The first Greek book to be printed in Italy, Constantine
Lascaris’s Erotemata, was issued at Milan in 1476.
The Visconti and Sforza were generous patrons of the
arts and scholarship. They encouraged humanist learning,
scientific studies, and great public works. PETRARCHowed
much to Visconti patronage. In the late 15th century
Lodovico (“il Moro”) SFORZAand his wife, the short-lived
Beatrice d’Este, made their court into a showpiece of cul-
ture and learning, supporting LEONARDO DA VINCIamong
others; Lodovico also commissioned for Milan several
buildings by BRAMANTE. Under Spanish rule in the 16th
century Milan’s political prestige and cultural glories were
in decline, although it was then the home of one of the
leading figures in the Counter-Reformation, St. CHARLES
BORROMEO.
Notable buildings surviving from the Renaissance pe-
riod include the enormous cathedral (begun 1386), the
Dominican monastery of Sta. Maria, containing Leo-
nardo’s LAST SUPPER, the Bibliotheca AMBROSIANA(founded
1609), and the Palazzo di Brera (present facade 1615).
Milán, Luis (c. 1500–1561) Spanish composer
Milán, who was born in Valencia, was one of the greatest
composers of music for the vihuela, the Spanish equiva-
lent of the lute. His most important work is El maestro
(1536), a collection of vihuela compositions and solo vo-
cals. It is the earliest surviving work of its kind in Spain
and was intended as an instruction book for the vihuela.
It contains fantasies, preludes, pavanes, Christmas carols,
and sonnets by Petrarch. Milán was the first composer to
write in detail about the interpretation of his music and
the first to provide tempo indications for it. His book El
cortesano (1561) is a Valencian equivalent of Castiglione’s
THE COURTIER.
millenarianism In Christianity, belief in a thousand-year
reign of peace and righteousness (the millennium) to be
enjoyed by the faithful at the end of human history. Opin-
ion has differed over whether such a period will herald or
follow the Second Coming of Christ. In either case, the
emphasis falls on the triumph of the believing community
in this world, rather than the salvation of the individual
believer in the next. The only clear biblical support for
millenarianism is in Revelation 20, although hints of a fu-
ture reign of the elect are also to be found in St. Paul. Ul-
timately, the doctrine derives from popular apocalyptic
traditions of the later Jewish era.
Millennial hopes, widespread among the first Chris-
tians, waned as expectations of Christ’s early return re-
ceded and the Church developed from persecuted sect
into powerful institution. From the fourth century on-
ward, millenarian beliefs were ignored by most orthodox
theologians and reinterpreted in a nonliteral sense by oth-
ers (notably St. Augustine). Millenarianism therefore dis-
appeared from mainstream Christian thought for a
thousand years, although there were sporadic outbreaks
among fringe groups, such as the Joachimites of the 13th
century.
The revival of millenarian ideas that is a marked fea-
ture of the Reformation period can be explained by several
factors. In the first place, reformers of all kinds shared a
reverence for the word of Scripture and the beliefs of the
primitive Church, both of which sanctioned such views.
More generally, millennial enthusiasms tend to recur at
periods of historical and intellectual crisis. Indeed, some
reformers saw a precise parallel between the cosmic battle
described in Revelation and the religious struggles of their
own day, with the pope in the role of the great Beast or an-
tichrist (Revelation 13), Rome as Babylon (Revelation 14),
and eventual victory for the righteous guaranteed. Mil-
lenarianism had particular appeal to the more extreme
Protestant groups, who sought a complete revolution in
the order of things, and a special allure for the persecuted,
who could look forward to a future in which the tables
were turned on their oppressors.
Although there is evidence of millennial belief among
LUTHER’s early supporters, Luther himself did not encour-
age it, and it increasingly became the province of more
radical groups. From the 1520s millenarianism was par-
ticularly associated with the ANABAPTISTS, whose extrem-
ism helped to bring all such notions into disrepute. For
instance, in 1520 a group known as the Zwickau Prophets
attempted to establish the rule of the righteous in
Zwickau, Saxony; they subsequently moved to Witten-
berg, where they attracted a growing following until
Luther had the movement suppressed (1522). A few years
later Thomas Müntzer, an early associate of the Zwickau
group, saw portents of the millennium in the violence of
the PEASANTS’ REVOLT. Belief in the imminent apocalypse
was also a distinctive belief of the Hoffmanites (or Mel-
chiorites), followers of the former Lutheran preacher Mel-
chior Hoffman (1498–1543), who prophesized that
Strasbourg would become the site of the New Jerusalem.
Taken together, such excesses led to a deep mistrust of
millenarianism in the mainstream reform movements—a
suspicion that remained entrenched within Lutheranism
until the advent of the Pietist movement in the 17th cen-
tury. In England, the mid-17th century saw an eruption of
millennial ideas among the left-wing Independent groups
of the Civil War and Commonwealth period.
An interesting offshoot of 16th- and 17th-century
millenarianism is the fascination with utopian political
ideas. In such works as More’s UTOPIA (1516), CAM-
PANELLA’s La città del solé (written 1602), the Reipublicae
Christianopolitanae descriptio (1619) of the German the-
ologian Johann Valentin Andreae, and BACON’s New At-
lantis (1627) the millennial hope is secularized and used
to express an essentially Renaissance vision of human pos-
sibility.33118 8 MMiillaaíí nn,, LLuuiiss