Modern Age

We explain what the Modern Age was, its discoveries, beginning, end and other characteristics. Also, Renaissance humanism.

Modern Age
According to some authors, the fall of Constantinople marked the beginning of the Modern Age.

What was the Modern Age?

The Modern Age or Modernity was the period of universal history that It lasted from the middle of the 15th century to the end of the 18th centurythat is, between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Contemporary Age.

It was a time of great changes in the political, social, economic, cultural and scientific spheres.which laid the foundations for the world as we know it today. It marked a departure from the religious dogmas that limited thought and art during the Middle Ages (what some authors called “obscurantism”). The intellectual movement that promoted this change was called Renaissance humanism. In addition, the Protestant Reformation arose during this period.

In the Modern Age modern states were formed in Europe and a social class linked to commerce and other urban activities was established: the bourgeoisie. With this fact and the global expansion of the nascent Portuguese, Spanish, British, French and Dutch empires, Europe was placed at the centre of the world's political and economic scene.

For this reason, in the study of the Early Modern Period, much emphasis is often placed on Western Europe, but many scholars criticize this emphasis and even the idea of ​​a “Modern Period” because they consider them Eurocentric.

Although there is no consensus as to when the Modern Age began, two possible events are usually taken as indicators of its beginning: the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 (which put an end to the Byzantine Empire) or the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the shores of America in 1492. Its end is usually marked in the French Revolution of 1789.although some scholars opt for the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Key points

  • The Modern Age was the period of universal history that was located between the Middle Ages and the Contemporary Age, between the 15th and 18th centuries.
  • It was a time of philosophical and cultural changes, such as those introduced by Renaissance humanism, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.
  • It marked the emergence of the modern state and the formation of European colonial empires that expanded to other continents.
  • The Protestant Reformation arose, which separated from the Catholic Church, and the predominant role of the bourgeoisie in the world economy was consolidated.

Characteristics of the Modern Age

Broadly speaking, the Modern Age can be characterized as follows:

  • It was a period of profound changes in Western culture and society, the first impulse of which came with the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. Thus, the medieval tradition focused exclusively on the figure of God was abandoned and the new values ​​of reason and science were favoured.
  • It was a time of formation of the great European imperial powerswith the strengthening of their monarchies, known generically as the “Ancien Régime”. These empires established colonies on other continents, which initiated a competition for obtaining resources according to the principles of mercantilism. In this way, the foundations for the global expansion of capitalism were laid.
  • It was an era of colonial exploration and expansion in America (where a war of conquest was carried out that marked the end of the pre-Columbian empires), Africa, Asia and Oceania, which led to the spread of modern ideas, European languages ​​and the Christian religion throughout much of the world.
  • It was the moment when the States modernwhich had a clearly delimited territory, a more or less constant population, a centralized government and a bureaucracy. An example of this were the absolute monarchies.
  • It was the stage in which a company grew and consolidated. social class new: the bourgeoisieThis class did not base its wealth on inheritance or the privileges of nobility but on commercial and professional activity, and it concentrated economic power throughout the Modern Age. However, political power continued to be in the hands of the monarchy and the aristocracy.
  • It was a phase of transformation for the Catholic Churchwhich was challenged by the Protestant Reformation and by humanism. Western culture began a path of secularization.
  • It was a period in which great changes took place in science and technologywhich had a huge impact on the working, military and philosophical life of the West. In addition, faith in progress, communication and reason was established, new philosophical values ​​that soon spread to most of the world.

Renaissance humanism

modern age renaissance art
The art of the Modern Age took up figures from Greco-Roman mythology.

Between the 15th and 16th centuries, a fundamental cultural change took place in Europe in order to understand the Modern Age, which was later baptized as the Renaissance. Its name is due to the fact that, after centuries of predominance of the religious values ​​of the Church (traditionally identified with the concept of medieval obscurantism), There was a recovery of works, ideas and values ​​of classical Greco-Roman culture.

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This process was made possible by the erosion of traditional religious values. replaced religious faith with human reason and the scholastic methods of reading ancient texts through observation, research and evaluation of empirical reality.

He paradigm Renaissance intellectual was known as humanismsince it stopped considering God as the measure of all things and placed the human being in his place, who came to occupy the center of human concerns (this phenomenon was called anthropocentrism).

Art and philosophy were an important part of this change. Medieval paintings, which focused on the representation of the divine, gave way to representations of Greco-Roman mythological scenes, in which the human body and its actions occupied a central role, and to new ways of understanding Christian aesthetics.

On the other hand, the dissemination of knowledge in vernacular languages ​​became imperative. For this reason, Classical works, especially the Bible, were translated from Latin into the various European languages.an important step towards the construction of national identities and nation-states, as well as the separation between politics and religion.

Philosophy was the great protagonist of the humanist movement. Thinkers such as Petrarch (1304-1374), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469-1536), Thomas More (1478-1535) and Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527)This movement made possible the later emergence of philosophers such as René Descartes (1596-1650), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704) or Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), who approached the great themes of the time from a new perspective.

Rationality, freedom, free will, the formation of the individual, tolerance and curiosity were part of the values ​​that humanism defended. Thus A new philosophical system was founded, characterized by a moral and one ethics secularwho understood the human being as a being capable of providing for his own well-being.

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Thus, Humanism laid the foundations for the Illustration from the mid-18th centurya cultural movement of crucial importance in contemporary thought.

The age of discovery

Between the 15th and 17th centuries, the so-called “age of discovery” took place, whose name is due to the fact that The European kingdoms began the global exploration of the planetHowever, the term “discovery” has been questioned for its Eurocentric bias, as it promotes the idea that the populations of pre-Columbian America and other regions only entered history by being “discovered” by Europeans, when in reality they had a long history of their own.

The Portuguese and Spanish began exploring and mapping beyond the world they had known until then, motivated by the demand for goods from the East and the desire to find new trade routes, since the Ottoman Empire controlled southeastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.

Portuguese navigators explored the coasts of western and southern Africa and reached India. On the other hand, Christopher Columbus was financed by the Catholic Monarchs to find an alternative route to the Indies and reached the Caribbean coast, a fact that marked the so-called European discovery of America.

This produced a fundamental change in the medieval paradigm of the world, since Europeans realized that there was a world unexplored by themalien to the ancient books and scholastic tradition. In addition, in that world there were important resources that had to be claimed before other competing empires did, which led to conquest and colonization.

Thus, during this period the African coasts were explored and the American continent was conquered by defeating the Aztec and Inca empires and many other indigenous peoples. In addition, The first circumnavigation of the planet took place and a competition began between the nascent European empires (Portuguese, Spanish, British, French and Dutch), who established their colonies throughout the world.

In this way, the world's commercial axis shifted from Eastern Europe to the West across the Atlantic Ocean, and a process of globalisation took place, that is, the first economic flow on a global scale. In addition, the seas and oceans became one of the main theatres of armed struggle through naval warfare.

The Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion

martin luther protestant reformation
The Protestant Reformation was born with Martin Luther's ninety-five theses.

In the 16th century a Christian religious movement known as the Protestant Reformation or Protestantism took placeIt was initiated by the theologian Martin Luther (1483-1546) in Germany and had representatives in other parts of Europe, such as the Frenchman John Calvin (1509-1564).

This movement He opposed the absolute authority of the Pope on the Christians of the world and reproached the Catholic Church for having become corrupt and for having moved away from the fundamental Christian precepts of the Bible. Consequently, he proposed a return to primitive Christianity.

In the context of a major scandal in Germany over the sale of indulgences by Catholic priests (i.e. the exchange of religious absolutions for money), Protestantism was born with Luther's ninety-five thesesIn them he denounced indulgences and proposed a new Christian doctrine based on salvation through faith and personal repentance.

Luther's theses were soon widely distributed, thanks to the recent invention of the modern printing press.. Various sovereigns adhered to Protestantism as a way of appropriating ecclesiastical property and reinforcing their authority by founding national churches under their strict control (not dependent on the Pope).

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The Reformation was a severe blow to the hegemony of the Catholic Church in Europe. The response was the Counter-Reformation, with which the Church introduced internal changes and dedicated itself to persecuting Protestants. At the end of the 16th century Wars of religion broke out, such as those between Catholics and Huguenots (Calvinists) in the kingdoms of France and Navarre (1562-1598), which claimed the lives of millions of people.

Despite Catholic opposition and persecution by the Inquisition, the Reformation spread and Today Protestantism is the second major branch of Christianity..

Continued on: Protestant Reformation

The Scientific Revolution

One of the central aspects of the Modern Age in Europe was the emergence of scientific methoda philosophical and methodological concept that changed the understanding of the world forever.

The Scientific Revolution took place between the 16th century and the end of the 17th centuryIt consisted of a veritable explosion of new knowledge in physics, biology, astronomy, human anatomy, botany, mathematics, chemistry and other fields of knowledge. Its impact on human history was compared to that of the Neolithic revolution that produced the invention of agriculture.

This revolution was made possible by the existence of humanism, which emphasized observation to answer questions about the natural world, and especially thanks to the work of philosophers and scientists such as Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)His work “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs” is considered the founding milestone of the Scientific Revolution. In it, he questioned the geocentric model that stated that the Earth was located at the center of the universe and proposed instead the heliocentric model, which maintains that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

Other key names were Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), René Descartes (1596-1650), Isaac Newton (1643-1727), Robert Hooke (1635-1703), among many others.

The scientific method It consists of formulating hypotheses with the intention of confirming or refuting them through experimentation and mathematical calculations. It represented a major philosophical change, which allowed the study of the natural world outside of what religious tradition dictated.

The end of the modern age

The end of the modern age It is generally located in the French Revolution from 1789or in the Declaration of Independence of the United States in 1776, that is, at the end of the 18th century. However, in the field of Anglo-Saxon historiography this period is called the Early Modern Age (Early modern period), as it is considered to have many aspects of continuity with the Contemporary Age (called in English Late modern period or Late Modern Age).

The French Revolution and its social ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity put an end to the Ancien Régime. It was the beginning of a process in which The bourgeois republican world prevailed over the aristocratic order which until then prevailed in the West, as capitalism became established as a global economic system, hand in hand with the Industrial Revolution, and the bourgeoisie became the dominant social class.

References

  • Dewald, J. (2024). The Early Modern Period. Encyclopedia of European Social History. https://www.encyclopedia.com/
  • Hunt, L. et al. (2016). The Making of the West. Peoples and Cultures. 5th edition. Bedford/St. Martin's.
  • Tenenti, A. (2001). The Modern Age XVI-XVIII. Criticism.
  • Ribot, L. (2021). The Modern Age (15th-18th centuries). Marcial Pons.