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| Scholars commonly use the term Renaissance to describe the cultural achievements of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries; those achievemnts rest on teh economic and political developments of earlier centuries. |
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| The northern Italian cities were communes, sworn associations of free men seeking complete political and economic independence from local nobles. |
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| A new force, called the popolo, disenfranchised and heavily taxed, bitterly resented their exclusion from power. The popolo wanted places in teh communal government and equality of taxation. |
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| Despots, or one man rulers. They had triumphed everywhere in Italy by 1300 along with oligarchies. |
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| The rule of merchant aristorcaies. They had triumphed every in Italy by 1300 along with signori. |
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| In the fifteenth century, politcal power and elite culture centered on the princely courts of despots and oligarchs. |
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| Venice, with its enormous trade and vast colonial empire, ranked as an international power. Though Venice had a sophisticated constitution and was a republic in the city. Milan and Florence were also republics. |
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| Individualism stressed personality uniqueness, genius, and full devlopment of one's capabilities and talents. |
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| The revival of antiquity also took the form of profound interest in and study of the Latin classics. This feature of the Renaissance became known as the "new learning," or simply humanism, the term of Florentine rhetorician and historian Leonardo Bruni. |
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| Secularism invovles a basic concern with the material world instead of with the eternal world of spirit. A secular way of thinking tends to find the ultimate explanation of everything and the final end of human beings within th elimits of what the senses can discover. |
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| No Renaissance book on any topic, however, has been more widely read and studied in all the centuries since its publication (1513) than the short political treatise The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli. |
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| Charles VII reorganized the royal council, giving increased influence to middle-class men, and strengthened royal finances through such taxes as the gabelle (on salt) amd the taille (land tax). |
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| Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges pg 441 |
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| In 1438 Charles published the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, asserting the superiority of a general council over the papacy, giving the French crown major control over the appointment of bishops, and depriving the pope of French ecclesiastical revenues. |
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| Henry VII did summon several meetings of Parliament in teh early years of his reign primarily to confirm laws, but the center of royal authority was the royal council, which governed at the national level. |
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| Court of Star Chamber pg 442 |
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| Teh council dealt with real or potential aristocratic threats through a judicial offshoot, the court of Star Chamber, so called because of the stars painted on the ceiling on the room. The court applied principles of Roman law, and its methods were somtimes terrifying: accused persons were not entitled to see evidence against them, sessions were secret, torture could be applied to extract confessions, and juries were not called. |
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| Unlike the continental countries of Spain and France, England had no standard army or professional civil service bureaucracy. The Tudors relied on teh support of unpaid local officials, the justices of the peace. |
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| To curb the rebellious and warrying aristocracy, Ferdinand and Isabella revived an old medieval institution: the hermandades, or "brotherhoods," which were popular groups in teh towns given authority to act as local police forces and as judicial tribunals. |
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| One scholar estimated that 40% of teh Jewish population of Spain was killed or forced to convert to Christianity. Those convereted were called conversos, Maranos, or New Christians, the three terms here used interchangeably. |
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