Many centuries have passed since Augustine's world - about eight centuries. Much has happened in these intervening centuries, and the other IDS 171 class (Mr. Allis, Mr. Cox, Ms. Portfleet and Mr. Quinn) has chosen to focus on some of its most fascinating aspects. If you meet someone from this class at an off-campus party or Bible study, you may wish to engage them in stimulating intellectual conversation about what they've learned.

But this is the history of those illustrious centuries in a nutshell: The new Germanic and other migrants who swept into Western Europe from 400 to 900, while respecting many Roman traditions, brought an end to unified government and urban life. Rural and illiterate, they placed little emphasis on learning, and thus much of the Roman - and particularly the Greek - intellectual legacy was lost to Western Europe. The Roman Catholic Church, with its influential pope in Rome, was instrumental in keeping whatever learning there was alive, as monks and priests were among the few literate people in large parts of Europe. The Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire survived the "barbarian" invasions and kept much of the ancient legacy alive - and added to it. So, too, did the Arabs, most of them Muslim, whose empires dominated the Middle East after 650. They translated and preserved Plato and Aristotle, as well as excelling in medicine, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry and other sciences hardly practiced in Western Europe during the early medieval period (500 - 1000).

The institution to watch in medieval Western Europe (from, say, 500 to 1500) is the Catholic church, which exercised enormous influence not only religiously, but politically, culturally and intellectually as well. By the year 1000, Catholic Christianity was the only acceptable faith in large parts of Europe, from Poland in the east to Ireland in the west, from Spain in the south to Norway in the north. (You will read about the spiritual contours of medieval Christianity in Rogers.) The popes claimed not only all spiritual authority for the church, but the right to judge kings and other rulers. At no point was this claim fully accepted by secular rulers. But until about 1300, kings were often too weak politically to challenge the pope. Keep in mind that this was the age of feudalism, when kings and emperors, though nominally commanding the obedience of local nobility, often did not possess the power to force that obedience. As a result, the nobility, sitting in their castles, often thumbed their noses at these rulers. Finally, it may be worth mentioning that the popes also directly ruled large portions of Italy, and proved as grasping and ambitious as other political leaders in Italy. This should give you some sense of why Dante, an Italian, consigns a number of popes to his Inferno.

Sometime in the 1200s - the century our unit begins - this picture begins to change. By the 11th century, Europe was emerging from the difficult centuries of the early Middle Ages. Better agricultural techniques and more arable land ensured that there was a decent food supply, and this supply enabled, in various ways, the growth of trade and towns. The reemergence of cities created new classes of people, including skilled craftspeople and powerful merchants. Although these groups often fought against each other for economic and political control of their cities (you'll see how this struggle affected Florence) these urban-dwellers generated - by medieval standards - huge amounts of money. In the long run, money meant that the kings of England, France and Spain were able to consolidate their own power and establish the kind of strong states that had been absent from Western Europe for centuries. This development had bad consequences for papal political power. In 1303, French agents roughed up Pope Boniface VIII (see the Inferno), and in 1309 the seat of the Catholic church was moved from Rome to Avignon, France. Although the papacy later relocated to Rome, subsequent troubles (see Rogers) also weakened the church's political - and spiritual - power.

Money also had an enormous effect on the trading cities of northern Italy, not least the greatest of these cities, Florence. The pope and the German emperor (or Holy Roman emperor, as he was also called) had so weakened each other trying to control Italy that these cities could become city-states, virtually independent from papal and imperial authority. Certainly the wealth of their trade gave them the means to maintain their independence. We might add that a lot of wealth was also required in this respect, given how often various parties in these city-states, not to mention pope and emperor, sought to take over their own cities and neighboring ones as well. But wealth also had other, more positive effects. It created a new class of merchant who possessed the time and the interest to pursue education and other forms of cultural refinement. Such an education was not only to be pursued for its own sake, but was supposed to enhance the prestige of one's family and one's city. In short, wealth created an urban, civic culture in which art, literature and other intellectual pursuits were considered extremely important to individual and collective identity, and thus were strongly encouraged.

Northern Italy was, from roughly 1200 to 1500, the most urban, wealthy part of Europe, and this goes a long way toward explaining why the Northern Italian cities - with Florence often leading the way - produced some of the finest works of art, literature and political theory in the "Western" tradition. Great art is seldom very far from money. But the very location of the Northern Italian cities also greatly enhanced the artistic and intellectual tenor of the region. Not only did they lie in Italy, with its strong Roman influences, but they were also directly on trade routes between the Near East and Western Europe. This was, in fact, was the very reason for these cities' wealth. But location also gave the Northern Italians access to the great learning of the Byzantines and Arabs, with whom they extensively traded. It cannot be a surprise, therefore, that the first medieval university in Christian Europe, was founded at Bologna (1088), in Northern Italy. To be sure, universities were soon founded elsewhere (including the University of Paris, where the Northern Italian Aquinas studied and taught), and shows just how widespread the new learning was throughout Europe. Still, the Northern Italians continued to press their natural advantage. Over the course of many decades, these Italians discovered the cultural treasures of the East, from scientific handbooks to the "lost" texts of Plato. In time, they - and the Florentines again in particular - developed their own distinct cultural legacy, which included the great literary works of Dante and Boccaccio, not to mention the art of Giotto, Botticelli, Michelangelo and Leonardo DaVinci.

The period from 1200 to 1500 (or 1512, when the Florentine Republic collapses) covers what most historians would consider both the "late medieval" and the "Renaissance" periods. Although the very term "Renaissance" is a hotly debated one, we may define it, at least for Northern Italy, as the period when artists and intellectuals enthusiastically rediscovered the style and content characteristic of ancient Greek and Roman culture. To what extent they actually broke with medieval culture - a church-dominated world in which one's estate beyond the grave was considered more important than the one on this earth - is a problem you should try to work out. All of the authors we will be reading, from Aquinas to Machiavelli, consciously incorporated Greek or Roman ideas into their own work. Yet some of the early authors of this unit, notably Aquinas and Dante, are considered "medieval," not "Renaissance" writers. So a number of questions arise: At one point - if any - did authors and artists discussed here develop a spirit or attitude distinct from a medieval one? And even if they did, is there a point when their work became more secular (or more "pagan") than Christian? These are very old and difficult questions. But these questions help us think about the character of the cultural heritage of "the West," and of the interaction between Christianity - the dominant religion of "the West" for much of the last two millennia - and the persistent influence of Greece and Rome.

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