The Renaissance in European history was a time of political, intellectual, and cultural change that had its origins in Italy during the fourteenth century. Beginning roughly during the lifetime of the poet Francesco Petrarch, who died in 1374, literati began to look to classical Greece and Rome for models of human political behavior and stylistic models of discourse and artistic representation. This humanistic quest involved the energies of philosophers and artists throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeen centuries, as Renaissance ideas spread northward. Though narrowly conceived in scholarly and artistic circles, the Renaissance matured in urban settings. Because this time period coincides with technological innovations and the subsequent exploration and conquest of new worlds, we are inclined to associate the issue of Renaissance diseases with both the growth of cities and the age of European discovery. The period also frames the era of recurrent epidemics of bubonic plague in Europe.

Population growth in Europe was steady during the central, or “High,” Middle Ages but did not lead to the growth of large metropolitan centers. Urbanization was earliest and most dramatic in the Mediterranean lands, where city cultures had also been the basis of ancient Roman hegemony. By the late thirteenth century, Florence and Venice, as successful commercial centers, had populations of more than 100,000. Rome, Milan, and Barcelona may have been equally large. Smaller urban areas of 50,000 to 80,000 individuals existed throughout northern Italy and Spain. These cities were roughly twice as large as the “urban” areas of England, including London.