Modern age
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The Modern Age is the third of the historical periods into which universal history is conventionally divided, between the XV and the XVIII. Chronologically, it houses a period whose beginning can be set at the fall of Constantinople (1453) or the discovery of America (1492), and whose end can be placed at the French Revolution (1789) or at the end of the previous decade, after the independence of the United States (1776). In this convention, the Modern Age corresponds to the period in which the values of modernity (progress, communication, reason) stand out compared to the previous period, the Middle Ages, which it is generally identified as an isolated and intellectually dark age. The spirit of the Modern Age would look for its referent in an earlier past, the Ancient Age identified as the Classical Period.
In the XIX century, a fourth age was added to the history of humanity, the so-called Contemporary Age, in which not only does not depart, but also intensifies the tendency to modernization extraordinarily, since its significantly different characteristics, fundamentally because it means the moment of success and spectacular development of the economic and social forces that during the Modern Age were leaving slowly brewing: capitalism and the bourgeoisie; and the political entities that do it in parallel: the nation and the State.
In the Modern Age the two "worlds" that had remained almost completely unrelated since Prehistory: the New World (America) and the Old World (Eurasia and Africa). When European exploration of Australia was consolidated, there was talk of the Newest World.
The historiographical discipline that studies it is called Modern History, and its historians, "modernists".
Location in space
For its time, it was considered that the Modern Age was a division of historical time with a worldwide scope, but currently this perspective is usually accused of being Eurocentric (see History and Historiography), with which its scope would be restricted to the history of Western Civilization, or even solely from Europe. However, it must be taken into account that it coincides with the Age of Discovery and the emergence of the first world-economy. From an even more restrictive point of view, only in some Western European monarchies would it be identified with the period and the historical social formation called Old Regime
Location in time
The starting date most accepted by historians to establish the Modern Age is the one in which the capture of Constantinople and the definitive fall of all vestiges of antiquity occurred, this city was destroyed and taken over by the Ottomans in the year 1453 – coinciding in time with the beginning of the massive use of movable type printing and the development of Humanism and the Renaissance, processes that occurred in part thanks to the arrival in Italy of Byzantine exiles and classical Greek texts–). Traditionally, the Discovery of America (1492) is also taken because it is considered one of the most significant milestones in the history of humanity, the beginning of globalization and in its time a complete revolution.
Regarding its end, some Anglo-Saxon historians[who?] argue that it did not occur and that we are still in the Modern Age (identifying the period between between the centuries XV to the XVIII as Early Modern Times –early modern times– and considering the XIX centuries, XX and XXI as the central object of study of Modern History),[citation needed] while the historiographies more influenced by the French call the period after the French Revolution (1789) as Contemporary Age. Other events have also been proposed as a milestone of separation: the independence of the United States (1776), the Spanish War of Independence (1808) or the Spanish-American wars of independence (1809-1824). As is often the case, these dates or milestones are merely indicative, since there was not an abrupt transition of the characteristics of one historical period to another, but rather a gradual and staged transition, although the coincidence of abrupt, violent and decisive changes over the decades The late XVIII century and early XIX century also allow us to talk about the Era of the Revolution. For this reason, all these dates with a rather pedagogical criterion. The modern age spans roughly from the mid-15th century to the late XVIII.
Sequencing
The Modern Age is usually sequenced by its centuries, but in general historians have defined it as a cyclical succession, which some have tried to identify with economic cycles similar to those described by Clement Juglar and Nikolai Kondratiev, but broader, with phases A for expansion and B for secular recession.
In the 16th century, after the recovery from the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, economics produced what It is called the Price Revolution, coinciding with the Age of Discoveries that allowed a European expansion made possible in part by the technological advances and social organization that arose. Few events changed the history of the world as much as the arrival of the Spanish in America and the subsequent Conquest and the "opening" of the oceanic routes that the Castilians and the Portuguese achieved in the years around 1500. The culture shock led to the collapse of pre-Columbian civilizations. Gradually, the Atlantic Ocean gains prominence compared to the Mediterranean, whose basin witnesses a readjustment of civilizations: if in the Middle Ages it was divided between a Christian north and an Islamic south (with a border that crossed al-Andalus, Sicily and the Holy Land), from the end of the XV century the axis is reversed, leaving the Western Mediterranean, (including the key coastal cities of North Africa) hegemonized by the Hispanic Monarchy (which since 1580 included Portugal), while in Eastern Europe the Ottoman Empire reached its maximum expansion. The millennial oriental civilizations (India, China and Japan) receive a punctual Portuguese presence in some coastal cities (Goa, Ceylon, Malacca, Macao, Nagasaki missions of San Francisco Javier), but after the first contacts they remained little connected or they even olympically ignored the changes in the West; for now they could afford it. The Spice Islands (Indonesia) and the Philippines will be subject to more intensive European colonial domination. Faced with Eastern continuity, social changes are concentrated at the vertices of the so-called triangular trade: notable in Europe (where a bourgeois northwest and an east and south in the process of refeudalization begin to diverge), and cataclysmic in America (colonization) and Africa (slavery). Population growth in Europe probably did not compensate for the decline in those continents, especially in America, where it reached catastrophic proportions and has been considered the greatest demographic disaster in Universal History (several researchers have estimated that more than 90% of the American population died in the first century after the arrival of the Europeans, representing between 40 and 112 million people). The political and military upheavals are also spectacular. In the mythical Timbuktu, the Askia Mohamed I (1493-1528) produced the heyday of the Songhay Empire, which entered the orbit of Islam and declined in the following period. Simultaneously, the Renaissance gives way to the clashes of the Reformation and the religious wars. The ideological expansion of Europe is manifested in the advance of Christianity throughout the world, except in the Balkans, where it recedes in the face of Islam, with which it also comes into contact in the Far East, after going around the globe.
In the 17th century humanity possibly witnessed a general crisis (perhaps triggered by the Little Ice Age) that known as the crisis of the 17th century, which, in addition to the decline in population (cycles of famines, wars, epidemics) and the decline in the series of prices or the arrival of metals from America, was very uneven in the way it affected the different countries. countries, including Europe: catastrophic for the Spanish Monarchy (crisis of 1640) and Germany (Thirty Years' War), but driving force for France and England once their internal problems were resolved (Fronde and English Civil War). During this period, numerous wars between Poland, Russia and Turkey, later also Sweden, took place in Eastern Europe. During the period between 1612-1613 the Polish army occupied Moscow, and until the middle of the XVII century, Poland continued to dominate that part of Europe. The golden age of the Polish empire ended after two events, the first event, the Khmelnytsky Rebellion and the second, the Flood. The Ottoman Empire lost its last chance to expand against Europe at the Battle of Vienna, and began a slow decline, partly to the benefit of a Poland that would soon take over from the gigantic Russian Empire. On its eastern front, the Persian Empire reappeared with the Safavid dynasty, brought to a brief heyday by Shah Abbas I the Great, who made Isfahan one of the most beautiful cities in the world. At the same time, in India, which maintained the European colonial presence on the coast, a great continental empire arose and began to dismember under Aurangzeb. All these movements have to do with the geostrategic vacuum formed in Central Asia, which the inheritor khanates of the Golden Horde are unable to occupy. In China, the timeless dynastic cycles are renewed with the accession of the Manchu dynasty: the Qing. Japan expelled the Portuguese (not the Dutch) and was locked into the relative isolation of the Tokugawa period, which included the extermination of Christians but may have been a factor. that prevented Japanese society from being colonized and allowed an endogenous development that in the XIX century will make it burst into modernization. In this period, the vessels belonging to the Spanish Empire transited the oceans to a lesser extent (which had reached its peak, temporarily linked to the Portuguese) for the benefit of the Dutch and British. It is the period there was a high practice of piracy, which caused the ephemeral rise of a violent and excessive way of life, but romantically perceived as a free utopia in the Caribbean (Isla de la Tortuga).
The 18th century began with what Paul Hazard called the crisis of European consciousness (1680-1715), which made possible the Newtonian Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Crisis of the Old Regime and what can properly be called the Age of Revolutions, whose triple aspect is categorized as the Industrial Revolution (in the development of the productive forces, the technological and the economic, including the triumph of capitalism), the bourgeois Revolution (socially, with the conversion of the bourgeoisie into a new ruling class and the appearance of its new antagonist: the proletariat) and the liberal Revolution (politically-ideologically, of which they are a part the French Revolution and the American revolutions of independence). The development of these processes, which can be considered as logical consequences of the changes developed since the end of the Middle Ages, will put an end to the Modern Age. In Europe it is once again in demographic growth, which this time becomes the beginning of the demographic transition, once the catastrophic mortalities have been overcome: the last Black Death in Western Europe (Marseille, 1720) was extinguished thanks to the presence of the brown rat, which biologically replaced the pestiferous black rat; and with Jenner's vaccine the first resource for the treatment of epidemics is obtained. As for hunger, it does not disappear, in fact in the century numerous subsistence riots occurred (which in England preceded the new type of protest, linked to the nascent industrial proletariat), but in areas that early developed capitalist agriculture and a modernized transport system can be saved (in England, France and Holland the system of fluvial canals predates the railway layout by a century). In others it continued to exist until well into the 19th century, such as Spain (famine of 1812, when massive consumption of the toxic grass pea was resorted to, which at the same time was also detected by the English in India) or Ireland (monoculture of the potato that will lead to the Irish famine of 1845 and mass emigration). The European equilibrium initiated in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) was recomposed in that of Utrecht (1714) and was maintained not without conflicts (several of them called War of Succession), with continental hegemony for France (linked to Spain by the Pacts of family of the Bourbon dynasty) and maritime hegemony for England, later certified at Trafalgar (1805). The explorations of James Cook and the occupation of Oceania conclude the era of geographical discoveries Global integration advances and the first world wars arise as the European colonial empires divide up distant territories (India, Canada) while other divisions are settled in Europe (such as Poland). European possessions reached their maximum expansion in America prior to the Independence of the United States (1776) and the Spanish-American Emancipation (1808-1824), anticipated by the Revolution of the Comuneros in 1737 and the Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II in 1780. To pick up the baton of colonial submission, Africa and the Far East will have to wait for the 19th century, but in Central Asia attend a race for the occupation of a geostrategically empty space between Russia and China. Simultaneously, in the North American Pacific, Russia, England and Spain undertake it, while the colonization of Australia is initiated by England with hardly any opposition.
Characterization
The most transcendental character of the Modern Age is what Ruggiero Romano and Alberto Tenenti call “the first unity of the world”:
In 1531, the opening of the new Antwerp Stock Exchange, an inscription warned that it was in usum negotiatorum cuiuscumque nationis ac linguae: for use of businessmen of any nation and language. It is in a fact like this and in many others of a similar nature, even more so than in the external aspects of political or economic gigantism, where it seems to us that the profound meaning of the period must be sought... A first unit of the world was created: the techniques circulate quickly; the products and the types of food are diffused; the Spanish cuisine, the wheat, the ram, are introduced in America; more or less long term, the corn, the potato, the chocolate, the turkeys arrive in Europe. In the Balkans, the heavy Turkish confections are slowly penetrating; the Turkish beverages – or the Turkish way of preparing them – are consolidated. Everywhere, the landscapes change: the temples of the religions of the pre-Columbian America torn down and in their place Catholic churches are built, and at the crossroads of the roads of America crosses were placed; in the Balkans, the minarets rise next to the Orthodox churches. Exchanges of techniques, cultures, civilizations, artistic forms: the wheel – unknown in America – is introduced into the new world; the Italian painters reach the courts of the sultans (so, Gentile Bellini ends, in 1480, the fine portrait of Mohamed the Conquistador). A vast world economy spreads its threads around the globe: the way of the coins of the Spanish Empire, the famous "reals of eight", coined in the American currency houses, becomes increasingly long and, after the voyage after Atlantic, arrive in small or large stages to the Far East, to be changed by spices, silks, porcelains, pearls... The Baltic wheat reaches the Atlantic region of the Iberian peninsula, and by 1590 it will enter massively to the Mediterranean; the sugar, of the Atlantic islands or of Brazil, begins to arrive in large quantities to the European markets; some products – such as pepper – considered up to then of luxury or, at least, privileged. The modernity of this time, around which entire generations of historians have discussed to capture their presence in a thousand aspects, in a thousand ideas, is affirmed precisely in this first unity of the world. But this is still too fragile: if the lines of navigation already link with great regularity the different continents, piracy or the technical difficulties of navigation break that regularity; if the imperial longings – and unifying ones – of a Carlos V seemed, at times, to become reality as a result of the victories, they discarded very easily with the defeats... and in the great internal splits that appear in Europe on the religious plane, or at the national level.
The consubstantial element of the Modern Age, especially in Europe, is the presence of a transformative, gradual, even hesitant, but decisive ideology of the economic, social, political and ideological structures typical of the Middle Ages. Contrary to what happened with the revolutionary changes typical of the Contemporary Age, in which the historical dynamics accelerated extraordinarily, in the Modern Age the legacy of the past and the pace of changes are slow, typical of long-term phenomena.. As indicated above, there was not a sudden transition from the Middle Ages to modern times, but rather a transition. The main historical phenomena associated with Modernity (capitalism, humanism, national states, etc.) had been preparing long before, although it was over the centuries XV to XVI where they came together to create a new historical stage. These changes occurred simultaneously in several different areas: economically with the development of capitalism; politically, with the rise of national states and the first overseas empires; in the war, with the changes in the military strategy derived from the use of gunpowder; artistically with the Renaissance, religiously with the Protestant Reformation; in the philosophical with Humanism, the emergence of a secular philosophy that replaced medieval Scholasticism and provided a new concept of man and society; in the scientific with the abandonment of the magister dixit and the development of empirical research of modern science, which in the long term will be interconnected with the technology of the Industrial Revolution. By the 17th century, these dissolving forces had changed the face of Europe, especially in its north-western part, although they were still very far from relegating the traditional social actors of the Middle Ages (the clergy and the nobility) to the role of mere sidekicks for the new protagonists: the modern State and the bourgeoisie.
From a materialist perspective, it is understood that this transformation process began with the development of the productive forces, in a context of population increase (with ups and downs, unequal on each continent and with the existence of a catastrophic mortality rate typical of the the Old Demographic Regime, so it cannot be compared to the demographic explosion of the Contemporary Age). There is a transition from an overwhelmingly agrarian and rural economy, the basis of a feudal social and political system, to another that, while remaining so for the most part, added a new commercial and urban dimension, the basis of a political system that is being articulated in states- nation (the monarchy in its authoritarian, absolute and in some cases parliamentary variants); A change whose beginning can be detected from as early as the so-called revolution of the 12th century and which was precipitated by the crisis of the 14th century, when the transition from feudalism to capitalism began, which ended in the XIX.
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In this period, the bourgeoisie emerges, a social class that can associate itself with the new ideological values (individualism, work, the market, progress...). However, the social predominance of clergy and nobility is not seriously discussed during most of the Age, and traditional values (the honor and fame of the nobles, poverty, obedience and chastity of the monastic vows) are the ones that they conform as the dominant ideology, which justifies the persistence of a class society. There are historians who even deny that the social category of class (defined with economic criteria) is applicable to the society of the Modern Age, which they prefer to define as a society of orders (defined by prestige and client relationships). In a broader perspective, considering the period as a whole, it is undeniable that powerful forces, the one on which these new values are based, were in conflict and collided, at the speed of continents, with the great historical structures of the Middle Ages (the Catholic Church, the Empire, fiefs, serfdom, privilege) and others that expanded during the Modern Age, such as the colony, slavery and Eurocentric racism.
While this centuries-old conflict raged in Europe, the entire world, consciously or not, was affected by European expansion. As seen in Sequencing, for the extra-European world the Modern Age means the irruption of Europe, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the continent and the civilization, with the exception of an old acquaintance, the Islamic one, whose champion, the Turkish Empire, remained throughout the period as its geostrategic rival. From the perspective of America, the Modern Age means both the irruption of Europe and the feat of independence that gave rise to the new American nation states.
The role of the bourgeoisie
The burghers, a name given in the Middle Ages in Europe to the inhabitants of the boroughs (the new neighborhoods of expanding cities), had an ambiguous position in the Modern Age. A linear vision, that is interested in the facts until the Bourgeois Revolution, will look for them placing themselves outside the feudal system, as free men who, in Europe, became powerful thanks to the creation of commercial networks that covered it from north to south.. Cities that had achieved a free existence between the empire and the papacy, such as Venice and Genoa, created veritable commercial empires. For its part, the Hansa dominated the economic life of the Baltic Sea until the 18th century. The cities were islands in the feudal ocean, but whether the bourgeoisie was really a factor in dissolving the feudal system, or rather a testament to its dynamism, expanding with the surplus that the lords extracted in their fiefdoms, is a subject that has been extensively discussed by historiography. The very role of the European city during the Modern Age can be considered a long-lasting process within the millennial urbanization process: the creation of an urban network, necessary preparation for the fulfillment of the social functions of the modern industrial world. Metropolises such as London and Paris reached the finish line with an advantage in the 18th century; along the way, cities relegated to the status of semi-peripherals: Lisbon, Seville, Madrid, Naples, Rome or Vienna; or, with other functional characteristics, regardless of their size, those of the Euro-Mediterranean periphery: Moscow or Saint Petersburg, Istanbul, Alexandria or Cairo; and those of the foreign arena, both in spaces unconnected to European colonization (Beijing) and in colonial cities.
Although the difference in economic position between the upper bourgeoisie, the lower bourgeoisie and the impoverished commoners was enormous, it was not so in many extremes due to their social condition: they were all ordinary people. The differentiation between the bourgeoisie and the peasantry was even more significant, since the vast majority of the population lived outside the cities, dedicating themselves to agricultural activities with very low productivity, which condemned them to historical anonymity: documentary production, which is developed in an extraordinary way in the Modern Age (not only with the printing press, but with the bureaucratic rise of the state and individuals: economic records, notarial protocols...) it is essentially urban. The collections of the European archives are already beginning to compete in density of documentary sources with a huge advantage over the Chinese, of millenary continuity.
The bourgeoisie can also be seen as an ally of absolutism, or as a social aggregate without true class consciousness, whose individuals prefer "betrayal" which allows them to be ennobled by purchase or marriage, especially when the dominant ideology pursues profit and sanctifies land rent. His role as a revolutionary agent had caused the urban popular revolts of the Middle Ages, and he will continue to be alive but erratic in those of the Modern Age, some tinged with religious ideology, others with anti-fiscal revolts or even subsistence riots. Within the Hispanic Monarchy, a complex system of social dynamics was established, which within historiography has been established as the Immobile Change. This develops, based on the service of the crown, mixed marriages, as in the rest of Europe. However, the most relevant thing will be the supplanting of the nobility, through assimilating the different formalities, ways of life of the noble classes. Passing in a matter of one or two generations to consider both themselves and the rest of their community. Based on these movements and the need for financing by the Hispanic Monarchy, it gave rise to a continuous sale of both positions and positions. titles of nobility against the crown's own territories.
In other continents, the social characterization of a class defined by its urban activity, its identification with capital and its non-privileged condition is much more problematic. However, the term has been applied in Japan, whose socio-economic formation has been assimilated to feudalism, and with many more difficulties in China, although the interpretations of its history are closely linked to ideological positions. In the specific case of Japan, we must highlight the constitution of a completely tight class society, maintained by the Tokugawa Shogunate. In it, the military caste maintained its importance despite tending towards poverty, remaining until the XIX century.
From its origins, the Islamic world had a strong commercial component, with an impressive development of long-distance routes (shipping and caravanning), and craftsmanship superior to the European in many aspects, but the development of the productive forces demonstrated be less dynamic, and with them the social dynamic. The Arab merchants or the souk, without ceasing to be bustling and reflecting popular discontent in periods of crisis, were never in a position to challenge the structures.
America was, from the beginning of its colonization, a land of promise where social engineering experiments were carried out. The Jesuit reductions or the pilgrims of the Mayflower are extreme cases, the most important phenomenon being the Hispanic colonial city, with its urbanism traced by a string starting from a wide Plaza Mayor on virgin lands or pre-Columbian cities, sometimes even becoming a pilgrim city, changing its location due to earthquakes or sanitary conditions. It is possible to find the formation of a bourgeoisie in America during the Modern Age, in the British colonies in the north, and in the Spanish-American Creoles, who will promote the independence processes and contribute decisively to the end of the Old Regime and the embodiment of the values of the Contemporary age.
The explorations financed by the European monarchies (in Portugal, the early case of Enrique the Navigator), and carried out by figures such as Christopher Columbus, Juan Caboto, Vasco de Gama or Hernando de Magallanes, sailed seas hitherto unexplored and they reached lands that were unknown to Europeans, made possible thanks to a series of advances in nautical matters: the compass and the caravel. The relationship that the individualistic spirit and the search for prestige could have with bourgeois values is not so clear: it does not represent any change since the time of Marco Polo and is possibly more related to the chivalrous spirit and noble values of the late Middle Ages. Taking advantage of their discoveries, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands first, and France and England later, built colonial empires, whose wealth, especially the extraction of gold and silver from America, further stimulated the accumulation of capital and the development of industry and commerce, although sometimes more outside the country itself than within, as was the case of the Castilian, which suffered the consequences of the Price Revolution and an economic policy, paternalistic mercantilism that seeks more consumer protection (and the privileged) than that of the producer.
Outside England and Holland, in the 17th century, the bourgeoisie had relative economic power, and no political power. It would not be proper to say that it came into their hands even when kings like Louis XIV began to call on bourgeois as ministers of state, instead of the old aristocracy.
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The power of kings
In Western Europe, since the end of the Middle Ages, some monarchies tended to form what could be called national states, in geographically defined spaces and with unified markets and with an adequate dimension for economic modernization. Without reaching the extremes of the nationalism of the XIX and XX, the identification of some monarchies with a national character was evident, and those features were sought and exaggerated, which could be traditional laws and customs, religion or language. In this sense, the vindication of the vernacular language for the court of England (which throughout the Middle Ages spoke French) or Nebrija's argument to the Catholic Monarchs in his Castilian Grammar that they should imitate to Rome and Latin because the language goes with the empire (leading to a series of proud defenses of Spanish in diplomatic acts).
This process was neither continuous nor smooth, and it was not clear at the outset whether the Imperial Idea of Charles V, the dynastic multinational mosaic of the Habsburgs, or the European expansion of the ottoman empire. If in the 18th century the current states of Spain, Portugal, France, England, Sweden, Holland or Denmark seemed strongly established, no one could have foreseen the fate of Poland, divided among its neighbors. The dynastic interests of the monarchies were changing and throughout the Modern Age they produced endless exchanges of territories, for war, matrimonial, succession and diplomatic reasons, which made the borders changeable, and with them the subjects.
The increase in the power of the kings was focused in three directions: elimination of all counterpower within the State, expansion and simplification of political borders (the concept of natural borders) in competition with others kings, and elimination of supranational feudal structures (the two swords: the pope and the emperor).
Authoritarian monarchies tried to quash all possible opposition. In the 16th century they took advantage of the Protestant Reformation to separate from the Catholic Church (German principalities and Scandinavian monarchies) or to identify with her (the monarchy of the Christianity King of France or the Catholic King of Spain), although not without conflicts (as evidenced by the controversies around regalism, or Gallicanism). The English monarchy of the Defender of the Faith (Henry VIII, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I) alternately tried one or the other option to finally opt for an intermediate solution between the two (Anglicanism). The kings tried to impose religious unity on their subjects: in Spain the Catholic Monarchs expelled the Jews and Philip III the Moors, in England the Anglican Henry VIII persecuted the Catholics, and in France Richelieu persecuted the Protestants. The principle cuius regio eius religio (the religion of the king must be the religion of the subject) was the director of international relations from the Diet of Augsburg, although it did not manage to avoid religious wars until the signing of the Westphalian Treaties (1648).
Another battlefront was the nobility, which sometimes resisted the increase in royal power, such as the War of the Communities of Castile (1521), the French Fronde of 1648, or the conspiracies on the occasion of the crisis of 1640 against the Count-Duke of Olivares in different points of the Hispanic Monarchy. This should not be interpreted as an identification of the class interests of the bourgeoisie and the monarchy, which can rely on it, knowing that it is its main source of income, but, at least in areas where we can speak of Old Regime societies, is much more clearly identified with the interests of the ruling class: the privileged (nobility and clergy). On those same occasions, the revolts also showed a component of regional particularism that opposes centralization, the resistance of institutions that can function as a counterweight to the crown (judicial or legislative Parliaments), or an anti-fiscal character. In the case most favorable to royal power, the French, resulted in an absolute monarchy identified with the unitary and centralized state. Meanwhile, first in the Netherlands (after its independence) and then in England (after the English Civil War) the functioning of the parliamentary monarchy was experienced in response to another socio-economic formation.
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Externally, the European empires sought to expand their territorial domains. Spain built an empire in America. Portugal and the Netherlands founded factories, nuclei of future cities, in various coastal points scattered throughout the land map. France and England attempted to enter India while founding colonies in what would later become the United States and Canada. The struggle for the complex European political map was incessant, wearing out the social energies extracted through taxes in bloody conflagrations whose end could be dynastic or religious predominance or the maintenance or discussion of continental hegemony, in which successive Spain and France, with the local irruption of local powers (Denmark, Sweden, Poland...). The scenes of the European conflagrations were preferably the atomized political spaces of the Italian peninsula and Central Europe, emerging in this the rival powers of Austria and Prussia, whose future will not be elucidated until well into the Contemporary Age.
Faced with all this, a crisis was generated in the old supranational structures. The Catholic Church was unable to keep Europe consolidated under its rule, although the Papal States subsisted with an influence incomparably greater than its temporal weight, and the Holy Roman Empire, after Charles V's frustrated attempt to restore it, was practically dismantled by the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. The Empire continued to exist theoretically until 1806, but in fact it was no more than a nominal presence on the international map, without effective power.
The King is dead, long live the King!
This expression, which guaranteed the continuity of the hereditary monarchy, is also an indication of the limits of the State that is intended to be built by a monarchy with absolutist aspirations. In all civilizations, the time of death of kings (or its agony, or its lack of succession) has historically given rise to succession problems, and even wars.
The possibility of killing the king was an even more serious event, and the lèse majesté punished with the worst of sentences (the ordeal of regicides like Ravaillac was particularly painful). The mere consideration of this argument in fiction guaranteed the interest of Shakespeare's gruesome tragedies, in which the usurper finds his deserved punishment (Hamlet or Macbeth) especially in the court of Elizabeth I of England, always vigilant against real or imaginary conspiracies against his life.
In most cultures, killing the king was reserved at best for chivalrous clashes with another king on the field of battle (for example, despite some dastardly details, Enrique de Trastamara's fratricide of Pedro I the cruel), something that rarely occurred in the Modern Age because they did not usually take risks (the death of Henry II of France in a tournament falls within the category of sporting accidents, and the capture in the battle of Pavía of Francisco I, who complained that Carlos V did not enter personally into contention with him, is something exceptional). That is why the early death of Sebastián I of Portugal in the battle of Alcazarquivir shocked all of Europe so much. This fact was also at the origin of the Portuguese decadence (the army was destroyed and his uncle Felipe II established himself as heir, incorporating the kingdom into the Hispanic Monarchy, which squandered the best of the fleet in the Invincible Armada and faced the colonial empire to the plunder of their English and Dutch enemies). It was also the origin of a very curious social movement, Sebastianismo, very popular among the peasants and lower classes, which claimed its hidden presence and its messianic return. An identical movement took place in Russia, where fake Dimitris periodically appeared claiming to be Ivan the Terrible's heir tsarevitch. These movements (similar to other millenarian or messianic movements, such as those associated with the hidden imam in the Islamic religion) welcomed all kinds of popular demands that seized the opportunity to express themselves in association with an idealized concept of the paternalistic monarchy. It was difficult to conceive that the sacred figure of a king could carry out acts of tyranny. All tyranny is attributed to bad advisers, or to the hijacking of the king's will (the legend of The Iron Mask). The valid ones are the most hated figures. In the Modern Age the most daring discrepancy used to be the cry Long live the king and death to bad government. In other civilizations, it is decided to radically separate the figure of the legal ruler, who becomes a solely decorative figure (the Caliph in Islam and the Emperor in Japan) and the de facto ruler, who also becomes hereditary and solemnized. (the Ottoman sultan or shōgun in Japan)
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What is a great novelty of Europe in the Modern Age is turning the death of the king into something theorizable, connecting it with classical Antiquity. The tyrannicide was justified by Father Mariana, from the School of Salamanca, in a book that he dedicated to the instruction of the future Felipe III, and which was widely disseminated more outside than within Spain, using his arguments to justify the rebellion of the Netherlands and even later, in the two great revolutions of the XVIII century (American and French), which always put good care to legitimize themselves in opposition to the loss of legitimacy of the king against whom they rebel, in a way not so different from how vassals and feudal lords reciprocally applied the concept of felony. In the Dutch anthem, William of Orange says: "I have always honored the King of Spain" - Den Koning van Hispanje/ Heb ik altijd geëerd, and the American revolutionaries devote the entire first part of their Declaration of Independence to convincing the world that they have no other way out.
The sacral respect that the figure of kings was kept in Europe was not applied by the conquerors to the caciques, kings or American emperors, all of them considered by the Europeans as “pagan indigenous”, whose sovereignty could be challenged only if they refused to meet the Requirement. Thus, there was no major inconvenience in extorting, torturing and killing Hatuey, Atahualpa and Moctezuma (even less in quelling the revolts after the conquest, even as late as that of Túpac Amaru II, which is already linked to the cries of independence American). But over time, the old continent also witnessed some notable regicides, such as those of William of Orange, Henry III and Henry IV of France, at the hands of fanatics, and the judicial ones of Mary Stuart and Charles I of England. When the guillotine falls on Louis XVI, the Modern Age will already have ended, proving that blue blood is the same as any other.
In America, the independence revolutions that began in 1776 with the uprising of the thirteen British colonies that gave rise to the United States and spread with the Spanish-American War of Independence (1809-1824), which gave rise to the first Latin American nations, merged the idea of independence with radical opposition to the monarchy and the right to regicide. The result was the appearance of a number of republics without precedent in Universal History.
Military Revolution
Also, military art underwent profound changes, which were correlative to the political changes that were taking place at that time. The introduction of firearms marked the end of the age of feudal knights, and the beginning of the dominance of the infantry. Although the first uses of gunpowder were in China, its military use was fundamentally European during the Modern Age. The code of honor of the medieval knight saw firearms as an insult to bravery, which allowed the best knight to be shot down by the most base mercenary villain, but its acceptance, development and sophistication in Europe is one of the keys to its expansion during The modern age. The social changes that it produced within ended, paradoxically, including its use in dueling for honor.
The Hundred Years' War had already humiliated the French nobility against the English archers, but it was artillery, which was experimented with in the last phases of the Reconquest (it seems that the Muslim defenders used it in the of Niebla in the XIII century, and the Christians since the time of Alfonso XI), which will prove to be the decisive weapon, whose cost, unaffordable by any particular nobleman, could only be borne by the growing resources of the authoritarian monarchies, with which the modern army will become one of its attributes. The War of Granada will be decisive for the formation of a complex and well-articulated military unit: the tercios, which will be successfully tested in Italy under the command of the Great Captain against the French armies, while internationalizing with mercenaries of all nationalities.. The Swiss and the German landsquenets will be the most famous. For the first time since the Roman Empire, European wars were fought with a continental strategic vision that put growing state apparatuses at their service: it was a greater feat to "put a pike in Flanders" than to "put a pike in Flanders"; from an economic point of view than from a purely tactical one, and the diplomatic battles were no less decisive than the real ones in closing or keeping open the so-called Spanish road.
At the same time, engineering made a breakthrough, perfecting a new defense tactic: the bastion. Driven by the challenge of the artillerymen, military engineers, including Leonardo da Vinci himself, engage them in an arms race that has not stopped until the century XXI.
As a consequence, medieval campaigns, clashes between hosts recruited by vassalage ties, became true wars of siege and attrition of the enemy, using professional, mercenary troops, which partly explains the enormous growing cruelty of the conflicts until the 17th century. By the 18th century, wars, subjected to academic method and calculation, underwent a notable change, transforming into tempered campaigns, voluntarily limited and lengthy manoeuvres, where the generals risked little and took great care of their troops (the king sergeant, Frederick William I of Prussia, was famous for this). The uniforms, flags and military music are exquisitely coded (the anthem and the flag of Spain come from this period). This scheme would govern the European battlefields until the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte, the first general who took advantage of the massive recruitment product of compulsory military service or nation in arms on a large scale, ignoring the aristocratic ranks that in the armies Most of the absolute monarchies reserved managerial positions for people of unproven worth, while for him "every soldier carries a marshal's baton in his backpack." But that was already in a different historical period, the Contemporary Age, in which, after the attempted continental blockade against English industry and Clausewitz's theorizing, they ended up talking about total war, a concept alien to the period of the Old Age. Modern, in which economic and social life was largely unrelated to the battles.
Naval Warfare
Naval warfare experienced a qualitative leap with the incorporation of artillery and technical improvements in navigation. The rapid maneuvering and boarding capabilities of rowing propulsion (still useful in 1571 at Lepanto) will become obsolete, to the benefit of strategic planning in a planetary setting, where oceanic fleets carry the military presence over enormous distances with increasing agility. «The greatest occasion that centuries have seen», as Cervantes described it, who lost his left hand there (for the greater glory of his right hand), meant in fact the maintenance of the status quo in the Mediterranean: the eastern for the Turks and the western for the Spanish, but the Mare Nostrum as a whole had already lost its centrality to the benefit of the Atlantic. Until the defeat of the Invincible Armada (1588) no one challenged the Spanish-Portuguese naval hegemony beyond irregular confrontations (the Dutch beggars from the sea or the Barbary or English pirates, little important until the XVII).
Aware of possessing an empire where the sun did not set, Felipe II offered a fabulous reward to anyone who offered him a mechanical clock that would allow his ships to accurately calculate cartographic longitude, something that was not it was achieved until the XIX century; but by then the zero meridian was that of Greenwich and not that of Cádiz or Paris, despite the scientific effort involved in the decimal metric system. The Battle of Trafalgar (1805) unquestionably sanctioned the maritime hegemony that England had already achieved, at least since the War of the Spanish Succession, which gave it Gibraltar and Menorca, as well as commercial advantages in America (1714). Forgotten was the hemispheric division of the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese (Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494) and that had provoked the anger of Francisco I of France, who asked to be shown the clause of Adam's will that provided for such a thing. Meanwhile, the Iberian forests of Strabo's squirrel (which crossed the peninsula without touching the ground) had become ship planks or carvings of saints (destinations for which the most select pieces were selected), which had decisive consequences. economic and ecological: it is said that a large part of the sediments deposited in the Ebro Delta are due to deforestation in the Pyrenees in the Modern Age.
Religion
As evidenced by the medieval urban heresies appeased by the Inquisition and the Dominican Order, the Catholic Church finds itself in conflict with the new urban life, and had viewed its transformations with reluctance, although it also demonstrated a great capacity for assimilation of the elements solvents (Franciscan Order and devotio moderna of Thomas of Kempis). In the XIV century he had lived through the Avignon Captivity and the Western Schism, and in the XV experienced a process of increasing temporal power. Examples of worldly popes were, for example, Alexander VI and Julius II, the latter nicknamed, and not without reason, the "Warrior Pope". To finance himself, he resorted more and more scandalously to the sale of indulgences, which excited the protests of John Wycliff, Jan Hus, and Martin Luther. The latter, when called upon by the Church to submit, refused, pointing out that the only source of authority was the Holy Scriptures. This was a new vision of the relationship between man and God, personal and intimate, more in line with the values of modernity and very different from the social and communal idea of religion that medieval Catholicism had. Uniformity was not possible among the numerous followers of Luther (the free interpretation of the Bible and the denial of intermediate authority between God and man made it impossible), and thus Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin or John Knox founded reformed churches that became They expanded geographically turning Europe into a conglomerate of people with often contradictory beliefs. It has been proposed that Calvinism and the doctrine of predestination are possibly an essential contribution to the conformation of the capitalist bourgeois spirit, by exalting work and personal triumph. However, it is not impossible to find a Catholic version of the same spirit, as was Jansenism; which would abound in the materialist thesis that more than an ideological determination it was the different conditions of the economic structure of northern and southern Europe that influenced their divergent history throughout the Modern Age.
The Catholic Church reacted belatedly, at the end of the XVI century, imposing a series of internal changes at the Council of Trent (1545-1563). The main exponents of this reform were Ignacio de Loyola and the Society of Jesus. However, he was generally unable to return numerous Reformed nations to the Catholic faith. In general, northern Germany, Scandinavia and Great Britain no longer returned to Catholicism, while France would struggle through years of internal conflicts for religious reasons, until in 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed Catholic tolerance towards the Huguenots, and drove them out. The success of the Counter-Reformation occurred in Danubian Europe, southern Germany, and Poland. Ireland, the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, as well as the recently conquered Spanish overseas domains in America, remained Catholic.
All this happened in the midst of a strong period of religious wars: in Germany, the Catholic princes supported Charles V against the Protestant princes, while social movements such as the Peasants' War or the Anabaptists emerged, persecuted bloodily on both sides, with the express blessing of both the pope and Luther; In France, the no less violent Massacre of Saint Bartholomew (1572) was just one episode in its particular and prolonged series of religious wars, in which different social groups form part of noble factions with opposing political and dynastic claims and foreign alliances.; the Eighty Years' War that involves the separation of the Netherlands into a Protestant north and a Catholic south; in its last phase (after a 12-year Truce) simultaneous to the Thirty Years' War (1614-1648) in the Holy Empire, which ended up becoming a generalized European conflict.
European expansion meant the disappearance or submission of many indigenous religions in the territories occupied by the Europeans. Exceptionally, a new religion arose in northern India: Sikhism.
In Latin America, Catholicism was imposed as a practically exclusive religion following the guidelines of the Counter-Reformation, but at the same time the old religions and repressed pre-Columbian and African beliefs reappeared, combining their beliefs with Christianity through religious syncretism. An example of this is the fusion of cults such as Pachamama and the Virgin Mary in the Andean region and the presence of the orishás of the Yoruba religion in Santeria and Candomblé. Latin American Catholicism, especially in its aspects more closely linked to the cultures of native and Afro-American peoples, gave rise to new approaches to human rights, nature, social equality and republicanism, reaching prominent expressions in cases such as that of Bartolomé de the Houses and the Jesuit Missions.
The other great religion in expansion, Islam, did not have a separation of civil and religious authorities, which does not necessarily mean greater fundamentalism, and the proof had been the periods of tolerance and great cultural exchange of the Middle Ages. The Turkish, Safavid or Mughal Empires were not less, but rather more tolerant in religious matters than the Catholic Monarchy or John Calvin's Geneva, and the Eastern Mediterranean (including the Balkans) was throughout the Modern Age an ethnic and religious diversity that welcomed the Sephardic diaspora in an equivalent way as Amsterdam did. However, in Christian Europe, Renaissance humanism (in principle, the simple claim of the studia humanitatis against theology) gradually accentuated the separation of the religious and secular spheres.
Erasmianism or concepts such as freedom of conscience not only give rise to other religions (Protestantism), but to new positions of man before nature, such as Cartesian doubt, rationalism and empiricism. Very different from each other, religious indifference, libertines, Freemasonry, pantheism, agnosticism and atheism began to be considered as imaginable positions –although by no means tolerated– and gradually gained acceptance as the Modern Age passed. Voltaire's personal and intellectual trajectory will mean a reference that will remain fixed in the encyclopedic spirit. The de-Christianization linked to the French Revolution will make possible, in an ephemeral episode, a secular cult of the Goddess Reason, under a revolutionary calendar deprived of all liturgical traces.
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The law and the concept of man in society.
After the Treaty of Westphalia, religion ceased to be invoked as the cause of wars in Europe, imposing the pragmatism of international relations that invoke more secularized interests for them, as Nicholas Machiavelli had claimed in his famous treatise The Prince. This work for some marks the beginning of modernity, and its trail was continued by the founders of the law of nations, the Dutch Hugo Grocio or, from an opposite point of view, the neo-scholastic School of Salamanca.
The alleged inability (already discussed at the time) of non-Western civilizations to adapt to the legal concepts that lead or are identified with modernity (property, legal certainty, rule of law) is one of the most interesting issues of the comparative history of civilizations (see interpretations of the history of China). It is often argued that behind this alleged Western predisposition to modernity is the heritage of Roman Law, Germanic customary law or Christian humanism; but the same inheritances can be claimed by the Absolutism of the Old Regime, the Inquisition and the judicial systems common in all countries during the Modern Age, which included torture and diabolical tests without respecting the presumption of innocence. Conversely, the backwardness caused by European colonialism in the societies of Latin America and the Caribbean, also belonging to the West, as well as the development of modern non-Western societies such as Japan, China and other East Asian countries, have been pointed out. True or not, and although many precedents can be sought (notably Ibn Khaldun and other advanced social analysts in the Islamic world since the 14th century), the historical reality indicates that it was in the revolutionary England of the XVII century, with the contradictory conceptions of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, which opens the question of the nature of social relations that from that moment on will demonstrate in the European world their effectiveness, not only theoretical, but their involvement with social development and political change: it also demonstrates their capacity for extension and contagion, when it was taken up in France by Montesquieu and Rousseau, compared with the original political cultures of pre-Columbian societies (Iroquois Confederation), synthesized and carried out by the American revolutionaries in the new historical era opened in 1776. The nature of man and his condition as a social animal, which had begun in Greek philosophy, had not been alien to medieval thought, but its reappearance as a central point of the same spirit of the Modern Age is fully typical of this time, and their intellectual debate was sparked in part by the impact of the cultural diversity shown by the discoveries and its cruel reverse (colonialism, slave trade) giving rise to intellectual products such as the myth of the noble savage or the Hispanic polemics of the war against the natives and the just titles of dominion over America.
During the Modern Age Europe, slavery began to have a completely different function than it had in other historical periods. Although it was not the dominant form of production (a role it fulfilled only in classical Greece and Rome), it became one of the central systems of work on the periphery of the world-economy, a fact that led to the establishment of the traffic in slaves as one of the most lucrative businesses of the period. After its intellectual questioning by some of the French revolutionaries (for example Robespierre), and the first emancipatory movements (notably the Haitian revolution, led by Toussaint L'Ouverture), at the beginning of the century XIX Great Britain and the Spanish-American nations recently independent from Spain (with a certain confluence of interests with that one), undertook the abolition of slavery that would cover practically the entire of the world in the course of the century. The movement was far from being purely altruistic or obeying alleged Christian principles: it responds to the new logic of the industrial capitalist system, and also allowed the British Royal Navy to become a kind of ocean police, with the ability to inspect ships at their convenience., a function that it was in a position to fulfill once it had become a "workshop of the world" thanks to the Industrial Revolution and has suppressed its competing fleets at Trafalgar.
A more idealistic vision of the possibility of forming a perfect society, but not in an eschatological paradise, but really on earth, was the one that provided a new literary genre that emerged around 1500 and also sparked by the discovery that the Europeans did in America: Utopia, the title of a novel by Thomas More, and in which authors such as Erasmus of Rotterdam (In Praise of Madness), Thomas Campanella ( The City of the Sun) and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (Royal Comments).
The consequences that were derived from this did not necessarily have to go in the sense of founding the doctrine of human rights, not even in Protestant Europe, a good part of it subjected to systems more typical of the Old Regime. There are even arguments to propose that obscurantist Spain was closer to it, which in addition to welcoming (not without problems) Erasmusism, produced on its own land the legislative corpus of the Laws of the Indies, the defense of the indigenous by Bartolomé de las Casas or the famous justification of tyrannicide already mentioned, and maintained until the XVII century an institutional balance between king and kingdom , and of the different kingdoms among themselves (see Spanish Institutions of the Old Regime), not too different from England. On the other hand, in France, there was a shift from the pragmatic tolerance of the politiques of the court of Henri IV to the more radical and complete theorization of absolutism, with the work of Bossuet. On the contrary, in America the independence movement was organized from the beginning closely related to the doctrine of human rights and democracy, although the political practice of this concept was still far from being contemporary. The Communal Revolutions such as the one led in 1735 in Paraguay by José de Antequera y Castro under the motto: "The will of the common is superior to that of the king himself " were an early precedent. The interrelationship between the liberal revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic has been defined as a back and forth movement, and after being influenced by the Enlightenment and developing endogenously, the United States Independence will end up becoming a model of political freedom for Europe and the rest of America.
Commercial practices, developed since the Late Middle Ages (fairs, banking, loans, bills of exchange), became even more sophisticated with the birth of public finance (public debt, such as Spanish juros) accustomed jurists and confessors to confront the theologically elusive concepts of price and profit (initially associated with profit and the sin of usury, ideological guarantees of the social predominance of the privileged who base their wealth not on work but on income, and gradually accepted) and They designed the concept of contractual obligation or limited liability. It is not easy to say which is the older sister: civil society or mercantile society (another namesake is the Societas Iesus, the Society of Jesus).
The family and its legal treatment are also undergoing changes. Modernity represents the transition from the extended, patriarchal family to the nuclear family, which is not necessarily stable. Divorce does not become a widespread practice, nor is it original to the Modern Age, but the resounding separation of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon would divide Europe as much as the Reformation. It has even been argued that different marriage and inheritance regimes, as well as different religions, will shape different economic strategies and social mentalities towards the formation of capitalist society.
The woman
All the great civilizations of the Modern Age follow the patriarchal model that restricts women to a subordinate role and makes them invisible before history; but the woman is not absent, neither from society nor from documents. The so-called gender studies or, more properly, the history of women have a lot of work to do for the period of the Modern Age. The role of women in Western civilization was surely more visible, and her historical visibility greater, when chance and dynastic laws allowed her the role of queen or regent. Although the Middle Ages had had women in this role (Theodora of Byzantium, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Urraca of León and Castilla), historiography used to treat them with extraordinary misogyny. On the other hand, some queens of the Modern Age have been treated with great admiration (Isabel I of Castile the Catholic, who has even been proposed for beatification, or Elizabeth I of England the virgin queen), although it is true that many others have suffered their inclusion in cruel stereotypes (Juana the mad, Mary the bloody of England, Cristina of Sweden, Catherine II of Russia the great), some of them linked to a freedom of sexual customs that in male kings was taken for granted. The stereotype of the peacemaker woman (as old as humanity, as can be seen in the myth of the kidnapping of the Sabine women) was also staged in her role as a pledge of peace between dynasties that leads them to marriage. (Isabel de Valois to Philip II of Spain, Anne of Habsburg to Louis XIII of France...) or in the so-called Peace of the Ladies. What is exceptional are the women who are given an intellectual role, sometimes linked to their eccentric position, either the nuns (on the way to being a saint, like Teresa de Jesús or a poet, like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz), or the Venetian courtesans (such as Verónica Franco). A parallel case is the Japanese geishas, who throughout the modern age supplanted the men who previously performed the not obviously sexual functions that characterize them. In some cases, a woman's position of subordination was overcome by circumstances to acquire an unsuspected individual role, as happened with La Malinche, the Aztec slave-translator-concubine of Hernán Cortés.
Without prejudice to this general trend, the Modern Age records some civilizations and situations in which women played a leading role, such as that of the Iroquois Confederacy, where there was a division of political power between men and women, as a result of which the five nations that made up the alliance were governed by the women who were heads of each clan. Some anthropologists analyze the case as one of the many and different examples of situations of what was traditionally called matriarchy and maintain that they can only anachronistically be understood as early feminism. Other authors describe a more complex reality, since among the Iroquois political-military power was rigorously divided between men and women, with the former occupying the military posts and the latter holding the political posts. A favorable situation for the female leadership occurred in liberal revolutions, such as the French revolution (in which some some women tried to overcome the social role that limited them to the informal power of Madame Pompadour's salons) or the Spanish-American War of Independence in which some women held decisive positions such as Colonel Juana Azurduy in Upper Peru.
Considerations on Modern Art
What is considered modern art today is not the artistic production of the Modern Age, but of contemporary art: the European avant-garde around 1900, which in fact signifies a reaction against the European art of the Modern Age, which was considered stiff by academicism and limited by subjection to the principle of imitation of nature; not so against extra-European art, which is received with admiration for its exoticism (Japanese prints and African carvings). Even from another perspective, there was an English pictorial school (Pre-Raphaelite) that sought to return to the purity of the Italian primitives and Flemish primitives before the century XVI and the divine Raphael.
Therefore, to the cultural creations that occurred between the XV and XVIII should be called "Art of the Modern Age", with enough intellectual distance from it to consider it, although it is clear that the concept from "modern" (also for what we call that today) will always be provisional.
This reflection is by no means recent: in Europe, the Renaissance of the XV and XVI initiates and identifies with the concept of modernity, identifying it with the break with medieval art (despised by Mediterranean Italians and yearning for ancient imperial glories with the adjective Gothic, that is, typical of Goths, barbarians from northern Europe) and with the imitation (mimesis) of both the models that were considered classic (Greco-Roman art) as (above all) from nature. It should not be forgotten, however, that the key to the creative wealth of the time was the exchange between Italy and Flanders. The Flemings fall in love with the Italian mountains, which they lack, and reproduce them on their boards; the Italians take advantage of many of the technical innovations that come from these northern barbarians (oil painting). Research on perspective is done with different criteria, but almost simultaneously.
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Perhaps the most representative art of the Modern Age was not so much the Renaissance but its following period: the Baroque, if we consider that it is the one that reached the longest length in time (centuries XVII and XVIII, in overlap with earlier Mannerism and the later Rococo) and space (can be found from Protestant Northern Europe to Catholic colonial America or the Philippines). This style was characterized by being visually overloaded, and far from the simplicity and search for harmony typical of the full Renaissance. Although its possible etymologies are discussed, it is usually made synonymous with "strange", "irregular". It is postulated that the Baroque was born as a reaction to the crisis of humanist and Renaissance confidence in the human being, which explains its powerful religious character, as well as the abandonment of classical simplicity to try to express the greatness of the infinite, and the predilection for grotesque or "ugly" realistic reasons, which contradicts the search for ideal Renaissance beauty. There has also been talk of a culture of the baroque, of equivocation and the ephemeral, coinciding with the so-called crisis of the 17th century, in which appearance was valued more than essence, scenery than solidity.
This does not mean, however, that the Baroque has totally renounced Classicism. Not surprisingly, one of the greatest monuments of Baroque architecture is the Palace of Versailles, built around the notion of the cult of the solar god Apollo, as a representation of the monarch Louis XIV, the Sun King. The Europe of the 18th century will be filled with replicas of Versailles, sometimes passed off by local sensibilities, like Viennese palaces. There would be a first baroque, the deep and concentrated one of Caravaggio and tenebrism, a full, triumphant baroque, that of Bernini or Rubens, and a final baroque, the one with the greatest decorative excess, of Churriguera and the rococo interiors.
Baroque urbanism requires the experience of the city as an artificial setting, beyond the singular buildings or monuments, in which the perspectives glorify the representative spaces of power following an iconographic program that the connoisseur is able to read (for example, the Plaza de San Pedro in the Vatican City or the Paseo del Prado in Madrid). The integration of all the arts and all the senses is sometimes produced in a sublime way, in the time and space of the festival, such as Holy Week in Seville or Murcia, or the Carnival of Venice or Oruro. The more individualistic Protestant Baroque produces the splendid interiors of Vermeer or the competitive mass of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, a rival to St. Peter's in Rome.
The pendulum interpretation of Art History corresponds well with the return to the academic discipline in the middle of the XVIII century, when the rediscovery of the Roman ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum brought classical art back into fashion. This time, those who were inspired by it did so in an even more rigorous way than in the Renaissance, thus generating the so-called Neoclassicism. Neoclassicism is often considered as an art of transition to the Contemporary Age, because it is politically associated not with Absolutism, but with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire.
Asian and African art
During the Modern Age, art in Asia and Africa produced artistic manifestations of the same level, either following its own dynamics, as in African art, Islamic art, Chinese art or Japanese art.
In Islamic art, the traditional rejection of iconography led to an emphasis on geometric patterns, Islamic calligraphy, and architecture. In India and Tibet, artistic expression was developed through painted sculptures. In China, he continued to develop his great variety of completely original arts and styles, jade carvings, bronze works, ceramics, poetry, calligraphy, music, painting, theater, etc. In Japan, the extensive artistic interplay between calligraphy and painting continued, while woodblock prints became important after the 17th century. .
Colonial Art in the New World
In America an art developed under the sign of colonial domination, which received both European and African influences and pre-Columbian cultures, often fused in complex and innovative ways in the same way as the syncretism of Catholic worship with the pre-Columbian religions. Grouping very different styles, the term colonial art is often used; a term that should not be confused with indigenous art, sometimes appreciated for its authenticity, and other times the object of true human zoos such as colonial exhibitions, samples of anthropology imperialist of the XIX century. The colonial baroque had distinctive characteristics from the European, such as its extraordinary diversity, the presence of color, the proliferation of mixtilinear forms and the anthropomorphic support. In Brazil, the extraordinary figure of the sculptor and architect Antonio Francisco Lisboa, "el Aleijadinho", stands out. The Cusco school of painting was characterized by naturalism, strong colors, and the presence of indigenous and mestizo faces and themes. Diego Quispe Tito introduced a certain freedom in the management of perspective and the prominence of the landscape, fauna and flora. In the English, French or Dutch colonies of North America, colonial art remained more closely linked to the characteristics of the art of their metropolises, with few variations.
Role of the artist
An essential difference can be pointed out from the Modern Age between the so-called western art and the other geographical denominations (African art, Asian art, etc. –see Study of the History of Art–): the social function and consideration of the artist. Unlike other areas of the world, in Europe and its colonies, since the Renaissance, painters, sculptors and architects not only come out of anonymity and begin to sign their work, but also rub shoulders with philosophers and princes. This social ascent is several centuries ahead of that of other parts of the bourgeoisie, and forms a new aristocracy of intellectual merit, into which later the literati and scientists will also enter. On the other hand, the Church, the nobility and the monarchy, traditional clients, are no longer exclusive, as can be exemplified by the Dutch bourgeoisie, and a true art market is born that begins to no longer work on commission and the artist's creation can emerge. much more freely. When in the XIX century the process is completed, and society itself responds to the criteria of the market, art will have died of the modern age and contemporary art was born (paradoxically together with the figure of the cursed artist, who does not succeed in life).
Theater and music
These two arts reached a sublime maturity in the Modern Age. While many world cultures had produced highly refined expressions of sacred theatrical and musical forms, such as Balinese dances based on Hindu mythology (Katchak and Barong), in the XVII, simultaneously at each end of the world, Japanese kabuki and the classical theaters of the three main Western European cultures (these are interrelated): Spanish (Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina), English (William Shakespeare) and French (Jean Racine, Pierre Corneille and Molière). In the emergence of classical European theater, medieval traditions converge, both religious (autos sacramentales) and profane (puppeteers ancestors of the comedians of the league, still present in the Commedia del arte, which will also be seen at the root of a theater illustrated as that of Carlo Goldoni), and conform to the discipline of classical literary norms, recovered from Greco-Roman antiquity in an extraordinary case of archaeological resurrection. The performing arts also include music that, in addition to the medieval ecclesiastical choral and instrumental tradition, includes popular themes, airs and dances and even, in some cases, the influence of other civilizations (the XVIII experienced a musical Turkish fever, with the incorporation of instruments and a peculiar sense of rhythm of powerful Ottoman military marches). The so-called classical music, whose first exponents were in baroque composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Vivaldi or Handel, culminates with the peaks of musical classicism (Haydn and Mozart). Child prodigies like the latter or singers like the castrato Farinelli (who proved to have more business acumen) tour Europe "fichados" for the royal houses. The instruments and the groups are being perfected, the so-called chamber music being established, appropriate to the scenery of the Rococo palaces, while the theaters require larger formations, since they welcomed a larger audience, which, (waiting for the Beethoven symphonies or Strauss waltzes), celebrates The Magic Flute. As a musical form, opera (born with Monteverdi's Orfeo in 1607) has only begun to travel a path that will take it into the XIX to be a vehicle of revolutionary ideology (Giuseppe Verdi or Wagner), but for the moment it serves perfectly to adapt scripts as subversive as those of Beaumarchais (The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart and The Barber of Seville, by Rossini).
Meanwhile, European music spreads throughout the world, first of all through the American colonies, where it is received and reworked with great success, including the famous indigenous musicians of the Jesuit reductions of Paraguay.
Science and magic
The new questioning mentality, which can be considered as part of the bourgeois mentality, produced a general questioning of medieval wisdom, based on the criterion of authority, and expressed in aphorisms such as magister dixit (« the master has said it") or Roma locuta, causa finita ("Rome has spoken, the matter is finished"). Thus, in the Late Middle Ages, the empirical investigation of nature was born, although at least until the Enlightenment it coexisted with elements that surprise us today and that we tend to describe as irrational: figures such as Paracelsus (the builder of yatrochemistry) or Nostradamus. (highly respected by all the kings of Europe), who claim mysterious knowledge, are as representative of the scientific Renaissance as the military surgeon Ambroise Paré or the automaton builder Juanelo Turriano. The problems that led to the death of Giordano Bruno or Miguel Servet are precisely the non-separation of the spheres of science and religion. Less tragic cases, but which show how there was no obvious separation between the world of science and that of less methodical knowledge, are that of Johannes Kepler or John Dee, who earned their living as astrologers, which allowed them to approach power. in addition to developing another more scientific facet of his intellectual production, or that of Isaac Newton himself who, in this case in a hidden way, had his dark side related to alchemy.
The cultural clash between the various peoples of the world (Europeans, Americans, Asians, Africans) led the different civilizations to exploit the credulity and the "uncivilized" condition that they inevitably assigned to others, based on the prediction of eclipses, anti-seismic techniques, hygienic habits, innovative weapons, knowledge about plant and animal species, the use of technologies never seen by the other. In some cases the "others" were considered gods and in other cases, animals.
The credulity of the European peoples acquired specific forms. They continued to venerate relics and images of various supernatural beings (among Catholics) or crossing the world to found earthly Jerusalems (among Protestants), going to kings to cure scrofula, or exorcising them when they were "bewitched" (Charles II of Spain)... In the middle of the XVIII century, Feijoo had to dedicate himself to fighting superstitions that at the same time were maintained from the chair of mathematics in Salamanca (the ineffable Diego de Torres Villarroel). The world of the occult and the esoteric coexisted among the enlightened themselves (the case of the Neapolitan Raimondo di Sangro).
The presence of the supernatural in everyday life was admitted by all social levels, including collective mobilizations of fear, such as the witch hunt, which was more cruel and irrational in northern Europe (supposedly more "modern") and in the British colonies, than in the south (supposedly more "backward") and in the Ibero-American colonies. The popular perception of the complicated theological debates was far from rational, in a world mostly illiterate (even with the effort to disseminate writing made by the Reformation thanks to the printing press), and it produced cases in which the inquisitorial persecution was looking for non-existent heresies, which the accused were unable to elaborate on their own. The comparison with other civilizations do not leave the western one in a better light either: the experience in Istanbul of the English lady Mary Montagu as late as the first half of the century XVIII (which allowed her to compare the Ottoman effendi with thinkers as secularized as Alexander Pope or Jonathan Swift) is illustrative enough.
The year 1543 was a year in which two transcendental works appeared: Nicolás Copernicus postulated Heliocentrism for the first time, thus questioning the Geocentrism of the Greek Ptolemy, while Andrés Vesalio reviewed Galen's anatomy. The path opened by both was fruitful: in Physics and Astronomy, the accumulated contributions of Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler changed the vision of the universe, while Miguel Servetus, William Harvey and Marcello Malpighi did the same in Medicine, among others.. An entire school of Italian mathematicians, such as Bonaventura Cavalieri, prepared the necessary mathematical tools for Isaac Newton to scientifically postulate the Law of gravity, with the publication of Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687.
Determinant for the construction of modern science was communication between scientists that allowed for epistolary exchange (Newton's correspondence with Leibniz was particularly enriching), publication and institutionalization (Royal Academy, French Academy of Sciences). But it would be wrong to consider that the succession of discoveries and the linking of biographies of scientists led inevitably to the new paradigm. The resistance to change was or seemed as strong as the (not so obvious) evidence of the new vision of nature: Tycho Brahe made Kepler swear not to go over to the Copernican side; he had to make a costly exercise in scientific honesty to disappoint his teacher and his own mystical preconceptions of celestial harmony; Galileo's retraction was not as insincere as the romantic vision would lead us to believe, since he himself had a real problem of reconciling his faith with the testimony of his reason and his senses; Giovanni Cassini himself, who had been capable of the extraordinary feat of converting Jupiter's satellites into clocks (which made it possible to give the first estimate of the speed of light), never came to accept such a possibility. For this, a true scientific Revolution was necessary, not far removed from the social or political revolutions that sustained it.
In the 18th century there was an advance in other fundamental disciplines, such as chemistry or the biological sciences, with no less conceptual obstacles. Until Lavoisier gave the definitive kick to the systematic nomenclature and quantification of the discipline (1789), old theories such as that of the phlogiston, which tried to reconcile the new experimental data with the old alchemical or derived conceptions, were not completely discarded. of the concept of classical Greek element. On the other hand, in the field of Taxonomy, the taxonomic systematizations of Buffon or Linnaeus were also essential, but it was necessary to wait until much later to deny theories such as spontaneous generation or to integrate the microscopy that had been developed since the XVII (Leeuwenhoek). The separation of science from belief never fully occurred (as Darwin later verified), but at least Laplace was able to dare to reply to Napoleon, when the latter asked him what role he reserved for God in the Universe, that < i>had no need for such a hypothesis.
At the same time, in the field of Physics the machinery of the first industrial revolution was developed (Thomas Newcomen's steam engine in 1705, James Watt's, 1774), but without science having much to do with it, since the principles of thermodynamics were discovered because of the challenge posed by the new machine, and not the other way around. We had to wait for the second industrial revolution for science and technology to feed back.
The new economic events that the development of commercial capitalism brought with it the appearance of the first economic literature, whose first testimonies were the Spanish mercantilists (Tomás de Mercado, Sancho de Moncada). The definition of an economic doctrine with more scientific pretensions (which really was no more than a simple mathematical apparatus, which did not rival that of other sciences) had to wait for Quesnay's Physiocracy (Tableau Economique, 1758), which, in opposition to the interventionist obsession of mercantilism, proposes economic freedom (the laissez faire) and fiscal simplification, on the basis that land is the only productive force. In 1776, the Scotsman Adam Smith gave the birth certificate to modern economics with his book The Wealth of Nations, quickly spread by Jean Baptiste Say or Jovellanos, and which is still considered the Bible. of economic liberalism.
Citizen resistance to scientific advances was notable, and it did not come solely from people with traditional reactionary ideologies. China remained open to cultural exchange for a time, but then preferred to maintain isolation, which was not as effective as Japan. Possibly on this difference rested the divergent trajectory of both countries from the second half of the XIX century: to avoid or not relationships of dependency seems retrospectively essential to generate technologically developed societies. Russia's enlightened minority and reformist czars longed for modernization and rapprochement with a Western Europe that they idealized as a counterfigure of their backwardness. If Amsterdam allowed exceptional freedom of thought and press, so did Venice. The Protestant universities were no less sclerotic than the Catholic ones in the face of innovations. In Europe, enlightened despotism was very receptive to all kinds of science, while in the Republic that he himself had helped to bring about, Lavoisier was guillotined to the fatal cry of La revolution n'a pas besoin de savants (The revolution does not need wise men). In America, the new republics resorted to science and popular education as a mechanism for the construction of their nations, especially the United States, which a century later would displace the European ones as the dominant world power.
Literacy was an essential resource for this throughout the world: from Gutenberg's printing press to the mass media, writing played a strong role in society. However, even in the middle of the Contemporary Age, in most of the world the ability to understand its meaning continued to be reserved for the upper social classes, more numerous than in the Middle Ages, but who condemned the least favored to ignorance of the written culture and the limitations of the (otherwise extremely rich) traditional oral culture.
Note
- ↑ This classification was proposed by Cristóbal Celarius
- ↑ They should not be confused with the followers of modernism, artistic and literary style, and religious movement (theological model), of the end of the centuryXIX and beginnings of the centuryXX..
- ↑ Concept of Fernand Braudel developed by Immanuel Wallerstein Modern world system
- ↑ Similar to how the man's arrival at the Moon began the space age.
- ↑ The concept was coined by Eric J. Hobsbawm The bourgeois revolutions, Barcelona, Labor ISBN 84-335-2987-1 (Original title The Age of Revolution. Europe 1789-1848London, 1964.
- ↑ E. P. Thompson is the author who treats these concepts more extensively, from a non-orthodox materialist perspective in Moral economy of the crowd (an article of great repercussion, in which it calls for the study not in a mechanistic way, but with the same subtlety the behavior of the pre-industrial masses as that of the primitive peoples subjected to anthropological science), The historical formation of the working class (translation of title The making of the english working classa voluminous treatise), and Tradition, revolt and class consciousness.
- ↑ Without including contemporary polar expeditions
- ↑ The term was coined in the famous debate that in the middle of the centuryXX. They maintained personalities of historiography and the economy more or less close to the paradigm of historical materialism, in its English or French version (e.g. magazines Past and Present and Annales), such as Maurice Dobb, Karl Polanyi, R. H. Tawney, Paul Sweezy, Kohachiro Takahashi, Christopher Hill, Georges Lefebvre, Giuliano Procacci, Eric Hobsbawm and John Merrington among others. A compilation of the articles with their answers was made in HILTON, Rodney (ed.) (1976, 1977 in Spanish) The transition from feudalism to capitalism, Barcelona, Critics, ISBN 84-7423-017-9.
- ↑ Some historians, such as Henry Kamen, pollamize by denying the history of the Habsburg Empire, claiming that Spanish was a minority language. The idea of Kamen that Spain was created by the Empire and not the empire by Spain is quite defendable: also Józef Piłsudski said it is the state that creates the nation and not the nation to the state.
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