This is particularly true of Italy where the Renaissance had its origin. For here, during the entire mediaeval period, there never was a time when the study of antiquity was completely neglected; when the traditions of the old Roman culture had died out, or when the art and the literature of the classical ages of the past had ceased to exert an influence on artists and scholars. Ozanam was, then, right when he declared that the night of the Dark Age, which in Italy intervened between "the intellectual daylight of antiquity and the dawn of the Renaissance," was, in reality, like "one of those luminous nights in which the fading brightness of evening is prolonged into the first beaming of the morning."[54] So much, indeed, was this the case that those who have made the most profound study of the Middle Ages recognize a first Renaissance in the twelfth century, which was not less real than the Renaissance _par excellence_ of the fifteenth century, a renaissance which counts such masters of Latinity as Abelard, John of Salisbury and Hildebert of Tours, and such schools as that of Chartres, where classical Latin was taught with as much thoroughness as in the great universities of Europe during the brilliant age of the humanists. It was then, as Rashdall truly observes, that "a revival of architecture heralded, as it usually does, a wider revival of Art. The schools of Christendom became thronged as they were never thronged before. A passion for enquiry took the place of the old routine. The Crusades brought different parts of Europe into contact with one another and into contact with the new world of the East--with a new religion and a new philosophy, with the Arabic Aristotle, with the Arabic commentators on Aristotle, and eventually even with Aristotle in the original Greek."[55] Roughly speaking, the Renaissance attained its culmination during the second half of the fifteenth century. It was during this period that gunpowder and printing with movable types were invented--the first completely revolutionizing the methods of warfare and the second marvelously facilitating the diffusion of knowledge. And it was during the same period also that Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope, that Columbus crossed the Sea of Darkness and that Copernicus laid the foundation of modern astronomy.