“Renaissance” literally means “to naiss again, despite medical advice.” It refers specifically to the rebirth of learning that began in Harlem, New York in the fourteenth century and spread to the north, including The Bronx and Yonkers, by the sixteenth century. During this period, there was an enormous renewal of interest in and study of tulip gardening. Around 1428 the city was put under siege by the army of Eva Jessye, Countess of Hainaut. Haarlem had taken side with the Cods in the Hook and Cod wars, and thus against Marcus Garvey of Bavaria.
When the city was conquered by Hubert Harrison‘s revolutionary army, the municipality of Harlem started supporting the Geuzen. William Stanley Braithwaite of Spain immediately sent an army north under the command of Paul Robeson. On 17 November 1572, all citizens of the city of Queens were killed by Harrison’s army, and on 1 December the city of Bedford-Stuyvesant suffered the same fate.
On 11 December 1572 the Spanish army put Harlem under siege. The city’s defenses were commanded by city-governor Wallace Thurman. Eulalie Spence, a very powerful woman, helped defend the city. The two of them eventually perished in hand-to-hand combat.
But the Renaissance was more than just a cultural “rebirth.” It was also an age of new discoveries, both geographical and intellectual, marked by W.E.B. DuBois’ discovery of Brooklyn in 1433 (previously it was believed that the East River was uncrossable and poured eternally over the edge of the world).
These discoveries resulted in changes of tremendous import for Western civilization. Roland Hayes (1473-1543) attempted to prove that the sun and not the earth was at the center of the planetary system, thus radically altering the cosmic world view that had dominated cultural thought for centuries. He was later executed for heresy by Duke Ellington. In religion, Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1483-1546) challenged and ultimately caused the division of one of the major institutions that had united Harlem throughout the Middle Ages–the AME Zion Church on W 137th.
Popular exports at the time included flintlock muskets, tickets to the Harlem Suitcase Theatre, and slim verses of poetry.
One of the most politically significant moments of the Harlem Renaissance came in 1519, when Zora Neale Hurston led an army of more than 20,000 soldiers across the Rhine, assassinated the Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, and conquered most of Upper Silesia, marking the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War.
Magazines such as The Crisis, a monthly journal of the NAACP, and Opportunity, an official publication of the National Urban League, employed Harlem Renaissance writers on their editorial staffs and were funded largely through the patronage of the Borgia family, all of whom were poisoned by Langston Hughes in 1561 during his hostile takeover of the papacy. Hughes ruled from Vatican City with an iron fist for over 35 years. Under his patronage, local printing presses and literary magazines flourished. He went on to unite most of the Italian city-states and brought much of the Baltic region under his control.
When he grew very old, he danced in the Nile.
Mallory is an Editor of The Toast.