powers--the Gonzaga of Mantua, the Este of Ferrara--could easily outshine the greater.
Ultimately, though, Renaissance Italy was the focus for a movement that soon transcended nationality. Indeed, it always had been so; from the period of the Avignonese papacy Italian art had been exported and writers had been in contact with their colleagues north of the Alps. The great church councils helped to accelerate this process; humanists of court and curia alike attended, and indeed it was the Council of Constance which had given Poggio Bracciolini the opportunity to search the nearby monasteries and to make his discoveries. The travels of the Italian Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, and the many contacts he had made before becoming pope, helped spread an interest in humanist activity, and the development of the Roman court added a fresh focus and a multiplication of international contacts through cardinals and courtiers. Spain received much of the new culture through the Aragonese court at Naples, and also through the growing numbers of Spanish merchants and students throughout the peninsula. The universities also became a focus for German interest, many coming to pursue higher education in Italy, and there soon germinated, there and in some of eastern Europe, that persistent idea that a visit to Italy was an important part of one's cultural formation. It worked both ways, of course; as well as exporting the Renaissance, Italy imported; Flemish painters, and particularly musicians, found a home in Italy just as Italian artists and humanists did in northern Europe. The parallel with the commercial hegemony of Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is not entirely fanciful. To remain with the metaphor for a moment, the international wars at the end of the century were no check to this production and exchange. Even as its political independence was being destroyed, and its economy was being undermined, Italy continued for a while to be thought of as the crossroads of European culture.
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