Before sinking into utter political decadence, the Italians had gloriously scaled new heights of culture. They again revealed themselves as the Latin nation at a time when their land, freed from the German imperial power, and not yet fallen under the dominion of France and Spain, was the most nourishing country in Europe. Their great national deed was the Renascence of antiquity, the foundations of which were so deeply laid, as well in the memory as in the thirst for culture of the Latin races, that its first indications were already evident at the time of the revival of the Roman Empire by Charles the Great.

Acquaintance with the ancients had never completely vanished. In every period a certain number of Latin authors had been studied, and even in times of profoundest barbarism, ancient culture constantly broke from its hidden sources. It reappeared in the times of the Ottos and Sylvester II., of John of Salisbury, and Vincent of Beauvais; it re-awoke under the Hohenstaufens, until the great movement of the fourteenth century produced the revolution of the fifteenth. But in spite of Dante, Cola di Rienzo, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the Renascence in the fifteenth century appears as a sudden resurrection of paganism, as a magical and all - powerful metamorphosis of the human mind.