Renaissance

The Crusades and the Inventing of the Printing Press.

Additionally, the population losses sustained in Europe as a result of the Black Death made it necessary to invent new devices to save human labor.

There were about 40,000 peasants involved in the peasants revolt. Wat Tyler and John Ball were also involved in the peasants revolt of 1381.

Medieval England experienced few revolts but the most serious was the Peasants' Revolt which took place in June 1381, A violent system of punishments for offenders was usually enough to put off peasants from causing trouble. Most areas in England also had castles in which soldiers were garrisoned, and these were usually enough to guarantee reasonable behaviour among medieval peasants.

An army of peasants from Kent and Essex marched on London. They did something no-one had done before or since - they captured the Tower of London. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the King's Treasurer were killed. The king, Richard II, was only 14 at the time but despite his youth, he agreed to meet the peasants at a place called Mile End.

What were the peasants angry about and why had they come to London?

1. After the Black Death, many manors were left short of workers. To encourage those who had survived to stay on their manor, many lords had given the peasants on their estates their freedom and paid them to work on their land. Now, nearly 35 years after the Black Death, many peasants feared that the lords would take back these privileges and they were prepared to fight for them.

2. Many peasants had to work for free on church land, sometimes up to two days in the week. This meant that they could not work on their own land which made it difficult to grow enough food for their families. Peasants wanted to be free of this burden that made the church rich but them poor. They were supported in what they wanted by a priest called John Ball from Kent.

3. There had been a long war with France. Wars cost money and that money usually came from the peasants through the taxes that they paid. In 1380, Richard II introduced a new tax called the Poll Tax. This made everyone who was on the tax register pay 5p. It was the third time in four years that such a tax had been used. By 1381, the peasants had had enough. 5p to them was a great deal of money. If they could not pay in cash, they could pay in kind, such as seeds, tools etc., anything that could be vital to survival in the coming year.

In May 1381, a tax collector arrived at the Essex village of Fobbing to find out why the people there had not paid their poll tax. He was thrown out by the villagers. In June, soldiers arrived to establish law and order. They too were thrown out as the villagers of Fobbing had now organised themselves and many other local villages in Essex had joined them. After doing this, the villagers marched on London to plead with the young king to hear their complaints.

One man had emerged as the leader of the peasants - Wat Tyler from Kent. As the peasants from Kent had marched to London, they had destroyed tax records and tax registers. The buildings which housed government records were burned down. They got into the city of London because the people there had opened the gates to them.

By mid-June the discipline of the peasants was starting to go. Many got drunk in London and looting took place. It is known that foreigners were murdered by the peasants. Wat Tyler had asked for discipline amongst those who looked up to him as their leader. He did not get it.

On June 14th, the king met the rebels at Mile End. At this meeting, Richard II gave the peasants all that they asked for and asked that they go home in peace. Some did. Others returned to the city and murdered the archbishop and Treasurer - their heads were cut off on Tower Hill by the Tower of London. Richard II spent the night in hiding in fear of his life.

On June 15th, he met the rebels again at Smithfield outside of the city's walls. It is said that this was the idea of the Lord Mayor (Sir William Walworthe) who wanted to get the rebels out of the city. Medieval London was wooden and the streets were cramped. Any attempt to put down the rebels in the city could have ended in a fire or the rebels would have found it easy to vanish into the city once they knew that soldiers were after them.

At this meeting, the Lord Mayor killed Wat Tyler. We are not sure what happened at this meeting as the only people who could write about it were on the side of the king and their evidence might not be accurate. The death of Tyler and another promise by Richard to give the peasants what they asked for, was enough to send them home.

By the summer of 1381, the revolt was over. John Ball was hanged. Richard did not keep any of his promises claiming that they were made under threat and were therefore not valid in law. Other leaders from both Kent and Essex were hanged. The poll tax was withdrawn but the peasants were forced back into their old way of life - under the control of the lord of the manor.

However, the lords did not have it their own way. The Black Death had caused a shortage of labour and over the next 100 years many peasants found that they could earn more (by their standards) as the lords needed a harvest in and the only people who could do it were the peasants. They asked for more money and the lords had to give it.

The 1895 Winchester which was made in Japan was actually made by Miroku firearms under contract for Winchester. It is not a replica, but a contracted Winchester. They have been made on a limited run basis in different calibers for the last decade. Prior to that Miroku also made the same rifle under contract from Browning Firearms.

Miroku is currently still making the 1895 for the Winchester Firearms Company, and Winchester is still selling them. New in the Box and Unfired with all papers are getting about $1300 US, but if they have been fired or used, value starts declining rapidly. 99% condition but used would garner approximately $900, while a 90% condition rifle would be worth considerably less.

Renaissance ART is art that came shortly after the middle ages. This art included building, painting, and sculptures. Mostly found in Florence, Italy.

The Spanish Inquisition was primarily an action of the Crown in Spain. It did, however, employ clerical judges, mostly religious from the Dominican Order, I believe, who judged cases according to the law of the Church. Since the religious judges were much more lenient than the civil judges, many people attempted to get their cases tried by the Inquisition instead of the civil authority.

The renaissance did not have a geography. The development of the city states of Italy started before the Renaissance, during the High Middle Ages. The Italians of central and northern Italy fought against the Holy Roman Emperor and achieved effective independence. They developed their institutions for self-government. The wealth of these city states developed through trade with the east across the eastern Mediterranean and the development of textile manufacture.

The Da Vinci Robot is used for minimally invasive surgery. Using small incisions, the surgeon is able to transfer the motion of his/her hands into smaller more precise movements. The system also includes an enhanced 3-D vision system that assists the surgeon with accuracy.

Isabel of Este, wife of Francis II Gonzaga in 1490.

Michelangelo did create a sculpture of David, but there are also other artists who have worked with that Biblical subject and done sculptures of David, so really it depends upon which statue you're talking about.

yes.

science and art

Florence

the last supper, Mona Lisa, the school of athens,

No, Saint Nicholas lived in ancient times, and died about a century before the Middle Ages started.

one reason why education was important to cosimo de' medici was because he valued education and because he needed workers who could read,write,and understand math.

the song of Roland to the best of my knowledge is not part of Renaissance literature, but it is rather the first work that came out of the Middle Ages that wasn't in Latin. It was in Old French.

Genoa had a republican government beginning in the 11th century. It was at that time an independent commune, or republican city, technically within the Kingdom of Italy.

There is a link to an article on the Republic of Genoa below.

The medieval popes had a series of problems with monarchs who wanted to take some of the power of the Church. There were three major issues. One of these was that the Church owned a huge amount of land, and did not pay taxes on it. Another was that the clergy had a benefit, called benefit of clergy, which freed them from secular courts; if a clergyman was accused of a crime, he would be tried by the Church rather than an ordinary court. Also, the kings wanted control over who was made bishops in the cathedrals of their countries.

In the conflicts that arose over these issues, kings and emperors were subject to excommunication. When a king was excommunicated, the people who had obligations to him were often freed of those obligations. People who made oaths of loyalty were excused from those oaths. Countries that had treaties were excused of those treaties. The result was that a powerful leader could suddenly find himself without much of the support he was used to. King John of England, his father King Henry II, and Emperor Henry IV all suffered from problems from excommunication.

There are links below to articles dealing with excommunicated monarchs.

There is very little information available about Catherine Talbot, Countess of Pembroke. I was not able to find any portraits of her online.

Some of Titian's achievements were: influencing other artists, making innovations in the handling of color, and becoming court palatine and the knight of the Golden Spur.

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

With increasing literacy, and scientific productivity of ordinary people, it became apparent that scientific discovery did not come only from persons having positions of priority, such as those among the nobility, but rather that no scientific investigator could be excluded on the basis of relative poverty alone.

There were royalty, noblewomen of various ranks, and of course commoners- peasants and serfs, etc, who were essentially bound to the land owned by the lords or nobles/ Women did normally take up arms- but they were assigned various tasks in the community ( obviously cooking, child care, making and repairing clothes). One can see even in fantasy the attraction of being a Girl Knight would hold! There were some, (all of the nobility) but few and far. Queen Isabella wore armor in the field, and had red hair also- move over, Anastasia!

There is a link to a related question below.

Rennaissance is french for re-new, basically all the old ways of thinking in the medieval era were renewed, meaning Artwork was changing, buildings were looking differently, different religious tolerance was starting to happen (although it was still pretty bad) and most importantly, technological advances started changing the landscape, gun-powder was discovered, new ways of governing people were develloped, and machines did most the hard-work, more people were educated