![]() ![]() So he sent a message to Pope Urban II, in Rome, asking for mercenaries to help him push the Turkish threat back. They conquered a good deal of Byzantine land in Asia Minor in 1077 they took the city of Jerusalem away from the Fatimids, the Islamic dynasty that ruled Egypt and by 1095 Alexius was seriously worried. About fifty years before, they had united together into a coalition–and their unified power had grown. The Turks were wandering tribes, originally from central Asia, who had been filtering westward for centuries. And Alexius Komnenos was alarmed by the gathering power of the Ottoman Turks over to his east. Here’s a quick review: Just before the First Crusade, the Greek-speaking Christian empire of Byzantium was under the rule of the emperor Alexius Komnenos. Those cracks had to widen and fracture apart before Renaissance humanism could establish new loyalties. The First Crusade fatally cracked the accepted Western consensus that the cause of Christ was the highest and most paramount loyalty on earth. You might think the First Crusade succeeded–it did, after all, recapture Jerusalem.īut it failed in another drastic way. To properly set the stage for the Renaissance, we need to start with the failure of the First Crusade (1095-1099). What events began to create something new in history. Let’s try to identify what changed, between 1200-1500 or so. So instead of trying to figure out what “ended” the Middle Ages, ![]() These “in between” years didn’t have any quality of their own-they simply lay in the middle. Once they began to identify this re-awakening, they had to find a name for the years that came between ancient culture itself and the return of ancient culture. In fact, it’s a little bit like saying, “My childhood ended when I started liking spinach,” or “He stopped being President when he got married.” It’s putting two completely different things side by side, and pretending that they are the same.įor one thing, the Renaissance isn’t a historical period, like the Early Modern period it’s an intellectual movement.Īnd for another, the idea of the “Middle Ages” didn’t even exist until historians began talking about the “Renaissance.” In the eighteenth century, scholars increasingly focused on the reawakening of interest in ancient art, ancient philosophy, and ancient literature that began in the 1300s (or later, depending on which eighteenth-century historian you’re reading). Most of us were taught, in history class, that the Middle Ages ended when the Renaissance began. The Middle Ages (the favorite historical period of 9 out of 10 young history students!) is generally thought to occupy the years between the collapse of Rome and the beginning of the Renaissance-between, more or less, 4 AD. ![]()
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