The emerging middle class became increasingly resentful of the insatiable demands of the papacy for more and more money to finance holy decadence, 19 so even by the new worldly standard of economics, the Church was a vexation. For the ways the people of the Renaissance presumed to modify their traditional, Christian schema to cope with the vexatious Church, they (like the Greeks) are better known for what they attempted than what they achieved. Even if much of what they attempted was done mistakenly or imperfectly, it all contributed to the shaping of the strange, confused, uncritical Renaissance mentality in a tumultuous period when the zenith achieved in artistic expression was matched by the nadir attained in political morality. While they had not abandoned heavenly ideals, they tried to satisfy their curiosity by doing things. Neither an age of believers nor thinkers, the Renaissance was an age of "Doers" 20 in which the ancient order of esteem was reversed, and those who used their hands were more prized than those who played word games in their heads. 21 In an age when both human hands and heads were turned loose to interact with the world, the c One of the first was Muslim scholar Avicenna, who, circa 1000 A. D., founded modern medicine and espoused the philosophy later picked up by Aquinas and Locke that people can improve themselves through reason and aspire to universal truths. (Suskind. 2008. pp. 114,116-117 Renaissance doer was first and foremost a "Discoverer". He discovered not only new places but an artistic appreciation of life, the past, the present and, most important of all, himself. Proud of his accomplishments rather than afraid of God, the Renaissance man was eager to discover d who he was so he could be whatever he was going to be. Neither reborn Greek nor good Christian, he was more flamboyant than classical more theatrical than theological. 22 What he failed to discover about being human was that his limitations were a function of his subjective nature. Nevertheless, as the star of a drama with neither plot nor development, Renaissance man strutted grandly about his world stage in this unstructured age which had its own characteristic spirit, attitude and tone. It should no surprising that the most notable achievements of the age were in the field of art because the Renaissance was essentially artistic in spirit. The use of knowledge about the world to create order, beauty and truth was the inherently artistic, subjective process that characterized the age, and as gratifying and selfserving as it was emotionally for each individual, it was confusing intellectually for society in the long run and shaped the stupidity of the era. Truth no longer was found in the Bible or classics but in the impressionable mind of the individual as it interacted with the world, imposed a pattern of thought on knowledge and synthesized it into something satisfying if inaccurate. Nor was a commonly accepted guiding moral schema to be found, as ethics came to be shaped by the impulsive, artistic/subjective spirit of the period which was nascent realism/nowism overcoming clerical standards of judgment. 23 This spirit was accompanied by new attitudes which developed as people overcame the medieval fiction that natural man was inherently sinful and ergo dependent upon the Church for both moral leadership and spiritual redemption. The new hope for enjoying a good life here and now on earth was accompanied by a rebirth of intellectual interest in understanding the universe. 24 With the facade of piety gone, people expanded their geographical horizons, resurrected the ancient values of classical Greece and studied the natural world around them. As these new, broadening attitudes toward learning about life developed, the tone of the age clearly became that of confused conflict. Whereas Medieval man had been confronted with conflicting opposites, a d The word "Discover" says it all. Whatever it is was always there and had been covered up, but now someone removes the cover, so it is uncovered or "Discovered. (Dolnick.p.42.) or often "Rediscover", as much of what was discovered was previously known. (And the process continues still: See Livraghi.) On the other hand, not much was known and much of what was known was wrong. However, consistent with the theme of the age, one of the original findings was "Man" as opposed to a farmer, banker or noble (Foucault.1966.) as in "Man", as a generality, does this or needs that. balance had been found between treachery and honor, virtue and vice, brutality and piety even if behavior commonly conflicted with Church ideology. By way of contrast, Renaissance man lived in a multidimensional world with no fixed standards. To the simple Christian answers to the problems of life were added many more, most of which clashed with Christianity and each other. Discoveries from the past conflicted with traditions just as discoveries from other continents conflicted with set notions about the nature of the world and people. Such conflicts made the 1400's a century of wars, with some of them taking the form of religious spats and others workers' revolts. These evinced a new attitude quite different from the accepting apathy of serfs and peasants in Egypt and India or the hopeless resignation common among slaves and plebes of the Roman Empire. Although cruelly suppressed during this era, this attitude lives on today as an unexpected result of Christianity. While the Church never intended to promote humanism or spread a doctrine of social equality, as it nevertheless did so, an activist idea sprang up and took root along with an incongruous sense of freedom from the past or responsibility to the future. Wherever priests introduced people to the teachings of St. Paul in the name of Jesus, man became God 25 and vice versa. While Christianity had these unintended effects (and provided theological themes for artists and writers), it failed to provide dependable, intelligible, ethical standards for social behavior. With religious ceremonies increasingly reduced to functionless rituals e which were continually challenged and undermined by new forms of immorality, a vestige of stability was maintained by common, shared internal standards of civil obedience if indecency by which love of gold, beauty and sometimes God compounded each other and occasionally went to excesses. 26 Life became brasher and more sordid as popes and princes, explorers and artists, sages and scoundrels were fired up by a lust for its expression. 27 As they did, the Renaissance became an age of action and excitement, so whatever else it was, in the near absence of a credible, established ideology it was an era of external disorder characterized by social unrest, ferment and political instability conditions which, as they did in the waning years of the Roman Republic, promoted artistic creativity. As Renaissance art became more representative than just decorative, 28 it expressed the tone of conflict in the self image of a bold and splendid spirit confronting a beautiful but brutal world. Painting, especially, was considered all but divine in its capacity to represent the principles of harmony, proportion and balance which governed nature. 29 The mind of the artist as creator is transformed into the image of the mind of God. 30 In its glory, this artistic movement peaked in the early sixteenth century: Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel in 1512, Leonardo died in 1519 and Raphael, always a good imitator, followed in 1520. However, your archetypical Renaissance artist was Sandro Botticelli (1444?-1510). Representing the next group of plungers, Botticelli was an archetypical artist in that he was not simply a passive spectator or recreator of an outward vision. He took over reality and made it his subjective own by using incoming bits of information as exponents of his personal ideas, moods and visions. Thus, when interacting with his environment, he embodied artistic license on the loose in that he was quite casual with images rejecting some, isolating others and combining still others into a new synthesis as suited his imaginative fancy. 31 For Botticelli, both conventional and unconventional orthodoxy were out. As a theologian, he was all artist, with a careless formula for the traditional roles of purgatory, heaven and hell. He could accept what was unworthy in heaven and worthy in hell and live comfortably in between with people who took no sides in great conflicts, decided no great issues and made no great moral decisions. In fact, his art was sincere and sure while being amoral, since he was interested in neither good nor evil. His typically Renaissance interest was in people and their mixed, confused, uncertain condition. If he had any morality, it was sympathy for those who were understandably indecisive in the midst of uncertainty. Words and honor had no meaning, so if there was to be understanding, it would come not through the study of things but through expressions of emotions and sentiment. 32 Fittingly, one of the sentiments he expressed was his appreciation of the support of the Medicis, three generations of whom he represented along with a likeness of himself, asserting the rising cultural significance of the artist in The Adoration of the Magi (1475). 33 While Botticelli was all artist, Leonardo was all everything. f If he was the archetypical Renaissance man in a broad sense, he was also deeply enigmatic and sought meaning in nature and purpose in humanity. Certainly, his art reflects the ideas of an inner man who seemed to possess some unsanctified, secret wisdom which allowed him to pass unmoved through personal difficulties. 34 Whatever the nature of his genius, it came in many forms. In fact, Leonardo truly embodied the Renaissance in that he went in all direction at once except back to church, and although his interests were f Except verbal: Extremely left-handed/right brained, he had no interest in languages, letters, history, theology or philosophy, (Barzun. p.79.) although he was oddly quite adept at writing verses. (Lester T. 2012. p. 103.) In versatility he was matched only by Julius Caesar. (Lissner p 53) By way of contrast, Michelangelo was an accomplished sonneteer. universal, they lacked a unifying design. No one could do as many things as well as he, but he was a collage of brilliant themes which remained parts of a colorful, disorganized, undirected, abstractly moder nesque, unfinished canvas. With his eye for insight, he would cut to the center of things while generalizing beyond specifics into boundless nature, but since he could not quite match nature's ability to fit things together, he, like Michelangelo, often failed to complete projects begun. 35 This failure to complete works stemmed from his greatest virtue his ability to conceive too richly. He would become lost in experimenting with details and absorbed in the theory of art rather than in its accomplishment and then would leave the physical task uncompleted. Basically, his keen sense of imperfection, which continually confronted the reality of the material at hand, was his character, fate and tragedy. 36 Likewise, but even more extreme, he occasionally destroyed works in progress, perhaps due to frustration at not being able to create in reality the ideal he had in his mind. In rages of frustration, he slashed canvases and took hammers to marble, thus endearing himself to 18 th century romantics, who revered such displays of passion, 37 be they negative or otherwise. As the ultimate artist, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was particularly adept, especially as a sculptor, in bringing the inner soul to the surface, even if there was usually something incomplete g about his creations. Although he transcended the Renaissance in otherwise dispensing with precedents, measures, orders and rules which constrained his contemporaries, 38 in emphasizing the spirit of piety, he expressed with profound intensity a quality which was strikingly absent in the vain, superficial, capricious behavior of his age when people were turning away from theology (as well as ancient tradition) and becoming absorbed in the realities of this world. 39 This was not only ironic but also typical, in that, unlike our avant guard artists who are early sensing systems, the artists of the period looked backward, filling their works with religious themes and statuesque classical ideals while ignoring completely the brave new worlds which were being discovered all around them. 40 It was not until God withdrew from human affairs in the 20 th century that artists could abstract Her out of art and openly express their abject if adventurously confounded humanity. 41 g Both Leonardo and Michelangelo were medieval in leaving works unfinished. (Collinsp. 259. ) The flip side of this was that Leonardo was forever tinkering with his Mona Lisa, and the only reason we have it in its current form is that he finally stopped when he died. True to himself, his most famous quotation translates as," Art is never finished, only abandoned." (Cahill. 2013. p. 95.) The idea of having a completed, finished work of art/literature is, apparently, modern. However there was another modern wrinkle to Leonardo's failure to complete projects for which he had been paid: Patrons felt shortchanged and it often took some smoothing of feathers to placate them. (Strathern. p. 30.) Like the visual arts, Renaissance literature was also largely an attempt to combine Christianity with the classics. There were simple imitations of the classics as both figures and formal themes were copied in mechanical fashion often by conservative, Latinspouting humanists who venerated the past and thus initially acted as obstructionists. 42 However, as vernacular writing (e.g., the volgare aka Tuscan cum Italian) emerged, the classical mold was broken by the pragmatic optimism of the emerging modern mind 43e.g., federalist, one worlder Dante, 44 pioneered the negative travelogue about a place, Hell, he had not yet seen. Not only was the first western novel h written, but stories abounded about real life experiences 45 along with abiblical fantasies. As revealed in the literature of the time, the nascent modern mind was remarkably superstitious, i with the general curiosity in all things human being satisfied by oracles, webs of romantic imagery and quaint old wives' tales which explained everything and nothing. 46 The true wonder is that a mentality which accepted such explanations and entertained such beliefs produced as many worthy achievements as it did. Ideologically, the ideal Renaissance construct was a synthesis of classicism and Christianity, but as knowledge grew, the maintenance of any ideal at all became increasingly difficult. Theology certainly continued to predominate, but after waiting more than 1,400 years for Christ to return to earth, j some concluded He had changed His mind or, refusing to ask for directions, had ended up going elsewhere. Further, as the plunging humanists discovered the past, their successful efforts to get back to original sources and achieve fundamental understandings 47 often challenged increasingly suspect Church doctrine. 48 Thus, the modern mind was fashioned partially by a respect for antiquity as the authority of Greek philosophers came to replace that of medieval theologians. This represented a giant leap forward in intellectual emancipation because when the ancients disagreed with each other, as they occasionally did, scholars had to make judgments in evaluating what they read. Hence, while everything was respected, little or nothing was accepted with medieval, Biblical finality. One of the first casualties of these disagreements was the rigid scholastic system which had kept the Western in an intellectual straitjacket for centuries. Although this led to a revival of Plato, there was a benefit even to this in that independence of h La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes. Anonymous. 1500. (Ferguson. 201. p. 60.)The first novel was The Tale of Genji by M. Shikibu.1002. i Leonardo was a noted exception in his respect for science. j On the other hand, Charles Russell, the founder of the Jehovah's Witnesses, claims He dropped by in 1874 for a brief visit and was to return permanently some forty years later. He also predicted that divinely inspired global warming would create balmy conditions. (Carroll.p 165.) thought was called for in choosing between him and Aristotle. This encouraged firsthand knowledge of the classics and removed scholarly activity from the cloistered monasteries, where the aim had been to preserve, protect and defend predetermined Aquinas induced orthodoxy. While freed from the intellectual fetters of theology, the humanists were too absorbed with learning from the classical past to produce anything new, original or effective 49 so they remained pedantically literary as they, like the Scholastics before them, mulled over ancient authorities and aloofly ruminated as remote from the new, developing reality as possible. This ineffectiveness of the humanists (and thus Renaissance intellectuals in general) was well illustrated by the careers of Erasmus (1466-1536) and his friend Sir Thomas More (1478-1535). 50 In 1509, Erasmus conceived The Praise of Folly, based on the premise that life rewards absurdity at the expense of reason 51 and in which folly, a female, praises herself and claims the human race would die out without her. She, introduces her handmaidens Drunkenness, Ignorance, Self Love, Flattery, Wantonness, etc. and claims all great human endeavors i. e., war, society, the Church and its theology depend on her. 52 As an antidote to wisdom, she recommends marriage. Based on the real life observation that the least reasonable people are happiest, she equates happiness with folly. Catholic in her criticisms of Catholicism, she impugns the Church for abuses of Christianity, ridicules pardons, indulgences and theological disputes in turn, points out that the Church is committed to formality at the expense of simple Christian love and ends by suggesting that true religion is a form of folly. 53 Finally, she explicitly attributes the success of the Church partially to the stupidity of the faithful. On the other hand, practically speaking, Erasmus allowed that piety "Requires that we should sometimes conceal truth... we must admit with Plato that lies are useful to the people". 54 He had no intention of lying to anyone but naively thought reason could lead to reform of the Church to which he was devoted. In this he miscalculated: His message of reform went over the heads of those not of his academic/intellectual level meaning practically everyone so it was well wasted on the public 55 as well as the not so reform minded clergy. In contrast to Erasmus, who was a scholarly satirist, Sir Thomas More was a pious humanist. He was incorruptible k and was beheaded for allegedly saying Parliament could not make the king head of the Church, or, alternatively, for being silent about the king's dubious marriage to Anne Boleyn 56 . He is best known for his k Jonathan Swift deemed More the most virtuous person England had ever produced, (Cahill.2013. p. 216n.) but look what it got him. Like Christ, he was too good for this world. It is best not to be too virtuous. (Greenfield and Mee.p.12.) Utopia (1516), a description of a communistic Levittown most nearly realized in the company town of Pullman, IL, in the 1890's 57 in which monotony is carried to Philadelphian extremes. All the streets are alike; everyone dresses alike; all go to bed at the same time, etc. There was no private property nor locks on the doors. 58 It was an incredibly dull society 59 as all diversity was forbidden except in religion, since God gets off on being worshiped in different ways. l Not only were lawyers prudently banned, 60 but Utopia which means "No place" in Greek 61 was a land of religious toleration in an age of bigotry and persecution. This was the only sphere in which variety was permitted, 62 although even that was limited in that Epicurean/Lucretian atomism was unacceptable to the author, who wore a hair shirt and whipped himself to the point of bleeding: Anyone believing the soul died with the body was arrested and enslaved by a totalitarian government based on fear 63 and which prescribed slavery. 64 Holy men who eschewed meat and matrimony were regarded as indeed holy but not wise. 65 In a peculiar arrangement of reciprocity, wives had to confess their sins to their husbands, who had to obey their sinful wives. 66 It is important to note that for all their intellect and erudition, neither Erasmus nor More could relate their mental worlds to the events of their day. In this regard, they were carrying on the venerable tradition of schema-lag set by the first of the humanists, Petrarch (1350), who deliberately cultivated letters so as to "Shut out the reality of [his] own times". 67 Likewise, an artistlag affected the painters of the age: e.g., it was not until the 18 th century that an oil appeared depicting the crowning of Mary with a mountain of silver (i.e., Polosi) in the background. 68 Erasmus was thus typical of the humanists in his indifference to science, inventions and explorations that were transforming and expanding the Renaissance world all around him 69 unless news of such found its way to him in books. He found the Argonauts far more interesting than Columbus and was pre-disposed to believe any ancient nonsense he read while being wont to discount any travelers tales he heard-many of which were far-fetched. In 1517, on the eve of the Reformation, he optimistically saw himself living in the dawn of a golden age of peace 70 rather than actually in the midst of one of religious bigotry, persecution social turmoil, peasant revolts and pending wars. On the other hand, More's problem was just the opposite of detach men tin tense involvement. As Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas was like a latter-day Plato who was too involved with the events of his day to apply his idealistic principles effectively. He persecuted the new Protestants harshly for their beliefs, thoughts, errors and heresies despite his utopian insight that people of different beliefs should live together in mutual toleration. Had this humanistic view been converted into policy by himself and later statesmen, much ensuing religious strife (e. g., The Thirty Years War) might have been avoided. 71 However, he was typical of the humanists (and later romantics) in having no definite social or political agenda to promote or program to follow, 72 and, just for the record, Utopia had slaves. In general, the humanists had precious little practical impact because they were pointedly unrealistic with More being unrealistic in his own individualistic, principled way, while most usually served those, like the Medici and humanist popes, who supported them. Usually, the relation of the humanists to the Church was shaped by the obvious, pragmatic fact that it was the paying patron of most such Renaissance scholars. m Although most of these were impressed by the wickedness of the popes and the ambitions, greed and immorality of the priests, they were happily employed by the Church and intended to stay that way. This was why the humanists could not inaugurate the Reformation: Too many of them depended on the Church for support and were not disposed to hound those who fed them. Particularly in Rome, which banked heavily upon Church revenues, such orthodoxy (i.e., commitment to the Bible) as could be found remained purely intellectual and did not create a popular movement away from the Church 73 or toward Christianity. n As the sixteenth century progressed, people throughout Europe gradually became more and more interested in the natural world being discovered and expanding around them than in classical works revered by the intellectually isolated and mostly servile humanists, so the focus of curiosity shifted from musty old books to reality. Interest in the surrounding environment gradually grew and that in classicism waned as new facts overwhelmed old systems of thought, which often could be proven wrong. 74 Ptolemy's astronomy, Galen's medicine and Aristotle's physics could no longer be stretched to cover the new scientific discoveries being made. In fact, discovery was being enjoyed as delightful in and of itself, but there were no philosophers o to organize what was newly found. 75 with ambiguity and confusion, disciplined "Systematics" (science as an intellectual adventure in the codified, rational analysis of empirical fact 76 ) did not catch up with observation and inquiry until the 1600's. 77 Thus, although intellectually the Renaissance was an age of discovery, it was most certainly not really an age of science. Renaissance science was actually just another occult art directed not toward "Truth" but toward proving the divinity of Christ. 78 It mixed chemistry with alchemy and astronomy with astrology and had none of its modern precision. 79 In most cases, it was an unformulated, impulsive adventure into the incomprehensible in which a single subjective vision would magically leap over reason and concentrate a thousand experiences and distill hundreds of observations by clairvoyant divination into some brilliant, semi mystical generalization. 80 Nevertheless, as modern science gradually took shape in the sixteenth century, its practitioners were not really pioneers. They were more like "Redis coverers" who were reestablishing on their own the ancient Ionian tradition which had been buried and forgotten for over two thousand years. Of course, they had to overcome the tyranny of later Greek thought (e.g., that of Ptolemy and Aristotle) because books by the ancients were still the best available: p e.g., for Vesalius, Galen's anatomical works were not historical curiosities but the best then existent. 81 Whatever they were, the two great scientists q of the era were Copernicus and Leonardo. It seems in that Copernicus (1473-1543) was misplaced in time, as he had little influence until the seventeenth century and therefore will be considered in Chapter XI. In this regard, he personified modern science in the Renaissance: It received some impetus in this age but did not flower until a century later in the Age of Reason. Leonardo was a peculiar combination of prophet of technology 82 and artistic naturalist but was a scientist because he had such wider anging interests. 83 As an inveterate nurturist, he grounded his interests on experience rather than ancient writings, 84 which he, in fact, would occasionally correct based on first-hand knowledge. 85 In addition, he was a Renaissance man in that he was primarily a problem solver rather than a theoretician. He personified the Renaissance because the fading, failing Christian/Biblical schema provided no answers to many of the real problems he faced as he delved into the tangible world. In this regard, it is noteworthy that, although he read widely, he like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford had a minimum of formal education so his practical achievements were made likely because he had no blinding schema or dogmatic theory to block the originality which was his genius. 86 His specific solutions to pragmatic, p Just as philosophers had to overcome Plato. q The term was not coined until 1833. (Purnell. p.100.) technological problems were made possible by his lack of constraining, formal theory, but his attempts to solve theoretical problems were remarkably impractical because, like a good Greek, he was indifferent to or even contemptuous of mere practicality. He thus both profited from and suffered for the absence of an organizing, functional schema. On the one hand, he was free to follow his curiosity to natural (but not always logical) conclusions unhampered by the learning r which shaped the minds of his contemporaries. 87 So he explained the dark part of the moon and knew the sea had covered the mountains and the poles had been at the equator. 88 It seems he was saved for the ages by his ignorance, and if a negative example can be used to make the point, he failed to discover the circulation of blood because he knew of Galen's theory of invisible pores in the inner wall of the heart. 89 In this particular case, he uncharacteristically and sacrificed the authority of personal observation to that of traditional if mistaken "Knowledge". 90 On the other hand, being unencumbered by anything like a methodical schema and true to the artistic temper of the age, his investigations usually were matters of intuitive analysis which bypassed reason and formed ideas with an eye for aesthetics be they TC theologically corrector not. Intensely visual, 91 his studies of nature invariably were compromises between his intellectual curiosity and his artistic desire for beauty, and like the Renaissance, they added up to nothing but a disorganized jumble of experiences which pointed toward the future. In this vein were his measurements of the parts of the human body, which he systematically analyzed arith metically 92 in his efforts typical of the ageto understand all aspects of being human. 93 Not surprisingly, speculative leaps, which were typical of the age, led Leonardo to atypical conclusions. Most of his engineering innovations were remarkably impractical for precisely the reason that they were made in the first place there was no mechanical way in his day to realize his fantasies. s He blithely ignored the mundane details of constructing functional machinery and was content to indulge his visionary curiosity in designing contraptions, like the submarine, automobile and airplane, which were centuries ahead of themselves but r Likewise, Machiavelli's failure to learn Greek left him open minded and curious as to how government worked. (Boorstin. 1998. p. 175.) James Watt also had no preconceived notion of what a steam engine should be (Klein. p. 23) so was conceptually free to devise the best he could imagine. Albert Einstein was also unusually openminded because of his indifference to if not suspicion of revered knowledge (Isaacson. 2007. p. 40.) and likewise succumbed to conventional thought in one notable instance in his case intergalactic but nonexistent "Ether" which everyone presumed made transmission of light possible throughout the universe. s In this regard, he was trumped by Galileo, who was a remarkably pracitcal inventor, (Bronowski. p 198) airplane, which were centuries ahead of themselves but failed with the sewing machine. 94 In fact, he was very much at his inventive best when illustrating impractical solutions to theoretical scientific problems which no one (except the Chinese 95 ) even contemplated. By way of contrast, in the field of geographical exploration, there were more pragmatic problems to be solved whose solutions had not only been found but then forgotten or ignored. Thus, some of the presumed discoveries of the Renaissance adventurers were really rediscoveries, in that information about them had been lost or had not been shared. Even most of these rediscoveries were accidental because most of the plunging Renaissance explorers really did not set out to discover anything but a new way to the Orient and never did find the coveted Northwest Passage they doggedly sought. t Inadvertently, they bumped into the New World because it just happened to be in their way as they tried to sail to lands Marco Polo had already visited two hundred years before. When Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, Mediterranean merchants and sailors who began looking for new ways to the East u for trade did not know that Pharaoh Necho had solved the problem of rounding Africa to get to India more than 2,000 years earlier. In addition, Irish myths about a land to the west 96 had been unwittingly confirmed by vikings, who had known about Vinland (i.e., Newfoundland) for centuries but all this was not part of general European lore so would not have seeped through to Columbus, who read widely albeit not in search of new knowledge but in a positive feedback effort to support his existing belief. 97 He may have read in Marco Polo's Travels that "Japan" could be reached by sailing west from Portugal. He did, however, read a letter (with a map) written in 1474 by Paolo Toscanelli to Fernão Martins 98 in which he theorized that the best way to the Orient was to sail westward. He opened a correspondence with Toscanelli 99 and, in addition, had been to Iceland, might have learned about Vinland and thus been further encouraged to try reach the East by sailing west. Aristotle had determined the planet must be a sphere after incorrectly concluding only an orb could throw a circular shadow on the moon: A disk could too, if at a right angle to the source of light. That aside, he also erred v in assuming the distance between Iberia and t It was finally discovered 1905 by Roald Amundsen, who concluded that arctic conditions made the route impractical. (Manchester. 1992. p. 246.and Galvin.p.143. For a brief account of the voyage, see Morison. 1971. pp. 613-615.) u Menzies (2008) opines there was a shipping route no one knew about via a canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea and that Columbus was really seeking land (i.e., riches) for himself in the name of Spain. v He estimated China is 3,500 miles west of the Canaries while it is actually 11,700. (T. Lester. 2009. p. 254) Had he known the actual distance, he probably would not have gone. He was not seduced, however, by the Church endorsed notion that the earth was flat, India was not great and for some reason that nothing there for lay in between. Both errors were picked up by Columbus, who incorporated them into his erroneous but functional schema. Four hundred years after Ari, the Alexandrians calculated the earth's circumference to be 25,000 miles, divided the globe in 360 degrees, lined its surface with parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude and invented the astrolabe, 100 which measured latitude. One hundred years later, in Claud Ptolemy's Geograp hike hyphegesis (Guide to Geography), the Alexandrians erred astronomically in concluding the earth was the immovable center of the universe and again geographically in inferring that Asia extended further east than it does. This strengthened Columbus's Aristotelian 101 and Biblically 102 supported if not induced belief that Asia could be reached by sailing westward which was further confirmed by 14 th century cardinal Pierred' Ailly's Imago mundi, 103 which misled him into believing there was only a small sea separating East from West. In addition, he knew Moorish texts indicated the earth was 15,000 miles in diameter at the equator, which it is if you bear in mind that a Moorish mile is 1.6 statute miles. 104 So, he knew the earth was round even if he seriously underestimated its size thinking Japan to be about as far west as the Rocky Mountains. 105 In addition, he assumed there was no intervening land mass. Sailing westward became the ruling passion of Columbus's life, but his requests for ships were rejected by the Portuguese, Genoese, Venetians, two Spanish dukes and the royal house as well, 106 because the scholars who reviewed Columbus's plan knew, as Columbus did not, Ptolemy had drastically underestimated the circumference of the earth. Hence, the nearly comic scene of experts correctly denying the neophyte nut case, who nevertheless wrongly persisted in his cause, 107 until the Moors were driven out of Granada in early 1492. That freed up some resources so, whether it made sense or not considering the unlikelihood of new discoveries being made in a world so old 108 Spanish royalty sponsored the expedition. Except in rare moments of clarity which dispelled his otherwise unlimited capacity for self deception 109 to the point of delusion, 110 Columbus could not bring himself to admit he had failed to reach the Orient, and any crewman who alleged the truth was given 100 lashes, fined and had his tongue torn out. 111 The facts are: when he set out on his journey, he had no idea "America" existed, bumped into it by accident because it was in his way to a goal he never reached, and never did comprehend what he had done. So, his introduced by 6 th century monk Cosmas's Topographia Christiana. (Manchester. 1992.p. 230) Nor, apparently did he know of the explorers from Bristol, Eng-land, who discovered America in 1481. (Westropp.) impact was considerably greater than he was. About fifteen years after his first successful voyage, Europeans in general finally realized he had not found Asia but rediscovered a new world which they could develop and exploit 112 if they had the knowledge and desire to do so. This discovery of the News World was an epochal event heralding a cognitive revolution in the Old that current observations rendered traditional sources of misinformation like the Bible and ancient writing srelatively irrelevant. 113 a new way of thinking not confined by what was known impelled adventurers into the unknown. 114 An unfortunate exception was Spain's non adventurous colonial policy, which was based on Christian avaricea compromise between saving souls and stealing gold. x After a debate as to whether or not indigenous people had souls was settled in the affirmative, 115 medieval greed 116 triumphed as Dominican friars struggled for a humane and peaceful verbal policy toward the Indians to rationalize and cover for the Conquistadores thirst for riches. If the effects of the Spaniards' spiritual imperialism are still debatable, their extractive/exploitive imperialism, unassociated with any commitment to the creation y of wealth, 117 led to the destruction of three cultures: Those of the Aztecs and the Incas as well as their own. 118 In destroying the Aztec culture (and people), Hernando Cortez (ca. 1520) was aided by smallpox, 119 the superiority of Western weaponry and battle tactics 120 and the resentment many subjects felt toward Aztec rule but most of all by a self dooming belief on the part of Montezuma II. Confused at first as to the nature of the visitors, like a good 17 th rationalist who failed to analyze facts logically, Monty decided more time and study of them were needed. 121 Via an excess of supernatural mysticism, he eventually convinced himself that the conquerors were the expected party of Quetzalcoatl the state's founding god, whose return would portend the demise of his empire, and he was half right. Although he was slightly mistaken as to the divine nature of the Spanish, he was correct about the result of their presence. z Since he fatalistically believed himself doomed, he made no effort to oppose Cortez. He was w The earliest reference to a "New world" was made by a nameless fisherman from the Orkneys who spent twenty six years in Newfoundland at the end of the 14 th century. (Pohl.p.150.) He was not blinded by an obsession to get to the Orient, so he recognized where he was for what it was. Apparently, the viking regarded Vinland as 'just another land'. x The French and English were almost lucky in that the absence of mineral riches in their domains delayed colonization for a century. When it occurred, it was based on furs and tobacco. (Morison. 1971. p. 678) y In this sense, they prefigure the oil rich sand boxes of the 21 st century mid East. When these run out of oil, they will have nothing but sand. z Europeans likewise mistook Genghis Khan's invasion in the 13 th century as a mythological army of Prester John come to unite Christiandom.(T. Lester. pp. 49-53.) sovereign over a warlike people who outnumbered their captors by a thousand to one, but he submitted not so much to the Spanish as to his fatalistic conviction that his and their destiny were preordained. Not even the Spaniards' continual demands for gold and provisions could lead him to the realization that they were just a bunch of very human thieves. aa His mind was set and nothing the Spanish did nor any thingelse could change it. 122 Appeasement reigned extreme. 123 The Spanish were also fortunate in their conquest of Peru, which was aided by some illplanned insurrections by the Incas, 124 ignorance about Spanish weapons and naivete about the intruders' intentions. The story was Mexico all over again: In 1532, without suffering a single casualty, 168 Spaniards on 62 horses defeated 80,000 Inca warriors. 125 Francisco Pizarro captured his opposite number within minutes and stretched cogntive dissonance to the max by assuring him the Spanish treat their prisoners with mercy 126 while treating the natives abominably and working to destroy them as convincingly as they had the Aztecs. To put the matter in a Christian context, the Spaniards' general attitude was, "What an excellent time we shall have kidnaping, torturing and burning the Inca's alive, to say nothing of raping their women, looting the country....a seven thousand year old...civilization all in the name of the One True Faith." (Buckley. p. 101.)or, Heil Jesus. To compound the travesty, the Spaniards attributed their overwhelming success not to duplicity and smallpox but to Christianity and the grace of God. 127 Further, if there was any confusion or uncertainty as to how or why the Spaniards triumphed so easily, it was attributed to the guile of God and his inscrutable ways. 128 However, unfortunately for Spain, as gold and silver flowed into the royal coffers from the American provinces, the Spanish became dependent upon this source of wealth and, like the imperial Romans, ergo failed to develop any industry. In fact, Spain spent so much gold that the European market collapsed, greatly reducing the value of the gold Spain had not spent. 129 Thus, when the Armada was defeated in 1588, Spain began its long, irreversible decline as a world power which mercifully ended when it was relieved of the last of its economically stultifying, corrupting colonies in 1898. If Spain eventually paid the price for its rapacious successes, the conquered horizons were forever expanded, and Europe became a dominant aa Actually, Cortez first requested gold saying he and his companions suffered from a disease of the heart which could be cured only by gold. (Aron. p.60. Thomsen. p. 66.) This was almost true, if you allow it was more a psychological condition than a disease, and no amount of gold could cure it. world power. The financial weakness of European kings ironically promoted the rise of the West because monarchs had to resort to private enterprise to push exploration and colonization. By so doing, Europeans developed the joint stock company the progenitor of the corporation: This enabled a group of investors to pool their resources and share the risks of a large and potentially very rewarding financial venture. 130 In the East (i.e., xenophobic China and the shrinking Muslim world), royal complacence and prerogative prevented private participation in such lucrative ventures. 131 A further paradox in this age of exploration was that just as Christianity had encouraged and then been weakened by humanist scholarship, it encouraged and then was weakened by both the expanded European view of the world and the development of printing. Christians had always been motivated by a quest for perfection and a vision of a better place which Virgil (ca 40 BC) had entoned in his tenth Eclogue and where "Everlasting spring abides, and never fading flowers". 132 It might have been in the past, be created or found somewhere else. 133 However, as Christians pushed into the world in search of a Garden of Eden, a heaven on earth or simply some place they might perfect, they found themselves creating and confronting lessons they were loath to learn. Until this time, Europe had been bound by a common legal system, religious belief and sense of ethics, with the pope considered the supreme arbiter and final judge in legal affairs, religious disputes and matters of immorality, in which he was often a hands-on expert. This view of the pope and Church and the self-assurance of Christianity was profoundly challenged and altered by geographical exploration among other things. While the case for Christianity was undermined by new knowledge gained about the ever deepening past and widening world, the primacy of the priest as intermediary between the Bible and the people was undermined by printing which begot a literate public. There is irony in the development of printing, in that all the major technical breakthroughs were made in the Orient that is, in a cultural milieu in which its use was restricted because of the nature of the linguistic characters. bb Thus, it did not lead to an intellectual revolution in China, where it began 1,400 years before Gutenberg. 134 One of the earliest applications of block printing was the production of paper money, which first appeared in China in the tenth century. Then as now, inflation was considered to be a new way of creating wealth. 135 At that time none knew and few have since bb The first book was printed in China ca. 850.(Lee. 2013. p. 33n.)The first massed produce book was Nung Shu (on agricultural engineering) printed in China in1313. Sadly, many copies were burned by Mao's mindless Red Guards some 650 years later. (Menzies. 2008. p. 189.) learned two basic principles of modern economics 1.) that paper money symbolizes cc but can wreck wealth: The Chinese (Mongols) also invented hyperinflation ca. 1350 which, in 1394, led the Ming dynasty to ban its own nearly worthless coins; 136 2.) that printing more symbols does not create more wealth any more than making crosses creates more Christianity. Even when movable type was invented in eleventh century China, printing remained of little practical use to the Chinese. 137 However (and again ironically), European culture sprang to world dominance on the back of this new Oriental technology, which was well suited to alphabetical languages. A further irony for the Christian world was that by their very success in spreading the Holy Word in print, the devout made Biblical interpretation by different readers possible and then doctrinal dissent by conscientious thinkers probable. The prime European contribution to the technology of printing was a crucial improvement in the casting of type made about 1445. From then on, books became available to the general public, even if humanist scholars at first rejected printed tomes as vulgar, and some snobs paid scribes to copy printed books back into manuscripts. 138 Printing was nevertheless a major step toward a mass media culture. It standardized languages 139 while promoting careful thought and appealing to popular emotion. Whereas until this age, primarily only church officials had been misinformed via reading, Gutenberg's press made it possible for everyone to be so misinformed. On the one hand, it was the press that made Erasmus, inventor of the bestseller, 140 possibleal though his message did not penetrate to those in power. On the other hand, the printed broadside, which was seldom reasonable, revolutionized politics, 141 and indeed, reason was usually lost amidst all the pages of emotionally inspired misinformation. In fact, one of the tragedies of the age was that the press had the power to preserve and spread obsolete ideas. A case in point was the Ptolemaic notion of a homoc entered universe, which was diffused just as it was being proved wrong. A primary contributing cause of this general problem was economic: Printing books required an investment, and printers were reluctant to change a set galley just to accommodate new and even better information. Thus, the copper plates upon which maps were inscribed were seldom revised just to accommodate new discoveries so their truths often simply outlived cc Symbolism is captured in a story about an Arab who was required by an agent to sell his camel to the cashs trapped government. The agent handed him a piece of paper upon which was written, "This is a piece of gold" explaining that after the war, he could redeem it for a piece of gold. The Arab went into his tent and emerged handing the agent a slip piece of paper upon which he had written "This is a camel". themselves. As distributors thus had a vested financial interest in obsolete facts, a popular work could run for a hundred years even if it had nothing to do with revised versions of reality. 142 Not that they had much to do with any version of reality: Cartographers abhorred space, so would sprinkle islands around to suit their fancies, and in the 16 th century, one Joao de Lisbos thoughtfully devoted a chapter in a book to providing directions to islands that had not yet been discovered. 143 Although old truths hung on in printed forms, the Renaissance was characterized by an undeniable growth of intellectual freedom for the individual. This was a mixed blessing as the medieval order had provided substantial psychological security through feudal rights. It was this sense of permanence and security which the West traded in for the illusion of freedom. No longer fixed to a particular purpose or place in life, Renaissance man was restless but surprisingly secure in a new sense: He believed he would develop according to his own potential for wealth, power or fame. 144 It was this optimistic belief in potential that gave the new personality confidence and a kind of psychological security which transcended physical insecurity i.e., almost no one had a nervous breakdown, even though many experienced a stab in the back as that was considered a culturally acceptable way to resolve any number of problems during this Christian era of treachery, abduction, fratricide, barbarism, sadism and depravity. 145 On the other hand, slavery was down if not out; the conscience was loosening up as was trade, but hunger, cold, squalor and stupidity remained free and available as ever. 146 This Renaissance sense of freedom was more illusionary than real, however, because there were still general behavioral constraints. These were different from those of the Middle Ages, but such conditional restraints had just been changed not eliminated. The Renaissance man was a slave to the money market, was free to starve and had a right to fail if he could not sell his services 147 to contractors whose decisions were governed more by principles of business than the gospel according to Paul much less Christ. While the Renaissance was an age of great artistic creation, it was also an age of sex scandals in cities rife with depravity and social inequality. Streets were polluted with prostitutes and perverted priests, with institutions homes to shady deals and conspiracies of every type imaginable. Corrupt bankers vied for power among murderous mercenaries verging on uncontrollable insanity and sacrilegious popes lusting after riches, power and lust. Other peoples and cultures were denigrated if not dismissed in a bigoted culture of Anti Semitism, Islama phobia and extremeracial prejudice. 148 If the newly freed individual were indulgent, the State was likewise freed of any pretense of theological restraints and became the great individualist of the age an end in itself. dd More important, the means used to achieve state ends were not notably Christian. Justification by Biblical standards was superseded by justification in terms of secular success. Accordingly, the state had but one law the pursuit of its own immediate and long term best interest. Actually, in politics, neither institutions nor behavior changed from the Middle Ages so much as the ethical standards for rationalizing conduct. Christian ethics were no longer used as much (by either the Church which sanctioned slavery in 1452 149 or state) as was a hopeful presumption that means and ends would justify themselves. A prime example of this principle was the plot of Pope Sixtus IV 150 to overthrow Medici rule in Florence and seize territory for the papal family. Accompanied by machinations which make our Watergate and Iran gate conspirators look like altar boys playing on a Sunday school picnic, the plot was hatched in the Curia and probably with the knowledge and encouragement if not the blessing of the pope himself. The assassinations of Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano de' Medici were planned for Easter Sunday, 1478, and the attack, precipitated by two holy knife wielding priests 151 was made in the Cathedral of Florence. Giuliano was killed, but Lorenzo survived to take notso Christian revenge upon the perpetrators, who just happened to be his political rivals. 152 In a more general sense, as the not particularly Christian states pursued their own interests in Italy in the latter half of the fifteenth century, various combinations of them produced a compromise between international anarchy and order by maintaining a dynamic imbalance of power. In order to achieve and maintain this condition for the good of all selfish little states, the process of interstate relations became systematized, diplomacy institutionalized, competition among states codified and the process of governmental relations made "Reasonable". ee This did not mean statecraft was made logical or that it was divorced from ethics just that a state ethic replaced that of Christ as the basis for diplomatic interaction so assassination was commonly employed and spying accepted, since information was crucial to state success. 153 If the city-states were doomed by their own narrow, anarchistic nature, as existing institutions will, they hung on and, in their pettiness, made and kept Italy petty. As improvised political works of art, 154 they were typically Renaissance in being compartmentalized from ecclesiastical control and Christian ethics as well as by being independent of secular tradition and general legality. 155 In their new found freedom, they failed because, like the Greek states, they could develop no political mechanism for resolving their internal economic/class conflicts and would not unify, so they remained a fragmented mosaic which invited devastating foreign invasions. Internal conflicts went unresolved because the franchise was usually limited to a shortsighted few of those who lived within the city walls. They thought they were being self-serving, but their narrowness made their political base unstable and left them vulnerable. In Florence, for example, the Medici government was nominally democratic, 156 but in reality, it was a rigid oligarchy which excluded many residential interest groups. Politics was modernesque in being a real-life stage play in which the poor and disenfranchised were spectators of a drama designed to deceive and delude them 157 into thinking it was done for them. Naturally, those excluded did not identify with the establishment, so the city played out the history of the Roman Empire writ small and employed mercenaries to fight its wars. This led to a series of disasters beginning early in the sixteenth century, and by the time Machiavelli noted the problem, it was too late to resolve it. 158 For the preceding forty years, power politics as played among the Italian city states had been incredibly complex, with princes and tyrants shifting allegiances with one another in efforts to create and/or maintain an imbalance of power favorable to themselves. Anyone who made a mistake was likely to be eliminated, and there were many mistakes. Although there were also many wars, these were largely bloodless, as the soldiers were professionals who specialized in minimizing risks to everyone especially themselves. Trade thus usually continued, and the non-existent country grew rich. 159 Somehow, the imbalance of power which characterized interstate relations in Italy survived the age, thanks to ambitious, counterbalancing designs of aggressive popes and princes, but the constitutional innovation of the modern state 160 and the system of independent Italian city-states were induced by the French invasion of 1494. Until that time, prosperity if not peace had been maintained apparently without conscious efforts on the part of statesmen. In 1536, a balance of power mentality was attributed to this age, but there really was none because foreign powers, like France, Spain and Turkey, were always threatening to become or were involved in Italian affairs. 161 Dedicated more to statecraft than statesmanship, the contentious city states were distracted by each other and their entangling alliances and hence rendered themselves mutually defenseless when the expansionist French invaded. In fact, it was Milan's request for French aid in its quarrel with Naples that resulted in the invasion of 1494. Italy soon became a battleground for the Spanish and French, with the French shocking everyone by killing enemy soldiers in wars which, until then, had been characterized by Machiavelli as "Commenced without fear, continued without danger, and concluded without loss". 162 Although the new wars brought suffering and poverty to Italy, the leaders of the city states continued to intrigue against each other, seeking the aid of either foreign power regardless of "National" injury. Eventually, all were ruined in this self-induced debacle referred to as the "Italian question". 163 This question was really a medieval problem for modern diplomacy although it was a problem only because there were no Italians at the time. There were citizens of Florence, Milan and Naples, for example, but no Italians. Like the "Non Greeks" before them, the residents of these various city states simply could not perceive themselves as members of a greater community. They were, at best, members of an exclusive set in a particular polis, and many were not even that, as most of the city-states were personal creations or perhaps exclusive political organizations run by a family or a class. 164 Abstract loyalty to an area or an institution (like monarchy) rather than to personal leaders had not yet developed into a national conscience, 165 and the only diplomatic connections among the city states were military alliances which never developed into a federation or league to protect the members from invasion. 166 For their part, the French were bent on the conquest of Italy, which was rich even if it did not exist. French King Charles VIII (1483-1498) saw such an enterprise as a way of occupying his restless nobles, and in that spirit, the sixteenth century was to become one in which foreign adventure was the preferred alternative to domestic violence. 167 After many machinations and much looting, thirty years and several popes later, little would be settled, and all that would be proved was that the nationalistic European states were interag gravating and that the rest would take common action against any one which appeared to be getting too powerful. 168 Actually, the first evidence of this came as early as 1495 in the form of the Holy League, which was established ostensibly to defend Christianity against the Turks but really to confront the victorious French. Thus, the early triumphs of the French induced failure for them by creating enemies, and once their position in Naples became untenable, their retreat became more rapid than their conquest had been. They gained little for themselves but hostility and syphilis, 169 which they spread through Italy as they retreated northward. 170 Although the French invasion of Italy had clearly been a failure, the European powers followed the lead and competed with each other for chunks of the peninsula, which was all but ruined in the process. 171 For the French themselves, having learned only that Italy was worth invading but nothing about how to do it to any lasting effect, failure begot disaster. The promise of unrealized riches encouraged King Louis XII ( 1498 1515) to assert claims he could not back up with force, and by 1512, the French were pushed completely out of Italy. 172 Iron ically, those who gained most from the French defeat were not the luckless Italians but the opportunistic Spanish, who took over Naples. 173 This success of the Spanish in Italy was the result of well-timed maneuvers made with a cynical disregard for previous political commitments, 174 but this whole era was characterized by shifting alliances and betrayals in the finest "Christian" tradition. Viewed the other way, it was an age when honoring a commitment could be very expensive as the Florentines learned hen, as a price for maintaining their connections with France, they experienced the imposition of Medici rule by the triumphant Holy League. 175 The restoration of the Medici to power also brought a restoration of the neopla tonic family's tradition of patronage of the arts, which reached its zenith when Giovanni de' Medici became Pope Leo X in 1513. He created a court of unrivaled splendor 176 and beauty and made magnificence the standard for measuring worldly success. In fact, it was the adoption of this gilded secular standard for judgment which made him unable to comprehend Luther's theological/spiritual revolution when it broke upon him. In Europe in general, the emerging states followed the Italian lead of pragmatic rather than Christian diplomacy. Such as it was, the commitment to nationalism made precious little sense, as most countries were formed by accidents of conquest and thus constituted totally arbitrary political entities which were ethnically if not linguistically heterogeneous. As the nationalistic governments looked to overseas expansion, they paid just lip service to the pope's authority to divide up the world. The acid test was power i.e., the ability to maintain a political domain. ff A dreamt of world-wide Christian community never was to be: It became a casualty of nationalism even before it could be formed. 177 These interests were themselves very much shaped and structured by the outlook of absolutist Charles V (1519-1556). Within the Hapsburg Empire, he was all powerful, but as he looked backward, he failed to realize that if government was absolute, it was also beyond the control of any single person precisely ff The honoring of Alexander VI's bull making Brazil Portuguese being a noted exception. While nationalism was thus undercutting the Church, ascending Spain was becoming part of the burgeoning Hapsburg Empire, whose growth was based on the assumption that crowns and titiles to dominion were subject to the same laws as private ance. By such formality, the inherit national interests of Spain were subverted by being bound to unrelated Hapsburg interests in central Europe. 178 because its expanded role was so great. 179 Thus, while trying to cope with the vast and detailed problems of imperial rule, Charles had to function within the limitations set by his inability to understand the nature of the forces confronting him. For example, as a staunch Catholic, he viewed religious disputes as mere theological differences and gathered diets and councils in futile attempts to reconcile the various warring factions of Christendom. 180 To the extent that he could not comprehend what was going on around him, Charles was just an ordinary man in a complex, eventful age in his particular case, a com mon place son of a mentally defective mother who, in true Hapsburg fashion, had married for reasons of state. 181 If the Hapsburgs usually married their way to power and generally proceeded to incompetence, Charles was at least bright and rich enough to bribe his way to election as head of the Holy Roman Empire. In so doing, he revived the ancient Roman tradition of secular corruption. Not only did big money return to politics during his age, but money in general, public debt, social unrest and discontent all made their triumphant re-entries into European life. 182 As it turned out, the political entity best suited to conditions emerging throughout Europe in this period was the kingdom rather than the city state or the empire. The former was usually too small and the latter simply too vast to maintain any semblance of integrity, so even though the interests of the people remained unrecognized, those kingdoms which happened to extend and expand along nationalistic lines were favored by the future. Thus, the disputes among the Italian city states and the efforts of Charles V notwithstanding, in terms of political organization for Europe, the major fact of Renaissance civic life was the development of powerful kings. 183 In the early sixteenth century, these were not yet the absolute monarchs they would become, but they were seemingly committed to absolute stupidity, as power begot an arrogant insensitivity to human needs and rights. This eventually led to revolutions against monarchy, but there were some short term benefits in the sixteenth century to a strong leader who could organize and expand a state by lording over the nobility and clergy, controlling revenues to support a large army and conducting an aggressive foreign policy. Although the monarchs of the nation states might be almighty when they ruled, orderly political succession remained uncertain. With traditions awry, continuity and stability were no longer assumed, and transitions of power were commonly settled by power. The Wars of the Roses in England, for example, were typical of Renaissance politics. gg In suppressing both competing contenders for and challenging pretenders to the throne, monarchs (like Henry VII) established the tradition of royal tyranny, while the confiscation of losers' lands often made the king independently wealthy and thus not in need of financial support from a legislative body (like Parliament). 184 If there were serious threats in the nation-state to the absolute authority of the monarchies and public order in general, they came from old nobles and the new elite. The nobles were invariably at odds with the kings, who undermined their power (as well as that of the emperor). However, the nobility was declining, as was evident in court life, which became ritualized ceremonies with symbolism of rites substituted for substance. 185 Nevertheless, even the absolute monarchs never were truly absolute, since they had to contend with the new elite the merchants and lawyers. The commercial class had some financial influence, while the lawyers, as educated public administrators, replaced the hereditary land owners as decision makers in local government. 186 Still, if the Renaissance needed any one thing, it was stability, and this was best provided by a strong king who personified an active, organized government. As the role and size of government expanded, its cost rose accordingly, so one of the chief problems that had to be solved was that of increasing revenues without violating property rights. Although Western tradition has always maintained a fictitious separation between State and Estate, this distinction became blurred during the Renaissance and has remained unclear ever since. Actually, the whole financial structure of emerging government was ill defined during this era but tended to favor those who shaped the definitions. To wit, legal precedents were reinterpreted to justify confiscation, and government, as usual, took the lead in mocking legality. 187 During the Renaissance, the operative maxim in this regard was that of the Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca: "To kings belongs authority over all; to private persons property". 188 Whereas, previously, medieval rights had been owned by people, now individuals owned things, and governments owned rights and told people what they could and could not do with their property. The only certainty in all of this was that any government that could do so would increase its share of wealth so as to have the power to consolidate territorial gains and conduct military operations which would extend them further 189 into more clashes with others. Institutional life in the larger emerging nationstates was otherwise rather uncertain because it was independent of not only theological but some financial restraints as well. In a general sense, as the European financial community developed, it remained quite deferential and so conservative in its interactions with developing political authority of the period that politicians were independent of this bloc as a special interest group. Bankers would not challenge governmental polices even when they led to bankruptcy and confiscation. At this time, money simply did not have the political clout in such states that it later had because the economic revolution, which was under way, had not yet progressed to the point that financial power represented the interests of a general, identifiable, self-conscious Marxist class. Particularly in these states, financiers were too reticent and economic factors too weak and diluted to be decisive in political decisions, so bankers supported the political establishment and made great profits or sustained great losses according to policies beyond their influence. 190 On the other hand, to the extent that money had a significant impact on policies in the smaller city states of Renaissance Italy, it promoted economic/class conflict which ended up with everyone losing. The rich lost and no one gained in this zero-deficit game because the clashes killed the cities. If there is a lesson to be learned in this about the impact of money on Renaissance politics, it is that the stable nation-states were insensitive to the needs and potential of the growing financial/banking community while the city states were too susceptible to growing fiscal influence. Because they were so narrowly based, 191 the local wealthy were all but feared as a threat to political stability and liberty. With Renaissance statecraft liberated from the constraints of theological justification and not yet subject to the economic restraints of big money, diplomats schemed and maneuvered in a world of power unto itself, removed from the limiting influence of any greater morality or rationality whatsoever. If anything, Renaissance politics became somewhat schizoid, as the intellectual development of the Western mind went on independent of yet concurrent with the drift toward amoral monarchy accurately described but condemned rather than condoned by Machiavelli. hh It was not until the seventeenth century that these two streams the world of general ideas and the desire for ethical leadership came into a conscious conflict which is yet to be resolved. 192 Thus, the Renaissance was an age when the growth and dissemination of knowledge was accompanied by a change of moral standards used to judge success. Certainly information about the world was accruing, and as the Church was becoming ever more sordid, its grip of Christianity on the Western conscience was weakening. In a world in which priests were supposed to be celibate but not necessarily hh "Machiavellian" has come to have a pejorative connotation being used to describe a "Stab-in-the-back" politician, but Machiavelli did nota dvocate this kind of conduct-he just observed it was successful. Ironically, the personification of Machiavelli's "Good Prince" was orge Washington. Chadwick, B p.114.) childless, monarchs replaced popes as posers of moral leadership. As statesmen, they could hardly be frank and candid nor could they practice what priests preached. However, if this was the age of ambition, audacity, cunning, treachery and cruelty, it had its beau ideal 193 Cesare Borgia, the personification of Renaissance "Virtue". ii He was the son of Pope Alexander VI and the role model for Machiavelli's The Prince (1513). Murder and betrayal were his fortes and were condemned but also acknowledged as successful by the author. Combined with his father's influence, these villainies made Cesare a successful duke, so Machiavelli saw him as a superb prince and downplayed the flaws masked by his superficial magnificence, which collapsed with his father's death. 194 For all his political astuteness, Nicolo Machiavelli (1467-1527) had a blind spot for judging princes of all things. Not only did he miss on Cesare, but he backed a loser Soderini in the battles for Florentine power and paid for it by being tortured on the rack and banished. 195 Further, he was unreceptive to modern possibilities, dismissing the cannon as a noisy toy and missing the fact that the Mediterranean was becoming a lake in a world of oceanic trade, but too early in trying and failing to create a citizens' militia in Florence in the day of mercenaries. 196 Because he was not traditionally educated, his mind was, like Leonardo's, inventively open to pragmatic answers to real problems. Nevertheless, his thinking was bound by Roman tradition and was thus neither truly modern nor oriented toward the future. 197 Despite his personal shortcomings and drawbacks, Machiavelli remains significant as a political philosopher because of his honesty about political dishonesty. His concern was with how principalities were won, held and lost, and his approach was empirical in the tradition of a pragmatic Roman. In describing and codifying what occurred around him, he merely noted the obvious, commonplace facts that commitments were to be honored if and when they paid off, and if disguise, feigning, dissembling and worse were necessary for success, they were acceptable if not condoned, in this unsettled age. In a world in which few rulers were legitimate and papal elections were rigged, no one was shocked by cruelty and treachery, but nearly everyone was shocked by his writing about such commonly condoned if nefarious political means to what he regarded as the end of the state maintaining law and order. 198 Machiavelli was Roman esquely Renaissance in that he believed he had discovered a new basis for ii The word itself had several different meanings, and its differences from the modern sense are interesting and revealing (Lefer. p. 12 and other indexed pages) but beyond the scope of this work. (See Monte squieu.) ethics (i.e., power) although he had really only (re)discovered and made explicit what everyone concerned had long known that power belongs to those who take it. jj Further, he was a man of his age in that none of his political arguments were based on either the Bible, ancient texts or abstract idealism, since he entertained no distracting illusions whatsoever about holiness or "Legitimate power". 199 Whereas Christian ethics clearly had no place in diplomacy, and its place in intrastate and Church relations was suspect, Machiavelli divorced power from personal morality 200 and reduced it to a matter of cold blooded efficiency. In an age of villainy, cynics would forgive anything that worked: Hence, if a ruler would perish by being "Good" according to Christian morality but could retain power by being "Bad", he must suffer no scruples but do whatever was necessary to survive, since that was the nature of the political game and only a fool would think, believe or behave otherwise. As there were more successful sinners than saints, Christian ethics remained important only in that leaders should appear virtuous by such standards 201 while abiding by an operative unenunciated political ethic of image which differs somewhat but notably from the prevailing personal/Christian ethic. However, within the context of his pragmatic, Roman schema, Machiavelli had a failing as an analyst if not as a Christian philosopher. It was not that he was a hypocrite, for he was only incongruously inconsistent when being righteous about depicting "Evil", obvious about being tricky and candid about duplicity. Much as we might admire such a man whose writing is so free of deception, we must bear in mind he would have accepted it not admired Hitler for his purge of his own party in 1934, his breach of faith after Munich 202 and perhaps even the "Final Solution" and would have condemned him not for the nature of his nefarious policies but only for failing to effect the worst of them. Machiavelli's own failing was his justification of power as an end in itself. His ruling thought was that princes should be guided by a morality of power, but if this kind of thinking might suffice in a self contained world of political philosophy, it is a bit shallow for the real world of hard and soft knocks. Basically, he could not see how politics fits in with the rest of society to make a contentious, dynamic whole. 203 All he could see was a bunch of princes scheming to outdo each other and rewarded by gratified malice, plunder and, most of all, more power. 204 Men generally were "Ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers, they shun danger and are greedy for profit". 205 jj In later centuries, as political institutions became better organized and behavior codified, the more blatant forms of "Machiavellian" tactics ceased to be openly condoned in Western Civilization in general, although they were perhaps still practiced by the likes of Talleyrand, who might have dismissed Machiavelli as rather naive (Ellis. 208 209.) and hopelessly idealistic. In this regard, Machiavelli was clearly culture bound being spiritually blind in an age of spiritual blindness. Deprived of a utopian vision by the cynical cesspool of Italian politics, he could not recognize the need of people for inspiring leaders who obey the laws of state and embody the ideals of their general culture. The nearest he got to this was grounding the successful state in good laws and a good army. Although in his Discourses (1513-1527), he recognized the binding political importance of religion, he dismissed as pragmatically irrelevant the individual human heart and conscience 206 and regarded the Church as an impediment to the realization of his pet political project the unification of Italy. If Machiavelli believed in anything beyond sheer power, it was not the individual conscience but the "Nation" as the proper setting for power. For him, patriotism was a consuming passion and a self evident moral justification for any and all forms of statecraft tiness. For the good of the nation state, anything and everything was condoned or condonable. This fixation on nationalism led him somewhat astray in that he failed to realize it could not be used where it did not exist. Specifically, it led him to perceive around him a sense of Italian unity which existed only in his Romanesque mind. Machiavelli was quite astute, however, in perceiving the disintegration of the Church around him, but his warning that "Her ruin and chastisement is near at hand" in his Discourses was just one of many ignored by Catholic officials. Further, he took the Church to task for preventing the realization of his pet project and also because Catholicism's own unifying idea of the world of God, far from being realized by the clergy, was actually being subverted by the immoral if not evil conduct of Church leaders. 207 While traditional religious faith was thus being undermined, the Renaissance was concurrently kindling in the Western mind a new sense of social justice based not on Machiavelli's (later Hegel's) self justifying nation but on a secularized Christian conscience which was profounder than the ology permitted or the Catholic Church encouraged. 208 Unfortunately, this new consciousness had not reached the lay leaders of society, since the political institutions were as removed from their cognitive and moral environments as was the Church. What the pragmatic Machiavelli observed and wrote about of the political scene might have been noted in Egypt, India or China, but he was simply being descriptive and commenting on age old behavior and offered no new ideas to match the world evolving around him. Thus, at a time when all kinds of things were being discovered in a world in which everything was changing, political thought was standing still that is, there was no basic change in the ideas about the relationship of state to state or state to citizen. In fact, Charles V had carried the idea of absolutism to the absolute extreme of a political limbo, and the world seemed to be falling back toward personal monarchies of the Macedonian pattern. 209 However, this secular conscience was spreading among the people. Intellectually, the Renaissance world was fragmented into art, religion, science, exploration, commerce, politics, etc. This chaos release new energy within society with commoners were voicing their vernacular ideas and opinions, particularly in the otherwise stagnant fields of theology and political theory. Creative, pragmatic thinking was done by practitioners and the people not by popes or princes, who had everything set to suit themselves nor by abstract, humanist intellectuals. By way of ironic contrast, Sir Thomas More and Machiavelli personified the split of the idealist and realist traditions and the pointlessness of both. More's mind was basically medieval and contrasted markedly with that of his practical contemporary. For example, both embraced fear as the ultimate in social control: for More, it was fear of the quality of life hereafter; 210 for Machiavelli, it was fear of the state. More dealt with the world as it should be; Machiavelli, as it was. More becama beheaded theorist and Machiavelli a disenfranchised pessimist. 211 Still, for all the practical effect they had, both might just as well have been arbitrarily splitting argumentative hairs in some medieval monastery. In his useless way, Sir Thomas More wasted his intelligence and integrity to no immediate effect while in a mighty intellectual leap, Machiavelli related politics to power but went nowhere with either. At best, they and other Renaissance writers and artists joined explorers and humanist popes in a rebirth of interest in worldly affairs that led the way to both theological and reasonable, secular reforms. *For us, the Renaissance remains significant as the grand opening of our born again modern world. It was the age in which humanism, nationalism, vernacular literacy, art and trade had challenged and triumphed over blind, ritualistic allegiance to age old assumptions, beliefs 212 and certainty. If anything remains of the Renaissance spirit, it is the optimism inherent in the belief that it is at least theoretically possible to increase the sum of temporal wellbeing and happiness on this earth. The legacy of the good life conceived by the Greeks for the aristocratic few and extended by Christianity to everyone in the next life became a possibility for everyone here and now. Rather than fatalistically (as in the Mid East) or passively (as in the Far East) accepting whatever might come along, the belief that life can be improved is the ultimate Western legacy from the age when the importance of this life was rediscovered and the creative possibilities of the future (progress) here on earth were first perceived and embraced. 213 It was the age in which man turned away from angels, demons and immaterial causes of events and Volume XIX Issue III Version I focused on worldly factors. It was a time when we realized we are part of the natural order of things. We could investigate nature without fear of infringing on God's domain, and citizens could question civil authority and challenge received doctrine of the church. The pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain were accepted and condoned. One could imagine other worlds and consider the sun as only one star in an infinite universe. Ethics were no longer necessarily based on postmortem rewards or punishments but good or bad in themselves according to contemporary human standards. In short, it became possible to accept that the natural universe and our own secular worlds were enough. 214 The ultimate Renaissance problem remains the coordination of superficial, secular materialism with a sense of inner morality. Thus, we are still searching for a balanced ethical order while living amidst a chaotic disorder of competing, contradictory institutions some of which are indifferent to while others play upon our emotional needs. , 1300-1800. New York. 1950. pp. 38-39. (Republished by G. Bell; London. 1957.) # 90 . Gilmore. op. cit. p. 258. 91 . Lester, T. op. cit. p. 174. 92 . Pater. op. cit. pp. 79-82. 93 . Francis, G. Adventures in Being Human. Basic Books; New York. 2015. p. 47. 94 . Baker, K. America the Ingenious. Artisan; New York. 2016. p. 98. 95 . Menzies, G. 1434. HarperCollins; New York. 2008. xiv. Mr. Menzies attributes the onset of the Renaissance to the arrival of a Chinese fleet in Italy in 1434. That may be an over-statement, as one traditional year given for the start of the era is 1349-when Europe began its recovery from the Plague (Bauer. op. cit. p. 509.) or even 1345, when Petrarch discovered Cicero's letters. (Hecht. op. cit. p. 269.) Historians delight in pushing starting dates back ever further, so the latest assertion is the middle of the 12 th century, when northern Italian cities freed themselves from the domination of Germany and the popes. (I. Morris. p. 417.) This also fits well with Gerard of Cremona's discovery of Arabic translations of Greek texts in Toledo. (Bauer. op. cit. p. xxiii.) I would suggest the early 12 th century, when the first crusaders clearly displayed a penchant for power and indifference to religion. (Ibid. p. 17.) The apse of San Clemente in Rome, ca. 1118 depicts people performing domestic chores. (Wickham. Plate 13.) The official establishment of the Renaissance was Easter Sunday, Apr., 18, 1341, (Ibid. p. 488.) (Fawcett. 100 Mistakes That Changed History. Chap. 33.) It could also be that he did not realize the distance for a degree of longitude varies with latitude -being longer near the equator than at the poles. Had he known the actual distance, he might not have gone. As it was, he was wrong about where he was going, how long it would take to get there and what it was when he arrived. Otherwise, he was spot on. # 106 . Diamond, J. Guns, Germs, and Steel. Norton; New York. 2005 . Trager, J. The People's Chronology. Holt, Rinehart and Winston;NewYork. 1979. pp. 161-163. Although Columbus never comprehended what he had accomplished, Amerigo Vespucci did, said so in his book Modus vivas [1504] and in 1507, his name was put on the map. (Lester, T. 2009. p.3.) It is ironically apt that the hemisphere which became the adoptive home of the ideal of democracy is named for one of the thousands of otherwise unknown sailors who labored anonymously on ships mastered by the great explorers, (Zweig. 1941. See also: DeMaria, R. The Decline And Fall of America. Saturday Review Press; New York. 1968. p. 99.) although, Amerigo has been characterized as a lying thief (Emerson. pp. 154-155.) . 100; pp. 147-163. 191 . Gilmore. op. cit. pp. 59-60. Brucker, G. ed. The Society of Renaissance Florence. New York. 1971. p. 137. 192 . Wells. op. cit. p. 795. 193 . Ibid. pp. 779-780. 194 . Ibid. p. 781. 195 . Ibid. p. 780. 196 . Bobbitt. op. cit. p. 126. 197 . Santillana. op. cit. pp. 109-110. 198 . Russell. op. cit. pp. 504-505, See also Butler-Bowdon. p. 3. 199 . Renaissance StupidityYear 2019( H )Global Journal of Human Social Science - Renaissance StupidityYear 2019( H )Global Journal of Human Social Science -m Erasmus defended Luther albeit moderately.(Manchester 1992. 180.) n The notable exception to this being the efforts of political activist Savonarola, who really tried to go back to purity/poverty of the Middle Ages. o The nearest was Giovanni Pico della Mirondola whose On the Dignity of Man was slammed by Pope Innocent VIII in 1487. (Strathern. 89) Renaissance StupidityYear 2019( H )Global Journal of Human Social Science - Renaissance StupidityVolume XIX Issue III Version I 34 Year 2019 ( H ) -Global Journal of Human Social Sciencenotes . Miradola, G. Oratorio on the Dignity of Man. 1486. 1 2 . Lee,A. The Ugly Renaissance. Doubleday; NewYork. 2013. p. 16. 3 . Grayling, A. The Age of Genius. Bloomsbury; NewYork. 2016. p. 240. 4 . Pater, W. The Renaissance. 1873. (Republished by Mentor;New York.1959. p. 152.) 5 . Tuchman, B. 1984.The March of Folly. Knopf;NY. p. 125. 6 . Manchester, W. A World Lit by Fire. Back Bay Books; Boston, MA. 1992. pp. 113-114. 7 . Tuchman. op. cit. p. 64. 8 . Manchester. op. cit. p. 73. 9 . Lester, T.The Fourth Part of the World. Free Press; New York.2009. p. 151. 11 . Russell, B.A History of Western Philosophy. Simon and Schuster; New York. 1945. p. 498. 12 . Tuchman. op. cit. p. 52. 13 . Ibid. p. 64. 14 . Durant, W.1953.The Renaissance. Simon and Schuster;New York. pp. 398-399. 15 61 . Gopnik. op. cit. 65 . Russell. op. cit. p. 521. 66 . Gopnik. op. cit. 72 . Muller. op. cit. p. 284. 73 . Russell. op. cit. p. 501. 75 . Strathern. op. cit. p. 86. . Jedin, H.1957.A 17 . Gilmore, M. The World of Humanism. Harper & Row; New York. 1952. p. 135. 18 .Erasmus, D. 1516.Colloquies.(University of Chicago Press; Chicago, IL. 1965.) 19 . Tuchman. op. cit. p. 111. 20 . Pater. op. cit. pp. 31-33. 21 . McMahon, D. Divine Fury. Basic Books; NewYork. 2013. p. 11. 22 . Muller,H. J. The Uses of the Past. Mentor; NewYork. 1952. pp. 283-284. 23 . Prendeville, B. Realism in 20 th Century Painting. Thames and Hudson; NewYork. 2000. p. 7. 24 . Doubleday, S.2015.The Wise King. Basic Books; New York. p. xxi. 26 . Muller. op. cit. p. 284. 27 . Manchester. op. cit. p. 86. 28 . Wells, H. G.The Outline of History. 1920. (Cassel; Lon-don. 4th ed. Revised by R. Postgate 1961. p. 767.) 29 . Alberti, L. On Painting. Ca. 1435. Florence, Italy. 30 . Leonardo da Vinci.Treatise on Painting.I, #280, 113.(Published very posthumously in 1651.) 31 . Pater. op. cit. pp. 48-49. 32 . Ibid. pp. 49-53.(Anticipating Rousseau in this regard.) 33 . Strathern, P. Death in Florence. Pegasus Books; New York. 2015. p. 30. 34 . Pater. op. cit. p. 74. 35 . Durant. op. cit. pp. 216-217. 36 . Ibid. p.201. 37 . McMahon. op. cit. pp. 63-64. 38 . Ibid. p.65. 39 . Pater. op. cit. pp. 54-58. 40 . Lee. op. cit. pp. 343-344. 41 . McMahon. op. cit. p. 64. 42 . Manchester. op. cit. p. 164. 43 . Gilmore. op. cit. pp. 243-244. Vernacularization began in England with the medieval poems of Caedmon, ca. 650. (Lacey. p. 31.) 44 . Alighieri, Dante. 1311. De Monarchia. (A tribute to Germanic king Henry VII.) 45 . Hecht. op. cit. p.270. 46 . Pater. op. cit. p. 37. . Seznec, J. La survivance des dieux antiques. London. 1940. (Translated by Barbara Sessions and republished as The Survival of the Pagan Gods by Pantheon; New York. 1953. Reprinted by Princeton University Press; Princeton, NJ. 1995.) 48 . Gilmore. op. cit. p. 239. 49 . Russell. op. cit. pp. 500-501. 50 . Ibid. p. 512. 51 . Manchester. op. cit. p. 122. 52 . Cahill, T. Heretics and Heroes. Anchor Books; New York. 2013. p. 136. 53 . Russell. op. cit. pp. 514-515. 77 . Russell. op. cit. p. 516. 78 . Strathern. op. cit. p. 88. 79 . Ibid. p. 87. 80 . Pater. op. cit. p. 79. 81 . Farrington, B. Greek Science. Penguin; Baltimore, MD. 1953. p. 153. Phoenix; San Diego. 609.) 87 . Gilmore. op. cit. pp. 256-257. 88 . Pater. op. cit. p. 81. 89 . Butterfield, H. The Origins of Modern ScienceTalking Back.(2005. Viking; New York. p. 204.) Samuel Goldwyn's54 . Erasmus, D. Undated private letter quoted by Manchester. op. cit.p. 118.10 . 25 . 55 . Manchester. op. cit. p. 121. 56 . McWilliams, P. Ain't 57 . Carwardine, W.58 . 59 . 62 . 67 . 74 . 76 . 82 . 83 . Wells. op. cit. p. 756. 84 . 85 . 86 . . p.412.107 . Mortimer, I. Millennium. Pegasus; NewYork. 2016. p. 113.108. 110 .111.Cahill. op. cit. p. 56. 112 114 . Mortimer. op. cit. p. 116.115 . 116 . 117 . 201 . Russell. op. cit. pp. 507-510.202 . Ibid. p. 505.203 . Ibid. p. 511.204 . Wells. op. cit. p. 782.205 . 209 . Ibid. 210 . Greenblatt. op. cit. p. 232. 211 . Gilmore. op. cit. pp. 135-136. 212 . Manchester. op. cit. p. 295. 213 . 214 . Greenblatt. op. cit. pp. 12-13. © 2019 Global Journals e As were the rites of chivalry in courts.© 2019 Global Journals l Such absurdity came to life in Calvin's Geneva, where legislation specified the number of dishes to be served at each meal and the color of garments worn,(Manchester. 1992. 191.) while in contemporary suburbia, communities may dictate the color of front doors. (Barzun. 777) In a case of life imitating art, in 1538, Bishop Vasco de Quiroga laid out, according to Utopian prescription, reservation towns west of Mexico City for 30,000 Indians at a pop. (C.Mann. p. 401.) gg Except in duration, as they lasted for a rather lengthy thirty four years from 1453 to 1487 all for thirteen weeks of fighting.(Lacey.67nd 174.)© 2019 Global Journals ## Year 2019 Renaissance Stupidity 118 . Hanke, L. Conquest and the Cross. American Heritage; XIV, #2, pp. 5ff. Feb. 1963. 119 . Wright, J. Get Well Soon. Holt; New York. 2017. p. 68. 120 . Schweikart, L. and Allen, M. A Patriot's History of the United States. Sentinel; New York. 2014. p. 7. 121 . Thomsen, P. On page 66 of Fawcett. 2016. No amount of time or study could compensate intellectually for the absence of the wheel as a functional entity in their culture and model for cyclical nature. (Bronowski. op. cit. p. 194.) 122 . Tuchman. op. cit. p. 13 . Gilmore. op. cit. pp. 149 and 153. In Italian history, this is refined into the "Southern question"-why the south lags economically and culturally behind the north. (Schneider.) The gap was shocking to the first new governor who arrived in Naples after its liberation in 1861and commented, "This is not Italy. This is Africa. The bedouins are the flower of civic virtue be-side these country bumpkins". (Allum. p. 9.) 164 . Ibid. p. 117. 165 . Rice, E. The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559. Norton; New York. 1970. pp. 116-117. Fyi, loyalty . Ibid. pp. 156-157. Durant. 1953. op. cit. p. 534. Treatment of the disease was impeded by the cultural fact that it was less proper to discuss it than contract it. In 1901, before every performance of Les Avartiés, a play regarding syphilis, the stage manager orally assured the audience that women need not be ignorant nor foolish to be virtuous. (Watson. 2001. p century (Abbé de Véri.) due to the development of a bureaucracy which would outlast and thus transcend any individual leader.