What Was The Renaissance: Fill & Download for Free

Yes!All empires eventually collapse and the Roman Empire was no exception. What was astonishing about the Roman Empire was not that it collapsed but the fact that it lasted so bloody long!!!The Roman state existed in some shape or form from its founding in 753BC until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. That’s a whopping 2,206 years! It basically lasted from the dawn of the Iron Age before the deportation of the 10 lost tribes of Israel until the Renaissance and Age of Exploration when the Europeans were on the brink of discovering America.Basically the Roman state was in existence when this polymath was aliveAnd it was still in existence when this polymath was aliveNow that’s what you call imperial longevity!

The Renaissance started on 6 April 1327.On this day, a young cleric, specialist in Roman and canon law, came to the church of Sainte-Claire d’Avignon. He was Italian but Pope lived in Avignon, making it one of the best places for an educated young man to make a career.In this church, he saw a young woman named Laura. And he fell in love.This love, however, was hopeless. And not only because Francesco Petrarca had already taken monastic vows but because the lady was married and did not deem it possible to cheat on her husband.So Petrarch (this is how his name is Anglicized) started to write poems about his love. He wrote many poems. He became a superstar, a famous poet. His admirers wrote him letters and he answered them - and they read his letters to everyone they knew, proud to get something written by Petrarch. Soon his fan base included kings and popes.In 1340 both Paris and Rome proposed to crown him with a laurel wreath. He chose Rome because he loved Antiquity. And he was crowned on the grounds of Rome’s Capitol, becoming a laureate in an event to which all the award-giving ceremonies from Nobel Prizes to Academy Awards can be traced.Now that Petrarch was officially recognized as superstar, every phrase of his immediately became popular throughout Europe. Petrarch was interested in the inner mind of the human. Petrarch loved travelling just for fun - he is sometimes known as the ‘first tourist’. He climbed a mountain in the Alps - and wrote a famous account about it. It became fashionable to travel, to climb mountains and to try to understand the human mind.But most of all (second only to Laura) Petrarch loved old books. In his voyages, he bought many ancient manuscrits and commissionned copies of others, finally collecting a library of some 200 volumes, absolutely exceptional for this time. It became fashionable to read ancient authors. Petrarch was the first to speak about ‘Middle Ages’, the time of decline between the Roman Empire and his own era. He believed that assiduous study of classic texts and imitating the classics can help make life better. Needless to say, such a way of thinking became fashionable. The Renaissance was born - the movement that was at the origin of the modern Western civilisation.One could speculate that the Renaissance was inevitable, with or without Petrarch’s inspiration. Yet we would never know how different would our world be if Petrarch never saw Laura or if he could be reunited with her in real life.One of Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura with an English translation

The Middle Ages in-between.The Dark Ages ended with the coronation of Charlemagne as the Holy Roman Emperor in 800 AD. The Renaissance began in the late 15th century.There was the 700 years of the Middle Ages in-between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance.