of Paris and Strasbourg: Bruges, Antwerp, Cologne, and many others. It is there that we shall find the outstanding industrial developments of printing, tapestry-making, and machinery such as the crane. Among the technical innovations which gave an added sophistication to temporal life we should include the painting of the Van Eycks and Memling which achieved quite new standards in the precise representation of the human face and the natural landscape. The Flemings and Brabanters of the fifteenth century are plainly the precursors of the commercial civilization of Holland in the age of Rembrandt.
Early Renaissance Italy was less inventive industrially but its astonishing artistic movement, which had given birth before 1500 to Leonardo and Michelangelo as well as the exquisite classicism of Botticelli, was related to highly original innovations in the world of ideas. The humanism of the cities created a new kind of political thought to justify republican liberalism and despotic efficiency. If Machiavelli had not yet written The Prince he must already have developed some of his ideas before 1500. At the same time Lorenzo Valla's investigation of the text of the New Testament and Marsiglio Ficino's translation of Plato gave birth to a variety of speculations which were to disturb the spiritual life of Europe for centuries to come.
As we approach 1500 we find ourselves in a world which is quite fundamentally different from the one with which we began a thousand years earlier. We have moved out of the period of the great world empires and seen the creation of a civilization of a different kind. It was distinguished by its wealth, based on highly successful agriculture and industry. But it could not have taken the form it had or presented the springboard for future expansion without the diversity of a hundred centres of political and cultural aspiration competing for success. That untidy fragmentation was the ground for the extraordinary fertility of our cultural forebears.
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