1472–1536
Gutenberg’s printing press opened ancient scholarship and a thousand years of Biblical interpretation to those seeking to understand the world.
In Europe the fall of the Roman Empire isolated the region from the rest of the hemisphere. For centuries thereafter, Western Europe remained a cultural and economic backwater, far from the network of pan-Asian routes known as the Silk Road and cut off from the exchanges nourishing the civilizations it connected. But by the eleventh century, the Church had accumulated enough political authority to insist on its independence from the aristocratic families it relied on for defense. Finding power as a sovereign entity with interests spanning the continent, it shifted the scope of its concerns. Ongoing assimilation of Germanic tribes and the spread of a popular Christian identity converged in the Crusades, which forcibly re-engaged Western Europe with the substantially more developed empires to the East.
As medieval culture reached its peak, Venice became a major commercial hub and the main point of exchange between Europe and the Orient. As principle outfitters and transporters of the Crusaders, its armory and navy grew considerably, while its sophisticated political structure allowed the city-state to maintain the discipline required for sustained dominance. By the early fifteenth century, Venice was the world’s richest city, controlling the bulk of Eastern Mediterranean trade and, consequently, much of the traffic in goods—including classical texts—flowing north of the Alps.
In this environment, Gutenberg’s invention proved to be catalytic. Initially adopted by the Church as an efficient way to circulate works preserved as manuscripts, it soon became a mechanism for expanding considerable stores of knowledge and of distributing them among an increasingly literate public. As the volume of information about the world grew in circulation, so did the need to make sense of it. Maps from antiquity—rudimentary as they may have been—provided an invaluable frame of reference for those developing a common conception about what had happened since the world began, where it had taken place, and how it all pertained to the present day.
