Renaissance of the 12th century

• 1. Introduction

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  The Renaissance of the 12th century did not begin with a painter mixing pigments or a poet picking up a quill. It began earlier, in the wreckage of the Western Roman Empire, when most scientific texts of classical antiquity simply vanished. They were lost, unavailable, or locked away in the few monasteries that bothered to keep copies at all. What followed was centuries of stalled learning. Then, sometime around 1070, something shifted. Harvard professor Charles Homer Haskins was the first historian to write extensively about what he called a renaissance that ushered in the High Middle Ages. He described it as an age of fresh and vigorous life. Who brought the lost knowledge back? How did it travel from the Islamic world into the lecture halls of Europe? And what did this recovering civilization actually build with its rediscovered ideas?

• 2. Three Renaissances

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  Charlemagne, King of the Franks from 768 to 814, had an unusual preoccupation for a medieval ruler: he cared about schools. His push to build churches and schools where students learned Latin and Greek created what historians call the Carolingian Renaissance. Yet later scholars would argue that this first renaissance was really more particular to Charlemagne himself, more of a veneer on a changing society than something springing up from society at large.

  A second renaissance followed during the reign of Otto I, known as the Great, who ruled the Saxons from 936 to 973 and the Holy Roman Empire from 962. Otto unified his kingdom and, critically, asserted his right to appoint bishops and archbishops throughout his realm. This brought him into close contact with the best-educated men of his day, and reforms followed. Historians named this period the Ottonian Renaissance.

  The 12th-century movement was identified as the third and final of these medieval renaissances. But it operated at a different scale entirely. Where the Carolingian and Ottonian periods were driven largely by the personalities of individual rulers, the renaissance of the 12th century grew from society itself. Some medieval historians have since argued that applying the word renaissance to the earlier two periods is actively misleading as a description of the social changes of the 9th and 10th centuries.

• 3. Lost Texts, New Routes

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  After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, most scientific treatises of classical antiquity, written in Greek or Latin, had become unavailable or lost entirely. Only the Christian church maintained copies of these written works, distributing them periodically among scriptoria across Europe. Literate clerics served as a kind of traveling knowledge network; popes sent them to kings, who were typically illiterate, and those clerics joined royal courts as specialists in music, medicine, or history.

  The decisive change came through contact with the Islamic world. In Muslim-dominated Iberia, called Al-Andalus, and in Southern Italy, Western Europeans found Islamic philosophers and scientists who had not only preserved ancient Greek works but expanded upon them. The works of Aristotle and Euclid were translated into Latin, and those translations revitalized European science in ways that generations of papal-sponsored clerics had not managed. New translations also arrived through the Crusades, the Reconquista, and growing contact with Byzantium.

  The Toledo School of Translators in Castile was one conduit. James of Venice working in Constantinople was another. Constantine the African contributed translations in the Papal States. The medieval university system then placed many of these texts at the center of its curriculum. One observer would later note that the medieval university laid far greater emphasis on science than its modern descendant does. Several translations of Euclid were made, though no extensive commentary on his work appeared until the middle of the 13th century.

• 4. Commerce and Crusaders

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  Crusaders returning from the East brought small luxuries and souvenirs with them, and those souvenirs created an appetite. For the first time in many centuries, large groups of Europeans had encountered the technologies and goods of Byzantium. Italian maritime powers moved quickly to exploit the moment. Genoa and Venice developed advanced commercial and financial techniques and began monopolizing trade between Europe, Muslims, and Byzantium across the Mediterranean. Florence became a major center of the financial industry that grew around this commerce.

  In Northern Europe, the Hanseatic League emerged in the 12th century following the foundation of the city of Lubeck in 1158-1159. Hamburg, Stettin, Bremen, and Rostock joined as Hanseatic cities within the Holy Roman Empire. Bruges, London, and the Polish city of Gdansk, then called Danzig, became Hanseatic cities outside it. In Bergen and Novgorod the league established factories and middlemen. Germans began colonizing Eastern Europe beyond the Empire during this period, pushing into Prussia and Silesia.

  In the mid-13th century, the Pax Mongolica re-invigorated the land-based trade routes between China and West Asia that had gone dormant in the 9th and 10th centuries. Following the Mongol incursion into Europe in 1241, European rulers sent emissaries to the Mongol court, including William of Rubruck, Giovanni da Pian del Carpini, and Andrew of Longjumeau. The later Italian traveler Marco Polo wrote an account of his journey as far as China in Franco-Venetian around 1300, and it was later translated into other popular languages, reaching a far wider European audience than the Latin letters of his predecessors.

• 5. Mills, Compasses, Clocks

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  Water-driven hammers to pulp plant fibres for textiles are documented as early as 1010 in Upper Palatinate in Germany. Hemp was being manufactured mechanically in France, in the region of Gresivaudan, around 1040. A fulling mill is first mentioned in Normandy about 1086. The chapter of Notre-Dame de Paris ran a tanning mill documented in 1138. These are not isolated curiosities. They trace a systematic shift in how work was organized, as tasks formerly done by hand or foot were transferred to mechanical power.

  Windmills, specifically the post mill design, appeared in the 12th century and were exported as far as the Middle East during the Third Crusade. By the end of the 12th century they were so numerous that Pope Celestine III, who served from 1191 to 1198, placed a tax on them. Waterpowered paper mills are first documented in 1238 in Spanish Valencia. By 1268, the Italian town of Fabriano had seven mills producing paper.

  The magnetic compass aided navigation and is attested in Europe in the late 12th century. The dry compass was invented in 12th-century France. The astrolabe, of ancient Greek origin, returned to Europe via Islamic Spain. The West's oldest known depiction of a stern-mounted rudder appears on church carvings dating to around 1180. The mechanical clock followed in the 13th century. English art historian Kenneth Clark wrote that from 1100, monumental abbeys and cathedrals were constructed and decorated with sculptures, hangings, and mosaics, providing stark contrast to the cramped conditions of ordinary life during the same period.

• 6. Schoolmen and Heretics

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  Scholasticism was the name for a new form of Christian theology that championed a more systematic and rational approach to divine matters. Its roots lay partly in a reconsideration of Boethius's commentaries on Aristotle and of Calcidius's commentary on Plato's Timaeus, the chief works through which those philosophers were then known in the Latin West. St. Anselm and figures at Chartres, including Bernard of Chartres and William of Conches, were early champions.

  France, and particularly the University of Paris, became a center for the transmission of new texts. But the road was not smooth. Early French figures including Roscelin, Peter Abelard, and William of Conches were either condemned for heresy or compelled to soften their treatment of sensitive subjects like Plato's world soul. The problem of universals, a question about whether abstract categories like redness or humanity exist independently of the things that instantiate them, was one of the central debates of the era.

  By the 13th century the atmosphere had shifted. Scholastic scholars including Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas became revered as doctors of the Church by using secular study and logic to uphold existing orthodoxy rather than challenge it. The works of Maimonides, Avicenna, and Averroes had arrived through Islamic and Jewish philosophical traditions, strengthening the movement's intellectual foundations. Prominent non-scholastics of the same period included Peter Damian, Bernard of Clairvaux, and the Victorines.

• 7. Latin Letters and the Vernacular

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  John of Salisbury served as secretary at Canterbury and later became bishop of Chartres. He held Cicero in the highest regard in philosophy, language, and the humanities. The cathedral schools at Chartres, Orleans, and Canterbury were centers of Latin literature where scholars possessed and read virtually all the Latin authors we have today: Ovid, Virgil, Terence, Horace, Seneca, and Cicero. The exceptions were few; Tacitus, Livy, and Lucretius were among them. In poetry, Virgil was universally admired and Ovid followed.

  Charles Homer Haskins argued that it was not religion but logic, specifically Aristotle's New Logic toward the middle of the 12th century, that threw a heavy weight on the side of dialectic at the expense of Latin literature, oratory, and poetry. The nascent universities became Aristotelian centers. The Latin humanist heritage was displaced and would not find its final revival until Petrarch took it up again in the 14th century.

  Poetry written in vernacular languages expanded dramatically during the 12th-century renaissance. Meter diverged from classical forms into newer schemes. The division between religious and secular poetry narrowed. The Goliards were noted for profane parodies of religious texts, a signal of how much had changed from the tight ecclesiastical control of the Carolingian era. Abbot Suger of the Abbey of St. Denis, considered an influential early patron of Gothic architecture, believed that love of beauty brought people closer to God and expressed it plainly: the dull mind rises to truth through that which is material. Kenneth Clark called that idea the intellectual background of all the sublime works of art of the next century.