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1350–1550 What were the key social hierarchies in Renaissance Europe? 67

The Chess Game, 1555 In this oil painting, the
Italian artist Sofonisba Anguissola (1532–1625) shows
her three younger sisters playing chess, a game that
was growing in popularity in the sixteenth century.
Each sister looks at the one immediately older than
herself, with the girl on the left looking out at her
sister, the artist. Anguissola’s father, a minor noble-
man, recognized his daughter’s talent and arranged
for her to study with several painters. She became a
court painter at the Spanish royal court, where she
painted many portraits. Returning to Italy, she con-
tinued to be active, painting her last portrait when
she was over eighty. (Museum Narodowe, Poznan, Poland/
Bridgeman Images)

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What were the key social hierarchies in Renaissance Europe?

he division between educated and uneducated In some parts of Europe, urban residents included
Tpeople was only one of many social hierarchies Black Africans, small numbers of whom had lived
evident in the Renaissance. Every society has social in Europe since Roman times, but whose numbers

hierarchies; in ancient Rome, for example, there increased in the fifteenth century as Portuguese ships
were patricians and plebeians. Such hierarchies are brought enslaved Africans to the markets of Seville, Bar-
to some degree descriptions of social reality, but they celona, Marseilles, and Genoa. In Portugal and Spain,
are also idealizations — that is, they describe how enslaved people, mostly from Africa, supplemented the
people imagined their society to be, without all the labor force in virtually all occupations — as servants,
messy reality of social-climbing plebeians or groups laborers, artisans, and sailors. By the mid-sixteenth cen-
that did not fit the standard categories. Social hier- tury enslaved, freed, and free people of African descent
archies in the Renaissance were built on those of the made up about 10 percent of the Portuguese city of
Middle Ages that divided nobles from commoners, Lisbon and perhaps 3 percent of the Portuguese pop-
but new concepts were also developed that contrib- ulation overall. Cities such as Lisbon also had signifi-
uted to modern social hierarchies, such as those of cant numbers of people of mixed African and European
race, class, and gender. descent, as Africans intermingled with the people they
lived among and sometimes intermarried.
Race and Slavery Africans lived in other parts of Europe as well, especially
in port cities. Some were enslaved, but others were free ser-
Renaissance people did not use the word race the way vants, musicians, mariners, and artisans. There were free
we do, but often used race, people, and nation inter- Black gondoliers in Venice and Black weavers in London.
changeably for ethnic, national, religious, or other John Blanke was a Black trumpeter at King Henry VIII’s
groups — the French race, the Jewish nation, the court in London, and a diver from West Africa worked to
Irish people, “the race of learned gentlemen,” and so salvage Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, when it sank
on. They made distinctions between groups based in the English Channel. For wealthy Europeans, a Black
on language, religion, culture, geographic location, servant — especially a child — was a sought-after commod-
real or perceived kinship, and other characteristics. ity, akin to other imported luxury goods. Portraits of aris-
Differences between groups were (and are) some- tocrats and courtiers contrasted white and black skin (as
times evident in the body, and were (and are) often in the painting on page 68, which depicts a Black child
conceptualized as blood, a substance with deep mean- gazing up at a richly dressed central figure).
ing. People spoke of “French blood,” “noble blood,” As contacts between Black Africans and Europeans
“Jewish blood,” and so on, and thought of difference increased in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, Euro-
as heritable. peans increasingly focused on skin color as a marker of

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