Modern age it was one of the ways found by historians to divide the history of mankind. Its time frame begins with the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the seizure of the city of Constantinople by the Turkish-Ottoman Empire in 1453. Its final cut is delimited with the French Revolution, in 1789.
This division is based on the European historical perspective, since the dividing marks refer indirectly or directly to facts that are important to Europeans. The takeover of Constantinople by the Turks ended the Byzantine Empire – direct heir to the Roman Empire of antiquity and emerged in what is now Italy – and represented the end of a long era.
The conception of a Modern Age was also a break with what was considered a Middle Age in history. Middle, in this sense, was the period between Antiquity and the Modern Age. The very historical division as we know it (Ancient, Medieval, Modern and Contemporary Ages) arises at this moment in European History.
The Modern Age was an opposition to the Middle Ages, mistakenly regarded as a Dark Age, as it was dominated by religion and Christian-Catholic obscurantism. The Modern Age would appear as the time to retake the perspective of life from the Greco-Roman Antiquity, considered as the cultural peak of humanity. The mistake, in this sense, was not to consider the cultural, philosophical and even technical production verified during the Middle Ages period.
This can be understood by the great transformations that took place in the European territory in the period. It was during the Modern Age that Europeans carried out the Great Navigations and the Maritime Expansion, creating the conditions for the domination of entire continents, such as Africa and the newly known America. The dominance of these regions resulted in the conquest of countless wealth by the European ruling classes, creating the bases so that they could later expand their form of social organization to the rest of the world.
Painting by Antônio Allegri, in the chapel of the Cathedral of parma in Italy *
The expansion of this form of social organization had a material basis based on the development of capitalism. The shift from predominantly agrarian material production to commercial and industrial material production took place during this period. Leading this passage were the pioneers of capitalism, the bourgeois, building their wealth from the exploitation of the nascent urban proletariat. The so-called first Industrial Revolution, which took place mainly in England, began in the Modern Age.
In the cultural aspect, the Modern Age was characterized by a very rich production. Whether in its beginnings, with the Renaissance, mainly in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the resumption of the Greco-Roman heritage, or with the eighteenth-century Illuminists, who proposed new philosophical, scientific and political ways of understanding the world. In religion, the main change with the medieval world occurred with the Protestant Reformation, begun with Martin Luther in the 16th century and which would permanently alter the Western Christian world.
Politically, the Modern Age was mainly characterized by the creation of National States in Europe. It was in this process that national monarchies emerged, creating centralized political and administrative structures, in contrast to the decentralization prevalent in the Middle Ages. This political-administrative structure also served as a basis for the strengthening of capitalism and the political power of the bourgeoisie. This social class, when perceived to be economically and politically strengthened, was able to organize itself and put an end to the hegemony previously held by the aristocratic nobility. The end of this hegemony was mainly represented by the French Revolution, when the representative bourgeois state was created, ending the Modern Age and beginning the Contemporary Age.
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* Image Credit:miqu77 and Shutterstock.com
By Me. Tales Pinto
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/o-que-e/historia/o-que-e-idade-moderna.htm
