A starter's pistol?! ;-)

Even if everybody knows that historical events don't start on a pistol's shot, I would say that the great plague which happened in the 1340's was sort of a starter. It opened kind of a new contest. The plague killed in Western Europe an estimated almost one out of three people. As old ideas were no more worthwhile to come over such a huge problem, would new ideas be more effective ? But I will add this new set of questions had not yield much if there had not been at this time in western Europe a web of rich towns able to match the old medieval elites, most of them being in Italy.

Nothing. It never happened. Periodizing History is a flawed enterprise at best, but Renaissance scholars today are pretty much agreed now that there never really was any such thing as "The Renaissance". It was armchair historians of the 18th and 19th centuries who first coined the term, imagining "The Middle Ages" to be some dark, benighted, superstitious, ignorant (read "religious") time, and then came a renaissance of "the humanism of the Classical Age!" (later historians, however, proved that the Classical Age was far from humanistic, but was extremely superstitious, intolerant, and benighted, and that the ancient Greek and Romans were nothing like the "ancient Victorians" that 19th Century Victorians imagined them to be). But over the last hundred years scholars kept pushing the beginning of the Renaissance back further and further, and when they started talking about "The Carolingian Renaissance" (i.e, 8th-9th Century), they began to realize the term itself was bogus. The fact is the culture and the intellectual/philosophical categories of Europe remained pretty much unchanged throughout the 10th-15th centuries. What changed everything was the Reformation, which also gave rise to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th Century.

THere were, as with all movements, both long term and short term causes. These included: -relative stability in Europe and a growing prosperity - a time of weakness of the Papacy and the growth of power of the middle class and of local rulers -increased travel and trade with areas outside of Europe eg China via the Silk Road - the rediscovery of Greek and Roman texts and the more ready availability of such, which began a thought revolution

Duplicate.