,
because the invention of gunpowder had previously been changing the art
of war. For example, the King of France, Louis XI, as well as the King
of England, Henry VII, had entire disposal of the national artillery;
and therefore overawed the barons and armored knights. Neither moated
fortresses nor mail-clad warriors, nor archers with bows and arrows,
could prevail against powder and shot. The middle ages had come to an
end; modern Europe was being born. France had become concentrated by the
union of the south to the north on the conclusion of the "Hundred Years'
War," the final expulsion of the English, and the abolition of all the
great feudatories of the kingdom. England, at the same time, had
entirely swept away the rule of the barons by the recent "Wars of the
Roses," and Henry had strengthened his position by alliance with
France, Spain, and Scotland. Spain, by the expulsion of the Moors from
Granada in A. D. 1492, was for the first time concentrated into one
great state by the union of Isabella's Kingdom of Castile-Leon to
Ferdinand's Kingdom of Aragon-Sicily.

From the importance of the word _renaissance_ as indicating the
"movement of transition from the medieval to the modern world," Matthew
Arnold gave it the English form "renascence"--adopted by J. R. Green,
Coleridge, and others. In Germany, this great revival of letters and
learning was contemporaneous with the Reformation, which had long been
preparing (e. g., in England since John Wyclif) and was specially
assisted by the invention of printing, which we have just mentioned. The
minds of men everywhere were expanded: "whatever works of history,
science, morality, or entertainment seemed likely to instruct or amuse
were printed and distributed among the people at large by printers and
booksellers."

Thus it was that, though the Turks never had any pretension to learning
or culture, yet their action in the middle of the fifteenth century
indirectly caused a marvelous tide of civilization to overflow all the
western countries of Europe. Another result in the same age was the
increase of navigation and exploration--the discovery of the world as
well as of man. When the Turks became masters of the eastern shores of
the Mediterranean, the European merchants were prevented from going to
India and the East by the overland route, as had been done for
generations. Thus, since geography was at this very time improved by
the science of Copernicus and others, the na