the opportunities of the old world were being supplanted by those of the new.
The theory that Columbus was to put to the test, that it was possible to sail westwards to reach Cathay and the Indies, had been elaborated by the Florentine Paolo Toscanelli, who wrote about it to the confessor of the Portuguese king in 1474. It was the product of an interest in geography and cartography which had a long history in the maritime towns, but which had also developed steadily in the intellectual community since Ptolemy's Geography had been made available in Latin through the translation of another Florentine ( 1409). It was just one of the many areas of intellectual life affected by the movement known as humanism, which began to spread from Italy extensively in the first half of the fifteenth century.
However revolutionary humanist and Renaissance ideas were to become, their origins are firmly rooted in medieval culture, to the extent that it is difficult to pin-point the beginning of the movement. In the thirteenth century several features of western European cultural activity were truly international, and Italy participated in these fully along with the rest of Mediterranean Europe. One was the aristocratic culture of chivalric values, courtly love, heroic epic, and so on, much of which had its original focus in southern France, and which is to be found richly in late medieval Spain, Frankish Greece, and to a large extent also in Italy, both in the towns and in the less urbanized south. Another was the deeply religious nature of culture. Religion imbued the Reconquista and the crusading ethos hand in hand with chivalric ideals, and in different forms was prominent in the intellectual ferment of the thirteenth century, the flowering of theology and philosophy with the development of scholasticism, the intellectual stance against heresy, and the organization of preaching. Though Paris was the unquestioned capital of this achievement it was equally an international culture. (St Thomas Aquinas, the great thirteenth-century theologian of Paris, was an Italian.) Religious culture was
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