An Earlier Renaissance?

Right, I have a challenge for you all. How can you make the Renaissance occur earlier than in OTL, and/or have it occur faster?

This also ties into a question of what caused the Renaissance. According to some, it was because of a particular combination of social and economic factors in Florence, Italy, that kickstarted the Renaissance there, and it spread to the rest of Italy and from there to other parts of Europe.

However, another theory is that the Renaissance was caused by the Black Death, because it freed up capital, improved the economic power of the lower classes etc.

Which if these is generally considered the more important factor, or are they roughly equal? Would it be possible for a *Renaissance to ccur without the Black Death, in some other location? If not, is it plausible to have an earlier plague to provide the conditions?

I'm asking this because I'm writing a timeline where I'd like an earlier Renaissance to occur, in a different location. I can give this location all the qualities Florence had, and a few more besides, but it won't have the plague, and I want to know if it will still be possible.

So anyone have any ideas?
 
I'm bumping this because I really need an answer.

I'm trying, in my timeline, to have the Renaissance occur in Valencia instead of in Florence.

In my timeline, Valencia is either under the control of Barcelona or is an independent state (I haven't quite decided yet). It has a mixed population of Muslims, Chritians (Mozarabic and Catholic) and Jews. Reduced persecution of the Jews leads to modern banking beginning in Valencia and other coastal towns instead; political instability in the rest of Iberia leads to a great deal of immigration, and the region becomes prosperous based on both farmers and sea trade. At the same time, the intermixing of different religions, who have less conflict IITL (the Crusades are... different, to say the least) leads to the filtering of medival Islamic learning into Europe.

This all leads to the Renaissance starting at around 1290-1310 ITTL, maybe a century earlier than it did OTL.

So, is this combination of factors (which can be logically explained) enough to launch the Renaissance early?
 
I'd say without the plague you might have some of the effects take longer to develop (not so much freeing money as men - well, freeing them in the West), but in the cultural sphere, it's easy to have it happen earlier.
 
I'm actually a little skeptical of that, with one important exception(namely, not killing off the Lorenzetti brothers would have important effects), because the cultural aspects of the Renaissance could and did play off the socio-economic aspects of the Renaissance in important ways-for example, in the kind of patronage available to the arts, the ways broader social and political formations shaped artistic taste, and so on and so forth. Which likely won't happen if those social and political formations are different.
 
I'm actually a little skeptical of that, with one important exception(namely, not killing off the Lorenzetti brothers would have important effects), because the cultural aspects of the Renaissance could and did play off the socio-economic aspects of the Renaissance in important ways-for example, in the kind of patronage available to the arts, the ways broader social and political formations shaped artistic taste, and so on and so forth. Which likely won't happen if those social and political formations are different.

Yeah, but that may be more dependent on Florence-like conditions than whether or not yeomen in England can demand higher prices for their labor.

It's complicated, to be sure.
 
Yeah, but that may be more dependent on Florence-like conditions than whether or not yeomen in England can demand higher prices for their labor.

It's complicated, to be sure.

See that's the thing; I always thought that the aftermath of the Black Death wasn't as important a factor in sparking the Renaissance as the particular conditions of Florence at the time. I'm sure that, with the right sequence of historical events, that those factors can be placed elsewhere; part of it was the development of banking in northern Italy, which only occurred because a lot of Jews fled Spain and settled there, and were immune to Church laws against usury.

I'm sure if you made the Jews never be expelled, or made them flee somewhere else, you could have a renaissanc ein different places. I'm pretty sure I can make it so the development of banking occurs earlier, in a region just as prosperous as Italy became (I'm planning this on being Valencia and surrounds)

I thought that I could also bolster the Renaissance by having a number of arabic scholars there, due to some odd circumstances, but I see two problems with this.

1) Islam prevents images of human figures; which kind of removes Renaissance art from the picture. However, we might, MIGHT, see a more scientific renaissanc,e at least early on, base don Arabic Renaissance.

2) More importantly, it's extremely implausible that any Christian ruler would allow Jews and Muslims to live in his lands.

The best explaination I could think of was that the Jews are simply richer, and he needs their loans, but then I realised that Christian moneylenders wouldn't be charging interest, so that doesn't work.

The only other one I had was that the Almoravids leave the Count (maybe he's a king now) of Barcelona alone while they invade Leon and Castille and such if he treats the Muslim population of his lands well, and the Jews are simply too small in number to bother expelling without the Muslims going as well. But this seems plausible only if the Barcelonans manage to take the city just as the Almoravids arrive.

Any ideas? Sorry I morphed the purpose of this thread, but I'm really trying to make my TL as believable as possible, and that means effectively simulating all the causes of the Renaissance (or, at least, enough of them) in a completely different location and time.

Thanks for your advice :)
 
Could you just push the Black Death forward a century or two? Like have it happen in the 11th or 12th century? Or is a POD like that ASB?
 
Could you just push the Black Death forward a century or two? Like have it happen in the 11th or 12th century? Or is a POD like that ASB?

Yeah, that's he thing; I don't want to just randomly say 'Oh, the Black Death comes early' because it is ASB, or seems that way; it's a Deus Ex Machina, at the very least. I'd prefer to simply plausibly explain how the various other contributing factors arose earlier thanks to specific historical circumstances in my TL.
 
Depends how you define the Renaissance, I guess. I always thought the drivers were the rediscovery of classical texts from the Muslim world and the voyages of discovery. Both of these were obviously caused by trade with the East.

However, I focus more on the scientific side of the Renaissance than the artistic stuff.
 
Any ideas? Sorry I morphed the purpose of this thread, but I'm really trying to make my TL as believable as possible, and that means effectively simulating all the causes of the Renaissance (or, at least, enough of them) in a completely different location and time.

Thanks for your advice :)

Islam prevents images of the human form, but that's for Muslims - what Christians do is their business.

And I think a few Aragonian kings OTL tolerated there being a Muslim population in their lands. I know Frederick Stupor Mundi in Sicily and previous Sicilian rulers did there, but that that ended badly.
 
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