Reference no: EM13873037

PLEASE answer the following 5 questions. Each question can be answered with a short answer of 2-3 sentences. No more than 3 sentences for each. . 

Question 1. The 9 Crusades from 1099 -1300AD had a significant causal role in the subsequent re-birth of science and humanism in Western, with the Renaissance, Reformation and the Scientific Revolution of the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries, respectively.  How so? Please explain with examples to support your views.

Question 2. What were the traditionally held  Aristotlean Geocentric and Teleological world views that were challenged in the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th Ceturies AD? Why were Aristotle's view so strongly held? What were these two theories replaced with? 

Question 3. We see the use of mathematics, reason and scientific observation change the both the subject  and method of natural philosophy from a qualitative to a quantitative view of the world and its description. Explain this change, called the scientific revolution, that gave us modern science. Support your explanations with examples.

 

Question 4. The scientific revolution may be described as a movement away from Church authority and divine authorship beliefs to an explanation of nature based on reason and observation. Explain: including the people, their inventions and their theories that changed forever our understanding of the world we live in.  

Question 5. In the Enlightenment, we see the abandonment of Divine Right theory and the establishment and rapid expansion the Natural Rights theory of human nature and political justice. How does this change in the grounding of political realm  mirror the change in the natural sciences realm? What is common to both the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment?

The Crusades  influence on the Renaissance

https://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/the-real-significance-of-the-crusades

https://www.medieval-life-and-times.info/crusades/effects-of-crusades.htm

https://tdl.org/txlor-dspace/bitstream/handle/2249.3/584/03_changes_in_europe.htm?sequence=88

https://www.preservearticles.com/2011090713162/what-are-the-important-causes-for-the-beginning-of-renaissance-in-europe.html

https://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320Hist&Civ/PP/slides/15crusade.pdf

https://www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/MunCru.html

The Crusades and the Renaissance

                                                                                                                                                                The Crusades were not without effect on the Renaissance and the Reformation. Friendly intercourse with the Islamic world brought Europe into contact with accomplishments and virtues which were felt to be lacking at home. Europeans became aware of a moral system independent of Christianity that was ... worthy of respect. Theological disputations between Christian and Muslim revealed the fact that Catholic religious laws were not invulnerable. Some Europeans took critical examination of their own condition. In Germany suspicion of the motives of the Church in urging the wars against the Islam and a reluctance to contribute toward the realization of the plans formulated by an ambitious papacy and carried on by self seeking warriors became manifest. Germany will eventually revolt against the infallibility of the Church kick started by a German monk, Martin Luther.  The Crusades constitute a controversial chapter in the history of Christianity, and their excesses have been the subject of centuries of historiography. The Crusades ... played an integral role in the expansion of medieval Europe.

Beginning in the 11th century, the people of Western Europe launched a series of armed expeditions, or Crusades, to the East and Constantinople. The reason for the Crusades is relatively clear: the West wanted to free the Holy Lands from Islamic influence. The first of early Crusades were part of a religious revivalism. The initiative was taken by popes and supported by religious enthusiasm and therefore the Crusades demonstrated papal leadership as well as popular religious beliefs. They were ... an indication of the growing self-awareness and self-confidence of Europe in general.

 

Perhaps the most significant effect of the Crusades was a vast increase in cultural horizons for many Europeans. For every European who went on a Crusade (let alone the minuscule fraction who returned) there were hundreds who knew someone who had gone, or who had seen the Crusaders march by. Palestine was no longer a quasi-mythical place that people knew only from Bible readings in church; it was a real place where real people went. Once Crusader kingdoms were set up in Palestine, they traded with their kin in Europe, sending finished goods to Europe and importing raw materials. The result was a stimulus to Mediterranean trade. The need to transfer large sums of money for troops and supplies led to development of banking and accounting techniques.

 

The most important effect of the Crusades was economic. The Italian cities prospered from the transport of Crusaders and replaced Byzantines and Muslims as merchant-traders in the Mediterranean. Trade passed through Italian hands to Western Europe at a handsome profit. This commercial power became the economic base of the Italian Renaissance. It provoked such Atlantic powers as Spain and Portugal to seek trade routes to India and China. Their efforts, through such explorers as Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus, helped to open most of the world to European trade dominance and colonization and to shift the center of commercial activity from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.

The Crusades brought to Europe first hand experience of the Near East through the thousands of Crusaders who went to and from that region. The knowledge and goods brought back to Europeans increased the interest of Europeans in the Eastern cultures. For the images that had been implanted in the minds of returning Crusaders, it influenced the minds of a great many, who enjoyed philosophy, logic, medicine, and mathematics discussion with Muslims.

The Church, which had made itself the leader of the Crusades, came to suffer the consequences of their ill success. Faith in papal absolutism declined; and a new religious spirit appeared, first in the offshoots of Christianity (Cathari and Albigenses), and later in the Reformation (the pope was not infallible). This spirit was fostered by the inspiration of that higher culture by the development of the sciences, and by the growth of commerce with the East, which enriched Europe and turned the attention of men from purely religious to material and cultural interests in the movement known as the Renaissance.

Some historians -- particularly Crusades scholars -- consider the Crusades the single most important series of events in the Middle Ages. The significant changes in the structure of European society that took place in the 12th and 13th centuries were long considered the direct result of Europe's participation in the Crusades.  Although the explanations for the Crusades may hold some validity, advances in scholarship of the subject indicate that Crusaders did not particularly look forward to crusading with its threat of disease, long overland marches, and death in battle far from home. Families left behind in Europe often had to struggle to manage farms and properties for long periods.

The Crusades did manage to reduce the number of quarrelsome and contentious knights in Europe. The Crusades provided an outlet for their penchant for fighting and it has been argued that European monarchs were able to consolidate their control much more easily now that the warrior class had been reduced in number.

Socio-economic factors contributed to the formation of the Crusades as well. In the second half of the first millennium West Europeans adopted a number of agricultural innovations, including the heavy plow and the horse collar. It seems likely that these innovations increased food production, which in turn increased population, making manpower for expeditions available (and possibly creating pressure on existing resources which led men to begin looking for external adventures, according to some historians). In addition, the rise of a class of lesser nobles who collected and disposed of local production with relative efficiency may have contributed, by focusing resources in the hands of the very people who could most profitably assist the crusades.

                                                                                                                                                                        Treaties with Byzantine Empire allowed merchant cities of Italy, Genoa, Venice, and Pisa to benefit from the trading rights they were given in the Eastern of the Mediterranean.  All of these new goods, found in large commercial quantities, in the Near East, opened Europeans' desire to reach their sources.  Indeed, it can be argued that the Age of Exploration by European ships, roaming the world looking for India or China, have been inspired by the descriptions of Crusaders to the Holy Land.

One of the most important effects of the crusades was on commerce. They created a constant demand for the transportation of men and supplies, encouraged ship-building, and extended the market for eastern wares in Europe. The products of Damascus, Mosul, Alexandria, Cairo, and other great cities were carried across the Mediterranean to the Italian seaports, whence they found their way into all European lands. The elegance of the Orient, with its silks, tapestries, precious stones, perfumes, spices, pearls, and ivory, was so enchanting that an enthusiastic crusader called it "the vestibule of Paradise."

In Western Europe, the crusades helped to break down feudalism. Kings at home then increased their authority and feudal lords were fighting in Palestine. Along with the religious ideas of Western Europeans was the desire for power and land. When the Byzantines and Muslims were contacted by crusaders, Western Europeans became interested in learning after hundreds of years of darkness.

The effects of the Crusades on Europe of the Middle Ages were an important factor in the history of the progress of civilization. The effects of the Crusades influenced the wealth and power of the Catholic Church, political matters, commerce, feudalism, intellectual development, social effects, material effects and the effects of the crusades ... prompted the famous voyages during the Age of Exploration.Chapter Summary 

Chapter 17: The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment: Intellectual Transformations

The modern secular tradition initiated by the Renaissance was advanced by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.  This chapter surveys the major thinkers and ideas of these ages and discusses the principles of the modern outlook to which they contributed. 

Combining Ptolemeic astronomy, Aristotelian philosophy, and Christian theology, medieval thought posited a hierarchical, geocentric universe.  Renaissance humanists and artists began to challenge this view by reviving classical learning and by promoting accurate mathematical representation of the physical world.  Inspired by ancient scientific texts, the seventeenth-century scientific thinkers gradually replaced the old Ptolemeic-Aristotelian model of the universe with a Pythagorean-Platonic model.  Copernicus took the first steps in this effort when he challenged the cumbersome Ptolemeic system with his Platonic heliocentric theory.  Proposing the uniformity of nature, Galileo grounded Copernicus' theory in careful observations of planets, moons, and stars.  Galileo also challenged Aristotelian physics through pioneering experiments with motion.  In an effort to separate science from faith, Galileo attacked uncritical acceptance of ancient authority, an attack that prompted the church to denounce his ideas and silence him.  Further supporting Copernicus' theory, Kepler's laws fused Pythagorean and Platonic principles into a mathematically harmonious account of planetary motion.  Answering the questions Kepler could not, Newton developed a physics that explained mathematically all the phenomena of motion within the heliocentric system.  Newton also pioneered the modern science of optics and promoted experimental technique, all while arguing that God was the architect of the mechanical universe. 

As this new model of the universe evolved, a new approach to scientific inquiry emerged.  Denying the traditional philosophical authorities, Bacon advocated the inductive approach, arguing that conclusions should be based on observable facts alone.  Descartes promoted the deductive approach, proclaiming the mind's ability to formulate incontrovertible first principles from which further knowledge may be derived.  These complementary approaches to rational investigation provided crucial intellectual tools to modern experimental and theoretical science. 

The Scientific Revolution erected the modern conception of a homogenous universe, the structure of which could be represented in terms of mathematical relationships and chemical compositions.  Although the pioneers of this view saw no conflict between it and Christianity, that view prompted spiritual anxiety in later centuries, anguish poignantly articulated by Pascal.   Still, the Scientific Revolution and the critical spirit it fostered weakened traditional Christianity and all the concepts of authority that attended it, laying the groundwork for the Enlightenment. 

What the Scientific Revolution did for the physical world, the Enlightenment strove to do for society and politics.  Cultivating Cartesian skepticism, the philosophes questioned all received ideas, working thereby to liberate humanity from tyranny and superstition.  Many of the basic terms and concepts of this movement came from the work of Hobbes and Locke.  From Hobbes' secular political theory, the philosophes took the rejection of divine monarchy, while rejecting its pessimism and approval of absolutism.  From Locke, the philosophes borrowed political ideas including natural rights and constitutional government, and the epistemological notion that knowledge comes not from innate ideas, but accumulated experience. 

On this foundation, the philosophes built a systematic critique of Western thought and belief.  Denouncing traditional Christianity as brutal and superstitious, the philosophes subjected the Bible to critical scrutiny and rejected the clerical establishment.  Most embraced rational deism, promoting morality over ritual and freedom of conscience over coerced observance.  In the face of censorship, philosophes including Montesqieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau advanced modern political ideas such as governmental checks and balances, the rule of law, and government by general will.  Rejecting mercantilism, Smith proposed an enlightened economics in which governments allow the invisible hand of the marketplace to work unimpeded.  Assuming the essential goodness of human nature, Rousseau developed an educational philosophy that treated children as children, and many Enlightenment thinkers-including Beccaria, Paine, and Franklin-denounced torture, war, and the slave trade.  Although most philosophes considered women inferior to men, their ideas contained the possibility of women's equality, a possibility Wolstonecraft hoped to realize through her critique of women's subordination.  Finally, Enlightenment optimism and veneration of science prompted the idea of continuous human progress articulated most fully by Condorcet. 

The modern outlook owes its core principles to the Enlightenment thinkers.  Borrowing the insights and methods of the Scientific Revolution, the philosophes offered a rational, secular interpretation of society that advocated tolerance, freedom, equality, and rule of law.  These ideals came to serve as the theoretical foundation of modern liberal government and market economics.