MEANWHILE IN EUROPE 203By the fourteenth century CE, the Genovese and the Venetians were
competing for the Mediterranean trade in some of the biggest, sturdiest
fleets around, and on the water, these Italians could fight. Venetians did
vigorous business in Constantinople, and after the Ottomans took over
they boldly opened commercial offices at Istanbul.
The Mediterranean trade drew tremendous wealth into Italy and
spawned booming city-states, not just Venice and Genoa, but also Flo-
rence, Milan, and others. Here in Italy, money supplanted land as the chief
marker of wealth and status. Merchants became the new power elite; fam-
ilies like the Medicis of Florence and the Sforzas of Milan supplanted the
old military aristocracy of feudal landowners. All the money, all that en-
trepreneurial energy, all that urban diversity, all those sovereign entities in
such close proximity competing for grandeur, eminence, and reputation
generated a dynamism unprecedented in history. Any talented artist or
craftsman with a skill to sell could have a field day in the Italy of this era
because he could get so many patrons bidding against one another for his
services. Dukes and cardinals and even the pope competed to lure artists
such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci to their courts because their
works were not only beautiful but represented great status symbols. Italy
began to overflow with the art, invention, creativity, and achievement that
was later labeled "the Italian Renaissance."
Books, meanwhile, were coming back into fashion. During the Dark
Ages, hardly anyone in Europe knew how to read except clerics, and cler-
ics learned the skill just to read the Bible and conduct services. Among
Germanic Christians, in Charlemagne's time for example, clerics revered
Latin, the language in which Christian services were performed, because
they thought of it as the language God spoke. They worried that if their
Latin deteriorated, God would not understand their prayers, so they pre-
served and studied a few ancient books written by pagans such as Cicero
purely as an aid to mastering the grammar and structure and pronuncia-
tion of the old tongue. They wanted to ensure that they would be able to
continue sounding out syllables that would reach God. When reading
writers such as Cicero, they tried assiduously to ignore what they were say-
ing and focus only on their style so as not to be contaminated by their
pagan sensibilities. Their efforts to preserve Latin petrified it into a dead
language suitable only for ritual and incantatory purposes, incapable of