It was the age of geographical explorations. The discoveries of the telescope, the mariner’s compass, and gunpowder gave men mastery over previously unknown natural forces, and multiplied their powers, their daring, and their capacities for adventure. When these geographical discoveries had made a world-trade a possible thing, there began that change from mediæval to modern methods in trade and commerce which lasted from the close of the fourteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the modern commercial conditions were thoroughly established. The transition period was marked by the widening area of trade, which was no longer restricted to the Mediterranean, the Black and the North Seas, to the Baltic, and to the east coasts of Africa. The rigid groups of artisans and traders—the guild system of the Middle Ages—began to dissolve, and to leave freer space for individual and new corporate effort. Prices were gradually freed from official regulation, and became subject to the natural effects of bargaining. Adventure companies were started to share in the world-trade, and a beginning was made of dealing on commissions. All these changes belong to the period of transition between the mediæval and the modern world. In the art of governing men the Renaissance was the age of political concentration. In two realms—Germany and Italy—the mediæval conceptions of Emperor and Pope, world-king and world-priest, were still strong enough to prevent the union of national forces under one political head; but there, also, the principle of coalescence may be found in partial operation,—in Germany in the formation of great independent principalities, and in Italy in the growth of the States of the Church,—and its partial failure subjected both nationalities to foreign oppression. Everywhere there was the attempt to assert the claims of the secular powers to emancipate themselves from clerical tutelage and ecclesiastical usurpation. While, underlying all, there was the beginning of the assertion of the supreme right of individual revolt against every custom, law, or theory which would subordinate the man to the caste or class. The Swiss peasantry began it when they made pikes by tying their scythes to their alpenstocks, and, standing shoulder to shoulder at Morgarten and Sempach, broke the fiercest charges of mediæval knighthood. They proved that man for man the peasant was as good as the noble, and individual manhood asserted in this rude and bodily fashion soon began to express itself mentally and morally.