Toby Lester

Our guest today, Toby Lester, has worked as a refugee affairs officer for the United Nations, helped with programmes in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, undertaken Peace Corps work in Yemen. He has written also extensively for national publications, including the Smithsonian, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The American Scholar, The Wilson Quarterly, BBC Magazine, and the London Times. He also worked at The Atlantic in a variety of editorial capacities: including as the managing editor. Today he serves part-time as a senior editor for Harvard Business Review and edits books for writers, but he is himself a writer of two wonderful history books, The Fourth Part of the World (2009) and Da Vinci’s Ghost (2011) which is about Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.  Oh dear!  This page contains Member's Only content... and you aren't logged in! Sucks to be you, seriously, because the content you are missing is really funny. And clever. And probably very, very sexy. So sign up now and your life will be improved substantially. The post #138 – Toby Lester, Da Vinci’s Ghost – Leonardo da Vinci Part 27 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

Our guest today, <a href="http://www.tobylester.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Toby Lester</a>, has worked as a refugee affairs officer for the United Nations, helped with programmes in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, undertaken Peace Corps work in Yemen. He has written also extensively for national publications, including the Smithsonian, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The American Scholar, The Wilson Quarterly, BBC Magazine, and the London Times. He also worked at The Atlantic in a variety of editorial capacities: including as the managing editor. Today he serves part-time as a senior editor for Harvard Business Review and edits books for writers, but he is himself a writer of two wonderful history books, The Fourth Part of the World (2009) and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Vincis-Ghost-Obsession-Leonardo-Created/dp/1439189242" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Da Vinci’s Ghost</a> (2011) which is about Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. <h2>Oh dear!</h2> This page contains Member's Only content... and you aren't logged in! Sucks to be you, seriously, because the content you are missing is really funny. And clever. And probably very, very sexy. So <a href="/register/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">sign up now</a> and your life will be improved substantially. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2022/01/08/138-toby-lester-da-vincis-ghost-leonardo-da-vinci-part-27/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#138 – Toby Lester, Da Vinci’s Ghost – Leonardo da Vinci Part 27</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#138 – Toby Lester, Da Vinci’s Ghost – Leonardo da Vinci Part 27

Taking a short break from Leonardo, our guest today is Julia Charity, an official Vatican tour guide! Julia, who originally hails from the UK, tells us how she ended up as a Vatican tour guide and about some of her favourite art on display in the Pope’s fortress, including “The Last Judgment” by Michelangelo, the “Transfiguration” by her “Renaissance husband”, Raphael, and the Borgia Apartments. If you want to book a Vatican tour with Julia, you can email here at theacharity[at]gmail.com.  Oh dear!  This page contains Member's Only content... and you aren't logged in! Sucks to be you, seriously, because the content you are missing is really funny. And clever. And probably very, very sexy. So sign up now and your life will be improved substantially.  The post #136 – Julia &amp; The Vatican appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

Taking a short break from Leonardo, our guest today is <a href="https://www.instagram.com/virtuallyvisit/?hl=en" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Julia Charity</a>, an official Vatican tour guide! Julia, who originally hails from the UK, tells us how she ended up as a Vatican tour guide and about some of her favourite art on display in the Pope’s fortress, including “The Last Judgment” by Michelangelo, the “Transfiguration” by her “Renaissance husband”, Raphael, and the Borgia Apartments. If you want to book a Vatican tour with Julia, you can email here at theacharity[at]<a href="http://gmail.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">gmail.com</a>. <h2>Oh dear!</h2> This page contains Member's Only content... and you aren't logged in! Sucks to be you, seriously, because the content you are missing is really funny. And clever. And probably very, very sexy. So <a href="/register/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">sign up now</a> and your life will be improved substantially. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2021/12/11/136-julia-the-vatican/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#136 – Julia &amp; The Vatican</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#136 – Julia & The Vatican

Curtis Wong

Curtis Wong has had an incredible career. He has produced critically acclaimed educational CD-ROMs at Corbis and the Voyager Co., as well as the definitive editions of feature films for the Criterion Collection. He ran  the Content Group at Intel, and was granted many patents at Microsoft Research. Today he joins us to tell some stories from his career, including his groundbreaking work with Bill Gates to produce the digital version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester.  The post #120 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 13 – Curtis Wong appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

<a href="https://www.futureinreview.com/leaders/curtis-wong/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Curtis Wong</a> has had an incredible career. He has produced critically acclaimed educational CD-ROMs at Corbis and the Voyager Co., as well as the definitive editions of feature films for the Criterion Collection. He ran  the Content Group at Intel, and was granted many patents at Microsoft Research. Today he joins us to tell some stories from his career, including his groundbreaking work with Bill Gates to produce the digital version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2021/04/29/120-leonardo-da-vinci-part-13-curtis-wong/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#120 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 13 – Curtis Wong</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#120 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 13 – Curtis Wong

We chat with one of the world’s leading authorities on Leonardo da Vinci – Matthew Landrus from Oxford University, author of Leonardo da Vinci’s Giant Crossbow.      The post #118 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 11 – Matthew Landrus appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

We chat with one of the world’s leading authorities on Leonardo da Vinci – Matthew Landrus from Oxford University, author of Leonardo da Vinci’s Giant Crossbow. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Vincis-Giant-Crossbow-Landrus/dp/354068915X" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2021/04/01/118-leonardo-da-vinci-part-11-matthew-landrus/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#118 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 11 – Matthew Landrus</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#118 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 11 – Matthew Landrus

If you’re wondering “where are rest of the episodes?”, they are on our website as part of our membership program. The post Where are rest of the episodes? appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

If you’re wondering “where are rest of the episodes?”, they are on our website as part of our membership program. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2021/01/01/where-are-rest-of-the-episodes/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Where are rest of the episodes?</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

Where are rest of the episodes?

Leonardo’s earliest surviving work of art is a landscape sketch of Vinci in his notebook dating from 1473 when he was 21 years old.  The earliest surviving painting is BAPTISM OF CHRIST, a collaboration with his old master, Verrocchio (as seen in Marketing The Messiah).  On this episode, we go deep on both works of art, looking at what made Leonardo da Vinci different from his contemporaries. Oh dear!  This page contains Member's Only content... and you aren't logged in! Sucks to be you, seriously, because the content you are missing is really funny. And clever. And probably very, very sexy. So sign up now and your life will be improved substantially. The post #111 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 4 – Manscaping Jesus appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

Leonardo’s earliest surviving work of art is a landscape sketch of Vinci in his notebook dating from 1473 when he was 21 years old. <a href="https://i0.wp.com/www.therenaissancetimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/image.jpg?ssl=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> The earliest surviving painting is BAPTISM OF CHRIST, a collaboration with his old master, Verrocchio (as seen in Marketing The Messiah). <a href="https://i0.wp.com/www.therenaissancetimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/1800-The_Baptism_of_Christ_Verrocchio__Leonardo.jpg?ssl=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> On this episode, we go deep on both works of art, looking at what made Leonardo da Vinci different from his contemporaries. <h2>Oh dear!</h2> This page contains Member's Only content... and you aren't logged in! Sucks to be you, seriously, because the content you are missing is really funny. And clever. And probably very, very sexy. So <a href="/register/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">sign up now</a> and your life will be improved substantially. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2020/12/24/111-leonardo-da-vinci-part-4-manscaping-jesus/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#111 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 4 – Manscaping Jesus</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#111 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 4 – Manscaping Jesus

Leonardo’s first known artwork is a Frankenstein monster and he invents sfumato.    The post #110 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 3 – Frankenstein’s Monster appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

Leonardo’s first known artwork is a Frankenstein monster and he invents sfumato. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2020/12/13/110-leonardo-da-vinci-part-3-frankensteins-monster/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#110 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 3 – Frankenstein’s Monster</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#110 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 3 – Frankenstein’s Monster

We examine Leonardo’s writing style, and his apprenticeship at age 14 to Andrea del Verrocchio, an Italian painter, sculptor, and goldsmith, because even geniuses need a master to learn from (despite what The Queen’s Gambit would have you believe).    The post #109 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 2 – Back And To The Left appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

We examine Leonardo’s writing style, and his apprenticeship at age 14 to Andrea del Verrocchio, an Italian painter, sculptor, and goldsmith, because even geniuses need a master to learn from (despite what The Queen’s Gambit would have you believe). The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2020/11/27/109-leonardo-da-vinci-part-2-back-and-to-the-left/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#109 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 2 – Back And To The Left</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#109 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 2 – Back And To The Left

“Extraordinary power … conjoined with remarkable facility, a mind of regal boldness and magnanimous daring.” That’s how Vasari described Leonardo da Vinci. But how much do we really know about the world’s most famous artist? And how much of what we think we know is myth?   The post #108 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 1 – A Complete Bastard appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

“Extraordinary power … conjoined with remarkable facility, a mind of regal boldness and magnanimous daring.” That’s how Vasari described Leonardo da Vinci. But how much do we really know about the world’s most famous artist? And how much of what we think we know is myth? The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2020/11/18/108-leonardo-da-vinci-part-1-a-complete-bastard/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#108 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 1 – A Complete Bastard</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#108 – Leonardo da Vinci Part 1 – A Complete Bastard

Savonarola was notified that he and his closest colleagues had been condemned to die. His most ardent believers had faith that the Lord would save him at the last minute, but, yet again, God didn’t show up for work. At 1pm, May 23, 1498, they were degraded then burned in the Piazza della Signoria. And now Florence needs to get its shit together. Do they bring back the Medici? Join the Holy League? And what can they learn from the Savonarola episode?    The post #107 – Savonarola Part 14 – Savonarola Burns appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

Savonarola was notified that he and his closest colleagues had been condemned to die. His most ardent believers had faith that the Lord would save him at the last minute, but, yet again, God didn’t show up for work. At 1pm, May 23, 1498, they were degraded then burned in the Piazza della Signoria. And now Florence needs to get its shit together. Do they bring back the Medici? Join the Holy League? And what can they learn from the Savonarola episode? The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2020/10/30/107-savonarola-part-14-savonarola-burns/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#107 – Savonarola Part 14 – Savonarola Burns</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#107 – Savonarola Part 14 – Savonarola Burns

The ultimate podcast about the Renaissance!

On a recent episode Cam said “I Podcast like I F**k.”

I assume this means it happens for three hours and change every week, at a desk, broadcast on Facebook Live, there are a lot of confusing tangents that are equal parts revelatory and revolting, any time you say “Oh God!” he explains how there are no gods, only atoms, and that there’s multiple references to a movie he’s making.

Five stars.

Podcast like I F***

It’s a great show if you want to be entertained while you learn

Another great show from Ray and Cam

The Renaissance Times

In 1453, when the Turks took Constantinople, Pope Nicky 5 wanted a crusade and authorized the sale of letters of indulgence—religious documents that released the buyers from penalties for their sins. And guess who printed them? Then he finally got around to working on his masterpiece and the book he is most remembered for – the “42-line Bible,” aka the Gutenberg Bible. But just before the printing of the bibles was finished, his investor, Fust, took him to court and sued him for overdue repayment of the investment. And Gutenberg was ruined. He eventually recovered and printed an even more complicated work – The Catholicon, a Latin grammar and a very detailed dictionary. But the, in the early 1460s, an outright war between two contenders for the seat of archbishop of Mainz got in the way. And Gutenberg was ruined yet again. He died in 1468, his contributions to printing pretty much forgotten.   The post #70 – Gutenberg Part 6 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

In 1453, when the Turks took Constantinople, Pope Nicky 5 wanted a crusade and authorized the sale of letters of indulgence—religious documents that released the buyers from penalties for their sins. And guess who printed them? Then he finally got around to working on his masterpiece and the book he is most remembered for – the “42-line Bible,” aka the Gutenberg Bible. But just before the printing of the bibles was finished, his investor, Fust, took him to court and sued him for overdue repayment of the investment. And Gutenberg was ruined. He eventually recovered and printed an even more complicated work – The Catholicon, a Latin grammar and a very detailed dictionary. But the, in the early 1460s, an outright war between two contenders for the seat of archbishop of Mainz got in the way. And Gutenberg was ruined yet again. He died in 1468, his contributions to printing pretty much forgotten. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2019/10/25/70-gutenberg-part-6/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#70 – Gutenberg Part 6</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#70 – Gutenberg Part 6

 So let’s move on to Julian. Julian’s personal religion was both pagan and philosophical; he viewed the traditional myths as allegories, in which the ancient gods were aspects of a philosophical divinity. He was tutored by Eusebius of Nicomedia, the same guy who baptised Constantine on his death bed. He was apparently a vegetarian. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus tells us that he believed that Christian infighting was so bitter that the religion would simply destroy itself. He returned to the old gods. He was also prepared to write his own rebuttal of Christianity. During his short reign, he wrote Contra Galilaeos (‘Against the Galileans’), which Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria, claimed was one of the most important anti-Christian works that had been written, and that it was widely considered to be irrefutable, Julian used his considerable knowledge of the scriptures to highlight their contradictions. For example Why is there no recognition in the synoptic gospels of Jesus’ divinity? He thought the use of Old Testament prophecies as harbingers of Christ is arbitrary and unjustified. Why did God create Eve if he knew that she would thwart his plans for creation? Unfortunately the three-book volume didn’t survive, except for when it’s quoted by Christian apologists who tried to argue against it. He made a sophisticated plea for religious toleration, giving the view that each culture needed to define the supreme divinity in its own way. When he became Augustus, he started a religious reformation, restoring the traditional polytheism as the state religion. He didn’t try to destroy Christianity, but to drive them out of the governing classes of the empire. He restored the pagan temples and repealed the stipends that Constantine had awarded to Christian bishops. On 4 February 362, Julian promulgated an edict to guarantee freedom of religion. This edict proclaimed that all the religions were equal before the law, and that the Roman Empire had to return to its original religious eclecticism, according to which the Roman state did not impose any religion on its provinces. The edict also allowed the return from exile of dissident Christian bishops. He also issued an edict that declared that all public teachers had to be approved by himself. He wanted to stop Christian teachers from using pagan texts like the Iliad. He wrote: “If they want to learn literature, they have Luke and Mark: Let them go back to their churches and expound on them” This was an attempt to remove some of the power of the Christian schools which at that time and later used ancient Greek literature in their teachings in their effort to present the Christian religion as being superior to paganism. But after several generations of pro-Christian emperors, the pagans were reluctant to just pick up where they left off. On top of that, they didn’t have the funds to hold big public sacrifices and festivals, because the Constantines had stolen all of their treasuries and given them to the Christians. And of course there was no single pagan religion, there were tons of them, so it was all disorganised. So Julian tried to re-organise the pagan worship more in line with the Christian model. He tried to introduce new moral codes for pagan priests. Traditionally, there weren’t any – a priest was just an elite with social prestige and financial power to organise and pay for festivals. But Julian’s attempts to tighten it up went nowhere. He ended up making paganism a religion, where traditionally it had just been more of a tradition. He also tried to set up a system of charity resembling the Christian model. He wrote: “These impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also; welcoming them into their agapae, they attract them, as children are attracted, with cakes.” He also wanted to re-build the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Ammianus Marcellinus, wrote this about the effort: Julian thought to rebuild at an extravagant expense the proud Temple once at Jerusalem, and committed this task to Alypius of Antioch. Alypius set vigorously to work, and was seconded by the governor of the province; when fearful balls of fire, breaking out near the foundations, continued their attacks, till the workmen, after repeated scorchings, could approach no more: and he gave up the attempt. The failure to rebuild the Temple has been ascribed to the Galilee earthquake of 363. Sabotage by Christians is a possibility, as is an accidental fire. Unfortunately for the world, Julian’s reign didn’t last long. During a campaign in Persian, he was wounded with a spear that went through his liver and intestines. He died of a hemorrhage a few days later. Tradition has it that his dying words were “You have won, Galilean”. In 364, Libanius stated that Julian was assassinated by a Christian who was one of his own soldiers. Later Christian historians propagated the tradition that Julian was killed by the ghost of Saint Mercurius, a Christian soldier who had a shining divine sword given to him by the Archangel Michael, and who had been beheaded by the Emperor Decius in 250 CE. Julian’s reign lasted less than two years. He was the last pagan emperor of Rome. Julian was succeeded by the even shorter-lived Emperor Jovian (8 months) who reestablished Christianity’s privileged position throughout the Empire. Poor Jovian. Like his father before him, he was the the commander of Constantius II’s imperial bodyguards. When Julian died, he was accidentally made emperor. I say accidentally, because, according to Ammianus Marcellinus, who was a near contemporary, when the name Jovianus was called out to the troops looking for their acclamation, they thought they heard Julianus, and thought Julian had recovered from his wound. He was found dead in his tent rushing back to Constantinople after being defeated by the Persians. Some sources say he died from eating too many mushrooms. Others say he suffocated from the smoke of the fireplace in his tent. Ammianus said his death was suspicious and went strangley uninvestigated. But during his short reign he repealed Julian’s edicts surrounding Christianity, again making it the official state religion. He also initially issued an edict of toleration, allowing the pagans to continue to worship the old gods. But not long later he orderd the burning of the Library of Antioch, “at the urging of his wife, burned the temple with all the books in it with his concubines laughing and setting the fire”. It had been built by Antiochus III the Great, the 6th ruler of the Seleucid empire, around 221 B.C. in Ancient Syria. It was considered a rival to the great Library of Alexandria. Jovian was followed by Valentinian who had a better run. His rise to power was also unusual. He’d been a disgraced commander under Julian and had actually been kicked out of the army for allowing the Alamanni to slip by him during a campaign in Gaul and inflict heavy losses on the Romans. But after Jovian’s death, he somehow becomes Emperor. He almost immediately appoints his brother, Valens, as co-Augustus. Valentinian got his revenge against the Alamanni, although he suffered several more defeats in the process. And he had to deal with problems in Britain, so he sent Theodosius to handle those. He survived nearly 12 years in the role. He died when he burst a blood vessel in his brain while yelling at some German envoys. He was also a Christian, a Nicene, but kept up the policy of toleration for the pagans. The best story about him, though, is the rumour that he was a polygamist. Socrates Scholasticus gives an interesting account in his Historia Ecclesiastica of Valentinian’s marriages. According to the text: the empress Justina “became known to Marina Severa, wife of the emperor Valentinian, and had frequent dialogue with the empress, until their intimacy at length grew to such an extent that they were accustomed to bathe together. When Severa saw Justina in the bath she was greatly struck with the beauty of the virgin, and spoke of her to the emperor; saying that the daughter of Justus was so lovely a creature, and possessed of such symmetry of form, that she herself, though a woman, was altogether charmed with her. The emperor, treasuring this description by his wife in his own mind, considered with himself how he could espouse Justina, without repudiating Severa, as she had borne him Gratian, whom he had created Augustus a little while before. He accordingly framed a law, and caused it to be published throughout all the cities, by which any man was permitted to have two lawful wives. The law was promulgated and he married Justina, by whom he had Valentinian the younger.” Justina was the widow of the ursurper Magnentius, the guy we mentioned earlier to assassinated Constans for liking to have hot, sweet butt sex with barbarian men. She was apparently too young to have children while married to him, which is why she was still a virgin when Valentinian started having baths with her. Of course, Christianity at the time not only didn’t accept bigamy, it didn’t even allow for divorce. Some scholars think this story is therefore bullshit, but hey, I like it. Sound like they had some hot MFF threesomes, and I’m totally loving it. His brother Valens only last a few more years. Valens was an Arian Christian. He infamously did a deal with the Visigoths, allowing hundreds of thousands of them to cross the Danube. When they were abused by Roman generals, and refused grain during a famine, they revolted in 377. After they joined forces with the Ostrogoths and eventually the Huns and Alans, they ended up defeated Valens at the Battle of Adrianople, (modern Edirne in European Turkey, near the border with Greece and Bulgaria) in the Roman province of Thracia, in 378. The numbers are unclear. But some sources suggest the Romans had 30,000 men versus 100,000 Goths. Valens didn’t wait to be reinforced by Gratian, the son of Valentinian, who was now his co-Augustus. Valens was killed during the battle. We’re not sure how. Some sources say he was injured by an arrow or a dart, was taken to a cottage, which was then set fire to. So much for the Labarum standard meaning Jesus would assure the Christian armies of victory. This was a huge defeat for the Romans, both in terms of numbers lost, as well as the optics of the whole thing. One estimate is that two-thirds of the Roman army in the East was lost. Including many generals and the loss of their entire arms factories on the Danube. This was a turning point in military history, with heavy cavalry triumphing over Roman infantry and ushering in the age of the Medieval knight. It also, of course, quickly lead to the Sacking of Rome. With Valens dead, Gratian became the sole Augustus, although his infant half-brother, Valentinian II, was also Augustus in name only. Gratian himself was only 19. Within a year, he promoted Theodosius on 19 January 379 to govern the Eastern portion of the Empire, for reasons unknown, because Theo was a bit of a nobody. But he was born in Hispania, and his father had been a successful general there. Theodosius was in charge of fighting against the Goths. He had some success for a few years, but then things started to turn against him, and eventually Gratian sent in some forces, and they ended up making peace with the Goths in 382. In terms of the rise of Christianity, both of these guys made a lasting contribution. Gratian was a Nicene. He published an edict that all their subjects should profess the faith of the bishops of Rome and Alexandria (i.e., the Nicene faith). This was the beginning of the end of Arianism, at least in the Eastern empire. As we’ll see later, the Goths most converted to Christianity too, but they were Arians for another couple of hundred years. Gratian published edicts basically banning the pagan religion again. He had their temples and treasuries confiscated. He ordered another removal of the Altar of Victory from the Senate House at Rome. Pagan Senators responded by sending an appeal to Gratian, reminding him that he was still the Pontifex Maximus and that it was his duty to see that the ancestral Pagan rites were properly performed. They appealed to him to restore the Altar of Victory and the rights and privileges of the Vestal Virgins and priestly colleges. Gratian, at the urging of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, didn’t even grant them an audience. To top it off, he renounced the title, office, and insignia of the Pontifex Maximus. Towards the end of his life, Gratian went a little mad. By taking into his personal service a body of Alans (Iranian Christians), and appearing in public in the dress of a Scythian warrior, after the disaster of the Battle of Adrianople, he aroused the contempt and resentment of his Roman troops. A Roman general named Magnus Maximus took advantage of this feeling to raise the standard of revolt in Britain and invaded Gaul with a large army. Gratian, who was then in Paris, being deserted by his troops, fled to Lyon. There, through the treachery of the governor, Gratian was delivered over to one of the rebel generals, Andragathius, and assassinated on 25 August 383. He was only 24.     The post Episode 6 – The Imperial Threesome appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

<ul> <li>So let’s move on to Julian.</li> <li>Julian’s personal religion was both pagan and philosophical; he viewed the traditional myths as allegories, in which the ancient gods were aspects of a philosophical divinity.</li> <li>He was tutored by Eusebius of Nicomedia, the same guy who baptised Constantine on his death bed.</li> <li>He was apparently a vegetarian.</li> <li>The historian Ammianus Marcellinus tells us that he believed that Christian infighting was so bitter that the religion would simply destroy itself.</li> <li>He returned to the old gods.</li> <li>He was also prepared to write his own rebuttal of Christianity.</li> <li>During his short reign, he wrote Contra Galilaeos (‘Against the Galileans’), which Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria, claimed was one of the most important anti-Christian works that had been written, and that it was widely considered to be irrefutable, Julian used his considerable knowledge of the scriptures to highlight their contradictions.</li> <li>For example</li> <li>Why is there no recognition in the synoptic gospels of Jesus’ divinity?</li> <li>He thought the use of Old Testament prophecies as harbingers of Christ is arbitrary and unjustified.</li> <li>Why did God create Eve if he knew that she would thwart his plans for creation?</li> <li>Unfortunately the three-book volume didn’t survive, except for when it’s quoted by Christian apologists who tried to argue against it.</li> <li>He made a sophisticated plea for religious toleration, giving the view that each culture needed to define the supreme divinity in its own way.</li> <li>When he became Augustus, he started a religious reformation, restoring the traditional polytheism as the state religion.</li> <li>He didn’t try to destroy Christianity, but to drive them out of the governing classes of the empire.</li> <li>He restored the pagan temples and repealed the stipends that Constantine had awarded to Christian bishops.</li> <li>On 4 February 362, Julian promulgated an edict to guarantee freedom of religion.</li> <li>This edict proclaimed that all the religions were equal before the law, and that the Roman Empire had to return to its original religious eclecticism, according to which the Roman state did not impose any religion on its provinces.</li> <li>The edict also allowed the return from exile of dissident Christian bishops.</li> <li>He also issued an edict that declared that all public teachers had to be approved by himself.</li> <li>He wanted to stop Christian teachers from using pagan texts like the Iliad.</li> <li>He wrote: “If they want to learn literature, they have Luke and Mark: Let them go back to their churches and expound on them”</li> <li>This was an attempt to remove some of the power of the Christian schools which at that time and later used ancient Greek literature in their teachings in their effort to present the Christian religion as being superior to paganism.</li> <li>But after several generations of pro-Christian emperors, the pagans were reluctant to just pick up where they left off.</li> <li>On top of that, they didn’t have the funds to hold big public sacrifices and festivals, because the Constantines had stolen all of their treasuries and given them to the Christians.</li> <li>And of course there was no single pagan religion, there were tons of them, so it was all disorganised.</li> <li>So Julian tried to re-organise the pagan worship more in line with the Christian model.</li> <li>He tried to introduce new moral codes for pagan priests.</li> <li>Traditionally, there weren’t any – a priest was just an elite with social prestige and financial power to organise and pay for festivals.</li> <li>But Julian’s attempts to tighten it up went nowhere.</li> <li>He ended up making paganism a religion, where traditionally it had just been more of a tradition.</li> <li>He also tried to set up a system of charity resembling the Christian model.</li> <li>He wrote: “These impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also; welcoming them into their agapae, they attract them, as children are attracted, with cakes.”</li> <li>He also wanted to re-build the Jewish temple in Jerusalem.</li> <li>Ammianus Marcellinus, wrote this about the effort:</li> <li>Julian thought to rebuild at an extravagant expense the proud Temple once at Jerusalem, and committed this task to Alypius of Antioch. Alypius set vigorously to work, and was seconded by the governor of the province; when fearful balls of fire, breaking out near the foundations, continued their attacks, till the workmen, after repeated scorchings, could approach no more: and he gave up the attempt.</li> <li>The failure to rebuild the Temple has been ascribed to the Galilee earthquake of 363.</li> <li>Sabotage by Christians is a possibility, as is an accidental fire.</li> <li>Unfortunately for the world, Julian’s reign didn’t last long.</li> <li>During a campaign in Persian, he was wounded with a spear that went through his liver and intestines.</li> <li>He died of a hemorrhage a few days later.</li> <li>Tradition has it that his dying words were “You have won, Galilean”.</li> <li>In 364, Libanius stated that Julian was assassinated by a Christian who was one of his own soldiers.</li> <li>Later Christian historians propagated the tradition that Julian was killed by the ghost of Saint Mercurius, a Christian soldier who had a shining divine sword given to him by the Archangel Michael, and who had been beheaded by the Emperor Decius in 250 CE.</li> <li>Julian’s reign lasted less than two years.</li> <li>He was the last pagan emperor of Rome.</li> <li>Julian was succeeded by the even shorter-lived Emperor Jovian (8 months) who reestablished Christianity’s privileged position throughout the Empire.</li> <li>Poor Jovian.</li> <li>Like his father before him, he was the the commander of Constantius II’s imperial bodyguards.</li> <li>When Julian died, he was accidentally made emperor.</li> <li>I say accidentally, because, according to Ammianus Marcellinus, who was a near contemporary, when the name Jovianus was called out to the troops looking for their acclamation, they thought they heard Julianus, and thought Julian had recovered from his wound.</li> <li>He was found dead in his tent rushing back to Constantinople after being defeated by the Persians.</li> <li>Some sources say he died from eating too many mushrooms.</li> <li>Others say he suffocated from the smoke of the fireplace in his tent.</li> <li>Ammianus said his death was suspicious and went strangley uninvestigated.</li> <li>But during his short reign he repealed Julian’s edicts surrounding Christianity, again making it the official state religion.</li> <li>He also initially issued an edict of toleration, allowing the pagans to continue to worship the old gods.</li> <li>But not long later he orderd the burning of the Library of Antioch, “at the urging of his wife, burned the temple with all the books in it with his concubines laughing and setting the fire”.</li> <li>It had been built by Antiochus III the Great, the 6th ruler of the Seleucid empire, around 221 B.C. in Ancient Syria.</li> <li>It was considered a rival to the great Library of Alexandria.</li> <li>Jovian was followed by Valentinian who had a better run.</li> <li>His rise to power was also unusual.</li> <li>He’d been a disgraced commander under Julian and had actually been kicked out of the army for allowing the Alamanni to slip by him during a campaign in Gaul and inflict heavy losses on the Romans.</li> <li>But after Jovian’s death, he somehow becomes Emperor.</li> <li>He almost immediately appoints his brother, Valens, as co-Augustus.</li> <li>Valentinian got his revenge against the Alamanni, although he suffered several more defeats in the process.</li> <li>And he had to deal with problems in Britain, so he sent Theodosius to handle those.</li> <li>He survived nearly 12 years in the role.</li> <li>He died when he burst a blood vessel in his brain while yelling at some German envoys.</li> <li>He was also a Christian, a Nicene, but kept up the policy of toleration for the pagans.</li> <li>The best story about him, though, is the rumour that he was a polygamist.</li> <li>Socrates Scholasticus gives an interesting account in his Historia Ecclesiastica of Valentinian’s marriages.</li> <li>According to the text: the empress Justina “became known to Marina Severa, wife of the emperor Valentinian, and had frequent dialogue with the empress, until their intimacy at length grew to such an extent that they were accustomed to bathe together. When Severa saw Justina in the bath she was greatly struck with the beauty of the virgin, and spoke of her to the emperor; saying that the daughter of Justus was so lovely a creature, and possessed of such symmetry of form, that she herself, though a woman, was altogether charmed with her. The emperor, treasuring this description by his wife in his own mind, considered with himself how he could espouse Justina, without repudiating Severa, as she had borne him Gratian, whom he had created Augustus a little while before. He accordingly framed a law, and caused it to be published throughout all the cities, by which any man was permitted to have two lawful wives. The law was promulgated and he married Justina, by whom he had Valentinian the younger.”</li> <li>Justina was the widow of the ursurper Magnentius, the guy we mentioned earlier to assassinated Constans for liking to have hot, sweet butt sex with barbarian men.</li> <li>She was apparently too young to have children while married to him, which is why she was still a virgin when Valentinian started having baths with her.</li> <li>Of course, Christianity at the time not only didn’t accept bigamy, it didn’t even allow for divorce.</li> <li>Some scholars think this story is therefore bullshit, but hey, I like it.</li> <li>Sound like they had some hot MFF threesomes, and I’m totally loving it.</li> <li>His brother Valens only last a few more years.</li> <li>Valens was an Arian Christian.</li> <li>He infamously did a deal with the Visigoths, allowing hundreds of thousands of them to cross the Danube.</li> <li>When they were abused by Roman generals, and refused grain during a famine, they revolted in 377.</li> <li>After they joined forces with the Ostrogoths and eventually the Huns and Alans, they ended up defeated Valens at the Battle of Adrianople, (modern Edirne in European Turkey, near the border with Greece and Bulgaria) in the Roman province of Thracia, in 378.</li> <li>The numbers are unclear.</li> <li>But some sources suggest the Romans had 30,000 men versus 100,000 Goths.</li> <li>Valens didn’t wait to be reinforced by Gratian, the son of Valentinian, who was now his co-Augustus.</li> <li>Valens was killed during the battle.</li> <li>We’re not sure how.</li> <li>Some sources say he was injured by an arrow or a dart, was taken to a cottage, which was then set fire to.</li> <li>So much for the Labarum standard meaning Jesus would assure the Christian armies of victory.</li> <li>This was a huge defeat for the Romans, both in terms of numbers lost, as well as the optics of the whole thing.</li> <li>One estimate is that two-thirds of the Roman army in the East was lost.</li> <li>Including many generals and the loss of their entire arms factories on the Danube.</li> <li>This was a turning point in military history, with heavy cavalry triumphing over Roman infantry and ushering in the age of the Medieval knight.</li> <li>It also, of course, quickly lead to the Sacking of Rome.</li> <li>With Valens dead, Gratian became the sole Augustus, although his infant half-brother, Valentinian II, was also Augustus in name only.</li> <li>Gratian himself was only 19.</li> <li>Within a year, he promoted Theodosius on 19 January 379 to govern the Eastern portion of the Empire, for reasons unknown, because Theo was a bit of a nobody.</li> <li>But he was born in Hispania, and his father had been a successful general there.</li> <li>Theodosius was in charge of fighting against the Goths.</li> <li>He had some success for a few years, but then things started to turn against him, and eventually Gratian sent in some forces, and they ended up making peace with the Goths in 382.</li> <li>In terms of the rise of Christianity, both of these guys made a lasting contribution.</li> <li>Gratian was a Nicene.</li> <li>He published an edict that all their subjects should profess the faith of the bishops of Rome and Alexandria (i.e., the Nicene faith).</li> <li>This was the beginning of the end of Arianism, at least in the Eastern empire.</li> <li>As we’ll see later, the Goths most converted to Christianity too, but they were Arians for another couple of hundred years.</li> <li>Gratian published edicts basically banning the pagan religion again.</li> <li>He had their temples and treasuries confiscated.</li> <li>He ordered another removal of the Altar of Victory from the Senate House at Rome.</li> <li>Pagan Senators responded by sending an appeal to Gratian, reminding him that he was still the Pontifex Maximus and that it was his duty to see that the ancestral Pagan rites were properly performed.</li> <li>They appealed to him to restore the Altar of Victory and the rights and privileges of the Vestal Virgins and priestly colleges.</li> <li>Gratian, at the urging of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, didn’t even grant them an audience.</li> <li>To top it off, he renounced the title, office, and insignia of the Pontifex Maximus.</li> <li>Towards the end of his life, Gratian went a little mad.</li> <li>By taking into his personal service a body of Alans (Iranian Christians), and appearing in public in the dress of a Scythian warrior, after the disaster of the Battle of Adrianople, he aroused the contempt and resentment of his Roman troops.</li> <li>A Roman general named Magnus Maximus took advantage of this feeling to raise the standard of revolt in Britain and invaded Gaul with a large army.</li> <li>Gratian, who was then in Paris, being deserted by his troops, fled to Lyon.</li> <li>There, through the treachery of the governor, Gratian was delivered over to one of the rebel generals, Andragathius, and assassinated on 25 August 383.</li> <li>He was only 24.</li> </ul> The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2018/02/17/episode-6-imperial-threesome/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Episode 6 – The Imperial Threesome</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

Episode 6 – The Imperial Threesome

Two days after the death of Piero de’ Medici in December 1469, his eldest son, Lorenzo de’ Medici, aka Larry The Med, became the new ruler of Florence. He was 20 years old. He was a major patron of the Renaissance and the father of the future Pope Leo X. The post #76 – Larry The Med appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

Two days after the death of Piero de’ Medici in December 1469, his eldest son, Lorenzo de’ Medici, aka Larry The Med, became the new ruler of Florence. He was 20 years old. He was a major patron of the Renaissance and the father of the future Pope Leo X. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2020/01/11/76-larry-the-med/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#76 – Larry The Med</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#76 – Larry The Med

* Theodosius appointed his young children as his co-emperors, but he’s the sole emperor * He died a few months later, leaving the empire in the hands of his two young children. * Before we get on to what happened next, we need to talk about “Cunctos populos” * the so-called “Edict of Thessalonica” * On 27 February 380, together with Gratian and Valentinian II, Theodosius had issues the edict which declared Nicene Trinitarian Christianity to be the only legitimate imperial religion and the only one entitled to call itself Catholic, which means universal. * All other Christians were declared to be “foolish madmen” and `insane and demented heretics’. * When he first entered Constantinople in November 380, Theodosius summoned the bishop there, Demphilus, and demanded he renounce his “homoian” beliefs and accept the Nicene creed. * This is how silly it’s become. * Homoian mean Jesus was “similar” to God, but said nothing about substance. * And even that was a heresy now. * So Demophilus refuses, Theodosius fires him, and appoints his own Nicene bishop. * Even though the Nicene contingent in the city was quite small. * To ensure his safety from the Homoian masses, troops had to line the streets and even take up guard inside the Church of the Holy Apostles where his enthronement took place. * A year later, in 381, Theodosius begun his persecutions of the pagans. * He also declares that only Nicenes can become bishops. * Everyone else is locked out of the church. * They had to surrender their churches to those clergy who came within Theodosius’ definition, lose any tax exemptions they had and they could not build replacement churches within the city walls. * Not surprisingly disorder broke out as the new laws were enforced. * The church had built up so much wealth and enjoyed so many privileges that expelling the `Arians’ from their churches was explosive. * One pro-Nicene historian, writing in the next century, talks of ` [Arian] wolves harrying the flocks up and down the glades, daring to hold rival assemblies, stirring sedition among the people, and shrinking from nothing which can do damage to the churches’. * It’s worth stopping and wondering why Theodosius might have favoured the Nicene version. * The problem for anyone, emperor, senior administrator or aristocratic landowner, who was concerned with upholding the hierarchical structure of the empire, was that the Jesus of the gospels was a rebel against the empire and had been executed by one of its provincial governors. * He had preached the immediate coming of the kingdom in which the poor would inherit the earth, hardly what the elite wished to hear at a time of intense danger. * There was an incentive to shift the emphasis from the gospels to the divine Jesus, as pre-existent to the Incarnation and of high status `at the right hand of the Father’. * Less talk about how Jesus was executed by Romans and is coming to take his revenge. * More talk about how one day, if you’re nice and obedient and don’t cause trouble, you might get to heaven. * He reiterated Constantine’s ban on pagan sacrifice, prohibited haruspicy on pain of death, pioneered the criminalization of magistrates who did not enforce anti-pagan laws, broke up some pagan associations and destroyed pagan temples. * In 388 he sent a prefect to Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor with the aim of breaking up pagan associations and the destruction of their temples. * The Serapeum at Alexandria, an ancient Greek temple built by Ptolemy III Euergetes 600 years earlier, was destroyed during this campaign, probably around 391. * the Serapeum was the largest and most magnificent of all temples in the Greek quarter of Alexandria. * It may have also housed the last remains of the collection of the great Library of Alexandria. * It was closed in July of 325 AD, likely on the orders of Constantine. * The Christian leader of Alexandria in 391 was Theophilus. * In 391, Theophilus discovered a hidden pagan temple. * He and his followers mockingly displayed the pagan artifacts to the public which offended the pagans enough to provoke an attack on the Christians. * The Christian faction counter-attacked, forcing the pagans to retreat to the Serapeum. * A letter was sent by the emperor that Theophilus should grant the offending pagans pardon, but destroy the temple; * according to Socrates Scholasticus, a contemporary of his, the latter aspect (the destruction of the temple) was added as a result of heavy solicitation for it by Theophilus. * Scholasticus goes on to state that: * “Seizing this opportunity, Theophilus exerted himself to the utmost … he caused the Mithraeum to be cleaned out… Then he destroyed the Serapeum… and he had the phalli of Priapus carried through the midst of the forum. … the heathen temples… were therefore razed to the ground, and the images of their gods molten into pots and other convenient utensils for the use of the Alexandrian church” * Between 389 and 391 Theodosius issued the “Theodosian decrees,” which established a practical ban on paganism; visits to the temples were forbidden, remaining pagan holidays abolished, the sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum extinguished, the Vestal Virgins disbanded, auspices and witchcraft punished. * And modern scholars think Ambrose was behind it. * In 388 news reached the emperor that a Christian mob led by its bishop had sacked a Jewish synagogue in Callinicum, a city on the Euphrates. * Theodosius had ordered the bishop to restore the building. * Ambrose was having none of it. * He declared that there must be no building where Christ was denied and that it was unjustified to ask a bishop to betray his conscience by restoring a synagogue. * He even said that he would be prepared to assume responsibility for the burning of the building himself. * Theodosius quietly backed down. * So he’s already a whipped dog. * The initiation of such violence against Jewish and pagan shrines was not new. * Many of the `miracles’ accredited to the bishop Martin of Tours (tewch) in the 370s in Gaul involved the destruction of pagan shrines. * Oh a good story about Martin of Tours. * When he was young and a soldier in the Roman army and stationed in Gaul, he supposedly had a dream where he was walked down the street and met a beggar who was naked, so Martin tore his military cloak in half and gave one half to the begger. * That night he dreams Jesus was wearing the half he gave the beggar and when he woke up the next morning, the cloak was miraculously repaired. * The cloak was treated as a relic by the Merovingian kings. * During the Middle Ages, they would carry it into battle for good luck. * It was called St. Martin’s miraculous cloak, (cappa Sancti Martini). * The priest who cared for the cloak in its reliquary was called a cappellanu, and ultimately all priests who served the military were called cappellani. * The French translation is chapelains, from which the English word chaplain is derived. * A similar linguistic development took place for the term referring to the small temporary churches built for the relic. * People called them a “capella”, the word for a little cloak. * Eventually, such small churches lost their association with the cloak, and all small churches began to be referred to as “chapels”. * Anyway, back to destroying pagan temples. * Several of Theodosius’ senior officials in his eastern administration had come with him from the west and brought their own fanatical impulses with them. * Another Spanish Christian, Maternus Cynegius, appointed prefect of the east by Theodosius, is associated with the destruction of the great temple complex at Edessa among with other famous temples, like the temple of Zeus Belos in Apamea, which had included a famed oracle, which Septimius Severus, among others, had consulted and the Temple of Allat in Palmyra. * These officials were supported by roving bands of monks. * The pagan orator Libanius complained in an oration of 386 of `the black-robed tribe who hasten to attack the temples with sticks and stone and bars of iron … utter desolation follows, with the stripping of roofs, demolition of walls, the tearing down of statues’. * The archaeological evidence of destruction is extensive. * Christians were the original ISIS. * But it’s after what is commonly known as the “massacre” of Thessalonica (in 390) was Ambrose able to gain total influence with Theodosius. * The Massacre of Thessalonica was an atrocity carried out by Gothic troops under Theodosius against the inhabitants of Thessalonica, who had risen in revolt against the Gothic troops. * In April 390, Butheric, a Gothic magister militum in command of Illyricum (which included Thessalonica), had a popular charioteer arrested for a homosexual offence (he tried to rape a male cupbearer). * The populace demanded the charioteer’s release and, as Butheric refused, a general revolt ensued which cost Butheric and several other Roman authorities their lives. * As soon as Theodosius heard of the uprising, he was enraged and ordered an immediate retaliation. * The army units sent to Thessalonica acted as if they had captured a hostile city and massacred several thousands of its inhabitants. * Church historian Theodoretus puts the figure at about 7,000, saying: * The anger of the Emperor rose to the highest pitch, and he gratified his vindictive desire for vengeance by unsheathing the sword most unjustly and tyrannically against all, slaying the innocent and guilty alike. It is said seven thousand perished without any forms of law, and without even having judicial sentence passed upon them; but that, like ears of wheat in the time of harvest, they were alike cut down. * Ambrose heard about the massacre, and left Milan (which was the residence of Theodosius at that time) and refused to celebrate a mass in the Emperor’s presence, until Theodosius repented. * Now Milan is a long fucking way from Thessalonica. * It’s not Ambrose’s domain. * He’s not even the Pope, who maybe could claim some kind of universal authority. * He’s just the bishop of Milan. * but this show you the kind of power he had. * In a letter to the emperor, Ambrose explained his position and gave reasons for his resolution: * What could I do? Should I not hear? But I could not clog my ears with wax, as old fables tell. Should I then speak about what I heard? But I was obliged to avoid precisely what I feared could be brought about by your orders, that is, a bloodshed. Should I remain silent? But then the worst thing would happen as my conscience would be bound and my words taken away. And where would they be then? When a priest does not talk to a sinner, then the sinner will die in his sin, and the priest will be guilty because he failed to correct him. * When the emperor tried to enter a Milanese church, where Ambrose was about to celebrate a mass, Ambrose stopped him and rebuked him for what he had done. * And because the emperor “had been brought up according to divine words and understood well that some affairs are handled by priests, others by emperors”, he could do nothing but return “weeping and sighing” to the palace. * Eight months had passed and Theodosius still sat in the palace, moaning and sobbing. * His magister officiorum Flavinus Rufinus, who “used great freedom of speech due to the familiarity with the emperor”, noticed this behaviour, approached and asked him why he was weeping. * Having been told, he volunteered to see the bishop and ask him to reconsider. * Theodosius hesitantly agreed and even chose to follow Rufinus from a distance. * Ambrose was not restrained at all when negotiating with Rufinus, scolding him and even accusing him of complicity in the massacre: “Rufinus, you are as impudent as a dog, because it was you who advised the emperor such a bloodshed.” * When the emperor showed up, Ambrose at first remained stubborn and changed his mind only after Theodosius promised to promulgate a law, which in cases of death sentences would introduce a thirty-day lag before the execution. * Theodosius’ penance apparently included his promise to adopt a new role as the champion of the Christian faith. * This is when Theodosius does all out against the pagans. * But just stop and think about this situation. * The SOLE emperor of the Roman Empire is allowing a Christian bishop to punish him. * And instead of having the bishop arrested or exiled or executed, he just sits around and cries because he might die and go to hell. * How fucking pathetic. * Can you imagine how Julius Caesar or Augustus would have handled that situation?  The post Episode 9 – The Whipped Dog appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

* Theodosius appointed his young children as his co-emperors, but he’s the sole emperor * He died a few months later, leaving the empire in the hands of his two young children. * Before we get on to what happened next, we need to talk about “Cunctos populos” * the so-called “Edict of Thessalonica” * On 27 February 380, together with Gratian and Valentinian II, Theodosius had issues the edict which declared Nicene Trinitarian Christianity to be the only legitimate imperial religion and the only one entitled to call itself Catholic, which means universal. * All other Christians were declared to be “foolish madmen” and `insane and demented heretics’. * When he first entered Constantinople in November 380, Theodosius summoned the bishop there, Demphilus, and demanded he renounce his “homoian” beliefs and accept the Nicene creed. * This is how silly it’s become. * Homoian mean Jesus was “similar” to God, but said nothing about substance. * And even that was a heresy now. * So Demophilus refuses, Theodosius fires him, and appoints his own Nicene bishop. * Even though the Nicene contingent in the city was quite small. * To ensure his safety from the Homoian masses, troops had to line the streets and even take up guard inside the Church of the Holy Apostles where his enthronement took place. * A year later, in 381, Theodosius begun his persecutions of the pagans. * He also declares that only Nicenes can become bishops. * Everyone else is locked out of the church. * They had to surrender their churches to those clergy who came within Theodosius’ definition, lose any tax exemptions they had and they could not build replacement churches within the city walls. * Not surprisingly disorder broke out as the new laws were enforced. * The church had built up so much wealth and enjoyed so many privileges that expelling the `Arians’ from their churches was explosive. * One pro-Nicene historian, writing in the next century, talks of ` [Arian] wolves harrying the flocks up and down the glades, daring to hold rival assemblies, stirring sedition among the people, and shrinking from nothing which can do damage to the churches’. * It’s worth stopping and wondering why Theodosius might have favoured the Nicene version. * The problem for anyone, emperor, senior administrator or aristocratic landowner, who was concerned with upholding the hierarchical structure of the empire, was that the Jesus of the gospels was a rebel against the empire and had been executed by one of its provincial governors. * He had preached the immediate coming of the kingdom in which the poor would inherit the earth, hardly what the elite wished to hear at a time of intense danger. * There was an incentive to shift the emphasis from the gospels to the divine Jesus, as pre-existent to the Incarnation and of high status `at the right hand of the Father’. * Less talk about how Jesus was executed by Romans and is coming to take his revenge. * More talk about how one day, if you’re nice and obedient and don’t cause trouble, you might get to heaven. * He reiterated Constantine’s ban on pagan sacrifice, prohibited haruspicy on pain of death, pioneered the criminalization of magistrates who did not enforce anti-pagan laws, broke up some pagan associations and destroyed pagan temples. * In 388 he sent a prefect to Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor with the aim of breaking up pagan associations and the destruction of their temples. * The Serapeum at Alexandria, an ancient Greek temple built by Ptolemy III Euergetes 600 years earlier, was destroyed during this campaign, probably around 391. * the Serapeum was the largest and most magnificent of all temples in the Greek quarter of Alexandria. * It may have also housed the last remains of the collection of the great Library of Alexandria. * It was closed in July of 325 AD, likely on the orders of Constantine. * The Christian leader of Alexandria in 391 was Theophilus. * In 391, Theophilus discovered a hidden pagan temple. * He and his followers mockingly displayed the pagan artifacts to the public which offended the pagans enough to provoke an attack on the Christians. * The Christian faction counter-attacked, forcing the pagans to retreat to the Serapeum. * A letter was sent by the emperor that Theophilus should grant the offending pagans pardon, but destroy the temple; * according to Socrates Scholasticus, a contemporary of his, the latter aspect (the destruction of the temple) was added as a result of heavy solicitation for it by Theophilus. * Scholasticus goes on to state that: * “Seizing this opportunity, Theophilus exerted himself to the utmost … he caused the Mithraeum to be cleaned out… Then he destroyed the Serapeum… and he had the phalli of Priapus carried through the midst of the forum. … the heathen temples… were therefore razed to the ground, and the images of their gods molten into pots and other convenient utensils for the use of the Alexandrian church” * Between 389 and 391 Theodosius issued the “Theodosian decrees,” which established a practical ban on paganism; visits to the temples were forbidden, remaining pagan holidays abolished, the sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum extinguished, the Vestal Virgins disbanded, auspices and witchcraft punished. * And modern scholars think Ambrose was behind it. * In 388 news reached the emperor that a Christian mob led by its bishop had sacked a Jewish synagogue in Callinicum, a city on the Euphrates. * Theodosius had ordered the bishop to restore the building. * Ambrose was having none of it. * He declared that there must be no building where Christ was denied and that it was unjustified to ask a bishop to betray his conscience by restoring a synagogue. * He even said that he would be prepared to assume responsibility for the burning of the building himself. * Theodosius quietly backed down. * So he’s already a whipped dog. * The initiation of such violence against Jewish and pagan shrines was not new. * Many of the `miracles’ accredited to the bishop Martin of Tours (tewch) in the 370s in Gaul involved the destruction of pagan shrines. * Oh a good story about Martin of Tours. * When he was young and a soldier in the Roman army and stationed in Gaul, he supposedly had a dream where he was walked down the street and met a beggar who was naked, so Martin tore his military cloak in half and gave one half to the begger. * That night he dreams Jesus was wearing the half he gave the beggar and when he woke up the next morning, the cloak was miraculously repaired. * The cloak was treated as a relic by the Merovingian kings. * During the Middle Ages, they would carry it into battle for good luck. * It was called St. Martin’s miraculous cloak, (cappa Sancti Martini). * The priest who cared for the cloak in its reliquary was called a cappellanu, and ultimately all priests who served the military were called cappellani. * The French translation is chapelains, from which the English word chaplain is derived. * A similar linguistic development took place for the term referring to the small temporary churches built for the relic. * People called them a “capella”, the word for a little cloak. * Eventually, such small churches lost their association with the cloak, and all small churches began to be referred to as “chapels”. * Anyway, back to destroying pagan temples. * Several of Theodosius’ senior officials in his eastern administration had come with him from the west and brought their own fanatical impulses with them. * Another Spanish Christian, Maternus Cynegius, appointed prefect of the east by Theodosius, is associated with the destruction of the great temple complex at Edessa among with other famous temples, like the temple of Zeus Belos in Apamea, which had included a famed oracle, which Septimius Severus, among others, had consulted and the Temple of Allat in Palmyra. * These officials were supported by roving bands of monks. * The pagan orator Libanius complained in an oration of 386 of `the black-robed tribe who hasten to attack the temples with sticks and stone and bars of iron … utter desolation follows, with the stripping of roofs, demolition of walls, the tearing down of statues’. * The archaeological evidence of destruction is extensive. * Christians were the original ISIS. * But it’s after what is commonly known as the “massacre” of Thessalonica (in 390) was Ambrose able to gain total influence with Theodosius. * The Massacre of Thessalonica was an atrocity carried out by Gothic troops under Theodosius against the inhabitants of Thessalonica, who had risen in revolt against the Gothic troops. * In April 390, Butheric, a Gothic magister militum in command of Illyricum (which included Thessalonica), had a popular charioteer arrested for a homosexual offence (he tried to rape a male cupbearer). * The populace demanded the charioteer’s release and, as Butheric refused, a general revolt ensued which cost Butheric and several other Roman authorities their lives. * As soon as Theodosius heard of the uprising, he was enraged and ordered an immediate retaliation. * The army units sent to Thessalonica acted as if they had captured a hostile city and massacred several thousands of its inhabitants. * Church historian Theodoretus puts the figure at about 7,000, saying: * The anger of the Emperor rose to the highest pitch, and he gratified his vindictive desire for vengeance by unsheathing the sword most unjustly and tyrannically against all, slaying the innocent and guilty alike. It is said seven thousand perished without any forms of law, and without even having judicial sentence passed upon them; but that, like ears of wheat in the time of harvest, they were alike cut down. * Ambrose heard about the massacre, and left Milan (which was the residence of Theodosius at that time) and refused to celebrate a mass in the Emperor’s presence, until Theodosius repented. * Now Milan is a long fucking way from Thessalonica. * It’s not Ambrose’s domain. * He’s not even the Pope, who maybe could claim some kind of universal authority. * He’s just the bishop of Milan. * but this show you the kind of power he had. * In a letter to the emperor, Ambrose explained his position and gave reasons for his resolution: * What could I do? Should I not hear? But I could not clog my ears with wax, as old fables tell. Should I then speak about what I heard? But I was obliged to avoid precisely what I feared could be brought about by your orders, that is, a bloodshed. Should I remain silent? But then the worst thing would happen as my conscience would be bound and my words taken away. And where would they be then? When a priest does not talk to a sinner, then the sinner will die in his sin, and the priest will be guilty because he failed to correct him. * When the emperor tried to enter a Milanese church, where Ambrose was about to celebrate a mass, Ambrose stopped him and rebuked him for what he had done. * And because the emperor “had been brought up according to divine words and understood well that some affairs are handled by priests, others by emperors”, he could do nothing but return “weeping and sighing” to the palace. * Eight months had passed and Theodosius still sat in the palace, moaning and sobbing. * His magister officiorum Flavinus Rufinus, who “used great freedom of speech due to the familiarity with the emperor”, noticed this behaviour, approached and asked him why he was weeping. * Having been told, he volunteered to see the bishop and ask him to reconsider. * Theodosius hesitantly agreed and even chose to follow Rufinus from a distance. * Ambrose was not restrained at all when negotiating with Rufinus, scolding him and even accusing him of complicity in the massacre: “Rufinus, you are as impudent as a dog, because it was you who advised the emperor such a bloodshed.” * When the emperor showed up, Ambrose at first remained stubborn and changed his mind only after Theodosius promised to promulgate a law, which in cases of death sentences would introduce a thirty-day lag before the execution. * Theodosius’ penance apparently included his promise to adopt a new role as the champion of the Christian faith. * This is when Theodosius does all out against the pagans. * But just stop and think about this situation. * The SOLE emperor of the Roman Empire is allowing a Christian bishop to punish him. * And instead of having the bishop arrested or exiled or executed, he just sits around and cries because he might die and go to hell. * How fucking pathetic. * Can you imagine how Julius Caesar or Augustus would have handled that situation? The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2018/03/16/episode-9-the-whipped-dog/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Episode 9 – The Whipped Dog</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

Episode 9 – The Whipped Dog

 Then On 11 November 308, Gally called a council to put this nonsense to bed. He invited Maximian and Diocletian. Maximian was forced to abdicate again and Constantine was again demoted to Caesar. Licinius, one of Galerius’ old military companions, and a close childhood friend, was appointed Augustus in the western regions. But Conny wasn’t having it. He continued to call himself Augustus. Meanwhile Maximinus Daia, Galerius’ nephew, who was a Caesar, was frustrated that he had been passed over for promotion while the newcomer Licinius had been raised to the office of Augustus, and demanded that Galerius promote him. Galerius offered to call both Maximinus and Constantine “sons of the Augusti”, and they were like “fuck off, what is that?” By the spring of 310 AD, Galerius was referring to both men as Augusti. Then old Maximian was getting bored in retirement and he started a rumour that Constantine was dead and he was the new Augusutus. That didn’t go well. Conny heard about it, returned from fighting the Franks across the Rhine, and defeated Maximian in battle. Conny captured him and but gave him clemency. Although he strongly suggested he commit suicide. Which he did. He hung himself. Maxentius promised to avenge his fathers’ death. Conny then claimed that Maximian had actually tried to murder him in his sleep after his clemency, but Fausta had found out, so Conny told a eunuch to sleep in his place. “Hey ummm Johnny, listen… you’ve always said you thought my bed looked really comfy, right? Well how would you like to try it out? Oh suuuure, no problem, it’s my pleasure, I’m that kind of king.” The eunuch was murdered in his place. And then the jig was up and Maximian committed suicide. Conny then instituted a damnatio memoriae on Maximian. This is all obviously propaganda to ruin Maxentius’ family’s reputation. But it also had an impact on Conny’s legitimacy, because it was Maximian who first made him Augustus. So, miraculously, he now discovered that he was actually distantly related to Claudius II, a soldier emperor of barbarian birth from the 3rd century. So Conny was all like “well hold on a minute! I don’t need to be a tetrarch. I’m the real deal. Descended from an emperor. It’s mine! All mine!” This is in 310. BTW, there are some great stories about Claudius II. Also known as Claudius Gothicus because he defeated the Goths. He once knocked out a horse’s teeth with one punch. When he performed as a wrestler in the 250s, before he was emperor, he supposedly knocked out the teeth of his opponent when his genitalia had been grabbed in the match. Anyway, not Conny claims a divine vision of Apollo and Victory granting him laurel wreaths of health and a long reign.  In the likeness of Apollo Constantine recognized himself as the saving figure to whom would be granted “rule of the whole world”. He basically declared himself the saviour and sole ruler. And his affiliation with the gods on his coinage changed too. In his early reign, the coinage of Constantine advertised Mars as his patron. From 310 AD on, Mars was replaced by Sol Invictus, the Unconquered sun, a god conventionally identified with Apollo. The date of 25 December was the date of the festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti Constantine decreed in 321 that the dies Solis—day of the sun, “Sunday”—as the Roman day of rest. “On the venerable day of the Sun let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest, and let all workshops be closed.” Sol had been worshiped since the founding of Rome. So we see here that Conny was happy switching around his allegiance to the gods, depending on his agenda at the time. In 310 Galerius fell ill and died a year later in 311. According to the Origo, “he was attacked by a violent disease and wasted away so completely, that he died with the inner parts of his body exposed and in a state of corruption.” His last official proclamation was an edict ending the persecution of the Christians. Then the others went to war, just like Alexander’s successors. Maxentius strengthened his support in the Christian community by allowing it to elect a new Bishop of Rome, Eusebius. In the summer of 311 AD, Maxentius mobilized against Constantine while Licinius was occupied with affairs in the East. He declared war on Constantine, vowing to avenge his father’s “murder”. Constantine forged his own alliance with Licinius over the winter of 311–312 AD, and offered him his sister Constantia in marriage. This lead to Maximinus and Maxentius doing a deal as well. Early in 312, Conny went to Italy to battle Maxentius with 40,000 troops. The fought several battles that Conny won. Maxentius ended up in Rome, just preparing for a siege. He destroyed all of the bridges across the Tiber cut. but he eventually was worried that he wouldn’t survive a siege and ordered a temporary boat bridge across the Tiber in preparation for a field battle, that could be broken up if Constantine tried to cross. Maxentius organized his forces—still twice the size of Constantine’s—in long lines facing the battle plain, with their backs to the river.[159] Constantine’s army arrived at the field bearing unfamiliar symbols on either its standards or its soldiers’ shields.[160] Lactantius, close to Constantine as his son’s tutor, told of a dream Constantine had had the night before the battle in which he had been told to place a sign of Christ (presumably the Chi-Rho, the first two letters in Greek of Christ’s name) on the shields of his men. Twenty-five years later, Eusebius describes another version, where, while marching at midday, “he saw with his own eyes in the heavens a trophy of the cross arising from the light of the sun, carrying the message, In Hoc Signo Vinces or “with this sign, you shall win”;[162] in Eusebius’s account, Constantine had a dream the following night, in which Christ appeared with the same heavenly sign, and told him to make a standard, the labarum, for his army in that form.[163] Eusebius is vague about when and where these events took place,[164] but it enters his narrative before the war against Maxentius begins.[165] Eusebius describes the sign as Chi (Χ) traversed by Rho (Ρ): ☧, a symbol representing the first two letters of the Greek spelling of the word Christos or Christ.[166][167] In 315 AD a medallion was issued at Ticinum showing Constantine wearing a helmet emblazoned with the Chi Rho,[168] and coins issued at Siscia in 317/318 AD repeat the image.[169] The figure was otherwise rare, however, and is uncommon in imperial iconography and propaganda before the 320s.[170] But it actually predates Constantine by 500 years. Ptolemy III. 246-221 BC had a coin minted with the Chi Rho. It may have represented the Greek word chreston which means “useful”. Or it was also the first two letters of Chronos, the god of time. XP were also the first two letters in the Greek words for “gold” (χρυσός), “anointed” (χριστός) and “virtuous or good” (χρηστός) Demosthenes, who had the phrase “good luck” emblazoned in gold letters on his shield at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE – possibly the same XP symbol. Maybe Constantine was just saying “good luck” or calling himself “the virtuous” or “the good”. Or maybe he had already planned to integrate the Christians into his empire and thought this was good PR. Outside Eusebius’ Life, there is virtually no evidence that suggests that Constantine knew anything much about Christ or even of the requirements for Christian living. His main concern may rather have been to ensure that the growing Christian communities supported his imperial rule. And… Eusebius’ The Life of Constantine was not the first volume of contemporary history published by Eusebius. He had already written a History of the Church, which he issued to the world in 326. What, then, had the author to say in that year about this marvellous vision? Nothing. There is not a word about the flaming cross, or the coming of Christ to Constantine in a dream, or the fashioning of the Labarum. All Eusebius says, in his History, of the conversion of Constantine, is that the Emperor “piously called to his aid the God of Heaven and his son Jesus Christ” It is a strange silence. If the heavenly cross had been seen by the whole army; if the current version of the story had been the same in 326 as it was in 337, it is at least difficult to understand why Eusebius omitted all mention of an event which must have been the talk of the whole Roman world and must have made the heart of every Christian exult. Such manifest signs from Heaven were scarcely so common in the opening of the fourth century that an ecclesiastical historian would think any allusion to it unnecessary. What about the version of Lactantius? It is that just before the battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine was warned in a dream to have the divine sign of the cross (caeleste signuni) inscribed on the shields of his soldiers before leading them to the attack. Just a cross. He did as he was bidden, and the letter X, was placed upon his legionaries’ shields. That is the legend in its earliest guise. There is not a word about Constantine’s anxiety and searching of soul. The event is placed, not at the opening of the campaign, as Eusebius would seem to suggest though he does not expressly say so, but on the eve of the decisive battle. There is nothing about the cross flaming in the afternoon sky, nothing of the inscription, “Conquer by This,” nothing of the entire army being witness of the portent. Constantine simply has a dream and is warned (commonitus) to place the initial of Christ on his soldiers’ shields. It is not even said who gave the warning; there is not a hint that it was Christ Himself — as in the story of Eusebius — who appeared to Constantine; there is no mention of the Labarum. Obviously, Lactantius wasn’t aware of any triumphant answer to Constantine’s prayer for a sign. According to him, the Emperor was merely warned in a dream that victory would reward him if he dedicated his weapons to the honour and service of Christ. Assuming for a moment that Constantine did mean to fight in the name of Jesus, it might have been because he thought Maxentius had a monopoly on the old gods. What then more natural than that he should take for granted that, if ever the gods of Rome had interfered in mortal affairs, they would do so now on behalf of Maxentius, who had been raised to empire as Rome’s champion? Constantine was not one of those people who seek truth for its own sake without regard for material advantage. Conversion in his case didn’t mean some sudden or even gradual change permanently altering his outlook upon life, and refining and transmuting personal character. It merely meant worshipping at another shrine, entering another temple, reciting another formula. Adding one more god. His ruling motive was ambition. Was the whole legend was an invention of the Emperor’s from beginning to end? In this connection it is important to take into account the narrative of Nazarius, a rhetorician who delivered a formal panegyric upon Constantine in 321 on the anniversary of his fifteenth year of rule, and took the opportunity of reviewing the whole campaign against Maxentius. Nazarius was a pagan;  what then was the pagan version, if any, of the miracle described by Eusebius and the Emperor? Did the pagans attribute divine assistance to Constantine throughout this critical campaign? The answer is unmistakable. YES. Nazarius tells us that all Gaul was talking with awe and wonder of the marvels which had taken place, how the soldiers of Constantine had seen in the sky celestial armies marching in battle array and had been dazzled by their flashing shields and glittering armour. Constantine’s soldiery had also heard the shouts of these armies in the sky, “We seek Constantine; we are marching to the aid of Constantine.” Clearly the pagan as well as the Christian world insisted upon attributing divine assistance to Constantine and had its own version of how that succor came. Nazarius’s explanation was simple. According to him, it was Constantius Chlorus, the deified Emperor, who was leading up the hosts of heaven, and such miraculous intervention was due to the supreme virtue of the father, which had descended to the son. Chlorus, of course, in Greek, starts with an X. The question at once arises whether this is merely a pagan version of the Christian legend. Did the pagans just steal the Christian version of the story? Probably not. We have to remember that public opinion in the fourth century — as indeed for many centuries both before and after — was not only willing to believe in supernatural intervention at moments of great crisis, but actually insisted that there should be such intervention. The greater the crisis, the more entirely reasonable it was that some deity or deities should make their influence especially felt and turn the scale to one side or the other. But was there some unusual manifestation in the sky which was the common basis of the stories of Eusebius and Nazarius? It is not unreasonable to suppose so. Scientists say that the natural phenomenon known as the parhelion or “sun dog”, not infrequently assumes the shape of a cross, an atmospheric optical phenomenon that consists of a bright spot to the left and/or right of the Sun. It looks like a cross on the sun with a halo. BTW, we have stories MUCH LATER in history of people believing the saw signs in the sky. Such as the aurora borealis of November, 1848. Throughout France, the people thought they saw in the sky the letters L. N. — the initials of Louis Napoleon — and took them as a clear indication from Heaven of how they ought to vote at the impending Presidential election, and as an omen of the result. That was the interpretation in France.  In Rome — where the people knew and cared nothing for Louis Napoleon — no one saw the Napoleonic initials. They thought it was the blood of the assassinated politician Pellegrino Rossi, which had risen to heaven and was calling for vengeance. BTW – his murderer’s name was Constantini. If such varying interpretations of a natural if rare phenomenon were possible in the middle of the nineteenth century, what interpretation was not possible in the fourth? The world was profoundly superstitious. When people believe in manifest signs they usually see them. But though we may be justly skeptical of the circumstances attending the conversion of Constantine, there is no room to doubt the conversion itself. We do not believe that he fought the battle of the Milvian Bridge as the avowed champion of Christianity, but the probabilities are that he had made up his mind to become a Christian when he fought it. In a recent book by Harold Drake, Professor Emeritus of History at UC Santa Barbara: “Constantine’s goal was to create a neutral public space in which Christians and pagans could both function . . . [and] he was far more successful in creating a stable coalition of both Christians and non-Christians in support of this program of ‘peaceful co-existence’ than has generally been recognised.” Remember he had earlier claimed to have a vision from Apollo, promising him he would rule for thirty years. Hard to imagine that having had a vision of ONE god, he’d now say “oh no there is only this other god.” He wants ALL the gods on his side. Or, at least, all of their followers. Not a bad strategy. Whatever his reasons, this was the first time Jesus was known to support a war. I thought Jesus was all about peace and love? This is the beginning of a long history of Christians using their religion for war and violence. Constantine deployed his own forces along the whole length of Maxentius’ line. He ordered his cavalry to charge, and they broke Maxentius’ cavalry. He then sent his infantry against Maxentius’ infantry. Defeated on the far side of the bridge, Maxentius and his men fled back over it towards Rome. Under the weight of panicking soldiers, the “bridge” disintegrated and Maxentius was drowned with hundreds of his men. Constantine announced that his victory was due to the support he had received from “the supreme deity,” by which Christians such as Eusebius and Lactantius claimed he meant the God of the Christians. The earliest account we have is from two or three years after the battle. Constantine entered Rome on 29 October 312. He staged a grand adventus in the city, and was met with popular jubilation. Maxentius’ body was fished out of the Tiber and decapitated. His head was paraded through the streets for all to see. After the ceremonies, Maxentius’ disembodied head was sent to Carthage, where there had been riots; the riots stopped.    The post Episode 3 – Constantine’s Vision appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

<ul> <li>Then On 11 November 308, Gally called a council to put this nonsense to bed.</li> <li>He invited Maximian and Diocletian.</li> <li>Maximian was forced to abdicate again and Constantine was again demoted to Caesar.</li> <li>Licinius, one of Galerius’ old military companions, and a close childhood friend, was appointed Augustus in the western regions.</li> <li>But Conny wasn’t having it.</li> <li>He continued to call himself Augustus.</li> <li>Meanwhile Maximinus Daia, Galerius’ nephew, who was a Caesar, was frustrated that he had been passed over for promotion while the newcomer Licinius had been raised to the office of Augustus, and demanded that Galerius promote him.</li> <li>Galerius offered to call both Maximinus and Constantine “sons of the Augusti”, and they were like “fuck off, what is that?”</li> <li>By the spring of 310 AD, Galerius was referring to both men as Augusti.</li> <li>Then old Maximian was getting bored in retirement and he started a rumour that Constantine was dead and he was the new Augusutus.</li> <li>That didn’t go well.</li> <li>Conny heard about it, returned from fighting the Franks across the Rhine, and defeated Maximian in battle.</li> <li>Conny captured him and but gave him clemency.</li> <li>Although he strongly suggested he commit suicide.</li> <li>Which he did. He hung himself.</li> <li>Maxentius promised to avenge his fathers’ death.</li> <li>Conny then claimed that Maximian had actually tried to murder him in his sleep after his clemency, but Fausta had found out, so Conny told a eunuch to sleep in his place.</li> <li>“Hey ummm Johnny, listen… you’ve always said you thought my bed looked really comfy, right? Well how would you like to try it out? Oh suuuure, no problem, it’s my pleasure, I’m that kind of king.”</li> <li>The eunuch was murdered in his place.</li> <li>And then the jig was up and Maximian committed suicide.</li> <li>Conny then instituted a damnatio memoriae on Maximian.</li> <li>This is all obviously propaganda to ruin Maxentius’ family’s reputation.</li> <li>But it also had an impact on Conny’s legitimacy, because it was Maximian who first made him Augustus.</li> <li>So, miraculously, he now discovered that he was actually distantly related to Claudius II, a soldier emperor of barbarian birth from the 3rd century.</li> <li>So Conny was all like “well hold on a minute! I don’t need to be a tetrarch. I’m the real deal. Descended from an emperor. It’s mine! All mine!”</li> <li>This is in 310.</li> <li>BTW, there are some great stories about Claudius II.</li> <li>Also known as Claudius Gothicus because he defeated the Goths.</li> <li>He once knocked out a horse’s teeth with one punch.</li> <li>When he performed as a wrestler in the 250s, before he was emperor, he supposedly knocked out the teeth of his opponent when his genitalia had been grabbed in the match.</li> <li>Anyway, not Conny claims a divine vision of Apollo and Victory granting him laurel wreaths of health and a long reign.</li> <li> In the likeness of Apollo Constantine recognized himself as the saving figure to whom would be granted “rule of the whole world”.</li> <li>He basically declared himself the saviour and sole ruler.</li> <li>And his affiliation with the gods on his coinage changed too.</li> <li>In his early reign, the coinage of Constantine advertised Mars as his patron.</li> <li>From 310 AD on, Mars was replaced by Sol Invictus, the Unconquered sun, a god conventionally identified with Apollo.</li> <li>The date of 25 December was the date of the festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti</li> <li>Constantine decreed in 321 that the dies Solis—day of the sun, “Sunday”—as the Roman day of rest.</li> <li>“On the venerable day of the Sun let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest, and let all workshops be closed.”</li> <li>Sol had been worshiped since the founding of Rome.</li> <li>So we see here that Conny was happy switching around his allegiance to the gods, depending on his agenda at the time.</li> <li>In 310 Galerius fell ill and died a year later in 311.</li> <li>According to the Origo, “he was attacked by a violent disease and wasted away so completely, that he died with the inner parts of his body exposed and in a state of corruption.”</li> <li>His last official proclamation was an edict ending the persecution of the Christians.</li> <li>Then the others went to war, just like Alexander’s successors.</li> <li>Maxentius strengthened his support in the Christian community by allowing it to elect a new Bishop of Rome, Eusebius.</li> <li>In the summer of 311 AD, Maxentius mobilized against Constantine while Licinius was occupied with affairs in the East.</li> <li>He declared war on Constantine, vowing to avenge his father’s “murder”.</li> <li>Constantine forged his own alliance with Licinius over the winter of 311–312 AD, and offered him his sister Constantia in marriage.</li> <li>This lead to Maximinus and Maxentius doing a deal as well.</li> <li>Early in 312, Conny went to Italy to battle Maxentius with 40,000 troops.</li> <li>The fought several battles that Conny won.</li> <li>Maxentius ended up in Rome, just preparing for a siege.</li> <li>He destroyed all of the bridges across the Tiber cut.</li> <li>but he eventually was worried that he wouldn’t survive a siege and ordered a temporary boat bridge across the Tiber in preparation for a field battle, that could be broken up if Constantine tried to cross.</li> <li>Maxentius organized his forces—still twice the size of Constantine’s—in long lines facing the battle plain, with their backs to the river.[159]</li> <li>Constantine’s army arrived at the field bearing unfamiliar symbols on either its standards or its soldiers’ shields.[160]</li> <li>Lactantius, close to Constantine as his son’s tutor, told of a dream Constantine had had the night before the battle in which he had been told to place a sign of Christ (presumably the Chi-Rho, the first two letters in Greek of Christ’s name) on the shields of his men.</li> <li>Twenty-five years later, Eusebius describes another version, where, while marching at midday, “he saw with his own eyes in the heavens a trophy of the cross arising from the light of the sun, carrying the message, In Hoc Signo Vinces or “with this sign, you shall win”;[162]</li> <li>in Eusebius’s account, Constantine had a dream the following night, in which Christ appeared with the same heavenly sign, and told him to make a standard, the labarum, for his army in that form.[163]</li> <li>Eusebius is vague about when and where these events took place,[164] but it enters his narrative before the war against Maxentius begins.[165]</li> <li>Eusebius describes the sign as Chi (Χ) traversed by Rho (Ρ): ☧, a symbol representing the first two letters of the Greek spelling of the word Christos or Christ.[166][167]</li> <li>In 315 AD a medallion was issued at Ticinum showing Constantine wearing a helmet emblazoned with the Chi Rho,[168] and coins issued at Siscia in 317/318 AD repeat the image.[169]</li> <li>The figure was otherwise rare, however, and is uncommon in imperial iconography and propaganda before the 320s.[170]</li> <li>But it actually predates Constantine by 500 years.</li> <li>Ptolemy III. 246-221 BC had a coin minted with the Chi Rho.</li> <li>It may have represented the Greek word chreston which means “useful”.</li> <li>Or it was also the first two letters of Chronos, the god of time.</li> <li>XP were also the first two letters in the Greek words for “gold” (χρυσός), “anointed” (χριστός) and “virtuous or good” (χρηστός)</li> <li>Demosthenes, who had the phrase “good luck” emblazoned in gold letters on his shield at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE – possibly the same XP symbol.</li> <li>Maybe Constantine was just saying “good luck” or calling himself “the virtuous” or “the good”.</li> <li>Or maybe he had already planned to integrate the Christians into his empire and thought this was good PR.</li> <li>Outside Eusebius’ Life, there is virtually no evidence that suggests that Constantine knew anything much about Christ or even of the requirements for Christian living.</li> <li>His main concern may rather have been to ensure that the growing Christian communities supported his imperial rule.</li> <li>And… Eusebius’ The Life of Constantine was not the first volume of contemporary history published by Eusebius.</li> <li>He had already written a History of the Church, which he issued to the world in 326.</li> <li>What, then, had the author to say in that year about this marvellous vision?</li> <li>Nothing.</li> <li>There is not a word about the flaming cross, or the coming of Christ to Constantine in a dream, or the fashioning of the Labarum.</li> <li>All Eusebius says, in his History, of the conversion of Constantine, is that the Emperor “piously called to his aid the God of Heaven and his son Jesus Christ”</li> <li>It is a strange silence.</li> <li>If the heavenly cross had been seen by the whole army; if the current version of the story had been the same in 326 as it was in 337, it is at least difficult to understand why Eusebius omitted all mention of an event which must have been the talk of the whole Roman world and must have made the heart of every Christian exult.</li> <li>Such manifest signs from Heaven were scarcely so common in the opening of the fourth century that an ecclesiastical historian would think any allusion to it unnecessary.</li> <li>What about the version of Lactantius?</li> <li>It is that just before the battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine was warned in a dream to have the divine sign of the cross (caeleste signuni) inscribed on the shields of his soldiers before leading them to the attack.</li> <li>Just a cross.</li> <li>He did as he was bidden, and the letter X, was placed upon his legionaries’ shields.</li> <li>That is the legend in its earliest guise.</li> <li>There is not a word about Constantine’s anxiety and searching of soul.</li> <li>The event is placed, not at the opening of the campaign, as Eusebius would seem to suggest though he does not expressly say so, but on the eve of the decisive battle.</li> <li>There is nothing about the cross flaming in the afternoon sky, nothing of the inscription, “Conquer by This,” nothing of the entire army being witness of the portent.</li> <li>Constantine simply has a dream and is warned (commonitus) to place the initial of Christ on his soldiers’ shields.</li> <li>It is not even said who gave the warning; there is not a hint that it was Christ Himself — as in the story of Eusebius — who appeared to Constantine; there is no mention of the Labarum.</li> <li>Obviously, Lactantius wasn’t aware of any triumphant answer to Constantine’s prayer for a sign.</li> <li>According to him, the Emperor was merely warned in a dream that victory would reward him if he dedicated his weapons to the honour and service of Christ.</li> <li>Assuming for a moment that Constantine did mean to fight in the name of Jesus, it might have been because he thought Maxentius had a monopoly on the old gods.</li> <li>What then more natural than that he should take for granted that, if ever the gods of Rome had interfered in mortal affairs, they would do so now on behalf of Maxentius, who had been raised to empire as Rome’s champion?</li> <li>Constantine was not one of those people who seek truth for its own sake without regard for material advantage.</li> <li>Conversion in his case didn’t mean some sudden or even gradual change permanently altering his outlook upon life, and refining and transmuting personal character.</li> <li>It merely meant worshipping at another shrine, entering another temple, reciting another formula.</li> <li>Adding one more god.</li> <li>His ruling motive was ambition.</li> <li>Was the whole legend was an invention of the Emperor’s from beginning to end?</li> <li>In this connection it is important to take into account the narrative of Nazarius, a rhetorician who delivered a formal panegyric upon Constantine in 321 on the anniversary of his fifteenth year of rule, and took the opportunity of reviewing the whole campaign against Maxentius.</li> <li>Nazarius was a pagan;</li> <li> what then was the pagan version, if any, of the miracle described by Eusebius and the Emperor?</li> <li>Did the pagans attribute divine assistance to Constantine throughout this critical campaign?</li> <li>The answer is unmistakable.</li> <li>YES.</li> <li>Nazarius tells us that all Gaul was talking with awe and wonder of the marvels which had taken place, how the soldiers of Constantine had seen in the sky celestial armies marching in battle array and had been dazzled by their flashing shields and glittering armour.</li> <li>Constantine’s soldiery had also heard the shouts of these armies in the sky, “We seek Constantine; we are marching to the aid of Constantine.”</li> <li>Clearly the pagan as well as the Christian world insisted upon attributing divine assistance to Constantine and had its own version of how that succor came.</li> <li>Nazarius’s explanation was simple.</li> <li>According to him, it was Constantius Chlorus, the deified Emperor, who was leading up the hosts of heaven, and such miraculous intervention was due to the supreme virtue of the father, which had descended to the son.</li> <li>Chlorus, of course, in Greek, starts with an X.</li> <li>The question at once arises whether this is merely a pagan version of the Christian legend.</li> <li>Did the pagans just steal the Christian version of the story?</li> <li>Probably not.</li> <li>We have to remember that public opinion in the fourth century — as indeed for many centuries both before and after — was not only willing to believe in supernatural intervention at moments of great crisis, but actually insisted that there should be such intervention.</li> <li>The greater the crisis, the more entirely reasonable it was that some deity or deities should make their influence especially felt and turn the scale to one side or the other.</li> <li>But was there some unusual manifestation in the sky which was the common basis of the stories of Eusebius and Nazarius?</li> <li>It is not unreasonable to suppose so.</li> <li>Scientists say that the natural phenomenon known as the parhelion or “sun dog”, not infrequently assumes the shape of a cross, an atmospheric optical phenomenon that consists of a bright spot to the left and/or right of the Sun.</li> <li>It looks like a cross on the sun with a halo.</li> <li>BTW, we have stories MUCH LATER in history of people believing the saw signs in the sky.</li> <li>Such as the aurora borealis of November, 1848.</li> <li>Throughout France, the people thought they saw in the sky the letters L. N. — the initials of Louis Napoleon — and took them as a clear indication from Heaven of how they ought to vote at the impending Presidential election, and as an omen of the result.</li> <li>That was the interpretation in France.</li> <li> In Rome — where the people knew and cared nothing for Louis Napoleon — no one saw the Napoleonic initials.</li> <li>They thought it was the blood of the assassinated politician Pellegrino Rossi, which had risen to heaven and was calling for vengeance.</li> <li>BTW – his murderer’s name was Constantini.</li> <li>If such varying interpretations of a natural if rare phenomenon were possible in the middle of the nineteenth century, what interpretation was not possible in the fourth?</li> <li>The world was profoundly superstitious.</li> <li>When people believe in manifest signs they usually see them.</li> <li>But though we may be justly skeptical of the circumstances attending the conversion of Constantine, there is no room to doubt the conversion itself.</li> <li>We do not believe that he fought the battle of the Milvian Bridge as the avowed champion of Christianity, but the probabilities are that he had made up his mind to become a Christian when he fought it.</li> <li>In a recent book by Harold Drake, Professor Emeritus of History at UC Santa Barbara: “Constantine’s goal was to create a neutral public space in which Christians and pagans could both function . . . [and] he was far more successful in creating a stable coalition of both Christians and non-Christians in support of this program of ‘peaceful co-existence’ than has generally been recognised.”</li> <li>Remember he had earlier claimed to have a vision from Apollo, promising him he would rule for thirty years.</li> <li>Hard to imagine that having had a vision of ONE god, he’d now say “oh no there is only this other god.”</li> <li>He wants ALL the gods on his side.</li> <li>Or, at least, all of their followers.</li> <li>Not a bad strategy.</li> <li>Whatever his reasons, this was the first time Jesus was known to support a war.</li> <li>I thought Jesus was all about peace and love?</li> <li>This is the beginning of a long history of Christians using their religion for war and violence.</li> <li>Constantine deployed his own forces along the whole length of Maxentius’ line.</li> <li>He ordered his cavalry to charge, and they broke Maxentius’ cavalry.</li> <li>He then sent his infantry against Maxentius’ infantry.</li> <li>Defeated on the far side of the bridge, Maxentius and his men fled back over it towards Rome.</li> <li>Under the weight of panicking soldiers, the “bridge” disintegrated and Maxentius was drowned with hundreds of his men.</li> <li>Constantine announced that his victory was due to the support he had received from “the supreme deity,” by which Christians such as Eusebius and Lactantius claimed he meant the God of the Christians.</li> <li>The earliest account we have is from two or three years after the battle.</li> <li>Constantine entered Rome on 29 October 312.</li> <li>He staged a grand adventus in the city, and was met with popular jubilation.</li> <li>Maxentius’ body was fished out of the Tiber and decapitated.</li> <li>His head was paraded through the streets for all to see.</li> <li>After the ceremonies, Maxentius’ disembodied head was sent to Carthage, where there had been riots; the riots stopped.</li> </ul> The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2018/01/01/episode-3-constantines-vision/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Episode 3 – Constantine’s Vision</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

Episode 3 – Constantine’s Vision

Piero de Medici

In 1464, with the death of Cosimo, his only surviving son, Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici – or Piero the Gouty, ‘il Gottoso’, as he came to be called – took over. He was 48 years old. He would survive – and rule – Florence for just five years. Piero was perceived to be so weak and ineffectual that long-standing friends and allies of the Medici turned against him and the family. It was a decision they would live to regret.   The post #73 – Piero de Medici appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

In 1464, with the death of Cosimo, his only surviving son, Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici – or Piero the Gouty, ‘il Gottoso’, as he came to be called – took over. He was 48 years old. He would survive – and rule – Florence for just five years. Piero was perceived to be so weak and ineffectual that long-standing friends and allies of the Medici turned against him and the family. It was a decision they would live to regret. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2019/12/07/73-piero-de-medici/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#73 – Piero de Medici</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#73 – Piero de Medici

From episode 4 onwards, our episodes are for premium subscribers only. We’ll throw one up in the free feed from time to time, but if you want to hear all of them, you need to register AND make sure you subscribe to the premium feed in your podcast app. If you can’t remember the feed you signed up for, either look for the email we sent you at the time, or have a look at your account page. There’s a list of the premium feeds here.   The post Introducing the Premium Series appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

From episode 4 onwards, our episodes are for premium subscribers only. We’ll throw one up in the free feed from time to time, but if you want to hear all of them, you need to <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/register/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">register</a> AND make sure you subscribe to the premium feed in your podcast app. If you can’t remember the feed you signed up for, either look for the email we sent you at the time, or have a look at your <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/account/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">account</a> page. There’s a list of the premium feeds <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/feeds/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2018/02/01/introducing-the-premium-series/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Introducing the Premium Series</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

Introducing the Premium Series

Today we begin a series about the man without whom our podcasts would not exist because there would be no books. And you know we get all of our knowledge from books. The man who invented movable type and the printing press (or did he?). Johannes Gutenberg.   The post #65 – Gutenberg Part 1 appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

Today we begin a series about the man without whom our podcasts would not exist because there would be no books. And you know we get all of our knowledge from books. The man who invented movable type and the printing press (or did he?). Johannes Gutenberg. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2019/09/14/65-gutenberg-part-1/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#65 – Gutenberg Part 1</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#65 – Gutenberg Part 1

The first written work of art theory, produced during the Renaissance was “De Pictura”, or “On Painting”, written in 1435 by Leon Battista Alberti but not published until 1450, in which he explained the science behind linear perspective. He was a humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, mathematician and cryptographer. He also wrote the first autobiography since St Augustine. A true polymath and the first Renaissance Man, who inspired every Renaissance artist who followed him.  The post #62 The First Renaissance Man appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

The first written work of art theory, produced during the Renaissance was “De Pictura”, or “On Painting”, written in 1435 by Leon Battista Alberti but not published until 1450, in which he explained the science behind linear perspective. He was a humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, mathematician and cryptographer. He also wrote the first autobiography since St Augustine. A true polymath and the first Renaissance Man, who inspired every Renaissance artist who followed him. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2019/08/17/62-the-first-renaissance-man/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#62 The First Renaissance Man</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#62 The First Renaissance Man

In the year 1417, 17 years before Cosimo De Medici took control of Florence, a man called Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini went hunting in the middle of Germany. Hunting for manuscripts. Thanks to Poggio, we have today several masterpieces of Roman literature, including Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, Vitruvius’ De Architectura, and Lucretius’ On The Nature Of Things.   The post #53 Poggio Bracciolini appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

In the year 1417, 17 years before Cosimo De Medici took control of Florence, a man called Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini went hunting in the middle of Germany. Hunting for manuscripts. Thanks to Poggio, we have today several masterpieces of Roman literature, including Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, Vitruvius’ De Architectura, and Lucretius’ On The Nature Of Things. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2019/05/25/53-poggio-bracciolini/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#53 Poggio Bracciolini</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#53 Poggio Bracciolini

Our guest today is friend of the show, one of our favourite people – artist Alex Kynaston. She was with us in Durham NC while we shot the Jesus film and was also on our inaugural European tour. She and Cameron (and her dad Tony) smoked stogies and caught some jazz in NYC and have hung out in Toronto. She’s known Cameron since she was 10 years old – and has been listening our to our shows since she was 15. She sent us a picture of herself wearing a toga when she was 14. So that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about her. Today she’s studying fine arts in Melbourne and already has forgotten more about art than we ever will know. So we asked her to come on and talk about Florence’s special relationship with David &amp; Goliath and the differences between Donatello’s twink statue versus Michelangelo’s swole version. Check out Alex’s website and commission a painting from her!   The post #41 David &amp; Goliath appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

Our guest today is friend of the show, one of our favourite people – artist Alex Kynaston. She was with us in Durham NC while we shot the Jesus film and was also on our inaugural European tour. She and Cameron (and her dad Tony) smoked stogies and caught some jazz in NYC and have hung out in Toronto. She’s known Cameron since she was 10 years old – and has been listening our to our shows since she was 15. She sent us a picture of herself wearing a toga when she was 14. So that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about her. Today she’s studying fine arts in Melbourne and already has forgotten more about art than we ever will know. So we asked her to come on and talk about Florence’s special relationship with David &amp; Goliath and the differences between Donatello’s twink statue versus Michelangelo’s swole version. Check out <a href="http://alexkynaston.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Alex’s website</a> and commission a painting from her! <a href="https://i0.wp.com/www.therenaissancetimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Florence_-_David_by_Donatello.jpg?ssl=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://i0.wp.com/www.therenaissancetimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/david-full-front.jpg?ssl=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2019/02/02/41-david-goliath/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#41 David &amp; Goliath</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#41 David & Goliath

 One of the one of the most powerful and influential families of the Renaissance – the Medici – took centuries to rise to power. But when they did, they changed the world.     The post #38 The Rise Of The Medici (part 1) appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

<ul> <li>One of the one of the most powerful and influential families of the Renaissance – the Medici – took centuries to rise to power. But when they did, they changed the world.</li> </ul> The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2019/01/05/38-the-rise-of-the-medici-part-1/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#38 The Rise Of The Medici (part 1)</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#38 The Rise Of The Medici (part 1)

Avignon Popes

 We want to go back and discuss the political situation in Italy in the 14th century. We mentioned in an earlier episode that in 1309, Pope Clement V moved the Papacy from Rome to Avignon. He was French. The former bishop of Bordeaux. And King Philip IV of France, who arrested Pope Boniface VIII, and almost starved him to death, was the guy who made Clement the new Pope. Clement knew he wasn’t safe in Rome. And most of the “Sacred College” was now made up of French cardinals. They also didn’t feel safe in Italy So they all moved to Avignon. Which wasn’t actually controlled by France at the time. Provence was actually controlled by the King Of Naples. So Clement tried to keep a little distance. For centuries, the Popes had tried to subordinate the kings of Europe to the papacy. But it had failed. France, Florence, Venice, Lombardy, Naples had all rejected papal control. Rome had twice tried to bring back a republic. We talked in an earlier episode about Rienzo. But that was later, in 1346. In the other Papal States, a series of feudal magnates had supplanted the Church. For centuries, the church had been able to demand homage and tribute from the kings of Europe. On threat of excommunication. And now, with the Papacy basically run by the French king, Germany, Italy, England and Bohemia saw it as a hostile power. And they increasingly started to ignore it, including excommunications and prohibitions. They could sell it to their people as a fake news papacy. Clement V tried to keep his head up. He bowed as little as possible to Philip IV. Despite Philip’s threats to hold a post-mortem inquest into the private conduct and beliefs of Boniface VIII. In 1302, Boniface issued a papal bull saying “Popes are the boss of the kings.” that it is “absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff”. Even more than the Popes who came before him, he claimed to have temporal as well as spiritual power over every human. Philip decided to tax the church in France and Boniface told him to get fucked and excommunicated him. So Philip had him arrested and tortured. He was released but died weeks later. His successor, Pope Benedict XI, only lasted 8 months before he also died, probably poisoned – and Philip forced a deadlocked conclave to elect the French Clement V as Pope in 1305. Clement lead a fairly clean and frugal life. But the Papacy was also short on funds so he sold ecclesiastical benefices to the highest bidder And suffered from a painful disease—lupus (malfunctioning immune system, skin rashes, joint and muscle pain and fatigue) And probably a fistula Caused by fisting. Almost immediately after being elected Pope, Clement withdrew the bull of Boniface VIII that asserted papal supremacy over secular rulers. He’s also remembered for suppressing the order of the Knights Templar and allowing the execution of many of its members. On Friday, 13 October 1307, hundreds of the Knights Templar were arrested in France. Apparently motivated by Philip’s desire to take control of their wealth and get rid of his debt to them. They were the papal bankers and protectors of pilgrims in the East From the very day of Clement V’s coronation, the king charged the Templars with usury, credit inflation, fraud, heresy, sodomy, immorality, and abuses. The order was founded in 1119. After Europeans in the First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099, many Christians made pilgrimages to various sacred sites in the Holy Land. Bandits and marauding highwaymen preyed upon pilgrims, who were routinely slaughtered, sometimes by the hundreds, as they attempted to make the journey. In 1119, the French knight Hugues de Payens approached King Baldwin II of Jerusalem and Warmund, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and proposed creating a monastic order for the protection of these pilgrims. The king granted the Templars a headquarters in a wing of the royal palace on the Temple Mount in the captured Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Temple Mount had a mystique because it was above what was believed to be the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. The Crusaders therefore referred to the Al-Aqsa Mosque as Solomon’s Temple, and from this location the new order took the name of Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, or “Templar” knights. The order, with about nine knights including Godfrey de Saint-Omer and André de Montbard, had few financial resources and relied on donations to survive. They didn’t stay poor for long. They got the support of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who founded the Cistercian Order of monks and was the nephew of André de Montbard, one of the founding knights. Bernard was the guy who called for the Second Crusade in Vezelay in 1146. Louis VII of France, his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine were both there. I’ve been to that church. Heard a polyphonic mass. Anyway, the Templars ended up being one of the most popular charities in Europe. Then 1139, Pope Innocent II’s papal bull Omne Datum Optimum exempted the order from obedience to local laws. This ruling meant that the Templars could pass freely through all borders, were not required to pay any taxes, and were exempt from all authority except that of the pope. They were receiving money, land, businesses, and noble-born sons from families who were eager to help with the fight in the Holy Land. The Templars were often the advance shock troops in key battles of the Crusades, as the heavily armoured knights on their warhorses would set out to charge at the enemy, ahead of the main army bodies, in an attempt to break opposition lines. Although the primary mission of the order was militaristic, relatively few members were combatants. The others acted in support positions to assist the knights and to manage the financial infrastructure. The Templar Order, though its members were sworn to individual poverty, was given control of wealth beyond direct donations. A nobleman who was interested in participating in the Crusades might place all his assets under Templar management while he was away. Accumulating wealth in this manner throughout Christendom and the Outremer, the order in 1150 began generating letters of credit for pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land: pilgrims deposited their valuables with a local Templar preceptory before embarking, received a document indicating the value of their deposit, then used that document upon arrival in the Holy Land to retrieve their funds in an amount of treasure of equal value. This innovative arrangement was an early form of banking and may have been the first formal system to support the use of cheques; it improved the safety of pilgrims by making them less attractive targets for thieves, and also contributed to the Templar coffers. They acquired large tracts of land, both in Europe and the Middle East; they bought and managed farms and vineyards; they built massive stone cathedrals and castles; they were involved in manufacturing, import and export; they had their own fleet of ships; and at one point they even owned the entire island of Cyprus. The Order of the Knights Templar arguably qualifies as the world’s first multinational corporation. Then the Crusades started to go badly for the Europeans, and they lost Jerusalem in 1244. Western Europe didn’t get control back until 1917. So the Templars became less important as a military unit. The Templars still managed many businesses, and many Europeans had daily contact with the Templar network, such as by working at a Templar farm or vineyard, or using the order as a bank in which to store personal valuables. King Philip, who was already deeply in debt to the Templars from his war with the English, decided to seize upon rumours spread by an ex-Templar for his own purposes. He began pressuring the church to take action against the order, as a way of freeing himself from his debts. In the dawn of Friday, 13 October 1307 (a date sometimes linked with the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition)   King Philip IV ordered de Molay and scores of other French Templars to be simultaneously arrested. The arrest warrant started with the phrase: “Dieu n’est pas content, nous avons des ennemis de la foi dans le Royaume” [“God is not pleased. We have enemies of the faith in the kingdom”]. Claims were made that during Templar admissions ceremonies, recruits were forced to spit on the Cross, deny Christ, and engage in indecent kissing; brethren were also accused of worshipping idols, and the order was said to have encouraged homosexual practices. The Templars were charged with numerous other offences such as financial corruption, fraud, and secrecy. Many of the accused confessed to these charges under torture, and their confessions, even though obtained under duress, caused a scandal in Paris. Pope Clement then issued the papal bull Pastoralis praeeminentiae on 22 November 1307, which instructed all Christian monarchs in Europe to arrest all Templars and seize their assets. in 1312, he issued a series of papal bulls, including Vox in excelso, which officially dissolved the order, and Ad providam, which turned over most Templar assets to the Hospitallers. As for the leaders of the order, the elderly Grand Master Jacques de Molay, who had confessed under torture, retracted his confession. Geoffroi de Charney, Preceptor of Normandy, also retracted his confession and insisted on his innocence. Both men were declared guilty of being relapsed heretics, and they were sentenced to burn alive at the stake in Paris on 18 March 1314. De Molay reportedly remained defiant to the end, asking to be tied in such a way that he could face the Notre Dame Cathedral and hold his hands together in prayer. According to legend, he called out from the flames that both Pope Clement and King Philip would soon meet him before God. His actual words were recorded on the parchment as follows : “God knows who is wrong and has sinned. Soon a calamity will occur to those who have condemned us to death”. Pope Clement died only a month later, and King Philip died in a hunting accident before the end of the year. The remaining Templars around Europe were either arrested and tried under the Papal investigation (with virtually none convicted), absorbed into other Catholic military orders such as the Knights Hospitaller, or pensioned off and allowed to live out their days peacefully. By papal decree, the property of the Templars was transferred to the Knights Hospitaller aka Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem. So how is all of this relevant to the Renaissance? WELL…. They Papacy now needed new bankers. And it explains how the Pope’s were the bitches of the French king in the 14th century. Clement V’s pontificate was also a disastrous time for Italy. The Papal States were entrusted to a team of three cardinals, but Rome, the battleground of the Colonna and Orsini factions, was ungovernable. In 1310, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII entered Italy, established the Visconti as vicars in Milan, and was crowned by Clement V’s legates in Rome in 1312 before he died near Siena in 1313. Henry was the first emperor since Frederick II had died in 1250. At this stage, the Holy Roman Empire consisted of Germany, Italy, Bohemia and Burgundy. He was crowned by Clement with the understanding that he would support the Papal States and the Pope and go on a crusade. He intended to restore the glory of the Holy Roman Empire – but after 60 years without an Emperor, things had changed. There had been decades of warfare and strife. The Guelphs and The Ghibellines and other local non-noble bourgeoisie had become used to having the power to govern without someone above them. Of course, those battles also had losers who were always looking for a king, emperor or Pope to come and help them defeat their enemies. Clement V had also preached a crusade against the Venetians in May 1309, declaring that Venetians captured abroad might be sold into slavery, like non-Christians. Clement died on 20 April 1314. According to one account, while his body was lying in state, a thunderstorm arose during the night and lightning struck the church where his body lay, setting on fire. The fire was so intense that by the time it was extinguished, the Pope’s body had been all but destroyed.     The post #35 The Avignon Popes – Part I appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

<ul> <li> We want to go back and discuss the political situation in Italy in the 14th century. </li> <li> We mentioned in an earlier episode that in 1309, Pope Clement V moved the Papacy from Rome to Avignon. </li> <li> He was French. </li> <li> The former bishop of Bordeaux. </li> <li> And King Philip IV of France, who arrested Pope Boniface VIII, and almost starved him to death, was the guy who made Clement the new Pope. </li> <li> Clement knew he wasn’t safe in Rome. </li> <li> And most of the “Sacred College” was now made up of French cardinals. </li> <li> They also didn’t feel safe in Italy </li> <li> So they all moved to Avignon. </li> <li> Which wasn’t actually controlled by France at the time. </li> <li> Provence was actually controlled by the King Of Naples. </li> <li> So Clement tried to keep a little distance. </li> <li> For centuries, the Popes had tried to subordinate the kings of Europe to the papacy. </li> <li> But it had failed. </li> <li> France, Florence, Venice, Lombardy, Naples had all rejected papal control. </li> <li> Rome had twice tried to bring back a republic. </li> <li> We talked in an earlier episode about Rienzo. </li> <li> But that was later, in 1346. </li> <li> In the other Papal States, a series of feudal magnates had supplanted the Church. </li> <li> For centuries, the church had been able to demand homage and tribute from the kings of Europe. </li> <li> On threat of excommunication. </li> <li> And now, with the Papacy basically run by the French king, Germany, Italy, England and Bohemia saw it as a hostile power. </li> <li> And they increasingly started to ignore it, including excommunications and prohibitions. </li> <li> They could sell it to their people as a fake news papacy. </li> <li> Clement V tried to keep his head up. </li> <li> He bowed as little as possible to Philip IV. </li> <li> Despite Philip’s threats to hold a post-mortem inquest into the private conduct and beliefs of Boniface VIII. </li> <li> In 1302, Boniface issued a papal bull saying “Popes are the boss of the kings.” </li> <li> that it is “absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff”. </li> <li> Even more than the Popes who came before him, he claimed to have temporal as well as spiritual power over every human. </li> <li> Philip decided to tax the church in France and Boniface told him to get fucked and excommunicated him. </li> <li> So Philip had him arrested and tortured. </li> <li> He was released but died weeks later. </li> <li> His successor, Pope Benedict XI, only lasted 8 months before he also died, probably poisoned – and Philip forced a deadlocked conclave to elect the French Clement V as Pope in 1305. </li> <li> Clement lead a fairly clean and frugal life. </li> <li> But the Papacy was also short on funds so he sold ecclesiastical benefices to the highest bidder </li> <li> And suffered from a painful disease—lupus (malfunctioning immune system, skin rashes, joint and muscle pain and fatigue) </li> <li> And probably a fistula </li> <li> Caused by fisting. </li> <li> Almost immediately after being elected Pope, Clement withdrew the bull of Boniface VIII that asserted papal supremacy over secular rulers. </li> <li> He’s also remembered for suppressing the order of the Knights Templar and allowing the execution of many of its members. </li> <li> On Friday, 13 October 1307, hundreds of the Knights Templar were arrested in France. </li> <li> Apparently motivated by Philip’s desire to take control of their wealth and get rid of his debt to them. </li> <li> They were the papal bankers and protectors of pilgrims in the East </li> <li> From the very day of Clement V’s coronation, the king charged the Templars with usury, credit inflation, fraud, heresy, sodomy, immorality, and abuses. </li> <li> The order was founded in 1119. </li> <li> After Europeans in the First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099, many Christians made pilgrimages to various sacred sites in the Holy Land. </li> <li> Bandits and marauding highwaymen preyed upon pilgrims, who were routinely slaughtered, sometimes by the hundreds, as they attempted to make the journey. </li> <li> In 1119, the French knight Hugues de Payens approached King Baldwin II of Jerusalem and Warmund, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and proposed creating a monastic order for the protection of these pilgrims. </li> <li> The king granted the Templars a headquarters in a wing of the royal palace on the Temple Mount in the captured Al-Aqsa Mosque. </li> <li> The Temple Mount had a mystique because it was above what was believed to be the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. </li> <li> The Crusaders therefore referred to the Al-Aqsa Mosque as Solomon’s Temple, and from this location the new order took the name of Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, or “Templar” knights. </li> <li> The order, with about nine knights including Godfrey de Saint-Omer and André de Montbard, had few financial resources and relied on donations to survive. </li> <li> They didn’t stay poor for long. </li> <li> They got the support of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who founded the Cistercian Order of monks and was the nephew of André de Montbard, one of the founding knights. </li> <li> Bernard was the guy who called for the Second Crusade in Vezelay in 1146. </li> <li> Louis VII of France, his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine were both there. </li> <li> I’ve been to that church. </li> <li> Heard a polyphonic mass. </li> <li> Anyway, the Templars ended up being one of the most popular charities in Europe. </li> <li> Then 1139, Pope Innocent II’s papal bull Omne Datum Optimum exempted the order from obedience to local laws. </li> <li> This ruling meant that the Templars could pass freely through all borders, were not required to pay any taxes, and were exempt from all authority except that of the pope. </li> <li> They were receiving money, land, businesses, and noble-born sons from families who were eager to help with the fight in the Holy Land. </li> <li> The Templars were often the advance shock troops in key battles of the Crusades, as the heavily armoured knights on their warhorses would set out to charge at the enemy, ahead of the main army bodies, in an attempt to break opposition lines. </li> <li> Although the primary mission of the order was militaristic, relatively few members were combatants. </li> <li> The others acted in support positions to assist the knights and to manage the financial infrastructure. </li> <li> The Templar Order, though its members were sworn to individual poverty, was given control of wealth beyond direct donations. </li> <li> A nobleman who was interested in participating in the Crusades might place all his assets under Templar management while he was away. </li> <li> Accumulating wealth in this manner throughout Christendom and the Outremer, the order in 1150 began generating letters of credit for pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land: pilgrims deposited their valuables with a local Templar preceptory before embarking, received a document indicating the value of their deposit, then used that document upon arrival in the Holy Land to retrieve their funds in an amount of treasure of equal value. </li> <li> This innovative arrangement was an early form of banking and may have been the first formal system to support the use of cheques; it improved the safety of pilgrims by making them less attractive targets for thieves, and also contributed to the Templar coffers. </li> <li> They acquired large tracts of land, both in Europe and the Middle East; they bought and managed farms and vineyards; they built massive stone cathedrals and castles; they were involved in manufacturing, import and export; they had their own fleet of ships; and at one point they even owned the entire island of Cyprus. </li> <li> The Order of the Knights Templar arguably qualifies as the world’s first multinational corporation. </li> <li> Then the Crusades started to go badly for the Europeans, and they lost Jerusalem in 1244. </li> <li> Western Europe didn’t get control back until 1917. </li> <li> So the Templars became less important as a military unit. </li> <li> The Templars still managed many businesses, and many Europeans had daily contact with the Templar network, such as by working at a Templar farm or vineyard, or using the order as a bank in which to store personal valuables. </li> <li> King Philip, who was already deeply in debt to the Templars from his war with the English, decided to seize upon rumours spread by an ex-Templar for his own purposes. </li> <li> He began pressuring the church to take action against the order, as a way of freeing himself from his debts. </li> <li> In the dawn of Friday, 13 October 1307 (a date sometimes linked with the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition)   King Philip IV ordered de Molay and scores of other French Templars to be simultaneously arrested. </li> <li> The arrest warrant started with the phrase: “Dieu n’est pas content, nous avons des ennemis de la foi dans le Royaume” [“God is not pleased. </li> <li> We have enemies of the faith in the kingdom”]. </li> <li> Claims were made that during Templar admissions ceremonies, recruits were forced to spit on the Cross, deny Christ, and engage in indecent kissing; brethren were also accused of worshipping idols, and the order was said to have encouraged homosexual practices. </li> <li> The Templars were charged with numerous other offences such as financial corruption, fraud, and secrecy. </li> <li> Many of the accused confessed to these charges under torture, and their confessions, even though obtained under duress, caused a scandal in Paris. </li> <li> Pope Clement then issued the papal bull Pastoralis praeeminentiae on 22 November 1307, which instructed all Christian monarchs in Europe to arrest all Templars and seize their assets. </li> <li> in 1312, he issued a series of papal bulls, including Vox in excelso, which officially dissolved the order, and Ad providam, which turned over most Templar assets to the Hospitallers. </li> <li> As for the leaders of the order, the elderly Grand Master Jacques de Molay, who had confessed under torture, retracted his confession. </li> <li> Geoffroi de Charney, Preceptor of Normandy, also retracted his confession and insisted on his innocence. </li> <li> Both men were declared guilty of being relapsed heretics, and they were sentenced to burn alive at the stake in Paris on 18 March 1314. </li> <li> De Molay reportedly remained defiant to the end, asking to be tied in such a way that he could face the Notre Dame Cathedral and hold his hands together in prayer. </li> <li> According to legend, he called out from the flames that both Pope Clement and King Philip would soon meet him before God. </li> <li> His actual words were recorded on the parchment as follows : “God knows who is wrong and has sinned. Soon a calamity will occur to those who have condemned us to death”. </li> <li> Pope Clement died only a month later, and King Philip died in a hunting accident before the end of the year. </li> <li> The remaining Templars around Europe were either arrested and tried under the Papal investigation (with virtually none convicted), absorbed into other Catholic military orders such as the Knights Hospitaller, or pensioned off and allowed to live out their days peacefully. </li> <li> By papal decree, the property of the Templars was transferred to the Knights Hospitaller aka Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem. </li> <li> So how is all of this relevant to the Renaissance? </li> <li> WELL…. </li> <li> They Papacy now needed new bankers. </li> <li> And it explains how the Pope’s were the bitches of the French king in the 14th century. </li> <li> Clement V’s pontificate was also a disastrous time for Italy. </li> <li> The Papal States were entrusted to a team of three cardinals, but Rome, the battleground of the Colonna and Orsini factions, was ungovernable. </li> <li> In 1310, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII entered Italy, established the Visconti as vicars in Milan, and was crowned by Clement V’s legates in Rome in 1312 before he died near Siena in 1313. </li> <li> Henry was the first emperor since Frederick II had died in 1250. </li> <li> At this stage, the Holy Roman Empire consisted of Germany, Italy, Bohemia and Burgundy. </li> <li> He was crowned by Clement with the understanding that he would support the Papal States and the Pope and go on a crusade. </li> <li> He intended to restore the glory of the Holy Roman Empire – but after 60 years without an Emperor, things had changed. </li> <li> There had been decades of warfare and strife. </li> <li> The Guelphs and The Ghibellines and other local non-noble bourgeoisie had become used to having the power to govern without someone above them. </li> <li> Of course, those battles also had losers who were always looking for a king, emperor or Pope to come and help them defeat their enemies. </li> <li> Clement V had also preached a crusade against the Venetians in May 1309, declaring that Venetians captured abroad might be sold into slavery, like non-Christians. </li> <li> Clement died on 20 April 1314. </li> <li> According to one account, while his body was lying in state, a thunderstorm arose during the night and lightning struck the church where his body lay, setting on fire. </li> <li> The fire was so intense that by the time it was extinguished, the Pope’s body had been all but destroyed. </li> </ul> The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2018/12/01/35-the-avignon-popes-part-i/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#35 The Avignon Popes – Part I</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#35 The Avignon Popes – Part I

 If you’ve ever been to Florence, you’ve no doubt paid a visit to the Duomo, the Florence Cathedral, formally the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore. Known as the Duomo. Well we’re NOT going to be talking about that today. Instead we’re going to be talking about the building right next to it – the Baptistery of St John, one of the most historic and important buildings in Florence. Aka  the Battistero di San Giovanni John the Baptist was the patron saint of baptistries as well as the patron saint of the city of Florence. In particular we want to talk about the doors of the Baptistery. And the man who cast them in bronze – Lorenzo Ghiberti. Also sometimes called Di Bartoluccio. When we were in Florence in July, I took everyone to see the bronze doors but unfortunately the greatest of them, the so-called ‘Gates of Paradise”, were covered up and undergoing cleaning. However – the doors that ARE there – aren’t even the original doors! They are a copy of the originals, made in 1990 so they could preserve the originals which had over five hundred years of exposure and damage. To protect the original panels for the future, they are being restored and kept in a dry environment in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, the museum of the Duomo’s art and sculpture But they are easy to miss because I think for most tourists, the Duomo is far more famous and attention-grabbing. But the baptistery doors are famous, brilliant and played a huge role in the Duomo’s construction. Lorenzo was born just outside of Florence in the year 1378 or 1381. According to one story, he was the son of Cione di Ser Buonaccorso Ghiberti and Fiore Ghiberti. At some point, his mother, Fiore, went to Florence and shacked up with a goldsmith by the name of Bartolo di Michele. Either true love or he was able to give her lots of nice shiny necklaces. So we’re not sure who Lorenzo’s biological father really was. But either way, Bartolo was the only father he ever knew. And when Cione died, Fiore married Bartolo. But that wasn’t until 1406 when Lorenzo would have been around 25. Lorenzo started studying goldsmithing under Bartolo. And apparently was starting to overtake him, then the plague hit Florence again in 1400. Young Lorenzo, aged about 20, went to Rimini with another artist, where he worked as a painter, painting the apartment of a rich dude. While he was away from Florence, he kept up his studies, including studying sculpture. Once the plague had died down in Florence, in 1401, the governors of the Baptistery were holding a competition and sending for masters who were skilled in bronze working. It was actually the Arte di Calimala (Cloth Importers Guild) who were paying the commission. The doors were to serve as a votive offering to celebrate the sparing of Florence from the recent plague. And it was going to be an expensive project. The eventual cost was 22,000 florins, equal to the entire defense budget of the city of Florence. Imagine if the United States spent $700 billion on a single art project? So Lorenzo headed back to his hometown to enter into the competition. Now let’s talk about The Baptistery It is one of the oldest buildings in the city, constructed between 1059 and 1128. But there was another baptistery on that site from way way back. A baptistery BTW is where people get baptised. And it’s still being used for that today! We got Fox baptised in it while we were there. Only joking. For a long time, people believed the Baptistery was originally a Roman temple dedicated to Mars. But twentieth-century excavations have shown that there was a first-century Roman wall running through the piazza with the Baptistery, which may have been built on the remains of a Roman guard tower on the corner of this wall, or possibly another Roman building. It is, however, certain that a first octagonal baptistery was erected here in the late fourth or early fifth century. It was replaced or altered by another early Christian baptistery in the sixth century. Its construction is attributed to Theodolinda, queen of the Lombards (570-628) to seal the conversion of her husband, King Authari. She was a Bavarian Catholic and he, being a Lombard, was probably Arian, although he could have still been a pagan. It didn’t stop her from poisoning him and marrying his successor a year later but anyway. At least he died a Catholic. So then it was re-built from 1059 and 1128 in green and white marble, like the Cathedral next door, which wasn’t started for another 150 years. The sculptor Andrea Pisano had built the first set of doors in 1329. Depicting twenty scenes from the life of St. John the Baptist. And now they wanted more doors. Because you can never have enough doors. That’s my policy. The original idea for the doors was to have them depict scenes from the Old Testament. There were seven artists from around Italy who were chosen for the competition. They were all given some funds, some bronze and a year to complete their submission – a single panel in the style of the original panels by Pisano. The subject selected for competition was the Old Testament story of how God tested the faith of Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice Isaac, his only son, who had been born to Abraham and his wife Sarah in their extreme old age (Genesis 22: 1-12). Abraham, accompanied by two servants and a donkey, took Isaac into the wilderness, but just as he held the knife to his son’s throat, God sent an angel to tell him that the Lord was pleased by his faith and would be satisfied with the offering of a ram caught in a nearby thicket. Because Yahweh, in his extreme wisdom, couldn’t think of any other way to test Abraham’s faith than by putting him through the emotional torture of thinking he had to murder his only son in cold blood. It’s not like Yahweh is omnipotent or anything, and could just look into Abraham’s mind. I bet this is a story is that Isaac was being a little dick, not listening, talking back to his father, and Abraham one day decided to teach him a lesson, and said “right! That’s it! I’m going to fucking take you up into the hills and cut your throat!” And he dragged him up there by his hair, and held the kid down, pulled out his dagger and then said “What’s that Lord? Give him another chance? Okay Lord, if you say so. You’re fucking lucky, kid.” Christians think the story was interpreted as foreshadowing the sacrifice of Christ, “his only son”, etc – like it’s Chekhov’s gun, which BTW is my favourite episode of Star Trek – but of course Jews had been telling each other this story for hundreds of years before Jesus showed up and started ruining the livelihood of Israeli fisherman and bakers. What’s more likely? That Yahweh told Abraham to kill his son so 1000 years later Christians would have something to point at and say “oh look! Yahweh was hinting at this 1000 years ago!” Or that the guys who wrote the New Testament had a copy of the Old Testament in front of them and were like “let’s write a modern adaptation that Gentiles can get into too!” ????     The post #28  Ghiberti &amp; The Doors I appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

<ul> <li> If you’ve ever been to Florence, you’ve no doubt paid a visit to the Duomo, the Florence Cathedral, formally the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore. </li> <li> Known as the Duomo. </li> <li>Well we’re NOT going to be talking about that today.</li> <li> Instead we’re going to be talking about the building right next to it – the Baptistery of St John, one of the most historic and important buildings in Florence. </li> <li> Aka  the Battistero di San Giovanni </li> <li> John the Baptist was the patron saint of baptistries as well as the patron saint of the city of Florence. </li> <li> In particular we want to talk about the doors of the Baptistery. </li> <li> And the man who cast them in bronze – Lorenzo Ghiberti. </li> <li> Also sometimes called Di Bartoluccio. </li> <li> When we were in Florence in July, I took everyone to see the bronze doors but unfortunately the greatest of them, the so-called ‘Gates of Paradise”, were covered up and undergoing cleaning. </li> <li> However – the doors that ARE there – aren’t even the original doors! </li> <li> They are a copy of the originals, made in 1990 so they could preserve the originals which had over five hundred years of exposure and damage. </li> <li> To protect the original panels for the future, they are being restored and kept in a dry environment in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, the museum of the Duomo’s art and sculpture </li> <li> But they are easy to miss because I think for most tourists, the Duomo is far more famous and attention-grabbing. </li> <li> But the baptistery doors are famous, brilliant and played a huge role in the Duomo’s construction. </li> <li> Lorenzo was born just outside of Florence in the year 1378 or 1381. </li> <li> According to one story, he was the son of Cione di Ser Buonaccorso Ghiberti and Fiore Ghiberti. </li> <li> At some point, his mother, Fiore, went to Florence and shacked up with a goldsmith by the name of Bartolo di Michele. </li> <li> Either true love or he was able to give her lots of nice shiny necklaces. </li> <li> So we’re not sure who Lorenzo’s biological father really was. </li> <li> But either way, Bartolo was the only father he ever knew. </li> <li> And when Cione died, Fiore married Bartolo. </li> <li> But that wasn’t until 1406 when Lorenzo would have been around 25. </li> <li> Lorenzo started studying goldsmithing under Bartolo. </li> <li> And apparently was starting to overtake him, then the plague hit Florence again in 1400. </li> <li> Young Lorenzo, aged about 20, went to Rimini with another artist, where he worked as a painter, painting the apartment of a rich dude. </li> <li> While he was away from Florence, he kept up his studies, including studying sculpture. </li> <li> Once the plague had died down in Florence, in 1401, the governors of the Baptistery were holding a competition and sending for masters who were skilled in bronze working. </li> <li> It was actually the Arte di Calimala (Cloth Importers Guild) who were paying the commission. </li> <li> The doors were to serve as a votive offering to celebrate the sparing of Florence from the recent plague. </li> <li> And it was going to be an expensive project. </li> <li> The eventual cost was 22,000 florins, equal to the entire defense budget of the city of Florence. </li> <li> Imagine if the United States spent $700 billion on a single art project? </li> <li> So Lorenzo headed back to his hometown to enter into the competition. </li> <li> Now let’s talk about The Baptistery </li> <li> It is one of the oldest buildings in the city, constructed between 1059 and 1128. </li> <li> But there was another baptistery on that site from way way back. </li> <li> A baptistery BTW is where people get baptised. </li> <li> And it’s still being used for that today! </li> <li> We got Fox baptised in it while we were there. </li> <li> Only joking. </li> <li> For a long time, people believed the Baptistery was originally a Roman temple dedicated to Mars. </li> <li> But twentieth-century excavations have shown that there was a first-century Roman wall running through the piazza with the Baptistery, which may have been built on the remains of a Roman guard tower on the corner of this wall, or possibly another Roman building. </li> <li> It is, however, certain that a first octagonal baptistery was erected here in the late fourth or early fifth century. It was replaced or altered by another early Christian baptistery in the sixth century. </li> <li> Its construction is attributed to Theodolinda, queen of the Lombards (570-628) to seal the conversion of her husband, King Authari. </li> <li> She was a Bavarian Catholic and he, being a Lombard, was probably Arian, although he could have still been a pagan. </li> <li> It didn’t stop her from poisoning him and marrying his successor a year later but anyway. </li> <li> At least he died a Catholic. </li> <li> So then it was re-built from 1059 and 1128 in green and white marble, like the Cathedral next door, which wasn’t started for another 150 years. </li> <li> The sculptor Andrea Pisano had built the first set of doors in 1329. </li> <li> Depicting twenty scenes from the life of St. John the Baptist. </li> <li> And now they wanted more doors. </li> <li> Because you can never have enough doors. </li> <li> That’s my policy. </li> <li> The original idea for the doors was to have them depict scenes from the Old Testament. </li> <li> There were seven artists from around Italy who were chosen for the competition. </li> <li> They were all given some funds, some bronze and a year to complete their submission – a single panel in the style of the original panels by Pisano. </li> <li> The subject selected for competition was the Old Testament story of how God tested the faith of Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice Isaac, his only son, who had been born to Abraham and his wife Sarah in their extreme old age (Genesis 22: 1-12). </li> <li> Abraham, accompanied by two servants and a donkey, took Isaac into the wilderness, but just as he held the knife to his son’s throat, God sent an angel to tell him that the Lord was pleased by his faith and would be satisfied with the offering of a ram caught in a nearby thicket. </li> <li> Because Yahweh, in his extreme wisdom, couldn’t think of any other way to test Abraham’s faith than by putting him through the emotional torture of thinking he had to murder his only son in cold blood. </li> <li> It’s not like Yahweh is omnipotent or anything, and could just look into Abraham’s mind. </li> <li> I bet this is a story is that Isaac was being a little dick, not listening, talking back to his father, and Abraham one day decided to teach him a lesson, and said “right! That’s it! I’m going to fucking take you up into the hills and cut your throat!” And he dragged him up there by his hair, and held the kid down, pulled out his dagger and then said “What’s that Lord? Give him another chance? Okay Lord, if you say so. You’re fucking lucky, kid.” </li> <li> Christians think the story was interpreted as foreshadowing the sacrifice of Christ, “his only son”, etc – like it’s Chekhov’s gun, which BTW is my favourite episode of Star Trek – but of course Jews had been telling each other this story for hundreds of years before Jesus showed up and started ruining the livelihood of Israeli fisherman and bakers. </li> <li> What’s more likely? That Yahweh told Abraham to kill his son so 1000 years later Christians would have something to point at and say “oh look! Yahweh was hinting at this 1000 years ago!” </li> <li> Or that the guys who wrote the New Testament had a copy of the Old Testament in front of them and were like “let’s write a modern adaptation that Gentiles can get into too!” ???? </li> </ul> The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2018/10/06/28-ghiberti-the-doors-i/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#28 Ghiberti &amp; The Doors I</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#28  Ghiberti & The Doors I

 I want to pick up our story in the year 1302 To talk about a man called Pietro di Parenzo di Garzo. Well actually I want to talk about his SON. But we’ll get there. And to get there, we’re going to need to duck in and out of the 800 years we’ve skipped since our last episodes. So hang in there. Pietro di Parenzo di Garzo was a notary in FLORENCE. A contract lawyer. At some point in 1302, he was falsely charged with faking some documents. He belonged to the political party of the White Guelphs along with the famous poet Dante, who was its most illustrious member. The Guelphs and Ghibellines were Italian factions supporting the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. The division goes back to the 12th century and Frederick Barbarossa. Barbarossa was elected King of Germany at Frankfurt on 4 March 1152. He was crowned King of Italy on 24 April1155 in Pavia and Roman Emperor by Pope Adrian IV on 18 June 1155 in Rome. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 480, when Julius Nepos was was deposed in 475 by Orestes, the title of Emperor lay dormant until Charlemagne revived it He was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III in 800, and his successors maintained the title until the death of Berengar I of Italy in 924. No pope appointed an emperor again until the coronation of the German king Otto the Great in 962. Who, despite being a German, was the Great-great-great-great grandson of Charlemagne. The actual Holy Roman Empire is usually considered to have begun with Otto He was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 962 by Pope John XII in Rome after he defeated the pagan Magyars and was declared the saviour of Christendom. Why was the Pope now crowning Emperors? The Holy Roman Emperor was widely perceived to rule by divine right by Roman Catholic rulers in Europe. It also goes back to an agreement between the Frankish kings to defend the Popes from their enemies in return for the continued support of the Pope. The leader of the Catholics could – and often did – cause huge problems for European royalty. Charlemagne’s father, Pepin the Short, defended the papacy against the Lombards and issued the Donation of Pepin, which granted the land around Rome to the pope as a fief. In 754, Pope Stephen II crossed the Alps to anoint Pepin king, which enabled the Carolingian family to supplant the old Merovingian royal line. In return for Stephen’s support, Pepin gave the Pope the lands in Italy which the Lombards had taken from the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire Pope Stephen II conferred on Pepin the dignity of Patricius Romanus – the Father of the Romans. And then 46 years later, in 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne the Roman Emperor. The first time the title had been used in 300 years. The precise term “Holy Roman Empire” was not used until the 13th century. So anyway. Back to Barbarossa. Before his imperial election, Frederick was the Duke of Swabia. He had a castle called Waiblingen (German pronunciation: [ˈvaɪblɪŋən]). His supported would cry that out in battle. In Italy, that word became Ghibellino in Italian. His opponents were from the House of Welf, the family of the dukes of Bavaria. Their supporters would shout out WELF! And in Italy, that became Guelph. When Barbarossa was trying to take Italy, his supporters were the Ghibellines. They tended to be rural nobility whose wealth came from agriculture. His enemies were the Guelphs. They supported the Pope’s control over the various Italian cities, They were typically the urban faction whose wealth came from commerce. Which gets us back to Pietro di Parenzo di Garzo. He was a merchant who also worked for the State as a notary. Notaries were professional writers of contracts, wills, and a wide variety of legal documents. He was basically a lawyer and came from generations of notable lawyers – notable notaries – before him. He also belonged to a political faction known as the White Guelphs. So he was accused by another faction, the Black Guelphs, of the charge of having falsified a legal document. At the close of the 13th century the Ghibellines had been pretty thoroughly eradicated, and the Guelphs began fighting each other over whether or not they should maintain any allegiance to the Pope. Black Guelphs were those who still thought of themselves as the “church party” opposed to the “imperial party”, while White Guelphs felt that, with the Emperor and the Ghibellines falling into irrelevance, there was no further need for the Pope as a leader and their loyalty should be to each other and their cities. All this is important to know for when we get to the Medicis and Florence later on in the series. The White Guelphs were promoting an early form of secular nationalism. Anyway, Pietro di Parenzo di Garzo refused to stand for trial. He believed the whole thing was a stitch up. He left town and was convicted in absence, and then was given the choice of paying a heavy fine or having his right hand cut off. As he still refused to appear before the court, he was banished from Florence, and suffered the confiscation of his property. Taking his young wife with him, he fled to Arezzo, a town about 80 kilometres (50 miles) southeast of Florence. It was there that Pietro’s son was born in 1304. Now Pietro had a nickname – Ser Petracco. Ser = Mister. His son was Francesco Petrarca. We know him as Petrarch, the great Florentine poet who is often called the father of humanism and the father of the Renaissance. He’s also the person credited with first referring to the Middle Ages as the “dark ages”. Writing of those who had come before him, he said that “amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius, no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom”. He once wrote ‘I am a citizen of no place, everywhere I am a stranger,” for which he has been called “the first modern man.” So who was he and why is he important to our story? Let’s find out. Not long after Petrarch was born in Arezzo, his father got permission for his wife and son to move closer to Florence, to a small town called Incisa in Val d’Arno, about 20 kilometres (12 mi) southeast of Florence, where they owned a house with other members of the family. Ser Petracco had to find employment elsewhere. Around 1311 Ser Petracco got employment in Avignon where the papal household had moved to from Rome. Remember how I said the Emperors used to fight with the Popes? Well in 1303 Pope Boniface VIII was arrested by Philip IV of France over taxation. Philip wanted to tax the church in France and Boniface told him to get fucked and excommunicated him. He issued a papal bull saying “Popes are the boss of the kings.” So Philip had him arrested and tortured. He was released but died weeks later. His successor, Pope Benedict XI, only lasted 8 months before he also died, probably poisoned – and Philip forced a deadlocked conclave to elect the French Clement V as Pope in 1305. Clement refused to move to Rome, and in 1309, he moved his court to the papal enclave at Avignon, where it remained for the next 67 years. Clement is also remembered for suppressing the order of the Knights Templar and allowing the execution of many of its members. In 1316 Petracco sent Petrarch and his brother Gherardo to study law at the University of Montpellier. It was the family business. Petrarch never liked law and thought it was a waste of his time. He wanted to be a poet. By his own account, he’d been reading Cicero since he was quite young, thanks to his father. “At that time I could not understand what I read, but the sweetness of the language and majesty of the cadences enchanted me, so that whatever else I read sounded harsh in my ears and quite discordant.” But his father had fallen on hard time and was pushing Petrarch to give up on Cicero and dedicate himself to making a career as a lawyer. One day he found Petrarch hidden stash of Cicero and threw it all into the fire. Wait? People in Petrarch’s time still read Cicero? They had BITS of Cicero. And the reason we have so much is much the same as the reason we have so much Virgil or Ovid: because during Rome’s peak, here WAS so much of it. Cicero’s latin was so famous during his lifetime, and in the years afterwards, that everyone who was anyone wanted their own copy of his collected works, to enjoy and for their children to study. They became textbooks on how to write in Latin, in addition to being an invaluable first-hand (albeit biased) source on his times. Finally, it’s also worth noting that Cicero did write a LOT of stuff. Unlike Virgil, Cicero left behind reams and reams of writing: more than 20 writings in his philosophia, more than 30 writings in his oratoria, and literally hundreds of letters to various people, which accounts for the sheer volume of his writings. To add to this, it didn’t hurt that his best friend Atticus (who many of the letters were addressed to) was more or less a publisher in Greece. He had a large number of slaves whose sole job was making more copies of Cicero’s work. As things are, seventy-five percent of what survives in Latin from Cicero’s lifetime was written by Cicero himself. Anyway back to the fire. Petrarch says he screamed so loudly when his father threw his books into the fire, that his father reached in and pulled two out that had been barely scorched. Virgil’s Aeneid and a copy of Cicero’s “On Rhetoric”. He told his son to read the first when he had a spare hour, and to read the second to help him in his career as a lawyer. Which is what Petrarch studied for the next seven years, although he considered it a waste of time and energy. When he was about 22, his father died. His mother died a few weeks later. By this time, Ser Petracco had managed to build up his personal fortune again, but none of it made it to his two sons. It was apparently stolen by the executors of his will. Now I bet Petrarch wished he’d paid more attention in law school! He says that all he got from his father’s estate was a single book by Cicero. “A volume of Cicero so exquisite that you could hardly find its equal, which my father used to cherish as his darling treasure, and which escaped the hands of his executors not because they wished to save it for me, but because they were busy plundering what they considered the more valuable portions of my inheritance.” Unfortunately, a few years later, he loaned this book, and another book by Cicero, De Gloria, ON GLORY, which he had himself borrowed from someone else, to one of his old teachers, who said he wanted to write a commentary on them. But the teacher secretly sold them both off because he was hard up for cash. And Petrarch never saw them again. And that copy of De Gloria? It was the last one in existence. ANYWHERE. IT’S GONE. ON GLORY, it was written in 44 BCE, the year before his murder.     The post #22 – The Father Of The Renaissance (part one) appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

<ul> <li> I want to pick up our story in the year 1302 </li> <li> To talk about a man called Pietro di Parenzo di Garzo. </li> <li> Well actually I want to talk about his SON. </li> <li> But we’ll get there. </li> <li> And to get there, we’re going to need to duck in and out of the 800 years we’ve skipped since our last episodes. </li> <li> So hang in there. </li> <li> Pietro di Parenzo di Garzo was a notary in FLORENCE. </li> <li> A contract lawyer. </li> <li> At some point in 1302, he was falsely charged with faking some documents. </li> <li> He belonged to the political party of the White Guelphs along with the famous poet Dante, who was its most illustrious member. </li> <li> The Guelphs and Ghibellines were Italian factions supporting the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. </li> <li> The division goes back to the 12th century and Frederick Barbarossa. </li> <li> Barbarossa was elected King of Germany at Frankfurt on 4 March 1152. </li> <li> He was crowned King of Italy on 24 April1155 in Pavia and Roman Emperor by Pope Adrian IV on 18 June 1155 in Rome. </li> <li> After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 480, when Julius Nepos was was deposed in 475 by Orestes, the title of Emperor lay dormant until Charlemagne revived it </li> <li> He was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III in 800, and his successors maintained the title until the death of Berengar I of Italy in 924. </li> <li> No pope appointed an emperor again until the coronation of the German king Otto the Great in 962. </li> <li> Who, despite being a German, was the Great-great-great-great grandson of Charlemagne. </li> <li> The actual Holy Roman Empire is usually considered to have begun with Otto </li> <li> He was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 962 by Pope John XII in Rome after he defeated the pagan Magyars and was declared the saviour of Christendom. </li> <li> Why was the Pope now crowning Emperors? </li> <li> The Holy Roman Emperor was widely perceived to rule by divine right by Roman Catholic rulers in Europe. </li> <li> It also goes back to an agreement between the Frankish kings to defend the Popes from their enemies in return for the continued support of the Pope. </li> <li> The leader of the Catholics could – and often did – cause huge problems for European royalty. </li> <li> Charlemagne’s father, Pepin the Short, defended the papacy against the Lombards and issued the Donation of Pepin, which granted the land around Rome to the pope as a fief. </li> <li> In 754, Pope Stephen II crossed the Alps to anoint Pepin king, which enabled the Carolingian family to supplant the old Merovingian royal line. </li> <li> In return for Stephen’s support, Pepin gave the Pope the lands in Italy which the Lombards had taken from the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire </li> <li> Pope Stephen II conferred on Pepin the dignity of Patricius Romanus – the Father of the Romans. </li> <li> And then 46 years later, in 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne the Roman Emperor. </li> <li> The first time the title had been used in 300 years. </li> <li> The precise term “Holy Roman Empire” was not used until the 13th century. </li> <li> So anyway. </li> <li> Back to Barbarossa. </li> <li> Before his imperial election, Frederick was the Duke of Swabia. </li> <li> He had a castle called Waiblingen (German pronunciation: [ˈvaɪblɪŋən]). </li> <li> His supported would cry that out in battle. </li> <li> In Italy, that word became Ghibellino in Italian. </li> <li> His opponents were from the House of Welf, the family of the dukes of Bavaria. </li> <li> Their supporters would shout out WELF! </li> <li> And in Italy, that became Guelph. </li> <li> When Barbarossa was trying to take Italy, his supporters were the Ghibellines. </li> <li> They tended to be rural nobility whose wealth came from agriculture. </li> <li> His enemies were the Guelphs. </li> <li> They supported the Pope’s control over the various Italian cities, </li> <li> They were typically the urban faction whose wealth came from commerce. </li> <li> Which gets us back to Pietro di Parenzo di Garzo. </li> <li> He was a merchant who also worked for the State as a notary. </li> <li> Notaries were professional writers of contracts, wills, and a wide variety of legal documents. </li> <li> He was basically a lawyer and came from generations of notable lawyers – notable notaries – before him. </li> <li> He also belonged to a political faction known as the White Guelphs. </li> <li> So he was accused by another faction, the Black Guelphs, of the charge of having falsified a legal document. </li> <li> At the close of the 13th century the Ghibellines had been pretty thoroughly eradicated, and the Guelphs began fighting each other over whether or not they should maintain any allegiance to the Pope. </li> <li> Black Guelphs were those who still thought of themselves as the “church party” opposed to the “imperial party”, while White Guelphs felt that, with the Emperor and the Ghibellines falling into irrelevance, there was no further need for the Pope as a leader and their loyalty should be to each other and their cities. </li> <li> All this is important to know for when we get to the Medicis and Florence later on in the series. </li> <li> The White Guelphs were promoting an early form of secular nationalism. </li> <li> Anyway, Pietro di Parenzo di Garzo refused to stand for trial. </li> <li> He believed the whole thing was a stitch up. </li> <li> He left town and was convicted in absence, and then was given the choice of paying a heavy fine or having his right hand cut off. </li> <li> As he still refused to appear before the court, he was banished from Florence, and suffered the confiscation of his property. </li> <li> Taking his young wife with him, he fled to Arezzo, a town about 80 kilometres (50 miles) southeast of Florence. </li> <li> It was there that Pietro’s son was born in 1304. </li> <li> Now Pietro had a nickname – Ser Petracco. </li> <li> Ser = Mister. </li> <li> His son was Francesco Petrarca. </li> <li> We know him as Petrarch, the great Florentine poet who is often called the father of humanism and the father of the Renaissance. </li> <li> He’s also the person credited with first referring to the Middle Ages as the “dark ages”. </li> <li> Writing of those who had come before him, he said that “amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius, no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom”. </li> <li> He once wrote ‘I am a citizen of no place, everywhere I am a stranger,” for which he has been called “the first modern man.” </li> <li> So who was he and why is he important to our story? </li> <li> Let’s find out. </li> <li> Not long after Petrarch was born in Arezzo, his father got permission for his wife and son to move closer to Florence, to a small town called Incisa in Val d’Arno, about 20 kilometres (12 mi) southeast of Florence, where they owned a house with other members of the family. </li> <li> Ser Petracco had to find employment elsewhere. </li> <li> Around 1311 Ser Petracco got employment in Avignon where the papal household had moved to from Rome. </li> <li> Remember how I said the Emperors used to fight with the Popes? </li> <li> Well in 1303 Pope Boniface VIII was arrested by Philip IV of France over taxation. </li> <li> Philip wanted to tax the church in France and Boniface told him to get fucked and excommunicated him. </li> <li> He issued a papal bull saying “Popes are the boss of the kings.” </li> <li> So Philip had him arrested and tortured. </li> <li> He was released but died weeks later. </li> <li> His successor, Pope Benedict XI, only lasted 8 months before he also died, probably poisoned – and Philip forced a deadlocked conclave to elect the French Clement V as Pope in 1305. </li> <li> Clement refused to move to Rome, and in 1309, he moved his court to the papal enclave at Avignon, where it remained for the next 67 years. </li> <li> Clement is also remembered for suppressing the order of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Knights Templar</a> and allowing the execution of many of its members. </li> <li> In 1316 Petracco sent Petrarch and his brother Gherardo to study law at the University of Montpellier. </li> <li> It was the family business. </li> <li> Petrarch never liked law and thought it was a waste of his time. </li> <li> He wanted to be a poet. </li> <li> By his own account, he’d been reading Cicero since he was quite young, thanks to his father. </li> <li> “At that time I could not understand what I read, but the sweetness of the language and majesty of the cadences enchanted me, so that whatever else I read sounded harsh in my ears and quite discordant.” </li> <li> But his father had fallen on hard time and was pushing Petrarch to give up on Cicero and dedicate himself to making a career as a lawyer. </li> <li> One day he found Petrarch hidden stash of Cicero and threw it all into the fire. </li> <li> Wait? People in Petrarch’s time still read Cicero? </li> <li> They had BITS of Cicero. </li> <li> And the reason we have so much is much the same as the reason we have so much Virgil or Ovid: because during Rome’s peak, here WAS so much of it. </li> <li> Cicero’s latin was so famous during his lifetime, and in the years afterwards, that everyone who was anyone wanted their own copy of his collected works, to enjoy and for their children to study. </li> <li> They became textbooks on how to write in Latin, in addition to being an invaluable first-hand (albeit biased) source on his times. </li> <li> Finally, it’s also worth noting that Cicero did write a LOT of stuff. </li> <li> Unlike Virgil, Cicero left behind reams and reams of writing: more than 20 writings in his philosophia, more than 30 writings in his oratoria, and literally hundreds of letters to various people, which accounts for the sheer volume of his writings. </li> <li> To add to this, it didn’t hurt that his best friend Atticus (who many of the letters were addressed to) was more or less a publisher in Greece. </li> <li> He had a large number of slaves whose sole job was making more copies of Cicero’s work. </li> <li> As things are, seventy-five percent of what survives in Latin from Cicero’s lifetime was written by Cicero himself. </li> <li> Anyway back to the fire. </li> <li> Petrarch says he screamed so loudly when his father threw his books into the fire, that his father reached in and pulled two out that had been barely scorched. </li> <li> Virgil’s Aeneid and a copy of Cicero’s “On Rhetoric”. </li> <li> He told his son to read the first when he had a spare hour, and to read the second to help him in his career as a lawyer. </li> <li> Which is what Petrarch studied for the next seven years, although he considered it a waste of time and energy. </li> <li> When he was about 22, his father died. </li> <li> His mother died a few weeks later. </li> <li> By this time, Ser Petracco had managed to build up his personal fortune again, but none of it made it to his two sons. </li> <li> It was apparently stolen by the executors of his will. </li> <li> Now I bet Petrarch wished he’d paid more attention in law school! </li> <li> He says that all he got from his father’s estate was a single book by Cicero. </li> <li> “A volume of Cicero so exquisite that you could hardly find its equal, which my father used to cherish as his darling treasure, and which escaped the hands of his executors not because they wished to save it for me, but because they were busy plundering what they considered the more valuable portions of my inheritance.” </li> <li> Unfortunately, a few years later, he loaned this book, and another book by Cicero, De Gloria, ON GLORY, which he had himself borrowed from someone else, to one of his old teachers, who said he wanted to write a commentary on them. </li> <li> But the teacher secretly sold them both off because he was hard up for cash. </li> <li> And Petrarch never saw them again. </li> <li> And that copy of De Gloria? It was the last one in existence. ANYWHERE. IT’S GONE. </li> <li> ON GLORY, it was written in 44 BCE, the year before his murder. </li> </ul> The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2018/08/05/22-the-father-of-the-renaissance-part-one/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#22 – The Father Of The Renaissance (part one)</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#22 – The Father Of The Renaissance (part one)

Augustine said he heard a childlike voice he heard telling him to “take up and read” which he took as a divine command to open the Bible and read the first thing he saw. He opened the bible at a random page and read from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans chapter 13, verses 13 and 14: Let’s behave decently, as people who live in the light of day. No wild parties, drunkenness, sexual immorality, promiscuity, quarreling, or jealousy! And Augustine though “oh fuuuuuuck.” Or NOT fuck, to be more accurate. Now – if Augustine had taken the time to read the previous two verses, he might have waited before he converted. Because they read: And do this, understanding the present time: The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. Because Paul believed the end of the world was going to happen ANY FUCKING MINUTE. And not like we think of it. I mean, if you thought the world was going to end tomorrow, you’d be fucking your brains out, getting shit faced, punching people you don’t like in the face, having sex with animals – hey you have to try everything before you die! But Paul thought JAYSUS was coming and if you were in the middle of fucking or you were drunk when he came, you might miss the Jesus Train! So sure, it made sense for Paul to say that. But Augustine is living 300 years later! Jesus STILL hadn’t come! Paul didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. Anyway, Augustine gets baptised in 387. As does his son from the old hag, Adeodatus. The following year, 388, he completed his apology On the Holiness of the Catholic Church. So let me get this straight. In two years he goes from thinking Christianity is a bunch of Jack Shit to writing an entire book justifying it? Fuck off. In 388 he and his son both go back to Africa. His mother dies and he seems to inherit a fortune, because he and his son live like kings. And he definitely does NOT hook up with the old hag, not even for a random booty call. YEAH RIIIIGHT. You know he gets his freak on. GET YOUR FREAK ON – MISSY But then his son dies – from getting his freak on too much, I heard. And Augustine gives all his money away, except the family home which he turns into a monastery for himself and some friends. The Catholics in North Africa are still battling agains the Donatists (who believe people who gave up the holy books during the persecutions shouldn’t be allowed back into the fold) and the Manichaens. So they need a smart, well educated guy in the region to be the point man. So in 391 Augustine was ordained a priest in Hippo Regius (now Annaba), in Algeria. Which is a backwater. But he spends the rest of his life there, nearly 40 years. He would go on to write three of the most important books in Christianity history: Confessions, the City Of God Against The Pagans, and “De Trinitate” (“On the Trinity”). the cornerstone of the western Christian tradition Confessions – Basically it’s Augustine telling God that he thinks he’s awesome. Most of the book is just Aug saying “wow God you are awesome, you really are, no, seriously, I mean it.” And how when he was younger, he liked to fuck, and steal fruit, just to be a little cunt. Not because he was hungry or anything. Just because he was a little cunt. It is widely seen as the first Western autobiography ever written He wrote it when he was about 40, not long after his conversion to Christianity What is remarkable about the Confessions is that for the first time in western literature the world of the interior mind—with, in this case, all its guilt and uncertainty—is explored in detail in what is essentially a dialogue with God. Augustine talks in the Confessions, as throughout his writings, of the supreme importance of the love of God, but the dominant picture he gives in the Confessions is of a God who is angry and punitive. I broke all your lawful bounds and did not escape your lash. For what man can escape it? You were always present, angry and merciful at once, strewing the pangs of bitterness over all my lawless pleasures to look for others unallied by pain. You meant me to find them nowhere but in yourself, O Lord, for you teach us by inflicting pain, you smite so that you may heal and you kill us so that we may not die away from you.   And then he grew up to be a big cunt and wrote City of God Against The Pagans. it’s a horrible books by a horrible little man. This is the one that was his attempt at apologetics to justify why the God of the Christians allowed Rome to get pillaged – by other Christians. Because the pagan were saying “See! You stopped us sacrificing to the old gods and this is what happened!” Augustine’s argument is: look, it could have been a LOT worse. Compared to other pillagings of other cities throughout history, this one wasn’t so bad. So, really, we should be THANKING God for being so merciful. The first thing that jumped out at me while I read the book was that he never really addresses the issue that the people who pillaged Rome were ALSO Christians. He refers to them as “savage barbarians”. The second is that he blames women who got raped for being too proud. Chapter 28.— By What Judgment of God the Enemy Was Permitted to Indulge His Lust on the Bodies of Continent Christians. Let not your life, then, be a burden to you, you faithful servants of Christ, though your chastity was made the sport of your enemies. You have a grand and true consolation, if you maintain a good conscience, and know that you did not consent to the sins of those who were permitted to commit sinful outrage upon you. And if you should ask why this permission was granted, indeed it is a deep providence of the Creator and Governor of the world; and unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out. [Romans 11: 33] Nevertheless, faithfully interrogate your own souls, whether you have not been unduly puffed up by your integrity, and continence, and chastity; and whether you have not been so desirous of the human praise that is accorded to these virtues, that you have envied some who possessed them. And yet, if they answer that it is as I have supposed it might be, do not marvel that you have lost that by which you can win men’s praise, and retain that which cannot be exhibited to men. If you did not consent to sin, it was because God added His aid to His grace that it might not be lost, and because shame before men succeeded to human glory that it might not be loved. But in both respects even the faint-hearted among you have a consolation, approved by the one experience, chastened by the other; justified by the one, corrected by the other. As to those whose hearts, when interrogated, reply that they have never been proud of the virtue of virginity, widowhood, or matrimonial chastity, but, condescending to those of low estate, rejoiced with trembling in these gifts of God, and that they have never envied any one the like excellences of sanctity and purity, but rose superior to human applause, which is wont to be abundant in proportion to the rarity of the virtue applauded, and rather desired that their own number be increased, than that by the smallness of their numbers each of them should be conspicuous— even such faithful women, I say, must not complain that permission was given to the barbarians so grossly to outrage them; nor must they allow themselves to believe that God overlooked their character when He permitted acts which no one with impunity commits. For some most flagrant and wicked desires are allowed free play at present by the secret judgment of God, and are reserved to the public and final judgment. Moreover, it is possible that those Christian women, who are unconscious of any undue pride on account of their virtuous chastity, whereby they sinlessly suffered the violence of their captors, had yet some lurking infirmity which might have betrayed them into a proud and contemptuous bearing, had they not been subjected to the humiliation that befell them in the taking of the city. As, therefore, some men were removed by death, that no wickedness might change their disposition, so these women were outraged lest prosperity should corrupt their modesty. Neither those women then, who were already puffed up by the circumstance that they were still virgins, nor those who might have been so puffed up had they not been exposed to the violence of the enemy, lost their chastity, but rather gained humility; the former were saved from pride already cherished, the latter from pride that would shortly have grown upon them.   He goes on to say that any women who took her own life to save herself from being raped and tortured commited a grave sin. Because if she was raped and tortured, the rapist would be committing a sin. She would be blameless. So what, she suffers a little bit – at least she isn’t condemned to hell for eternity. But if she commits suicide, she’s worse than the rapist. He explains why the good people were tortured, raped and killed along with the bad people: God is pleased to visit with temporal punishments the profligate manners of a community. They are punished together, not because they have spent an equally corrupt life, but because the good as well as the wicked, though not equally with them, love this present life; while they ought to hold it cheap, that the wicked, being admonished and reformed by their example, might lay hold of life eternal.   So it was THEIR fault they were tortured, raped and killed. And they should be grateful to God. And that you are yet alive is due to God, who spares you that you may be admonished to repent and reform your lives. It is He who has permitted you, ungrateful as you are, to escape the sword of the enemy, by calling yourselves His servants, or by finding asylum in the sacred places of the martyrs.       The post #15 – City Of God appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

Augustine said he heard a childlike voice he heard telling him to “take up and read” which he took as a divine command to open the Bible and read the first thing he saw. <ul> <li> He opened the bible at a random page and read from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans chapter 13, verses 13 and 14: </li> <li> Let’s behave decently, as people who live in the light of day. No wild parties, drunkenness, sexual immorality, promiscuity, quarreling, or jealousy! </li> <li> And Augustine though “oh fuuuuuuck.” </li> <li> Or NOT fuck, to be more accurate. </li> <li> Now – if Augustine had taken the time to read the previous two verses, he might have waited before he converted. </li> <li> Because they read: </li> <li> And do this, understanding the present time: The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. </li> <li> Because Paul believed the end of the world was going to happen ANY FUCKING MINUTE. </li> <li> And not like we think of it. </li> <li> I mean, if you thought the world was going to end tomorrow, you’d be fucking your brains out, getting shit faced, punching people you don’t like in the face, having sex with animals – hey you have to try everything before you die! </li> <li> But Paul thought JAYSUS was coming and if you were in the middle of fucking or you were drunk when he came, you might miss the Jesus Train! </li> <li> So sure, it made sense for Paul to say that. </li> <li> But Augustine is living 300 years later! </li> <li> Jesus STILL hadn’t come! </li> <li> Paul didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. </li> <li> Anyway, Augustine gets baptised in 387. </li> <li> As does his son from the old hag, Adeodatus. </li> <li> The following year, 388, he completed his apology On the Holiness of the Catholic Church. </li> <li> So let me get this straight. </li> <li> In two years he goes from thinking Christianity is a bunch of Jack Shit to writing an entire book justifying it? </li> <li> Fuck off. </li> <li> In 388 he and his son both go back to Africa. </li> <li> His mother dies and he seems to inherit a fortune, because he and his son live like kings. </li> <li> And he definitely does NOT hook up with the old hag, not even for a random booty call. </li> <li> YEAH RIIIIGHT. </li> <li> You know he gets his freak on. </li> <li> GET YOUR FREAK ON – MISSY </li> <li> But then his son dies – from getting his freak on too much, I heard. </li> <li> And Augustine gives all his money away, except the family home which he turns into a monastery for himself and some friends. </li> <li> The Catholics in North Africa are still battling agains the Donatists (who believe people who gave up the holy books during the persecutions shouldn’t be allowed back into the fold) and the Manichaens. </li> <li> So they need a smart, well educated guy in the region to be the point man. </li> <li> So in 391 Augustine was ordained a priest in Hippo Regius (now Annaba), in Algeria. </li> <li> Which is a backwater. </li> <li> But he spends the rest of his life there, nearly 40 years. </li> <li> He would go on to write three of the most important books in Christianity history: Confessions, the City Of God Against The Pagans, and “De Trinitate” (“On the Trinity”). </li> <li> the cornerstone of the western Christian tradition </li> <li> Confessions – Basically it’s Augustine telling God that he thinks he’s awesome. </li> <li> Most of the book is just Aug saying “wow God you are awesome, you really are, no, seriously, I mean it.” </li> <li> And how when he was younger, he liked to fuck, and steal fruit, just to be a little cunt. </li> <li> Not because he was hungry or anything. </li> <li> Just because he was a little cunt. </li> <li> It is widely seen as the first Western autobiography ever written </li> <li> He wrote it when he was about 40, not long after his conversion to Christianity </li> <li> What is remarkable about the Confessions is that for the first time in western literature the world of the interior mind—with, in this case, all its guilt and uncertainty—is explored in detail in what is essentially a dialogue with God. </li> <li> Augustine talks in the Confessions, as throughout his writings, of the supreme importance of the love of God, but the dominant picture he gives in the Confessions is of a God who is angry and punitive. <ul> <li> I broke all your lawful bounds and did not escape your lash. For what man can escape it? You were always present, angry and merciful at once, strewing the pangs of bitterness over all my lawless pleasures to look for others unallied by pain. You meant me to find them nowhere but in yourself, O Lord, for you teach us by inflicting pain, you smite so that you may heal and you kill us so that we may not die away from you. </li> </ul> </li> <li> And then he grew up to be a big cunt and wrote City of God Against The Pagans. </li> <li> it’s a horrible books by a horrible little man. </li> <li> This is the one that was his attempt at apologetics to justify why the God of the Christians allowed Rome to get pillaged – by other Christians. </li> <li> Because the pagan were saying “See! You stopped us sacrificing to the old gods and this is what happened!” </li> <li> Augustine’s argument is: look, it could have been a LOT worse. </li> <li> Compared to other pillagings of other cities throughout history, this one wasn’t so bad. </li> <li> So, really, we should be THANKING God for being so merciful. </li> <li> The first thing that jumped out at me while I read the book was that he never really addresses the issue that the people who pillaged Rome were ALSO Christians. </li> <li> He refers to them as “savage barbarians”. </li> <li> The second is that he blames women who got raped for being too proud. <ul> <li> Chapter 28.— By What Judgment of God the Enemy Was Permitted to Indulge His Lust on the Bodies of Continent Christians. </li> <li> Let not your life, then, be a burden to you, you faithful servants of Christ, though your chastity was made the sport of your enemies. You have a grand and true consolation, if you maintain a good conscience, and know that you did not consent to the sins of those who were permitted to commit sinful outrage upon you. And if you should ask why this permission was granted, indeed it is a deep providence of the Creator and Governor of the world; and unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out. [Romans 11: 33] Nevertheless, faithfully interrogate your own souls, whether you have not been unduly puffed up by your integrity, and continence, and chastity; and whether you have not been so desirous of the human praise that is accorded to these virtues, that you have envied some who possessed them. </li> <li> And yet, if they answer that it is as I have supposed it might be, do not marvel that you have lost that by which you can win men’s praise, and retain that which cannot be exhibited to men. If you did not consent to sin, it was because God added His aid to His grace that it might not be lost, and because shame before men succeeded to human glory that it might not be loved. But in both respects even the faint-hearted among you have a consolation, approved by the one experience, chastened by the other; justified by the one, corrected by the other. As to those whose hearts, when interrogated, reply that they have never been proud of the virtue of virginity, widowhood, or matrimonial chastity, but, condescending to those of low estate, rejoiced with trembling in these gifts of God, and that they have never envied any one the like excellences of sanctity and purity, but rose superior to human applause, which is wont to be abundant in proportion to the rarity of the virtue applauded, and rather desired that their own number be increased, than that by the smallness of their numbers each of them should be conspicuous— even such faithful women, I say, must not complain that permission was given to the barbarians so grossly to outrage them; nor must they allow themselves to believe that God overlooked their character when He permitted acts which no one with impunity commits. For some most flagrant and wicked desires are allowed free play at present by the secret judgment of God, and are reserved to the public and final judgment. Moreover, it is possible that those Christian women, who are unconscious of any undue pride on account of their virtuous chastity, whereby they sinlessly suffered the violence of their captors, had yet some lurking infirmity which might have betrayed them into a proud and contemptuous bearing, had they not been subjected to the humiliation that befell them in the taking of the city. As, therefore, some men were removed by death, that no wickedness might change their disposition, so these women were outraged lest prosperity should corrupt their modesty. Neither those women then, who were already puffed up by the circumstance that they were still virgins, nor those who might have been so puffed up had they not been exposed to the violence of the enemy, lost their chastity, but rather gained humility; the former were saved from pride already cherished, the latter from pride that would shortly have grown upon them. </li> </ul> </li> <li> He goes on to say that any women who took her own life to save herself from being raped and tortured commited a grave sin. </li> <li> Because if she was raped and tortured, the rapist would be committing a sin. </li> <li> She would be blameless. </li> <li> So what, she suffers a little bit – at least she isn’t condemned to hell for eternity. </li> <li> But if she commits suicide, she’s worse than the rapist. </li> <li> He explains why the good people were tortured, raped and killed along with the bad people: <ul> <li> God is pleased to visit with temporal punishments the profligate manners of a community. They are punished together, not because they have spent an equally corrupt life, but because the good as well as the wicked, though not equally with them, love this present life; while they ought to hold it cheap, that the wicked, being admonished and reformed by their example, might lay hold of life eternal. </li> </ul> </li> <li> So it was THEIR fault they were tortured, raped and killed. </li> <li> And they should be grateful to God. <ul> <li> And that you are yet alive is due to God, who spares you that you may be admonished to repent and reform your lives. It is He who has permitted you, ungrateful as you are, to escape the sword of the enemy, by calling yourselves His servants, or by finding asylum in the sacred places of the martyrs. </li> </ul> </li> </ul> The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2018/05/11/15-city-of-god/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#15 – City Of God</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#15 – City Of God

Stilicho and the chief ministers of his party were treacherously slain on Honorius’ orders. * Stilicho had been accused by one of his enemies at court, Olympius, of treason and wanting to put his own son on the throne. * So Stilicho went to Ravenna to meet with the Emperor to protest his innocence. * Honorius, now believing the rumors of Stilicho’s treason, ordered his arrest. * Stilicho sought sanctuary in a church in Ravenna, but he was lured out with promises of safety. * Stepping foot outside, he was arrested and told he was to be immediately executed on Honorius’ orders. * Stilicho refused to allow his followers to resist, and he was executed on August 22, 408. * His son was also executed. * And Alaric didn’t get his gold * Olympius was appointed magister officiorum and replaced Stilicho as the power behind the throne. * His new government was strongly anti-Germanic and obsessed with purging any and all of Stilicho’s former supporters. * Roman soldiers began to indiscriminately slaughter allied barbarian foederati soldiers and their families in Roman cities. * Thousands of them fled Italy and sought refuge with Alaric in Noricum. * Their wives and children of the other Germanic tribes were murdered. * Alaric led them leaisurely across the Julian Alps and, in September 408, stood before the walls of Rome (now with no capable general like Stilicho as a defender) and began a strict blockade. * Sarus and his band of Goths, still in Italy, remained neutral and aloof. * The city of Rome may have held as many as 800,000 people, making it the largest in the world at the time. * No blood was shed this time; Alaric relied on hunger as his most powerful weapon. * He blockaded the city – I don’t know how long it was, but it must have been a while as people starved to death. * Julius Caesar would have been proud. * there was an attempt to reinstate pagan rituals in the still religiously mixed city to ward off the Visigoths. * Pope Innocent I even agreed to it, provided it be done in private. * I guess that speaks volumes about how much confidence the Pope had in his monotheism and his God. * The pagan priests, however, said the sacrifices could only be done publicly in the Roman Forum, and the idea was abandoned. * Serena, the wife of the Stilicho and a cousin of emperor Honorius, was in the city and believed by the Roman populace, with little evidence, to be encouraging Alaric’s invasion. * Galla Placidia, the sister of the emperor Honorius, was also trapped in the city and gave her consent to the Roman Senate to execute Serena. * Serena was then strangled to death. * Hopes of help from the Imperial government faded as the siege continued and Alaric took control of the Tiber river, which cut the supplies going into Rome. * Grain was rationed to one-half and then one-third of its previous amount. * Starvation and disease rapidly spread throughout the city, and rotting bodies were left unburied in the streets. * The Roman Senate then decided to send two envoys to Alaric. * When the envoys boasted to him that the Roman people were trained to fight and ready for war, Alaric laughed at them and said, “The thickest grass is easier to cut than the thinnest. * The envoys asked under what terms could the siege be lifted, and Alaric demanded all the gold and silver, household goods, and barbarian slaves in the city. * One envoy asked what would be left to the citizens of Rome. * Alaric replied, “Their lives.” * Ultimately, the city was forced to give the Goths 5,000 pounds of gold, 30,000 pounds of silver, 4,000 silken tunics, 3,000 hides dyed scarlet, and 3,000 pounds of pepper in exchange for lifting the siege. * The barbarian slaves fled to Alaric as well, who swelled his ranks to about 40,000. * To raise the needed money, Roman senators were to contribute according to their means. * This led to corruption and abuse, and the sum came up short. * The Romans then stripped down and melted pagan statues and shrines to make up the difference. * Zosimus reports one such statue was of Virtus, and that when it was melted down to pay off barbarians it seemed “all that remained of the Roman valor and intrepidity was totally extinguished”. * So that ended Alaric’s first siege of Rome. * The greatest impact of their attack on Rome was psychological * Rome had considered itself immune from attack. * No foreign invader had breached the city walls since the Gauls in 390 BCE, exactly eight hundred years earlier. * The Visigoths themselves moved on to Erturia, modern Tuscany and Umbria, in Central Italy. * But Alaric wasn’t done with the Romans. * He demanded a block of territory 200 miles long by 150 wide between the Danube and the Gulf of Venice (to be held probably on some terms of nominal dependence on the Empire) and the title of commander-in-chief of the Imperial Army. * In January 409, the Senate sent an embassy to the imperial court at Ravenna to encourage the Emperor to come to terms with the Goths, and to give Roman aristocratic children as hostages to the Goths as insurance. * Alaric would then resume his alliance with the Roman Empire. * Honorius, now 25 years old, vacillates. * He thinks he’s personally safe in Ravenna because MARCIA MARCIA MARCIA. * Fuck Rome. * Honorius refused and called in five legions from Dalmatia, totaling six thousand men. * They were to go to Rome and garrison the city, but their commander, a man named Valens, marched his men into Etruria, believing it cowardly to go around the Goths. * He and his men were intercepted and attacked by Alaric’s full force, and almost all were killed or captured. * Only 100 managed to escape and reach Rome. * A second Senatorial embassy, this time including Pope Innocent I, was sent with Gothic guards to Honorius to plead with him to accept the Visigoths’ demands. * The imperial government also received word that Ataulf, Alaric’s brother-in-law, was coming with his Goth army into Italy with the intent of joining Alaric. * Honorius summoned together all available Roman forces in northern Italy. * He placed 300 Huns of the imperial guard under the command of Olympius, and possibly the other forces as well, and ordered him to intercept Ataulf. * They clashed near Pisa, and despite supposedly killing 1,100 Goths and losing only 17 of his own men, Olympius was forced to retreat back to Ravenna. * Ataulf then joined Alaric. * This failure caused Olympius to fall from power and to flee for his life to Dalmatia. * The guy who replaces Olympius is Jovius, a friend of Alaric’s who had been a supporter of Stilicho. * So he’s open to negotiations. * No more fucking around. * So they meet. * Alaric wanted a yearly tribute in gold and grain, and lands in the provinces of Dalmatia, Noricum, and Venetia for his people. * Think Croatia, modern Austria and part of Slovenia. * Jovius also wrote privately to Honorius, suggesting that if Alaric was offered the position of magister utriusque militae, “Master of the Soldiers”, they could lessen Alaric’s other demands. * Honorius rejected the demand for a Roman office, and he sent an insulting letter to Alaric, which was read out in the negotiations. * Because he’s a fucktard. * Alaric broke off negotiations and prepared to march again on Rome. * Jovius went back to Ravenna and swore an oath to Honorius that he would never betray him. * And anyone who has watched Game Of Thrones knows what THAT means. * But then Alaric heard Honorius was going to hire 10,000 Huns to join his army. * And he thought OH FUCK. * I mean, even the Goths don’t want to fuck with the Huns. * It was the Huns that started this whole fucking mess in the first place! * They caused the Great Migration. * And this is even before Attila. * So Alaric backs down. * He doesn’t want gold, he doesn’t want high office. * He just wants some land and as much grain as Honorius can spare. * But Honorius told him to go fuck himself. * So Alaric returns to Rome and attacks it again in 409. * Fortunately for him, the Huns never show up. * This time, faced again with famine and starvation, the Senate buy him off. * He demanded that they appoint one of their own as Emperor to rival Honorius, and he instigated the election of the elderly Priscus Attalus to that end, a pagan who permitted himself to be baptized. * Alaric was then made magister utriusque militiae and his brother-in-law Ataulf was given the position comes domesticorum equitum, basically the new Imperial Guard, and the siege was lifted. * Priscus Attalus was a Greek from Asia whose father had moved to Italy under Valentinian I. * Attalus was an important senator in Rome, who served as praefectus urbi in 409. * For some reason, Alaric decides this guy would make a good puppet emperor. * Why didn’t he make himself emperor? * Who knows. * Maybe he didn’t want the job. * The governor of the food-rich province of Africa, Heraclian, remained loyal to Honorius. * Attalus sent a Roman force to subdue him, refusing to send Gothic soldiers there as he was distrustful of their intentions. * Attalus and Alaric then marched to Ravenna, forcing some cities in northern Italy to submit to Attalus. * Honorius sent Jovius and others to Attalus, pleading that they share the Western Empire. * Attalus said he would only negotiate on Honorius’ place of exile. * Jovius, for his part, switched sides to Attalus and was named patrician by his new master. * Jovius wanted to have Honorius mutilated as well, but Attalus rejected it. * * So much for that loyalty pledge. * Now in pure panic, Honorius was preparing to flee to Constantinople when 4,000 Eastern Roman soldiers appeared at Ravenna’s docks to defend the city. * Their arrival strengthened Honorius’ resolve to await news of what had happened in Africa: Heraclian had defeated Attalus’ force and cut supplies to Rome, threatening another famine in the city. * Alaric wanted to send Gothic soldiers to invade Africa and secure the province, but Attalus again refused, distrustful of the Visigoths’ intentions for the province. * Counseled by Jovius to do away with his puppet emperor, Alaric summoned Attalus to Ariminum and ceremonially stripped him of his imperial regalia and title in the summer of 410. * Alaric then reopened negotiations with Honorius. * Honorius arranged for a meeting with Alaric about 12 kilometers outside of Ravenna. * As Alaric waited at the meeting place, Sarus, a Gallic commander who hates Alaric, maybe because he lost the election to be the King of the Goth, and is now allied to Honorius, attacked Alaric and his men with a small Roman force * Alaric cuts off the negotiations and attacks Rome on August 24, 410 for the third and final time. * This is the infamous Sack of Rome. * According to some sources, the Roman just opened the gates and let him in. * They pillaged the city for three days. * Many of the city’s great buildings were ransacked, including the mausoleums of Augustus and Hadrian, in which many Roman Emperors of the past were buried; the ashes of the urns in both tombs were scattered. * Keep in mind that these are Christians attacking other Christians. * St. Jerome, living in Bethlehem at the time, wrote that “The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken.” * All valuables were taken and people were raped and tortured to force them to give up their gold. * But by the standards of the time, the Goths were pretty restrained. * There wasn’t a mass slaughter. * The basilicas of Peter and Paul were allowed to be places of sanctuary for both Christians and Pagans. * And most of the buildings and monuments were left unharmed, just stripped of their valuables. * There’s a great story, probably fictional, about Honorius. * At that time they say that the Emperor Honorius in Ravenna received the message from one of the eunuchs, evidently a keeper of the poultry, that Rome had perished. And he cried out and said, ‘And yet it has just eaten from my hands!’ For he had a very large cock, Rome by name; and the eunuch comprehending his words said that it was the city of Rome which had perished at the hands of Alaric, and the emperor with a sigh of relief answered quickly: ‘But I thought that my fowl Rome had perished.’ So great, they say, was the folly with which this emperor was possessed. * I also have a very large cock, but do you know what I call it? * “Ray.” * Because that’s ironic.  The post #12 – The Sack Of Rome appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

Stilicho and the chief ministers of his party were treacherously slain on Honorius’ orders. * Stilicho had been accused by one of his enemies at court, Olympius, of treason and wanting to put his own son on the throne. * So Stilicho went to Ravenna to meet with the Emperor to protest his innocence. * Honorius, now believing the rumors of Stilicho’s treason, ordered his arrest. * Stilicho sought sanctuary in a church in Ravenna, but he was lured out with promises of safety. * Stepping foot outside, he was arrested and told he was to be immediately executed on Honorius’ orders. * Stilicho refused to allow his followers to resist, and he was executed on August 22, 408. * His son was also executed. * And Alaric didn’t get his gold * Olympius was appointed magister officiorum and replaced Stilicho as the power behind the throne. * His new government was strongly anti-Germanic and obsessed with purging any and all of Stilicho’s former supporters. * Roman soldiers began to indiscriminately slaughter allied barbarian foederati soldiers and their families in Roman cities. * Thousands of them fled Italy and sought refuge with Alaric in Noricum. * Their wives and children of the other Germanic tribes were murdered. * Alaric led them leaisurely across the Julian Alps and, in September 408, stood before the walls of Rome (now with no capable general like Stilicho as a defender) and began a strict blockade. * Sarus and his band of Goths, still in Italy, remained neutral and aloof. * The city of Rome may have held as many as 800,000 people, making it the largest in the world at the time. * No blood was shed this time; Alaric relied on hunger as his most powerful weapon. * He blockaded the city – I don’t know how long it was, but it must have been a while as people starved to death. * Julius Caesar would have been proud. * there was an attempt to reinstate pagan rituals in the still religiously mixed city to ward off the Visigoths. * Pope Innocent I even agreed to it, provided it be done in private. * I guess that speaks volumes about how much confidence the Pope had in his monotheism and his God. * The pagan priests, however, said the sacrifices could only be done publicly in the Roman Forum, and the idea was abandoned. * Serena, the wife of the Stilicho and a cousin of emperor Honorius, was in the city and believed by the Roman populace, with little evidence, to be encouraging Alaric’s invasion. * Galla Placidia, the sister of the emperor Honorius, was also trapped in the city and gave her consent to the Roman Senate to execute Serena. * Serena was then strangled to death. * Hopes of help from the Imperial government faded as the siege continued and Alaric took control of the Tiber river, which cut the supplies going into Rome. * Grain was rationed to one-half and then one-third of its previous amount. * Starvation and disease rapidly spread throughout the city, and rotting bodies were left unburied in the streets. * The Roman Senate then decided to send two envoys to Alaric. * When the envoys boasted to him that the Roman people were trained to fight and ready for war, Alaric laughed at them and said, “The thickest grass is easier to cut than the thinnest. * The envoys asked under what terms could the siege be lifted, and Alaric demanded all the gold and silver, household goods, and barbarian slaves in the city. * One envoy asked what would be left to the citizens of Rome. * Alaric replied, “Their lives.” * Ultimately, the city was forced to give the Goths 5,000 pounds of gold, 30,000 pounds of silver, 4,000 silken tunics, 3,000 hides dyed scarlet, and 3,000 pounds of pepper in exchange for lifting the siege. * The barbarian slaves fled to Alaric as well, who swelled his ranks to about 40,000. * To raise the needed money, Roman senators were to contribute according to their means. * This led to corruption and abuse, and the sum came up short. * The Romans then stripped down and melted pagan statues and shrines to make up the difference. * Zosimus reports one such statue was of Virtus, and that when it was melted down to pay off barbarians it seemed “all that remained of the Roman valor and intrepidity was totally extinguished”. * So that ended Alaric’s first siege of Rome. * The greatest impact of their attack on Rome was psychological * Rome had considered itself immune from attack. * No foreign invader had breached the city walls since the Gauls in 390 BCE, exactly eight hundred years earlier. * The Visigoths themselves moved on to Erturia, modern Tuscany and Umbria, in Central Italy. * But Alaric wasn’t done with the Romans. * He demanded a block of territory 200 miles long by 150 wide between the Danube and the Gulf of Venice (to be held probably on some terms of nominal dependence on the Empire) and the title of commander-in-chief of the Imperial Army. * In January 409, the Senate sent an embassy to the imperial court at Ravenna to encourage the Emperor to come to terms with the Goths, and to give Roman aristocratic children as hostages to the Goths as insurance. * Alaric would then resume his alliance with the Roman Empire. * Honorius, now 25 years old, vacillates. * He thinks he’s personally safe in Ravenna because MARCIA MARCIA MARCIA. * Fuck Rome. * Honorius refused and called in five legions from Dalmatia, totaling six thousand men. * They were to go to Rome and garrison the city, but their commander, a man named Valens, marched his men into Etruria, believing it cowardly to go around the Goths. * He and his men were intercepted and attacked by Alaric’s full force, and almost all were killed or captured. * Only 100 managed to escape and reach Rome. * A second Senatorial embassy, this time including Pope Innocent I, was sent with Gothic guards to Honorius to plead with him to accept the Visigoths’ demands. * The imperial government also received word that Ataulf, Alaric’s brother-in-law, was coming with his Goth army into Italy with the intent of joining Alaric. * Honorius summoned together all available Roman forces in northern Italy. * He placed 300 Huns of the imperial guard under the command of Olympius, and possibly the other forces as well, and ordered him to intercept Ataulf. * They clashed near Pisa, and despite supposedly killing 1,100 Goths and losing only 17 of his own men, Olympius was forced to retreat back to Ravenna. * Ataulf then joined Alaric. * This failure caused Olympius to fall from power and to flee for his life to Dalmatia. * The guy who replaces Olympius is Jovius, a friend of Alaric’s who had been a supporter of Stilicho. * So he’s open to negotiations. * No more fucking around. * So they meet. * Alaric wanted a yearly tribute in gold and grain, and lands in the provinces of Dalmatia, Noricum, and Venetia for his people. * Think Croatia, modern Austria and part of Slovenia. * Jovius also wrote privately to Honorius, suggesting that if Alaric was offered the position of magister utriusque militae, “Master of the Soldiers”, they could lessen Alaric’s other demands. * Honorius rejected the demand for a Roman office, and he sent an insulting letter to Alaric, which was read out in the negotiations. * Because he’s a fucktard. * Alaric broke off negotiations and prepared to march again on Rome. * Jovius went back to Ravenna and swore an oath to Honorius that he would never betray him. * And anyone who has watched Game Of Thrones knows what THAT means. * But then Alaric heard Honorius was going to hire 10,000 Huns to join his army. * And he thought OH FUCK. * I mean, even the Goths don’t want to fuck with the Huns. * It was the Huns that started this whole fucking mess in the first place! * They caused the Great Migration. * And this is even before Attila. * So Alaric backs down. * He doesn’t want gold, he doesn’t want high office. * He just wants some land and as much grain as Honorius can spare. * But Honorius told him to go fuck himself. * So Alaric returns to Rome and attacks it again in 409. * Fortunately for him, the Huns never show up. * This time, faced again with famine and starvation, the Senate buy him off. * He demanded that they appoint one of their own as Emperor to rival Honorius, and he instigated the election of the elderly Priscus Attalus to that end, a pagan who permitted himself to be baptized. * Alaric was then made magister utriusque militiae and his brother-in-law Ataulf was given the position comes domesticorum equitum, basically the new Imperial Guard, and the siege was lifted. * Priscus Attalus was a Greek from Asia whose father had moved to Italy under Valentinian I. * Attalus was an important senator in Rome, who served as praefectus urbi in 409. * For some reason, Alaric decides this guy would make a good puppet emperor. * Why didn’t he make himself emperor? * Who knows. * Maybe he didn’t want the job. * The governor of the food-rich province of Africa, Heraclian, remained loyal to Honorius. * Attalus sent a Roman force to subdue him, refusing to send Gothic soldiers there as he was distrustful of their intentions. * Attalus and Alaric then marched to Ravenna, forcing some cities in northern Italy to submit to Attalus. * Honorius sent Jovius and others to Attalus, pleading that they share the Western Empire. * Attalus said he would only negotiate on Honorius’ place of exile. * Jovius, for his part, switched sides to Attalus and was named patrician by his new master. * Jovius wanted to have Honorius mutilated as well, but Attalus rejected it. * * So much for that loyalty pledge. * Now in pure panic, Honorius was preparing to flee to Constantinople when 4,000 Eastern Roman soldiers appeared at Ravenna’s docks to defend the city. * Their arrival strengthened Honorius’ resolve to await news of what had happened in Africa: Heraclian had defeated Attalus’ force and cut supplies to Rome, threatening another famine in the city. * Alaric wanted to send Gothic soldiers to invade Africa and secure the province, but Attalus again refused, distrustful of the Visigoths’ intentions for the province. * Counseled by Jovius to do away with his puppet emperor, Alaric summoned Attalus to Ariminum and ceremonially stripped him of his imperial regalia and title in the summer of 410. * Alaric then reopened negotiations with Honorius. * Honorius arranged for a meeting with Alaric about 12 kilometers outside of Ravenna. * As Alaric waited at the meeting place, Sarus, a Gallic commander who hates Alaric, maybe because he lost the election to be the King of the Goth, and is now allied to Honorius, attacked Alaric and his men with a small Roman force * Alaric cuts off the negotiations and attacks Rome on August 24, 410 for the third and final time. * This is the infamous Sack of Rome. * According to some sources, the Roman just opened the gates and let him in. * They pillaged the city for three days. * Many of the city’s great buildings were ransacked, including the mausoleums of Augustus and Hadrian, in which many Roman Emperors of the past were buried; the ashes of the urns in both tombs were scattered. * Keep in mind that these are Christians attacking other Christians. * St. Jerome, living in Bethlehem at the time, wrote that “The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken.” * All valuables were taken and people were raped and tortured to force them to give up their gold. * But by the standards of the time, the Goths were pretty restrained. * There wasn’t a mass slaughter. * The basilicas of Peter and Paul were allowed to be places of sanctuary for both Christians and Pagans. * And most of the buildings and monuments were left unharmed, just stripped of their valuables. * There’s a great story, probably fictional, about Honorius. * At that time they say that the Emperor Honorius in Ravenna received the message from one of the eunuchs, evidently a keeper of the poultry, that Rome had perished. And he cried out and said, ‘And yet it has just eaten from my hands!’ For he had a very large cock, Rome by name; and the eunuch comprehending his words said that it was the city of Rome which had perished at the hands of Alaric, and the emperor with a sigh of relief answered quickly: ‘But I thought that my fowl Rome had perished.’ So great, they say, was the folly with which this emperor was possessed. * I also have a very large cock, but do you know what I call it? * “Ray.” * Because that’s ironic. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2018/04/13/episode-12-the-sack-of-rome/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#12 – The Sack Of Rome</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#12 – The Sack Of Rome

During Lorenzo de Medici’s life, no fewer than three of the outstanding artists of the Renaissance are thought to have spent at least a brief formative period of their early lives in the Palazzo Medici: Leonardo and Michelangelo and the one we’re going to talk about for the next few episodes – the great Sandro Botticelli. Oh dear!  This page contains Member's Only content... and you aren't logged in! Sucks to be you, seriously, because the content you are missing is really funny. And clever. And probably very, very sexy. So sign up now and your life will be improved substantially. The post #89 – Sandro Botticelli appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

During Lorenzo de Medici’s life, no fewer than three of the outstanding artists of the Renaissance are thought to have spent at least a brief formative period of their early lives in the Palazzo Medici: Leonardo and Michelangelo and the one we’re going to talk about for the next few episodes – the great Sandro Botticelli. <h2>Oh dear!</h2> This page contains Member's Only content... and you aren't logged in! Sucks to be you, seriously, because the content you are missing is really funny. And clever. And probably very, very sexy. So <a href="/register/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">sign up now</a> and your life will be improved substantially. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2020/05/08/89-sandro-botticelli/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#89 – Sandro Botticelli</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#89 – Sandro Botticelli

This episode starts with a correction about the skin colour of the Moors, brought to you by our Moroccan listener Mohamed.Then, to set the scene for this episode, we have a special song – “The Alhambra Decree” by legendary contemporary folk singer-songwriter David Rovics. Crazy coincidence – I’ve been a fan of David’s work for 15 years and have been on his mailing list forever. And the same week I happened to be preparing this episode, I saw his latest email that contained this song. So I reached out and he was nice enough to give me permission to use this track.So what was the Alhambra Decree? It was the 1492 decision, by Isabella and Ferdinand, after they concluded their war with the last remaining Muslim region of Granada, that all of the Jews were to be banished from Spain. But did they really want to banish them? Or just give them an added incentive to convert to Christianity? And why would anyone want to convert to Christianity after the hell the Inquisition had just put the conversos through?Some gave in under pressure and converted – some stuck to their guns and migrated to Portugal, whose King promised them refuge. Which was great – until the King of Portugal decided he wanted to marry the daughter of Isabella and Ferdinand. The post #87 – The Alhambra Decree appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

This episode starts with a correction about the skin colour of the Moors, brought to you by our Moroccan listener Mohamed.Then, to set the scene for this episode, we have a special song – “The Alhambra Decree” by <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/1492-alhambra-35428800?utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_campaign=postshare" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">legendary contemporary folk singer-songwriter David Rovics. </a>Crazy coincidence – I’ve been a fan of David’s work for 15 years and have been on his mailing list forever. And the same week I happened to be preparing this episode, I saw his latest email that contained this song. So I reached out and he was nice enough to give me permission to use this track.So what was the Alhambra Decree? It was the 1492 decision, by Isabella and Ferdinand, after they concluded their war with the last remaining Muslim region of Granada, that all of the Jews were to be banished from Spain. But did they really want to banish them? Or just give them an added incentive to convert to Christianity? And why would anyone want to convert to Christianity after the hell the Inquisition had just put the conversos through?Some gave in under pressure and converted – some stuck to their guns and migrated to Portugal, whose King promised them refuge. Which was great – until the King of Portugal decided he wanted to marry the daughter of Isabella and Ferdinand. The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2020/04/17/87-the-alhambra-decree/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#87 – The Alhambra Decree</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#87 – The Alhambra Decree

In 1184, Pope Lucius III issued a papal bull, Ad Abolendam, to combat the Albigensian heresy in southern France. They were known as Cathars, or Good Christians. They were going around doing horrible anti-Christian things – like saying killing was bad, being vegetarian and treating women as equals was good, and that the church was too rich. The Pope decided they had to be stopped. How? In the words of the army commander he sent to them: ‘Kill them all. God will recognise his own.’    The post #82 – The Cathars appeared first on The Renaissance Times.

In 1184, Pope Lucius III issued a papal bull, Ad Abolendam, to combat the Albigensian heresy in southern France. They were known as Cathars, or Good Christians. They were going around doing horrible anti-Christian things – like saying killing was bad, being vegetarian and treating women as equals was good, and that the church was too rich. The Pope decided they had to be stopped. How? In the words of the army commander he sent to them: ‘Kill them all. God will recognise his own.’ The post <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com/2020/03/09/82-the-cathars/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">#82 – The Cathars</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.therenaissancetimes.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Renaissance Times</a>.

#82 – The Cathars

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