Such indications of the increasing salience of the
northwest did not
mean that the south no longer mattered. Italy, or most of it,had
remained Christian territory throughout the Middle Ages. It was the
seat of the papacy, and thus the ecclesiastical metropolis of western
Christendom. It was also blessed with a richer survival of Roman
culture than the north; here, if anywhere, there may have been an
unbroken continuity of learning outside the ecclesiastical context.
Moreover, an important aspect of the political fragmentation of Italy
was the reappearance of city- states, some of them aggressive
mercantile and naval polities more reminiscent of Carthage than of
Rome. All this led to the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century,
with its extravagant revival of the cultural heritage of antiquity in a
context far more secular than the universities of medieval Europe.
Northwestern Europe proved very receptive to the Renaissance, but there
is little reason to think that the region would have come up with it on
its own.
Christian Spain, eclipsed by the long centuries of
Muslim rule, had
been of much less consequence than Italy for the cultural history of
northwestern Europe, despite its leading role in the translation of
Arabic texts. Yet it was from the Iberian Peninsula that in the late
fifteenth century the expeditions were dispatched that rounded Africa
and discovered the New World. Here too the northwestern Europeans took
notice and soon became participants; but again, they showed no sign of
being about to initiate the process for themselves.
We have nevertheless reached a point at which it no longer makes any sense to think
of
northwestern Europe as a provincial extension of the Mediterranean world. As we have seen in
several connections, it was now a region in which major historical developments might have their
beginnings. There was a further example of this in the early sixteenth century, the Protestant
Reformation. This movement began in Germany and established itself widely in northwestern
Europe. It thereby brought about a dramatic change in the landscape of western Christendom,
irreversibly shattering its religious unity and unleashing a prolonged outburst of war and fanaticism.
It also played a significant role in weakening the institutional and intellectual grip of the highly
organized church that had been so central to the cultural life of the Middle Ages. Reforming the
church meant, among other things, stripping it of most of its economic assets; as a Chinese
emperor had already discovered in the ninth century, dissolving monasteries was a good way for a
ruler to get rich.
