AP European History

## Why Italy: the context of the Renaissance The Renaissance ("rebirth") began in the Italian city-states in the 14th century and was in full flower by the 15th. Several features of Italy help explain why it started there. The peninsula was politically fragmented into republics such as Florence and Venice, duchies such as Milan, the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples, so no single monarch or empire controlled it. Rival states competed for prestige and talent, and wealthy elites competed to commission art, buildings and scholarship. Italy was also the commercial heart of Europe. Merchants and bankers in Florence, Venice, Genoa and Milan made fortunes from Mediterranean trade, banking and cloth manufacture, and this money paid for patronage. The Medici family of Florence, who ran a bank and dominated the city's politics from the 1430s, are the best known example. Italy was also littered with the physical remains of Rome, and Italian scholars received Greek manuscripts and Greek-speaking scholars as the Byzantine Empire weakened and then fell to the Ottomans in 1453. The Black Death of the mid-14th century and the long crisis that followed unsettled older certainties, and the growing wealth of cities encouraged a confident, worldly culture. Medieval Europe had not forgotten the ancient world, but Renaissance writers approached it differently: they treated classical Greece and Rome as models to be studied directly and imitated, rather than as a background to Christian…