Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/608

 5i6 Outlines of Europe a7t History arches leading the eye toward heaven, and its glowing windows suggesting the glories of paradise, may well have fostered the faith of the medieval Christian. Map of Italy in the fourteenth century Venice and its relations with the East Section 90. The Italian Cities of the Renaissance We have been speaking so far of the town life in northern Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. We must now see how the Italian towns in the following two centuries reached a degree of prosperity and refinement undreamed of north of the Alps. Within their walls learning and art made such ex- traordinary progress that a special name is often given to the period when they flourished — the Renaissance,^ 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 A^enice, Florence, and Genoa, did not become conspicuous until about the time of the Crusades. The map of Italy at the beginning of the fourteenth century was still divided into three zones, as it had been in the time of the Hohenstaufens.^ To the south lay the kingdom of Naples. Then came the states of the Church, extending diagonally across the peninsula. To the north and west lay the group of city- states to which we now turn our attention. Of these 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 Adriatic Sea, about two miles from the mainland. It was protected from the waves by a long, narrow sand bar similar to those which fringe the Atlantic coast from New Jersey south- ward. Such a situation would not ordinarily have been delib- erately chosen as the site of a great city ; but it was a good 1 This 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, 2 See map above, p. 454.