§ 1. Christianity and Popular Education. § 2. Europe begins to Think for Itself. § 3. The Great Plague and the Dawn of Communism. § 4. How Paper Liberated the Human Mind. § 5. Protestantism of the Princes and Protestantism of the Peoples. § 6. The Reawakening of Science. § 7. The New Growth of European Towns. § 8. America Comes into History. § 9. What Machiavelli Thought of the World. § 10. The Republic of Switzerland. § 11a. The Life of the Emperor Charles V. § 11b. Protestants if the Prince Wills it. § 11c. The Intellectual Under-tow.
§ 1
JUDGED by the map, the three centuries from the beginning of the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century were an age of recession for Christendom. These centuries were the Age of the Mongolian peoples. Nomadism from Central Asia dominated the known world. At the crest of this period there were rulers of Mongol or the kindred Turkish race and nomadic tradition in China, India, Persia, Egypt, North Africa, the Balkan Peninsula, Hungary, and Russia. The Ottoman Turk had even taken to the sea, and fought the Venetian upon his own Mediter-
- ↑ Renascence here means rebirth, and it is applied to the recovery of the entire Western world. It is not to be confused with "the Renaissance," an educational, literary, and artistic revival that went on in Italy and the Western world affected by Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Renaissance was only a part of the Renascence of Europe. The Renaissance was a revival due to the exhumation of classical art and learning; it was but one factor in the very much larger and more complicated resurrection of European capacity and vigour, with which we are dealing in this chapter.
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