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Section III: The Renaissance and Reformation
Dr. Simon Kow, Director, Early Modern Studies Program; Associate Professor of Humanities
…in the middle of the eighth [i.e., fourteenth] century, civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed. The East, it seems, was similarly visited, though in accordance with and in proportion to (the East’s more affluent) civilization. It was as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion and restriction, and the world had responded to its call. God inherits the earth and whomever is upon it. - Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (1377)
The Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century did not only inspire Boccaccio’s Decameron; it was also a pivotal event in the youth of Ibn Khaldun, the North African historian whose masterpiece The Muqaddimah opened Section III of the Foundation Year Program in Fall 2019. What was the importance of the Black Death in forming Ibn Khaldun’s reflections on history, and how do the latter constitute a prelude to the era of the Renaissance and Reformation? Ibn Khaldun lost his parents, teachers, and many of his friends to the Black Death. In hindsight, for this Islamic philosopher of history, it was also a sign that the golden age of Arab civilization was coming to an end. By ‘the East’ and ‘the West’ in the quotation above, Ibn Khaldun is referring to the great centres of Arab civilization from Egypt to Islamic Spain. The plague wiped out much of civilization in these regions, but at the same time, they had reached stages of cultural decadence (what he describes as ‘senility’) such that the Black Death finished off societies tottering on their last legs. In Ibn Khaldun’s east, Arab dynasties would be overrun by central Asian conquerors like Tamerlane (a prominent figure in the Renaissance imagination), while in the west, an invigorated Christian Europe was in the process of reconquering Spain, later to assert dominance in the Mediterranean and across the ocean in the Americas. What Ibn Khaldun witnessed, then, was the end of an era which would usher in new formidable powers—and which in the west would radically transform Europe’s view of itself in the Renaissance and Reformation.
Ibn Khaldun’s analysis of the effects of the Black Death would also be echoed by, and inspire, later thinkers in the Muslim world, Europe, and America. He saw the history of civilization especially in the Islamic world as a cyclical movement between vigorous tribal societies with strong ‘group feeling’ on the one hand; and established, increasingly despotic ‘sedentary’ civilizations on the other hand which were gradually enfeebled over time. The Black Death, then, was God’s way of finishing off societies which were already fatally vulnerable to enemies from within and without. History is governed by certain natural laws, but these are also God’s laws. Like other thinkers of his time, as well as in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, the hand of God was regarded as working through natural and historical causes. But unlike more forward-looking thinkers and artists of the Renaissance—such as Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Bacon—Ibn Khaldun interpreted the decline and imminent collapse of his civilization, hastened by such scourges as plague and foreign conquest, as possible signs of the end of time.
