Question

what were the main factors that led to Renaissance in Europe ?

Answer 1

The Renaissance was a period of scientific, intellectual, and cultural awakening beginning in mid-14th century Italy.  The Renaissance stressed humanist ideas, that is ideas founded in classical Greek and Roman thought, from philosophy and education to art and cultural influence.  

One key reason for the Renaissance was the emergence of secular curiosity.  During the long feudal period in Western Europe, education was done through the church.  Not even kings were necessarily literate

Answer 2

Thanks for ask. There were a few really important causes.

First was urbanisation - people started to move to cities. This meant a few things. People started to trade, and buy food, rather than farm it themselves. This meant they were always trying to come up with new things to trade in new places. This meant they invented stuff and travelled - which makes new ideas possible. So, things like stained glass and masonry, wild new cathedrals, experimental dye-stuffs, fancy cloths from far away, new types of ship.

Urbanisation also meant rich kids with nothing to do - in the countryside, they farm or hunt or adminster the land. So monks started offering classes, and they set up schools and universities where people were paid to think about stuff.

The new travelling, the new markets and trade, and the new thinking, meant that some people learnt Arabic and started to confront fully worked out ideas of alternative world views from Muslims, and also the ancient Greeks, whom the Arabs had translated into Arabic.

These cities also started to experiment with new types of politics, in which the ‘divine right’ to rule, and the aristocracy deriving their authority from land and peasants tied to the land, just had no role. City states emerged.

All of these urban changes were accidents - no-one intended them. They show how important structural changes are in history, and why we shouldn’t focus on famous people and notable dates very much.

Secondly, new types of religious thinking emerged. Partly, this is because monks moved to cities and stopped living in rural monasteries; and they worked in the new universities. They gained employment as royal administrators too, placing them at the heart of politics. These monks - known as friars - proposed radical new interpretations of Christ’s teachings, and set up contests that would be depicted and debated in the new books being written and pictures being painted.

Thirdly, there was the major calamity of the Black Death in the 14th century, and spilled over into the 15th. This killed a third of the continent’s population. That meant that ‘business as usual’ literally could not continue: there weren’t the people to farm the fields, or tile the roofs. It destabilised social norms and hierarchies, made ordinary people mobilise and migrate, and set them to experimenting (out of necessity) with new ways of doing things and new ways to make money.

So you can see that there wasn’t a tidy set of causes - most of them were hidden in things like geography, travel patterns, health, educational structures, cultural encounters, and so on!