Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/395

 CHAPTER XXIII ITALY AND THE RENAISSANCE I. THE ITALIAN CITIES DURING THE RENAISSANCE 485. The Flourishing of the Italian Cities ; the Renaissance. We have already seen how town life developed in northern Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Chapter XX, above). In the following two centuries, while England and France were engaged in the weary Hundred Years' War, the Italian cities reached a degree of prosperity and refinement in buildings and art unknown north of the Alps. Within their walls the Humanists revived the lost knowledge of Greece and Rome (454); learning, painting, sculpture, and architecture made such extraordinary progress that a special name is often given to the period when they flourished the Renais- sance? or new birth. The Italian towns, like those of ancient Greece, were each a little state with its own peculiar life and institutions. Some of them, like Rome, Milan, and Pisa, had been important in Roman times ; others, like Venice, Florence, and Genoa, did not become conspicuous until the time of the Crusades. The map of Italy at the beginning of the fourteenth century was divided into three zones. To the south lay the kingdom of Naples. Then came the states of the Church, extending diago- nally across the peninsula. To the north and west lay the group of city-states to which we now turn our attention. 486. Venice and its Relations with the East. Of these city- states none was more celebrated than Venice, which in the history of Europe ranks in importance with Paris and London. This singular town was built upon a group of sandy islets lying in the iThis word, although originally French, has come into such common use that it is quite permissible to pronounce it as if it were English, re-na'sens. 28Q