The Renaisance started in Italy in the fourteenth century and spread across Europe. Italy was a fertile ground for a cultural revolution. People had more wealth because previously the Black Death had wiped out millions of people in Europe – by some measures killing as many as one in three between 1346 and 1353. So if there were fewer people there were more economic means. Great artists appeared like Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello. etc. Fantastic astronomers like Copernicus and Galileo developed an unprecedented understanding of our planet’s place in the cosmos, proving that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Advances in chemistry led to the rise of gunpowder, while a new model of mathematics stimulated new financial trading systems and made it easier than ever to navigate across the world. And navigate the Renaissance men did. Columbus discovered America, Ferdinand Magellan led an expedition to circumnavigate the globe.
