Introduction | Our Game Year | Politics and War | Money | Vampire Boons | Art and Education | Religion | Sexuality

Have a look at the above image. Most visitors to London's National Gallery fail to leave without seeing one of the most famous works of art in its collection - Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, dated 1533. For many people Holbein's painting is an abiding image of the European Renaissance. Indeed even today, it is a favoured portrait to parody, mimic, or cite in art, TV, film, and social media.

You can find the full image on The National Gallery’s website, important for seeing the bottom of the image which will be important in a moment…

(Opens in a new window. Small scale below.)

This double portrait portrays two elegantly dressed men, surrounded by slyly hand-picked artefacts of 16th-century life, with a dark surprise hiding amongst them. On the left is Jean de Dinteville, the French ambassador to the English court of Henry VIII. On the right is his close friend, Georges de Selve, the bishop of Lavaur.

Arguably the first novelty is deceptively simple: the two men stare back at the viewer with a confident, almost questioning self-awareness. Everything that came before in Medieval art looked much more alien; it lacked this self-conscious individuality. We look at Holbein's painting now and the expressions feel recognizably "modern".

There’s also a load of objects scattered over a table. (It's actually called a "whatnot" in England - a type of table on which scientific instruments are lain out.) On the lower shelf are two books (a hymn book and a merchant’s arithmetic book), a lute, a terrestrial globe, a case of flutes, a set square, and a pair of dividers.

On the upper shelf contains a celestial globe, and several extremely specialised scientific instruments: quadrants, sundials, and a torquetum (a timepiece and navigational aid).

These objects represent the seven liberal arts that provided the basis of a Renaissance education. The three basic arts - grammar, logic, and rhetoric - were known as the Trivium. This can be related to the activities of the two sitters. They are ambassadors, trained in the use of texts, but above all skilled in the art of argument and persuasion, matters that the Ancient Greeks praised rather highly. The Renaissance was a rebirth of Greek and Roman ideas, which is why we call it neoclassical, and it was based on their texts.

Meanwhile the Quadrivium refers to the other side: arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy, all of which are represented in Holbein’s precise depiction of the arithmetic book, the lute and the scientific instruments.

Together, these academic subjects formed the basis of the “Studia Humanitatis” - the full education, more popularly known as humanism.

Holbein is showing that the sitters themselves are “New men”, scholarly but attempting to be worldly figures, too. The objects on the table are chosen to suggest that their career in the worlds of politics and religion is closely tied to their understanding of humanist thinking.

The Dark Surprise

Look closer at the painting on the bottom half - look to the floor.

You would be easily forgiven for assuming this was some kind of lighting choice or weird floor detail at a glance, slashing across the space. Viewed straight on, it is impossible to make out the meaning of the distorted shape. However, if the viewer stands at an angle to the painting…

The image metamorphoses into a perfectly drawn skull.

This was a very fashionable trick, known as anamorphosis, used by several Renaissance artists. A chilling reminder, perhaps, that in the midst of all this wealth and power, all this resurgence of education and learning, death comes to us all. Perhaps still it was a plea on Holbein’s part, or a warning: a visual one can only grasp when the viewer steps outside of the intended space, the viewing box, and looks at the picture (and the world) from another angle. Only then will they see the spanning reality, not as it is painted for them by politics, art and the educated, but the blacker facts that lie beneath. The skull sits beneath the table with all its Renaissance paraphernalia. Beneath the self-congratulatory growth of a Europe poised on the brink of its own ambition - one only just out of the plague and mass death - surrounding itself with non-European, eastern fabrics and decor, is the skull.

Holbein was a very conscientious painter for symbolism. But we have no idea today what was intended by this placement.

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You may notice that on the lower shelf one of the strings on the lute is broken, a symbol of discord. The lute is normally a symbol of harmony.

Next to the lute is an open hymn book, identifiable as the work of the religious reformer Martin Luther. Meanwhile hidden away, where it is difficult to spot is the presence of the crucified Christ. It is behind the curtains in the upper left hand corner. These objects draw our attention to the religious debate and discord in the Renaissance. At the time, Luther’s Protestant ideas were sweeping through Europe, defying the established authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The broken lute would have been a powerful symbol back then, of the religious conflict characterised by this juxtaposition of a Lutheran hymn book and the Catholic crucifix in the shadows.

There was ever increasing discord between Catholics and Protestants.

The Lutheran hymn book is quite clearly a printed book, too. The invention of printing occurs in our game year (we picked it just so!) and this would revolutionise the creation, distribution and the understanding of information of knowledge - leading many people to feel a weird modern whiplash of too much too soon, what does this mean, what’s to come, things are progressing faster than I keep up with, etc. There was a deep seated anxiousness behind progress for a lot of people, especially for vampires.

1454. The very first book will be printed a year from now. It will be The Bible.

Compared to the laborious and often inaccurate copying of manuscripts, printed books will be circulated with a speed and accuracy and in quantities previously unimaginable. But the spread of new ideas in print, especially in religion, will also provoke instability, uncertainty, and nervousness, leading artists and thinkers to further question humankind’s right to it, their place in the world and on a personal, individual level, it would lead people to question their significance, who they were and how they lived in a rapidly expanding world.

This relationship between achievement and anxiety is one of the defining hallmarks of the Renaissance.

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Moving Deeper…

Next to the Lutheran hymn book sits another printed book, which at first seems more mundane, but which offers another telling insight into the Renaissance. The book is an instruction manual for merchants in how to calculate profit and loss. It’s presence alongside the more “cultural” objects in the painting shows that in the Renaissance business and finance were absolutely and inextricably connected to culture and art. Art was not the free-fall of expression and creative independence so ascribed to this era; the art trade was a business, a lucrative one and a corrupt one. Artists had very little self expression and were controlled by heavy financial hands which traded their work above them - a matter that lead several rebellious artists to try and cleverly add their own spin or hidden embellishments to their paintings.

Anyone who’s watched The Medici TV series will know that the medieval church still forbade usury, defined as the charging of interest on a loan. The religious tenets of both Christianity and Islam officially forbade usury, but in practice both cultures found loads of loopholes to maximise financial profit at he expense of borrowers. merchant bankers could disguise the charging of interest by nominally lending money in one currency and then collecting it back in a different currency. Built into this process was a favourable rate of exchange that allowed the merchant banker to profit by a percentage of the original amount.

The Medici family who dominated Florentine politics and culture throughout the 15th century started out as merchant bankers. In 1397 Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici established the Medici Bank in Florence, which soon perfect the art of double-entry bookkeeping and accounting, deposit and transfer banking, maritime insurance loopholes, and the circulation of bills of exchange.

Another solution was to not touch the money yourselves - just hire Jewish merchants to handle credit transactions and act as commercial mediators between the two religions, for the simple reason that Jews were free of any official religious prohibition against usury. From this historical accident emerged the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews and their supposed predisposition towards international finance, a direct product of Christian and Muslim hypocrisy.

What’s more, while Holbein’s painted book alludes to the quadrivium of Renaissance humanist education, it also points towards an awareness Holbein had that the cultural achievements of the era were built on the success of the foreign trade and often-exploited foreigners. He drenches the painting in eastern objects.

Both Spain and Portugal were struggling for possession of the remote but highly lucrative spice-producing islands of the Indonesian archipelago, the Moluccas. In the Renaissance, Europe placed itself at the center of the terrestrial globe, but it looked towards the wealth of the east, from the textiles and silks of the Ottoman Empire to the spices and pepper of the Indonesian archipelago. Many of the objects in Holbein’s painting have an eastern origin, from the silk and velvet from by its subjects to the textiles and designs that decorate the room.

Even the objects that deal with science and mathematics were invented by Arab and Jewish astronomers - and almost all of our higher mathematics came from stolen Arabic texts we translated (sometimes very poorly). India in this time too was leagues ahead of Europe mathematically. All the beautiful Venetian architecture draw their inspiration (and in some cases, their pilfered blueprint) directly from the east. The entire subject of Algebra came from a Persian astronomer whose principles were named al-jabru - the Arabic term for restore, given Algebra is, fundamentally, a journey of restoration: restoring the balance of an equation in order and in occult beauty to ‘both sides’.

East-west trade had been taking place throughout the Mediterranean for centuries, but its volume increased following the end of the Crusades. (The Crusades were responsible actually, for how we work out sine, cosine etc. During our looting period we stole Arabic mathematics texts, who had themselves stole from mathematicians in India; these thefts revolutionised our mathematics and architecture).

Venice fought competitors like Genoa and Florence to establish its dominance of the trade from the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean that terminated at Alexandria - a huge route. Their impact on the culture and consumption of communities from Venice to London was profound. Every sphere of life was affected, from eating to painting. The palette of painters like the Bellinis was expanded with the addition of pigments like lapis lazuli, vermilion, and cinnabar, all of which were imported from the east via Venice, and provided Renaissance painters with their characteristic brilliant blues and reds. The Venetian Rialto market, with its linear buildings arranged in parallel to the main arteries is strikingly a mimic of the layout of the Syrian trading capital of Aleppo. The windows, arches and decorative facades of the Doge’s Palace and the Palazzo Ducale all draw from the mosques, bazaars and palaces of cities like Cairo, Acre and Tabriz, where Venetian merchants had traded for centuries.

From the beginning of the century that our game is set, the Portuguese crown and merchants realised that seaborne travel along the African coastline could tap into the gold and spice markets at source, circumventing taxes imposed on overland trade routes through Ottoman territories. Such an ambitious project involved organization and capital. By the point our game is set, in the middle of the century, German, Florentine, Genoese and Venetian merchants are sponsoring Portuguese voyages down the coast of West Africa and offering the Portuguese king a percentage of any profits.

The Dark Future

It was not only gold that flowed back into Europe. While travelling through West Africa a Venetian merchant named Alvise Cadamosto traded seven horses for one hundred human slaves. For the Venetian this was a profitable deal of course, based on the accepted exchange rate of nine to fourteen slaves for only one horse (it is estimated that at this time Venice has a population of over three thousand slaves). Writing in 1446, Cadamosto estimated that 1,000 slaves were shipped from the region of Arguim every year. They were taken to Lisbon and sold throughout Europe. This trade represents the darkest aspect of the European Renaissance. It marked the beginnings of a trans-Atlantic slave trade trade that was to bring misery and suffering to millions of Africans over subsequent centuries.

It is sobering to note how the economies funding the great cultural achievements of the Renaissance were profiting by this unscrupulous trade in human lives. Additionally, the anti-Semitic stereotypes eagerly cemented in this era by its hypocritical trading loopholes would go onto launch the foundation of the world’s largest genocide. The Renaissance, at its heart, will usher in an era where European greed and its thirst for expansion fashions the worst face humanity has ever shown across its long history, and on so global a scale.

The terrestrial globe is, understandably then, one of the most important objects in Holbein’s painting. For all its cruelties and corruption - indeed perhaps because of them - the Renaissance is a terribly fitting stage for a game set in The World of Darkness. The grim themes of Vampire can be explored almost realistically here, against a canvas splashed in contrast. For the Renaissance is the era of contrasts, of beauty and human ugliness; it bears the greatest heights of artistic expression and the lowest debasement of its oppression and pain. In a world changing too fast for the mortals to keep up with, it is no wonder that the slow-to-change vampires in our tale are more afraid than they have ever been - and looking to gain any foothold they can in this blinding, alien world.

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Our Game Year

Our story is set in the year 1454

It is the beginning of the early Renaissance - Holbein’s picture has not yet been painted - but the next century will see science and culture boom in unprecedented fashion. By this time the traditional feudal institutions have broken down, and those of lower birth find themselves able to elevate their positions from trade and economics.

The fall of the great Byzantine empire last year shook the continent, leading to an exodus of people and vampires further west. Many might see this gathering of vampires for an auction in Italy (and discovery of such abnormal mortals) as an oppoprtunity to recoup power, desperately so, or at least a sign that change could reap some benefits.

There were those who believed in “The Dream” and its mission, the vampiric Eutopia that Constantinople hoped to be, and even after the destruction of its once-leader, Michael, many years ago now, there were vampires who lasted through to Constantinople’s final death throws. Hoping, grasping at any lifeline through which they might establish The Dream again, and pull themselves back to its shore. Alas, with the Ottoman invasion and the fall of the Byzantine era, that dream is now officially dead.

(It was dying before - now The Dream is dead and steaming, on fire, crashed and poisoned and kicked several times. The vampires who stayed on as the believers probably feel very bad right now, looking for a home and something new to pin their ideals and even their spiritual hopes on.)

The Hundred Years’ War has also just ended, with the French emerging victorious in 1453. British vampires and humans will have experienced the subsequent turmoil in England as these events lead up to the War of the Roses in subsequent decades. There is a lot of British-French tension socially. As if there hasn’t always been. But the British are especially sore.

There was even a foreboding lunar eclipse - visible during the siege of Constantinople itself, in an eerie parallel to the solar eclipse that led to the births of the many strangely gifted mortals that find themselves under Claudius Giovanni’s care today.

One major way in which our setting differs from established historical records is the period of the Black Death. In this world, the plague did not officially “end” until 1385 (though as with real world, there were bouts of it in places after), and the catastrophic death toll was not only slightly worse, but spread over a period of 30 or so years. This leads to even greater destabilisation of institutions throughout Europe - pushing this hunger for change ever harder. It is a creeping, insidious disease that kills slower, but the suffering exacted on the populations of Europe is no less disastrous.

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Politics and War

1454

Florence and the Italian Renaissance

Whatever their clan or creed, when a vampire speaks of modern culture and progress, she often refers to events and scandals in Florence. Florence is the jewel in the crown of the European Renaissance*. All other civilised cities are measured against its standards, at least among the Damned.

(*Although in reality the term "Renaissance" would never have been used by a person of the 15th century to describe their era, you are welcome to use it for the purposes of this game - or think of yourself in a neoclassical "resurgence".)

We are at the dawn of an era and The Republic of Florence is now a bustling, thriving city state nestled in the heart of Tuscany, central Italy.

(What is a Republic you ask, childe of the old ways? A republic - or in Latin: res publica, meaning "public affair" - is a form of government in which "power is held by the people and their elected representatives". Or so one hopes.)

Florence is the main artery through Italy and it pumps the lifeblood of innovation around the body of the continent - never mind what you hear about Venice! No, no. Culture, art, politics, economics - Florence can rightly claim to be the birthplace of the revival of nearly every field of modern life. When Florence stirs, the whole of Europe ripples in its wake. And which city of import does not stir in these strange nights?

Who is the vampire leader?

Anicius “the Golden” is the vampire monarch, it’s ruling “Prince” having long defeated his rival of the dark ages, he holds domain over Florence. He is an elder of the clan Lasombra, a strange and often frightening group of vampires that dabble with shadow magic and things people cannot explain. It is no wonder, perhaps, that he has found his allies amongst the Giovanni, another group of vampires who deal with the darker things of this world.

The Lasombra have their fingers in one spiritual pie: they are the shadow behind much of the Pope’s throne. With the papal states currently in uproar and the Pope’s power shrinking, the Lasombra have consolidated their efforts in Rome; “princes” further away from Rome, like Anicius the Golden, enjoy an unprecedented amount of freedom suddenly to manage their domains as they see fit, growing fat on the influx of trade and monitoring the ebb and flow of human transition from the dark ages into the new age.

Who is the human leader?

There is no king. Italy is not united. Each city state is not dissimilar to a small country, each has its own distinctive cultural and historical identity, its own internal hierarchy and each city state will frequently go to war with one another. Milan and Florence are at it currently. Here in Florence we have a Signoria to govern the people and direct its larger decisions. A Signoria is a gathering in the medieval and Renaissance Italian city-states, a government run by a signore.

The Visconti, who ruled Milan until 1447, were the most notable of the signori in centralizing and consolidating their power compared to any other city state. In the commune of Florence, however, we have a less centralised a sense of power; there is not any one person or family in charge legally, though some individuals may hold a tremendous amount of power in practice: Cosimo de' Medici (a rather famous Florentine) has just helped Francesco Sforza conquer Milan in 1450.

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The Web of Republics

In the mid 15th century, Italy is not a country under the control of any monarchy or noble family but a collection of merchant city-states that are constantly at war with one another. Each city-state has its own system of governance and indeed its own vampire prince. Though one might come across the occasional Toreador or Brujah Prince, it is the Lasombra Princes who hold control over the majority of these city-states through their influence over Rome and the Papal States. 

The Papal States are the temporal dominions belonging to the pope, especially in central Italy.

Don’t be scared about this detail if you’re unfamiliar with Europe or its history; the game focusses more on the auction anyway, and the darker side of vampire urges and their world, though there is plenty “real world” meat to get into for players who enjoy stepping into the Renaissance era fully.

We have players from all over the globe; those interested in history might well passionately voice their character’s home history (as their character!) to anyone that will listen, and you can glaze out as the elder lectures you into a corner about the finer points of usury and loans, the Catholic church and its mission, the hundred years war… or you can jump as eagerly into the madness. The game is very interactive and you can always change it up if you want out of a scene, or ask questions in character or out of it. Historical games are a great excuse to learn something from an intimate perspective.

Most people in this era know nothing about other countries and their ways of doing things.

When you come to create your character we will focus in on one comparatively tiny part of the Renaissance and we’ll work out how living there affects you. You might be from a tiny village and never left it, or be in thriving center of a city state. You may even be from abroad! (The Giovanni collected mortals from all over the globe, it should be said; they have an especially unusual way of travelling.) Vampire characters have a year or more notice to attend the auction, tie up affairs and make the travel, which is made much easier in this era with the trade routes overland or by sea, even for those vampires not capable of stranger travel.

So: each city-state still exists as a self-governing republic, with Milan being a little different, existing as a duchy. Each city is fiercely independent with its own incestuous and violent political landscape; Rome has the infighting in its Curia, Venice and Florence the political showrooms of its Signoria and the streets of Milan are bloodied by the long knives of House Sforza. Through it all, one war between factions that has persisted since the 12th century and still rages on to this night.

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Guelphs and Ghibellines

Mortal or vampire, Venetian or Florentine - any individual of a political bent knows of the importance of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. The rivalry between these factions started as a conflict between the church and state in the medieval Holy Roman Empire which has crescendoed down through generations of the families involved to form the equivalent of two political parties in Renaissance Italy. 

Wait, what do you mean church and…?

The Roman Catholic Church (I’ll call it the church here, just or the purpose of this section) and the actual Holy Roman Empire (I will call the empire for now) do not always see eye to eye. It’s more complicated than this but at it’s essence: Pope versus Emperor. The church holds power from its center in Rome - but it also holds power over the Papal States it commands under the pope. Largely. In this era the Emperor has exerted a lot of power over those same Papal States - there has been an anarchical revolution, really.

There is a schism among normal people as to whether they support one side of the conflict over another. Church (and Pope) or Empire (and Emperor). This has been going on for a few centuries. The city states go back and forward on this. Soon as you have too many controlling papal officials around in a city state, people rebel and say Fuck you man, we want the Empire. Then when they have the Empire down their necks they rebel and say Fuck you, man, and go for the church. Often. Some of the city states have stayed more loyal to one side or the other.

What about Florence?

Florence is not a Papal State. Florence and Venice - both independent - lie just north of the Papal States and the heart of Rome's power (the church's power) but they are really close, so understandably they are also influenced by the church - and in part even controlled at least nominally by the Lasombra with all their insidious ties to mortal Catholics. Meanwhile, the Holy Roman Empire and the emperor himself is allied with the Roman Catholic Church proper and he certainly gains power from the pope, but there are immense differences of ideals between them both, especially in how they want things done. Florence and Venice sit slapbang between these two megaliths - with the Empire holding power of its own, technically, separate entirely from the church.

The Papal States are in near anarchy from an uprising and lots of papal officials have lost their power. Currently the Roman Catholic Church is shrinking a bit for its control while the emperor is growing in power. However this is a sliding scale and the baton passes back and forth historically between them.

And this bleeds down to daily life. In essence the conflict between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines (two rival parties, almost, which once began as a fierce feud between two families) which actually started all the way over in Germany (!) is a mirror of the conflict between the church and the emperor, or at least the Italian manifestation of it. What started as an argument of succession over the Holy Roman Empire, that is who would become emperor, has since then blown into a whole political ideology at each other’s throats with one group supporting the pope and the other the emperor. It’s an argument over who should have more power over the Italian City States.

Broadly speaking, The Guelphs are made up of a collection of wealthy merchant families who support the Pope and are sometimes referred to as ‘the church party’.  The Ghibellines, meanwhile, support the Holy Roman Emperor and maintain their wealth through agriculture and control over the condato (or countryside). They are sometimes called ‘the imperial party’. The power that each faction in each city-state waxes and wanes as Popes and Emperors change, but family allegiances tend to persist.

Loyalty to one of these parties is a deep and dividing characteristic in the political classes of Renaissance Italy - savvy politicians can tell if a rival is a Guelph or a Ghibelline simply by the way that they cut their fruit or the side of the hat that they chose to decorate with a feather. The history of these factions is complex but put simply; Guelphs support the Papacy and the Papal states, thereby supporting Italian independence for each city-state or republic. Ghibellines support the Emperor - currently Frederick III, a Habsburg and an Austrian - and therefore lobby for a more central power to maintain foreign control over the republics.

Vampires in Power

The vampire politics of the city-states of Italy are just as complicated and treacherous as the moral politics machine - and they are made all the more bloody by grudges and territorial instincts being maintained over centuries rather than mere generations.

The vampires of Italy have watched from the shadows while the mortal population of Italy has been cut by more than a third through a combination of plague, war and famine. Some vampires have lost carefully curated networks of ghouls and contacts through this glut of death, while others have found that thinning out the mortal crowds has only served to sharpen their political blades to a more exacting point. 

In either circumstance, it is vital for a political vampire to maintain trusted human contacts to be their eyes and ears throughout the important debates of the day. A valuable human retainer would have connections to a city’s Signoria (governing body) or be close to the ruling family of the city-state, which technically Florence doesn’t have (but everyone knows it’s the Medici family, which some people hate).

Vampires with an ambition to hold power in the Papal States or Rome would be inclined towards collecting mortals important in the church’s ranks, perhaps even members of the Curia itself. A few rare and socially driven vampires hold important positions in their own right but great care must be taken to conceal their nature - a difficult task that has ended many an immortal's existence through pure hubris.

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Economy: Money and Labour in Renaissance Italy

• WOOL we love it

• The Revolt of the Ciompi

• Boons and Vampies

• Everything is corrupt :)

Great Loss and Greater Gain

The Republics of Italy are no stranger to the fickleness of riches. After an explosion of development and expansion in the early middle ages, disaster struck. A cruel triad of plague, famine and civil unrest brought a violent end to almost 200 years of peace and prosperity in Europe. This so aptly named crises of events - The Crisis of the Late Middle Ages - catapulted the Italian republics into a century of poverty, death and darkness, destroying much of the progress that had been made in consolidating trade routes, agriculture and architecture. At the dawn of the 15th century, our century, Italy began to claw back what it once had and by the middle of the century we are finally in an economic golden age which has burst into fruition - one that the vampire denizens of Renaissance Italy have no intention of missing out on.

With Usura...

In Renaissance Europe there are no standard currencies, units of measure or financial calendars. In Italy, each city-state had its own coinage and a multitude of banks. All transactions required detailed documentation and many middle men - and many more bankers. A network of credit spun outwards across the Republics, reaching as far as London and Constantiople and at the centre of it all - Florence. Urusa - or usuary - describes the lending of money with interest and the Florentine bankers practice it with vigour and none more so than the Medici family. 

By 1454 The Medici bank has opened branches in Florence, Naples, Venice, Geneva, Avignon, London, Bruges - the list goes on. No other bank can rival the Medici and no other city but Florence can boast to be their home. Cosimo de’ Medici is the head of the Medici family and much more than just a banker. He held a position of great power in the Signoria of Florence and played a pivotal role in helping the Sforza family gain their own power in Milan. Outside of politics, Cosimo is a fervent patron of the arts and funded the development of many of the architectural wonders that stand in Florence today. Cosimo is a perfect example of how a middle class family can rise to a near godly state of nobility in this era, and the Medici exemplify how money and politics are essential to the development of the rich culture of education and art that the Renaissance is known for. 

Blood and Gold

As famous as families like the Medici are in the mortal world, for vampires the world of new money begins and ends with the Giovanni. Though they are Venetian by origin, the Giovannis  underworld control over the economy of the European Renaissance is even more widespread than the branches of the Medici bank. Even the Ventrue, clan of kings and kingmakers, who ordinarily wouldn’t turn head at so young a clan of vampires as the Giovanni, is finally - warily - recognising the speed at which humans, and indeed business, is progressing. The stagnant kings may well be in the market for new, less pure but more forward-thinking, blood.

The humans of the Giovanni family are successful bankers and traders, well known throughout Europe for their shrewd business decisions and very close family ties. The vampires, on the other hand, pull the strings behind the financial world of the newly emerging middle class.

(It seems the creators behind the Vampire: The Masquerade game who actually wrote the Giovanni wanted a group of vampires who were something of a thematic merge of the Medici and Borgia families, although with necromancy thrown onto the stew).

(In our setting we have followed the “canon” ((or: the original game fiction)) of Vampire: The Masquerade, but we would like to emphasise the interest that the Giovanni have taken in the actual Medici family; they have ghouled and even embraced members from it, into their tight ranks.)

There are the public faces of the Giovanni family - the mortal members of the family who are unaware of the vampire world, and also the empowered, ghouled mortal members who do - and they all move freely through human society without arousing suspicion, many of them completely unaware of the true nature of the reclusive heads of their house. 

The vampiric Giovanni deal in a different sort of usury altogether - the bondage and ownership of souls. 

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Vampire Finance

All vampires are familiar with the bondage of oaths and obligation.

The High Clans are especially au fait with the trading of vampire boons and loans of favours; they also have a few new grasping fingers beginning to dig into mortal banking and trade. In essence, not every vampire needs to have a good understanding of human economy but every vampire will be subjected to the cruel economy of boons. 

Why do vampires use Boons at all?

Mortal money is too volatile; it changes its value constantly and is tied to very rapid mortal changes. Whole human economies can rise and just as quickly fall when countries change hands for power, and many elders have seen their fair share of dynasties collapse. For the long-lived vampires, this is unacceptable a foundation for creating a system of finances out of.

All vampires may both grant boons and owe favours. They do this for reasons similar to mortals – they want to exchange in trade something of value between one another in a world where money has no permanent meaning (even the value of gold and diamonds fluctuates) and actual goods are bulky and impractical for frequent exchanges. Only a Cainite’s standing in society has any meaningful value between undying predators.

Indeed those vampires who have no proven track record of paying off boons have not been invited to Claudius Giovanni’s home, he being a vampire who cares most ardently for loans, repayments and financial institutions - be they mortal or vampiric.

How does this impact the nature of vampire society?

The system of boons ties together the vampires of every sect together in an interlocking web of mutually reinforcing belief. This web of debts is the glue that holds the vampiric world together. Every vampire who is owed debts has a vested interest in preserving the value and faithful fulfilment of all boons – to protect their own investment. Any vampire seeking the services or efforts of another (which is itself a very common occurance, especially so soon after such a difficult age for everyone) has an interest in preserving the value of all boons. In this way, boons are more than a currency unit in an undead economy – they are hard-wired into the deep social fabric of vampire interactions.

Mortals have established institutions to ensure the value of their currency: merchant banks determine the amount of money in the system, and the treasury department guards against counterfeits of bills. Likewise, vampires have an institution charged with ensuring the value of boons – this is the special domain of the Harpies.

However, it is also in every vampire’s best interest to enforce the precedents and customs of boons. As a store of value, a debt of a boon is only useful as long as all vampires believe that boons will be honoured. If any vampire fails to value a debt of a boon properly, it jeopardizes the belief in the validity of boons and the value of all boons currently owed to anyone.

An aggressive Brujah elder who might not give a stuffy Ventrue the time of day would still come down immensely hard on a rash Brujah neonate who is considering reneging on a boon debt to that Ventrue.

"Boons and scandals have long been part of Cainite society, and since ancient times, Harpies have ensured that the social mores were respected and boons were recorded."

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❤︎

The Denomination of a boon and is considered its “face value”. There are five Denominations: Trivial, Minor, Major, Blood and Life.

Denomination is only one aspect of value – the other is the Pedigree of the boon, i.e., who the Granter is and how important they are (see Pedigree below).

Life Boon

A life boon is a rare boon that should only be given in circumstances when a vampire saves another vampire from an external threat that will destroy the life of the debtor.

A powerful vampire cannot simply threaten a weak enemy and claim a life boon for not destroying her.

Owing a life boon can be tragic. Many vampires consider owing a life boon as equivalent to being an indentured servant or an unreleased childe. To owe a life boon is to surrender all of your own will until you have saved the life of the one that owns your life boon. Little to say, vampires want to pay these off as soon as they can.

Example Scenarios Involving Life Boons:

• Single-handedly holding off a pack of vampires inside a burning building so that the recipient can make a clean getaway

• Protecting a fugitive (who is hunted by more powerful vampires) on behalf of your creditor/Granter

• Protecting your creditor from the Prince’s justice to the bitter end

• Hiding a terrible crime, such as diablerie or infernalism (demon consorting)

• Saving the life of another vampire from an enemy at significant risk to your own life

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The Power of Position and Age

One of the unique elements of the system of boons is that each boon has a “Pedigree” based on the power and status of the the one doing the favour.

Like shares of stock in different companies, the value of these Pedigrees can vary and change as the Debtor’s standing rises and falls. And you can trade boons owed. A Trivial Boon owed by a Neonate debtor has a different value than one of an Elder Prince. When that boon is eventually called in the Neonate could do less powerful things; the Prince considerably more, so people want the debt of the Prince. If she owes someone a large debt, the trading value of that is equally high.

A Trivial Boon provided to a Neonate debtor who then ages into an Elder (while still owing the debt to someone) has gained in value, although it is still a Trivial Boon in terms of its Denomination. Thus while a particular boon may never be renegotiated into a different Denomination or transferred to a different debtor, due to Pedigree, the real value of that boon can change over time.

Pedigree also changes in regard to court offices which affect the Status of the officer. A boon granted to a back-seat political climber who later becomes his clan’s Whip, then Primogen, and then finally Prince, is an investment well made. Conversely, a boon debt owed by a Prince who soon loses her throne rapidly diminishes in value.

Owing boons can make you more valuable to people who want to keep you in the position you are already in, because your boons are worth more to them the more powerful you become.

Savvy neonates have used this fact to ensure they owe boons to all manner of important elders - in essence for for own protection. Elders protect assets above unknowns.

Pedigree is important when exchanging boons with another vampires. Many clever vampires go out their way to acquire boons of their social rivals, so as to make them in debt to them. They may cash in the boon for all manner of things, even have them leave town for a while (such as during a political praxis seizure of coup) and if the elder is capable of doing so, they will have to.

A common strategy for Elders is to identify promising neonates or ancillae climbers and find a way to help them, or offer their services in some way so as to make the vampire in debt to them. That boon debt will increase in value over time as the prodigy rises.

This may result in an Elder, intentionally or not, favouring the indebted fledgling and smoothing the path to acquire positions such as Sheriff, Whip, Harpy, etc.

Any compulsion, including the use of Disciplines, Blood Bonds or other rituals to compel another to grant a boon or take on a debt, or to discharge them, is forbidden.

Immutability of Boons

Unlike money, boons cannot be consolidated or broken apart across categories of Denomination. (This is like the mortgage on a modern house: your bank can sell your 25 year mortgage to another bank, but it is not allowed to sell 5 years’ worth to one bank and 20 years’ worth to another.)

Two Trivial debts cannot be combined into or renegotiated for one Minor Boon, nor can a Major Boon be broken into a Minor and a Trivial, then given to two separate vampires or called due at separate times. Only one vampire can ever be the Debtor and only one vampire at a time can be the Creditor or Granter (though the Creditor can change as the boon is traded).

Boons are durable.

If a Creditor of a boon passes the resulting debt off to another, the new holder of the boon is owed the same level of service from the Debtor as if the original Creditor were asking it of her.

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Taxation, Toil and Turmoil

The middle-class merchants of Venice and bankers of Florence manage trade routes and deals to disseminate gold throughout the European continent. Some may even become upper-class nobles who use the profits of these ventures to fund universities, architecture and the arts. But who works the land and toils in the factories, and what remuneration do they see for their work? The early Renaissance saw the outbreak of many peasant’s rebellions, leading to a paradigm shift of the role of the worker in European society.

The Crisis of the Late Middle Ages is a term that refers to all the horror that occurred in the last 14th century all over the 1300s resulting in the death of over a third of Europe’s population, causing massive disruption of the Feudal system of Lords, Vassals and Fiefs. When there aren’t enough men to till the field and their Vassals cannot guarantee their Lord’s protection from war, famine and plague - why should any peasant remain loyal to their Fief? The chaos of the Crisis weakened the power grip that the nobility and the church had maintained on the common people for so long and - in the midst of the death and devastation of the 1300s - the working class began to demand a better existence from their lords.

In Florence, the Revolt of the Ciompi (1378-1382) saw the uprising of labourers who were unrepresented in guilds and therefore could not participate in Florentine politics. Artisans, labourers and craftsmen rebelled against heavy taxation and the oligarchy of the Florentine patricians.

Simultaneously, the Peasants’ Revolt broke out in England led by one Wat Tyler - this revolt demanded an end to the exploitative system of Serfdom and also challenged unfair taxation. 

Seeds of Rebellion

These revolts were brief but their impact on Renaissance culture reverberated through the 1400s. They did not succeed in changing much for the workers of the time, but the revolts invited the possibility of rebellion to the minds of the working class. The high death toll on the side of serfs, freemen and labourers all added to the seeds of dissent in the souls of the people. 

Though the mortals of the Renaissance moved forward from these events without much change, vampire society was forever altered by the fires that were stoked in the bellies of their young over this era of rebellion. For many neonates, the oppression of serfs and peasants by their lordly masters mirrored their own suffering under the Elders all too keenly. Wat Tyler’s human lover was embraced by a Brujah who recognised this flame of vengeance burning within her, leading to a series of events that would begin the Anarch Revolt and change the nightly existence of vampires across the globe forever.

In our game year the Anarch Revolt is in its infancy and many neonates who go onto become anarchs have not yet joined that cause - it hasn’t yet got its teeth. There are likely great tensions, though, between someone like Tyler and any very controlling, suffocating elder who demand the world of their childer. These early anarchs would care a great deal about a group of humans (soon to be childer) being traded around and owned.

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Art and Education: Fine Art, Architecture and Music

As Italy and Europe recovered magnificently from the Crisis, the booming economy and relative political stability created space and funding for education and art to bloom in Renaissance Italy.  By 1454 in Italy, the Universities of Bologna, Siena, Pisa and Padua had developed an impressive list of benefactors and had expanded their teachings on classical language, philosophy and mathematics. 

Schools of music were springing up across the city-states faster than one could keep track of, snapping up promising young prodigies from across Europe and placing fascinating new instruments in their hands. Generous patronage of the arts enabled Masters to take on more apprentices than before, excelling progress in the fields of painting, sculpture and architecture to dizzying heights not witnessed since the great empires of Antiquity.

These developments spread from Italy throughout Renaissance Europe but everything circulated back to the heart of Florence. Mortals across the continent regarded Florence as a centre of art and progress and many flocked to the city to be part of something greater than themselves. To many vampires, Florence and the Early Renaissance also signified a profound change in fortune - for better or worse. 

More pragmatic vampires were filled with caution at the rate at which humans were beginning to travel, connect and spread news - fearing a breach of the Silence and a return of the Inquisition - but not all vampires resented this progress. For many immortals, the preceding centuries of darkness and stagnation had crushed much of when they held dear in their existence and witnessing a rebirth of knowledge and beauty resembled something of a spiritual renewal for them. For some of the ancients, the return of languages, concepts and even images that they had not witnessed for centuries was deeply moving and motivated an urge to reconnect with the modern world. For vampires embraced in more recent nights, their newfound keenness of senses and preternaturally sharp minds give them the means to savour these rich nights in even deeper detail.

Cathedrals of Learning and Humanism

Alongside an increase in funding and a new focus on education and artistic expression, the Renaissance brought with it an entirely new attitude towards the very potential of humanity. Many European scholars had lost faith in the church after the scandal and corruption of the Papal Schism and Mother Rome’s failure to protect the population from the evils of the Black Death, famine and war. Thanks to an influx of translated Arabic texts acquired through trade with Spain and North Africa, Europe was exposed to Greco-Roman literature, science and philosophy for the first time since antiquity.

Humanism: In Each Man, A Smaller God

These classical texts pre-dated Christianity and the Italian scholars who studied them in private were able to do so through a non-religious lens. Their public artistic works reflected these interests and sculptures and paintings representing Greco-Roman stories and heroes began to decorate the grand palazzos of Italian cities. These works of art emphasised the natural beauty of the human form and the philosophical writings that accompanied these works celebrated the wonder of the human mind, shining a bright and optimistic light on the mortal state after centuries of darkness.

For the first time in recent history, the great thinkers of society were beginning to look inward for enlightenment rather than heavenwards. This rediscovery of the wealth of human knowledge and history fuelled a sense of civic duty to provide a wider, richer education to the students of the medieval institutions of education that already existed throughout Europe. Humanist scholars believed that intellectual development and exposure to a wide range of philosophical materials not only improved a student’s mental faculties but also elevated their moral and spiritual condition to a higher state.

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Examples of art painted just before our game year!

(ง ื▿ ื)ว

French Art

Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels (c. 1452) by Jean Fouquet (How strikingly modern this piece looks, eerie! Almost like digital art.)

German Gothic Art

Saint Madeleine and Saint Catherine (c.1450) Konrad Witz

Netherlandish Art

Portrait of a Woman with a Winged Bonnet (c.1435) by Rogier van der Weyden

Also:

The Arnolfini Portrai (c.1434) by Jan van Eyck

The detail is insane. Notice also the painter has depicted themselves in the mirror behind the subjects, possibly a small expression of individuality and claim to the image.

Italian Art

Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata (c. 1420) by Gentile da Fabriano

Also:

Annunciation (c. 1425) by Fra Angelico

Also:

David (c.1440) by Donatello

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Erasmo of Narni - Wikipedia - first big equestrian bronze since the romans. ‘it is the earliest surviving Renaissance equestrian statue and the first to reintroduce the grandeur of Classical equestrian portraiture.’ - Wiki

Florence Cathedral - the dome that Cosimo commissioned, feat of architecture and design and took 100 years to figure out. Still the largest masonry dome in the world

David (Donatello) - gay little david. ‘Donatello's bronze statue of David (circa 1440s) is famous as the first unsupported standing work of bronze cast during the Renaissance, and the first freestanding nude male sculpture made since antiquity.’ - wiki

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Religion

Institutions, Spirituality and Transition

• Complex relationship between sensuality of renaissance spirituality and dogma of catholic church

• The Lasombra hold sway over Rome and the Holy See, keeping the Papal States in line and quickly quashing any rebellion against the Holy Roman Emperor

Then and Now | Christianity | Papal Schism | Judaism | Islam

In the Dark Ages and in the Renaissance, practically everyone is religious in some way or another - leave your atheist concepts at the door! It isn’t even a word yet. Some vampires, of course, have their faith impacted by the Embrace, but even neonates met by the bitter reality of the World of Darkness often believe in their old God - but it has become a God no longer on their side. (Alternatively they might have been pagan in life, especially for the elders.) Here is the era where faith and damnation are absolute, and Christianity is at an all time high.  Humanism might be the closest thing to a non-religious doctrine of belief that any mortal or vampire could follow.

The church was part of the fabric of everyday life for most individuals, and this means that the distinction between the sacred and the profane often becomes blurred. Churches are used for festivals, political meetings, eating, horse-trading, and even storing merchants’ goods and valuables. The clergy is everywhere. By 1550 out of a population of 60,000, Florence boasted over 5,000 clergymen. Poorly educated and barely paid, most of them are to be found working as masons, horse dealers, and cattle traders, keeping lovers and children, and carrying weapons.

For most people the church provided a ritual method of living day to day, rather than a set of rigid theological beliefs. The sacraments of baptism, confirmation, marriage and extreme unction provide rites of passage through crucial moments in an individual’s life. Between 1400 and 1600 religious belief was an integral part of everyday life. It is also impossible in this time to separate religion from the practice of political authority, the world of international finance, and the achievements of art and learning. 

The big Reformation of the 16th century hasn’t happened yet, but we are in the era where the Catholic Church is struggling to assert its temporal, wider power geographically and it is facing immense conflict, dissent, and division. We are seeing the rise of new forms of political authority which by the end of the century will control the lives of the common people with wealth and administrative innovation that will accompany the uneven commercial and urban expansion, creating conditions for significant political upheaval and expansion. Florence and Venice are already experimenting with republican governments, while the courts of Milan, Naples, Urbino, and Ferrara will rule as petty principalities. By the middle of the next two centuries, Europe will be in control of a series of sovereign states and empires - France, Portugal, Spain and the Ottomans. Their rise will be in inverse proportion to the worldly power of the church.

What about now? 

By the beginning of our century, even fifty years ago, the Catholic Church was in a crises. The word “Catholic” comes from the Greek word for “universal” but by the 1400s the church is anything but universal. It’s already experienced separation into the Western, Roman Church and the Eastern, Orthodox Church based in Constantinople. From then until our game date the Western Church will battle to assert its theological and imperial authority in the face of opposition from inside and outside. 

The pope claims by Biblical authority that, as Christ’s representative on earth, he still holds political sway over worldly issues. But throughout this century the papacy is split between rival claimants in Rome and Avignon in France. It’s becoming messy!

(Christianity, as you’ve guessed it, is The Big Thing for Italy. However, players are welcome to create vampire characters whose beliefs involve Catharism and Gnosticism and who want that a part of their history - as well as any number of pagan beliefs for the Gangrel and other relevant clans or concept backgrounds that support something in opposition to Christianity. The scope of the last two hundred years from the 1400s is terribly important in the formation of the Renaissance but it is too much detail to go into in one brief. Even the human characters, though, are welcome to have heard oratory retellings of history to know some o the events of the 13th - 14th centuries. Simply due to the huge amount of death, plague and war there’s no easily accessible written history, so it is more to the vampires we are offering wider religious backgrounds, who many may well predate Christianity or at least its rise to the prominence it has now found. It is the vampires who have lived the history - but if you’d like your human character to be non-Christian, absolutely :) There is room for it.)

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Christianity

Faith Among the Damned

The opposing urges of hunger for power and fear of faith have characterised the attitude of most vampires, especially Clan Lasombra, toward the Church for centuries. The shadow masters remain tantalised by the possibilities of controlling the Church, but they are all too often unable to penetrate the walls of faith that surround it, so these vampires hover around the edges, claiming minor positions in the hierarchy and corrupting a few major officials.

It is incredibly rare to Embrace a vampire with True Faith - it is just too dangerous to the sire in question. Rarer still does such a childe go on to survive, as an undead, and not take their life. The vampires with any faith who thrive are so few as to be counted on one hand in this world- unless there are more hiding - and they are most often those whose faith has warped and blackened under the ambition and the excitement of the Beast.

Clans Ventrue and Lasombra have squabbled over the Church for centuries. Why did the Lasombra care about infiltrating the Church in the first place? The clan understood the tremendous hold Christianity had over the mass of people. If the religion that now dominated Europe could be bent to their will, their power would be unlimited. Additionally, most nobbles looked to the Church for confirmation of their authority - their rule was affirmed by divine right. The Lasombra saw where that could get them.

Clan Ventrue meanwhile, miscalculated with Christianity, believing initially that it was yet another cult, one that would attract only a few crackpots and trouble-makers before quickly fading away. If it did become successful, they reasoned, they could always accommodate it - after all, the Roman state religion had served them well, and it would hardly be difficult to change horses in midstream. The infighting between the Lasombra cults and the doctrinal crises of the second century so long ago disguised the true influence of Christianity in Rome and its growing hold on the city's mortal masters; and, of course, the Lasombra did not tell the Ventrue of the dangerous faith that Christianity inspired.

The Ventrue were therefore shocked when, some 250 years after the birth of Christ, they discovered the true extent of Christianity in Rome - and the vast threat it posed to their own control. Though they’ve been trying to recuperate their losses to the Lasombra, with Christianity they were late to the party, a bitter pill to swallow for a clan usually so good at predicting mortal patterns of behaviour.

The Lasombra are not, of course, alone in the Church. Many pious Nosferatu continue to find sanctuary there, while some Brujah and Toreador saw it as the best hope for preserving the knowledge and culture of Rome during the barbaric chaos of the Dark Ages. Many lore masters and scholars are still reeling from the shock of those years, and desperate to cling to any structure they can now find. Unfortunately, the Church caused a tremendous amount of damage and despair too; there are as many vampires who resent the entire system.

Eastern Orthodox Christianity vs Western Catholic Church

In order to understand the conflicts and interests of Christians in the early European Renaissance, it is important to have a very basic understanding of the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire and the Eastern Orthodox Church. This brief will focus mainly on the Catholic Church and partly on the Holy Roman Empire as those are the main Christian powers in the European Renaissance. Any characters with a historical or geographical tie to Orthodox Christianity will be given another brief if requested, we’ll be able to tie it in with your personal player brief.

The East/West Schism or Great Schism of 1054 resulted in the formal separation of Eastern and Western Christian faiths that produced the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church as they are still known in the 1400s. This schism occurred due to a combination of many complex political, theological and organisational differences between Christians based mainly in Northern/Central/Southern Europe under the Holy Roman Empire and Christians living in Eastern Europe and the Middle East under the Byzantine Empire.

References in our brief to the Catholic Church refer to the Western faith that operates under the Holy See of Rome in 1453. The Holy Roman Empire is a multi-ethnic complex of territories in Western, Central and Southern Europe ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor, who is elected by a college of prince-electors and then crowned by the Catholic Pope. The Emperor is considered primum inter pares or first among equals compared to other European noble houses.

The Emperor is currently Frederick III from House Habsburg - the first Habsburg to hold this title - and the title of Holy Roman Emperor will remain with this house for twelve generations total. This is colossal - we are at the dawn of their rule. They basically define the power of the Holy Roman Empire for years and years to come, and this guy is the beginning. This may be very exciting to some vampires - and absolutely horrifying to others, or infuriating.

The Emperor technically reigned over Burgundy, Bohemia, Germany and North/Central Italy but in practice, Emperors were usually based in Northern Europe and delegated rulership of many distant states to their relatives. By the time of our game, the Empire is really a collection of hundreds of independent states. Italy is an especially good example of Renaissance debate between the centralised control of the Empire, centralised control of the Papacy and more independent, sovereign control of a state over its own matters - see the Guelphs and Ghibellines. 

In summary, Christians in mid 15th century Europe may be simplified as either Catholic or Orthodox and the country they live in may be ruled by the Holy Roman Empire or have more or less Papal or sovereign control. With the fall of Constantinople in 1453 came the end of the dregs of the Eastern Roman Empire/Byzantine Empire and the developing politics and power in Eastern Europe were complicated by Ottoman and Islamic conquest. With the Renaissance came the beginnings of what would form the Protestant reformation but these concepts are only in their infancy at the time of our game.

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Preceding Events to the State of Western Christianity in the 15th Century

The Legacy of the Crusades

Christianity experienced many upheavals over the courses of the 13th and 14th centuries. Whilst waves of bloody crusades over more than a hundred years took their toll (both spiritually and physically) on Christian and non-Christian populations throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle east - they also opened up travel and trade connections between the east and west that had not existed before the Crusades. Through their violent persecution of other faiths, Europeans became exposed to Eastern  academic and spiritual literature that would lay the ground for the development of the European Renaissance. 

War and Plague and Famine

On top of the brutality of the Crusades, The Hundred Years War has been raging across Western Europe right up until 1453 - the year before our game is set. The subsequent mass loss of human life, especially amongst the common people enlisted into the armies fighting this war, had a deep impact on the European psyche and spirituality. Many people were either angry at God or angry at the Church for not protecting them from the ravages of war.

Almost simultaneously, plague and famine were erupting across the European continent. The Great Famine of the early 14th century decimated the populations of North and Central Europe and many smaller famines recurred all over the continent for the remainder of that century.

As if by some cruel twist of fate, The Crisis of the Late Middle Ages continued without respite in the mid 14th century with the arrival of a foe that needs no introduction - The Black Death. 

The cumulative psychological effect of these crises manifested for many in a personal crisis of faith - or at least a loss of trust in the institution that they accessed their faith through. No amount of prayer could save a person from the ruin of war, plague and famine and ultimately even the powerful Western Church could not protect the vast majority of its flock from the kiss of that final pale horseman - Death.

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The Papal Schism

The Papal Schism in the Western Church was a final blow to the integrity of the Western Church in the minds of some Christians. Until recently, the seat of the Pope had been in Avignon, France for 68 years and the office of the Pope had become closely associated with the French monarchy. In 1377, Pope Gregory XI moved the seat of the Papacy to Rome - much to their chagrin. 

When he died, there was an intense political and social argument in the College of Cardinals over the election of the next pope. Initially, two Popes - one Roman and one from Avignon - were elected simultaneously. This led to a schism in the Western Catholic Church that would persist for thirty years, resulting in the dual existence of two lines of Papal succession and mounting tensions between France and Italy.

In 1409, the Council of Pisa would elect a third pope to try and end the dispute - unsurprisingly, this was not immediately successful. The Catholic Church would not be reunified until 1415 with the Council of Constance. This schism marked a decline in the morality and discipline of the Catholic Church, reducing its reputation in the hearts and minds of many of its followers. However, the debate also opened up a theory known as councilarism which introduced the idea that an ecumenical council could be superior to the Pope. 

This is an important concept that led to the The Council of Florence (1431-1449) which would attempt to bridge the divide between the Eastern and Western Churches caused by the Great Schism of 1054. These hopes would eventually be dashed by the Fall of Constantiople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 when Eastern Orthodox clerics would have their anti-unionist feeling encouraged to foster rebellion amongst European Christians.

Western Christianity in the Early Renaissance

With the Fall of Constantiniple to the Ottomans in 1453, the Catholic church was definitively isolated from Eastern Orthodox congregations in the Balkans and Near East and would remain separated by war and by the intercession of Islam for 400 years. This abrupt schism would have been unexpected and painful to many of the faithful, especially considering recent progress made to try and reunify the faith with the events of The Council of Florence. However, some more cynical Catholic leaders may have interpreted the Fall as a sign that the Catholic Church truly was the one true faith. Orthodox or Catholic, the Fall of Constantinople served to fuel the flames of hatred towards the Ottoman Empire and followers of Islamic faith. 

Far from Constantinople and the woes of its Orthodox cousins, the Catholic church thrived under the European Renaissance - or at the very least, its coffers certainly did. The increase in wealth that coursed through the pioneering European cities of the Renaissance was reflected in papal tithing. The explosion of new art, sculpture and music often portrayed biblical themes - though there were also many pieces that displayed Greco-Roman myths which some of the faithful saw as heathen and even idolatrous. In most cases, very prestigious artists had the support and patronage of the Church as they often decorated cathedrals and other religious buildings with their works.

As the Catholic Church became more involved with the burgeoning new developments of the Renaissance, it also became more corrupt. It was not uncommon for wealthy Italian families to secure religious offices for their own relatives through bribery and coercion, eventually leading to the acquisition of the Papal office for two famous rich men in the later 15th century - Rodrigo de Borgia and Francesco della Rovere. This corruption did not go unnoticed by the populace and only added to a loss of trust in the Church’s integrity - laying the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation in 1515.

Debates about the nature of the church, papal supremacy, and the role of councils and princes were encouraged in Renaissance universities - debates that would soon be printed into pamphlets and mass distributed thanks to the invention of movable type/the Gutenberg printing press. Overall, the Catholic church was still a mighty power in 1454 but its days of total supremacy over the Christian faith in Europe were numbered.

Humanism was not formally identified as an enemy of the Church but the ideology did champion academic freedom and independence of thought.

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Judaism

We have only briefly addressed the lives of Jews living in Renaissance cities, specifically Italy. We  would be happy to expand on this more in individual or regional briefs :) However, because we are restricting Judaism to roleplayers already familiar with it from a lived experience, we felt it less pressing to educate on. Hit us up if you’d like more in your own brief.

Jews in the European Renaissance and Italy

The 14th century was bloody and violent for the Jewish populations of Western Europe and the British Isle - courtesy of the medieval Inquisition. In Spain, there were massacres, torture and forced mass conversions that practically annihilated Sephardic culture in many regions by the time of their expulsion from Spain in 1492. The situation was not much better in France, which has just ordered an expulsion of the jews in 1394 after a previous Great Exile in 1306. Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and there is no official record of Jews in England again until the 17th century.

Life in Italy is far from idyllic for the Jews of the Renaissance but it is true that the great trade centres of the city states offer a modicum of tolerance - even if it is for the cities’ own gain. In Venice, Florence, Pisa and Genoa, leaders in the fields of banking, trade and academia value the progress of their own interests above any edicts issued by the Catholic Church. They recognise that there are many pioneers of economy and education among the Jewish people who have been forced from their homes in other neighbouring countries.

By the mid 15th century, Jewish people can be found in leading positions in banks, universities and even the halls of medicine - William of Portaleone was physician to King Ferdinand I of Naples, and to the ducal houses of Sforza and Gonzaga. This is not to say that life in Renaissance Italy is without prejudice for the Jews - depending on the laws of the city state, some Jewish people are still expected to wear easily identifiable clothing including yellow badges that mark them as Jewish. Clans more likely to embrace Jewish mortals in this era are likely those clans with higher populations in the Middle East but not the Followers of Set; although the Nosferatu and the Children of Haquim certainly would. Tremere might well too, some of their Hermetic practices line up well with Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah.

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Islam

This part of the brief will only touch on Islamic culture as it was experienced by Renaissance Europeans and how the Renaissance was possibly triggered by cultural influence from the Islamic world. The Islamic world in the Middle East - largely the Ottoman Empire - remained very separate from European culture apart from some naval and land conflicts that don’t really apply to this Renaissance Italy brief. Historically, the vast majority of Muslims in Renaissance Europe were either slaves or living in the Emirate of Granada under the Nasrid Dynasty. Similarly, the only exposure that Muslims living in the Ottoman Empire would have the Renaissance Europeans would be through Europeans slaves and conflict.

The Early Renaissance period saw some of the earliest contact between European and Islamic culture. Prior to the 15th century, direct interaction between the Middle East and Continental Europe was very limited and almost entirely through trade - most of which was conducted through intermediaries. The Islamic world was much more advanced in scholarly, philosophical and scientific pursuits than Europe - The Islamic Golden Age flourishing throughout the 8th -14th centuries, in some ways developing the Middle East’s own ‘Renaissance’. Though trade with Europe existed since the 13th century, European countries were too distracted by survival through war, plague and famine to take advantage of learning materials that might have been acquired on those trade routes - and they had very few means of translating them.

This all changed with the expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. Conflict between that Empire and Europeans living in the Balkans brought about a collision of cultures that was new to both sides. The Ottomans gained new territory rapidly, culminating in the capture of Constantinople in 1453. The exodus of Byzantine scholars from Constantinople to Italy brought many new ideas and literature to the centre of the European continent, sparking an influx of academic material that would begin the educational revivification that would be key to the Early Renaissance. Some of these new texts were Arabic copies of Greco-Roman myths, the translations of which would be central to the development of Humanism.

As well as war in the Balkans, Europeans and clashes with the Ottoman Empire in the seas of the Mediterranean. Barbary Corsairs commissioned by the Ottoman Empire would harry European trade ships and the Europeans would give back as good as they gave, resulting in large losses and high numbers of slaves captured on both sides.  Some of the Muslim men enslaved after conflicts at sea and on land belonged to scholarly professions - philosophers, physicians, mathematicians and scribes. Recent increasing contact with the Islamic world had taught Europeans just how advanced this culture was compared to their own, and these men were sold at slave markets for high sums. 

Almost every person of Muslim faith living in a European city in the Early Renaissance would have been a slave. They were often forcibly baptised and given Christian names before they were sold for the first time, and those who were not forced often chose to convert to Christianity to avoid the oppression of living as a Muslim in Europe. Some Muslims who converted could elevate their position from slave to serf, but this was a state matter that required many states of approval by a European Christian politician of some variety. Without these scholars and the education that they were obliged to share with Europeans under the bonds of slavery, it is doubtful that the European Renaissance would look anything like what we recognise it for today. 

It is crucial to understand that many Renaissance ‘discoveries’ were not truly made for the first time by an Italian genius working alone in a candlelit worship. Much of the knowledge that led to the economic, philosophical and artistic developments of the European Renaissance had already been discovered by Islamic and indeed Jewish scholars many hundred of years before the birth of any Renaissance greats of history. 

(Info drops relating to the Emirate of Grenada will be in any relevant personal briefs; it wasn’t really a part of Europe at the time and was only retaken by Spain in 1492, half a century after our game date. We might make a Spanish regional brief if we have concepts focussed there.)

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Sexuality: Love, Sex and Courtship

• Sex trade and trafficking

• The Office of the Night and sexuality >:3c

• Courtship and gender roles

The Secret Things of Our Town

Renaissance Florence in the 15th century can be said to have two faces; one public and one private. The face that is visible to the world reflects Florence’s modern system of government, its thriving economy and its propagation of the noble pursuits of art, education and humanism. Florence’s private face remains coyly turned inward, known only to its loyal citizens - its secrets accessible to Florentines alone. 

Rarely, a foreign ambassador, merchant or other person of means would be accepted into Florentine society and the citizens would ask themselves ‘Now do we share with them the le cose segrete della nostra città?’ - the secret things of our town. These secrets encapsulated the darker side of Florence’s success - its inner workings of its backstreet trade deals, violent politics and corrupt clergy. Hidden just as deeply as these secrets but more accessible to outsiders for the purposes of profit are the carnal delights offered by Florence’s underworld. 

The Office of the Night

The Office of the Night was founded in 1432 specifically to police sodomy because it was such a common practice in Renaissance Venice. By the late 15th century as many as one in two men had come to the Office’s attention for committing homosexual acts - though it should be noted that the Office also policed prostitution, radical elements in the popolo, and any nuisance occurring in taverns. The Office encouraged anonymous tips to be left in public note boxes though it was rare for the accused to face serious prosecution even if they confessed - in most cases, sexual acts between males were punished as minor misdemeanours. This is in stark contrast to the law in other Italian city states at the time. In Venice, castration and mutilation were common punishments for homosexuality, even for young boys.

In Florence, homosexual interactions were an unofficial rite of passage for many men with young boys under 18 taking the ‘passive’ role to be taught sexual acts by the ‘active’ parter who would usually be in their 20s.

Men generally turned their attentions towards marriages and therefore women in their 30s - this was seen as an end to sexual frivolity and a marriage was only considered when a man was sexually ‘mature’ after learning about sex from other men. This system is largely as a result of strict division between men and women in society.

Separate But Not Equal

Young boys were feminised but unlike their female counterparts, were not expected to stay locked into a submissive role. Men older than 18 who still enjoyed bottoming would be seen as immature, feminine, inferior. Men over 30 who still like to fuck men, even as a top, would be seen as pederasts, degenerates, morally corrupt. Women were very much second class citizens in this era, chastity was incredibly important and women were not thought to have sex drives - a matter which often changes for those who experience the Embrace into the ranks of undead. Vampires assigned female at birth rarely want to stay submissive and docile for even a moment longer than necessary - their Beasts rail against the thought.

It is a myth that lesbians were therefore exempt from punishment purely because they went undetected. There are specific legal references to penalties for female-female sexual contact. In the French code Li Livres di justice et de plet C.1270 lesbianism is punished just as harshly as male sodomy, with progressive genital mutilation being mandated punishments for both genders on the first and second offenses and death by burning for the third strike.

From Li Livres:

22. He who has been proved to be a sodomite must lose his testicles. And if he does it a second time, he must lose his membership. And if he does it a third time, he must be burned.

23. A woman who does this shall lose her member each time, and on the third must be burned.

While executions of women for sodomy are far rarer than those for men, for various reasons, in Das Strafrecht des deutschen Mittelalters by Rudolf His there is a record of a girl being drowned “for lesbian love.”There are also records of two Spanish nuns being burned for using, “material instruments,” a woman from Fontaines being burned for impersonating a man and marrying another woman, and the hanging of a girl in Marne in 1580 for refusing to return to “the state of a girl.”’ (Walking the Line: Renaissance and Reformation Societal Views on Lesbians and Lesbianism by Katherine Haas.)

Lesbians are as abound in the Renaissance as their gay male counterparts, as are cross-dressing and transexual women and men.

Love and Courtship

With unmarried women being kept so cloistered and separate from male company meant that courtship was often quite a formal affair. Lovers would exchange gifts with symbolic or literary images references in their design or function - using pictures to paint the thousand words that they often could not utter to each other for the sake of propriety. It was common for women to be gifted ornate belts or girdles as they were seen as a symbol of marriage and fertility - and sometimes chastity. Couples of Jewish and Christian faiths would exchange rings to mark their transition from betrothal to marriage and many newly-weds would be gifted a cassone or wedding chest - a symbolic piece of furniture, highly decorated, and strongly connected to marriage.

Vampires do not have any of this division and the Embrace is for many immortals an incredibly sexually liberating experience - but riddled with the danger of being intimate with another predator.

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Whew -! You made it all the way? (Hats off to you, I wasn’t expecting many people to be so wonderfully thorough; although perhaps some were sly and skipped right to the sex. Ha, ha.)

Are you ready for the last leg into your Setting?