Renaissance. The Dawn of the World (Hoepli, 2024, pp. 1140, also e-book) by the German historian Bernd Roeck is not only a monumental and fascinating work on one of the most vital and complex periods of European and world history. It is a majestic and narratively vast fresco that, in order to bring to light the roots of the Renaissance, dates back to the Middle Ages and antiquity, ranging widely outside the borders of Europe, passing from the art that flourished under the Italian sky and the ideals of the humanists, to the wars of religion and the beginnings of oppression in other parts of the world. All this in an era that with its innovations has not only created places of beauty and spirituality to look back on with nostalgia, but has also laid the foundations of the modern world in which we still live .
The Renaissance, in fact, represents the culmination of a century, the fifteenth century, in which Europe changed its appearance by facing epochal challenges to turn towards modernity. The first was represented by the effort to defeat the great crisis that had devastated the European continent in the second half of the fourteenth century. It was necessary to rebuild the social and political structures, relaunch the economy and overcome the shock caused by the black plague. The men and women of the time therefore had to find the energy to imagine a present, and above all a future, different from the one that, in a world marked by disease, hunger, social hatred and death, had accompanied the second part of the fourteenth century. The second challenge was that linked to the development of new concepts and new ideals, at a time when the certainties of the Middle Ages were irremediably waning. Medieval man had entrusted himself entirely to religion, imagining it as a guide capable of expressing and explaining the entire world. But something was beginning to escape this conception and the most astute intellectuals could not help but notice it. The third challenge was to try to overcome what had long been the vital space of the medieval world: the Mediterranean. The fall of Constantinople, the Ottoman conquest of some regions of the European continent showed that the East was definitively closed to Europeans. The decrepit Empire of Byzantium no longer controlled the routes of the eastern Mediterranean and the trade routes to Asia. Now there was a vital State, a great naval and land power, an Empire that looked at Europe as prey. For Europeans, the great challenge was to aim in other directions, to identify new paths, roads never taken to escape the risk of becoming marginal on the stage of history. Finally, a fourth challenge arose: to overcome the crisis of the great universal institutions of the Middle Ages, the Church and the Empire, without returning to the past, to the feudal fragmentation of the centuries around the year 1000. This political challenge would involve all the European monarchies first and foremost. It was therefore during the fifteenth century that European man prepared to face these challenges and to build a new course for Europe, developing new ways of thinking, travelling, fighting, reasoning, governing in a completely different way than what happened in the Middle Ages.
Modern man was, therefore, able to place himself at the center of historical events , to consider himself as the first actor in events and not a simple executor of divine will, expanding his space beyond measure, crossing the oceans and surpassing horizons unthinkable until a century before. Not everything worked for the best in this construction of early modernity. Terrible mistakes were made and acts of violence were perpetrated that are difficult even to imagine, especially against the inhabitants of the New World and Africa, exterminated and reduced to slavery. However, it is undeniable that Europe at the end of the fifteenth century presented itself as a young, vital continent, full of those energies that would lead it in the course of the modern age to extend its hegemony over the entire globe.
And what happened to Italy in all this? The country, precisely in the fifteenth century, began to register a delay in the process of political modernization underway in much of Europe . Divided in the Middle Ages into Communes and potentates in the Center North, controlled in the Center by the Pope, governed by the Aragonese in the South, the peninsula was unable to find a political synthesis capable of overcoming antagonisms and divisions, made up of States and statelets. But, if from the point of view of political evolution our peninsula remained a sort of periphery with respect to the rest of Europe, from the cultural and artistic point of view it assumed a role of absolute pre-eminence. It was precisely in our country that, immediately after the great crisis of the fourteenth century, a new way of feeling and understanding life began to assert itself. Italian intellectuals rediscovered in the texts of ancient writers, Greek and Roman, a heritage of knowledge and thought that was the basis of the culture of Humanism. They affirmed a different sensibility that had its roots in a newfound sense of confidence in the abilities of man. They therefore contrasted with the medieval vision, which was instead inclined to place limits and prohibitions on human nature and to consider existence in terms of God and religion. It was a liberating push of human thought that benefited the whole of European culture in the fifteenth century and from which arose the splendid season of the Italian Renaissance. Unfortunately, this was the swan song of our peninsula at least on the European stage.