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 Exercises

The Birth of the Modern World

    The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw an extraordinary migration of peoples from England and the continent of Europe to the New World. In those years, the modern European world was formed. Its formation was marked by growth of trade and commerce, the rise of the middle class, the evolution of national states, the reformation of the Christian Church, and the development of representative government. These changes, gradually developing over many years, led directly to the discovery and the settlement of the New World.

    The feudal system had depended upon the organization of society into two classes, those who owned the land and those who worked it. It also depended upon the institution of the Roman Catholic Church, headed by the Pope in Rome. The Church was a kind of super-government, holding together the different elements of European society in Christian unity.

    The final breakup of the feudal system had three main causes. First, feudalism overlooked the fact that men are not created with the same talents, ideas or imagination. Second, the Church found it increasingly difficult to keep control over all the parts of the European society. Third, Christian Europe, at the end of the eleventh century, changed its whole pattern of life by engaging in the Crusades. After experiencing other ways of living, they did not want to return to the narrow world that they had left. This physical freedom and movement of large numbers of people helped toward ending the close society of the medieval world.

    Economically, the most immediate change to result from the Crusades was the rise of trade and commerce. When the Crusaders went to the Near East, they were introduced to many things that made living more pleasant. It took little imagination for men to see the possibilities of developing trade by bringing such Eastern goods to the people of Europe. Venice was the first of the European cities to realize this, but it was not long before other Mediterranean cities began transporting Eastern goods back to Europe. Soon Westerners found their lives changed by such trade.

    At first, these goods were carried to places where they were bartered. To barter means to trade goods for goods. But the barter system soon proved impractical for two basic reasons. One was that the bartering process would not always work. The solution to this problem was in the wider use of money, since without a commonly accepted and practical means of determining value and price, the growth of trade would remain slow.

    The other reason was the inconvenient system of carrying the goods to the buyer, rather than having the buyer come to the goods. Only small amounts could be carried over long distances. The solution to this problem was in the development of trading centers. New towns generally grew up along well-traveled roads or on the river banks where communication and transportation were easy.

    With the gradual breakup of feudalism, however, a new group came into existence consisting of townsmen who made their living from banking and trade and the workers who provided goods and services for them. The activities and ideas of this growing group affected almost every aspect of life － political, social, economic, intellectual, and spiritual. Money, not land, became the source of wealth to these people, and it is to their group that the modern world largely owes its birth.

    In earlier years, land had been the only source of wealth, and the rich were only those who held and controlled property. Because land was usually passed from the father to the first-born son under the feudal law, the system offered little or no chance for the poor man to acquire the land he would need to make himself prosperous. However, with the rise of bankers and traders in the society, money became a more important source of wealth, and a man with talent and imagination could at last break the bonds on him by birth.

    Following closely on these economic changes came a breakup in the political foundations of the medieval world. Before the Crusades, kings had existed, but their role was more or less than of a figurehead, a chief in name only, in the complicated feudal system.

    In the period during and following the Crusades, the power of kings, however, began to grow. This happened for three main reasons. First, because of the absence of Crusaders from Europe or because of their death abroad, most of their property was left unprotected and taken over by the kings. Second, kings made use of the developing towns to add to their power. With the money collected from the towns, the king could then afford to raise an army loyal to himself with which to protect the towns. Third, kings began to levy taxes on their subjects instead of demanding service, which had been the custom in earlier times. The taxes enabled a king to buy services, thus increasing his power. Gradually, political authority was gathered into the hands of the king, and slowly the national states of modern Europe began to appear.

    Although English kings continued to build up their royal authority in many ways from 1215 to the seventeenth century, on the whole, they respected the principle of the Magna Carta. British royal authority was based on the principle of contract between the ruler and the ruled. And this was to be of great importance to the future history of the New World.

    Along with the social, economic, and political changes that overturned medieval Europe came the most exciting and liberating change of all: the revolution of men's minds. The intellectual movement which began in Italy in the fourteenth century and had swept through all of Europe by the sixteenth century is called the Renaissance. Renaissance means rebirth, and intellectually, men were indeed born again in this period. It was a many-sided movement that introduced a search for truth and knowledge that has never stopped.

    The medieval view to life had been a narrow one. This view, in general, was that God had created the world and man could not change its conditions. The Renaissance spirit, however, was in direct contrast to this view. The world was man's to explore, to use, and to change as he chose. This view to life encouraged action and gave people confidence in themselves and in their powers of reasoning. They dared to ask questions and wanted to find out the answers for themselves.

    This sudden curiosity about the world exploded in two main directions: the exploration of the physical world and the re-examination of religious beliefs. The former led to the discovery of faraway places all over the globe, including the New World, and the latter led to a change in the last great medieval institution, the single Christian Church. First, we will examine the exploration of the physical world.

    In the mid-fifteenth century, a great number of long ocean voyages took place. There were several practical reasons for this sudden exploration of the unknown. For one thing, Venice had built a monopoly on the Mediterranean trade and kept others from sharing this wealth. Eastern goods were in great demand in Europe, and Venice, being the chief source of supply, could charge high prices. As England, France, Spain, and Portugal appeared as nations, they wanted to break Venice's hold on this trade and to get their share of it. Their ships could not fight in the Mediterranean so they sent out explorers to seek other routes to the East.

    Another reason that some sailors dared to sail beyond the sight of land into the great Atlantic Ocean was the improvement in navigation. Better maps reduced fears of the unknown, and the earlier invention of the compass took the guess work out of sailing a ship on course.

    The last reason for the many sea voyages of this period was simply the great spirit of adventure which swept over the people of Europe. One voyage led to another, and a growing sense of competition encouraged each nation to send its ships to sea. In 1492, Christopher Columbus, encouraged and financed by the king and queen of Spain, sailed west in search of the East Indies and discovered instead the islands of the Caribbean which he called the West Indies. He had, however, found the New World.

    Not to be outdone by Spain, England sent John Cabot, an Italian explorer who had become an English citizen, across the Atlantic in 1497 and again in 1498 to explore the coast of North America. Upon his voyages, England rested its claims to the lands which would finally become the United States. In less than 100 years, from 1492 to 1534, Europeans had discovered two new continents of North and South America and had broadened their land to include the whole globe.

    This revolutionary spirit of exploration which led men to expand their physical world, also encouraged them to take a new look at their spiritual world. The questions and conclusions of these spiritual explorers led to the Reformation, the movement to reform the Roman Catholic Church. Just as the discovery of new lands was the result of the sea explorers, the evolvement of new ways of explaining the Christian beliefs was the result of intellectual explorers.

    One of the basic causes for this religious questioning was that by the beginning of the fifteenth century, education in Europe was spreading. The Bible had been translated from Latin into other languages. More and more people for the first time were able to read the Bible, and as a result, they began to develop their own ideas as to the meaning of Christianity. For this and other reasons, the sixteenth century saw the breakup of the one Roman Catholic Church into many different sects.

    With the Reformation, the modern European world was born. Almost every way of life in the medieval period was washed away by the tide of change. The rigid class social system had been replaced by the more flexible society of the middle class. National states had replaced many of the feudal powers. Trade and commerce had been allowed to expand at an ever-increasing rate. Man had sailed to new worlds, and the European had rebelled against old ideas and gained the freedom to seek truth in the world around him through the powers of his own mind.

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