An Economic Rebirth
The Renaissance is commonly called a European cultural movement. Its cultural and artistic elements get all the attention. Yet, the Renaissance was as much about trade as it was about art.
The Renaissance started at the end of some major upheavals. The Black Death had killed millions. The Crusades, the wars between Venice and Genoa, the Hundred Years War between England and France, and the Spanish Reconquista each created instability and hurt trade. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these upheavals settled down enough to allow trade networks to expand between Southern Europe and the Islamic world and between Northern and Southern Europe.
Trade connections made Italian bankers and merchants very rich. As parts of Europe emerged from the devastation of the Black Death, patterns of wealth and labor changed, with many people concentrating in urban centers and demanding higher wages. As more people could afford luxury goods, demand for trade increased. Italian merchants grew wealthy from trade, and Italian cities emerged as commercial hubs. Great banking families, like the Medici in Florence, dominated the politics of the region.
With their new wealth, these merchants, bankers, and rulers funded the arts and architecture of the Renaissance, patronizing artists like Donatello, Botticelli, and Titian. These patrons were not acting out of a sense of generosity or civic virtue. They wanted art and buildings that showed their wealth and power. In many cases, the wealthy commissioned elaborate portraits of themselves or had their family inserted into paintings of biblical or historical scenes. It was a bit like taking a selfie with a celebrity, but more expensive.
The great art and innovations of the Renaissance were made possible by Europe’s integration into Afro-Eurasian trade networks. Trade introduced new pigments from Central and South Asian plants and minerals to the palettes of Renaissance painters. The advances in finance employed by Italian bankers relied on mathematical concepts developed by Arabic and Indian scholars. Even the technologies behind the printing press—which allowed Renaissance ideas to spread rapidly after its invention in the fifteenth century—were probably the result of Afro- Eurasian trade. Moveable type and papermaking were first pioneered in China, Korea, and the Islamic world.
