Buy this book on Amazon: A Short History of the World
Fortuitously for Europe, Islamic scholars were beginning to reject development not expressly mentioned in the Qur’an and the Hadith58 just as the Chinese were limiting their relations with the outside world and looking backwards to Confucian writings from the 6th century BC. Europe on the other hand, until that point behind both the Chinese and the Islamic world in its general development, was about to witness a shift that would drag it out of the Middle Ages, change the course of history, and lead to European domination of the world.
The causes of this shift were many. They revolved around the exchange of ideas and goods that increased in volume after the end of the Crusades, the discovery of new worlds which led people to question what they believed, the challenge to the teachings of the Church and its authority after repeated schisms, and the sudden influx of knowledge brought to Europe by scholars fleeing the Ottoman advance.
Often referred to as the Renaissance, from the French word for ‘rebirth’, and generally understood to have taken place from the early 15th to the late 16th centuries, the period saw a deep transformation of the way in which Europeans thought, ruled, and lived.
The most important technical and cultural innovation of the Renaissance was the introduction of Guttenberg’s printing press around 1450. Without the ability to spread new ideas rapidly and cheaply, it is unlikely that Europe would have developed at the speed at which it did. The printing press saw the start of a communications revolution in which by 1480 books were being printed in the major cities of Germany, France, the Netherlands, England and Poland. To put it into perspective, ‘in the 50 years following the invention more books were produced than in the preceding thousand years.59 With larger print runs came lower unit costs, thus making books both more available and cheaper to the wider public. What’s more, books were also increasingly published in the local language of the region as opposed to Latin, which contributed to building a sense of nation-hood.
While the printing press made the Renaissance, its invention also happened to coincide with a period of relative peace in Europe. The Hundred Years War between France and England had ended in 1453 – coincidentally the same year as the fall of Constantinople – and the conflict between Muslims and Christians in present-day Spain60 had ended in favour of the Christians. Trade and agriculture, so long disrupted, first by the Barbarian invasions of the 4th and 5th centuries and then by the hostility between Christianity and Islam, flourished again and a feudalistic European society was slowly replaced by a society driven by trade.
The Italians, and the Florentines and Venetians in particular, took advantage of their location between East and West to accumulate huge wealth. A life of business and politics became as respected as a life in the Church. Many classical ideas, which had flown eastward with the fall of Rome a thousand years earlier, returned to Europe and led to a revival in the intellectual and artistic appreciation of Greco-Roman culture. Non-religious themes were no longer frowned upon and rich patrons bankrolled architecture and buildings, the likes of which no one had seen since Roman times. Great families such as the Medici became renowned as great patrons of the arts, for which the Renaissance is so famous; Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo are just two of the brightest stars in a constellation of artists that benefited from them and other rich patrons during this time. Tremendous advances were also made in the fields of mathematics, medicine, engineering, and architecture.