Florentine bankers financed Henry the Navigator and the Portuguese explorers who pioneered the route around Africa to India and the Far East. Petersburg were built.įlorentines were the driving force behind the Age of Discovery. These architectural styles revolutionised the way Rome, London, Paris and every other major city in Europe from Barcelona to St. The Florentines, perhaps most notably Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1466) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) invented both Renaissance and neoclassical architecture. This was the beginning of the end of Latin as a common language throughout Europe. Others started writing in French and Spanish. Because Dante, et al., wrote in Tuscan, Geoffrey Chaucer, who spent a lot of time in Northern Italy and who borrowed heavily from Boccaccio's little stories, wrote in English. In their case, Tuscan, which, because of them, became Italian. Peters and the Vatican when the papacy returned to Rome from the "Babylonian captivity".ĭante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio pioneered the use of the vernacular, the use of a language other than Latin. They financed the papacy, including the construction of the papal palace in Avignon and the reconstruction of St. They financed the English kings during the Hundred Years War.
They financed the development of industry all over Europe, from Britain to Bruges, to Lyon, to Hungary. This currency was the engine that drove Europe out of the "Dark Ages" a term invented by Petrarch, a Florentine whose family had been exiled to Arezzo. Politically, economically, and culturally it was the most important city in Europe for around 250 years from some time before 1300 until the early 1500s.įlorentines reinvented money in the form of the gold florin. Florence was the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance.
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