The origin of the Renaissance in Italy was due to many causes. The early Roman civilization was not entirely blotted out by the invasion of the barbarians of the North. And in the matter of language the Italians possessed an advantage, since the transition from Latin to Italian was easier than from Latin to Spanish, French, English or German. The fertility of the country; the mildness of the climate; the division into semi-independent states; the infusion of new northern blood into the veins of the Italians; the removal of the papal court to Avignon in 1309; and the gradual rise of a powerful middle class, whose members included the devotees of the professions of law and medicine, were factors which determined that Italy, rather than France or Spain, should be the field for the Revival of Letters. To Italy, then, belongs the glory of having been the first to free herself from the trammels of ancient scholasticism and the fetters of mediaeval theology. She abandoned the wordy dialectics and metaphysical gymnastics of the philosophers of old. In place of mortification, penance and solitary confinement in cloistered monasteries and convents, she began to have a proper conception of the dignity of man and his relation to nature. Italy, in the time of her freedom, received the torch of learning from Greece; Italy revived its brilliancy, and, when her time of adversity and ruin arrived, she passed it on to the nations of Northern Europe. They in turn have transferred it to America, to Australia, to India, and to the uttermost parts of the earth. The Anatomical Renaissance Italy in the sixteenth century was the fount from which issued a ceaseless stream of anatomical discoveries. The ancient and illustrious Universities of Bologna, Pavia, Padua, Pisa and Rome, eclipsed the schools of Paris and Montpellier, of Toulouse and Salamanca; and the Italian peninsula, which, in early mediaeval times, had gloried in the skill of the physicians of Salernum, a second time became the medical centre of Europe. Vesalius and his pupil, Fallopius, taught at Padua; the ancient fame of Bologna was supported by Arantius and Varolius; Vidius, returned from establishing the anatomical school at Paris, taught at Pisa; Eustachius was at Rome, Ingrassias lectured at Naples, and the fame of the New Anatomy spread throughout the world. The Italian cities were filled with students from foreign lands. Padua had more than one thousand new students every year, salaries were paid to her one hundred professors, and medicine was looked upon as a noble profession. While the Italians were the leaders in progress, the Germans were still lecturing on Galen and Avicenna, the English had done almost nothing, and the Collége de France was not established until 1530.