It was in 16th century that the Renaissance became an increasingly European movement. Probably the most decisive factor in this Europeanization was the shift of political power away from Italy to the new monarchies of Spain, France, and England. The political elites in these kingdoms were keen on importing Italian culture to their cities and courts; indeed we can see the sixteenth century as a period of translation of Italian art and ideas to northern Europe. Cosmopolitan by their very nature, courts attracted leading figures from the aristocracy and the cultural elite throughout Europe. Popes and princes competed for the most accomplished artists and humanists. The virtuoso painter and engineer Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was active not only in his native Florence, where he was a member of the painter's guild, but also at the Sforza court in Milan, the French court of Francis I, and, though fleetingly, the court of the Medici pope Julius II in Rome. Other factors also contributed to the Europeanization of the Renaissance. By 1500 the printing press, which had been invented in Mainz by Johannes Gutenberg in the 1450s, had led to a diffusion of classical and humanist works on an unprecedented scale. In the early sixteenth century, the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus worked for the printer Aldus Manutius in Venice, for Johann Froben's press in Basel, and for Josse Bade in Paris. Thus the print shop, like the court, served to Europeanize humanist culture.

Social change also underlay this development. From the middle of the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century, with plague now a less frequent occurrence, most of Europe participated in a sustained demographic and economic recovery, a period that historians refer to as the ''long sixteenth century.'' The social consequences of this growth were dramatic. Though the precise chronology varied from one part of Europe to another, land and grain became dear, and the overwhelming majority of peasants saw their living standard erode while their landlords reaped the harvest of higher and higher rents. Also conspicuous was the growth of cities in this period. London, which had some 50,000 to 60,000 inhabitants at the start of the sixteenth century, had doubled in size by midcentury and reached as many as 200,000 in 1600. Other major cities--Paris, Antwerp, and Amsterdam--saw comparable gains, with the result that in the sixteenth century northern Europe underwent a process of urbanization that was in some ways comparable to the earlier phase of urbanization that had taken place in Italy. And as in late medieval Italy, the growth of the city and the development of the new urban elites were closely tied to structural transformations in the rural areas, as more and more land was given to pasturage and as textile production was increasingly put out to peasant households often desperate to increase their incomes.

This process (which historians have variously called the putting-out system, Verlagssystem, cottage industry, and protoindustrialization) stemmed from the efforts of drapers and clothiers, who in their efforts to find cheap labor deliberately transferred even weaving to the countryside, bringing peasants and their families more fully into the ''industrial economy'' and further enriching the entrepreneurs who invested in this industry. The social consequences of such a system were widely felt in Europe, especially in highly urbanized areas. The system produced new social tensions but also created new opportunities. The encroachment of industry on the countryside as well as the increased demand for wool and the decision, especially by English landlords, to enclose their arable lands and turn them over to pasturage led to dislocations in traditional agrarian life, creating a new rural poor and contributing to the quickened pace of immigration to the cities, which quickly filled with impoverished migrants. . .

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