The Traditional Renaissance Narrative vs. Reality
John Green presents the standard story of the Renaissance as a "rebirth" of European culture after the Dark Ages, ushering in secularism, rationality, and individualism. However, he immediately challenges this view, arguing that it is deeply controversial and potentially inaccurate.
What the Renaissance Is Supposed to Be
- An efflorescence of visual arts (and some literature) focused on idealized human forms, copying Greek and Roman styles.
- A rediscovery of Greek and Roman texts and ideas, studied by scholars known as humanists.
- Humanism does not mean atheism. Renaissance artists and scholars were deeply religious (e.g., painting countless Madonnas). It simply means studying the "humanities" (literature, philosophy, history).
Why Italy? The Real Reason: Money
Green argues that the Renaissance was funded by massive wealth from trade, not just artistic genius.
- Industrial production: Florence made cloth, Milan made arms.
- Maritime trade: Venice and Genoa grew rich by trading with Islamic empires, particularly the Ottoman Empire. In fact, the story of how Venice and the Ottomans: How Trade Fueled the Renaissance and Columbus is central to understanding this economic engine.
- Key Example: The vibrant colors of Florentine textiles came from alum, a chemical dye fixative found primarily in Ottoman Anatolia. When Italian alum was discovered in 1460, Pope Pius II granted a monopoly to the Medici family, the famous patrons of Renaissance art.
"The clothes, the paint, the painters, enough food to get a double chin, all of that was paid for with money from trade with the Ottomans."
The Non-European Roots of the Renaissance
Green systematically dismantles the idea that the Renaissance was a purely European phenomenon.
1. Islamic Scholarship as a Foundation
Muslim scholars preserved and translated ancient Greek texts (Ptolemy, Aristotle) for centuries. This deep intellectual history is comparable to the rich story of Persians vs Greeks: Rethinking Ancient History and Western Civilization. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 caused Byzantine scholars to flee to Italy with their books, and Istanbul remained a destination for scholars seeking Greek texts.
2. Copernicus and Muslim Science
Green presents evidence that Copernicus, a doctor, lawyer, and the father of heliocentrism, likely had access to an Islamic mathematics treatise. His diagrams are nearly identical to those found in the Muslim work, even down to the lettering.
Why the Renaissance Didn't Actually Happen
Green presents three major arguments against the Renaissance as a distinct historical event.
The Problem of Awareness
- No one living in 1512 knew they were in the "Renaissance." It was not a conscious historical moment like the fall of the Berlin Wall.
- Peasants did not wake up thinking, "I feel a new sense of individualism based on my capacity for reason."
The Problem of Scope
- The Renaissance only affected a tiny sliver of the European population.
- 95% of Europeans lived on farms as peasants or tenants. Life expectancy actually decreased in some areas.
- The rediscovery of Aristotle did not change the daily lives of people governed by the sun and the Catholic Church.
The Problem of Time
- The Renaissance spans hundreds of years. Donatello and Raphael were born 97 years apart. Petrarch (1304) and Montaigne (1533) were separated by 229 years, a span almost as long as the history of the United States.
- This collection of "mutually interdependent things" occurring over centuries defies the simple cycle of life, death, and rebirth (the narrative of Enlightened-Dark-Reenlightened Europe). This narrative is critiqued in depth in the article on The Real Dark Ages: A Global Perspective on History's Most Misunderstood Era.
Conclusion: A Useful Narrative, Not a Fact
Green concludes that we remember the Renaissance as important not because it was central to the 15th century, but because it gives us a simple story that makes Europe the center of art and history. While the ideas became influential, the concept of a singular "Renaissance" is a constructed simplification.
Hi, I'm John Green, This is Crash Course: World History and today we're going to talk about something that ought to be controversial: The Renaissance. So you probably already know about the Renaissance thanks to the work of noted teenage mutant
ninja turtles Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael. But that isn't the whole story. Mr. Green, Mr. Green. What about Splinter? I think he was an architect. Ugh, me from the past, youíre such an idiot. Splinter was a painter, sculptor, AND an architect.
He was a quite a Renaissance rat. [theme music] Right, so the story goes that the Renaissance saw the rebirth of European culture after
the miserable Dark Ages, and that it ushered in the modern era of secularism, rationality, and individualism. And those are all in the list of things we like here at Crash Course. Mr. Green. I think you're forgetting Cool Ranch Doritos?
Yeah, fair enough. Then what's so controversial? Well, the whole idea of a European Renaissance presupposes that Europe was like an island unto itself that was briefly enlightened when the Greeks
were ascendant and then lost its way and then rediscovered its former European glory. Furthermore, I'm going to argue that the Renaissance didn't even necessarily happen. But first, let's assume that it did. Essentially, the Renaissance was an efflorescence of arts
(primarily visual, but also to a lesser extent literary) and ideas in Europe that coincided with the rediscovery of Roman and Greek culture. It's easiest to see this in terms of visual art, Renaissance art tends to feature a focus
on the human form, somewhat idealized, as Roman and especially Greek art had. And this "classicizing" is also rather apparent in the architecture of the Renaissance which featured all sorts of Greek columns and triangular pediments and Roman arches and domes. In fact,
looking at a Renaissance building you might even be able to fool yourself into thinking you're looking at an actual Greek building, if you sort of squint and ignore the fact that Greek buildings tend to be, you know, ruins.
In addition to rediscovering, that is, copying, Greek and Roman art, the Renaissance saw the rediscovery of Greek and Roman writings and their ideas. And that opened up a whole new world for scholars, well, not a new world, actually since the texts
were more than 1000 years old, but you know what I mean. The scholars who examined, translated, and commented upon these writings were called humanists, which can be a little bit of a confusing term, because it implies they were
concerned with, you know, humans rather than, say, the religious world. Which can add to the common, but totally incorrect, assumption that Renaissance writers and artists and scholars were, like, secretly not religious.
That's a favorite favorite area of speculation on the Internet and in Dan Brown novels, but the truth is that Renaissance artists were religious. As evidence, let me present you with that fact that they painted the Madonna over and over and over and over and over and STAN!
Anyway, all humanism means is that these scholars studied what were called the humanities. Literature, philosophy, history. Today, of course, these areas of study are known as the so-called dark arts. What? Liberal
arts? Aw, Stan, youíre always making history less fun. I WANT TO BE A PROFESSOR OF THE DARK ARTS. Stan: The Dark Arts job is a dangerous position. Yeah, I guess that's true, so we'll stick with this.
Right so here at Crash Course, we try not to focus too much on dates, but if Iím going to convince you that the Renaissance didn't actually happen, I should probably tell you, you know, when it didn't happen. So traditionally the Renaissance is associated with the 15th
and 16th centuries. Ish. The Renaissance happened all across Europe, but weíre going to focus on Italy, because I want to and I own the video camera. Plus, Italy really spawned the Renaissance.
What was it about Italy that lent itself to Renaissancing? Was it the wine? The olives? The pasta? The plumbers? The relative permissiveness when it comes to the moral lassitude of their leaders? Well, letís go to the Thought Bubble.
Italy was primed for Renaissance for exactly one reason: Money. A society has to be super rich to support artists and elaborate building projects and to feed scholars who translate and comment on thousand-year-old documents. And the Italian
city states were very wealthy for two reasons. First, many city states were mini-industrial powerhouses each specializing in a particular industrial product like Florence made cloth, Milan made arms.
Second, the cities of Venice and Genoa got stinking rich from trade. Genoa turned out a fair number of top-notch sailors, like for instance Christopher Columbus. But the Venetians became the richest city state of all.
As you'll remember from the Crusades, the Venetians were expert sailors, shipbuilders, and merchants, and as you'll remember from our discussions of Indian Ocean trade, they also had figured out ways to trade with Islamic empires, including the biggest economic power
in the region: the Ottomans. Without trading with the Islamic world, especially in pepper, Venice couldn't have afforded all those painters, nor would they have had money to pay for the incredibly fancy clothes
they put on to pose for their fancy portraits. The clothes, the paint, the painters, enough food to get a double chin, all of that was paid for with money from trade with the Ottomans.
I know I talk a lot about trade, but that's because itís so incredibly awesome, and it really does bind the world together. And while trade can lead to conflicts, on balance, it has been responsible for more
peaceful contacts than violent ones because, you know, death is bad for business. This was certainly the case in the Eastern Mediterranean where the periods of trade-based diplomacy were longer and more frequent than periods of war, even though all we ever talk
about is war because it's very dramatic, which is why my brother Hank's favorite video game is called Assassin's Creed, not Some Venetian Guys Negotiate A Trade Treaty. Thanks, Thought Bubble. So here's another example of non-Europeans supporting the Renaissance:
The Venetians exported textiles to the Ottomans. They were usually woven in other cities like Florence, and the reason Florentine textiles were so valuable is because their color remained vibrant.
That is because they were dyed with a chemical called alum, which was primarily found in Anatolia, in the Ottoman Empire. So to make the textiles the Ottomans craved, the Italians needed Ottoman alum, at least until 1460.
When Giovanni da Castro, Pope Pius II's godson, discovered alum, in Italy, in Tolfa. And he wrote to his godfather, the Pope: "Today I bring you victory over the Turk. Every year they wring from the Christians more than 300,000 ducats for the alum with which we dye wool
various colors, But I have found seven mountains so rich in this material that they could supply seven worlds. If you will give orders to engage workmen, build furnaces, and smelt the ore, you will provide all Europe with alum and the Turk will lose all his profits. Instead
they will accrue to you." So the Pope was like, "Heck yeah." More importantly he granted a monopoly on the mining rights of alum to a particular Florentine family, the Medicis.
You know, the ones you always see painted. But vitally, Italian alum mines didn't bring victory over the Turks, or cause them to lose all their profits, just as mining and drilling at home never obviate the need for trade.
Okay, one last way contact with Islam helped to create the European Renaissance, if indeed it happened: The Muslim world was the source of many of the writings that Renaissance scholars studied. For centuries, Muslim scholars had been working their way through ancient Greek writings,
especially Ptolemy and Aristotle, who despite being consistently wrong about everything managed to be the jumping off point for thinking both in the Christian and Muslim worlds. And the fall of Constantinople in 1453 helped further spread Greek ideas because Byzantine
scholars fled for Italy, taking their books with them. So we have the Ottomans to thank for that, too. And even after it had become a Muslim capital, Istanbul was still, like, the number one destination for book nerds searching for ancient Greek texts.
Plus, if we stretch our definition of Renaissance thought to include scientific thought, there is a definite case to be made that Muslim scholars influenced Copernicus, arguably the Renaissance's greatest mind.
Oh, it's time for the open letter? An Open Letter to Copernicus. But first, let's see whatís in the secret compartment today. Wow, the heliocentric solar system? Cool. Earth in the middle, sun in the middle, earth in the middle, sun in the
middle. Ptolemy. Copernicus. Ptolemy. Copernicus. Right, an open letter to Copernicus. Dear Copernicus,
Why you always gotta make the rest of us look so bad? You were both a lawyer and a doctor? That doesn't seem fair. You spoke four languages and discovered that the earth is not the center of the universe, come on.
But at least you didn't discover it entirely on your own. Now, there's no way to be sure that you had access to Muslim scholarship on this topic. But one of your diagrams is so similar to a proof found in an Islamic mathematics treatise
that it's almost impossible that you didnít have access to it. Even the letters on the diagram are almost the same. So at least I can tell my mom that when she asks why I'm not a doctor and a lawyer and the guy who discovered the heliocentric solar system.
Best wishes, John Green Alright, so now having spent the last several minutes telling you why the Renaissance happened in Italy and not in, I don't know, like India or Russia or whatever, I'm going to argue
that the Renaissance did not in fact happen. Let's start with the problem of time. The Renaissance isn't like the Battle of Hastings or the French Revolution where people were aware that they were living amid history.
Like, when I was eleven and most of you didnít exist yet, my dad made my brother and me turn off the Cosby Show and watch people climbing on the Berlin Wall so we could see history. But no one, like, woke their kids up in Tuscan village in 1512 like, "Mario, Luigi, come
outside. The Renaissance is here!" "Hurry, we're living in a glorious new era, where man's relationship to learning is changing." "I somehow feel a new sense of individualism based on my capacity for reason."
No. In fact, most people in Europe were totally unaware of the Renaissance, because its art and learning affected a tiny sliver of the European population. Like, life expectancy in many areas of Europe actually went down during the Renaissance.
Art and learning of the Renaissance didn't filter down to most people the way that technology does today. And really the Renaissance was only experienced by the richest of the rich and those people, like painters, who served them.
I mean, there were some commercial opportunities, like for framing paintings or binding books, but the vast majority of Europeans still lived on farms either as free peasants or tenants. And the rediscovery of Aristotle didnít in any way change their lives, which were governed
by the rising and setting of the sun, and, intellectually, by the Catholic Church. In fact, probably about 95% of Europeans never encountered the Renaissance's opulence or art or modes of thought. We have constructed the Renaissance as important not because it was so central to the 15th
century. I mean, at the time Europe wasnít the worldís leader in, anything other than the tiny business of Atlantic trade. We remember it as important because it matters to us now. It gave us the ninja turtles.
We care about Aristotle and individualism and the Mona Lisa and the possibility that Michelangelo painted an anatomically correct brain onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, because these things give us a narrative that makes sense.
Europe was enlightened, and then it was unenlightened, and then it was re-enlightened, and ever since it's been the center of art and commerce and history. You see that cycle of life, death, and rebirth a lot in historical recollection, but it just isn't accurate.
So it's true that many of the ideas introduced to Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries became very important. But remember, when we talk about the Renaissance, weíre talking about hundreds of years. I mean, although they share ninja turtledom, Donatello and Raphael were born 97 years apart. And the
Renaissance humanist Petrarch was born in 1304, 229 years before the Renaissance humanist Montaigne. That's almost as long as the United States has existed. So was the Renaissance a thing? Not really. It was a lot of mutually interdependent things that occurred over centuries. Stupid
truth always resisting simplicity. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week. Crash Sourse is produced and directed by Stan Muller. Our script supervisor is Danica Johnson. The show is written by my high school history teacher Raoul Meyer and myself, and our graphic team is Thought Bubble.
Last week's phrase of the week was Angry Birds. If you wanna suggest future phrases of the week or guess at this week's, you can do so in comments where you can also ask question about today's video that will be answered by our team of historians. Thanks for watching Crash Course. As we say in my
hometown, Don't Forget to Be Awesome.
The Renaissance is traditionally described as a 'rebirth' of European culture after the Dark Ages, marked by a revival of art, literature, and classical learning. However, the video argues this narrative is controversial because it ignores the economic foundations (funded by trade with the Ottoman Empire) and non-European roots (Islamic scholarship), and it overstates the impact on the majority of Europeans who remained peasants unaffected by these changes.
The Renaissance was largely fueled by wealth from trade, not just artistic genius. Cities like Florence, Milan, Venice, and Genoa grew rich through industrial production (cloth, arms) and maritime trade with Islamic empires, especially the Ottoman Empire. For example, the vibrant colors in Florentine textiles came from alum, a chemical dye fixative sourced from Ottoman Anatolia, and the Medici family's monopoly on Italian alum made them key patrons of Renaissance art.
Islamic scholars preserved and translated ancient Greek texts (e.g., Ptolemy, Aristotle) for centuries, which later reached Europe. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 caused Byzantine scholars to flee to Italy with their books, and Istanbul remained a hub for Greek texts. Additionally, Copernicus likely based his heliocentric model on an Islamic mathematics treatise, as his diagrams nearly match those in the Muslim work.
Humanism in the Renaissance refers to the study of the 'humanities' (literature, philosophy, history) based on classical texts, not atheism. Renaissance artists and scholars were deeply religious, as seen in their countless paintings of Madonnas and religious themes. It was a focus on human potential and achievements within a Christian framework.
People living in the 15th century did not know they were in the 'Renaissance'—it was not a conscious historical moment. The concept only affected a tiny elite (5% of Europeans), while 95% of peasants lived unchanged lives governed by the sun and Church. Moreover, the Renaissance spanned hundreds of years (e.g., Petrarch in 1304 to Montaigne in 1533), making it too broad and gradual to fit the simple cycle of 'rebirth'.
The video concludes that the Renaissance is a 'useful narrative' rather than a historical fact because it simplifies history to make Europe the center of art and progress. While the ideas and art became influential later, the concept was constructed by historians to tell a convenient story, ignoring the global economic and intellectual contributions that shaped it.
The Renaissance was not a purely European phenomenon. It was funded by trade with the Islamic Ottoman Empire, and its intellectual foundations came from Islamic scholarship that preserved and advanced Greek texts. Copernicus's heliocentrism likely drew from Muslim science, and the fall of Constantinople brought Byzantine scholars with Greek texts to Italy. This challenges the Eurocentric narrative of a 'rebirth' originating solely in Europe.
Heads up!
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