into walled ghettoes, or prohibited from
cities altogether.
Toward the end of the Renaissance,
economic stagnation took hold in south-
ern Europe as trade shifted to the north
and costly wars drained treasuries and the
cities of men and material. Although Spain
drew an immense amount of money from
its colonies in the Americas, its ambitious
kings bankrupted their realm through
costly wars in Italy and the Low Coun-
tries. Heavily taxed and with their produc-
tive members levied into the royal armies,
the cities of Spain saw their industries and
commerce decline. The Thirty Years’ War
devastated cities in central Europe and
Germany, while Venice and Genoa had to
deal with the rising Ottoman Empire,
whose corsairs and navies were closing the
Mediterranean to European merchants al-
together.
Nevertheless, the crowded, walled city
had become a fixture in the landscape of
Europe, and continued to draw immi-
grants from the countryside. Urban popu-
lation would continue to increase after the
Renaissance, and the city’s role as a center
of education, the arts, and an economic
and cultural exchange between nations
would remain.
classical literature ...............................
The works of the ancient Greeks and Ro-
mans survived the fall of the western Ro-
man Empire and the chaos of the early
Middle Ages. In monasteries of Europe and
the British Isles, scribes carefully copied
these books by hand and preserved them
in small libraries. Medieval scholars knew
the works of the Greek philosopher Aris-
totle, and the Roman historians Livy, Sal-
lust, and Julius Caesar. Virgil’sThe Aeneid
was considered the finest work of epic po-
etry, and the themes and characters of the
Metamorphoses of Ovidinspired many me-
dieval poets and artists.
The Italian poet Petrarch was the lead-
ing medieval scholar of classical literature,
and the first to seek out and collect un-
known ancient works, including the
speeches of the Roman orator Cicero. Pe-
trarch drew on classical ideas in his own
works of history and poetry. He devoted
muchofhisworktorevisingandediting
manuscripts that had gone through many
changes in the centuries since they were
written. In his editing of the Roman histo-
rian Livy, for example, Petrarch made
notes and suggestions wherever the mean-
ing or language was not clear, and brought
out corrected editions of his own.
In the early fifteenth century, collect-
ing ancient manuscripts became a popular
pastime of writers and scholars. Poggio
Bracciolini spent years browsing through
the libraries and monasteries of northern
Europe. The poet Angelo Poliziano mas-
tered ancient Greek, a rare feat in the early
Renaissance, when the language was all
but unknown in western Europe.
Poliziano’s scholarship was the most thor-
ough and skilled of his times. He carefully
traced the history of the books he exam-
ined, comparing the different versions in
an attempt to arrive at the language of the
archetype, or original work. This method
of collation was an important advance
over emendation, in which scholars ap-
plied their own interpretations to the
original manuscripts and made additions
and deletions directly to the text according
to whim.
The invention of printing in the mid-
fifteenth century proved a great boon to
classical scholarship. Books no longer had
to be transcribed by hand, and could be
printed in large, uniform editions. Print-
ing these editions in copies of hundredsclassical literature