The Italian cities, particularly Genoa and Venice, had become rich from their commerce, as had many cities in northern lands. Everywhere the cities were centers for the new life in western Christendom. England was rapidly changing from an agricultural to a manufacturing nation. The serf was evolving into a free man all over western Europe. Italian navigators had discovered new sea routes and lands, and robbed the ocean of its terrors. Columbus had discovered a new world, soon to be peopled and to become the home of a new civilization. Magellan had shown that the world was round and poised in space, instead of flat and surrounded by a circumfluent ocean. The printing-press had been perfected and scattered over Europe, and was rapidly multiplying books and creating a new desire to read (R. 134). The Church was more tolerant of new ideas than it had been in the past, or soon was to be for centuries to come. All of these new influences and conditions combined to awaken thought as had not happened before since the days of ancient Rome. The world seemed about ready for rapid advances in many new directions, and great progress in learning, education, government, art, commerce, and invention seemed almost within grasp. Unfortunately the promise was not to be fulfilled, and the progress that seemed possible in 1500 was soon lost amid the bitterness and hatreds engendered by a great religious conflict, then about to break, and which was destined to leave, for centuries to come, a legacy of intolerance and suspicion in all lands. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. In what way was the fact that Dante wrote his _Divine Comedy_ in Italian instead of Latin an evidence of large independence? 2. Was it a good thing for peace and civilization that the modern languages arose, instead of all speaking and writing Latin? Why? 3. Of what value to one is a "sense of the past behind him, and a conception of the possibilities of the future before him," by way of giving perspective and self-confidence? Do we have many mediaeval-type people to-day? 4. Show how the work of Petrarch required a man with a strong historic sense. 5. Show the awakening of the modern scientific spirit in the critical and reconstructive work of the scholars of the Revival. 6. Of what was the exposure of the forgery of the "Donation of Constantine" a precursor? 7. Contrast the modern and the mediaeval spirit as related to learning. 8. Suppose that we should unexpectedly unearth in Mexico a vast literature of a very learned and scholarly people who once inhabited the United States, and should discover a key by which to read it. Would the interest awakened be comparable with that awakened by the revival of Greek in Italy? Why? 9. What does the fact that no copy of Quintilian's _Institutes_, a very famous Roman book, was known in Europe before 1416 indicate as to the destruction of books during the early Christian period?