By D P Curtin, European Conservative. (Image: Public Domain)
Before Europe became a collection of nation-states, it was a civilization bound together by scholars, shared learning, and the pursuit of truth. As our capacity to communicate has expanded beyond imagination, the intellectual culture that sustained that world has steadily eroded.
As a child, I fell in love with maps. Old maps in particular, which highlighted the shifting political boundaries of Medieval Europe and the birth of familiar nations during the early modern period. In observing the European world in the year 1500 or so, you are instantly struck by its heavy fragmentation, particularly in the regions of modern Germany and Italy, which appeared as a patchwork of duchies, principalities, and bishoprics. It is hard to imagine traveling between these dominions without encountering a host of civil and cultural issues. Tensions raged between different dynasties, or even within dynasties; princes fought their emperor in what seemed like a state of perpetual civil chaos. While the state of politics at this time was, in fact, quite contentious, there was a latent civilization that underlay it, particularly from the Renaissance onward, known as the Respublica Litterarum—the Republic of Letters.
The phrase itself emerged in 15th-century humanist circles, and was popularized in the writings of Francesco Barbaro and Guillaume Budé, and later by the Dutch humanist Erasmus. However, the reality of the civilization it described was considerably older. As a function of the uniformity of the Catholic Church, medieval Europe had long possessed an international community of scholars united less by political allegiance than by a common intellectual inheritance. Latin functioned as its lingua franca, a useful tool for international correspondence. Christianity supplied its social philosophy and moral vocabulary. And classical antiquity furnished its literary canon, pulling in the great authors of the Greek and Roman world. The Republic of Letters did not arrive ex nihilo, as was later suggested by French secularists. It developed out of the maturation and self-awareness of an older, distinctively Latin civilization.