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Early renaissance

The early renaissance transition from the Late Gothic to the Renaissance is extremely varied In Italian art c 1300 the works of Giotto and his contemporaries already indicate a first surge of interest in the phenomena of the temporal world, for example Giotto’s frescoes (c 1305–10) in the Arena Chapel in Padua (eg Joachim and the Shepherds, Betrayal of Christ and Lamentation)) or the cycle of scenes from the Life of St Francis (c 1290) by unknown masters in the Upper Church of S. Francesco at Assisi Vasari correctly saw this as a first stage in the ‘rinascità’. In the fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, the Effects of Good Government (1338–9; Siena, Pal Pub), buildings and landscape attain a realism unrivalled until the second quarter of the 15th century North of the Alps the art associated with Emperor Charles IV’s court in Prague, with its strong emphasis on the body and on space, and the tendency to portray strongly characterized individuals (eg the portrait busts, from 1372, in the triforium of the choir of Prague Cathedral), can also be seen as part of the prologue to the Renaissance.

The Renaissance of the 12th century was a period of many changes at the outset of the High Middle Ages. It included social, political and economic transformations, and an intellectual revitalization of Western Europe with strong philosophical and scientific roots. These changes paved the way for later achievements such as the literary and artistic movement of the Italian Renaissance in the 15th century and the scientific developments of the 17th century.

The early renaissance refers to a series of economic, social, political, ideological and cultural changes that Europe faced during the 12th century. Such changes tended to question the old agrarian and rural order of feudalism as a consequence of the emergence of a new economic and social agent: the artisan and commercial bourgeoisie of the resurgent cities. It included an intellectual revitalization of Europe with strong philosophical and scientific roots, which paved the way for the later literary and artistic achievements of the late Middle Ages and the beginnings of theModern Age: Humanism and the Renaissance of the XV and XVI centuries and the scientific revolution culminated in the XVI century.

Medieval renaissances
The groundwork for the rebirth of learning was laid by the process of political consolidation and centralization of the monarchies of Europe. This process of centralization began with Charlemagne (768–814) King of the Franks and later (800–814), Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne’s inclination towards education, which led to the creation of many new churches and schools where students were required to learn Latin and Greek, has been called the Carolingian Renaissance.

A second “renaissance” occurred during the reign of Otto I (The Great) (936–973) King of the Saxons and from 962 onwards Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Otto was successful in unifying his kingdom and asserting his right to appoint bishops and archbishops throughout his kingdom. Otto’s assumption of this ecclesiastical power brought him into close contact with the best educated and ablest class of men in his kingdom. Because of this close contact many new reforms were introduced in the Saxon Kingdom and in the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, Otto’s reign has been called the Ottonian Renaissance.

Therefore, the Renaissance of the 12th century has been identified as the third and final of the medieval renaissances. Yet the renaissance of the twelfth century was far more thoroughgoing than those renaissances that preceded in the Carolingian or in the Ottonian periods. Indeed, Charlemagne’s Carolingian Renaissance was really more particular to Charlemagne himself, and was really more of a “veneer on a changing society” than a true renaissance springing up from society, and the same might be said of the Ottonian Renaissance.

Historiography
Charles H. Haskins was the first historian to write extensively about a renaissance that ushered in the High Middle Ages starting about 1070. In 1927, he wrote that:

[The 12th century in Europe] was in many respects an age of fresh and vigorous life. The epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns, and of the earliest bureaucratic states of the West, it saw the culmination of Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic; the emergence of the vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law; the recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions, and of much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities. The 12th century left its signature on higher education, on the scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry…

British art historian Kenneth Clark wrote that Western Europe’s first “great age of civilisation” was ready to begin around the year 1000. From 1100, he wrote, monumental abbeys and cathedrals were constructed and decorated with sculptures, hangings, mosaics and works belonging to one of the greatest epochs of art and providing stark contrast to the monotonous and cramped conditions of ordinary living during the period. Abbot Suger of the Abbey of St. Denis is considered an influential early patron of Gothic architecture and believed that love of beauty brought people closer to God: “The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material”. Clark calls this “the intellectual background of all the sublime works of art of the next century and in fact has remained the basis of our belief of the value of art until today”.

Historical changes in 12th century Europe
Political changes
Two important political processes developed in Europe during this period. On the one hand, the European feudal system extended considerably in lands located until then outside it, and on the other, the process of centralization began which slowly transformed feudal monarchies into authoritarian monarchies (at the end of the Middle Ages), and which ended up giving rise to nation-states, as early as the Modern Age.

Expansion in the Iberian Peninsula
During this period the crisis and subsequent disintegration of the Caliphate of Córdoba, in the year 1031, gave the Christian kingdoms a great opportunity to attack the Muslim kingdoms (the taifa). The most important characters in this warrior cycle were the monarch Alfonso VI of Castilla and Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, better known as El Cid Campeador. This expansion was slowed for a time after the Almoravids invasion, but a new balance point was reached, favorable to the Christian kingdoms, after the battle of Navas de Tolosa, in 1212.

Expansion in Italy
During the second half of the 11th century, Norman invaders had snatched all of southern Italy from the Byzantines. During the first half of the 12th century, the Norman king Roger I of Sicily became one of the most powerful monarchs in Europe. During all this time, the kingdom of Sicily was the most prosperous and developed in Europe, thanks to a policy of religious tolerance that allowed the assimilation of the superior culture of Arabs and Byzantines. All this, despite the fact that during the Norman conquest of Sicily Catholicism began to enter, and therefore the power of the Catholic Church, in these lands was increasing.

Expansion in the British Isles
The Normans also invaded England in 1066. William the Conqueror laid the foundations of English power, which his successors took advantage of to make new incursions against Ireland and Scotland.

Expansion into Scandinavia
The product of the looting and plundering of the Vikings led to the introduction of the western economy into the Baltic Sea. The German prince Enrique the Lion, vassal of Federico Barbarossa, conquered the lands between Brandenburg and the Oder river to the Vendos, founding Berlin among other cities, and opening the way for new feudal lords.

Expansion in Eastern Europe
The kingdom of Poland was founded in the 10th century, and in the following centuries, it began a hard military pressure towards the east, in no man’s lands occupied by pagan tribes, such as Lithuania. The combined work of the Poles and the Teutonic Knights managed to win the entire stretch between the West and the Russian kingdoms, in particular Novgorod and Muscovy.

Expansion in the Near East
In the year 1100, the First Crusade managed to reconquer Jerusalem, founding a series of Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land. These kingdoms survived with great difficulties, divided by their own domestic quarrels, until the emergence of Saladin, at the end of the 12th century, ended up erasing almost all traces of them. Although there were some Christian fortresses that would not fall until the end of the 13th century, the truth is that Christian dominance in these lands can be completely terminated after the pact between Ricardo Corazón de León and Saladino, after the failed Third Crusade.

Internal consolidation of kingdoms

Hispanic kingdoms
The Reconquest is in a very dynamic phase, of a precarious balance between the Spanish-Christian kingdoms (among which Castilla and Aragon stand out) and the Muslims (divided into taifa or unified by the Almoravids and Almohads), until the decisive Christian victory in the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212).

England
The Norman conquest of England with William the Conqueror (1066) had already begun a certain work of administrative centralization, which was overcome by the decentralizing tendency of the turbulent feudal nobility, which starred in civil wars in the following reigns. In response, King Henry II of England introduced a series of administrative innovations that enabled the development of industry and commerce, creating a mercantile bourgeois class in the City of London. The process of consolidation of the monarchy over the nobles was slowed down by the Magna Carta (1214) that Juan Sin Tierra (son of Enrique II andLeonor de Aquitania and brother of Ricardo Corazón de León) was forced to sign. The regime agreed in said document established a delicate system of balances between the monarchy and the feudal barons.

France
The French kings of the time exercised their power little more than the territory near Paris (Ile de France). In fact, for the First Crusade the French king was not even considered, with Count Raymond I of Tolosa taking center stage in that region. The French spent several decades in a hurry, because the marriage between Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine placed in the hands of the English monarch an enormous territory, the Angevin Empire, which threatened to choke the French King’s own independence. However, with the reign of Felipe Augusto(1180-1223) The French monarchy began a process of internal consolidation, especially after its victory against Otto of Brunswick, an ally of England in the Battle of Bouvines (1214).

Italy and Germany
In these territories there was no consolidation of central power. On the contrary, the destructive wars between the Papacy and the Empire, in particular those waged by Frederick I Barbarossa, and later by Frederick II of Germany, led to the growth in their interstices of various autonomies, in Italy of the communes, and in Germany of the principalities. When Frederick II died in 1250, the Empire was just a shadow of what it once was. And the independent cities and boroughs had formed a whole constellation of autonomous states spanning all of northern Italy, Germany, Flanders, and the shores of the Baltic Sea.

Poland
The Polish kingdom had also undergone a certain process of internal consolidation, although visibly retarded from the rest of Europe, the power of the feudal nobility subsisting with great force above the king, who remained a primus inter pares, rather than a true monarch in the sense that such a figure was acquiring elsewhere in Europe.

All these political changes (centralization of monarchical power, and feudal geographical expansion) were related to the unexpected alliance that the kings wove with the urban bourgeoisie, in which they found a great ally to use against the landowning feudal nobility, an alliance that It allowed to gather the necessary resources to create a modern fiscal system, base of the consolidation of its power over the feudal lords, visibly weaker.

Economic and social changes

The aforementioned political changes were both cause and consequence, due to a feedback process, of a series of economic and social changes. On the one hand, feudalism had provided Europe with social stability, freeing it from the destructive invasions of Vikings, Magyars and Saracens of previous centuries. On the other hand, since Carolingian times agricultural methods had undergone a revolution, with new techniques of livestock and cultivation.

On the other hand, Feudalism generated a trickle of people who were left over within the system, both the second lords of the feudal lords, and the servants who wanted to escape the tyranny of their lord, some of whom undertook careers as soldiers of fortune on the borders of the Christianity, or found refuge in the nascent Burgos, dedicated to the exchange of surplus production from agriculture, and thus inaugurating the fairs and medieval markets. These new merchants, the bourgeoisThey formed a new social class, active and enterprising, and in constant conflict with the feudal world, based on tradition and social passivity. The cities and the bourgeoisie were thus the engine on which the kings leaned to gradually impose themselves on their turbulent feudal lords.

The First Crusade, for its part, created an active commercial exchange between East and West, which was used by Italian cities to create wealth, taking advantage of their position as intermediaries, thus financing the Italian communal movement. Although the Crusades would ultimately be unsuccessful, cities like Genoa, Venice, and Pisa had long become major political actors, giving new power to the bourgeoisie.

The presence of money completely disrupted the feudal system, in many of whose regions even the old barter system had receded. The feudal lords mistrusted the risk inherent in commercial activity, and were not in favor of investing in overseas companies that could make huge profits, but also huge losses. In this way, some merchants discovered that they could tempt the feudal lords to lend them money in exchange for paying an interest rate later, in order to amass a fortune to invest in other businesses. Banking was born in this way. There were even feudal lords who gambled in commercial activities in a sly way, through a new legal figure, the limited partnership, which divides the capitalist partners and its managing partners, the first role falling on the feudal lord, and the second on the bourgeois. In this way, commerce began to corrode the economic bases of the feudal order.

As for the bourgeois, they tended to group into organizations called guilds, guilds, brotherhoods or arts, depending on the European region in question. These union associations protected their corporate interests within the borough, and also influenced its policy in external affairs. Thus was born diplomacy and war for economic interests (in feudal times, war was fought for looting, for territorial expansion, and even for reasons such as sport or mere idealism). As time went by, under these associations that protected their members, a new social class emerged, that of salaried workers, a source of later social tensions.

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The bourgeois brought with them a new ethic and a new way of understanding life and the world. For the bourgeois, psychologically linked to their money, the main thing was worldly life and earthly pleasures. In this they distanced themselves decisively from the feudal world, which valued spiritual life and the vision of the body as a “prison of the soul”. They also imposed a new ethic of work, of the legitimacy of profit and profit (even of usury), and of individual effort and initiative over obedience and attachment to collective entities.

Legal historian Vanja Hamzić noted:
The eventful twelfth century was, in many ways, a veritable paradox. On the one hand, it saw a sudden surge in academic works and universities in western and southern Europe that sought to bridge the worlds previously thought entirely incommensurable and usher in an age of scholasticism that would eventually lead to the fourteenth- to seventeenth-century Renaissance. For this reason, it has been a staple of mediaevalist scholarship to describe those thorough-going changes as the ‘renaissance of the twelfth century’. On the other hand, the same century also reads as a striking catalogue of most violent acts and disasters: from the rise of inquisition and merciless Christian infighting, over the first expulsions of Jews and the intensification of the Reconquista on Muslim Spain to the blood and gore of the Second, Third and German Crusades. Might it not be more appropriate, then, to characterise this period as an age of profound crisis, in which the true contours of a ‘persecuting society’ were drawn?

Interested in gender and sexual diversity in this period, Hamzić considers “an unlikely rise of neo-Roman European civil law and Seljuk proto-civil legality and its formidable effect on two paradigmatic twelfth-century intellectual debates on the public, legal and theological standing of ‘sodomy’ (peccatum sodomiticum, liwāṭ): one in amongst prominent Benedictines and the other between the leading Ḥanafī scholars”. He argues that these debates, “led in the distinct spirit of concordia discors (discordant harmony) or ikhtilāf (permissible scholarly disagreement), are indispensable for our understanding of legal and social aspects of sexual and gender diversity in the twelfth century and, in turn, the way in which certain rapturous pluralities were continued and ruptured—concomitantly”. This complicates the story of the twelfth-century Renaissance as a site of both progressive and deeply troubled legal, religious and social developments.

Translation movement
The translation of texts from other cultures, especially ancient Greek works, was an important aspect of both this Twelfth-Century Renaissance and the latter Renaissance (of the 15th century), the relevant difference being that Latin scholars of this earlier period focused almost entirely on translating and studying Greek and Arabic works of natural science, philosophy and mathematics, while the later Renaissance focus was on literary and historical texts.

Trade and commerce
In Northern Europe, the Hanseatic League was founded in the 12th century, with the foundation of the city of Lübeck in 1158–1159. Many northern cities of the Holy Roman Empire became Hanseatic cities, including Hamburg, Stettin, Bremen and Rostock. Hanseatic cities outside the Holy Roman Empire were, for instance, Bruges, London and the Polish city of Danzig (Gdańsk). In Bergen and Novgorod the league had factories and middlemen. In this period the Germans started colonizing Eastern Europe beyond the Empire, into Prussia and Silesia.

The era of the Crusades brought large groups of Europeans into contact with the technologies and luxuries of Byzantium for the first time in many centuries. Crusaders returning to Europe brought numerous small luxuries and souvenirs with them, stimulating a new appetite for trade, carried out by both the Hanseatic League/Rus via the Black Sea routes, as well as rising Italian maritime powers such as Genoa and Venice.

In the mid 13th century, the “Pax Mongolica” re-invigorated the land-based trade routes between China and West Asia that had fallen dormant in the 9th and 10th centuries. Following the Mongol incursion into Europe in 1241, the Pope and some European rulers sent clerics as emissaries and/or missionaries to the Mongol court; these included William of Rubruck, Giovanni da Pian del Carpini, Andrew of Longjumeau, Odoric of Pordenone, Giovanni de Marignolli, Giovanni di Monte Corvino, and other travelers such as Niccolò da Conti. While the accounts of Carpini et al were written in Latin as letters to their sponsors, the account of the later Italian traveller Marco Polo, who followed his father and uncle as far as China, was written first in French c.1300 and later in other popular languages, making it relatively accessible to larger groups of Europeans.

Science
After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Western Europe had entered the Middle Ages with great difficulties. Apart from depopulation and other factors, most classical scientific treatises of classical antiquity, written in Greek or Latin, had become unavailable or lost entirely. Philosophical and scientific teaching of the Early Middle Ages was based upon the few Latin translations and commentaries on ancient Greek scientific and philosophical texts that remained in the Latin West, the study of which remained at minimal levels. Only the Christian church maintained copies of these written works, and they were periodically replaced and distributed to other churches.

This scenario changed during the renaissance of the 12th century. For several centuries, popes had been sending clerics to the various kings of Europe. Kings of Europe were typically illiterate. Literate clerics would be specialists of some subject or other, such as music, medicine or history etc., otherwise known as Roman cohors amicorum, the root of the Italian word corte ‘court’. As such, these clerics would become part of a king’s retinue or court, educating the king and his children, paid for by the pope, whilst facilitating the spread of knowledge into the Middle Ages. The church maintained classic scriptures in scrolls and books in numerous scriptoria across Europe, thus preserving the classic knowledge and allowing access to this important information to the European kings. In return, kings were encouraged to build monasteries that would act as orphanages, hospitals and schools, benefiting societies and eventually smoothing the transition from the Middle Ages.

The increased contact with the Islamic world in Muslim-dominated Iberia and Southern Italy, the Crusades, the Reconquista, as well as increased contact with Byzantium, allowed Western Europeans to seek and translate the works of Hellenic and Islamic philosophers and scientists, especially the works of Aristotle. Several translations were made of Euclid but no extensive commentary was written until the middle of the 13th century.

The development of medieval universities allowed them to aid materially in the translation and propagation of these texts and started a new infrastructure which was needed for scientific communities. In fact, the European university put many of these texts at the center of its curriculum, with the result that the “medieval university laid far greater emphasis on science than does its modern counterpart and descendent.”

At the beginning of the 13th century, there were reasonably accurate Latin translations of the main ancient Greek scientific works. From then on, these texts were studied and elaborated, leading to new insights into the phenomena of the universe. The influence of this revival is evident in the scientific work of Robert Grosseteste.

Technology
During the High Middle Ages in Europe, there was increased innovation in means of production, leading to economic growth.

Alfred Crosby described some of this technological revolution in The Measure of Reality: Quantification in Western Europe, 1250-1600 and other major historians of technology have also noted it.

The earliest written record of a windmill is from Yorkshire, England, dated 1185.
Paper manufacture began in Spain around 1100, and from there it spread to France and Italy during the 12th century.
The magnetic compass aided navigation, attested in Europe in the late 12th century.
The astrolabe returned to Europe via Islamic Spain.
The West’s oldest known depiction of a stern-mounted rudder can be found on church carvings dating to around 1180.

Latin literature
The early 12th century saw a revival of the study of Latin classics, prose, and verse before and independent of the revival of Greek philosophy in Latin translation. The Cathedral schools at Chartres, Orleans, and Canterbury were centers of Latin literature staffed by notable scholars. John of Salisbury, secretary at Canterbury, became the bishop of Chartres. He held Cicero in the highest regard in philosophy, language, and the humanities. Latin humanists possessed and read virtually all the Latin authors we have today—Ovid, Virgil, Terence, Horace, Seneca, Cicero. The exceptions were few—Tacitus, Livy, Lucretius. In poetry, Virgil was universally admired, followed by Ovid.

Like the earlier Carolingian revival, the 12th-century Latin revival would not be permanent. While religious opposition to pagan Roman literature existed, Haskins argues that “it was not religion but logic” in particular “Aristotle’s New Logic toward the middle of [the 12th] century threw a heavy weight on the side of dialectic…” at the expense of the letters, literature, oratory, and poetry of the Latin authors. The nascent universities would become Aristotelean centers displacing the Latin humanist heritage until its final revival by Petrarch in the 14th century.

Roman law
The study of the Digest was the first step to the revival of Roman legal jurisprudence and the establishment of Roman law as the basis of civil law in continental Europe. The Bologna University was Europe’s center of legal scholarship during this period.

Scholasticism
A new method of learning called scholasticism developed in the late 12th century from the rediscovery of the works of Aristotle; the works of medieval Muslims and Jews influenced by him, notably Maimonides, Avicenna (see Avicennism) and Averroes (see Averroism). The great scholastic scholars of the 13th century were Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas. Those who practiced the scholastic method defended Roman Catholic doctrines through secular study and logic. Other notable scholastics (“schoolmen”) included Roscelin and Peter Lombard. One of the main questions during this time was the problem of the universals. Prominent non-scholastics of the time included Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Damian, Bernard of Clairvaux, and the Victorines.

Arts
The 12th-century renaissance saw a revival of interest in poetry. Writing mostly in their own native languages, contemporary poets produced significantly more work than those of the Carolingian Renaissance. The subject matter varied wildly across epic, lyric, and dramatic. Meter was no longer confined to the classical forms and began to diverge into newer schemes. Additionally, the division between religious and secular poetry became smaller. In particular, the Goliards were noted for profane parodies of religious texts.

These expansions of poetic form contributed to the rise of vernacular literature, which tended to prefer the newer rhythms and structures. In general, Romanesque architecture is characterized by its buildings with thick walls, and more or less stubby, because their engineering knowledge prevented them from constructing higher-rise buildings. But at the beginning of the 12th century, two powerful architectural innovations, the buttress and the warhead arch, made it possible to prop up the walls and thin them, allowing them to hold a greater weight. This transformation is well visible in the architecture of the Cistercian monasteries, which are rightly considered as the transition between both styles, in particular due to the explosive number of them that were built throughout Europe., in a very short period of time. At the end of the 12th century, the construction of the first Gothic cathedrals proper began, such as the Chartres cathedral.

These changes in engineering and architecture went hand in hand with economic and social changes. Romanesque art had been developed primarily at the service of the kings and the Catholic Church, while Gothic art was largely developed at the service of the burgos. The race to decorate the boroughs with the most beautiful buildings had begun at the end of the Romanesque period, and one of the greatest exponents of this trend is the so-called Campo dei Miracoli, in Pisa, whose most relevant components are the famous Pisa Cathedral and Torre from Pisa. But the explosion of this trend coincided with the emergence of the Gothic. Once the fashion of the Gothic cathedrals began, each borough tried to have one larger than the others, and hence, over time, they would build more and more. Having a great cathedral not only implied making religious vows, but also giving neighboring boroughs a sample of their own economic power, investing in a large and solemn building that would give them prestige.

Religious changes
All these processes (concentration of political power, wars “the infidel”, growth of the boroughs, attack on the feudal system, boom in commerce and industry, artistic changes, etc.) were also marked by profound changes in medieval spirituality. The Catholic Church, the predominant religious organism at the time, was doomed to profound intellectual changes.

In theological matters, the main innovation was the reception of numerous foreign ideas. Among them, the West began to pay attention to Aristotle, a philosopher, either by reading directly to Greek, or through the comments of the Muslims Avicenna and Averroes. Until now, Christian theology was based on the Platonic ideas that Saint Augustine had adapted in the 5th century. Aristotle was uncomfortable because he raised questions radically opposed to the Catholic Church (for example, that the world is eternal and uncreated, which collides with the dogma of creation ” ex nihilo”(” out of nowhere “) expressed in Genesis.) The symbiosis between Christian Theology and Aristotelianism would not arrive until the thirteenth century, from the hand of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Even so, the Platonism inherent in Augustinian doctrines was questioned, in favor of positions that could be described as moderate realism. The main defender of them was Pedro Abelardo, a theologian who taught at the University of Paris, and who was involved in a tough fight (called the universal complaint) with Bernardo de Claraval, holder of extreme realism, who made him condemn as heretic and forced him to retract. Pedro Abelardo is a representative of the new times, daring to question, although timidly, some essential truths of Christian Theology.

The aforementioned Bernardo de Claraval is the most prominent defender of the medieval status quo against the social changes of his time. Founder of a large number of monasteries throughout the first half of the 12th century, in addition to actively participating in politics (including the preaching of the Second Crusade). Of aristocratic lineage, he reluctantly viewed all innovation, including urban and civic life. Its monasteries, the Order of the Císter, became an inescapable reference point to strengthen Christian unity, at a time when the Christians of the boroughs themselves began to question the Church vividly.

The Cisteri did not manage, in any case, to contain these questions, which crystallized in a series of heresies, the first since the time of Saint Augustine in the West. The most dangerous for the Catholic Church were those of the Waldenses and the Cathars, who grew especially in the south of France, and who were suppressed with the so-called Albigensian Crusade (1209 – 1244). However, this repressive work (which led to the founding of the Inquisition) was complemented by the opening of the Church towards new spiritual currents for the people of the boroughs, especially through the work of Saint Francis of Assisi. Some of the most important events of the time are that Pedro Valdo translated the Gospels into the vulgar language and in the Waldensian movement women and laity had the right to preach.

Consequences
As can be seen, the twelfth-century revolution was structured by a tangled tangle of changes, happening at the same time and feeding back on each other, throwing the West on an unstoppable slope of social change. At the beginning of these, the West was an agrarian and feudal society. In the passage from the 12th to the 13th century, a whole new social system had been consolidated, based on the burgos, on a new ethic, and at the same time redefining the political map of Europe, where kings would weigh more and more, to the detriment of the feudal lords. In a sense, it can be said that the most important consequence of the twelfth-century revolution was to have changed a static system and social immobility.

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