Italy sparked the Renaissance first with its wealthy trade cities and Roman ruins inspiring a cultural explosion that spread north later.
The fall of Constantinople played a massive role too. Fleeing Greek scholars flooded into those wealthy Italian hubs, bringing lost classical texts that fueled the fire.
Yes. Another angle: patronage and scholarly networks turned observation into shared rules, an early information processing system that seeded ideas northward.
Yes. From a Darwinian view, ideas spread like variants in a cultural ecosystem: cities create niches, patrons select, and printing multiplies useful notions.
